“Yes,” he said. “It counts. But I’m afraid it doesn’t change a thing.”
He gave three hard bangs on the door. Tumblers turned and the guard appeared.
“Don’t be dumb, Peter. Fanning’s everything I say he is. I don’t know what you’re planning, but don’t.”
“Thank you,” he said to the guard. “I’m finished here.”
The chain attaching Alicia to the wall rattled as she yanked on it. “Listen to me, goddamnit! It’s no good, fighting him!”
But these words barely reached his ears; Peter was already striding down the hall.
* * *
61
And now, my Alicia, you reside among them.
How do I know this? I know it as I know everything; I am a million minds, a million histories, a million roving pairs of eyes. I am everywhere, my Alicia, watching you. I have watched you since the beginning, taking measure and stock. Would it be too much to say that I felt your arrival on the day you were born into this world—a wet, squealing nugget, the hot blood of protest already pouring through your veins? Impossible, of course; yet it seems so. Such is the bewitching way of providence: all seems ordained, all known, both in forward and reverse.
What an entrance you made! With what bold declaration, what showmanship, what authoritative poise did you step into the city’s lights and stake your claim! How could the occupants of the besieged metropolis fail to swoon under your spell, enchanted by the drama of your arrival? I am Alicia Donadio, captain of the Expeditionary! Forgive, Alicia, these windy flights; my mood is grandiose. Not since the great Achilles stood without the battlements of mighty Troy has our pocket of creation seen the likes of you. Within those walls, no doubt, a great parliament commences. Debates, edicts, threats and counterthreats—the customary swordplay of a city under siege. Do we fight? Do we run? Earnest and admirable, yet—and you must pardon the analogy—these discussions are to the outcome what splashing is to drowning: they only make the whole thing go faster.
In your absence, Alicia, I have, so to speak, taken a page from your book. Night after night the dark beckons me; my feet cast me wandering anew into the streets of mighty Gotham. Summer has come at last upon this isle of exile. In the branches the songbirds twitter; the trees and flowers clutter the breeze with their airborne sexual excreta; newborn creatures of every ilk undertake their first uncertain adventures in the grass. (Last night, recalling your concerns for my strength, I devoured a litter of six young bunnies in your honor.) What is this new restlessness inside me? Adrift among Manhattan’s maze of glass and steel and stone, I feel closer to you, yes, but something else as well: a sense of the past so glowingly intense it is practically hallucinatory. It was in summer, after all, when I traveled to New York for my friend Lucessi’s funeral, when this city first laid its hand of love upon me. I close my eyes and there I am, with her, my Liz, the woman and the place indelible, one and the same. The appointed hour at the clock, and then our exit into the moist human heat of the season’s early rush; the abrupt encapsulation of the taxi, with its cracked vinyl bench and feeling of a million prior occupants; the parade of heaving humanity clogging the streets and sidewalks; the impatiently perfunctory honking of horns and the catlike mating shrieks of sirens; the majestic towers of midtown, glazed and shining with the hour’s exhausted light; my bright, almost painful awareness of everything, a rush of undifferentiated data to my brain, all of it permanently inseparable from the beloved and eternal her. Her shining, sun-blessed shoulders. The faint, womanly aroma of her perspiration in the sealed space of the taxi. Her wan, expressive face, with its touch of mortality, and her myopic gaze, always peering deeper into things. The perfection of her hand in my own as we wandered the dark streets together, alone among millions. It has been said that in ancient times there was only one gender; in that blissful state, humankind existed until, as punishment, the gods divided each of us in two, a cruel mitosis that sent each half forever spinning across the earth in search of its mate, so that it could be whole again.
That was how her hand felt in my own, Alicia: as if, of all men upon the earth, I had found that one.
Did she kiss me that night as I was sleeping? Was it a dream? Is there a difference? That is my New York, as it was once so many’s: the kiss one dreams of.
All lost, all gone—as is the city of your love, Alicia, the city of your Rose. Call Fanning, my friend Lucessi wrote. Call Fanning to tell him that love is all there is, and love is pain, and love is taken away. How many hours did he hang there? How many days and nights did my mother linger, floating in a sea of agony? And where was I? What fools we are. What fools we mortals be.