The Angel Esmeralda - Don Delillo [32]
“Nearly caught her. We ran into the thickest part of the lots and then I was distracted, damn scared actually, because bats, I couldn’t believe it, actual bats—like the only flying mammals on earth?” She made ironic wing motions with her fingers. “They came swirling up out of a crater filled with medical waste. Bandages smeared with body fluids.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” Edgar said.
“I saw, like, enough used syringes to satisfy the death wish of entire cities. Dead white mice by the hundreds with stiff flat bodies. You could flip them like baseball cards.”
Edgar stretched her fingers inside the milky gloves.
“And Esmeralda somewhere in those shrubs and junked cars. I’ll bet anything she’s living in a car,” Gracie said. “What happened here? Subway fire, looks like.”
“Yes.”
“Any dead?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I wish I’d caught her.”
“She’ll be all right,” Edgar said.
“She won’t be all right.”
“She can take care of herself. She knows the landscape. She’s smart.”
“Sooner or later,” Gracie said.
“She’s safe. She’s smart. She’ll be all right.”
And that night, under the first tier of scratchy sleep, Edgar saw the subway riders once again, adult males, females of childbearing age, all rescued from the smoky tunnels, groping along catwalks and led up companion ladders to the street—fathers and mothers, the lost parents found and gathered, shirt-plucked and bodied up, guided to the surface by small faceless figures with Day-Glo wings.
And some weeks later Edgar and Grace made their way on foot across a patch of leaf rot to the banks of the Bronx River near the city limits where a rear-ended Honda sat discarded in underbrush, plates gone, tires gone, windows lifted cleanly, rats ascratch in the glove compartment, and after they noted the particulars of abandonment and got back in the van, Edgar had an awful feeling, one of those forebodings from years long past when she sensed dire things about a pupil or a parent or another nun and felt stirrings of information in the dusty corridors of the convent or the school’s supply room that smelled of pencil wood and composition books or the church that abutted the school, some dark knowledge in the smoke that floated from the altar boy’s swinging censer, because things used to come to her in the creak of old floorboards and the odor of clothes, other people’s damp camel coats, because she drew News and Rumors and Catastrophes into the spotless cotton pores of her habit and veil.
Not that she claimed the power to live without doubt.
She doubted and she cleaned. That night she leaned over the washbasin in her room and cleaned every bristle of the scrub brush with steel wool drenched in disinfectant. But this meant she had to immerse the bottle of disinfectant in something stronger than disinfectant. And she hadn’t done this. She hadn’t done it because the regression was infinite. And the regression was infinite because it is called infinite regression. You see how doubt becomes a disease that spreads beyond the pushy extrusions of matter and into the elevated spaces where words play upon themselves.
And another morning a day later. She sat in the van and watched Sister Grace emerge from the convent, the rolling gait, the short legs and squarish body, Gracie’s face averted as she edged around the front of the vehicle and opened the door on the driver’s side.
She got in and gripped the wheel, looking straight ahead.
“I got a call from the friary.”
Then she reached for the door and shut it. She gripped the wheel again.
“Somebody raped Esmeralda and threw her off a roof.”
She started the engine.
“I’m sitting here thinking, Who do I kill?”
She looked at Edgar briefly, then put the van in gear.
“Because who do I kill is the only question I can ask myself without falling apart completely.”
They drove south through local streets, the tenement brick smoked mellow in the morning light. Edgar felt the weather of Gracie’s rage and pain—she’d approached the girl two or three times in recent weeks, had talked to her from a distance, thrown