I visited the Fulton Houses many times when John lived there with his mother, back when I was his mentor, but I never became comfortable walking through the narrow halls. Mina’s apartment was in the back, and the hallways leading there threaded through what felt like a menacing labyrinth. The buildings rise up in plain stories, one floor after another all the same, like a place that has no beginning and no real end.
The last time I visited the Fulton Houses was not long after the terrorist attacks—and I felt just as awful walking up those steps as I had when I first heard that a plane had struck the North Tower. The scale of the devastation of course is completely different. But something terrible was happening in each case; in each case, an entire world was coming to an end.
The place had not changed at all – except for the flags. Here as elsewhere in the city, American flags had bloomed after the terrorist attacks – they hung from windowsills, balcony rails, and transoms – little miniature flags were even stuck in the lawn.
I had no idea Mina Marion was addicted to smack when I agreed to mentor her son. I was too obtuse or perhaps too naïve to figure it out on my own. John spilled the news out of acute embarrassment one day, after she’d spent a distractingly long amount of time in the ladies’ room at a restaurant where we were having dinner. Mina often had a cold, or her eyes would look rheumy, her nose chapped and sore. I never saw her eat except when a plate of cake or brownies arrived.
Naive, I didn’t understand what this meant till John told me that these were all signs – the telltale sweet tooth, the constipation, the flared histamines, the complaints about leg pain. I had just assumed these were the idiosyncrasies of a woman who’d lived a far rougher life than I knew.
The last time I saw her she was too drunk to walk and she couldn’t shape the S in my name – she kept saying Aysh, Aysh, Aysh. So now, years later, I walked through tempered glass doors of Building 6 and at once I noticed the thin white woman with the bobbed dirty blonde hair and the amused eyes, but I did not recognize her as Mina until she smiled and I saw the stained teeth – she was able to fix so much, but not yet her teeth.
She was dressed now in a pale blue shirt and white slacks, and she looked like she could be anyone’s aunt. She smiled at me and I was stunned by her self-possession, her polish, and her, well, her utter normality. “It’s so good to see you, Ace,” she said.
She looked better than I had expected, and the stunning fact of her appearance made me almost mute as we walked up the back stairwell (the elevator, she said, was broken again). She was perfectly put together except for a blue and purple bruise at the base of her neck. Even that, I quickly decided, was a sign of almost banal normality – “I slept on my arm funny the other night,” she explained when she saw me looking at the bruise. “Isn’t it odd what a body can do to itself by mistake?”
Old Polariods prove that Mina was never beautiful, but she was once attractive and young. When I first met her she had sunken cheeks, painted on eyebrows, and coughing fits that would turn her whole neck red. She still had a good nose and a wide inviting smile, but her teeth had brownish stains. After John roped her into regular methadone treatment in 1998, she gained weight; in time she looked less like a woman who had forgotten how to sleep. I never would have expected she could look as she did now.
Her apartment also had been transformed. Gone were the stacks of celebrity sleaze magazines, the soiled laundry in heaps, the empty liquor bottles and stale milk cartons, the wadded up Kleenex and cigarette packs – the detritus that even on her best days had once cluttered the place.
Someone had shoveled all the trash aside and slowly, carefully, with what must have been excruciating effort, dug out a small, neat apartment, a place with tall windows, lush spider plants spilling from corners, and decorative plates hung on the walls. Mia stood in the center of the linoleum kitchen floor and spread her arms. “I just started cleaning,” she said, “and this is what I found.”
I walked around the living room twice, wondering if the pretty blue Persian-style rug had been here all along. She put tea on the stove and we talked gently about the quality of the light through the windows – her mien and poise put me off such that I didn’t remember my purpose for being here until I saw the shrine on a shelf in the corner and then my stomach tensed up and I had to suppress the urge to run out of here. I have to do this, I reminded myself. Someone has to.
Here were the markers of her son’s life: small glossy photographs, a blue carnation, a report card in its tan sheath, a torn white ribbon from a junior high drafting contest, a pair of diamond-shaped cufflinks. I stood over the objects and said nothing. I think she thought that I was moved to silence by emotion. A thick candle beside the shrine had dried wax tears along its fat red base. The truth was that I was choking back anger. This memorial was a mockery of all the real ones laid out at Union Square or down at Ground Zero or across the city. The real dead deserved this attention—not the boys playing pretend and toying with the world.
Mina rearranged the photographs of John and plucked a wilted pink gerbera from the collection. “He didn’t listen to anybody,” she said. “He had to have everything his way.”
“Yes.”
“He never should have gone to the Towers that morning.”
Before that morning I was certain that Mina was just putting on a show. I suspected that she was in on John’s gambit. That she had entered into a pact with John to fake his death and collect on the whole transaction like a latter-day Double Indemnity—except instead of one murdered dupe there were about three thousand lost souls.
