The Deed (23 page)

Jason was as hardened to Manhattan’s permanent itinerants as the next guy, with their wild-eyed babbling and the dried, cracked skin of their heels and their acrid stink. But when he was alone, and an encounter loomed, the enormity of the great cosmic inequity sometimes overwhelmed him.
What if there is a God, but it doesn’t make any difference?
Suddenly feeling very alone, he roused himself from his stupor and pulled out his cell phone. Time to go public.

“I’m proud of you,” said Nick.

What does it say about our culture,
Jason wondered,
when everyone’s first response on hearing that you’ve quit is to congratulate you?

“Thanks, Pop,” Jason replied. “You free for lunch?”

“Not a chance,” said Nick. “The Pacific Rim’s in a tailspin. But come out to Barleycorn’s tonight. I’m taking a couple of clients—steak, scotch, and cee-gars. Come on, it’ll be just like the eighties. We’ll celebrate your good fortune.”

“Maybe,” replied Jason. “Are they good guys?”

“Complete and total assholes, both of ’em,” said Nick. “No kidding; I guarantee you’ll want to punch them in the mouth. But make it count, ’cuz it’ll cost me about ten thousand bucks apiece.”

“I don’t think so, pal,” said Jason. “That’s in Brooklyn, right?”

“We’re taking a car. Look, aren’t you going to be eating in a lot of soup kitchens now? Take the free meal.”

Jason smiled. “Well, that’s a point.”

“Scotch older than you, stinky cigars, crappy company, and steaks that melt in your mouth—”

Jason smiled, in spite of himself; he realized he was being wooed like a client. “All right, I’m in,” he said.

He started to put the phone away, then thought better of it and stabbed in another series of numbers. He really didn’t feel like eating alone, and if landing a lunch date was now the most pressing problem in his life, at this, at least, he was determined to succeed.

SOUTH STREET SEAPORT
, 12:15
P.M.

The South Street Seaport, a painstakingly re-cobblestoned acre of turn-of-the-century marina between Battery Park and the Brooklyn Bridge, was the city’s only theme park, and it had a tourist-trappy, wall-to-wall-gift-shop inauthenticity about it; the “restoration” had rendered the area about as similar to a real seaport as Disneyland’s star-spangled Main Street, USA, is to the real small-town experience. Pockets of tourists gamely shouldered into the scrimshaw shop; Styrofoam flotsam battered the hulls of proud reconstruction schooners in the harbor; imitation fish-wives ladled out bowls of lukewarm oyster stew quietly imported from some coast where oysters still thrived.

An authentically restored seaport, Jason mused as he looked across this one’s spotless esplanade, would be swarming with black flies. Wharf rats as big as your brain crawling in and out of greasy barrels of spoiled fish, gout-wracked old rummies and prostitutes crippled with syphillis crabbing around in the horseshit and fish heads. An end of town to be avoided at all costs.

And on the very spot where rough pirates had once tumbled ashore, spilling pieces of eight on rough plank bars to exchange pubic lice with the local whores, now rose the squeaky-clean mizzen of Blackbeard’s Brewery, a microbrewery where many a manly broker quaffed a subtle single-barrel bourbon and bunged his pie hole with pepper-crusted filet of monkfish with a red-pepper remoulade.

“To new beginnings,” said Amanda, offering her cherry pilsener up for a high five.

“Cheers,” echoed Jason, in the seaside chair, bemusedly watching the nippy sea breeze whip her hair around.

“So, are you happy with your big move?”

“I am,” he said simply.

“Good,” she replied, sipping her beer. “That job never sounded quite right for you.”

In and around the ordering process, he gave her the morning’s play-by-play, reveling especially in the details of the final scene in Diana’s office. She seemed genuinely shocked and impressed.

“Good for you,” she said finally.

“God, it felt good,” he replied.

Amanda nodded, seemed about to ask a question, then thought better of it. “Law school’s wearing thin on me, too,” she confided, leaning back in her chair, and Jason smiled at the gesture of camaraderie. “It’s tough being cooped up all spring.”

“So why don’t you leave?” he asked, a newly minted anarchist. “What do you really want to do?”

“Eh,” she replied, dismissing the idea with a wave of her hand. “I’ve got thousands of dollars invested in it. I want the degree, at this point. Plus, there’s a lot of it I really do like. Arguing cases…the complexity of individual battles. I still get off on that.”

“You do love to talk,” observed Jason.

“Maybe,” she admitted with a smirk. “I hate the paper chase part of it. Poring over journals, comparing precedents, all that mechanical legwork. So much of the business is about small print and proper forms—it makes you crazy. If I could do old-style Solomon adjudication, I’d be happy as a clam.”

“What about
being
a judge?” said Jason. “Could you do that?”

Amanda smiled. “I’m on the road. But come on, back to you,” she continued, a wave of her hand preemptively setting aside any objections to her course change. “What are you going to do now?”

“Nothing, for a little while,” said Jason, watching her sip her beer; he’d thought about this question all the way downtown. “I’m happy to chase this deed for a few weeks while I get my shit together.”

“I like that plan,” she said, smiling broadly behind her glass.

“Good timing, huh?” he said with a grin.

Amanda responded with a knowing look. “You think it’s a coincidence, do you?”

