“Can I use a telephone directory?” she asked the officer who’d accompanied her to the wall telephone.
“Nope.” The officer scrutinized Hel with a level of interest that suggested she was new on the job. Either that, or she’d never seen a UDP before.
If Hel hadn’t been following Donaldson last night, no one would have stopped that man from attacking her. Maybe the man would have taken Donaldson’s money, her rings. Or maybe he would have beaten her, raped her. Maybe Donaldson would have struggled and maybe he would have killed her.
Donaldson had told the truth. She was a curator, after all. She understood the value of artifacts.
The only phone numbers Hel knew by heart were Vikram’s and Carlos Oliveira’s, and Vikram never picked up calls from numbers he didn’t recognize. He hadn’t even figured out how to set up his voicemail, yet. What she wanted was a lawyer.
“Can you possibly look something up for me on the internet?”
“No. You want to make a call or not?”
“Fine.” Hel punched in Oliveira’s office number.
Unlikely that he would be in this late.
Six rings and then Oliveira’s recorded voice. The tone.
She wasn’t supposed to feel disappointed.
“Uh, this is Helen Nash,” she told the machine. “I’ve been arrested. I know you don’t care, but maybe you could text Vikram Bhatnagar and let him know what happened? I can’t reach him because—well, never mind. Anyway, please tell him I’m being held at the . . .” Here, she turned to her babysitter, who stood five feet away with her arms crossed over her uniformed chest, listening in.
“One-hundred-fourteenth Precinct station house,” the officer provided.
“At the 114th Precinct. In Queens. Thank you.” What could it hurt to be polite, at this point? She hung up the receiver.
“You can make another call if you want,” the officer told her. “Most people don’t know this, but you can actually make three.”
“No thanks,” Hel said and the officer, shrugging, led her back to the holding cell.
Only one other person inside, an older woman in heeled boots, tight jeans, and a sweater patterned with snowflakes, who lay down with her head to the cinder-block wall, taking up the entire bench. Her face showed all the signs of a serious dross smoker. Or whatever it was desperate people smoked here instead.
The door clanged shut, locking Hel in. Without opening her eyes, the other woman drew her knees up to make room. Hel sat down in the space she’d vacated. “Thank you.”
She could see the drosshead’s chest rise in a sudden breath, could see her eyes flick beneath her lashes, but the woman didn’t speak.
If Donaldson were dead, she wouldn’t do all the things she was meant to do, whatever those things were. Her absence would change the course of the world—in some unknowable way, small and insignificant or large and far-reaching—change this world to which Hel had now reluctantly and accidentally committed herself. Here, they called that the butterfly effect.
The butterfly effect. Beautiful.
But where was The Pyronauts?
Vikram listened to the ring, waiting for Hel to pick up. The stubborn part of him that resented being the first to back down from their standoff had been fully overpowered by the part of him that was very, very excited. He knew she would be, too. He had to share that feeling.
He knelt on the floor of the big bedroom in front of it. The Shipwreck.
Together, he and Dwayne had dragged boxes, parcels, bags, and loose items into the upstairs hallway, tunneling through the hoarded junk to reach the wall where Dwayne guessed the painting had once hung. The camping lantern illuminated the stuff in their way. Piles of paperbacks. Folded quilts and blankets and a musty, sweat-stained pillow. A massive stack of plastic containers printed with the logos of different brands of yogurt, sour cream, and margarine, all ten years old, Dwayne said, all washed out and nested inside one another as if ready to be reused. Then, more framed art: a map of the London subway system, a midcentury depiction of a Native warrior slumped on a horse with an arrow protruding from his back. A framed cork bulletin board.
Finally, a glint of gold—the edge of the frame Dwayne had described—and the few leftmost inches of dusty canvas. Sea and sky. The broad brushstrokes with which Lowery had rendered the matte, bluish-white prismatic surfaces of the iceberg, sheaves of dirty ice.
The thrill of dread Vikram felt when he pulled the final things away made him think of what it might be like to be called into the office of the medical examiner to identify the damaged corpse of a long-lost loved one. Even if you couldn’t see the face, you could tell. You could tell just from the tiniest details. The shape of a kneecap or the faint hairs on the knuckles. A scar from an old burn. The bitten-down fingernails.
Yes. This was it.
“OK. It’s confirmed,” Vikram told Dwayne. “I can dig it out the rest of the way in the morning, when it’s brighter in here.”
“You working tonight, man?”