But her hands quivered as she put the gerbera back in place. She was calm and put-together despite this sense of quietly grieving – as if in stoic acceptance of her son’s death. She was not hysterical, was not relapsing; far from it, she was improving, gaining strength, digging herself out of the wreckage in the aftermath. In that moment I believed her to be honest. John must have found some other angle, I thought to myself.
Mina served the tea and accidentally spilled a sugar urn on the floor. As I stooped to help her, she opened a cabinet under the sink to get a dustpan. Under the sink I saw a black plastic bag wrapped around a bottle of Wild Turkey. Mina saw me notice; she took out the bottle, weighed it in her hands.
“I bought this on that Tuesday,” she said. “I bought it when he still hadn’t answered his phone and it was getting late. I didn’t know for certain what had happened. I mean, he shouldn’t have been there. But I just knew. So I bought this bottle, ready to do a swan dive into oblivion. But I didn’t open it. I kept thinking, now that he’s dead, he can see everything you do, because he’s in heaven. So there’s no hiding it anymore, no sipping in secret. I can’t open this unless I want him to know I failed him. The dead see everything. See, look, the foil seal is still there. You see that?”
“It’s still there,” I agreed.
After the tea, she insisted that I see her garden. She led me around to the back of the building; through a padlocked gate, she showed me a hidden inner courtyard of common ground where she had cultivated a long strip of loamy dirt in a ten by six feet swatch between her apartment building and a utility shed.
In that narrow patch of sun, you’d expect she could raise just a few sickly plants, but she showed me three low rows of rose bushes, tomato plants, and a batch of green beans. “Every time I tried to clean up, I planted tulips,” Mina said. “I’d always liked tulips. You put them in the ground and they come up again next year. They die and are reborn and die and are reborn again. You just keep getting second chances with them. Perfect for a screwed up girl like me, right? I call this my little garden of a thousand sighs because that’s how many tries it took for me to get it right.”
Mina stood in the modest rows of her tiny garden as she recounted her story, and as she stooped to tend to a bent plant, I couldn’t help but think of the migrant workers who had filled my uncle’s celery field in the first hours of daylight during each harvest – how those workers would fan out and swarm the rows, their backs bent over in work, hour after hour, day after day. I could not understand fully what it felt like to live Mina’s life, just as I never quite knew what it was like for those migrants who endured Horace’s tantrums, but I appreciated the effort that went into their lives, the endless renewals, the relentless life-and-death cycle of hope.
The connection between the past and this moment in the present was pleasing and calming to me, despite the turmoil of where I was, and what had happened with John; it was like a brief glimpse at a larger perspective, one that was bigger than my life alone, or than any single life could be.
This odd hopeful sensation left – and still leaves – me with a sense of hope for the deep and resonant similarities that exist between all of us, from the luckiest to the most luckless; and that’s what propels me, as I type these words even now, to push forward to the end of the story, to the finale between John and myself: I am not above hoping that I will find a deeper meaning in all this if I just listen closely enough.
Back upstairs in Mina’s apartment after we left the garden, I was completely in her power. I washed the dirt from my hands with her apple-scented soap and dried my face with a rough towel that smelled of cheap but clean fabric softener. This was a world of her own making, a place created by her intense will for survival. All of my reasons for visiting her seemed foolish now in the light of her presence.
“Too bad the rest of the building hasn’t cleaned up as well as you.”
“I’m working on that,” she laughed.
I spread my hands in a wide gesture. “Did you think about heading to Ground Zero to help?”
This, of course, was precisely the wrong thing to say. Her face fell and she looked away. And of course I felt like the callous fool. I was standing in her kitchen in front of a window that looked on the courtyard; in the building across the way, an old Hispanic man in overalls was leaning out his window and staring up into the sun as if in search of rain. I was in the wrong place looking for the wrong connections.
Mina went to the living room and opened a drawer in search of something. From inside the drawer, she lifted out a thin sheaf of papers. The papers were typed and bore an official seal. She carried the papers back to me with reverence, as if these pages contained sacred words that she hoped I would be able to translate for her.
“This is an application,” she said tentatively. “It’s for the Victim Compensation Fund.”
“I can see that,” I said. I sat down in a chair beside her kitchen table.
“You’ve heard of it?”
“I read about it in the paper,” I said.
“All I have to do,” she said, “is agree not to sue anybody, and I’ll get paid now.”
I was so saddened that a few moments passed before I realized she was not looking at me. And there was something wrong with her voice. There was a strain to it, as if she were trying to angle her own words so that they wouldn’t get caught on the edges of her mouth.
I sought her face and at last she met my gaze for the first time after handing me the papers. Her eyes were wide and full of sorrow and—something else. The papers tensed, creased between my fingers. The question that formed was the question I felt obliged to ask—the question that I knew would destroy this, all of this, this rebirth, this second chance, everything. And was it worth it? Did it make it better for all the lives lost if I made sure that not one soul profited from the matter?
