The Delivery, page 7
* * *
He sideswiped, frontswiped, and asswiped several of the other shoppers in the process, for which he apologized, though no one noticed or paid him any attention.
* * *
He was in a hurry, yet he stopped three more times.
* * *
He knew what he wanted, but needed to be sure.
* * *
He visited:
1. The greenhouse, to look at the exotic palms and strange flowers available for sale.
2. The food stalls.
3. The perfumery.
* * *
The accumulated aromas from these bazaars was far too intoxicating for him, and by the time he was sprayed by the young lady’s atomizer he had begun to feel not a little bit dizzy. He sat down for a moment.
* * *
And the music in the Emporium Market and Department Store was also loud, and surging.
* * *
Things spun.
* * *
He needed to go back to the toilets and wash his face in cold water, but did not have the time.
* * *
He forced himself up, and pushed onward toward his objective, following signs that read JEWELRY CENTER.
* * *
The Jewelry Center was its own mini-emporium, and consisted of about twenty individual stalls, each with glass cases displaying its particular specialty. Some stands sold watches, others rings. Some sold plates, candlesticks, centerpieces, commemorative coins. Everywhere the delivery boy looked there were precious metals and jewels.
* * *
The place was wet with treasure.
* * *
(It certainly did not occur to the delivery boy that much of this jewelry was paste. Not because he was poor, or foreign, or stupid—please—but because, again, he was young. And perhaps because no one can know everything about everything. Even at my age, now, I can’t tell real from fake. I don’t know why we should expect the delivery boy to have been able to make such difficult assessments. Anyway, some of the jewelry was valuable, certainly, but it was practically impossible to tell which pieces, among so much imitation. So.)
* * *
The delivery boy found his stall. There was a long row of dark velvet torsos and necks.
* * *
Against the dark velvet necks were a series of bright necklaces, set off, brilliant.
* * *
He had ten minutes, tops, to choose, given the state of traffic and the time of day.
* * *
Then he saw the large revolving-carousel display.
* * *
Draped on its many arms were exquisite, delicate chains. Thousands of them. Each locked. Each ending in a delicate charm, made up of a name, spelled out in a flowing script.
* * *
1. Ada. 2. Adelaide. 3. Alma. 4. Agatha. 5. Arabella …
* * *
He knelt down and spun the column until the Ns were facing him.
* * *
He was on all fours. People walked by. He could see their leather shoes strike the floor near his hands. He hoped no one would tread on his hands.
* * *
There were so many names. So many … but then, there it was.
* * *
Should he?
* * *
(“You needed to insist,” N. had told him.)
* * *
(And: “Be a man about it.”)
* * *
He called to a salesman, who looked him up and down.
* * *
The delivery boy got up from his crouch, wrested the roll of bills out of his pocket, and placed it on the shiny salver in front of the salesman on the glass counter.
* * *
The tightly wound bills rocked back and forth for a moment.
* * *
The man wrapped the necklace in paper, taped the paper up, and then put this parcel inside a small shopping bag.
* * *
The delivery boy had requested that the salesman staple up the shopping bag as well, which the man had done, reluctantly.
* * *
The shopping bag went on the back rack, wrapped in the delivery boy’s light jacket, and was secured with all four of his bungees.
* * *
He was glad to be back in the air, in space, with only the sounds of the street.
* * *
Once more, he turned his focus to the matter at hand, unlocking the bicycle, slinging the chain over his shoulder, standing bestride the frame and kicking off; thereby missing, again, the incredible—and quite famous—view from the top of Central Hill.
* * *
On the trip back to the warehouse (if he hurried, he would only be a little late, so hopefully no one would notice), he thought only about the necklace.
* * *
The necklace.
* * *
(It had a kind of gravity that pulled all his thinking to it.)
* * *
The delivery boy didn’t think once about the traffic or his aching leg.
* * *
He didn’t try—as he sometimes did while he rode—to sum up his tips for the day.
