MY BROTHER DAVID WANTED us to find an apartment together—me, him, and his two dogs, Bugsy and Roscoe, who had been in a fire and suffered from PTSD. We’d be a happy commune, without the sadness of parents. Everything our parents did in those days seemed to mourn the unexpected turn our lives had taken. If you glanced at my father at an unguarded moment he looked as if he were about to cry.
“Imagine coming home and nobody’s yelling,” said David.
Our mother did a lot of yelling. She was overwhelmed by her job as a lawyer for the city: the filing deadlines, the court dates, the judges who were petty dictators. She lived in fear of making a mistake. Plus, when she got home our father would be lying on the floor watching TV, a big bottle of antidepressants next to a bunch of dirty dishes. She would walk into the kitchen with her coat still on and start chopping onions. Nobody even thought of cleaning.
David and I did nothing to help out, either. It never occurred to any of us that we should. I think there was a depressive sense that nothing would make a difference—or that’s how I rationalized it. All I could imagine was getting free.
“Imagine coming home and you can sit down on the couch,” said David. The couch was covered in our mother’s legal files. At night, in her nightgown, she would pick up one and then another, pacing up and down.
“We can’t afford an apartment,” I said.
“You can’t stay here forever. It’s not healthy.”
Our parents’ place was a four-bedroom duplex, but I had a feeling like I was in a tiny capsule and being crushed. There was a lot of aspirational junk shoved everywhere, because through some odd logic, the less money they had the more they wanted to buy things, though now they had to be cheap: an exercise device called a Bullworker that my father had bought off TV. Neckties he got at the thrift shop, a gigantic mound of them hung over a chair back. My mother had been buying a lot of things too: porcelain figurines and Buddha statues and old candelabras—things that didn’t cost too much but allowed her to feel that she was still living a cultivated life.
Our parents had turned their bedroom into a home office for my father, now that he’d gotten his law license back and was trying to work as a lawyer again. They’d taken my bedroom, so I was camping in my sister’s room—she was going to college. David was back in his old bedroom along with the two dogs.
“What about a nice two-bedroom downtown?” David said. He was working at a lab at NYU while applying to medical school. “That way I could walk to work.”
I didn’t believe such an apartment existed, not for what we could afford, around fifteen hundred bucks a month. But I went along with his project because it made me feel better just to sit and listen, half forgetting that it was all theater, a performance meant for the performers. I even agreed to go with him to a real estate agent in the village. When the agent there heard what we wanted and what we were able to pay he looked suddenly cautious, as if we’d come to pick a fight. “I don’t think you’ll find that,” he said.
“Yes, we will,” said David, suddenly furious, stalking out.
“That’s the way they work,” he said, marching home at double speed. “They tell you this is all you can get and you believe them and then they’ve got you. But I know there are good apartments out there. They’re keeping them for themselves.”
I don’t know how he knew this, but he had an air of certainty. As a medical school applicant, he considered himself a man of science, a rational skeptic, a believer in evidence rather than rumor or common wisdom.
His certainty remained unchanged even when we began reading the classifieds in the back of the newspaper. Any apartment listing we could afford was way out in the boroughs, in a basement. David refused to go look at any of them, and when after many days of disappointment we finally went to see one, it was two rooms so small I found myself hunching my shoulders.
“Shit,” I said. The place looked like two coffins laid side by side so the dead could talk through the wall.
“They lied to us,” said David. “They said it was nice.”
“Maybe this is what we can get.”
“We’re not living in a shithole like this,” said David.
Back from that apartment, David and I sat at the dining room table, having an emergency meeting. We went over our list of preferences again—“I like a terrace,” said David—which then somehow segued into plans for our futures.
“I’ve been reading about trauma surgery,” said David. “Gunshot wounds, stabbings, car accidents. You’re never bored.” In a way, it was what our father used to do as a criminal defense lawyer: save people.
Mostly I listened and nodded. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t think clearly about what my future might be like as a writer, maybe because I’d never written anything. Every time I tried to think about it, I’d start to get nervous and feel panicked and trapped and desperate. The beauty of being a tour guide was that the hours were so extreme that there was only the present, a space out of time.
