Jonathan Lethem - Lucky Alan - And Other Stories

With that they were gone, and for the last time. Stevick never saw them again; the driver hadn’t been misleading him when he alluded to the narrow specialization of their tasks. Now there was only the hole, its occupant, and Stevick, with his own duties. For, when freed by the truck’s departure he turned to face the café, no one in fact was regarding him from the window, now streaked with rain and curtained by a dripping overhang. Stevick opened the umbrella. The hole was silent. Stevick could easily have gone home, but instead he stepped over, tested the soundness of the footing on top — there was little doubt, he’d watched them work — and sheltered both himself and the sturdy boards from the rain as well as he could beneath the feeble rigging of black cloth and wire.

In a lull the aproned counterman stepped outside the café’s doors for a cigarette break. He nodded curtly at Stevick, exhaled smoke rising into the rain. “So you’re in charge now, huh?” he said.

“I didn’t want to leave him completely alone.” There had been no sound, barely a detectable motion from the hole beneath his feet, where the captive now sat braced, knees wedged in dirt. “I wouldn’t say I’m in charge in any wider sense,” Stevick continued. “I’m something of a stopgap or placeholder, really.”

“I more than understand,” the café employee said. “We’re in a similar situation. Just a gig between real jobs, that’s what I keep telling myself.” He tossed his fuming butt into the gutter, quite near. “There’s a million stories like yours and mine.”

“That’s not what I was getting at,” Stevick began, but, uninterested, the counterman had returned inside. The café’s population had never completely recovered from the jackhammer exodus; that, combined with the rain, kept Stevick’s vigil a lonely one. He preferred it, actually. The usual early-afternoon dog-walkers passed by, hunched in tented plastic ponchos, their smaller dogs, the terriers and dachshunds, sheathed in sleeveless plaid coats, but Stevick had always regarded the walkers as ships on a distant sea, some passing flotilla. Even on days of bright sunshine, they were too occupied with canine herding and the management of plastic-bagged turds to engage in the human life of the street. Though few other humans acknowledged him, Stevick liked to believe that he was still a participant in this mainstream. Whether his relation to the man beneath the boards qualified as a human transaction was another question.

*

Toward evening, the rain tailed, though not enough so that Stevick lowered the umbrella. The café’s clientele turned over; the tables were set for dinner, decorated with lit candles, menus in place; the staff even switched off the WiFi in order to chase out the most tenacious of the afternoon Googlers. Others of Stevick’s neighbors, the professionally dressed, beleaguered rush-hour subwayers, slavers in financial offices, trudged past the corner with their own umbrellas. Though Stevick always thought of them as upright sheep, some were surprisingly bold in their muttering.

“What did you say?” Stevick shouted back.

“You heard me, friend. You’re lowering property values for the rest of us.”

“Not in my backyard, eh?” Stevick said. “Boy, when something like this arrives in your midst you learn pretty fast who’s who in this neighborhood, you yuppie.” Stevick spoiled for a fight, feeling now all the insurgent defiance he ought to have summoned for the diggers of the hole. But what was done, was done. Defense of what should never have been in the first place had become Stevick’s province.

“You artists need to grow up and learn the difference between an installation piece and a hole in the ground,” the man sneered. Surely Stevick’s age or younger, yet dressed like Stevick’s grandfather, he added, “Slack-ass.”

Stevick was incensed. “There’s a man in this hole!”

“Don’t bore me with your disgusting personal situation!”

“It’s not a personal situation, you fucker!”

“Roll up and die, grubbie!”

“Yaaaaarrrr!” They charged with umbrellas out-held, Stevick feeling he’d abandoned his station but unable to stem the urge to gore the man on the sidewalk and see him plead for mercy in the rain. Yet the two men essentially missed, failed to engage, the broad opened umbrellas merely grazing in a rubbery wet shudder as they passed. The single thrust having apparently exhausted his neighbor as much as it did Stevick, the man regathered his briefcase tightly beneath his elbow. “I need to go pay the nanny,” he murmured as he slunk off. Stevick retreated to his task.

It was night, and inside the café the menus at several of the tables had been taken up, wine poured, little plates delivered by the time another specialist made contact with Stevick. He wasn’t, as Stevick might have hoped, a sentry arriving to relieve Stevick of a duty that, now that he contemplated it, he had to admit was self-assigned. Rather, the jumpsuited man, a sturdy, almost fat one this time, with heavy, black-rimmed eyeglasses and a Yankees cap shielding him from the rain, appeared to be some kind of inspector, charged with ensuring the rightness of the site and recording in cryptic shorthand, with a ballpoint pen on a clipboarded sheet, certain impressions. The man double-parked his car, the blinking hazard lights of which gave clear evidence of the passing nature of his visit, and suggested to Stevick a long itinerary of random checks still ahead of him. He then politely asked Stevick for assistance in drawing aside the cover of planks. Stevick, in turn, extended the umbrella to help protect the operative’s clipboard while he wrote.

The captive, Stevick noted with relief, didn’t appear any more — or less — uncomfortable than when he’d first been lowered into his hole. He stood, as if to acknowledge the inspector’s attentions, but didn’t glance upward, possibly not wishing to incur rebuke, or perhaps he had merely grown incurious about what were, for him, routine operations. When the inspector went back to his car and returned bearing a wax-paper cup with a straw and a pair of plastic-wrapped sandwiches, Stevick understood that he intended to feed the man in the hole, and saw also that the captive had at some point spat the dirty cloth from his mouth, so that it now encircled his throat like a necklace. Probably it had never been secure to begin with, and the captive had not wished to embarrass the men who’d dug the hole by flaunting their ineffectual knotting skills. The inspector lowered both the cup with the straw and half a sandwich to within range of the captive’s mouth, and the man in the hole quietly and efficiently fed and drank. Stevick considered the fact that the captive could have cried out at any point and had chosen not to. Perhaps he’d learned that it led only to more punishment, if punishment was the right word. Stevick had begun to realize that he ascribed a certain strength, a gravity and authenticity, to the man in the hole, or perhaps to the hole itself, with which he wished to be associated, as in the sense of a shared undertaking. The passerby with whom he’d crossed umbrellas had been, in a manner, right: This was a kind of personal situation.

Stevick helped the inspector replace the wooden planks over the hole, then gratefully accepted the gift of the second wrapped sandwich, which turned out to contain pleasantly peppery chicken salad, albeit on soggy white bread. Stevick had been hungrier than he realized. Before departing, the inspector went back to his car one last time, returning now with an olive-green duffel, which he chucked gently to the edge of the hole, just beside Stevick.

“What’s that?”

“Standard issue,” the inspector explained obscurely. “It’ll be there when you need it.” He offered Stevick a quick salute and was off.