* * *
(He didn’t see anything around him, even neglecting to notice the young women who, with the warm, clear weather, had come out onto the broad plazas, boulevards, and side streets of the city, alone, in couples, gathered around in groups, looking at windows, clutching schoolbooks, handbags, piloting scooters, guiding tour groups, sitting at roundabout cafés, perched on the lips of the city’s gulping fountains, standing on balconies, leaning over bars, lying on park lawns, their legs drawn up under them, or knees clenched demurely, tossing their hair, colorful silks tied loosely around their necks, cigarettes slanting down out of slender fingers, their reverberant laughter the tinkle of hundreds of shop doors opening, seducing the air, spirits and skirts rising with the heat and lifting the entire metropolis up and off like a zeppelin … The delivery boy paid no mind to any of this and could only think about the necklace—as if its gilded emblem had been burned into his thoughts like the afterimage of the sun.)
CHAPTER THIRTY
He mopped up his sweat with his thin jacket.
He pushed the front of his hair to one side using the flat of his palm.
* * *
He entered through the front door of the warehouse.
* * *
(Tinkle.)
* * *
She had a phone cradled awkwardly between her ear and shoulder, and another phone in her hand. She was speaking …
* * *
(“Mile-a-minute. Means loud and fast.”)
* * *
The delivery boy waited.
* * *
She eventually punched off her call, went back to the other phone, then ended that call as well.
* * *
She began clacking her keyboard.
* * *
He did not want to have to announce his own presence; so he waited.
* * *
He wanted her to see him.
* * *
And eventually, her eyes began to rise …
* * *
… then focus …
* * *
She was startled by the poorly contained rapture on the delivery boy’s face, and failed to adjust her own reaction accordingly.
* * *
Briefly, for a moment only, she looked how she truly looked.
* * *
The delivery boy saw her expression (and mistranslated it as a sign of sympathy toward him).
* * *
(It had been sympathy: Pity, that is. Again, pity.)
* * *
(Either way, the delivery boy should have known from past experience that he would have to pay for even this small revelation.)
* * *
“What the fuck are you doing?” she said, swiftly recomposing her features.
* * *
He thought about the dances in the old public hall.
* * *
Rules.
* * *
“Well?!”
* * *
The rules governing …
* * *
“Go,” she barked at him then, as if he were in the next room.
* * *
“I told you before. I have … something for you,” he replied, straightening.
* * *
(A man about things.)
* * *
He had forgotten to take the present out of the stapled shopping bag, and so, while she watched impatiently, he had to tear the bag open.
* * *
(Not the flashy presentation he had envisaged.)
* * *
He held up the small paper packet.
* * *
“This is for you.”
* * *
(The delivery boy did not understand the new look on her face either. He thought she was angry.)
* * *
“No.”
* * *
“Please—”
She whispered loudly: “Goaway.”
* * *
She wouldn’t look at him. She hammered a few keys on her computer, decided something, and stormed off from the station.
* * *
He shoved his fingers under the folds of the parcel, roughly levered it open, and, pinching the delicate metal links, let the paper fall to the floor.
* * *
Deaf to him, she hurried through the large, swinging door.
He followed, entering on its backswing, and he was in the narrow hallway.
* * *
He took hold of the ends of the necklace, insubstantial as thread, and held it up between his two hands.
* * *
He shouted.
* * *
“Hey,” and she turned, and everything stopped.
* * *
(Another incredible silence.)
* * *
“Looks expensive,” said the Supervisor, his languid, fucker’s voice emerging from the darkness behind them.
PART II
When I make myself a sketch of N.’s face from memory, I can surely be said to mean, by my drawing: her.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“Where did you find my necklace,” N. hissed, snatching it away from him. She glared, shoved the delivery boy in the chest, and turned him around violently. Then she gave him another, sustained push between his shoulder blades. He was forced completely out through the swinging door, face-first.
He found himself alone in the middle of the dispatch area. He turned back then, and saw, as the door rocked to a close (as I imagine it, now), a series of vignettes of diminishing length:
Swing: The Supervisor grabbing N.’s arm.
Swing: N. being led to the far door marked SUPERVISOR.
Swing: N. disappearing into the office.
Swing: The Supervisor looking directly back at him for a beat.
The final, slender aperture, which framed the Supervisor, going in after her.
* * *
The delivery boy heard, from farther back in the shelves, Uncle’s low, hacking laugh, and from behind him, the tittering of the dispatch girls, then he heard a lock bar being clanked into place in the Supervisor’s office.
The delivery boy walked away, and out.
He got back on his bike.
He tried to resupply his body with air, but his body firmly refused to accept any.
He kicked off.
He pedaled.
