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

Fucking. Making love — the moment it hit me was the moment I heard the shot.

I turned in time to see the four shadows sprinting for the truck. Kaz’s voice: “You made me, you made me, you shouldn’t of fuckin’ made me—”

They’d driven off before I got back to Don.

He was lying on the floor scrabbling in the glass with a hand already sticky with blood. In the dark the blood looked black, and watching it seep out of his stomach was like watching his white sweatshirt disappear into the gloom. It was happening fast.

“Fuck, Paul,” he said, when he saw me.

“I’m going to get help,” I said.

“Wait, don’t leave me—”

“I’ll be back—”

I ran out, back under the freeway, and found a woman walking her dog in the park. “For God’s sake, my brother got shot, down in the old garage down there, please can you call an ambulance, please—” I fumbled it out between gasps, repeated everything, pointing, and when she agreed I turned and ran back, clutching a knot in my side; a cramp from running, but it felt like a sympathetic wound.

Moving too fast, I slid in his blood, and my knees buckled at seeing how little of the white of the sweatshirt was left. I sat down, in blood and glass, and held his hand.

His gun lay to one side, and I felt suddenly sure that he’d been shot with his own gun, Kaz trying to take it from him. The gun we could have left behind so many times in so many different places.

“I can’t see you, man,” said Don.

“Your eyes?” My voice was trembling, on the verge of sobs.

“No, stupid, I mean move around here, don’t sit behind me.”

I shifted. “An ambulance is coming, okay, Donnie? So just hang on. Guess you’ll have to talk to the police or something, huh?”

An hour ago I was still picturing Don in California. Now the dream of seeing him in a hospital bed seemed maybe too much to dare hope for.

“You’re so stupid about the cops, Paul.” His voice was husky, and as he went on, it got rougher and softer. “I don’t care about the cops. When they arrested me before I told the guy ‘Thank you, you saved me.’ ’Cause I was a skeleton, I weighed about ninety pounds, and I knew I would dry out, get healthy in jail. That’s all jail is, man, guys gettin’ fed, getting healthy again, doing pushups, so they can go out and do it again. Shit, if they’d given me time instead of parole I might be off rock now.”

I started weeping.

“C’mon, Paul, relax.”

“We could be on a plane right now,” I said. “We were right there, we were at the airport. The Sufferer, the Sufferer ruined everything.”

“Nah, man, I didn’t want to go. Tony the Tiger didn’t blow it.”

“Why? Why couldn’t we just go?”

“I was all freaked out. I mean, it sounds great, right? Start over, cut out, leave all the shit behind. But I wasn’t ready. I was just going along, I didn’t want to disappoint you.”

“What do you mean?”

“If California is my big second chance, Paul, I don’t wanna go fuck it up with my pockets full of rock. I wanted it to be like you said, but I wasn’t ready, I was afraid. If I went and I was still all fucked up there — I didn’t want to disappoint you, Paul. At least if we didn’t go I hadn’t fucked up California. It was still there, like this beautiful picture you were painting, you know—”

His voice was trailing off, and I could barely hear him for my own sobbing.

“It was sort of hard for me to think about California or whatever, anything else, with all that rock in my coat, Paul. When we took Kaz for rock instead of cash… I had to get rid of it, and if I had to get rid of it, why not get high, you know? You don’t know… you don’t know how much I… like to get high , Paul. You haven’t been around me that much. We haven’t been in touch. I’m not just, like, the little kid you knew. I been… doing stuff—”

“My fault, the whole thing about robbing Kaz. You did that because of my stupid idea, to get cash for the tickets.”

“Yeah, yeah, let’s blame it all on you and the monster. Whatever. But the California thing… wasn’t stupid. It was a good idea, so relax now, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Shut up now and stop making me talk so much, right?”

“Okay.”

“We’ll go… we’ll still go to California.”

I didn’t say anything, and Don closed his eyes, and we were quiet. The pace of blood leaking through his shirt slowed down. Time seemed to slow with it.

“I’m gonna pass out now,” he said.

“Okay,” I managed.

“I’m just… passing out, right, I’m not dying. ”

He couldn’t see his sweatshirt. “Right,” I said.

He was dead for almost five minutes before I finally heard sirens, and they weren’t even close yet.

I made a quick calculation about talking to a long series of people about what happened, starting with the ambulance people and the police and ending with our parents, versus getting the hell out of there, ft wasn’t a hard call.

I took Don’s pipe and lighter and put them in my pocket and ran, south under the highway, and circled around a couple of blocks back to Broadway.

I hopped the turnstile and took the IRT downtown, to the Village, then walked across West 3rd Street to Washington Square Park, where life went on as usual, all night every night, every night for the last thirty years, probably. I sat on the same bench I’d been on at noon, waiting for Don to turn up, finding him after so long. Now I had to share it with a guy who was sleeping, but his smell and my stare kept anyone else away.

I wondered if I was waiting for Kaz. I couldn’t think of what I would do or say if he showed, so I guessed I wasn’t.

I started feeling sleepy about the same time the sky began to lighten up. The deadest hour in the park, when the night is officially over. A few businessmen walked across, and joggers. It was their park now, for a few short hours.

I got off my bench and managed to find someone dealing. There’s always someone dealing. If I’d said to him: “You seen Kaz?” or “You seen Light?” he probably would have said: “Naw, man. But he be around later. What you want him for?”

Instead I just scored a five-dollar vial and went back to my bench.

I put it into Don’s pipe and flickered the lighter over it and drew a hit, and at that moment the Sufferer walked up. It sat down in front of me and cocked its head.

I tried to ignore it, which worked for about five seconds. Then, riding the rush from the crack, I jumped on it and started beating its face with my fists. “You didn’t do anything!” I screamed. The Sufferer just twisted slowly away from my blows, squinting its big eyes, shifting its feet to accommodate my assault. “You didn’t help him at all! You didn’t change anything!”

A crowd began to gather around us. “You were fucking, you were fucking when they killed him!” My voice cracked with rage, and I tasted my snot and tears as they ran down my face. I beat at it, my fists aching, then tried to reach for its mouth, its “Achilles tendon,” but it just butted me away with its cheek. “You didn’t help him at all!”

A couple of Rastafarians came forward out of the crowd and plucked me away. “Easy there, little man, come on. It didn’t hurt you now, you just hurting you-self. Easy up.”

I squirmed out of their grasp and fell to the pavement in front of the Sufferer. The alien opened its mouth and moaned silently at me, then took a step away from me. The crowd ducked quickly out of its way, though it hadn’t made a sudden or violent movement yet.

Sickened, trembling, I crawled off the pavement, into the grassy section behind the benches.