“No, I’ve got two days off. I’m just going to hang out here. Look through some of these National Geographics. You should get home to Eden, I guess.”
“I feel kind of bad for you,” Dwayne said, as he put on his coat. “This the city that never sleeps, you know. You should go catch a movie or something. Go to a club.”
“Nah, I’ll be fine here.”
But once Vikram was alone, he felt lonesome. From his place on the air mattress, he watched the hours turn on his watch to bad luck time and beyond, too keyed up to concentrate on the photo essay about the Padaung women of Burma. He found himself back in the room with the painting. He crouched, worshipful.
He thought he’d lost the capacity to feel this way.
He was no art historian—anybody looking closely would see what he saw, that this was no reproduction. He could make out the texture of the surface, how the artist had worked up layers of pigment to produce the luminescent clouds. It didn’t take an expert to note the lamentable damage inflicted by neglect, the fine cracks in the paint.
Vikram thought back to that morning fifteen years ago in the Sleight Museum with his vanished friends. The rival, the flatmate, the tour guide, the woman: all of them out of reach now. But being here and seeing the painting brought them back.
He’d climbed to the second floor with the woman he’d loved, watching her movements. Vikram remembered what she’d been wearing, the wide-legged trousers cut from a draping fabric, wet below the knees where the cloth had wicked up water as they walked in the rain. She climbed the stairs, and he followed. Down below, the others left behind in the kitchen exclaimed audibly over an empty tin, long stored in one of the cabinets and produced with a flourish by their guide. “This was Sleight’s favorite brand of tea.” And he’d trailed the young woman down the hallway to the big bedroom—to this very room—and there kissed her in secret. She’d kissed him back.
Had the painting hung behind them, then? No. Vikram knew for a fact that The Shipwreck was accounted for in the other world, on display in a Canadian museum’s collection. It had never been missing. Still, to check, he put a floor underneath his young self and his companion, erected sloping walls around them, papered them with shabby wallpaper. His mind’s eye had to invent the detail of the pattern.
What else, what else had been in the room? Try as he might, he couldn’t see anything but the down of a soft cheek, out of focus, a tendril of hair that touched him.
A skill, not remembering, one he’d cultivated. After all, holding on taxes you. You do it for a while, but eventually, you choose to stop working so hard. Drowning—drowning that part of you—begins to seem preferable to fighting.
He had no idea what might have hung on the wall in Sleight’s bedroom.
Not this painting though.
He couldn’t explain how it got here. And Hel wasn’t picking up to have the miracle revealed to her. The tone echoed in Vikram’s ear. Impatient, he ended the call and dialed again.
On his visit in the other world, this had been a place of preservation, a place one went to see things that had been deemed worthy of study and protection. A sturdy gate placed in the doorway of this room, like others in the cottage, kept visitors from entering Sleight’s boudoir with their grabbing hands and dirty shoes, and so he’d bent the girl back over the barrier, bracing one hand on the sloping wall—a touch more forbidden than the way he touched her body—and they’d kissed breathlessly. He’d smelled her perfume, a pungent and musky scent, reminiscent of dead leaves. It had seemed to him then like a scent an older woman might wear, a dowager, rich and worldly. A smell from across a boundary.
He remembered the perfume, the trousers, the spring in her step, and the coil of hair, but not her name. It was lost at sea. And it didn’t matter.
Hel still wasn’t answering. Vikram put down his phone and used both hands to clear away more of the junk. Shoe boxes heavy with unknown contents. A lamp, its cast-resin base shaped like a shepherd girl, the shade badly dented. A cardboard box with a bird’s nest inside. Dishes wrapped in yellowing newsprint. A small dusty cabinet of dark wood—some piece of music-playing equipment, a speaker or amplifier. He pushed them all away from the painting or picked them up and moved them behind him, careful not to touch the surface of the canvas, careful not to cause a collapse. He was blocking himself in, he realized, sealing the tunnel he’d created earlier and burying himself with The Shipwreck.
To whom did the painting belong?
Dwayne didn’t know which of his people had first inhabited this house, but he’d mentioned his great-grandmother, his mother’s mother’s mother. Allowing twenty-five years per generation, that put them close to the beginning of the twentieth century, a decade or two into After. How much further back did they go? And how had the painting gotten here from Sleight’s school? Who was its legal owner?
“What do you want me to do?” Vikram asked Dwayne, when they uncovered the first corner of the canvas, enough to confirm his suspicions. “This has been in your family—”
“Does me no good hidden away up here,” Dwayne said. “People ought to be looking at it, if you think it’s that important.”
