Mine All Mine Page 3

  Her father wanted a boy so much that he named her “Charles Izzo.” It was only through relentless lobbying that her mother succeeded in securing “Charlita” as a variant, but the feminized version was limited to mainly mother-daughter dialogue, and it never became ratified by any documents. Birth certificate, driver’s license, school records—everything—were all under the name Charles. For a few uncomfortable years he even called her “Chuck,” a mistake that I made only once.

  Every time she goes to this one bodega she gets accosted by the same Puerto Rican guys. At first they were trying to pick her up but when she didn’t respond to their overtures in Spanish they started berating her for not speaking her mother tongue. She tried to explain that she’s from Malta, that her language is closer to Arabic and Italian than to Spanish, but their English isn’t so hot and they never get the idea. They yell at her every time. When I asked her why she kept going there she said, “Alas, it is the only market around that carries Coco Rico.”

  “So?” I said.

  “It is the only soda that, ah...” She cleared her throat awkwardly. A sheepish smile was offered. “Well, it has . . . superior... acoustical properties. You know. When opened.”

  The slight boomerang bend in her nose came from an accident she had at age twelve. She was trying to flirt with a high school boy by riding her bike along the top of a stone wall. The boy was waiting on the curb for the bus and she rode along above him, waving gaily as if he were a sailor returning from sea. She passed by, only one hand steering the bike, juddering on the uneven stones until she hit a loose one and: smash. She executed a very sudden half-pirouette / half-pike, stalled momentarily in midair like a cartoon, then bellyflopped onto the pavement, breaking her fall with her face, an assault spear-headed by her nose. She didn’t get the guy.

  Charlie grew into her clumsiness as if into an allergy, and by the time I met her she had become a danger to herself and anything within striking distance. She is always knocking over stacks of cans at the grocery. Once she tried to put together a bed frame and bloodied her forehead. I discovered her on the floor, on the verge of tears, tools scattered around her like importunate pigeons. She tried a second time to mate the pieces and again struck herself in the face with the flat metal edge, which propelled her over the verge. Another time she set off an alarm at the Czartoryski Museum by headbutting Lady with an Ermine while closely inspecting one of the poorly retouched fingers (“a digit that belongs on E.T., not the duke’s mistress”) and, while being ushered out, klaxons wailing, she knocked over the urn containing the ashes of El Cid. Only the quick swandiving of an alert security guard saved her from disgorging the true grit of the Campeador all over the place. The Krakow paper ran a headline that said, DA VINCI AND EL CID SURVIVE TIME, EROSION, HITLER—BUT AMERICAN SCHOLAR?

  This sort of thing happens a lot.

  The one time when Charlie isn’t clumsy is during sex. Can I say this? Normally her body stutters, no doubt. Her left / right motor isn’t synchronized; she trips, she lurches in a zombie gait, she steps on the accelerator instead of the brake. She is an inveterate dropper of keys through subway grates. She endangers millennia-old masterworks. All true. But when she is naked she undergoes a wild, nearly Ovidian change. She becomes superkinetic, fluent, dancerly. When I surprise her in the shower, a hard-on banging around like a weather vane in a cyclone, she doesn’t rip the curtain or claw down the shampoo caddy. When she is innocently brushing her hair—thick with curls, fragrant with some odor that I can never fully parse— and I clutch it like a bouquet of flowers while rubbing that spot on her hips, she does not drop the brush or crack a knee on the table. When we fall to the carpet she doesn’t jab me in the ribs. Or elbow my skull. Or nearly enucleate me with a jagged fingernail.

  Her fingers are articulate, certain.

  Her hips are dextrous and undulant.

  Her body is all reflex, full of grace, rife with the purity of its own movement. It knows, as it knows at no other time, exactly what it wants to do. And it does it.

  How does it happen? How does she attain this transformation from smash-prone klutz to sex ballerina? I don’t know, but sometimes, when I’ve had a little too much naloxone or pancuronium bromide or norisol or something and am feeling high enough to permit myself some fantasy, I can’t help thinking, wistfully:

  Maybe it’s me?

  Considering Charlie’s all-around wonderfulness and my nearly record-setting sparsity of female contact, why am I so cowardly about popping the question?

