Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

“It’s on your old Blockbuster card. Though I notice you don’t seem to have a television.”

“It had an abrupt meeting with a thrown remote control during the 2004 Oscars.”

“Not a fan of The Return of the King ?”

“I was pulling for Seabiscuit . Look, why the hell didn’t you just take us to your place?”

William’s face reddened a little, and he squinted at the adjacent wall, which was badly cracked through the plaster. “You’d just have made fun of it,” he said at last.

Jacob snickered happily. “Your page twelve?”

William almost dropped the cup he’d been washing. “She told you?”

“No, she told Sara. Who told George, who told me.”

A flash, like lightning, flickered over William’s face, and Jacob was for the first time frightened of what was about to come forth. But before William could erupt, the entire room was filled with a thundering noise from outside — the sound of a garbage truck hitting the curb, then the lighter sound of the men opening the bins’ heavy iron lids, designed to keep the rats out. Jacob had been so grateful when they’d finally been installed, two years ago, and he’d no longer had to scramble past vermin to get to the door. But as with everything, there were trade-offs. Now the lids clanged loud enough to wake the dead or, failing that, an extremely hung-over astronomer.

George jolted up, looking around for the noise. “Where—?”

Jacob watched as his oldest friend made the same mistake of staring up too quickly. He could actually see the blood rushing from his head. George rolled over and planted his face into the soft dark safety of the couch cushions.

“—the hell are we?” George managed, his eyes darting above the cushions accusingly.

Jacob sighed and faced the humiliating prospect of surrender. I am not special , he thought. He just liked that they had always thought he was. Even if he’d known, years earlier than the rest of them, that it wasn’t true.

“My brother’s apartment,” William said quickly. “A friend of our father’s runs this church, and he rents Charles the room under the table.”

While George took another try at inspecting the ceilings, William wandered casually to the bookshelf and set the photograph of them all at the awards ceremony facedown so it was out of sight.

Jacob stood still, not really sure what to say.

“I thought your brother was a doctor,” George said to William. “With kids and stuff.”

“Let me guess,” William said. “Irene told Sara, who told you, who told Jacob? Yeah, well, he works over at Columbia Presbyterian, so he crashes here between shifts.”

Jacob was a bit stunned — George seemed to be buying it.

“Hey! Jacob and I bought this same couch, back in the day.” Smiling like a fool, George eased himself from the bed, stretched like a sandy-furred cat, and released a long sigh. “I am going to go throw up,” he announced as he padded off to the bathroom in his dress socks, undershirt, and a pair of blue boxer shorts with sandwiches on them.

From the bathroom they could hear the seat of the toilet as George knocked it back against the basin, followed by the sound of him emptying his stomach. “You didn’t have to do that,” Jacob said to William, who returned to washing the last of Jacob’s dishes. “Really. You didn’t have to do any of this. You could have left us down there in the Village.”

“I suppose,” William agreed, cheerful now for some reason. “But then you wouldn’t owe me one, and I couldn’t make you take me to see Irene.”

William passed him a sudsy beer stein.

Jacob dried it off. “And here I thought you were just doing all this out of the goodness of your heart.”

“Hell, Jacob. It’s not like I’m the Messiah or anything.”

Jacob froze, nearly dropping the stein on the counter. “How’d you — did I, um — did I say something last night?”

William smiled cryptically. “You were pretty drunk. I doubt it’ll hold up in court.”

Jacob felt a fury rising, but when he opened his mouth to release it, what came out was a sigh of relief. Hearing it out loud wasn’t as terrible as he’d thought. And who’d believe that he’d confided in William, of all people, if he ever were to repeat it?

“Well,” Jacob said, “you’re the one who went to Yale.”

A gruff vibration came from a pile of clothes near the couch. Jacob fished around in George’s discarded pants and thought, for a second, he had found a phone in the back pocket. Only the object he extracted wasn’t a phone at all but a slim silver flask with an engraving on the side: Coriolanus Crew 1967 League Champions . Jacob vaguely recalled being with George when he’d picked it up at the Salvation Army their freshman year. The flask was not quite empty.

Jacob unscrewed the cap and caught the scent of J&B — George’s favorite. With a sinking in his heart, he at last understood why George had kept rushing off to the bathroom in the hospital and at Bistro 19. He couldn’t decide if he wanted to smack him or crush him in his bare arms.

Whatever ambitions Jacob had held as a boy — to hear the voice of God, to wrestle with angels, to unite everything — he knew now that he’d become too selfish, too discontent, too upset. Maybe that had always been true, but especially after Isaac, he’d known for sure that Jacob Blaumann was no Messiah. He’d never been as good as the boy he thought he’d been. Nobody he knew was that good. Nobody could possibly be.

Then on his first day of freshman year he’d walked into a small room with bunked beds and shaken hands with George Murphy, who in ten years had proved to be the kindest and most generous person Jacob had ever known. And for all his griping, he’d needed George to be the good things that he’d long ago given up believing in. Only now his savior had been holing up in men’s rooms, sipping scotch, trying to numb the world’s unfairness.

“I think it’s your dad calling?” William said, lifting up Jacob’s phone.

Jacob almost laughed — why would his father be calling? He stared down at Oliver’s picture on the phone, feeling the buzz in his hand until the screen grew dark. “I’ll call him back later,” Jacob lied.

William seemed about to say something, when they heard the buzzing again now, not from Jacob’s phone but from inside George’s shoe, down near William’s foot. On the screen was Irene’s lovely face, framed in black. Jacob motioned for William to answer it.

William pressed the big green button on the screen and held it to his ear. “Sara? It’s William Cho. George is just in the bathroom — what’s the matter? Did something happen?”

Jacob felt the rush of a hundred voices all at once, his blood vessels and neurons and toenails and eyelashes all screaming in every language at once. He heard the sound of the toilet flushing in the bathroom as William tried to calm Sara down on the other end of the line.

“Shushhhhh,” he said, “Shushhhhh. Shushhhh.”

JULY

William counted his disappointments on both hands. There was, one, the ninety-eight-degree heat burning through the window of the bus, as it, two, crawled through Staten Island traffic. Three. He was there, on a weekday afternoon, because, four, he had finally been laid off at Joyce, Bennett, and Salzmann. At first he’d been almost glad to have it over with, but then, five, none of the other firms had been hiring. Six, his severance and savings were being so rapidly consumed by his rent that it seemed like only a matter of time before he would be forced to move back home again. He was vexed by a peculiar curdled milk smell, seven, emanating from the woman in the row ahead. Also, the periodic vibration of his phone alarm in his right pants pocket, which he couldn’t reach to disable, eight, reminded him that he and Irene were now a half hour late, nine, for their appointment with a guy named Skeevo, ten, whom she had been buying pot from lately (it helped with the nausea, as well as her overall mood), but who today had called about something else that he wanted her to see, all the way in Staten Island, down near the Fresh Kills Solid Waste Transfer Station.