Later that afternoon, our father came back from court looking surprisingly dapper in a suit and tie, his hair brushed back. He had good days, though it was unpredictable; on bad days he was in his underwear, letting his office phone roll to voicemail as he missed his court dates and watched TV and ate, methodically emptying the refrigerator. Only now do I really understand how hard it must have been, working in the same court building where he’d been sentenced to prison. All the court officers and law clerks and judges knew him from before.
He sat down and rubbed his face. “I hate criminals. They’re all such fucking liars. This one today told me he was never there, but now they’ve got three witnesses.” I listened, disturbed. It was such a change from the old days, when he loved criminals and watched them with distant amusement like a parent at the playground. Then he handed me a slip of paper with a name and number.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“His name is Brian Covington. He’s got an apartment for rent.”
“But is it the right price?”
“I told him what you wanted to pay.”
“But is it nice?” asked David. “For the money we’re paying, we should get something nice.”
“Call him and see.” Our father seemed glad to be able to help—maybe he felt as if he’d let us down and wanted to make up for it. I don’t know how he felt about us moving out. He never objected to us being there. Sometimes he seemed eager for company, late at night when he couldn’t sleep. “Sit with me,” he’d say, and we would sit there while he smoked, not talking but at least together. I remember watching his hand with the cigarette wavering, making the smoke squiggle. The lithium he took for his manic swings made his hands shake and it embarrassed him. He’d keep his hands in his pockets when he went to court.
“How’s work?” he asked.
“Good.”
“How are the Japanese?”
“Oh, the same.”
He nodded and we sat in the silence until I couldn’t stay awake and had to go to bed. But most of the time he seemed sealed off in his own world. Being around this version of him could feel very lonely.
An hour later David and I were walking into a huge new building on First Avenue, through a lobby with a two-story waterfall, up to the twenty-first floor in a golden elevator, and then into a big airy apartment. Light poured in through glass doors that led out to the terrace. It felt as if we’d left some kind of crazed, sick junk-shop storeroom for a palace: pristine, beautifully empty, and wonderfully expensive looking. We walked as if we might be ordered out.
It was Brian Covington who had that power, and we didn’t know what to make of him. He was youngish, incredibly heavy—huge, actually—dressed in a skintight V-neck undershirt and gym shorts. He looked like a boy at summer camp blown up with an air pump till he was a parade float.
“Marble countertops,” he said in the kitchen. “Wonderful light,” he said in the living room. His voice sounded as if it were coming from someone else, a movie actress from the ’30s. It was like getting an apartment tour from Vivien Leigh. “Come outside,” he said, and pulled open one of the sliding doors to the terrace. The three of us lined up at the railing to look at the East River across the street: gray and muscular, liquid stone. The colored beads of cars slid down the FDR Drive.
I glanced at David, wondering what he made of this. He seemed giddy, his theories of real estate proved true at last.
“So what is it you gentlemen do, exactly?” asked Brian.
This was the interview segment. David explained his work situation and I explained mine, including the fact that I was trying to write a novel, something that I normally hid. I always felt foolish mentioning writing, as if it made me instantly transparent: suddenly everyone could see the ridiculous longing inside me.
And it was ridiculous, too, because I didn’t write very much and had been on my first chapter for over a year. The novel was about my father and what had happened to him, to us, and writing it felt like a betrayal. We were doing our best to move forward, and we never mentioned the past. That made whatever I wrote seem sneaky and mean, a sort of revenge.
But I couldn’t afford to be finicky now: I was trying to snag the apartment by being what my mother called interesting.
“Oh, you’re a writer?” said Brian. “I’m a writer, too!”
David gave me an urgent look. I didn’t like it when someone volunteered that he was a writer—I wanted everyone to be as conflicted as I was. But I asked the question. “Well, wonderful! What sort of writing do you do?”
“Oh, it’s a memoir!” he said, sounding pleased to talk. “About running a brothel!” He gave a sigh and looked momentarily wistful. “I ran it out of this apartment, actually. Not inside, it was all outcall. But I would work the phones here with a couple of girls to help me out. I guess you could say that I was the madam.”
“A brothel?” said David.
The wind from the river picked up, blowing our hair. The sun brightened. I felt a rush of excitement, and I could see that David felt it too: Brian was a criminal. We were in familiar territory.