Figure it out. He wanted to. He pulled away one last overstuffed garbage bag.
Now, he’d fully exposed it, every square inch. He backed up—as much as he could in the maze he’d created—to take in the most important element of the composition. At the bottom center of the canvas, just below the foundering ship, grasped the white arm and hand Sleight wrote about, the sailor who had so terrified Sleight and Dwayne as boys, reaching up blindly from the water for a coil of rope he would never find.
The color plate Vikram pored over in an old book, the image translated to pixels on the screen of an ordinator—neither did justice to the experience of being right here with the painting. He stretched out his own hand, extending his forefinger, but he didn’t touch, knowing the oils of his skin might damage the fragile surface.
The arm was painted small, really—an inch and a half long, perhaps—and Lowery had chosen a ghastly blue overlay for the flesh, only a few shades lighter than the roiling waves. The foreground of that vast ocean nearly swallowed up the sailor’s signal for help, an arrangement that emphasized the unseen man’s centrality and his insignificance at the same time.
It would be cold in that water.
With his phone, Vikram snapped a picture and texted it to Hel. Surely, she would call him now. She would tell him what to do about this.
Close to dawn, too overwhelmed to dig himself out, he slept in the sea of Mrs. Defoe’s collections, his head pillowed on a stuffed toy, an orange bear someone—he imagined Shawn Sealy—might have won for her at Coney Island, if the carnival park were still there. Vikram was not used to sleeping at night and his dreams were uneasy ones, obsessive in their repetition. He was walking on a dark beach, making for a point of land that never seemed to get any closer, his calves aching, his feet sinking into the sand. Sometimes a stranger pursued him and other times he was the one in pursuit, following a dim figure he could make out ahead only intermittently. When he woke with a crick in his neck and a sore hip, he found the solidity of the bare floorboards to be a relief. He reached for his phone.
Midafternoon already. How had that happened?
Still no missed calls, no texts. He tried Hel’s number yet again. No answer. The call went straight to voicemail, as if she hadn’t charged her phone. That wasn’t like her. They had no home phone at the Bronx apartment. What else?
He called Oliveira. No answer there either.
The assistant at the museum who’d been helping Hel. He remembered the name, Teresa something. Vikram didn’t have her number, but he knew where she worked. Maybe Dwayne would give him a ride over to MoMT on his way to Williamsburg.
He went downstairs, walked around the echoing rooms of the cottage. Normally, Dwayne came to clean in the mornings, but there was no sign of him today. Had he gone in for an early shift? Maybe he could get Wes to run him over. Then he remembered that it was Wednesday. Wes would be at Reintegration Education now, where he should be.
He was late.
After a few hours in the brightly lit cell, Hel drifted off. She slumped on the very edge of the metal bench, Vikram’s parka pulled tight around her. At some point, she heard the cell door open to admit a third arrestee—an impossibly young-looking prostitute with a tear-streaked face—but Hel had run out of sympathy, and did not stir or speak to the new arrival or give up her spot. Some time later, officers loaded the three women and all the men from the holding cell down the hall into a van, which would bring them to Queens Central Booking for arraignment. Hel followed her arresting officer out the station house door, shuffling so as not to lose a shoe. They’d taken away her laces. The sky outside: still black.
The drosshead in the snowflake sweater cupped her hands around her eyes and looked through the grille and out the windshield of the van—as if trying to keep track of the route the speeding van was taking. “Ya estoy,” she whispered softly to herself. “Otra vez.”
They had her now. Hel rotated her wrists inside the cuffs, which were not uncomfortably tight, but certainly tight enough to hold her. They had her now; it had just taken them longer than she’d expected.
After the mother with the baby and the small boys left the site at Calvary, the entry group consisted of Hel and ninety-eight strangers. None of them talked as they stood where they’d been placed by the evac personnel, watching the small team of technicians in rubber jumpsuits working to expand the dormant Gate for passage. They weren’t the first group; they knew that by now, whatever waited on the other side must be expecting them. Hel had looked into the shimmer and prepared for two very obvious possibilities, which no one in charge of the evacuation effort had spoken aloud. First: that this other world might be damaged worse than the one they were leaving. Second: that if it wasn’t, its inhabitants might be ready to defend it from encroachment with whatever weapons they had.
Hel prepared herself for gas, for lasers, for bullets, for electric charge.
