Pete Hamill - Forever

“You know,” Warren says, gazing out at the rain-lashed city, “when I invited you here tonight, I thought part of me would die. The part that involved pride. I knew that when I asked you to… to give Elizabeth what she needs, that I would be stripping myself naked. So be it. Life is strange.” He lets the rain spray his face and shoulders. “It never occurred to me that I could end up a corpse.” He laughs. “Over some ancient relative.” He turns to Cormac. “Or that I would meet a man who thinks he has lived since the eighteenth century. Jesus Christ… But now, right here, right now, part of me thinks, Well, fuck it, why not? Why not just die now, instead of crumbling into some fleshy ruin. Besides, we’d sell a ton of newspapers, wouldn’t we? PUBLISHER SLAIN IN PENTHOUSE MYSTERY. No, that’s too many words. How about BOSS DEAD, with an exclamation point?”

He drains the brandy and drops the glass among the potted plants.

“I don’t have a clue about you, old sport,” he says. “You’re just another New York demento, as far as I can tell….”

He sighs. “So go ahead,” he says. “Just do it.”

Cormac is facing him, seeing his head and shoulders silhouetted against the rain-smeared glow of distant lights. The sword feels heavy. He spreads his feet, prepared to strike.

“Just do me one favor,” Warren says. “When the deed is done, please tell Elizabeth that I loved her. Somewhere out there, beside the telephone, you’ll find the number of her hotel….”

And Cormac feels something dissipating in his heart: the hard knot of the past. The fingers of his free hand open and close and he longs to sit at a piano. I can’t do this. To hell with the past.

“You can call her yourself,” Cormac says.

The tension seeps out of William Hancock Warren. He leans on the rail. Cormac turns and goes back inside, with Warren behind him.

“That’s it?” Warren says.

“I’ll be going now,” Cormac says. “Please don’t call the police.” “And have what: a tabloid scandal?”

Cormac smiles. Warren stands there looking at him, his hair and shirt wet from the rain. The fire is guttering in the hearth. The smoke rises slowly, as if it contained all the hatred, all the old vows of revenge, all the unburied dead that Cormac has carried across the decades. They walk to the door and Cormac lifts his black bag.

“Take the sword with you,” Warren says. “I don’t want it around here.”

“I never thought about leaving it,” Cormac says. “My father made it in his forge.”

He comes out on Fifth Avenue and feels that he is rising into the air. The bag is slung on his back. His feet are moving on the sidewalk. Taxis move south, their wheels making a tearing sound on the wet pavement. But he feels lifted, weightless, floating. He has failed to keep his vow but now feels released from its long burden. There is no blood on the sword. There is no corpse on a living room floor. On this rainy Monday night, there is no need for flight.

And now he hears drums. He looks for Kongo but does not see him, and yet the drums pull him north. He crosses to the park side, under the dripping black trees. Ahead are the bright lights of the Metropolitan Museum. He hears the bata. He hears the toques. Somewhere, a dog is barking.

Then he sees them high on the steps: three musicians. Two on drums, one playing flute. They are together out of the rain, playing for the empty world. He floats up the stairs. The musicians are young but seem older than the city. The bata player has bandages on three of his fingers, the sleeves of his jacket rolled up, his black forearms laced with muscle. The man supplying the toques is short and squat, like a fire hydrant. The flute player is tall, lean, with a hawk nose and jet-black beard. His gleaming skin is the color of coffee. The drummers are singing in Yoruba, slyly invoking Chango. Asking for his intercession. Smiling. Celebrating. Asking Chango to bless them with women, to bless this great city, to bless this cold world.

The drummers play without pause. The flutist rises high above the drums, telling five thousand stories at once, filling the night with lost women, with laughing children, with the sigh of tropical winds.

Cormac puts down the backpack with its hidden sword. He steps forward, feeling the rain on his face, letting the drums enter his body, his arms and legs and belly and balls, and a drummer shouts, “ Vaya!” and Cormac Samuel O’Connor begins to dance.

In the morning, Duane Street glows with the rising sun. At ten after eight, Cormac goes out for the tabloids, passing volunteers on Broadway handing out leaflets for the primary election. He has never voted in an election because that would have left a trail, an identity, proof of his presence in the world, but he loves the intense faces of the few people heading for the polls. They care about this process, which took so long to turn from promise into fact. He remembers the ward heelers reporting to Bill Tweed’s office, and the way Hugh Mulligan’s shoulder hitters roamed the streets near here, bumping people away from the polls or delivering others to vote for the third time in an hour. If he had registered under some name, any name, and used his address on Duane Street, voting year after year, decade after decade, Willie Warren’s private detective would have found him on some computer weeks ago, and warned off Warren, who would have closed the door against him (too mysterious, too uncertain), and he would never have faced that baffled man with a sword in his hand.

He wonders now what happened after he left Warren the night before. Did he open another bottle? Did he consult some family history where the earl still lived in a line engraving? He probably did call Elizabeth. He probably did tell her that he loved her. Cormac feels that none of the aftermath matters. He only needs this day, this evening, this night.

There’s a long line at the Korean deli for bagels and coffee, as courthouse guards and a few stray policemen carry away their breakfasts. The tabloids are full of politics. Cormac glances without interest at the headlines and walks back home under a sky scrubbed blue by the night’s rain. On the corner of Worth Street, parents and kids wait for a school bus. He wonders if Delfina will wait some morning on this corner too, gripping a boy’s hand. He calls her with the cell phone, but there is no answer at home, and her own cell phone is shut down. He leaves a message on her voice mail at Reynoso & Ryan. He’s certain that she’s in the subway, heading for work.

At home, he sips coffee, chews the bagel, and scans the newspapers. His mind shifts from release to weariness. He glances at the sword and then whispers a few words asking his father to forgive him. He was to pursue the Warrens to the end of the line, and instead had chosen mercy over vengeance. Please, he says to his unseen father, understand that I am sick of killing. I’m sick of revenge. If that should bar me from the Otherworld, so be it. I can’t kill again. I can’t kill a man I actually like. Forgive me, he says, I hope I will see you very soon.

Tonight I’ll meet Delfina and travel north, driven by another script from the eighteenth century. I have failed to keep one eighteenth-century vow, but perhaps it will not matter. Perhaps pity and mercy will count in any verdict about entrance to the Otherworld. With any luck, tonight I might be released.

He glances through the skylight and decides to finish his coffee under the cobalt sky. The day is glittering and lovely. With any luck, he can inhale the sky itself. He climbs the stairs and opens the door that leads to the roof.

He stands there for a long time, breathing the clean morning air. The fresh sparkling air of the world. The wind that is blowing from the north and making dazzling horizontals of the flags. The air of a city built on rivers and the sea.