“That’s going to be a bestseller,” I said.
“Well, I hope so,” said Brian, looking pleased. “What I want to tell people is that it’s a business like any other. I have no time for moralizing hypocrites.”
Our family was all great listeners, beginning with our father. I’d grown up watching him listen to his clients tell him their troubles. He would take them in with his enormous liquid brown eyes.
Brian wanted us to know how hard he’d worked. “My clients were paying a lot of money for perfect service and I made sure they got perfect service.” He wanted to tell us how much he had sacrificed in order to succeed. “We were so busy that I couldn’t leave the phone to go to the bathroom. I couldn’t take a day off. We ordered in three meals a day and I ate while I was answering calls. Look how heavy I got.”
“So what went wrong?” I asked.
“Well, let me just say that I had many very important and distinguished clients, some of whom were in government, some of whom were foreign diplomats. And what I learned is that the FBI watches people at those levels. The business is closed, but there are unexpected positives. At least now I have some time for myself. And I have a lot of new things going on, the book, and a possible movie deal. I’m writing a TV pilot.”
“And you’re okay with fifteen hundred a month for this apartment?” asked David.
“You know, I could get more, of course, but I love young people just starting out. It’s such an exciting time of life.”
Plus, he needed tenants who could work with him. He had rented this apartment and the one next to it on a long-term lease, planning to knock down the walls and combine them. He had made this clear to the management from the beginning, but the building had changed its mind at the last minute and tried to block him, so now he was suing. He lived in the other apartment, and he’d decided to sublet this one out till the case was finished; when he won, we’d have to go so he could start construction.
“How long will that be?” asked David.
“Their only strategy is delay.”
David’s dogs were no problem, he told us; he had a Yorkie—dogs were kinder and sweeter than humans, don’t you think? He showed us the big multi-line phone system inside and told us we could use one of his lines, which would save us from having to deal with the phone company. All he asked is that we use the service entrance in the back of the building instead of the lobby. “If anyone asks, tell them you’re my cousins and you’re staying with me for a little while.” He didn’t want further complications with the management. We wrote him a check for the first month and he gave us a set of keys.
Going down in the elevator, David and I began bouncing up and down with excitement, and then he stopped and said, “I told you so.”
“It’s a weird situation, though.”
“That’s a good thing—he needs us.”
It also helped explain the super-cheap price, which had been bothering me. It was obviously worth much more. “How much of that was bullshit, do you think?”
“All of it, maybe, or none of it. Who cares? All that matters is that we’re in.”
After dinner, we packed up David’s old station wagon and brought everything over, lugging it through the back entrance, the doorman stationed there watching with wry interest as we loaded the service elevator. We told him we were Brian’s cousins, and that seemed to amuse him even more. I shouldered a loose mattress; David carried another; we toted up garbage bags stuffed with clothes, and then led the two coughing, trembling dogs inside. Once in the apartment, the stuff we unpacked looked old and tattered and stained.
Our parents hadn’t really remarked on our leaving. Our mother had papers spread over the dining room table; she had some kind of deadline the next day. My father had experienced some kind of setback in court; he looked visibly frightened, biting his lip, his eyes wide open and staring. He would not say what it was, just shook his head.
I didn’t know if they were resentful, or if I just wanted them to be. Maybe I was the one who was resentful. I guess I wanted our moving out to matter, as if it were our big launch into the world, the first apartment experience.
“Now what?” I asked David, glancing around our new living room. It was night. The city lights looked beautiful and melancholy outside the windows.
Before he could answer, we heard Brian’s voice. “Is that you? Are you there?”
We both looked around.
“The intercom on the wall,” said Brian. “Press the button and speak.”
There was indeed an intercom set into the wall, silver and black, though I hadn’t noticed it before. I walked over and pressed the talk button. “Yes, we’re here.”
“This and the phones were the only thing I got done before they changed their mind. I’ll be right over.”
He let himself in with the key a minute later, without bothering to knock. He’d forgotten to explain the situation with the electricity, he said: he got the bill for both apartments, so when it came he’d tell us how much and we’d pay him. Sure, no problem, we said. But he seemed reluctant to leave, and soon he was entertaining us with more stories about his career as a madam, this time about the people who used to work for him. “My fucked-up children, the family I never had.”