  Part of the problem is that, outside of centuries-old artwork, I don’t have anybody to talk to about it. And I have no frame of reference. I have almost no memory of my mother and father together, and I don’t have any friends with real girlfriends to speak of—Herk’s Goldfish Girls don’t count14—so I don’t know what is normal and what isn’t. I am limited mainly to sitcom wisdom on this, which, according to a show I saw recently, says that to men engagement is terrifying because it is a visceral reminder of mortality. You are about to become engaged to be married, to just one person, with whom you will presumably spend the rest of your life and produce offspring, who are really just second-draft yous, said the hipster on the show, future yous, man, set to replace you after you kick it. Who needs that? Not me, said the guy. I don’t want to have a kid successor. I want to be the kid.

  I’m not sure his logic applies to me, necessarily—I metabolize visceral reminders of mortality every day, and they are much less pleasant than the strokable Charlie Izzo—but I still have the same fear. I’ve got no problem pulsing a site I know has a very good chance of being targeted by some of Azar’s trigger-happy talent, but man, when I crack that velvet box open it creaks like the coffin and terror makes the words in my throat turn into cement.

  It’s also true that practically everyone I have ever loved has died a painful death. That does not exactly provoke the urge to certify another love.

  The counterargument to this is Charlie herself.

  When I grit my teeth in my sleep she rubs my jaw and makes me stop.

  When I’m depressed she cooks me Maltese meals with names I cannot pronounce.

  She even makes me want to take it easy with the succinylcholine chloride.

  So why don’t I just spit it out, already?15

  I don’t know. Since I’ve met Charlie I have logged about five thousand hours of time sitting alone in dark rooms, thinking of almost nothing else, and I still don’t have the answer.

  In the museum, Charlie also told me her mother died when she was nine. Before the accident her mother was opening a party supply business and she had just received a huge order of balloons. Their house in Long Island was filled, in some places floor to ceiling, with countless boxes of them. After the accident her father could not bear to get rid of the balloons, but he also wouldn’t let anyone open them. So Charlie grew up in a house full of aging balloons that she was never allowed to touch. Sometimes, late at night, she would come home to find her father drunk in a chair, bringing the navel-like opening of the balloons to his mouth tenderly, as if in a kiss, and blowing them up. Then he would cradle them in the darkness of the room and whisper to them like children.

  When Charlie grew up and left the house he moved to one of those California towns that had legislated against meats, trans fats, and synthetic materials. No rubber, he thought, no balloons.

  He organized his whole life—abandoned his whole life—to kill memory.

  She told me this in the dark of the Frick’s screening room, as an educational reel was rolling. There was no one else in the room—it was two p.m. on a Tuesday—and I could see her eyes slick with threatening tears. I could smell the salt and water. I could detect her respiration catch, her heart rate accelerate. I almost reached out and touched her bare shoulder.

  I was this close.

  Instead I told her about my own family grief.

  When I was a kid my parents and my brother, Tobias, were killed in a botched robbery of our house in Connecticut while
I was on a sleepover at a friend’s. I told her what I remembered about my family—my mother playing the guitar on the porch, my father’s fridge in the basement with Pabst Blue Ribbons stacked like bars of gold in a vault, Toby’s corduroy pillow that made his face corrugated with wrinkles for half an hour every day when he woke up. But I did not tell her that this was one of the reasons why I wanted to become a pulse: to stop people taking what didn’t belong to them, whether it’s a Jasper Johns or sensitive government documents or the lives of the people you love.

  I also didn’t tell her that at age eleven I discovered my gift when, miserable and depressed and living in my third foster home in five years, I tried to end it all by downing a bottle of Somnipro Plus with a fifth-of-bourbon chaser only to wake up six hours later, a little foggy but very well rested.

  Something else undisclosed: for the first time in my adult life I was interested in something other than an eight-figure MacGuffin. I wanted to pulse Charlie herself. I wanted to protect her. I wanted to be her personal pulse.

