Prodigy

As if running a gauntlet, a night train speeds on gravity tracks between crumbling high-rises. Flame scarred brick apartment buildings stand like forgotten tombstones. Rubble spills onto wet black streets, a dream-like sheen. Graffiti streaks by spelling out bloated warnings, the train moving too fast to decipher the message.

With rhythmic shudders, the train slows and enters a tunnel beneath the Hudson. Soon, a landing platform appears in stark white lights. The train breaks to a stop, the Grand Central Complex.

A young man and woman de-board along with a throng of hundreds of rush hour commuters. The men wear well-kept leather brown shoes, slick blue suits, hold leather briefcases; the women are in gray pinstripe or simple black Armani, many carry Louis Vuitton handbags.

Joining everyone else at the entrance to a low ceiling corridor of white marble, the couple cues up on a moving walkway.

As they’re pulled forward, the walls diffuse into scenes of hologram projections: water falls behind white teethed tour guides hawking the excitement of Machu Picchu tours in lush rainforests; Danube river cruise with proud castles floats by; lithe teenagers hawk Ozempic, Semaglutide, delivery guaranteed. Behind everyone, the walls change back once the motion passes.

No one talks. As they exit the marble corridor, a cathedral-like space opens up and the throng of commuters raise their eyes to a monolithic dome. A god-like fresco covers the ceiling of a grand hall. At the top, scaffolded men lie prone, painting a religious scene emulated on Leonardo da Vinci.

***

Earlier that day, a boy with the tired eyes of an old man, a pain beyond reach in deep pools of dull brown, lays out his tools in the dimness of a shed set apart from a ramshackle house. Black tarpaper, a crumbling walkway, where his mom and little sister live. Their dad? Long gone, he died in the resistance.

The boy’s workbench displays his supplies, the tools of his trade: pliers in a variety of sizes, a soldering gun, duct tape, a doorbell mechanism, a half-empty gallon can of solvent, an empty nearby. The boy’s hands shake as he mixes solvent into a putty-like texture similar to modeling clay. He, while packing c4 into twenty canvas eight-inch tubes, sweats, an icy trickle down his spine, burns his eyes. He does not blink. When he presses on the pliable brown and white clay-like material, pushing the explosive into the bags with his thumbs, the plastic feels moist, smells like black engine oil, cool on his fingers in the moist heat. To keep the grease out of his long red hair, he pushes his bangs away with the back of his hand. His eyes concentrate, he thinks of a clockmaker. Wasn’t it his great grandfather who was a clockmaker? No, his grandfather’s brother. But they’re all dead so he can’t ask. There’s no one to ask. After tying the twenty tubes together with flexible wire, he lifts the cylinders around his waist, adjusting them much like a vest. As if modeling for a fresh shirt to start school, he examines the assembly in front of a mirror placed against a plank wall. But he doesn’t have the right shirt, or a school. He would have to do something or security might question him, he thinks, hell, not the right shirt. After taking off the vest, he places it in the bottom cabinet underneath the workbench.

Calling from the kitchen, his mom insists. “Frederick, it’s dinner!” She knows it’s best not to come to his shed. He’d made that clear.

The family of three, himself at fifteen, his mother, and his younger sister, join together every night for whatever food they have. His mother will soon leave for her second job. She says she’s lucky to have it.

Bears fascinate his little sister. “When the cubs split from the mom, the momma bear will protect the little bears,” she says. “You better not get in the way. You’ll get ate.” Her head barely clears the table as she’s small, even for her age, six.  

“What happens when the mother bear gets attacked?” he asks. My god, where does she come up with bears?

“The momma bear saves the cubs, silly. The cubs can’t save the family.”

“What about when the cub gets big enough?”

His mother interrupts. “Enough about bears.”

As his mother leaves for work, he tells her he will be working late downtown.

“Working?” she says. “You don’t work, if you did, what for?”

Later, he packs the c4 explosives into a backpack and meets Michael at the street. Michael’s got soldier eyes, a professional, and he’s steady like he’s been here before. He holds his face close to Frederick’s ear and whispers, “You’re doing the right thing.”

Frederick turns back for one last look, and like a lost kitten, his sister is on the front stoop with her bare knees drawn up under a pink and blue thin dress.

“You take care of your mom, Ellie.”

“What do you mean?” she asks.

“Life will be a whole lot better, and soon. I promise you girl.”

***

In the bright Grand Central Station the young couple wait for a table at Maxines. The woman takes time to admire the tiled expanse which spreads out around the two of them. “Grand Central. I barely remember the old one,” she says.

They soon have a lavish dining table, linen, a single purple orchid, English bone china with a gold rim. Hundreds of voices echo evenly around them, hollow acoustics, the air settling safely.

The woman has in front of her what looks like a filleted fish with the bones removed. She doesn’t eat.

“How is your food,” asks the man. “You should have something. Can I get you something else? You’ll feel better.”

“Nice of you to say.”

