Now I must describe the nauseating experience of my first ride in a horseless carriage. I clung to the shoulder seam of Leslie’s chemise, terrified by the spinning landscape to either side of me—blurred buildings, other carriages careening by us, pulled magically it seemed, their thick wheels spinning on the black road. With each passing behemoth I imagined the flash of metal as the great thing capsized and swirled toward us. I tried to close my eyes, but my lids seemed glued open. Unable to bear the view, I focused on Leslie’s hand clamped to the steering wheel. With my new, hyperlucid vision, I noticed the crosshatched weave of his skin. He had dry, rawboned knuckles, swollen veins: a worker’s hand. I stared at the fascinating map of his epidermis until I was able to calm myself and forget my frantic body.
Leslie tilted the rearview mirror down so he could see what Stevie was up to in the backseat. The boy was wan, his hair the color of putty. He was holding a rubber dog bone, running his fingers back and forth over its nubbly surface. Leslie wondered if it was unsanitary to let the boy play with something the dog had slobbered over. He hated taking things away from the child. He had had so much taken away already. Deafness was not so very bad. Not as bad as blindness. Yet, maybe worse. Not to hear words. Was that worse? Were you set further apart? Were we really word people, or picture people? When he thought about it, blindness made Leslie panic more. Yet a blind man could sound normal on the phone. He could order lumber or a pizza, he could call a girl for a date. A deaf man sounded like an idiot. His little boy. He was so small, small for five, smaller than a lot of dogs, even, Leslie mused as he pulled up to the Sunshine Center for the Hearing Impaired. There were a lot of deaf kids, he thought. Deafness still happened. Why it had happened to Stevie, though, was the thing that tormented him. He realized that bad things had to happen to somebody, but his father’s suicide seemed enough for his personal allotment of blows. He took the boy in his arms, then remembered the teacher’s admonishment to allow him his independence. He put him down, gently removing the dog toy from his grip. The boy whimpered, held the bone close to his chest. Leslie tightened his fingers around the toy. He felt Stevie’s body go rigid. Immediately Leslie let go of the rubber bone, but it was too late; hoarse shrieks were pumping out of the child, who was huddled over the bone, his body stiff.
“Okay, okay you can have it,” Leslie said, rubbing Stevie’s back, trying to relax his muscles. “Look at me, Stevie.” He knelt down and took the boy’s face in his hands. Stevie’s mouth was downturned like a clown’s, eyes clamped shut. He began shrieking in short animal bursts. His fingers had frozen around the dog toy.
“Calm down,” Leslie said in a level voice, looking the boy in the face. He tried signing: “It’s okay. Look,” he signed. “It’s okay. You can keep the toy.” Finally, he scooped the sobbing boy up in his arms and walked him to the school.
Stepping into Stevie’s classroom made Leslie feel like a giant. The top of his head brushed the ceiling. The children came up to his kneecaps. Ms. Parr, the teacher, wasn’t too tall either, yet she surprised him every time he saw her with the extreme breadth of her hips. She wore her long fuzzy hair parted in the middle, had droopy eyes with thick straight lashes. A tiny mouth. And she smelled of wood fires, at all times of year. Leslie found Ms. Parr disturbingly, inexplicably attractive.
“Hello, Stevie,” she said as Leslie tried to set the boy down. Stevie, his chest still shuddering with emotion, clung to the fabric of Leslie’s trousers like a little monkey. Ms. Parr knelt down and gestured a request to him with nimble sign language. Stevie shook his head, clasping the dog toy. Ms. Parr stood and said to Leslie, still signing, “Hi, Mr. Senzatimore, how are you?” She looked directly up at him as she asked the question, earnestly waiting for an answer. She came up to his armpit. Leslie suddenly felt desiccated, as though his sternum and the backs of his eyes were stuffed with cotton wool.
“Do you have any water?” he croaked.
Ms. Parr hesitated a split second. “Sure, there’s a water fountain over there.” Leslie walked to the Lilliputian water fountain, his son clamped to his calf, knelt down and drank his fill. He then sat down at the miniature art table to wait for Stevie to calm down. Drawing always soothed him. Leslie put a red pencil in the little hand and watched the line, so pure and clear, arc across the page. A boat. In moments the boy was absorbed.
When Leslie was about to leave, Ms. Parr gestured to him to join her in a corner of the room. He felt afraid. Maybe Stevie was no longer wanted in the school. Too emotional. In need of special care.