  When she asked me what I did that allowed me to escape to the Frick on a weekday it just came out. “I’m a talent scout for the Mets.” And for the last twelve months I’ve had to stick to that story. It makes me feel bad to lie to Charlie, but it also makes me feel a little James Bondy. Dangerous. And what choice do I have?

  If I had a second chance, though, I would tell her everything.

  It’s a small museum: it had to end.

  We walked out onto the sidewalk. Her body tugged south down Fifth; mine lurched north. I had a job uptown—one of my first jobs after the Frankie Nickels bust, eight-figs of Neo-Classicists in a private collector’s facility—and I was going to be late. So I was fretting over that. Additionally unnerving was the valedictory moment itself. I was once again arrested by a powerful paralyzing force—it was like my first major Pavulon hit—and I heard myself mumbling something about it being nice to meet you and good luck with classes and may all your pop-tops be fizzy. Then, with a crabbed, flipperlike wave of resignation I turned and started limping away.

  After three feet I regretted it. After five I hated myself intensely. After ten I knew I had made the biggest mistake of my life.

  But again a third party saved the day.

  I have already noted my olfactory percipience? I can affirm that my other senses scarcely score less well on Janus’s comps. My sense of smell, obviously, is nearly unchartable, and therefore my taste scores are enviable. Visual acuity tests out above “fighter pilot.” And auditory—well, modesty prohibits me from elaborating. Suffice to say that from nearly fifty feet away, with my back turned, and even with the ambient noise of the street—revving engines, tires abrading the asphalt, the plaintive bleating of a truck’s reverse-siren—I overhead several aggressive voices overlapping Charlie’s. Petitions for money were made, rejected. Imprecations were issued and footsteps accelerated in a way I knew, without turning around, indicated that the owners of the voices were now following her. Charlie iterated that she had nothing, which provoked more jeers and denunciation. And then the clincher.

  From my position, nearly around the corner, with the vociferation of afternoon Manhattan thrumming in my ears, I heard Charlie say, “Hey, get your hands off me!”

  Before I knew what I was doing I had wheeled around and saw Charlie surrounded by a crowd of guys. I was outnumbered 3:1 and outweighed by about 5:1. But they were openly pawing Charlie. They had pushed her into a hedge of blooming honeysuckle. One of them pinioned her arms while a second yanked her purse off her shoulder and a third made lewd clasping gestures with his hand near the opening of her dress. It was broad daylight. It was unbelievable.

  Also unbelievable: I was now streaking toward them, full speed ahead, fists clenched in a businesslike way.

  Even by my standards of visual acuity what ensued was a blur. I fell upon them and started flailing. The only punching I had ever done was in my aerobic kickboxing class, and the instructor’s loudspeaker beat-counting was so firmly embedded in my psyche that I swung away at Charlie’s assailants while counting out loud.

  “And a-one!” as I threw a sinking cross.

  “And a-two!” while looping a hard hook.

  “And a-three!” when I scooped an uppercut.

  When I stopped momentarily after my first onslaught— “And breathe, two three four”—I realized there was no need for another; all three attackers had been literally floored. They lay scattered about the pavement like spare change, emitting noises of remorse and surrender.

  I guess I didn’t know my own strength.

  With a shaky hand I pulled Charlie to her feet. With a Parkinsonian quiver I returned her purse. Her dress was torn and her shoulder was bare. Her hair was garlanded with wands of honeysuckle and nectar. Again I smelled the flowers and grass, the rosemary and mint. Again I detected the leather of her shoes and fresh sweat. And when she leaned into me, face upturned, adrenalized and frightened and wild, clutching my collar and pulling me down, pressing her beautiful mouth to mine, I realized I had been right:

  Pomegranates.

  I would give everything I have to taste them again.

  New Punch Line

  Apparently, to get a second chance at life I needn’t give up everything I have, merely the sum total of all dignity I have accrued during my lifetime. I wake up on my stomach in the dedicated pulse subacute-care unit with a tech—how can I put this?—wiping my ass. The odor, my abject babylike position, ass-high, and the mortifying heat and viscosity laminating everything south of the belt line eliminate any doubt about what has transpired.

  “Hey,” I say to the tech as he goes about his ungentle business. “What do you think you’re doing? We haven’t even been properly introduced.”

