On The Precipice

CHAPTER ONE The woman was talking to herself. At first I was sure it had to be that she was wearing an earpiece, and her conversation was with someone on the other end of a phone line. I figured that as we got closer to each other on the sidewalk, I’d be able to see what device she was using. But no. Maybe it was the amount of gesticulating she was doing with her hands that gave it away. Maybe it was the wild nest of her dirty blond hair, dirty in more ways than one. Maybe it was the disheveled appearance of her mismatched clothing, or the way she would shout every third or fourth word. Whatever the clue was, I finally realized that if she was talking to someone, it was someone in her own head. Just another day in New York City, I told myself—silently—as I tried to tear my gaze away from her. And I was so focused on what I was trying not to see that I didn’t see what I should have seen, and before I knew it I’d been pushed into the narrow space between two buildings. My back hit the brick wall with a painful thud, and the dirty white face of some guy in a dark blue hoodie was inches from mine. Between our faces was the blade of the knife he held. I barely registered that behind this guy was another guy. No one said anything. The second guy moved forward and fished through my pockets. He took my phone and my wallet. He lifted the key ring attached to a tiny replica of the Eiffel Tower, which held the keys to Nina’s loft, but there was nothing on it to indicate what it opened, so he threw it aside. Then he forced my left wrist against the bricks behind me so he could take my watch, the Garmin Forerunner hiker’s watch that Gram had given me for my birthday during my junior year at college. My mind must have been desperate for something rational in the midst of this chaos, because I remember thinking, I’ll have to buy another watch. I felt all this rather than saw it, because my eyes weren’t sure whether to focus on the knife or the face of the guy threatening to cut off my nose. And it all happened so fast—and I know this will sound crazy—that I didn’t have time to be scared. There was adrenaline, yeah, big time, and I could feel my heart pounding, but my brain didn’t register anything until the two thieves dashed out of the alley, my possessions now theirs. At that point my knees buckled a little, and I leaned against the brick wall as I slid down a few inches and then bent at the waist, hands clinging to my knees for support, my breath coming in harsh gasps. It was probably about two minutes, maybe more, before I had the strength and the stability to look for the key ring. As I picked it up, the pointy bits of the tower pressing reassuringly into my clenched hand, I thought, It’s a good thing I back up my phone to my laptop frequently. Looking back, I suspect my frazzled brain was still seeking desperately for an anchor, for something that was normal and predictable and safe. Like buying a new watch. Key ring in hand, I looked toward the street to make sure my assailants weren’t there, but one step forward told me I needed support. I leaned my right hand against the bricks and moved slowly toward the lightness of the street I had so recently been following, a street that had seemed like a normal city street just a few minutes ago and that now seemed like a war zone. I managed to stand unsupported where the alley opened onto the sidewalk, and my eyes darted in a frenzy in one direction and then another. There was no sign of the thieves, but—hell, there’d been no sign of them before the attack. I stood rooted to the cement for some amount of time I couldn’t have gauged. I must have looked a little wild, because people walking by were giving me odd looks. Aloud, I said to myself, "They’re gonna think you’re like that woman." That irony was enough to make me rub my face and move forward in the direction I’d been going before I’d been nabbed. I’d gone a block and a half before I could wrap my terrified brain around where I was and where I was going and how to get from where I was to where I’d been going before the sky fell. Half of my brain wanted to scream, to release the massive lump of pain in my chest that came from the absolute helplessness I’d felt when all that had existed in the world was that shiny knife blade and what it had threatened: the end of me, the end of my life, the end of everything I wanted to be and do and experience, forever and ever. The other half of my brain was working like mad to control all emotion—whether it was grief or fear or regret or anything else—and just get me back to Nina’s Broome Street loft. A voice in my head, which I managed to keep from speaking aloud, said, Just keep walking. In fifteen minutes, you can collapse and scream all you want. I fixed my eyes straight ahead, focusing on nothing, and I kept walking. It was maybe four o’clock by the time I fumbled my way into Nina’s building, up the elevator to her sixth floor loft, and into the foyer, where I sat heavily on the bench to my left. It was an odd piece, made of some kind of wood I didn’t recognize. Wood, of course, lends itself to being carved and shaped, but this bench was so unembellished as to be austere, devoid of any characteristic that would allow me to connect with it. Even the grain of the wood was featureless. I rubbed my hand gently along the edge, glad of something solid beneath me, even this empty thing, and thought—not for the first time—how well it fit into the rest of the loft. This loft was not really my sister Nina’s. It belonged to her boyfriend, Luc Beaumont, a French fashion photographer who, I suspected, wasn’t famous enough to have the wealth necessary to underwrite this blandly but expensively appointed space. It seemed likely his family had had something to do with it. And it seemed likely that the blandness would mean the place could be ready quickly to go on the market, if it came to that. I hadn’t met Luc yet, though. When I’d arrived about ten days ago, on August twelfth, he