“Is everything okay?” he asked, folding his arms and slumping to reduce the distance between their two heads.
“Fine, it’s just that Stevie’s mommy has asked me to come and spend a little extra tutoring time with him at your house, a couple of times a week after school?” Ms. Parr said, enunciating her words with care.
“Oh, right,” said Leslie, his washed-out blue eyes scanning the room. This was the first he was hearing about this arrangement. Deirdre always seemed to be hiring more people to be with Stevie. “Great,” he added.
“Anyway,” she said, her mouth chewing the words, as if he too were hearing impaired. “I had said I could do Tuesday and Thursday but I realize I would have to say Monday and Friday, because of a conflict on Tuesday afternoons? I was going to ask her when she came today. Unless Thursday is better, but I think it’s probably not ideal to do one day after another? Stevie might get frustrated.” Leslie couldn’t take his eyes off the woman’s interrogatory mouth. “So will you ask Deirdre if that’s okay?” she asked, gazing up at him expectantly.
“Just say it one more time.”
“Monday and Friday, is that okay?” Ms. Parr said, smiling. “I could start this coming Monday.”
“Yes, I can handle that,” he said.
“Or I can just text her,” said Ms. Parr, walking away and squatting to help with a little girl’s puzzle. Leslie walked out into the cold sunshine.
Leslie was on his way to the hospital, to visit the old man he’d saved from the fire last night. He wouldn’t normally visit someone he’d rescued, it made it all too personal—but he knew this man’s family: his son, Chuck, had been Leslie’s best friend growing up, until he drunk-drove his father’s Mercury off a bridge in Freeport, senior year of high school. Leslie felt he should sit down with the man for a few minutes. As he drove, he went over the find—his second ever of a living victim: the apartment had been choked with black smoke. Blinded, Leslie felt his way through the bedroom on all fours, the hiss of the air tank in his ears with every breath. As he patted his gloved hand across the bed, he touched a slender arm, and the thrill of a find went through him. He grabbed for the body, lifted. It was light as a girl’s, limp. It seemed like evil magic when he got to the window and saw the face like a rotten apple, slack jaw, sunken eyes. Leslie was ashamed by his disappointment. Still, he had saved him.
A violent, jangling rhythm erupted in the car, sending me flying in frantic loops, bumping against the cloth ceiling. I felt I was screaming, but no sound came out. With a push of a button, Leslie stopped the cacophony.
“Hello?” he called into the air. A plaintive, disembodied voice answered him.
“It’s Evie, my whole—my whole—there’s a leak in my kitchen, there’s water coming down everywhere. Down the wall.”
“So call a plumber.”
“It’s not a plumbing situation, necessarily. Come on, Les, just look at it and tell me who I have to call.”
Leslie sighed and started a U-turn. “Be right over.”
His older sister, Evie, was always calling him, panicked. It was her way, Deirdre told him, of letting him know she was still helpless. As if he needed a reminder. He drove up to a flat white brick building and parked. I was amazed to see a blond woman opening a door on the ground floor in nothing but a short multicolored shift that barely covered her pudendum, and a puffed-up red jacket. The flesh on her long thighs, Leslie noticed as he got out, was going spongy, melting slightly above the knee. This made her single status all the more worrying to him.
“Thanks, Les,” she said, tucking her snarled blond hair behind an ear.
“So where’s the problem?” asked Leslie, walking into the appalling apartment. Clothes were strewn on the couch, over the umbrella stand. A purple mat was rolled out onto the floor. On the walls, several primitive paintings, all of bare, moonlit fields, hung unframed.
“Over the sink,” she said. “Look, the wall is bulging.”
Leslie put his palm against the wall. It was wet. “The people upstairs have a leak, maybe a burst pipe. Do you know them?”
“Because if you knew what room was above this, it might be clearer what the problem is. Probably the kitchen,” he said. “You need a plumber. Like I said.”
“I don’t have a good plumber. Who do you use?”
Leslie took out his phone and started looking up a name. “John Green,” he said.
“Can you call them?” she asked, chewing on her thumb. Leslie made the call, his eyes roving over the chaos of his sister’s sink: coffee-splotched cups, a plate with half a piece of cake on it, an empty canister of yogurt. His voice sounded friendly, cajoling as he arranged for the plumber to come at three that afternoon, even though he felt like weeping.
“No—I can’t be here then,” whispered Evie.
“When can you be here?” he asked.
“Between now and two, or between four and whenever,” she said. He made the arrangements, conscious of a tightening in his chest.