* * *
In the warehouse corridor, Wodge had mumbled something. Wodge had been on the floor the entire time, sucking his discards and dog-ends. The delivery boy hadn’t seen Wodge there either, hadn’t seen anyone except N. Hadn’t checked, or said his “Coming through …”
Looks expensive.
The delivery boy stopped at a dead end, sat on a bench, and waited, though he did not know for what.
He watched the tree across from him. He took out his phone. He watched a bare branch move in the wind. “I am sorry,” he wrote, from the dead end, before pushing the back arrow hard, ten times.
* * *
(Dead end, it means no passage.) No passage. To, or away.
More cars went by on the perpendicular street. He kicked the ground. He smoked. A kind of throbbing nothingness overtook him, before reformulating itself into anger. He swore at everything, including (especially) the unblemished and untroubled sky above him. He pushed his bike over with his foot, then got up and kicked it. He looked at the bike on the ground. He noticed a small light, emanating from under the handlebars, and saw that the flashlight he had taped there just that morning had been left on, and had burned down most of its battery charge. He flicked off the pocket light, then consciously, and with effort, sucked even more breath into his lungs. He let it out without any real relief. He picked the bicycle back up again. (He had only noticed the flashlight as the day, the ruthless day, was finally moving toward late afternoon, and he was, at that moment, in the shadow of the building behind him.)
* * *
“Where did you find my necklace,” she had said, covering for him. Smart, he thought.
N.
N.
N.
(Etc.)
Then the phone buzzed and he scrambled to get it out from his pocket. He thumbed it to life.
Another delivery.
Simplest thing.
As if that was all there was.
(Even now.)
Pickup and delivery. Pickup and delivery.
Fast times, slow times.
“Come back now,” she wrote.
* * *
There she was. Looking as she always did.
And she was standing out in front of the door to the building.
Then he saw four large shopping bags. All lined up in the front.
She had brought his deliveries … to him.
(Unusual, in the extreme. Though the delivery boy wasn’t thinking of this. Of how unusual it was for her to have brought the bags out. And I don’t blame him for not noticing, as he was too focused on N.’s face: trying to read its disposition.)
He stopped the bicycle in front of her and got off, letting it fall over. She ignored the bike, picked the bags up two at a time, and handed them over to him, not speaking, eyes downcast.
He took them, and put them down on the sidewalk next to the fallen bike. Three bags were heavy. The fourth was light.
* * *
She spoke to him then, still looking down:
“A very long delivery.”
(To a part of the city he’d never seen.)
“You do this, for him, now.”
(Special trip. No choice.)
“Make it okay.”
(Debt-to-be-repaid.)
“No fucking around.”
(Of course.)
“Do not look in the bags.”
(Bad omen.)
“I have to go back.”
(But …)
“Go.”
(Tough nut.)
He nodded, but paused before turning. He looked at her. And saw something in her expression that was brand-new.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
He slid into the street, displacing humid air, and leaving behind him a thick fug of apprehension. He reached up to flip his helmet’s visor down, but didn’t. The air was warm, yes, but fresh, and he didn’t want anything between him and it. The light: clear and yellow. He got off the bike, took off the helmet, and strapped it down to the rack.
He would: 1. Not fuck around. 2. Make it okay.
He straddled the seat, leaned forward and pushed with both legs, clicked on the power-assist, which ground out one single, concise complaint, before finding its groove and humming once more. He set off, up the wide boulevard.
A quick glance in the small round rearview and he saw the warehouse withdraw. The sidewalk outside it was empty.
Green light, green light, green light …
* * *
He steered around (slowpokes), wove among the cars, finding lanes that shouldn’t have existed, spaces that were folded and unfolded by the flow of traffic. He knew every move of each vehicle on the street and, anticipating, made the most of it, cutting up the roadway into unexpected shapes, his bike a blade, and he found himself laughing at drivers, taunting other delivery boys. He leaned far to one side and then corrected to the other, never having to stop at lights, at crosswalks, never having to dismount (dismounting at intersections: he thought of this as a failure in a kind of child’s game, in which the pavement was made of fire). Soon the way opened up. Looking ahead as he coasted, he began to feel the neighborhood around him transform. But into what? All the streets and roundabouts he had become intimate with over those days and months (and who knows how long), those once-unknown streets that he had believed would always be part of a disorienting and alien future—this old route—was, perhaps, now, becoming precisely that: Old. Scenery. Part of the long unfurling of his past.
