But the barking. The slightest noise, from the halls or in either of the apartments next to mine, would set her off. It was a loud bark, it went through you—or me—like a shot, and it carried. Neighbors complained, the landlord threatened. Sometimes I would have to smack her with a rolled-up magazine to get her to shut up, but that didn’t happen too often, thank god. The point is, she was out of control, and the constant barking was driving me nuts, too. It affected my sleep. Sometimes it even carried into my dreams, as the sound of a hacking cough, for example, or a pile driver, or as someone pounding on a door. Only once did it register as what it was, but this time I was making the noise. I was down on all fours. I remember being wildly agitated, whipping myself from side to side in a furious, doglike frenzy, as Eva reared back above me.
I woke with my head in a vise. The dog of course barking like a crazy person and my neighbors hammering on the walls with their fists. I swallowed a couple of ibuprofen tablets and stayed awake until it was light out. And then I took her for her walk, the same routine as every other morning, only this one was colder—ridiculously bright and ridiculously cold. My breath left crystals on my scarf when it wasn’t steaming up my glasses. Every time we hit a patch of ice, Eva would pull at the leash extra hard. Come on, I thought, we both know it’ll take more than that, and I bent my knees and stayed lower to the ground, as if preparing to slalom.
It seemed to tear the top half of his head off. The new Santa’s laugh was that awful. Terrifying. A baritone but not Ho Ho Ho but a laugh that was also a cry for help. Help me! he laughed, and the children on his lap were reduced to tears or fits of screaming.
“Do yourself a favor,” said the manager, as he cut the check.
“I know,” Russell interrupted with a grimace. “I know what you’re going to say.”
“Bud, if you’ve heard it before. Jesus.”
So seven years pass. Seven holiday seasons and not one rolls by but Russell Richards doesn’t feel the pang. Temperatures go down, the trees go up with their tinsel, trinkets and blinking lights, and Russell starts to get angsty. Do yourself a favor. It’s a voice inside him he can’t turn off. Instead, why should I? he replies. It’s his catechism. A never-neglected routine. But the little ones still take fright of him.
That seventh year started off on two left feet—first a foot of snow over Thanksgiving, but later that December, three days of late Indian Summer, days so apocryphal and mild they seemed to belong on the April calendar. The remaining leaves clenched into little brown fists that shook at the buses wheezing past. Nannies and new moms backed the plastic off their baby carriages, neighbors returned to stoops, old men to the windows out which they’d stared their summer enmity, and Russell was moved to join in.
He joined like one granted a reprieve.
The passengers on the F train were good at avoiding eye contact. There was sincerity in their avoidance. It wasn’t easy for them because Russell was a scene unto himself. He seemed to be handing out licenses to stare.
He grabbed a window seat but couldn’t help but spill over. Although people were standing, nobody contended for a share of the seat next to him. He peered out on avenues laden with the dust from truck traffic and a mix of warehouse blocks and blocks of three-to-four-story brownstones, with their raked roofs all but touching. The train elbowed west by northwest before heading underground.
They waited in the darkness of the tunnel for the dispatch signal. The other riders dreamed fitfully inside the car, in those empty minutes, in the intimate anonymity of the delay. Their impatience hatched side projects, the obligatory groans of why me god, not again, motherfucker, why now and it don’t end, and the other insect racket embedded in their ears. Adjectives latticed across different faces: they appeared to him as on a sign. The signs ran the length of the car, all variations on the same theme. ESCAPE FROM EVERYDAY LIFE. Buy your bank tickets online. There was no way of escaping them. Look, don’t look, they’d find a way to seep in, look out the window, bare bulbs illuminating graffiti tags on the crossed lattices of pillar and post. Things were scurrying off behind. It was rat heaven out there. All the rats killed above ground, rats from all over the world, ended up in these tunnels, enjoying the filth and darkness, the human world enunciated as noise and delicious offal.
Russell repeated his catechism and that particular slice of heaven held off for a while longer. After several false starts, the train roused itself and staggered on.
Slant, facing diagonal from him, near one of the sliding doors, a toddler in a stroller watched three grown-ups who were making faces, cooing and hedging behind their fingers. The two women were obviously related, an old lady and her rosy-cheeked, middle-aged daughter—the giggling man next to them, not—but which of them the boy belonged to, Russell couldn’t guess. The antics of the grown-ups were so well choreographed the child might have been communicating telepathically. Puff your cheeks out! he’d command, and they would obey. They would huff and blow and pout and puff and their eyes would squint, like they were about to eat dirt sandwiches.
Then, without warning, the child turned his little extent in Russell’s direction. There was a moment of indescribable intensity as he stared and Russell stared back. Russell felt weak with hesitancy, hope, nausea. He was sure the spell would be broken and the crying begin (with a phenomenal howl, if past experience was any judge) but this time things were different. The infant was stopped in his tracks, but surprise turned into puzzlement and he kept staring, not sure how to place Russell in his limited but growing repertoire of the uncanny.
Was this one a threat? The kid was, in his preverbal way, undecided.
And then he turned aside, to the two cornrowed men and woman moving purposefully down the aisle. Their hands were filled with flyers: she was handing them out while the men were sticking sheaves of ten or more into the bottom corners of the overhead signs. “You think you’re messed up,” the woman said as she handed Russell the slip of paper, but it wasn’t clear if she was talking to herself or to him, asking or telling, rebuking or commiserating. It didn’t matter. The child hadn’t cried! The child hadn’t cried. A victory of who knew what order of magnitude.
SEE THE WORLD THROUGH YOUR NEIGHBORS’ EYES, he read. SEE YOURSELF! DON’T BE FOOLED BY APPEARANCES EVER AGAIN!
Remote viewing? But why not? It wasn’t for the crazies anymore.
At 42nd Street, the people in the car poured onto the platform, out between two wedges of waiting passengers. Russell was a sizable impediment, but he was carried along, washed up one set of stairs and out the stiles and up another into the even warmer air outside. The humidity seemed to make the dust hover more than usual, filling in the thin winter light. The symmetry of Manhattan is the symmetry of a grid. You see it even in its name: m, nn, aaa, tt, h. It isn’t a grid superimposed upon the clutter. The grid is the game. The stream of people divagated once they got above ground, and there were different currents, or causeways, to step into. Russell hesitated and so was jostled more than once.
“Watch it.” An immoveable obstruction. “Lameass.” A blockage. “Fuckinutjob.” Snowbanks sank to the pavement, their runoff backed up above the drains at the corners. The salt thrown down to melt the ice was being carried down into the earth, beneath the trembling pavement and into the tunnels, corroding the cables wrapped snugly underground—like the city was melting back to life. The sidewalks couldn’t fit all the people there were, and the impatient ones would shear off the curb, one eye over their shoulders.
The superstars of the WB empire were being dragged along the sides of buses. They lounged and bullshitted and laughed their way through the city, stopping every two blocks to let people on and off. His eyes traveled the length of these enormous reclining bodies. He walked slowly but couldn’t help getting