“I’ve always wondered who goes into that kind of work,” said David.
“Anyone who needs a lot of money fast. You could do it.”
“No, thanks, I’ve already got a job.”
“How much did they make?” I asked.
“A lot, though they always wasted it all and then needed more. I spoiled them rotten. I let them take complete advantage of me. And then, since I went to jail, not a word from any of them.”
This took a beat, the jail part. It should have been obvious, but I hadn’t thought of it before: I’d been totally focused on getting the apartment.
“Really, it was a kind of vacation,” he continued. “They put me in the gay men’s section, and we spent most of the time voguing.” He started to catwalk across the living room in his T-shirt and gym shorts, massive but surprisingly nimble, stopping to strike poses out of an imaginary fashion magazine for very fat men.
This struck us as incredibly funny, and we howled with laughter. We were in our first apartment; it was super luxurious, and we were making friends with our landlord, who was weird and rich, a kooky character in the novel starring us. It felt as if we were in a convertible racing up Park Avenue at midnight with the top down, free.
Looking back, I can see that it was really sorrow that made us laugh so hard. When our father got back from prison, he would sit in the dark and cry. But he never talked about it. His time behind bars was a blank around which everything in our family revolved. But Brian was open about it, and funny. The lack of shame was exhilarating. “How long were you in for?” asked David.
Brian struck a pose, leaning on one hairy leg. “Not too long. Really it was just a problem with the bail arrangements. Once that got solved, I was out.”
Later, after Brian had finally gone back to his apartment, our feelings started to shift. David and I stood out on the terrace, looking downtown, our parents’ building somewhere among the lights. “Did you notice how he walked right in without knocking?” I asked.
“Yeah, I definitely noticed that.”
“Shouldn’t we talk to him about it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we should let it slide for now.” We were getting a bargain, and we didn’t have a lease, so we shouldn’t risk offending him—we both saw that.
“He seems lonely,” I said.
“That doesn’t mean he can hang around all the time.”
Back inside, I used the big multi-line phone to call home and got my father. “How’s it going?” I asked.
“Okay,” he said. The TV was on in the background, loud.
“So we’re in the apartment,” I said. I guess I wanted him to tell me that he missed us, but the TV just got louder; he would turn up the dial when he didn’t want to talk.
“I’m in the middle of a program,” he said.
“Okay, sure, maybe tomorrow.”
“Yeah, tomorrow.”
That night, I lay in bed, unable to sleep, feeling the strangeness of the new room. The place looked the opposite of a bordello—pristine white walls, blond wood floors—but it still felt wrong, and I wondered if Brian was lying and something had happened here. I thought I heard the front door opening. But when I padded out, the room was full of nothing but moonlight, glowing. I put the chain on the door.
AROUND THIS TIME, I got my father a day’s work on a tour with me; it was a sign of how much he needed the money that he said yes—it was going to be around a hundred bucks for a very long day. I remember him in the hotel lobby in the early morning, dressed in a suit and tie that were way, way too good for the job, relics of his time as a successful lawyer. He was showered and shaved and his unruly hair was neatly brushed with pomade to keep it down. Something about the eager pains he’d gone through made me regret the whole idea—I didn’t want to see that hopefulness. Maybe he was regretting it, too; he pulled me aside. He had an exquisitely fragile, emotional face, with huge brown eyes that seemed to quiver with the fear of humiliation. “Listen, I’m going use a pseudonym,” he said.
“A false name?”
“Yes, call me Leo.”
“Leo?” I don’t think there was any meaning to the choice beyond the self-mocking tone.
“Like the lion. Don’t call me Stanley.”
“But I usually just call you Dad.”
“Don’t call me that, either. Use Leo.”
I spent the day devising ways to not use a name at all, and then I slipped up in a moment of confusion—we were unloading suitcases in a hurry. “Hey, Dad, that one there.”
One of the bus drivers snorted with laughter. My father was very fat and at moments like this one he looked like a baby inexplicably dressed like a flashy salesman. He froze, blinked, and then recovered with great dignity. “Yes, I’ve got it,” he said, reaching for the bag.
