Small Town

He was a man who liked things to remain the same. That, at least, was the sort of man he had always been. But things didn’t remain the same, they changed irrespective of the sort of man you were. And nowadays he didn’t know what he liked, or what sort of man he was.

He chose Clara. If he’d been told her name the first time he’d forgotten it as soon as he heard it, but he knew it now, and wished he didn’t.

“You musta worked late,” she said, when they were in the bedroom together. She nodded at the briefcase. “Came straight from the office, didn’t you?”

He nodded.

“What you need now,” she said, “is you need to relax.”

He undressed, and she slipped out of her wrapper. Her body was familiar to him, and that made him wish he’d chosen the other girl, whose name he’d already forgotten.

He wished he could forget Clara’s.

While she was hanging up his suit jacket, he opened the briefcase and drew out the heavy claw hammer, chromed steel with a black rubber grip. The price sticker was still on it. Her back was to him when he brought the hammer up and swung it as hard as he possibly could at the back of her head. It made an awful sound, but that was the only sound; she fell without crying out, and he caught her as she fell and eased her down.

Was she dead? Had the single blow been sufficient?

It was hard to tell. She lay face up, and she might have been sleeping but for the blood that welled from the back of her head. He took hold of her wrist but couldn’t tell whether it was her pulse that he felt or the throbbing of his own heart. He had to be sure, and he didn’t want to hit her again, wasn’t sure that he could, so he got the cold chisel and stuck it into the left side of her chest.

He felt an awful aching in his own chest, as if he himself had been stabbed. He looked down at her and felt tears coursing down his cheeks and realized that he was weeping. He got a tissue from the box at the bedside, wiped the tears away.

Sacrifice — hers now, along with so many others — had not made a stone of his heart, not yet, not entirely. He could still feel. He could still weep.

After the deaths, the four that were his, the three thousand that were his city’s, all he could seem to do was read, and all he could read was the city’s history. He took down his copy of the New York City encyclopedia, the huge volume that had been a surprise bestseller for Yale University Press, and sat down with it, reading it through like a novel. He’d browsed extensively in the book since it had come into his possession, but now he started at the first page and read through to the last.

Not everything registered. There were times when he would sit up, realizing he’d read his way through several articles, scanning the columns, turning the pages, and he had no idea what he’d just read. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t studying for a test. He went on reading, and turning pages.

From time to time he would pause and look off into the middle distance, and his mind would go all over the place.

When it was time to sleep, he slept. When he thought of it, he ate. When he was awake, he sat in his chair and read.

He had been reading about the Draft Riots in New York during the Civil War, when the city was essentially lawless for days, and when mobs lynched black men and beat policemen to death. The Draft Riots were a puzzle, an anomaly, and all the arguments trotted out to explain them — the animosity, born of competition for work, of Irish immigrants for freed African slaves, the resentment of white workingmen at being drafted to fight a war for black freedom, and others, so many others — all were valid, and all seemed beside the point.

But he’d looked at them in the context of the Civil War, or in the context of the city’s ethnic and political realities, and he could see that he’d been completely wrong. The Draft Riots happened because they had to happen.

They were a sacrifice.

They were the city, New York, sacrificing itself for its own greater glory. They were a ritual bloodletting by means of which the city’s soul was redeemed and renewed, rising from its own psychic ashes to be reborn greater than it had been before.

And the Draft Riots were not an isolated example. No, not at all. The city had been shocked over the centuries by no end of tragedies, great pointless disasters that were no longer pointless when viewed through the lens of his new perspective.

The General Slocum tragedy, for example, when a ship loaded to capacity with German immigrants and their children, bound for a holiday excursion, caught fire and burned and sank in the East River. Hundreds of men and women and children perished, so many that the Lower East Side neighborhood known as Little Germany ceased overnight to exist. So many residents had been lost that the survivors couldn’t bear to stay where they were. They moved en masse, most to the Yorkville section of the Upper East Side.