“I want you to stay strong. It’s your health I’m thinking about. The fish is bad, do you think?”

“The fish is fine. I just don’t want it.”

She plays with her food and the man eats.

The woman is staring at the far wall. “There used to be a café down at that end. Do you remember? Strange how I miss New York. There is no other city quite like it.” She folds her white linen napkin just so in her lap.

He reaches out and gently covers the woman’s hand with his own. “We don’t have long. Please have something.”

She picks at her fish with a heavy silver fork. “This fish does look excellent. The shape they form them is ideal, don’t you think? They make these things perfect now.” She pushes her plate away.

He sets his wineglass down, a red Bordeaux. “I would love to get you something else. What would you like? I’ll have them fix you a new fish.”

“It’s not the fixing I have a problem with. It’s way beyond just fixing, isn’t it?”

For the first time, she looks at her husband. “I used to come here with my grandmother. She’d take me on the train and I remember how tight she held my hand. She had arthritis and she walked with a cane. But she still wore these red high heels. There’s no way she was giving up the heels. Her eyes were blue, she’d describe them as a lapis blue, and she said the color came from Norway, the Vikings. The Vikings. Can you believe it? Anyway, she told me the story of how her great-grandparents came over on the boat to Ellis Island—but they must have lived much later—so it was generations before. As I washed her hair, she’d tell the story over and over.”

After leaning in front of her, the man quickly begins to cut the fish into bite-size pieces. “The Phillips had a boy just two weeks ago, you know. They say he’s going to be a music prodigy. A prodigy like Mozart. Anyway, I’ve known George since Oxford. You may remember I’ve talked about him, but I didn’t know he was a pianist. I found out one day when he needed help to move his piano. It was a beast of a thing to move. But he insisted we move it to clear the view to the Hudson and he didn’t play much anymore. He said he just wasn’t wired for it, you know?”

The woman laughs. “Maybe I will have another fish. The kitchen probably has a whole goddamn freezer of fish.”

“This might surprise you, but I just want you to be happy. It’s a painless procedure. You’ll see.”

“And you don’t think I’m happy now?”

“Of course you are. We both are. It’s just that we can be more happy.”

“And you think this will make us more happy?”

The man looks at his watch. “We don’t have time for this. If we miss our slot we may not get another.”

“Our slot, of course, but—”

“When you think about it, there’s no choice.”

“I’m sure you’re right, but I can’t help thinking my grandmother used to say she loved her husband because he was sensitive about his being short. ‘Napoleon was short, dammit,’ he’d say. Then he’d growl, ‘See? So there,’ like he’d won the argument. She laughed about his having these two-inch lifts in his shoes that hurt his feet like hell. Her words, like hell. He refused to say anything, she said, but she knew he could barely stand it, and he always wore the lifts and he worked his tail off and he was vulnerable and that’s why she loved him.”

***

Frederick waits in the cold storage room of the kitchen. His friend Michael holds both palms of his hands in front of him. You need to hide, the hands say. I’ll tell you when we’re ready.

So he hides, scrunched down behind stacked pallets of single ribeye steaks, each portion in vacuum pack. The labels say, ‘food product’. He puts his fisted hands, trembling, against the bottom of his chin, closes his eyes, tight.

When Michael tells him the time is now he straps on the c4 vest and puts on the white apron he’s been given.

***

The man takes out his credit card and puts it on the table. “When this is over you’ll see this is for us. I don’t blame you for being nervous.”

With her fingers, the woman examines the frayed edge of her linen napkin.

“You’re just nervous,” he says.

She doesn’t take her eyes off the napkin as she feels the loose threads. “There’s no great story about how fish get their eye color is there? It’s just color.”

The couple sits for a long time and neither speaks.

Finally, the man says, “We can’t just go home, even if we wanted to, can we?”

The woman tosses her linen napkin on the table, it falls crumpling to the floor. She quickly rises out of her chair and she is beautiful with a mole on her cheek. “Let’s go or we’ll miss the train.”

“Excuse me. We’ll take the check,” the man calls to the waiter.

“We’ll have to make a run for it.”

When they near the marble tunnel exit the man stops, and she turns back. “You said run. So run.”

Standing tall on the tile floor, her husband says, “Maybe we can go home.”

With her face breaking soft, the woman flicks her eyes back to the restaurant.

He smiles. “Sure, let’s get a bottle, you and I.”

Back at the restaurant, they see their table is not yet cleared, they sit down together. Pulling her close with his hand on the back of her neck, the man kisses his wife. “Waiter? We decided to stay.”

As the waiter approaches he’s different, red hair, very young, and his white apron falls from around his waist. He’s sweating. The waiter grabs the apron with his left hand to pull it back up. The man sees an array of brown and white canvass tubes surrounding the waiter’s torso, tied down with straps, red and blue wires. In the waiter’s hand is a button that makes the man think of a white knobbed doorbell. For an instant, the man questions himself why the server has a doorbell.