Peter Jonge - Shadows Still Remain

Seventy-eight Orchard is halfway between Broome and Grand, on the east side of the block. Less then eight minutes after leaving their car, they step into a vestibule papered with Chinese menus and hike the old tiled staircase, the marble so worn it looks like soft dough.

The door to apartment 5B is unlocked and slightly ajar. When they knock and step inside, McLain looks up at them from a tiny couch. He has a paper cup in his hand, half a bottle of Jack between his hightops, and the room reeks of pot. The rich bouquet reminds O’Hara of the fireman, and although in weaker moments she still feels pangs for the treacherous stoner, she also misses the pot. For some unfair reason, the NYPD routinely tests for marijuana and the FDNY almost never does, so maybe she and the fireman were doomed from the beginning.

“Throwing yourself a party?” asks Krekorian.

“No,” says McLain. “Just getting wasted.”

“How long you been at it?”

“What day is it?”

“Monday, Chief.”

“A while.”

“Is there a bed in this place?”

“I’m sitting on it.”

“Where do you sleep?”

“I don’t.”

“When you did?”

McLain nods at the purple sleeping bag on the floor.

“Your old girlfriend slept on the couch, and you slept beside her on the floor? That sounds like fun. And you did that for almost a month?”

“It’s her place. She didn’t have to let me stay at all.”

“She ever bring home guys?”

“Twice.”

“She make you watch?”

“She called from the street. I took a walk.”

“An eight-hour walk?”

“Went down to Battery Park and watched the sun come up. I recommend it. It clears the head.”

“Ever occur to you that your old girlfriend was trying to tell you something? Rub your nose in it so bad, you’d take the hint and leave on your own?”

“It’s possible. But I don’t think so. She was looking forward to spending Thanksgiving together as much as me.”

“So that was the fantasy? You roast a nice turkey, and she realizes what a mistake she’s been making.”

“Basically.”

On the way up the stairs, the two agreed that Krekorian would ask the questions and O’Hara would look around, but McLain’s responses are so guileless, Krekorian can’t get any traction, and the place is so small and sparsely furnished, there’s very little for O’Hara to look at. Against the wall behind McLain is a small table with two chairs, a dresser and a column of textbooks, but except for the iPod dock on the table and a small pile of wadded-up bills on the dresser, there’s not a single personal effect. It looks like Pena moved in over the weekend, not four months ago. More troubling to O’Hara, however, is the fact that there’s no trace of McLain’s Thanksgiving feast.

“David,” asks O’Hara, “you ate the turkey yourself?”

“Too depressing. I threw it out.”

“How about the pots and pans?”

“I washed them.”

“David, I need a list of everything you bought that night at the grocery store.”

McLain slowly stands, toppling his bottle of Jack with his right sneaker, and at the same time that he reaches under the cushion of the couch and pulls out a scrunched-up menu like those all over the vestibule, he catches and rights the bottle with his left sneaker. This feat of stoned and drunken athleticism impresses even Krekorian, a former hard-partying college point guard. The menu is from Empire Szechuan on Delancey, and running down the right side is McLain’s twenty-one-item list in small precise green letters.

“Keep it,” says McLain.

“You remember the total?”

“$119.57,” says McLain, refilling his Dixie cup.

“Got a pretty good memory,” says O’Hara.

McLain gives O’Hara permission to look into the barely filled closets and drawers, but they are no more revealing than the blank walls and furniture tops. The only thing of interest, at least to Krekorian, is a Nike sneaker box that Krekorian pulls out from under the couch. When he brings it to O’Hara in the bathroom, he dramatically opens the lid on two vibrators, a dildo and other novelty items.

“What’s the big deal?” says O’Hara. “A girl’s got to have her toys. If something were to happen to me, I’d appreciate it if you’d go to my place and throw out the box under my bed.”

O’Hara has no idea why she said that. She doesn’t have a dildo under her bed or anywhere else, but Krekorian’s junior-high leering, just like the tone of some of the newspaper stories, ticks her off and provokes a knee-jerk protective response. Those stories seem particularly unfair now that it looks like the only reason Pena was stalling at the bar was that she didn’t have the heart to face her puppy dog old boyfriend. Even after they leave McLain and hump down the stairs, O’Hara stays on Krekorian’s case about it. “The way you showed me that box was classic. It’s like you’re fourteen.”

“That’s not fair, Dar. I was just surprised Nike made a butt plug is all. Who do you think they’re going to get to endorse it?”

“Callahan,” says O’Hara. “This is Sergeant Callahan from NYPD, and I’m here to tell you about a remarkable new product that changed my life.”

Outside, the lights have come on and the slushy rain has turned to light snow, and in the soft light the profiles of the narrow streets, with their tenements and synagogues, can’t look much different than they did a hundred years ago. A large pack of NYU students have walked down from the campus and poured into the neighborhood to pass out pictures of their missing classmate, and in their straightforward parkas and hiking boots, they resemble missionaries.

O’Hara and Krekorian walk back through Rivington Park. This time O’Hara notices the crude sculptures rearing up in the weeds like downtown scarecrows, and when they get back to the Impala, O’Hara sees that Freemans has spawned a retail outlet, located at the mouth of the alley, called Freemans Sporting Club. The window is dressed with the same kind of old-timey props as the bar, and in the corner a sign reads, TAILORED CLOTHING, BARBERSHOP AND SUTLERY.

What the fuck , thinks O’Hara. A condo called the Atelier. A store that sells sutlery. O’Hara has worked in the precinct for five years, but take away the projects on the perimeter and she could be in a foreign country.

Three hours later, just before midnight, O’Hara and Krekorian watch through the falling snow as hundreds of NYU students and faculty crowd under the redbrick overhang in front of Bobst Library. While more students stream in from all directions, those in front, closest to the glass doors, grab a lit candle off a long table and file into the southest corner of Washington Square. The column moves silently past the leafless trees and white-limned statue of Garibaldi, and when a thousand candlelit faces surround the recessed circle at the center of the stone plaza, O’Hara and Krekorian leave their car to stand at the rear of the crowd.

Unlike the Lower East Side, Washington Square doesn’t seem foreign to O’Hara at all. As high school freshmen, O’Hara and her best friend Leslie Meehan would often skip school and catch a train into big bad Manhattan. A sizable chunk of those happy truant days was idled away in this very park, drinking Bud out of paper bags and making out with older boys with sideburns and brave smiles. The first time she let a boy slip a hand between her legs was in the grass at the edge of the square, although when she thought back on it, it was probably she who took his hand and guided it there. Sex is the one realm in which she felt at ease from the very beginning, maybe because with your clothes off, differences in class and income and education seemed less important and the playing field almost level. O’Hara isn’t so naive anymore. She realizes now that death is the only leveler, and although some of these kids will undoubtedly get laid post vigil, it’s the prospect of death, not sex, that’s brought them into the park tonight.