He laughed. “You think I quit my job because I subconsciously wanted some free time to scour New York for this deed with you?”

Amanda shrugged. “I don’t believe in accidents, that’s all.”

Jason nodded soberly. “Well, I do. The laws of probability demand them.”

She looked amused, but fixed him with a searching look. “Well, are you familiar with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle?”

He nodded. “Sure—from physics, right?”

“It has to do with how the tool you use subtly compromises any measurement you’re trying to take. That’s my philosophy: The way you choose to view the world changes that world. You create your own reality.”

“No offense,” said Jason, “but that’s bullshit. A rock is a rock.”

“Sure,” said Amanda, “but whether it’s a doorstop, or a building block, or a weapon depends on what you bring to the table.”

He shrugged. “Still hurts if you drop it on your toe.”

She settled back in her chair again. “You’re not going to like this, Jason,” she began, and he grinned, intrigued. “But here goes. You exist only because I
need
you to exist. I mean that very literally,” she continued soberly, trying to quell his rising amusement. “Think about it. I haven’t got a shred of evidence that you existed before I needed you to help me secure this deed. So when you tell me you quit your job, and it just
happens
to free you up to devote more time to my search, how can I accept that as a coincidence? Why
you
think you quit may matter to you, but it’s completely irrelevant to
my
world.”

He smiled and nodded. “Very entertaining theory.”

“Now you know why you quit, anyway.”

“So why are you telling me all this?”

“Because you’re the type of person who just lets life happen to you, and I can’t have that in a partner. I need your full attention; I need your will to power. You act like you have no control over your world—you’re just wandering around trying not to let anything too heavy hit you in the head.”

“Now you’re just insulting me.”

She shrugged.

“And changing your attitude about reality is
not
the same thing as changing reality.”

“Are you so sure there’s a difference?” she queried.

“Yes, there’s a difference!” Jason replied, incredulous. “All your believing can’t create the deed if it isn’t already there. There’s either a piece of paper at the end of this search, or there isn’t.”

“But we’re not
at
the end of this search,” she replied, with a mild karate chop into the table for emphasis. “Jason, if you’re going to be any use at all, you’ve got to stop saying, ‘Well, if there really is a deed,’ and so on.” She brushed the hair back from her face. “This is the long shot of all long shots, you’re right. It may never happen. But if we don’t play to win, it
definitely
dies with us.”

Pausing, Amanda took a long pull of beer as he sat back in his chair, munching tiny oyster crackers thoughtfully. “We can only preserve what slim odds we’ve got by really believing and operating as if we know this thing is real. That’s all I’m saying.”

“You have a very screwy philosophy,” said Jason.

“I want to show you something after lunch,” she continued, “if our food ever gets here. You game?”

He leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head. “Why not? I’ve got all the time in the world.”

WALL STREET
, 1:35
P.M.

“I don’t see it,” said Jason.

“Keep looking,” Amanda instructed. “Try not to focus so much. Let your mind wander a little.”

They were standing at the northeast corner of Broadway and Fremont Street, facing north, having traced a wiggly westward path from the seaport following some map in Amanda’s head. Three corners of the intersection were pinned down by stately brick office towers; a fourth featured a pointlessly small corporate park.
Here, peasants—have a tree.

“Look uptown,” she suggested.

“I
am
looking uptown,” he replied. “I need a hint.”

“Don’t look so hard. What do you see?”

“I see taxicabs and limousines,” he said. “I see pedestrians, traffic lights, skyscrapers.”

“That’s it,” she said. “Now put it all together.”

“Manhattan.”

“Well, no,” she chastised. “Zoom in a little.”

He shook his head and folded his arms. “I don’t care what it is anymore.”

“Come on. What do you see?” she coaxed slowly, as if speaking to a child.

“I see Broadway,” he said, annoyed.

“
There
ya go,” she replied, following his gaze uptown. “See? That wasn’t so hard.”

Jason glanced upward from the busy street to the crooked line traced by the tops of the tall buildings on either side, revisualizing Broadway as a deep canyon cut through skyscraper blocks.

“This is the oldest street in Manhattan,” said Amanda.

“I thought you said Water Street was the oldest street.”

“No,” she replied patiently, “I said that was the first street built by the
settlers.
Broadway is an old Native American warpath—it predates the white settlement by hundreds of years. Maybe thousands. Come on,” she said, as the light changed, taking his hand and leading him south across the street.

“I love that Broadway was a warpath,” said Jason.

“Know what that means?” asked Amanda. “Tribal lands in this part of the country tended to be laid out in east-west swatches,” she explained. “Roads that went from east to west, within one tribe’s domain, were called paths of peace. North-south paths crossed into different tribes’ territories, so they were called paths of war.”

A few more turns and a little more small talk later, they came across a part of town he did recognize. As they neared the corner, he could see the New York Stock Exchange two blocks uptown. “‘Wall Street,’” he read off the sign. “Financial capital of the world. Lots and lots of cash.”

“Do you know anything about Wall Street?” she asked.

“I think that unless I blurt something out,” said Jason, “you can safely assume that I don’t know anything.”

She pouted. “Don’t get testy; I’m trying to make this fun.”

“It is,” Jason assured her. “It’s very fascinating.”