Pete Hamill - Forever

“We can send out for pizza,” Warren said, and laughed. “And by the way, bring me back my bloody sword.”

The rest of Monday morning had been spent on final things. The news from Delfina moved in and out of him, swinging back and forth. A child. Absurd. Too strange. He cleaned the loft while listening to Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony and the CD of Charlie Parker with strings, and an album of Spanish monks singing Gregorian chant. The music of farewell. I won’t even see this child. He dusted the bookshelves. He tied up all the newspapers, his eyes weary of the shrapnel of the world beyond New York. Killings on the West Bank. Assaults in Belfast. The endless violence of believers. Won’t hear him squalling. He carried two roped bundles down to the bin at the back of the ground floor. Where is Kongo? What will he tell me about the child? For lunch, he ate a bowl of yogurt filled with grapes, sliced papaya, and mango, and then emptied the refrigerator.

Safe in Delfina’s womb, right down there, seven blocks south, at a desk on the eighty-fourth floor. Listen, son. Pay close attention. I made a vow to my father, and I must keep it, or live in damnation. Everything truly serious is absurd. He called Delfina. Just to hear her voice. And got her recorded voice, with its curl of a Spanish accent, explaining she was away from her desk, please leave a message. “It’s me,” Cormac said. “I love you.”

Around four, he walked down to Chambers Street under an iron-colored sky. Can I look at this world from the Otherworld? Can I see the boy learn to walk? Three Africans were emptying a truck outside a Big Sale shop named Great Expectations (how Dickens would have embraced them), talking in the percussive rhythms of Ashanti. Cormac couldn’t make out all the words and wished they were speaking in Yoruba, but the subject seemed to be soccer. I won’t see him run.

He bought some things he needed from an Indian shopkeeper, and then went into a Korean deli on the corner of Church Street. He bought a black coffee and then stepped outside and stood beside a pay phone, using its back wall to shield him from the river wind. He lit a cigarette. The view down Church Street was as always: the post office, the towers in gray fog, all lights burning. He wanted to be in Mary’s with Healey, hearing his booming voice, but Mary’s was closed now forever, and he hadn’t been able to find Healey since his expedition to the Hamptons. He might still be there. He might be lashed to a bed in a hospital, lost on Long Island, cursing fate and Hollywood. Cormac thought: Where are the morning sirens who called us sweetheart? Healey’s my last friend. The only friend in the great dense city. I couldn’t bear to bury another.

Time was racing in him now, the way it did when he would meet deadlines on the newspapers. Decade after decade. One deadline tonight, at Warren’s house. Another deadline tomorrow night, in a cave in Inwood. He might never see Healey again. He would never see the waitresses again. Nor would he see faces like these, passing him on the street: the high cheekbones and flared nose of this elegant high-hipped black woman hurrying downtown toward the post office or the World Trade Center; the gullied skin of the Puerto Rican man with the worried face and gray mustache, angling through traffic to the coffee shop across the street; the slack jaw of the teenage hip-hopper shambling along in his suit of polyester armor. Never see the boy become a man. He tried sketching the faces in his mind, drawing on old habit, using his eyelids like the shutter of a camera, freezing a moment: the Asian woman wrapped in solitary thought as she came out of a watch shop; the panicky glance of a heavy black woman whose three-year-old had jerked free of her grip. Never hear him talk about the Count of Monte Cristo.

And here’s a white rummy in filthy clothes spewing a personal jumble of words as if looking for directions to a mission that no longer exists. Take a left, Cormac instructs him from the side of the phone booth. Go up past Broadway and make another left. You’ll be in the Five Points then, old man. You’ll be in the Bloody Ould Sixth. They’ll know you there. Someone will give you succor.

There is harm in the world, son. There’s evil. There’s whiskey. There’s smack and crack and too much heartbreak. There’s violence. Listen to me, son.

And then he thought: If I do what I need to do tonight, I’ll see her on Tuesday evening. Then I’ll try to explain why I’ve killed a man named Warren. I’ll tell her that he’s the man in all the morning newspapers, on television, on radio. That man.

William Hancock Warren. Then I’ll take her to the north, to my farewell in the cave that gave me too much life, and tell her all of the truth. The least I can do: the truth. About who I am. All of it. While swearing to her that Usheen and Oshun will bring us once more together, forever.

He imagined her at this very moment, coming back from lunch, smiling, radiant, possessing her secret, walking between desks in her new suit from Century 21, women pleased with her, or envious, and men watching her with hungry eyes. But you can deal with it, son. You can deal with anything the world throws at you.

He stepped into the booth and called Healey.

“This is Healey,” the recorded voice said. “I am out of TOWN. With any luck, I will rob a BANK before I come home. If you leave a MESSAGE, I will call you BACK from the penitentiary!”

Cormac laughed and left a message: “Make sure it’s a big bank.”

He dropped the empty coffee cup in a trash bin and started walking home. Rain was predicted on New York 1, and they were never wrong. In a corner store, he bought a small bag of jellybeans, tiny, glistening, and delicious, one of the marvels of a long life. His sweet tooth had cost him many hours in a dentist’s chair, but he’d never gotten fat. Too much walking with Wordsworth in his head. Or (he thought) one more eerie mutation of my metabolism. A pregnant woman walked into the candy store as he was walking out. She was ochre-colored, with tired eyes above high cheekbones. He thought: Will her daughter ever know my son? You’re free to wander the whole wide world, son. Do it. See Paris and Rome and Florence. See Tokyo and Samarkand. Roam deserts and jungles. Sleep in an Irish meadow. Climb the Matterhorn. Go. Do what I could never do. Your mother will keep you safe.

He turned on Duane Street. Kongo was waiting in front of his building.

He wore a dark green corduroy jacket, a black turtleneck, and jeans. His brown boots were polished to a high sheen. His hands were jammed into his pockets. When he smiled, Cormac realized how much he looked like Michael Jordan. The true messenger of Chango.

“Good afternoon,” he said, as they embraced. “I just wanted to make certain all was ready.”

“All is ready.”

They talked about the coming night and where they would meet after Cormac’s appointment with Warren.

“It will be a cold night,” Kongo said.

“With rain, says the weather report.”

“Yes, with rain.”

They stood for a long moment without speaking, while cars and taxis honked for passage, the street blocked by a wide truck holding a construction crane. Kongo smiled.

“The woman is pregnant,” Cormac said. “With my child.” Kongo looked at him in a severe way.

“I know,” he said.

“It’s unfair.”

“Think of it as another gift.”

“But why now? Why after all the other women…”

“The time was right.”

Cormac thought: God damn you.

“You made it happen, didn’t you?”

“No, you made it happen and she made it happen.” He looked toward the river. “It was a sign that I must come and help you cross.”