All this make-believe was part of a wider pattern: we went to enormous lengths to cover up my father’s legal troubles and his joblessness. My parents’ friends and neighbors knew the truth, but they preserved a delicate silence, picking up on whatever story my father was telling that day and delicately adding to it as needed.
“I just couldn’t stand retirement anymore,” he told a friend of his who had come over for lunch.
“Of course not,” the friend said, meditatively stirring his cup of tea.
“It was too quiet. So I’m back to practicing law,” my father said, which was true, he’d just gotten his law license back after a hearing at which his psychiatrist had testified.
It was one of his really bad days. His face looked as if he’d attacked a mustard jar—not just his mouth but his cheeks and nose were pasted with mustard. There was a dot of mustard over one eyebrow.
“You’ll get back in the swing of it,” said the friend.
“Yeah,” said my father, looking haunted. “I guess you don’t really forget how to try a case.”
“No, it’s the proverbial bicycle.”
I had a tendency to lie to the tourists, too. I couldn’t help it: I would look out the window of the bus at the streets of Manhattan, the world I’d grown up in, and feel an odd sort of protectiveness, a desire to make it less sad for everyone. I lied about the price of X, and Y, and Z.
The lying felt necessary in the moment but made me feel guilty afterward. I worried that the tourists, so apparently eager to believe, suspected that I was in fact lying to them, and that one of them would tell my boss, Yoshii-san, who seemed to spend his entire life in the office, pouring over spreadsheets with flight times and hotel reservations and bus numbers, and making frantic phone calls. Whenever I stopped by, he would squint at me in a pained and long-suffering way and lecture me in Japanese about what I privately derided as the Way of the Tour Guide. I told myself that it was the same old bullshit I’d encountered in Japan, that Yoshii-san didn’t trust me to do the job just because I wasn’t Japanese. But secretly I wondered if he suspected the truth.
“Do they write to you when they get home, Robaato-san?” he asked me. “You know you have done a good job when they write to you thanking you for taking care of them.”
“I get letters all the time,” I lied.
He narrowed his eyes at me, as if trying to read my disloyal Caucasian face, and then the phone rang and he picked it up and began talking in a low murmur.
I left. I told myself that he was a corporate shill, that he didn’t even believe all that nonsense, but actually I wished I would get one of those letters. I didn’t like waiting on the tourists, getting them their dry cleaning at the hotel, and to salvage my dignity, I pretended to look down on them. That wasn’t hard to do: it was the era of the Japanese tourist with his camera and his light meter; the people on my tours were gauche and unsophisticated, first-time travelers often more interested in confirming their prejudices than in letting the world flow in. But the truth was that I liked them, liked the little conversations at lunch in Chinatown or at the top of the World Trade Center observation deck, which were never about America, always about Japan, a world I transmogrified in my memory as safer and more certain than this one.
The thought of Yoshii-san looking at me with disappointment would keep me awake at night. The thought of being late to a hotel departure made my eyes shoot open and my heart race. I had nightmares about being fired. It wasn’t just the money: I depended on my job to keep me from working on the novel, that terrible betrayal of my father containing all the truth we did not speak about.
But then suddenly the season began tapering off, and the travel office stopped calling. I had enough money saved up to last a while and just focus on the novel, so what I needed was to find new ways to fill the hours so I couldn’t write. I paced the beautiful, empty apartment, a squeamish low-level panic churning inside me, like electric current circulating around and around. It was as if there were a thought I must not have, something sitting in plain sight that I must absolutely not look at—that kind of nervousness. I would stand on the terrace and watch the river flow. It was lonely, and I was extravagantly grateful when Brian called me on the phone to talk. He wanted to tell me about his memoir. I’d thought it was finished and sold and on its way to becoming a movie, but he still seemed to be working on it, thinking things out. He would run over his ideas with me, less like a writer and more like a salesman practicing his pitch.
“You pay for food, so why can’t you pay for sex?” he said. “People need it, and they should be able to buy it.”
“Sure,” I said, though I could sense something fatally wrong with the idea.
“My clients were CEOs and movie stars. My agent wants me to name names, but it’s against the madam’s code. Then again, not a single one of these people came forward to help me when I got into trouble. So I guess I’ll think about it.”
