Jonathan Lethem - The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye

“ Donnie! That’s not cool. It saved you up there. Besides, you can’t kill them, I read it—”

“Okay, shut up.” He tossed the glass out into the street, under a parked car.

“Now what?” I said, and then quickly made my nomination: “The airport? Or Port Authority, catch a Greyhound upstate?”

Don didn’t say anything.

“Upstate, New York State, isn’t breaking parole, right? You can do anything you want, doesn’t matter if the Sufferer’s following you. I bet they’ve never seen one of these guys up there, huh?”

“I gotta sell the shit,” said Don. “The triangle on 72nd and Broadway. I can move it there. C’mon, we can walk across.” He started towards Central Park.

We ran after him, me and the Sufferer. “Don, wait. Why can’t we just go? What are you stalling for?”

“Damn, Paul, you can’t just show up with this idea and rush me out of town. Maybe I don’t want to go to California. Maybe at least you ought to let me clear up my damn business before we go, okay?”

“What? What? ” As if the robbery hadn’t happened, or as if it weren’t connected to the plan, a plan he’d already agreed to.

“Relax, okay. Damn. We’ll go. Just let me unload the stuff, okay?”

We walked to the edge of the park on the empty streets, the three of us. In silence, until Don said, without turning: “It’s been a while since we were in touch.”

“What? Yeah, I guess. What do you mean?”

“That’s all, just it’s been a while. We didn’t, like, keep up on each other’s lives or anything.”

“Yeah,” I said, chilled.

Central Park at night made me think of high school, of smoking pot with my Upper West Side friends. White people’s drugs, drugs for the kids who stay in school, go to college. While back in Brooklyn, Don was finding the other kind, the drugs for the black kids, the ones who wouldn’t go to college even if they bluffed it through high school.

Now my West Side friends were all off at college, in various parts of the country, and I was back in town to sell drugs at 72nd and Broadway, under their parents’ windows.

The Sufferer seemed to like the park. Several times it roamed wide of us, disappearing briefly in the trees. When we crossed Central Park West, though, it was back close at our heels.

We set up at the benches on the triangle, along with some sleeping winos. There was a black kid, too, who kept crossing the street to the subway and ducking inside, then crossing back to the triangle. He and the Sufferer exchanged a long look, then the kid went back to his pacing routine, and the Sufferer jumped over the bench, into the little plot of land the pavement and benches encircled. I hoped it would stay there, more or less out of sight from the street.

“This is dead, Don.”

“Relax. It’s where you come, up here. It’s the only place to score.”

“It’s Tuesday night.”

“Junkies don’t know weekends, man.”

“We’re gonna get arrested. This is just like a target, like sitting in the middle of a target.”

“Shut up. You’re being a chump. Forget the cops.”

A chump. The unkindest cut. I shut up. Don got out his pipe and smoked away another rock of the product. I had a hit too. The Sufferer didn’t seem as interested. And we waited.

The traffic on Broadway was all cabs, and — surprise! — two of them pulled over and transacted business with Don. One was slumming West Side yuppies on their way to a club, men overdressed, women waiting in the back of the cab, relieved laughter when the males returned safely. The other was two blacks in the front seat, the cabbie and a pal, with the cab still available. I ached to push Don in the back and take off, but I stayed shut up.

Another customer walked up, from the park side. He caught up with the kid, who shook his head, nodded at us, and made his jog across the street to the subway station again while the street was clear. Don made the sale and the guy headed back the way he’d come.

I was just noticing that this time the kid hadn’t come back to the triangle when the truck pulled up. A van, really, like a UPS delivery truck but covered with layers of graffiti and minor dents, and missing doors on both sides. It pulled around the triangle the wrong way, bringing down a plague of honking from cabs.

Don said: “Oh shit.”

“What?”

“That’s Randall’s truck.” But he didn’t move, or reach for the gun.

The driver kicked the emergency brake down and turned to us holding a toy-like machine gun. I figured it wasn’t a toy. “Is that Randall?” I said.

“Nah. Shut up now.”

The man in the passenger seat came around the front. Well dressed, unarmed. “Light,” he said.

“Yo, Randall.”

“Get in the back. This your man?” He raised his chin at me. His voice had a slight Caribbean lilt.

Don shrugged.

“You took my safe house tonight, my man?” Randall asked me. He was clean and pretty, like some young, unbeaten boxer. But he had a boiled-looking finger-thick scar running all along the right underside of his jaw, and where it would have crossed his ear the lobe was missing.

“That’s me,” I said, dorkily.

“Come along.” He made it sound jolly. He opened the back. Inside were Kaz and Drey, sitting on tires, looking miserable.

I tried to catch Don’s eye, but he just trudged forward and stepped up into the back. I went after him.

I glanced over my shoulder, but didn’t spot the Sufferer. Bandall climbed in behind us, slammed the two doors shut, and went up to the front. There wasn’t any divider, just a big open metal box with two bucket seats in front of the window, and a steering wheel on a post to the floor. The driver handed Randall the little machine gun and took off across Broadway, down 72nd Street.

Don and I leaned against the back. I looked out the back window and just caught sight of the pay phone on the far side of the subway entrance.

We rattled to the end of 72nd, under the West Side Highway and parked out on the stretch of nothing before the water. It’s always amazing to get to the edge of Manhattan and see how much stuff there is between the city — you know, the city that you think of, the city people use — and the real edge of the island. You think of it as being like a raft of skyscrapers, buildings to the edge, and instead there’s the edge of the island. Boathouses, concrete and weeds, places that nobody cares about.

Unfortunately, at the moment.

The driver serving as gunman again, Randall opened the back and steered us out into a dark, empty garage, a sort of cinderblock shell full of rusted iron drums and piles of rotting linoleum tile. The floor was littered with glass and twisted, rusty cable. A seagull squawked out of our path, flapping but not taking off, then refolded its wings and wobbled outside once we were safely past. Kaz and Drey both looked back dubiously, acting more like fellow captives than Randall’s henchmen, but Randall kept nodding us forward, until the moonlight from the garage entrance petered out and we all stood in darkness.

“You messin’ up, Light,” said Randall.

“Here’s your stuff,” said Don, scooping in his parka pockets. He sounded afraid. I wondered where the Sufferer was.

“That’s good. Give it to Drey. You make a little green out there?”

“Yeah.”

“You smoke up a little, there, too?”

Before Don could squeak “Yeah” again Randall stepped forward and smacked him, viciously hard, across the mouth. Don’s foot slipped and skidded through the broken glass, but he kept from falling.

“Relax, relax,” said Randall suddenly, as though some protest had been raised. “We ain’t killing you tonight, Light. But we gotta talk about this funny stuff, you chumps playing with my money. You think you takin’ Kaz but it’s all my money, right?”