It was common sense. It was human nature.
She and the others weren’t required to hold hands, but as soon as the countdown started, someone grabbed Hel’s and she squeezed back hard—half comfort and half punishment—and a thought came to her, as they all stepped forward together: This could be the last person I touch before I die.
That blaze of lights that blinded them, in the other Calvary, her first memory of a new world. Floodlights, and the sudden noise of a crowd. A beating thump that she learned later was the sound of helicopter rotors up above. The odd uniforms of the police and military units all around them, the news cameras rolling, a hectic welcoming committee.
But no chemical cloud, no machine-gun fire. No hoods, no handcuffs, not then, not yet. Just a voice, amplified by some mysterious means. “Drop your bags and step to the side,” the voice told them. “Please step to the side. Hands on your heads, folks. Each of you will be patted down. Hands on your heads. Welcome to New York.”
Nearly three years had passed. Two years and eight months. She’d stopped counting the days. And they’d been keeping an eye on her ever since.
Inside the court building in Queens, there was more paperwork, more waiting, though it seemed that whenever a new officer saw the UDP mark in her file, a restrained sort of hurry, a subdued excitement, ensued. After they moved her for the third time to a third bench, Hel found herself sandwiched between the baby prostitute from the holding cell at the 114th Precinct and a tall woman with thick black hair who confided to Hel that she’d recently undergone gender reassignment surgery in Thailand—“the whole shebang”—but that her ID still classified her as a man. She’d been held in lockup with male prisoners. “I mean, luckily, all those guys in there were real gentlemen about it,” she said. “Luckily! God, I can’t believe I was so dumb! My ex told me to get my license changed, but I was like, why bother—it’s not like I even drive in this city.”
A rumpled but handsome young man called Hel’s name, and she came to attention. Standing before her, he sorted through a stack of folders. Her public defender. That meant Vikram either still hadn’t heard about her arrest or didn’t care. “How are you going to plead?” he asked, leading her to a booth just outside the holding area.
She’d already decided not to speak, no matter what, so she shrugged mutely.
“Look, my job is to defend you, but I need you to help me out. It looks like you violated a restraining order, that’s a charge of Criminal Contempt in the first degree. A class-E felony. And as you know, they took a four-inch gravity knife off of you. They’ll probably go for Stalking in the second degree, plus Criminal Possession of a Weapon in the fourth.”
“But I wasn’t—” she said, startled out of her resolution. “That’s for protection! I always carry it.”
Around the corner, out of sight but still in earshot, the whole-shebang woman whistled. “Damn, mamí!”
“You’re gonna want to plead to Stalking in the third, if I can swing it with the ADA. Get you one year in jail, with post-release supervision. Not a bad deal, for someone like you.”
“What? No! I’m not guilty. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
The lawyer shrugged. “All right, then. Your funeral. Come on, they’re calling your docket number.”
Inside the small courtroom, dim and stifling with dry radiator heat, a judge, a clerk, some kind of stick—a bailiff, maybe—and a second suit sat waiting for them. The prosecuting attorney. Hel listened numbly as her lawyer waived the formal reading of the charges against her. She listened as the prosecutor argued that her lack of employment and lack of ties to the community made her a flight risk despite her previously clean record. He mentioned the antisocial tendencies typical of UDPs, stopping just short of referring to Joslan Micallef by name. Hel’s attorney attempted to argue that since Hel reliably presented herself at Reintegration Education classes and since she was prohibited by law from changing her residence without approval anyway, she’d have nowhere to flee, but the judge set bail.
Her attorney bargained the initial figure down to some slightly lower amount, which she still couldn’t pay, and it was all over.
They left the courtroom. Hel felt exhausted. Did any of her associates have that kind of money? the attorney wanted to know. Did she know anyone who owned property? She didn’t answer him, and after a minute, he left her in peace, taking her folder along with him.
An officer returned her to the bench to wait some more; no doubt additional paperwork would need to be filled out before they sent her to wherever they were going to hold her until trial. Her friend the whole shebang was gone by now, but the young cherry was still there. Hel looked at the girl’s thin legs, clad in sheer tights. She felt in her pocket, searching for something to give her, but all that was in there was her carbon of her property voucher. “Are you all right?” she asked.
The cherry sniffled. “What you fuckin’ think, bitch. Fuck off.” But there was no hostility in her voice. Their shoulders were an inch apart. Hel felt that inch like a touch. It was a comfort to her and a scourge, just as the hand-holding in Calvary had been. She resented the proximity but wouldn’t have moved over if she could.
