Small Town

The super thought maybe he’d gone to Florida, something like that. And maybe he was back by now, because the super hadn’t been in the apartment since. His mailbox was never jammed up, it was always clear, so either he was living in there now, keeping to himself the way he did, or at least he was coming by to collect his mail.

The super let the cops into the apartment, and they found it as he’d described it. There were additional bills from the co-op association for the monthly maintenance charges, slipped under the door every month, and there was the usual array of menus from Asian restaurants, and the air was stale and the horizontal surfaces coated with dust.

What there was not was any sign of William Boyce Harbinger, or any indication of where he might have gone.

twenty

Harbinger of doom, the papers called him. Harbinger the Carpenter.

There but for the grace of God, thought Susan Pomerance, go all my favorite artists.

She wasn’t following the unfolding story that intently, the way the rest of the city seemed to be. Chloe, for one, seemed capable of talking of little else. Every new development, every further revelation about the city’s greatest nightmare, informed the girl’s every utterance. The losses the man had suffered, his son and daughter and son-in-law, all killed when the towers came down. And then his wife dying, probably of a broken heart, and was it any wonder he cracked?

Without reading much of the newspaper coverage, without spending much time watching television or listening to any radio news beyond WQXR’s hourly summary, she nevertheless found herself aware of most of the story’s developments.

She heard about the increasing body of evidence suggesting he’d simply walked away from his apartment, turned the key in the lock, and disappeared. He hadn’t collected his mail, after all; instead, he’d rented a post office box and had all his mail forwarded to it. He’d paid rent on the box for three months in advance, and never paid anything further, nor was there any indication that he’d ever visited the box to collect his mail. After several past-due notices went unanswered, a clerk opened his box, marked the first-class mail to be returned to sender, and discarded the rest.

He’d evidently lived in a series of flophouses, all of them in the general vicinity of Penn Station. Why, people wondered, would a man walk away from a comfortable apartment, filled with his furniture and the possessions of a lifetime, to live in a squalid furnished room with the bathroom down the hall?

Susan didn’t find it that incomprehensible. That was one of the things people did when they were in the process of withdrawing, of turning inside. For a fortunate handful, the energies that made them turn inward were somehow magically channeled into art. Instead of walking onto a factory floor with an AK-47, instead of taking off all their clothes in the subway, instead of murdering their children in their beds, or drinking oven cleaner, or lying down in front of the Metroliner, they painted a picture or fashioned a sculpture. They made art.

And wasn’t all art created to preserve the artist’s sanity? Didn’t they all make art the way oysters made pearls? A grain of sand got into the oyster’s shell, which was to say under his skin, and it irritated him, it chafed him. So the oyster secreted something, squeezed out some essence of its own self, and coated the offending grain of sand with it, just to stop the pain. Layer after layer of this mystical substance the oyster brought forth, until the grain of sand and the pain it had occasioned were not even a memory.

The by-product of the oyster’s relief was the shimmering beauty of the pearl. And every pearl, every single luminous gem, had at the core of its being a grain of irritation.

If William Boyce Harbinger, Harbinger the Carpenter, had been able to so channel his own furious energies, then the roots of his discontent might have brought forth life instead of death. And yet, she thought, you could argue that Harbinger was making his own kind of art, composing it of death and destruction.

He knew so many unusual facts about New York, a neighbor had told a CNN reporter. How the streets were named, and some forgotten event that had taken place on a certain corner a hundred years ago. And a former coworker had confirmed that Harbinger’s only after-hours pastime that he knew of was the study of the city’s history. “He loved New York,” an op-ed columnist theorized, “and the city betrayed him, taking his loved ones from him all in a single horrible morning. And now he is getting his horrible twisted revenge.”

Perhaps, she thought. But perhaps not. Perhaps the city he loved was his canvas, and he was striving to paint his masterpiece in blood and fire.