“Why would a movie star need to pay for sex?” I asked.
“Because they want what they want when they want it. Same reason you go to a restaurant instead of cooking.”
“Who are we talking about here?”
“I’m not saying.”
Looking back, I don’t think it’s surprising that I somehow connected Brian and my father, that they blurred in my mind. They were both energetic rationalizers. Listening to Brian go on about prostitution wasn’t all that different from listening to my father talk about the constitutionally mandated role of the criminal defense lawyer, who did not consider guilt or innocence. They were both fat, the sort of fat that whispered of compulsion and shame. Other people looked down on them, but I understood them as human beings with the same mixture of vulnerability and yearning that everyone contained. They had both gone to jail. They were both making new lives for themselves.
The difference was that my father was destroyed by what he went through—the shame, the sense of failure. It made me ache to see him in his present state, his hands shaking from lithium. But Brian seemed to have no taint of the past. He’d walked away from the wreckage and was on to the next thing. A part of me suspected that that was because Brian wasn’t a good person—my father was a very good person, loving and kind. But I was angry with him for being weak in a way I wasn’t angry with Brian.
I began to fantasize that Brian would help me in some way. Maybe his TV series would get taken and I could write for the show. Maybe he would introduce me to his agent. Maybe he would need some help with the movie. I knew a couple of people from college who had started careers with the help of a really good mentor. Maybe Brian would be my big break.
That night, there was a knock on the door. It was Brian, dressed up in khaki pants and a button-down shirt—the first time I’d ever seen him in anything other than the undershirt and gym shorts. “I’m going to Atlantic City,” he said. The casino flew him to New Jersey by helicopter, he explained; the heliport was just across the street, by the river—one of the reasons he had chosen this building. He had only a few minutes to get over there if he was going to make his flight.
I’d seen those helicopters rising from the little fenced-in helipad, looking so incredibly important and urgent. In a few minutes Brian would be in one, sailing through the night sky.
“The beauty of being a high roller,” he said.
He left, and I went out on the terrace watching for his helicopter. There were a succession of them landing and taking off into the patent-leather darkness, and I didn’t know which was his.
One night Brian knocked and said he was going to Atlantic City by bus.
“No helicopter?”
“All booked up.” He asked if I could walk his dog if it got late. He’d leave the door open so we wouldn’t need a key. And then David got home and we did the obvious and walked down the hall to Brian’s apartment just to take a look.
What we found was a weird mirror image of our own place: a single couch in the middle of the vast living room and a mattress on the floor of the bedroom, and virtually nothing else. The T-shirt and gym shorts were on the floor. There was an enormous walk-in closet, but almost nothing hanging in it. We went back to the living room and stood in the middle of all that nothing, his little dog running around our feet.
“It’s creepier than finding a body,” said David, looking around at the bare white walls.
Weirdly, it took tremendous mental effort to put the stunningly obvious pieces together. It was like trying to solve a logic problem on the SATs. “He’s in Atlantic City trying to make money,” I said.
“Everyone in a casino is doing that,” said David. “That’s why you go.”
“No, I mean he has no money.”
We retreated back to our own living room and flopped on the couch to think about this new idea. We’d both seen the casino buses waiting to take off outside of Grand Central and on Mott Street in Chinatown: full of retirees, the elderly, they took three hours to reach Atlantic City and gave you forty dollars in chips to use at the casino. Somehow, that doomed us. “I don’t want to go back to the parents,” said David.
“We could rent a real apartment,” I said.
“We can’t afford one. Not one like this.”
“Maybe we should talk to him.”
“What good would that do?”
By now, Brian meant more to us than just the apartment, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the apartment meant more to us than just a place to live: there was something about the space and the view and the luxury and the specialness that seemed to speak to our futures, our possibilities, whether the world would be kind or cruel. We overlooked the fact that we had no furniture, only a few cups and plates, that we came and went through the service entrance in back, where the Dumpsters full of garbage were kept. We talked in circles for the rest of the night—we were good at those circles—and then said nothing to Brian about what we had figured out.
He stopped by a couple of days later to collect the next month’s rent, dressed in the undershirt and gym shorts.