After a minute, the sound of heels signaled that someone else approached them, a woman dressed in a nice skirt and a silk blouse. Surely another lawyer—the cherry’s. “Good luck,” Hel told her sincerely.
“Are you Helen Nash?” the lawyer asked.
The prostitute rolled her eyes. “No.”
“I am,” Hel said.
“Come with me.”
No one looked twice at them as they walked down the hallway. The lawyer woman held the stairwell door open.
“What’s happening? Did someone pay my bail?” Vikram, she thought, hopeful despite herself.
The woman shrugged. “Dr. Oliveira says to pull yourself together.”
Vikram thumped down the stairs to the basement and sprinted to the end of the hallway, out of breath. He was only twenty minutes late for Reintegration Education and he’d never missed a session before. He peeked into the room through the wire-embedded window set in the door. There was the group, sitting in a circle. Wes picked at his cuticles. Agnew, the new addition, worked out some kind of equation on the back of an envelope. Catalina Calderón appeared to be sound asleep.
Vikram opened the door. “Mr. Bhatnagar! We were worried you were sick, or that you’d gotten into an accident.” Sato reached behind her for the tablet she used to take attendance, tapping on its screen. Would he be written up, or was she letting him off the hook? He’d find out later, he supposed.
The metal chair squealed as he dragged it into position. “No. I’m not sick. The train was stopped.” Old Catalina scoffed at him under her breath. “I guess somebody was on the tracks killing himself,” Vikram said. “Trying to touch the third rail.” He hoped this was plausible. He’d never been sure exactly how that worked.
“I have days like that,” Catalina said.
The comment was loud enough that Sato had to address it. “Mrs. Calderón, it’s not your turn to talk. Mr. Pikarski was about to check in. Please continue, Mr. Pikarski.”
“Yeah, so this was a really good week,” Pikarski said. “I had no idea that my cousin’s son made it out. He’s been living here—in Kansas City, Missouri—since he passed through. I never would have known, but I was searching for names on the internet the other night. You know.”
Yes, they knew. They’d done it themselves, fishing blindly in the ether.
“He was in his local paper. He came in third in a 5K, can you believe it? And I’m like, there can’t be that many Andre Pikarskis out there. And there was a picture. I knew in a minute—would have known him anywhere.”
“This kind of thing wouldn’t happen,” Poornima Anthikkad said, “if they’d just publish the damn directory.” Certain members of the group groaned or shifted position restlessly; this was an old topic of debate and most of them were tired of hearing it hashed and rehashed.
“Are you crazy?” Agnew asked. “Sure, a directory might be convenient, but can you imagine what it would be like if anyone and everyone could find out who we are? If they put all our names in one place, publicly accessible? Thank God someone filed a cease and desist on that.”
“They put the mark already on our IDs,” Catalina said. “If the government wants names, look, they already have! Look at us all, here, under their thumb. They can round us up anytime they want.”
“I’m not even talking about that,” Agnew said. “I’m just talking about all the sad shitfoots out there who resent us. Who call us aliens and say we’re taking their jobs and whatnot. You want to find trash burning on your doorstep?”
“But think of the human cost,” Anthikkad said. “Think of poor Ed, the years he could have been spending with his cousin. What if that was you? Wouldn’t you want to know?”
Vikram tried to make eye contact with Wes as the UDP registry argument, now predictably reignited, raged around them in the basement, but Wes’s eyes were shut, as if he were in pain. Vikram, too, stopped listening.
Any of them could know someone who had made it out. One hundred fifty-six thousand was around 2 percent of the population of Greater New York. A small fraction, yet significant. Every UDP had heard anecdotal evidence of someone who’d said good-bye forever to a sister, a husband, or a mother and stepped through the Gate alone, only to be reunited hours or days later when the loved one’s number was chosen. That was how the authorities kept the system going during those desperate days. Don’t despair; maybe you’ll meet again on the other side. That kind of platitude. Didn’t mean it couldn’t happen.
If Vikram widened the reckoning of his acquaintance to everyone he’d ever known, every coffee vendor and loan officer, every fencing instructor and fellow Emergency Clinic patient, well. It was hard not to see connections everywhere. Proper names—the list Agnew talked about—wouldn’t have helped here; ferreting out connections so tenuous required a conversation. It became a game they all played, one less serious and intimate than What Did You Take Through, but just as common: Yes, we used to live on that block, but not since the ’90s—was the Youth Home still on the corner when you moved in? I was at that very baseball game, and I remember the score. Yes, that was my favorite place to get my eyebrows threaded! I used to ride the same trolley route to work every day; surely we hung on the same strap, did we ever sit next to each other?
