Dark Sky (The Misadventures of Max Bowman Book 1) (2 page)

As I rode the F train back home, I thought about Mr. Barry Filer. He flew all the way to New York to talk to me for less than three minutes. I guessed the flash drive would give me some answers, but I wanted to know more right then and there.

I got off the subway and rode up the three endless escalators that delivered commuters up out of the bowels of Roosevelt Island. As I watched the tiled walls go by, I pulled out my iPhone, waiting for the service dots to appear in the upper left corner of the phone face. Yeah, I had an iPhone. I finally broke down and bought one about a year ago and now the fucking thing was more in charge of my life than I was. You did good, Steve Jobs, even though your bedside manner wasn’t reputed to be high quality either.

My service dots appeared. I hit the Howard button in my Contacts list as I headed for the subway station exit, walking past the tall-as-me sculpture of what seemed to be a glass gong, which made no goddamn sense at all in my artistic estimation.

The phone rang on the other end.

“Hey, man.”

The greeting always made me flinch. Howard Klein was the kind of guy who always said, “Hey, man,” because he thought it made him cool. Which wasn’t going to happen.

“Howard. Just met up with somebody…”

He immediately cut me off.

“Are you on a secure line?”
I looked around as if I was wondering who the fuck he was talking to, just to entertain myself.

“On a secure line? Howard, this is Max. Max Bowman. Yesterday, I looked at the pictures of your kid’s wedding on Instagram. What…”

“You want to talk about shit, you need to be on a secure line.”

“Since when?”

“Since I’ve been telling you for the last twelve years.”

“It’s never exactly been a sticking point before.”

“Well, it’s sticking now.”

Oh, baby.

I was outside, a nice end-of-April day after a winter that caused me to repeatedly question God’s existence, so I stopped by the retaining wall by the sidewalk that came up to my elbow, behind which was an elevated patch of grass and trees. I leaned back on the wall and allowed the rest of the subway riders to walk past me. I can walk and chew gum at the same time, but I needed to focus. I’m old enough to understand when things are rapidly getting fucked-up without me having to lift a finger.

“You know, Howard, this is the second time today someone’s been very serious with me.”

“You should try serious, it might look good on you.”

“Howard, c’mon. I’m serious about what I do or you wouldn’t keep throwing my name around, would you?”

“Look, something has changed. That’s all I can say. And you have to take that change
seriously
.” 

I was back in the principal’s office and, again, I had no idea why. 

“Howard, how about you stop pretending everything didn’t just get strange with this phone call?  How about you admit that, up until now, you’ve been sending confidential information straight to my Yahoo! email account, the same account where I get spam about walk-in bathtubs, burial insurance and Russian brides, and that
now
all of a sudden it’s all about the secure lines?”

A beat.

“Fine.”

He kept wanting to assume we were done talking. But I was a dog with a bone.

“All I get is fine? Okay, then I guess I’ll have to ask a series of questions to find out what this is all about. Like they used to do on
What’s My Line?
Is this case bigger than a breadbox?”

“Max, update your fucking references.
What’s My Line
, Jesus, didn’t they give out buggy whips to the winners on that thing?”

“You’re the same age as me, Howard.”

“Yeah, but I try to exist in the current millennium. Another thing you might wanna try.”

Another pause. I decided to try again. What the hell.

“So – this whole “something has changed” business. Does that have to do with my new client?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. And, by the way, you’re still not on a secure line.”

“Which means you do know what I’m talking about.”

“Max. I don’t have time for this.”

“You don’t
want
to have time for this.”

“Gotta go, the other line’s blinking.”

“Color me perplexed.”

“Color you disconnected.”

Click.

I turned to see a squirrel running up a cherry tree followed by an angry beagle trying to climb up after it. It was too soon to tell which one of those I was about to be. At the very least, I received confirmation that shit was weird. Sometimes, it’s enough to know that you’re paranoid for a reason. But that big, fat envelope in my coat pocket was starting to feel like it weighed three tons.

Time to keep walking. Time to get home. On Roosevelt Island, that never takes too long.

Roosevelt Island is about two miles long and a tenth of one across. It’s got parks on either end, the one at the top has an ancient lighthouse near a huge ancient hospital, the one at the bottom has a brand new giant cement statue of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s disembodied head. There are exactly three ways to get to Roosevelt Island unless you’re a fucking bird; the tram from the Manhattan side, the Roosevelt Island Bridge from the Queens side, and the subway from both sides. You can’t walk or drive directly to the city itself from the Island – which is why most New Yorkers don’t make the effort.

Why the fuck would they?

First of all, there’s no place to eat. Yeah, there’s a Subway, and mediocre-to-poor sushi, Chinese and pizza places, and a sports bar where you can get a decent burger, and a Starbucks, but that’s about it. No great neighborhood places like in the rest of the five boroughs. And don’t think about getting anything better brought to your door. You can only get delivery from Queens and only from the places desperate enough to want to send a delivery guy across the bridge on a bike. You call and ask a place if it delivers to Roosevelt Island, and you can time the pause with a stopwatch. They don’t want to say no, but eventually they will.

Second of all, the population is half Chinese and the other half is disabled and/or elderly. Why so many Chinese? There must be some kind of flyer circulating around Beijing touting the wonders of Roosevelt Island, otherwise I can’t explain it. As for those who are no longer able to walk, I guess it’s appropriate that an island filled with people in wheelchairs should be named after Roosevelt. To me, they serve as a daily reminder that I don’t need or want that my time is running out.

