We didn’t know that the Volkswagen belonged to a monk. It just stood out: a powder blue Beetle in a stillness of dead leaves. The northwest quadrant of the city was quiet. The police were sweeping every street east of the river. Spring was a long way off.
We cased the Bug for five minutes, crouching in the doorway of the Orthodox synagogue. Above us two stained glass hands blessed no one in particular. Matty watched the car. I watched a wild and improbable tangle of roses tremble in the wind as it scaled a wall, slowly. My pupils were stretched so wide I missed nothing. Sometimes the aperture outgrows the camera.
“How does it work?” I asked. “The porcelain.”
The little ceramic fragment lay on the concrete before him. In the dark it looked like bone, or a single petal stripped from a bloom of popcorn.
“I don’t know. It just does.”
In America you can walk into a franchise automotive parts store, slide a sparkplug into your pocket, walk out. In the aftermath you might go to prison and serve a mandatory minimum sentence, or you might end up in Alphabet City, intentionally shattering the mint-condition sparkplug on the sidewalk. In shattering a sparkplug’s body, a constellation of instruments of shattering are produced. Porcelain is stronger than glass. One small piece of it, little half-tooth, undoes windows. The Bug had a four-cylinder engine and so four sparkplugs—kin of its fall—slept beneath its hood.
When Matty picked up the fragment I knew it was time. Heard him step quickly toward the car. My role as the lookout befitted my life lived secondarily through others. In the confusion of sudden departure you cannot tell whose shoes you are hearing, you run for miles and are far too afraid to look back ever, you barely know who you are. Sound returns in triplicate. Slapback. Sprinting with Matty down backstreets, I always heard the equivalent of six shadows, human, caterwauling the alley. It always sounded like someone was giving chase.
Matty threw the porcelain as if he had had a normal childhood and knew how to throw a baseball. The Beetle’s window spiderwebbed, and his collapsible police baton went snick in his hand like a fang. He made short work of the glass.
Later, in an apartment in the sky, surrounded by children sleeping among piles of scrap metal, we examined the worthless parchments and prayer beads, and I made a bad joke about karma. It was Scrapper John’s apartment, Scrap a static figure, bedbound god of alacrity, his room a catacomb of tool and recyclable. I’d sit with him as though in vigil, a mobile of methsmoke above us. I came often with offerings: knives, flashlights, boutique tapes and screws, pornographies, cardboard, steel, copper, gift cards, sleep, the radio, containers, realisms, engines, ideas, binaries, superglues, beer, sparkplugs, firearms, United States dollars, vintage headlamps, a signed and mint-condition graphic memoir, tobacco, intel, opinions, an unlocked smartphone, counterfeit U.S. dollars, an argument, fresh needles, my good spirit, 2x Cup O’ Noodles, God, speechcraft, indolence.
That was six years ago. I got out of prison in July. My mother had her car stolen in August, and I felt sorry for the thief.