Vikram grabbed Wes’s arm when the session ended. “Have you talked to Dwayne?” He remembered Dwayne had said he had to do something today but, in his excitement about the painting, couldn’t remember what it was.
Wes shrugged. “He texted me earlier that he might not be around, but said that I could get some hours in finishing up, if I wanted. I’m about to head over there to get started on that big bedroom. Want to come?”
He didn’t know about The Shipwreck yet. “I’ve actually got an errand to run. I need to get to Williamsburg, fast. Do you think you can take me?”
He held two fistfuls of Wes’s jacket as they zigzagged up to Eastern Parkway, where they cruised in the far right lane. The top speed Wes’s scooter could muster, according to the dial, was forty-five miles per hour. Vikram struggled to convert that to kilometers per hour and gave up. Compared to subway travel, it seemed fast. He felt he was riding on the wind’s back.
No way to talk over the roar of speed and traffic, and no face shield on the spare helmet. Vikram kept his eyes closed, aware only of the movement of traffic around them. Big cars and big trucks, but no vacuum trailers or rigs—in this world, the cross-borough highways all ran north and west of here. Instead, over Vikram’s shoulder, morning foot traffic and the parade of Crown Heights businesses—hair braiding, Caribbean bread, MoneyGram, fresh fruit, furniture on installment plans—all the innumerable things of this world. Vikram knew where he was. He knew. Still, he was filled with the nonsensical conviction that if he opened his eyes, he would be riding on a blazer in another New Jersey.
He peeked. There, inches from his eyes on the flesh of Wes’s neck: the horrible scar. A world erased.
Just before they hit Prospect Park, Wes steered them onto Bedford Avenue. They coasted past alternating one-ways, a poor neighborhood on their right and a gentrifying one on the left. Why? It was unknowable. At the red light at Wallabout Street, Wes flicked on his turn signal and they zoomed under the BQE toward the water.
When they got to the Domino Sugar complex, Vikram climbed off the scooter and headed straight for the museum entrance without looking back. He’d head over to Brownsville to meet Wes later. As he approached the front door, he felt his phone buzz in his pocket. The display read DWAYNE S. Vikram reversed course, walking over to one of the granite seats between the buildings as he picked up the call.
“What’s up,” Dwayne asked, his voice uncharacteristically hoarse. “I saw you been trying to reach me. Something important?”
“I’m about to talk to someone Hel’s been working with—she’s an art history person, works at a museum, has a lot of connections.” He lit a cigarette. “I’ve never met her, but she seems like a good bet for figuring out the provenance of the painting.”
“Oh.”
“The reason I was really calling was to ask if you’d try reaching Hel from your phone. She’s not picking up for my number and I’m getting a little concerned. I’ll text you her number.”
“Mmm. Yeah, I guess.” He sounded extremely unenthusiastic at the prospect.
“Hey, am I interrupting something? Are you at the bowling alley?”
“No. Just taking a day off from everything today.”
That was when it came back to him—Dwayne’s brother’s grave. “Look, man. I’m sorry to have bothered you. Forget about what I asked.” He dragged on his smoke, fighting an intense feeling of foolishness.
Dwayne had lost one person. Vikram had lost everyone. Almost certainly.
The year he left Boston for New York, he went to Union Square with coworkers to see the Halloween bonfires lit. They’d all taken pictures of themselves—him with his now-dead coworkers—the thronging crowd behind, and yes, many of those out-of-focus faces would have been tourists, dead now too, back home in another Nashville or another San Jose. And yes, many of them would have been New Yorkers who didn’t make it through, dead now too in another Morningside Heights or Battery Park. But surely at least one of those strangers had been displaced, too.
What if that was you? Anthikkad had asked. Wouldn’t you want to know?
Cristaudo in the storage unit with her machine, signaling and signaling and never a response.
Knowing for sure would be unbearable.
“I’m really sorry,” he said again.
“It’s OK,” Dwayne said and ended the call.
His phone was still out. To cheer himself, Vikram called up the pictures he’d taken of the painting. Ill lit and blurry but unmistakable.
He crushed the butt under his shoe. Time to go.