“You should go upstairs and make sure they turn off their water,” Leslie said.
“This is why I hate this condo, there’s no real super,” she whined.
“What about the—there’s gotta be at least a handyman,” said Leslie.
“He’s useless,” said Evie, pouring herself a glass of juice. “You want something to drink?”
“Nah,” said Leslie. “I got things I gotta do. How’s the job search going?”
“You know,” said Evie, “I thought I had something in graphic design, but it didn’t work out. I’m working on a children’s book.”
Just then I heard the sound of rushing water, and a topless man with a tanned, fleshy torso slumped into the room.
“Oh,” said Evie, as if just now recollecting his presence in the apartment. “Alan, this is my brother, Leslie.”
“Good to meet you,” said Alan, offering his palm. Leslie shook his loose-knit hand. Beneath the sweatpants, Alan wore no underwear.
“How’d you two meet?” Leslie asked.
Alan chuckled. “We’re, ah—”
“New friends,” said Evie.
“Okay,” said Leslie, blinking hard. “I’m late.”
Evie followed him to his car, shuffling in fluffy white slippers.
“Sorry about that,” she said, leaning into his open window.
“So you met him last night?” Leslie said.
“Yeah,” said Evie. “He took me home.”
“Did you forget he was in there, or what?”
“No, I …”
“Next time you’re too smashed to get yourself home, call me,” said Leslie. “Call me or call a cab.”
“He seems nice, though,” said Evie, looking back at the condo. “Doesn’t he?”
Leslie didn’t know what to say. He just waved at her and backed up the truck.
Of all his siblings, Evie was the most dependent on Leslie. The younger Senzatimore children’s postpaternal normality was their mother’s masterpiece. She and the slightly paranoid Vince McCaffrey became a bulwark of solidity, raising the three younger children with great love and many rules, dictated by the church. It was Leslie and Evie, the two eldest, for whom it had all been too late. Their childhoods were already almost over by the time Charlie de-selfed. Evie moved seamlessly toward badly chosen friends and substance abuse. Leslie created his life by using force of will.
His next stop was the firehouse. The Patchogue, Long Island, Fire Department was a large sand-colored building with gleaming red fire trucks parked in its tidy, cavernous garage. I rode on my host’s back as he entered, greeting the other men, who were wearing dark blue T-shirts with a white crest reading PFD on the pocket. Their hair was shorn, like Leslie’s. There was a resounding back slap, which nearly killed me, but I jinked to the left just in time. The men seemed to be congratulating Leslie on his rescue of the night before.
“And you know what, it turns out I know the guy,” said Leslie. “Mr. Tolan. He was my best friend’s father growing up. I gotta say he was an unpleasant man back then. But they all mellow out.”
Tony, a short, burly man holding a mug of steaming coffee, quipped, “Too bad you can’t do a quick character reference before you heave ’em outta the smoke.” He leaned down as if to a victim and mimed removing an air mask. “Excuse me, sir. Are you an asshole, by any chance? Because if you are, I think I’ll just leave you here.” Everybody laughed.
“This from the Fireman of the Year,” said Leslie. “I’m goin’ out to the hospital to see this guy now.”
“Yeah?” said Tony, surprised.
“I wouldn’t if I didn’t know him. But—I figure, he’s got nobody else. His son died in a stupid accident in high school, his wife is gone. You know.”
“I never go,” said Tony, flattening one palm emphatically. He was a professional fireman, worked in the city. He couldn’t afford to be sentimental.
Leslie shrugged. “I came by to find out who’s cooking tonight,” he said. “If it’s me I gotta shop on my way back.”
“What are you makin’?” asked Tony.
“I’m thinking spaghetti carbonara, Caesar salad. Maybe a Caprese.”
“Dessert?”
“You know it,” said Leslie.
“Better be good. Yelding’s still way ahead after that chocolate soufflé last week.”
Hiding under Leslie’s shirt collar on the ride to the hospital, comforted by the darkness, I wondered what my purpose as an angel here could possibly be. What could I help with? I already saw that Leslie was a noble soul overwhelmed with duty, visited by occasional odd little lustings he would never act on. He saved bitter old men who were about to die anyway from a little peaceful smoke inhalation, then went to visit them in the hospital to make up for the fact that he wished they had been children or young women. I worried that I would die all over again, this time of boredom. Confident that I wouldn’t miss anything important at this rate, I allowed myself a short nap.