him the voice of the choir seemed to swell.
“Are you sick, rose?”
There was no answer, of course. When his fingers left the faded pink bowl of the flower, it nodded back to its original position, growing out of the paint-splattered weeds in its quiet,
forgotten splendor.
Do roses bloom at this time of year? Jake wondered. Wild ones? Why would a wild rose
grow in a vacant lot, anyway? And if there’s one, how come there aren’t more?
He remained on his hands and knees a little longer, then realized he could stay here
looking at the rose for the rest of the afternoon (or maybe the rest of his life) and not come
any closer to solving its mystery. He had seen it plain for a moment, as he had seen
everything else in this forgotten, trash-littered corner of the city; he had seen it with its
mask off and its camouflage tossed aside. He wanted to see that again, but wanting would
not make it so.
It was time to go home.
He saw the two books he’d bought at The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind lying nearby.
As he picked them up, a bright silver object slipped from the pages of Charlie the
Choo-Choo and fell into a scruffy patch of weeds. Jake bent, favoring his hurt ankle, and
picked it up. As he did so, the choir seemed to sigh and swell, then fell back to its almost
inaudible hum.
“So that part was real, too,” he murmured. He ran the ball of his thumb over the blunt protruding points of the key and into those primi- tive V-shaped notches. He sent it skating
over the mild s-curves at the end of the third notch. Then he tucked it deep into the right
front pocket of his pants and began to limp back toward the fence.
He had reached it and was preparing to scramble over the top when a terrible thought
suddenly seized his mind.
The rose! What if somebody comes in here and picks it?
A little moan of horror escaped him. He turned back and after a moment his eyes picked it
out, although it was deep in the shadow of a neighboring building now—a tiny pink shape
in the dimness, vulnerable, beautiful, and alone.
I can’t leave it—I have to guard it!
But a voice spoke up in his mind, a voice that was surely that of the man he had met at the
way station in that strange other life. No one will pick it. Nor will any vandal crush it
beneath his heel because his dull eyes cannot abide the sight of its beauty. That is not the
danger. It can protect itself from such things as those.
A sense of deep relief swept through Jake.
Can I come here again and look at it? he asked the phantom voice.
When I’m low, or if the voices come hack and start their argument again? Can I come back
and look at it and have some peace?
The voice did not answer, and after a few moments of listening, Jake decided it was gone.
He tucked Charlie the Choo-Choo and Riddle-De-Dum! into the waistband of his
pants—which, he saw, were streaked with dirt and dotted with clinging burdocks—and
then grabbed the board fence. He boosted himself up, swung over the top, and dropped
onto the sidewalk of Second Avenue again, being careful to land on his good foot.
Traffic on the Avenue—both pedestrian and vehicular—was much heavier now as people
made their way home for the night. A few passersby looked at the dirty boy in the torn
blazer and untucked, flapping shirt as he jumped awkwardly down from the fence, but not
many. New Yorkers are used to the sight of people doing peculiar things.
He stood there a moment, feeling a sense of loss and realizing some- thing else, as
well—the arguing voices were still absent. That, at least, was something.
He glanced at the board fence; and the verse of spray-painted dog- gerel seemed to leap out
at him, perhaps because the paint was the same color as the rose.
“See the TURTLE of enormous girth” Jake muttered. “On his shell he holds the earth.” He shivered. “What a day! Boy!”
He turned and began to limp slowly in the direction of home.
19
THE DOORMAN MUST HAVE buzzed up as soon as Jake entered the lobby, because his
father was standing outside the elevator when it opened on the fifth floor. Elmer Chambers
was wearing faded jeans and cowboy boots that improved his five-ten to a rootin, tootin six
feet. His black, crewcut hair bolted up from his head; for as long as Jake could remem- ber,
his father had looked like a man who had just suffered some tremen- dous, galvanizing
shock. As soon as Jake stepped out of the elevator, Chambers seized him by the arm.
“Look at you!” His father’s eyes flicked up and down, taking in Jake’s dirty face and hands, the blood drying on his cheek and temple, the dusty pants, the torn blazer, and the burdock
that clung to his tie like some peculiar clip. “Get in here! Where the hell have you been?
Your mother’s just about off her fucking gourd!”
Without giving Jake a chance to answer, he dragged him through the apartment door. Jake
saw Greta Shaw standing in the archway between the dining room and the kitchen. She gave him a look of guarded sympathy, then disappeared before the eyes of “the mister”
could chance upon her.
Jake’s mother was sitting in her rocker. She got to her feet when she saw Jake, but she did
not leap to her feet; neither did she pelt across to the foyer so she could cover him with
kisses and invective. As she came toward him, Jake assessed her eyes and guessed she’d
had at least three Valium since noon. Maybe four. Both of his parents were firm believers
in better living through chemistry.
“You’re bleeding! Where have you been?” She made this inquiry in her cultured Vassar
voice, pronouncing been so it rhymed with seen. She might have been greeting an
acquaintance who had been involved in a minor traffic accident.
“Out,” he said.
His father gave him a rough shake. Jake wasn’t prepared for it. He stumbled and came
down on his bad ankle. The pain flared again, and he was suddenly furious. Jake didn’t
think his father was pissed because he had disappeared from school, leaving only his mad
composition behind; his father was pissed because Jake had had the temerity to fuck up his
own precious schedule.
To this point in his life, Jake had been aware of only three feelings about his father:
puzzlement, fear, and a species of weak, confused love. Now a fourth and fifth surfaced.
One was anger; the other was disgust. Mixed in with these unpleasant feelings was that
sense of homesickness. It was the largest thing inside him right now, weaving through
everything else like smoke. He looked at his father’s flushed cheeks and screaming haircut
and wished he was back in the vacant lot, looking at the rose and listening to the choir. This
is not my place, he thought. Not anymore. I have work to do. If only I knew what it was.
“Let go of me,” he said.
“What did you say to me?” His father’s blue eyes widened. They were very bloodshot
tonight. Jake guessed he had been dipping heavily into his supply of magic powder, and
that probably made this a bad time to cross him, but Jake realized he intended to cross him
just the same. He would not be shaken like a mouse in the jaws of a sadistic tomcat. Not
tonight. Maybe not ever again. He suddenly realized that a large part of his anger stemmed
from one simple fact: he could not talk to them about what had happened—what was still
happening. They had closed all the doors.
But I have a key, he thought, and touched its shape through the fabric of his pants. And the
rest of that strange verse occurred to him: If you want to run and play, /Come along the
BEAM today.
“I said let go of me,” he repeated. “I’ve got a sprained ankle and you’re hurting it.”
“I’ll hurt more than your ankle if you don’t—”
Sudden strength seemed to How into Jake. He seized the hand clamped on his arm just
below the shoulder and shoved it violently away. His father’s mouth dropped open.
“I don’t work for you,” Jake said. “I’m your son, remember? If you forgot, check the picture on your desk.”
His father’s upper lip pulled back from his perfectly capped teeth in a snarl that was two
parts surprise and one part fury. “Don’t you talk to me like that, mister—where in the hell is your respect?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I lost it on the way home.”