Small Town

One day he went into the bedroom they shared and his wife was sleeping. He called her name twice, a third time, but she didn’t stir. He went back and sat down again in front of the television set.

Some hours later he went to the bedroom again, and she hadn’t changed position, and he touched her forehead and realized that she was dead. There was, he noticed for the first time, a vial of sleeping pills on the bedside table, and it was empty.

Her action seemed entirely reasonable to him, and he only wondered that she had thought of it first, and only wished she’d told him, so that he could have lain down and died beside her. Without disturbing her body, he took the empty pill bottle downstairs and refilled it at the CVS on Broadway. He took all the pills and got undressed and got into bed.

Twelve hours later he awoke with a splitting headache and a dry mouth and a bottomless thirst. The throw rug beside the bed was stained with vomit.

He got out of bed, showered, put on clothes, and went up to the roof, intending to throw himself off it. He stood at the edge for what must have been half an hour. Then he went downstairs and called a doctor he knew, and a funeral parlor.

His daughter and son-in-law had been vaporized, atomized. Their bodies would never be recovered. His son lay at the bottom of a hundred stories of rubble. He told the funeral director there would be no service, and that he wanted his wife cremated. When they gave him the ashes he walked all the way downtown, five miles more or less, and got as close to Ground Zero as you could get. There were barriers up, you couldn’t get too close, but he did the best he could and found a spot where he could stand in relative privacy, tossing his wife’s remains a handful at a time into the air. He stood there for a few minutes after he’d finished, then turned around and walked back the way he came.

Crossing Twenty-third Street, he realized he was still carrying the container for the ashes. He dropped it in the next trash basket he came to and walked the rest of the way home.

He got up from his park bench now and walked to Christopher and Waverly, where he walked counterclockwise around the little triangular block on which stood the little triangular building that housed the Northern Dispensary. He liked the lines of the building, the way it filled its space. He liked, too, that it stood at the corner of Waverly Place and Waverly Place. The street didn’t just make a ninety-degree turn here, it actually intersected itself, and that had always appealed to him.

What’s the most religious street in the world? he used to ask his daughter, when he’d take her walking in the Village on a Sunday afternoon. Waverly Place was the answer, because it crosses itself.

The Northern Dispensary had been there forever. There’d been a little café on the corner called Waverly & Waverly, but it hadn’t been there for long. Something else had replaced it, and had been replaced in its turn.

Some things lasted, some things didn’t.

He stood listening to the sounds of the city, breathing in the taste and smell of the city. Sometimes, drawing a deep breath, he would fancy that he was inhaling some of the substance of his daughter and son-in-law. They had gone off into the air, and he was breathing the air, and who was to say he was not taking in some particulate matter that had once been theirs?

He turned, retraced his steps, crossed Christopher. Then came West Tenth Street, and then Charles.

Once all three streets were named for one man. Tenth Street, or at least a stretch of it, was then called Amos Street, and the man was Charles Christopher Amos, who’d owned a large tract of land there.

And West Fourth Street had been called Asylum Street. So, when you stood at the corner of West Fourth and West Tenth, you were at the erstwhile intersection of Amos and Asylum, and how many people knew that?

Of course it was no less interesting an intersection now, West Fourth and West Tenth Streets. What business did they have intersecting one another? Numbered streets ran east and west, numbered avenues ran north and south, that was how it was supposed to be, but here everything was askew, everything came at you on a slant, and West Fourth Street angled north even as Tenth and Eleventh and Twelfth Streets angled south.

He liked that almost as much as Waverly crossing Waverly...

He turned the corner on Charles Street and stood in a doorway across the street from where the woman had been killed. He remembered how the man and woman had left the bar together and walked side by side (but not arm in arm) along a more direct version of the route he’d just taken.

How he’d walked along in their wake.

He put his hand in his pocket and felt the cool surface of the object within, tracing its contours with his fingertips. He drew it from his pocket and held it in his closed right hand, and he stood in the shadows as they lengthened.