  “Hunh?”

  “Don’t you think you should at least buy me dinner first? Or take me to a show or compliment my shoes or something?”

  “What?”

  “It’s O.K.,” I tell him. “You don’t have to do that. I can take it from here.” The tech shrugs and tosses me the box of moist wipes. Fine by him, I’m sure.

  Delicately I peel up from the bed and teeter behind the curtain, where I continue in private my disgraceful ablutions.

  “How long have I been out?”

  “Nearly two hours.”

  “Jesus,” I say through the plastic sheeting. “They hit me with some kind of soporific I don’t know about?”

  “No, you suffered some extracranial nonpenetrating trauma.” When I stare at him blankly he says, “A nasty boo-boo. To your squash. Presumably when you fell over. Conked yourself out.”

  “Well, in one way, I guess I feel lucky to be alive. I had no idea what hit me. My stomach felt like it was on fire. Thought it was some kind of acid.”

  Before I get his “Nope” I am pretty sure I hear a snicker.

  “If it was a tranq it’s got weird side effects.”

  “Not a tranq,” the guy says, a warble in his voice.

  “Some kind of poison I don’t know about?”

  “Nope. It was nonlethal.”

  “I didn’t feel a dart.”

  “Wasn’t one.”

  “Airborne?”

  “Nope.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “It was an old-fashioned pill. Someone got to you.”

  “How would someone get to me?”

  The guy shrugs.

  “Well,” I say. “Go on then. What was it? Lay it on me.”

  After a silent interval I peer out from behind the curtain and see the tech vibrating with mirth. When he regains motor control he says, “You were temporarily debilitated by acute muscular seizure induced by a sizable overdose of ingested pachylax.”

  “By what?”

  After a few poorly suppressed giggles the guy manages to bear the bad news, a tidbit that will, I’m sure, be the highlight of Janus headquarters gossip for weeks to come. “Pachylax,” he repeats without the equanimity you hope for in a bedside manner. “Elephant laxativ
e.”

  There’s no getting around it: after my vitals check out stable at the SAC unit I have to report to Po-Mo at headquarters. On the long interborough ride the escort team doesn’t hide it very well. They try to swallow it down, or cough over it, but I can hear their jaws crunching, their vocal folds tensing. They want to laugh so bad. I almost tell them it’s O.K., just get it over with, but instead I try to concentrate on how I’m going to explain this one to the boss.

  Nothing useful comes to me.

  Half an hour later I’m at headquarters being logged in by security. None of the unies looks me in the eye, and after the usual checks and inventory I’m cleared for entrance wordlessly. After two corners and three different hallways I stop and wait another thirty seconds. Those guys know me, and my range, and I know they are going to wait a while before saying anything. After ten seconds there’s nothing, ditto twenty and thirty, but then, finally—right when I think I might be in the clear—they all crack up.

  Even the unies know. Perfect.

  Another record I’ve set: the only pulse ever to be a punch line to a stoolie.

  The machine scans me in and I slink into division. Mercifully it seems fairly quiet. Everyone at dispatch is at their desks, heads bent over schedules with phones plugged in their ears. The comp facility isn’t running any tests and the windows are all dark. I’m able to breeze past the frosted glass of the admin offices—Po-Mo’s is vacant—and before I know it I’m in the locker room. It’s empty, thank God, and still smells of fresh body odor and the saline shots that pulses use to keep their eyes fresh on double shifts, so I must have just missed an outgoing crew. I suppose I was due some sort of luck today.

  I pull on the handle and my locker creaks open. Taped to the inside of the door and the back panel are clippings of my more exalted accomplishments as a pulse—the award celebrating my three-year record of taking highest honors in industry-wide comps in Salt Lake City; my first at the Endurovigil Sleep-Deprivation Sit-Off; the newspaper clipping of the bust nearly a year ago that brought down Kong and Frankie Nickels—but they aren’t reassuring. They seem almost quaint, as if from a bygone era. When I finger the corner of the article about Kong turning state’s evidence against Frankie Nickels I realize that the powerful jolt of nostalgia I’m feeling is a bad sign: I’m already thinking in the past tense.