had already left on a trip to visit his family in Normandy and, as Nina had put it, "to rest up before the madness of Fashion Week in New York and then Milan, both in September." "Visit his family." That phrase seemed to echo through the empty loft. It implied home, which included people who cared about you, people you could rely on—such a long way from this sterile environment my only surviving family member now inhabited. Where I wanted to be, at that moment, was back in New Hampshire, back in the large colonial-style house where I’d grown up, that house full of memories and comfort, that house that had sheltered and nourished the life I’d lived with my sister Nina, and my brother Neil, and my Gram. I felt a new lump rising in my throat, a lump made of the profound sadness of knowing I could never be in that house again. Nina and I had sold it just last week to a young family from Cincinnati. There was a Mom and a Dad and two boys and a girl. Just like my family had been. Just like my family had stopped being, first because my parents and Gramps had died in a car wreck when I was all of one year old, and then, second, after Neil had been burned to death in a forest fire only a few years ago, and third after Gram had died of a stroke just last March. Even the Subaru Forester Gram had bought a few years ago, mine after her death, wasn’t here with me; it was tucked into the back of the driveway at a friend’s house in Concord. I had no more home. I stood, still a little shaky, and moved forward into my very temporary home, a place to stay for a few weeks while I sorted myself out. Nina called this a loft, but someone’s money had restructured it so that there were distinct rooms. The foyer led into the living room, where a huge circle of thin metal, stuck with flame-shaped bulbs, hung over the couch and two chairs. All three of those pieces were covered with leather of a mottled pale brown, all with low backs and arms, all equally without personality or warmth. To my left, facing the couch, was a fireplace. Inside it was a wrought-iron—what, candelabra, maybe?—that held several fat, grey candles. The fireplace gave off the air of something that was ornamental rather than functional, but it was summer—hardly the season for fires—so perhaps I was being ungenerous. But it was so different from the fireplace at my real home, which was sometimes stacked with wood and sometimes was in need of cleaning out from having hosted several glowing fires. I moved across the room to the windows overlooking Broome Street and gazed sightlessly at the building across the way. The fingers of my right hand wrapped around my left wrist before I realized why. Those fingers were feeling the skin where my watch had been, the watch Gram had given me as though it had been a token of acknowledgement that I had successfully followed in Neil’s footsteps, that I had figuratively stepped into the hiking boots the fire had burned from his feet. Getting that watch from her was as though she was saying, "Neil would be so proud of you, Nathan. You’ve become the mountain man he was meant to be." I could buy another watch. Gram’s inheritance—which had come as a complete surprise to Nina and me, given Gram’s history of thrift—meant I could buy almost any watch I wanted. But it would never be the same. It wouldn’t be a watch on which Gram had asked the jeweler to inscribe "NCB." Nathan Cassidy Bartlett. Sometime around seven o’clock I heard the lock turn in the door to the hall, and Nina came in. Rustling noises indicated that she was carrying some number of bags. She came into the living room and saw me sitting on the unwelcoming couch, staring at the useless fireplace, a glass of scotch—raided from Luc’s collection of beverages—on the glass-and-chrome coffee table in front of me. The scotch was a single-malt, The Glenlivet XXV, which I’d priced online at around four hundred dollars a bottle. The glass Nina saw had been filled twice before, and there was not much left of my third pour. I didn’t look away from the grey candles. "Nathan? What on earth are you doing, sitting here in the dark?" "It’s not quite dark." She dropped rather than set her bags on the dining table, which was several feet behind the couch. "It’s dark enough." She moved toward the couch, stood behind me for a few seconds, and then walked around where she could face me. "What’s going on?" I looked up at her, struck yet again (perhaps partly because of my inebriated state) at her exotic beauty, an artifact of our vague, somewhat remote Chinese heritage. It had been evident in her teen years, but now that she was in her early twenties she was stunning. The effect was, no doubt, enhanced by her talent at her chosen career in the world of fashion, but she needed little makeup for the clear skin surrounded in a perfect heart shape by her straight, nearly-black hair. When I didn’t speak, she prompted, "This isn’t like you, sitting in the dark, getting drunk on scotch. What’s going on?" She was right. It wasn’t like me, though I had developed a taste for single malts earlier in the summer, at a hotel in San Francisco, after a spiritual quest on the island of Kaua’i, and after that nearly dying in an airplane when it lost cabin pressure over the Pacific, on its way back to the mainland. I leaned forward, took another sip, and set the glass down heavily. "I got jumped. One of them had a knife." "What? Are you all right?" I nodded. "On the outside, yeah." I didn’t know where to go from there. "Where were you?" "Houston Street. I’d just come from visiting that methadone clinic to see how it operates. I was on my way home…." Home. "I was on my way back here when two guys hauled me into an alley." I stared around Nina at the grey candles. My voice sounded flat, but I figured it was better that way than shouting and yelling, an urge the scotch had helped me quell. "They took my phone, my wallet, and—" I almost lost it here. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. "And my watch."