Third, there’s the problematic history of this place.  When it was called Welfare Island, it hosted a notorious overcrowded asylum, a workhouse populated by irredeemable convicts and a smallpox hospital you could enter any time you liked but never leave. In other words, if you’re looking for Paradise, keep moving – this chunk of land has always been seen as a dumping ground for the exiled, the demented and the doomed.

I loved the fucking place.

Clearly, I had the personality of a demented and doomed exile, especially since the events of twelve years ago. Plus it was quiet in a way Manhattan never could be and it was manageable in a way Manhattan never wanted to be. Fifteen minutes away from La Guardia, twenty minutes from JFK and a great bodega at the bottom of my building that sold organic milk, so I wouldn’t grow tits from synthetic cow hormones.

My building. It resembled the projects you’d see in the opening credits of that seventies TV show,
Good Times.
Most of the residents in my building had their rent subsidized by the government; old-timers, poor
Good Times
families and the like. I was one of the few people paying most of the freight on the place, which didn’t bother me, it was still a good deal for this neck of the woods. I lived on the 13
th
floor, where else?  At least the building still had the balls to call it the 13
th
floor, not like the other high-rises where they went right from the 12
th
to the 14
th
. They’d rather look like they flunked arithmetic than deny ancient superstitions, which was typical in a country that tried to ignore climate change while the seas rose, the forests burned and the reservoirs dried up.

Immediately next door to me lived neighbor Larry, around sixty-five years old, grey hair, grungy cap and stubble. I didn’t know what was wrong with Larry and I didn’t want to find out. He was barely able to walk due to oozing sores on his leg, but he managed to double his speed when he finally got a cane to work with. Because Leg Sore Larry wasn’t all that mobile, he stayed at home covering every inch of the walls of his shitty little apartment with pictures ripped from whatever magazines they still actually churned out of a printing press. His ongoing sideways Sistine Chapel rip-and-tape mural extended to his front entrance, where he was in his Scarlett Period, Scarlett as in Scarlett Johansson, whose magnificent everything was the centerpiece of every photo on the door facing our common hallway. It added just the right touch of continental charm associated with every smelly college dorm hallway.

Lest you think I’m a cruel man who doesn’t care about the disabled, you’re entitled. From my side, Leg Sore Larry tried too hard to befriend me when I moved in and then turned surly when I didn’t greet him with open arms. After that, he started stealing my
New York Times
on a regular basis. I suppose we had a lot in common - like me, his marriage was long over and his kids didn’t talk to him. The difference was I didn’t mind being alone and he did. But something about him made me think his problems began long before his legs started leaking.    

On the other side of my door was Nancy with the Breathing Apparatus Face. That was my version of the Frank Sinatra classic love song,
Nancy with the Laughing Face
. True, my rewrite had a few too many syllables in the title, but my sick mind made them fit to the tune. Nancy was one of those confined to a wheelchair who also had, as my song title suggested, some sort of breathing tube attached to some sort of contraption in the back of the wheelchair that was required to be on twenty-four-seven. She wasn’t a sight most people would enjoy, but I liked her. In contrast to Leg Sore Larry, Nancy always had a big smile and a nice greeting for you. She was clearly not going to have a lot of enjoyment during what was left of her life, but she was going to make the most of it anyway. I might have married Nancy if sex wasn’t out of the question. Maybe I was just captivated by the knowledge that she was physically incapable of stealing my
Times
.

I unlocked the door and went inside my two bedroom apartment.  I didn’t really need that second bedroom anymore, it was where my daughters slept when they used to visit. Used to. I threw out the rest of their stuff last year.

“You’re back already? What the fuck? You barely had enough time to ride the train and back.”

Jules didn’t wait to be in the same room with me before she started in. She would always begin abusing me as soon as I opened the door. She kept at it as I walked down the flight of stairs inside the front door that led down to the actual apartment. Despite what Mr. Barry Filer thought of me, I did have a semblance of a bedside manner. Jules’, on the other hand, was removed at birth. Against my better judgment, I had given her a key three months ago. Now she thought she lived here.

“It was a short meeting,” I told her.

“What, you just blew each other and left?”

That made me laugh until I actually pictured what she was describing.

If it wasn’t for anti-depressants, Xanax and HGTV, Jules would’ve been very much at home in the island’s old asylum. Right now, she was OD-ing on one of those half hours where a couple pretended to look for a house and invariably narrowed it down to three choices. The half-hour inevitably ended with one of them saying to the other, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” and then the show cut to whatever shitbox they decided to buy. This is what passes for a TV show now. Bring back the Lone fucking Ranger.

I turned the corner into the living room, where Jules was sprawled out on my poor excuse for a couch in her panties and an
Anchorman
T-shirt she had nabbed at a Marshall’s close-out for $2.99. It was purple and featured Will Ferrell sitting at a desk with no pants. She was overcharged.

The house show went to commercial so she was free to talk to me.

“So – what crap job do you get to do now?”

“I’m not sure. And when I am sure, I still can’t tell you.”

That got her attention. I always told her everything. I had nobody else to listen to my shit.

“What?”

“You heard me. Howard’s suddenly talking about secure lines and everybody’s acting like I’m the guy that’s going to bring down the government.”

She sat up and considered me.

“So you’re doing something important. That should make you feel good, right?”

“I don’t like important. Important means somebody’s watching over your shoulder and sticking their fingers in your business.”