There's Something I Want You to Do

And the young couple in the next apartment over! During the summer, when their windows were open, their prideful love-yelps acquired carrying power. One of these days, she’d get pregnant, and then her baby would do all the screaming.

At his desk, he moved aside some bills and his checkbook before beginning to write an e-mail to his girlfriend: Dear Reena, I miss you so much. I just heard something, and I thought u might be interested. Somebody made a noise. Yelling. A scream maybe. It’s funny about noises like this in the city. You fry the eggs, you listen to the radio, you check your e-mail, you go on as if nothing has happened, you

But no: there it was again. A second scream. He put on his shoes, ran down the stairwell, and stepped outside. He turned northeast. The day presented him with brick and asphalt, scraggly warehouse-district trees, a school bus, a construction crane in the distance, the sun shining over them all. A scream — but no screamer. Another jogger passed by and frowned at him. Overhead, a large black bird was flapping around, chased by a sparrow or a starling. He couldn’t tell one bird from another. Stopping for a moment, he saw a ringlet of red hair on the sidewalk, as if someone had violently yanked it out from someone else’s scalp. Benny went back inside and after breakfast set off for work.

—

That night, Benny began his daily walk along the Mississippi, avoiding the park at the end of the street where he had once been mugged. He still retained a limp from being hit in the leg that time with a baseball bat. They had struck him from behind and just above the knee. He hadn’t seen them. It was like being struck by God. When he had fallen forward, a large man had reached into his pocket and grabbed his wallet before Benny could twist around to see who it was. The mugger had grunted quizzically as his fingers wormed inside Benny’s trouser pocket before he took what he wanted. Well, the wallet had only been a wallet. Benny had canceled the credit cards and gone to the DMV to replace his driver’s license. Tonight the air above the river smelled of vegetation, a green turtle — like aroma thick with reptilian life, but despite the attractions of the watery stink, Benny did not cross the street to the sidewalk beside the river until he had passed the unlit park where demons sat coiled patiently in the shadows waiting for him.

On both sides of the Mississippi, outdated buildings with limestone foundations that once housed mills — flour and lumber and woolen mills, once the source of the city’s wealth — stood in bleached floodlight like museum artifacts that no one was permitted to touch anymore.

He detoured past a coffee shop and through the front window saw his friend Elijah, a pediatrician who had moved to Minneapolis from the Bay Area a few years ago. His friend was sipping espresso and reading a copy of City Pages in the corner. Benny went inside.

“Doctor.”

“Takemitsu.” The pediatrician took another sip of his espresso. “Funny. You don’t look Japanese,” he said automatically, for the hundredth time, peering at his newspaper. They’d been friends ever since they’d met at a Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party precinct caucus, where they’d both volunteered to be delegates to the county convention. They canvassed in their neighborhood, and on Election Day they both drove oldsters to the polls.

“What’re you reading?” Benny asked.

“The sex advice column. I’m married, so it’s irrelevant. How’s tricks, by the way?”

“Tricks? Oh, the tricks are fine,” Benny said. He sat down. “So, Doctor, you’re not home again? How come you’re hanging out in a downtown coffee shop at this hour? What’s the appeal?” The questions were all rhetorical, a means to get conversation started. Benny knew perfectly well why his friend was sitting there.