The Goldfinch

As I was basking in the comfort of this notion, he squeezed my hand reassuringly, as if I’d spoken the thought aloud. We’ll get away from here, he said.

“I know.”

“Wrap it in newspapers and pack it at the very bottom of the trunk, my dear. With the other curiosities.”

Relieved that he’d calmed down, exhausted with my headache, all memory of my mother faded to a mothlike flicker, I settled down beside him and closed my eyes, feeling oddly comfortable and safe. Absent, dreamy. He was rambling a bit, under his breath: foreign names, sums and numbers, a few French words but mostly English. A man was coming to look at the furniture. Abdou was in trouble for throwing stones. And yet it all made sense somehow and I saw the palmy garden and the piano and the green lizard on the tree trunk as if they were pages in a photograph album.

Will you be all right getting home by yourself, my dear? I remember him asking at one point.

“Of course.” I was lying on the floor beside him, my head level with his rickety old breastbone, so that I could hear every catch and wheeze in his breath. “I take the train by myself every day.”

“And where did you say you were living now?” His hand on my head, very gently, the way you’d rest your hand on the head of a dog you liked.

“East Fifty-Seventh Street.”

“Oh, yes! Near Le Veau d’Or?”

“Well, a few blocks.” Le Veau d’Or was a restaurant where my mother had liked to go, back when we had money. I had eaten my first escargot there, and tasted my first sip of Marc de Bourgogne from her glass.

“Towards Park, you say?”

“No, closer to the river.”

“Close enough, my dear. Meringues and caviare. How I loved this city the first time I saw it! Still, it’s not the same, is it? I miss it all terribly, don’t you? The balcony, and the…”

“Garden.” I turned to look at him. Perfumes and melodies. In my swamp of confusion, it had come to seem that he was a close friend or family member I’d forgotten about, some long-lost relative of my mother’s.…

“Oh, your mother! The darling! I’ll never forget the first time she came to play. She was the prettiest little girl I ever saw.”

How had he known I was thinking about her? I started to ask him but he was asleep. His eyes were closed but his breath was fast and hoarse like he was ru

I was fading out myself—ears ringing, inane buzz and a metallic taste in my mouth like at the dentist’s—and I might have drifted back into unconsciousness and stayed there had he not at some point shaken me, hard, so I awoke with a buck of panic. He was mumbling and tugging at his index finger. He’d taken his ring off, a heavy gold ring with a carved stone; he was trying to give it to me.

“Here, I don’t want that,” I said, shying away. “What are you doing that for?”

But he pressed it into my palm. His breath was bubbled and ugly. “Hobart and Blackwell,” he said, in a voice like he was drowning from the inside out. “Ring the green bell.”

“Green bell,” I repeated, uncertainly.

He lolled his head back and forth, punch-drunk, lips quivering. His eyes were unfocused. When they slid over me without seeing me they gave me a shiver.

“Tell Hobie to get out of the store,” he said thickly.

In disbelief, I watched the blood trickling bright from the corner of his mouth. He’d loosened his tie by yanking at it; “here,” I said, reaching over to help, but he batted my hands away.

“He’s got to close the register and get out!” he rasped. “His father’s sending some guys to beat him up—”

His eyes rolled up; his eyelids fluttered. Then he sank down into himself, flat and collapsed-looking like all the air was out of him, thirty seconds, forty, like a heap of old clothes but then—so harshly I flinched—his chest swelled on a bellows-like rasp, and he coughed a percussive gout of blood that spewed all over me. As best he could, he hitched himself up on his elbows—and for thirty seconds or so he panted like a dog, chest pumping frantically, up and down, up and down, his eyes fixed on something I couldn’t see and all the time gripping my hand like maybe if he held on tight enough he’d be okay.

“Are you all right?” I said—frantic, close to tears. “Can you hear me?”

As he grappled and thrashed—a fish out of water—I held his head up, or tried to, not knowing how, afraid of hurting him, as all the time he clutched my hand like he was dangling off a building and about to fall. Each breath was an isolated, gargling heave, a heavy stone lifted with terrible effort and dropped again and again to the ground. At one point he looked at me directly, blood welling in his mouth, and seemed to say something, but the words were only a burble down his chin.

Then—to my intense relief—he grew calmer, quieter, his grasp on my hand loosening, melting, a sense of sinking and spi

Carefully, I dripped a bit of water on his mouth—his lips worked, I saw them moving; and then, on my knees, like a servant boy in a story, I wiped some of the blood off his face with the paisley square from his pocket. As he drifted—cruelly, by degrees and latitudes—into stillness, I rocked back on my heels and looked hard into his wrecked face.

Hello? I said.

One papery eyelid, half shut, twitched, a blue-veined tic.

“If you can hear me, squeeze my hand.”

But his hand in mine was limp. I sat there and looked at him, not knowing what to do. It was time to go, well past time—my mother had made that perfectly clear—and yet I could see no path out of the space where I was and in fact in some ways it was hard to imagine being anywhere else in the world—that there was another world, outside that one. It was like I’d never had another life at all.

“Can you hear me?” I asked him, one last time, bending close and putting my ear to his bloodied mouth. But there was nothing.

vi.

NOT WANTING TO DISTURB him, in case he was only resting, I was as quiet as I could be, standing up. I hurt all over. For some moments I stood looking down at him, wiping my hands on my school jacket—his blood was all over me, my hands were slick with it—and then I looked at the moonscape of rubble trying to orient myself and figure the best way to go.

When—with difficulty—I made my way into the center of the space, or what seemed like the center of the space, I saw that one door was obscured by rags of hanging debris, and I turned and began to work in the other direction. There, the lintel had fallen, dumping a pile of brick almost as tall as I was and leaving a smoky space at the top big enough to drive a car through. Laboriously I began to climb and scramble for it—over and around the chunks of concrete—but I had not got very far when I realized that I was going to have to go the other way. Faint traces of fire licked down the far walls of what had been the exhibition shop, spitting and sparkling in the dim, some of it well below the level where the floor should have been.

I didn’t like the looks of the other door (foam tiles stained red; the toe of a man’s shoe protruding from a pile of gravel) but at least most of the material blocking the door wasn’t very solid. Blundering back through, ducking some wires that sparked from the ceiling, I hoisted the bag over my shoulder and took a deep breath and plunged into the wreckage headlong.

Immediately I was choked by dust and a sharp chemical smell. Coughing, praying there were no more live wires hanging loose, I patted and groped in the dark as all sorts of loose debris began to patter and shower down in my eyes: gravel, crumbs of plaster, shreds and chunks of god-knows-what.

Some of the building material was light, and some of it was not. The further I worked in, the darker it got, and the hotter. Every so often my way dwindled or closed up unexpectedly and in my ears a roaring crowd noise, I wasn’t sure where it came from. I had to squeeze around things; sometimes I walked, sometimes I crawled, bodies in the wreckage more sensed than seen, a disturbing soft pressure that gave under my weight but worse than this, the smell: burnt cloth, burnt hair and flesh and the tang of fresh blood, copper and tin and salt.