“You boys are such a pleasure to have around,” he said. “I like the company. I’ve come to think of you as the little brothers I never had.” He offered us a deal: we could prepay the next month and he would give us a discount.
“How much?” asked David, looking shrewd.
“Oh, I don’t know. Say, twenty percent?”
“You’re on.”
We did it again a couple of weeks later, when Brian dropped by to say that he found himself mysteriously low on cash. And then again a few weeks after that. We were now three months ahead on our rent. Then a few weeks later, we were four. “No more,” I told David.
“Why not? He needs the money and it locks us in. Now he can’t get rid of us.”
“Why would he get rid of us?”
“This place is worth a lot more than we pay for it. He could always get somebody who would pay him more.”
“But what if something goes wrong?”
“For an apartment like this, I’ll take that chance.”
It was then that the lights went out, and we lived in darkness for a couple of days. At first Brian told us that it was a mechanical failure, and only later that it was a billing problem. We had been paying him our share—so what had happened? A terrible, ridiculous accounting error. We passed over the question of where our payments had gone. He negotiated with the electric company brilliantly, working his way up to a vice president of some kind, until he arrived at a settlement, a great deal that would cost us only pennies on the dollar. But to lock in the bargain we’d have to pay the bill right away. Would we give him the money? If we did, he’d give us a free month’s rent, which was worth a lot more.
The truth is that we had to say yes. We were already paid up four months in advance and couldn’t live in the dark all that time. So now we had five months free living ahead of us, which was good because both our bank accounts were finally empty.
I stopped by my parents’ apartment and found my father in his underwear, watching TV. “Hey, Dad,” I said, “I’m worried about our situation with Brian Covington. Can you talk to him for us?”
“Me? I don’t know if it would do any good.” He stared at the TV.
“Where do you know him from?”
“I met him in an elevator in the criminal court building. I was telling someone how you were looking for an apartment and he said he had one.”
“The criminal court building?”
My father didn’t answer. He would often just choose to stop speaking, as if it were all too much bother.
It was a little later that Brian came to us with a letter from the building saying that it knew he was subletting to us, that it was in violation of his lease. He told us that, given the delicacy of the litigation already underway, we’d have to go.
“Well, give us back our money,” said David.
“I will, definitely, but I’ll need a little time.”
“I want it now.”
“If you act like a brat, I won’t give it to you, ever.”
David decided that we would get our money back or at least get revenge. Maybe there was something we could use to force him to pay us back. We went over to Brian’s when he was out, found the door open, and did a search. What we found was a cardboard box containing papers, neatly sorted: court papers. The legal battle with the building was an eviction over nonpayment, not a disagreement over construction: Brian had never paid his rent, from the moment he moved in. It turned out that he wasn’t finished with his other legal problems, either. He had been released from prison temporarily while the court decided an issue involving his medical treatment in jail. He had argued that he wasn’t getting proper medical attention as a prisoner. This led us to medical reports: he was HIV positive. There were test results with numbers that David seemed to appreciate: “Not great,” he said. “Pretty bad, actually.” Brian was sick, though you couldn’t see it. He was going to die, sooner rather than later. “Who knows how long he’ll last,” said David. And then finally we came on a letter addressed to the judge, asking for leniency. And it was from another judge, a judge in North Carolina, and he used a different name for Brian, Morris—Morris Guller was the full name—and he called him My brother. And he asked for mercy.
Before my father was sentenced, I had written a letter like this, asking for mercy. I’d fantasized about writing an angry letter, telling how he had been railroaded by overzealous prosecutors, how his livelihood had been destroyed over the course of an investigation that was more like a one-sided war of attrition, a carpet bombing. I wanted to write about how we had suffered. But I didn’t write any of that. I wrote about what a good father he was and how much I loved him and would miss him if he had to go to prison. I wrote it in a sort of blank state, watching my hand move, as if I weren’t a whole person but just a collection of limbs.
I did not understand mercy then. I was ashamed to ask for it. I was angered by my own desire to give it.
We put the papers back in the box, put the box back in the big near-empty closet, spent the next few hours getting our stuff into David’s station wagon—using the service entrance—and drove back to my parents’ apartment.