The Candy House(7)
Rebecca spun around to face him. “Promise me you don’t work for them,” she said.
He was blindsided. “Me? That’s crazy. Work for who?” But he was keenly aware of being in disguise.
Rebecca stopped walking. They were nearly at the corner of Sixth Street. Searching his face, she said, “Can you swear that you really are Walter Whatever, graduate student in electrical engineering at Columbia?”
Bix stared at her, heart bucking in his chest.
“Shit,” Rebecca said.
She swerved right onto East Sixth, Bix matching her stride. He had to fix this. “Look,” he said under his breath, “you’re right. I’m… who I look like.”
“Bix Bouton?” she cried in outrage. “Give me a break! You have dreadlocks, for fuck’s sake.” She sped up, as if trying to escape him without breaking into a run.
“I am,” Bix insisted softly, but making this claim while he half-chased a beautiful stranger through the East Village, after midnight, caused him to doubt himself. Was he Bix Bouton? Had he ever been?
“I gave you that idea,” Rebecca said. “Remember?”
“You noticed the resemblance.”
“This is, like, classic.” She was smiling, but Bix could feel that she was afraid. There was trouble in this situation. To his relief, she stopped run-walking and scrutinized him in the acid streetlight. They had somehow lurched their way almost to Avenue C. “You don’t even look that much like him,” she concluded. “Your face is different.”
“That’s because I’m smiling, and he doesn’t smile.”
“You’re talking about him in the third person.”
“Fuck.”
She gave a scornful laugh. “Bix doesn’t swear, everyone knows that.”
“Holy shit,” Bix heard himself exclaim, but then his own suspicions swerved back into view. “Wait a minute,” he said, and something in his tone made Rebecca stop and listen. “You’re the one who came out of nowhere. I think you followed me all the way from Ted and Portia’s. How do I know you didn’t say yes to Homeland Security?”
She gave an outraged laugh. “That’s psychotic,” she said, but he heard a tremor of anxiety in her denial, the mirror of his own. “I wrote my master’s thesis on Nella Larsen,” she said. “Ask me anything about her.”
“I’ve never heard of her.”
They eyed each other with mistrust. Bix felt spooked in a way that brought to mind a bad mushroom trip in his teens when, after an Uptones concert, he and his friends had briefly scattered in fear. He took three long breaths, the basis of his mindfulness practice, and felt the world settle back around him. Whatever else Rebecca might be, she was a kid. He had fifteen years on her, at least.
“Look,” he said, standing at a respectful distance. “I don’t think either of us is a dangerous person.”
She swallowed, looking up at him. “I agree.”
“I accept that you’re Rebecca Amari, graduate student in sociology at Columbia.”
“I accept that you’re Walter Whatever, graduate student in electrical engineering at Columbia.”
“All right,” he said. “We have a contract.”
4
It turned out that Rebecca had circumvented her destination, a bar on Avenue B, which she returned to after they reached their fragile accord. Bix declined her invitation to join. He needed to reflect on their scrape and assess the damage. Was there any way he could return to the discussion group? Would Rebecca return?
He’d overshot the East Seventh Street apartment by several blocks and now was close to the Sixth Street overpass that led to East River Park. He mounted its stairs and crossed the FDR to find the park transformed since he’d last seen it: There were sculpted bushes and a picturesque little bridge and joggers still out, even at this hour.
He went to the rail and leaned over the river, watching its surface toggle the colored city lights. His overnight walks often had concluded here, sunrise skidding off the oily river into his eyes. Why would anyone swim in it? The question made him aware that he was standing in the place where he’d stood with Rob and Drew on the morning Rob drowned. “Gentlemen, good morning,” he suddenly remembered saying to them, an arm around each. An impression of Rob returned to him: a stocky athletic white kid with a smart-aleck grin and pained, evasive eyes. Where had that memory been? And where was the rest: Rob’s voice, and Drew’s, and everything they’d said and done on that last morning of Rob’s life? Had there been a clue Bix had missed, when he said goodbye, of what would happen next? He felt the mystery of his own unconscious like a whale looming invisibly beneath a tiny swimmer. If he couldn’t search or retrieve or view his own past, then it wasn’t really his. It was lost.
He stood up straight, as if he’d heard his name aloud. A connection quivered in his mind. He looked up and down the river. Two white women jogging toward him seemed to veer away when he turned. Or had he imagined that? He replayed the moment—an old, disquieting conundrum that clouded whatever new thought had been trying to form. Abruptly, he was exhausted, as if he’d been walking for days—as if he’d wandered too far from his own life to reenter it.
He speed-dialed Lizzie, wanting to close the distance between them, but ended the call before it rang. She would be asleep, likely with Gregory at her breast, her phone charging out of reach. She would scramble for it in fear. And how exactly would he explain his bizarre whereabouts at this hour?