“How,” I said, then quit speaking, swallowed, and started again: “Just how did you hear about this fund, Mina?”
“I don’t remember,” she said again in that strained voice. She was lying. For the first time I knew. For the first time I could tell. It was a lie like the lie in Harrington’s eyes when he told me about how he hid the video. A lie like the lie in the eyes of people who laughed about the little scams John pulled. A like like the easygoing lies that make life what it is—a lattice of untruths and near truths and falsehoods that robs life of its meaning. I cared for John like a brother. But I could not sacrifice my ideals for him.
“Maybe I can jog your memory,” I said softly. Before I could begin speaking, she turned and went to the window. Standing there she touched her collar bone, not far from the purplish blue bruise, and I wondered if she’d lied about that, too. I felt sick with a premonition of who gave it to her. The change in her demeanor was so fast that I began to wonder if she’d been waiting all along for me to ask the simplest of questions. As if she’d been hoping to be caught out. Like a relapsed criminal. Or a hopelessly lost junkie.
“He told you about it,” I said, heart beating loudly. “Didn’t he?”
“I’m feeling ill,” Mina said loudly.
An old, old look reappeared on her face; a look that I had not seen at all in the last hour; but a look that I knew all too well from the years when I saw her in John’s company: she was loosing her grip on a ruse.
“You don’t have to be afraid of him,” I said.
“Please,” she whispered. “He will – he won’t tell anyone else. I won’t, either. It’ll all be fine. Who has to know? He said I can even use some of the money and get my teeth fixed!”
I rose up slow and deliberate from my chair. I did not say what I was thinking: Only some of the money? Only some? The skin prickled on my shoulders and along my spine. I told myself that John was lying to her. That he’d lied to me. That he’d lied to everyone. That the end had come—that I could no longer let him slip out from the grasp of consequences. That should have made me feel better for what I was about to do. But it didn’t. It just made me hurt so much that I could barely hear my own voice.
“Tell me where he is, Mina.”
She did not look at me. She did not turn from the window. She did not need to turn around. She knew what was coming. Noiselessly, slowly, a closet door across the living room began to move – one of the old-fashioned accordion closet doors – it slid open as if of its own accord in silence like a door opening ominously behind a protagonist in an old silent film.
Standing inside, amid the coats and the shoes, I saw the tall thin figure of John Marion. He did not gesture or speak to address me. From across the room he looked like a terrible, vengeful ghost in his light-colored clothes: tan pants and a short-sleeved white polo shirt.
He had absolutely no expression on his face. He seemed to be preparing his precise words. I did not want to give him a chance to speak. For fear that he might somehow convince me to follow some scheme of his. I lifted a hand and I opened my shirt collar enough that he and Mina could see the wire leading from the microphone under my collar and connecting to the transmitter Harrington had taped to my chest.
It was my idea to come here. My idea to capture all this on tape. Harrington didn’t want to help. But he had to after I reminded him of his own involvement. His own culpability. He agreed in the end because he knew that John had gone to far.
All the smug confidence disappeared from John’s features when he saw the wire. He drew up to a greater height in one inhalation, as if he were puffing back up to full size after being crammed in the closet. His hands doubled into fists but the look on his face was scared—not at all the look, as I reflect upon it now much later, of a sociopath with real killer material. Just a boy. He was, under it all, just a kid, wasn’t he? Maybe, in the end, I had read him wrong, even in the final analysis?
I watched him come toward me with what anger he could muster. “Who’s listening in? Is someone coming?” He looked tired, like he hadn’t eaten or slept well in weeks. Most likely he had not. It’s hard to explain, but I was glad for this confrontation; for this accusation.
“I thought you were my friend,” he said.
“I am your friend, John.”
In one swipe of his arm he ripped the microphone and cord from me. He shook the wire in my face. “Tell me why you turned on me,” he said.
To his credit, he did not try to run, he didn’t try to flee. He knew the game had ended. I told him that he’d gone too far. He’d just gone too far for me.
“I never went too far,” he said derisively. “I never went anywhere. Look at where we are right now, Ace. This is the same place I’ve been all my life. I never got out of here. All I ever wanted was to get out of here!”
To punctuate his words, John swung his arm and his balled fist struck me hard in the center of my stomach; the blow caught me by surprise and caused me to double up and stagger backward. Then he struck me across the chin, a hard blow with his knuckles; he was not a brawler, and I actually outweighed him by twenty pounds, but what he lacked in brute strength, he made up for in persistence, striking me again and again until I went down on one knee and rolled onto my back on the kitchen floor.
Mina was shrieking, telling him to stop. I could also hear the sound of someone hammering on the apartment door. My vision wavered, the whole room spun around once or twice before my eyes, and right before I blacked out, I had time to think: I hope that’s Harrington. It’s time for all of this to come to an end. It’s time to bring all this out into the light.
##
You can also start the novel from the beginning.
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