CHAPTER 2

MAN ON THE HALF BENCH

AT THE END OF my second lap, I observed an old man sitting on one of the park benches. Half a bench, actually, the other portion of the over-painted wood-and-concrete structure having long ago fallen into the void where things went, unrecovered. You couldn’t miss the old guy. Except for the odd jogger, a couple of dog-walkers, and two cops in an armored police car tooling the park, no other human being ventured out that afternoon—save for this codger, erect as a yardstick.

There he sat, staring off into the cosmos, the unfiltered sun raining skin cancer down upon him. Every time I passed this old fellow, he nodded ever so vaguely toward me. Why should I care about this wisp of a man wrapped in a gray overcoat? My only job was to pump away, doing my best to lose myself in my meditations, my daily moment of private worship, awaiting the emergence of endorphins that would, if they did their magic that afternoon, push out the pain and chill, and leave me momentarily energized.

Ah, my daily moment of private worship.

I confess I no longer engaged in the act of prayer. I hadn’t for some time. In different parts of my life, prayer—both the act of it and contemplation about it—had consumed me. I retained striking memories from my teenage years of smooth-cheeked boys and men wearing long, unruly beards in various stages of graying, all davenning, praying, with vigor. They would bow up and down, human engines powering a divine machine, eyes closed with orgasmic power, addressing their Father in Heaven with words like, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God the Lord is One,” and “When everything comes to an end He alone will rule,” and “Every soul praises you, O Lord,” and so on and so forth, making these and so many more claims of equal or greater absurdity.

No. I prayed no longer. But my act of riding circles around the park, day in, day out, replete with dressing rituals, breathing rituals, rituals of movement, rituals of sight and sound, leading to exertion and sweat, occasionally capped by a meditative mood that, when will and grace combined, would persist for a couple of hours—this formed a kind of religion at least comprehensible to my colleagues over in Anthropology.

In one bundled-up mass, I was collectively the rabbi, the cantor, the congregation. I preached, I hummed melodies, I sang, I attended to the great wisdom pouring from my lips. The park was the synagogue, and my bike was the pew. I was a solitary multitasking worshiper-cum-leader.

And God? Always a good question.

I finished the ride, walking the bike to cool down, enjoying the cardiovascular lift. I passed the old guy again and felt his eyes root on me. He was, I figured, observing me in all my sartorial strangeness. I sought to walk by him and reenter my own little world unbothered by elderly men seated on elderly benches. But instead, his eyes compelled me to halt, turn around, and regard him.

He smiled in a toothy and familiar way. I thought he was going to cluck like a chicken as did so many in the city these days, hospitals attending to the mentally ill being nearly nonexistent. He leaned toward me. In a tone filled with familiarity, even intimacy, he said, “Hello, Nicky.”

No one had called me that since I was seventeen when I decreed myself an adult and demanded to be called Nick or Nicholas, or occasionally St. Nicholas. Nobody called me Nicky except relatives or old friends, neither of which was in large supply.

I halted and looked him over. Beyond his coat, I could see little. His hat came down to his eyes. His nose bore the scabs characteristic of men and women exposed to the sun’s increasingly damaging rays. Loose skin gathered around his chin, reminding me of a turkey that survived one Thanksgiving too many. He was pale as an ancient ghost. His ratty overcoat—once upon a time it might have fit him—hung clownishly. Above his mouth, a patch of white hair masqueraded as a mustache.

“Yes?”

“Don’t recognize me, do you?”

I struggled to place his voice in the text of my life. But his words had squeaked out in the tones of old age and disease, masking the younger voice I might have once known. Something familiar emanated from his face. But I couldn’t morph him back in time.

“No, don’t recognize you,” I said.

He bent toward me some more, and in a triumphant tone declared, “I’m Abe Shimmer, Shmulie’s father. You remember me, no?”

I remembered him, yes.

I whispered those words that come when truly surprised. “Holy shit,” I said.

For a moment, the air between us lay still as a corpse.

“Been a long time,” he said. A cliché, yet true.

“Yeah. We’ve been out of touch,” I answered lamely. For thirty years.

“Yes, out of touch. I’d say.” He looked at the ground as if studying a blade of brown grass or the mud on his shoe. “You know about Shmulie, of course,” he said, a note of pain thinning his voice.

A middling-sized boulder plopped into the center of my gut, and I had to pull hard to breathe.

“Who doesn’t?” I said. “Your boy’s more famous than Al Capone.”

He waited eight full beats and said, “Fame like that I can live without.”

A faux pas, I realized. “Sorry. You must feel terrible about Shmulie.”

“Yes, terrible. But you get used to feeling terrible. The feeling takes up residence in your soul and never leaves. Not used to Shmulie himself. Him no one ever gets used to. How can anyone, even his father—especially his father—ever get used to him and what he did? Such a brilliant chemist, and he made that awful thing instead of helping people. Uch!”

I placed my bike against a tree and pulled off my helmet.

“All those poor souls in those hospitals lying like meat in a freezer at the supermarket. They might as well be dead,” he said. “They’d be better off dead. I can’t tell you how many times have I thanked God his mother wasn’t alive to see what finally became of her son. She knew about the drug and the victims, but not the end, not the trial and everything else. By then she was, may she rest in peace, fortunate to no longer be among the living.”

Wincing, Abe pushed himself up from the bench, his left arm pressing on the cement armrest. He was bent at almost a forty-five-degree angle from the waist up, leaning slightly leftward. Yet, he conveyed a counterfeit sense of forward momentum, all that remained of a robust middle age.

“Maybe we can walk over to your place and talk?” he asked.

“Of course. Of course, Abe. I’m right off the park.”

“Yes. You’re in the book. I looked you up.” There was no book anymore, but old linguistic habits died hard. I still claimed, for instance, to dial my telephone, even though rotary phones had long joined the void, and in any event, my computer, Maggie, did it for me.

Thus, we walked to my apartment, Abe hobbling along, brought low by age and disease and grief, stopping now and then to catch his breath.

I slowed my normal hurried pace out of consideration for my visitor, for the memories his presence evoked, and because of curiosity. Why appear out of the mists today?

This encounter resurrected my past. I had never sought to escape it, just leave it far enough behind to bury memories best left to the archaeologists to uncover some eons past my time. But that old man on the half bench returned me to my personal antiquity, and I was dazed.

He did not set out to upset my equilibrium. He must have had his own personal reason for his appearance. Why come after all these years?