But that was a long time ago.
It was hard to believe that morning the Honorable Walter J. Stone had lived and breathed and existed. He had still been reading a book at five o’clock in the morning, as if preparing for a lecture later in the week. Now he was what? An empty vessel? Food for worms? Nothing. Forever is impossible to conceive until it’s upon you: the realization that forever is forever is forever. The Judge was gone and Stone was alone in the world.
As an only son, Stone faced the overwhelming task of selecting his father’s burial accoutrements. The body was barely cold and the funeral director, a thin arrow of a man with jet-black hair and a weak chin, who introduced himself as Mr. Ehrenkranz, had asked whether the Judge would enter eternity in a muslin shroud or a linen one, Israeli or one handmade here in America? It had never occurred to Stone that somebody actually had to make such a decision, as though picking out a Father’s Day tie at Macy’s. He didn’t care. His brain fired blanks.
He let Ehrenkranz decide.
“You’ll note,” Ehrenkranz added, handing Stone his father’s beloved school ring—yellow gold with a glittering blue sapphire in the center, bracketed with the words COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, “shrouds have no pockets to carry man’s material possessions into the next world. However, it is customary for the deceased to be wrapped in his prayer shawl. Do you happen to have it with you?”
The pigeons cooing on the ledge below sounded almost human, a choir full of sorrow and regret and loss, unintelligible, but almost human. Stone threw one leg over the railing, feeling dizzy exhilaration, a vein jumping in his wrist. He stood on the street side of the railing now as the pigeons chattered, beckoning him forward. You can fly like us, the pigeons teased, you have wings. Stone spread his arms wide and knew the black robe could just as easily be his own burial shroud; all he had to do was step forward, and the pain would be gone in a pure act of erasure. He could fill the empty space below him in an instant.
Instead, he pulled a pack of matches from his pocket and lit a loosely rolled joint. As he inhaled, the heat of the burning tip near his skin, he was reminded of the elemental power he held in his trembling hand. He dropped a match onto the street, lit another match, held it for a five count—nearly burning the tips of his fingers—and dropped it. A cluster of pigeons rose into the sky and scattered, a pungent rush of air blowing past on the updraft. A few streets over, a car alarm wailed.
Looking across the river toward the city and the fading pink sunset, he could see from the monolithic Twin Towers and the crenellated spires of the Woolworth Building all the way to the Chrysler Building halfway up the island, rising like a stainless steel rocket ship from the dissonant chaos of Midtown. He took another hit of his joint, pondering. This squat, ordinary apartment house set against a backdrop of brown brick tenement buildings was exactly the sort of end he deserved. As the smoke filled his lungs, his father, vibrant with life, appeared before him floating in the air, wearing a three-piece suit and half-moon glasses, a paragon of scholarly civility, shaking his colossal bald head in disapproval.
“Do it,” his father said, with characteristic cruelty. “You’re nothing but a coward, Matthew. You’re not even a shit stain in my shorts.”
“Would it make you proud?” Stone said aloud, his voice weak.
But the Judge vanished as quickly as he had materialized.
Now, in the cool air of the rooftop, a pigeon alighted on the railing beside Stone, strutting with stupid avian bravado; a challenge. He flapped his wings and disappeared into the sky. Stone spread his arms, the fabric fluttering in the wind. A single green iridescent feather floated in the air just out of Stone’s reach, taunting him.
“I can do it if I want to,” Stone shouted to the sky. It was strange how foreign his voice sounded to his ears in the thick evening air. “But I won’t. Because you want me to.”
He slumped against the railing, breathless, realizing he had made up his mind to live. For now. Stone might have nodded off because the sky was dark, full of heavy black clouds rolling in high on the wind as eerie yellow lights came on in the streets between his tenuous perch and the river. Brooklyn looked somehow more lurid now that night had fallen, its low buildings more shabby. Its windows were filling with broken silhouettes of WIC-assisted poor bent over dinner plates in the blue glare of their televisions; rooftop water tanks hunched like wild things about to spring; disembodied renegade shouts filled the air, the streets below burning with anger freed by the cover of darkness. Manhattan, too, looked different, its jagged spine illuminated, lights flaring along the length of the island like torches lit by primitives in another age.
Stone heard footsteps at his back, and then: “What the fuck are you doing?” It was Pinky. Stone had almost forgotten, amid the bewildering whirlwind of emotions, that he was staying with Pinky now; his father’s Midwood apartment was no longer safe. “You look like Count Dracula in that thing. Get off there before someone gets hurt.”
Stone had come up to the roof to get away from Pinky, who understood death and loss the same way a twelve-year-old boy understands sex by gawking at pictures in a National Geographic magazine—distant, exotic, virtually impossible. But Pinky had phoned at the right moment, with Stone in a panic at the state of his father’s apartment; he had come right away and filled a white cube van with Bankers Boxes of the Judge’s belongings and loaded them into his street-level apartment. Pinky had offered Stone a mattress and a bare room, but he offered no comfort aside from empty platitudes and a firm handshake. As soon as the last box was stacked in the middle of Pinky’s living room, he cranked up his stereo, subwoofers pulsing, blasting some hideous, bass-thumping rap music that threatened to split Stone’s head in two. Pinky produced a nasty resin-filled bong from a kitchen cabinet and presented it to Stone with a be-my-guest gesture meant to be comic, but that only made Pinky more of an insensitive jackass.
His father had just died, and this was what he was left with.
All Stone’s childhood friends were gone. Danny Green was in med school in Baltimore; Alan Grinstein, Harvard Law; Alvin Zuckerbrot, Stanford Law; Jay Coopersmith head chef in a Michelin-starred restaurant in Amsterdam; Mickey Zin was married, lighting out for the suburbs of Westchester County; Ami Alfasi, dead two years in the Security Zone in Lebanon and buried on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.
Only Pinky, Michael Pinsky, the schmuck who dropped out of twelfth grade to try out for the Yankees, who got genital herpes from a prostitute in Paterson, New Jersey, who believed Jack Ruby was a great American Jew, only Pinky remained. He was a friend, but a friend of habit more than desire. They had known each other a long time and they were the last two childhood friends left standing. It was hard to believe they had once had so much in common, but passion for baseball cards, bike riding, and ding dong dash was a flimsy foundation for an enduring bond.
“It’s time to come inside, bitch,” Pinky said, offering a hand to Stone as he climbed back over the railing. “We’ve got a funeral tomorrow.”
Stone returned to the apartment reluctantly, wordlessly, and he and Pinky descended the stairs. When they were back inside, Pinky asked Stone if he wanted to play blackjack or something, but Stone didn’t answer and locked himself behind the bathroom door. He hung the robe on a hook and turned on the fan. Then he sat down in the cool bathtub and lit a cigarette. Stone unbuttoned his pants, pulled aside the zipper, and found the pale white of his upper thigh. It had been a long time, but the skin called to him now. His skin was nothing more than a tight-fitting body bag anyway. He took a deep drag on the cigarette. His hand shook as he maneuvered the cigarette toward his thigh. An old purple scar in the shape of the letter C smiled at him, beckoning. The hair burned first, then the skin. His vision went white and his blood began to calm and, soon, he closed his eyes.
THE MORNING SKY was a bright Dodger blue and the glare of the piercing sun was sharp and pricked Stone’s retinas like needles. Dressed in his only suit, a modish single-breasted number he rarely had cause to wear, he asked