The Book of Air and Shadows

stank, in different but equally unpleasant ways, nor was the stench contained within either. So I was a little desperate, and it was a nice apartment, a two-bedroom with a partial view of the cathedral, and while dark in the manner of such long-hall uptown apartments, it was reasonably clean, and Mickey seemed a decent enough guy. I had seen him on campus before this, for he was a noticeable fellow: big, nearly as big as me, red-haired, with the pendulous lip and the protuberant, hooded blue eyes of one of the lesser Habsburgs. He wore tweed jackets and flannel pants and, in cold weather, an enveloping genuine Royal Navy duffel coat in camel, and he spoke in the precise, charmingly hesitant, anglophiliac accents we heard from those of Columbia’s famous English lit professors who were unfortunate enough to have been born in the USA.
    Despite these affectations, Mickey was, like most of New York’s sophisticates and unlike me, a hick. He came from-I can’t for the life of me recall the name of the place. Not Peoria, but like that. Kenosha. Ashtabula. Moline, maybe. One of those midsize midwestern industrial cities. Anyway, as he told me at that first interview, he was “the scion of a small business empire” that made industrial fasteners. I recall asking him what those might be and he laughed and said he had no idea, but he always imagined an immense zipper the size of a freight train. It was the great-grandfather who’d made the money, and Mickey’s dad and uncles just sat on the board and played golf a lot and were pillars of the community. Apparently there are thousands of such families across this nation, descendants of people who made their pile before taxes and globalization and hung on to it through safe investments and a horror of extravagance.
    And then, inevitably, the talk got around to me, and inspired by his frankness, and sensing that he wished for some urban exoticism in his roommate, I told him that I was the scion of Isaac Mishkin, known to federal investigators and organized criminals from here to Vegas as Izzy the Book, or sometimes Izzy Numbers, a certified public accountant and a bookkeeper to the mob. To which his response was the familiar “I didn’t know there were Jewish gangsters,” and I explained about Murder Inc., Louie Lepke, Kid Reles, and Meyer Lansky, this last person being Dad’s instructor and patron. That was, I believe, the first time I used my family history as a conversational gambit, and marked the end of the kind of shame I had writhed under all through high school. Why could I reveal all to Mickey? Because it was obvious that he had no idea what any of it meant, and regarded it as mere color, as if I’d been born in the circus or in a gypsy caravan. And there was, of course, yet more.
    So you’re Jewish? The natural query from Mickey here; I could tell he was surprised when I said no, actually, I’m not.

    Now I hear the sound of a boat’s motor out on the lake, a distant humming. It’s the middle of the night. No one fishes at night. Or do they? I am not a fisherman myself. Perhaps there are fish that bite in the dark, like mosquitoes, perhaps night fishing is like ice fishing, an unlikely sport but widely practiced by self-torturing fanatics. Or perhaps it’s them.
    Back again. I went out on the deck clutching my weapon and listened, but I heard nothing. It must have been some automatic motor switching on in one of the other cabins. There are several dozen here, widely spaced, apparently deserted now, in the interval between the summer and the skiing season, and sound, I know, can travel amazing distances across the water, especially on so calm a night. I had a flashlight too, and I was so moronic as to turn it on, making myself a perfect target for anyone who might be lurking out there. Although they would not want to just shoot me, oh no, it would not be anything so easy. The sky was heavily overcast, and before I realized the foolishness of the action, I was startled to observe how the blackness over the lake utterly consumed the thin beam. I found this oppressive, depressing: the feeble beam lost in vast darkness. Oh, a little memento mori here? Or merely a reminder of the extremity of my current isolation.

    Reading this over, I see I am still entangled in the distant past; this account will be another
Tristram Shandy
if I’m not careful, never getting to the fucking point.
    To resume, however: on that particular afternoon, I fed Mickey Haas’s