The Astral by Kate Christensen Read Free Book Online Page B

did all the bureaucratic hoopla required to make us feel like fifth graders who’d thrown spitballs and set off the fire alarm. When it was all over, I asked what was going to happen next.
    “We keep you here for a while. Then maybe we take you to Queens.”
    “I want my phone call,” I said.
    I was led into the hallway where there was a dinosaur of a pay phone and then the cop put some coins in the slot and handed me the receiver. He was not a bad sort, as they go. I’d seen him around the neighborhood with his partner. He was a tall redheaded Irish-looking lad, rawboned, as they used to say; his partner was a chubby little Latino guy with a mustache. They always looked like a pair of comically mismatched dogs forced to walk along together.
    I called Marion, of course.
    “Harry,” she said. “Are you all right? You sound terrible. Did you make it home okay last night?”
    “I’m in jail,” I said. It was hard to talk with my lip so swollen.
    She was quiet just long enough to register her simultaneous amusement and alarm. “You’re what?”
    “I’m only in a holding pen for now, at the station at Lorimer and Meserole. But it sounds like they’re going to take me to Queens and throw me into the real clink.”
    “What did you do?”
    “Got hit in the ear by a meathead and had the bad luck to fight back.”
    “Then you’re innocent! Do you have a lawyer?”
    “They’ll give me one, I guess.”
    “Have they set bail?”
    “So far they’ve just read me the Miranda, fingerprinted me, and told me I was not welcome to disturb the peace any further.”
    “I think that’s just a misdemeanor,” she said. “Are you sure they’re not going to just book you and release you?”
    “They might,” I said. “As crimes go, this was pretty low on the totem pole.”
    “I’ll be right there,” she said.
    “No need,” I said. “I can walk from here if they let me go.”
    “Please,” she said. “See you soon.”
    We hung up.
    Then I was thrown into the holding cell with the Polish guy, whose name as it turned out was to my private amusement Boleslaw Grabowski. There we were, alone together at last. Boleslaw stayed put on his bench, slumping a bit. I likewise slumped on my bench and pressed to my raw nose, lip, and eye the wad of Kleenex some nice lady cop had handed me. It was turning a lurid pink from a combination of drool and blood. Boleslaw seemed mildly pained by my continued existence, but on the whole quiescent.
    “This is perfect,” I said out loud.
    He cleared his throat with a strained, glottal quack, looking down at his shoes, which were as flat and shiny and red-brown as roaches.
    “It’s good to have things go from bad to ludicrous,” I said. Violence beat in my veins to the rhythm of the throbbing in my head.
    He was watching me now, wary, his eyes shifting from side to side.
    “When things go wrong, it’s easy to feel that there’s a conspiracy against you, that some force is causing things to go badly for you through no fault of your own, or maybe through some fault of your own that you can’t recognize. Like a bad dog being punished.”
    I spoke in a pleasant, easy voice, but his small eyes were narrowed as if he understood the meaning rather than the tone of what I was saying. I almost expected him to reply in perfect English, but things like that only happened in movies and books.
    “You’re probably a Catholic,” I informed him. “And you probably believe, because you’ve been told since you were a wee pierogi by the guys who run the church, that there’s some father figure in the sky who made you punch me. Some dark part of yourself, of course, made you punch me, but you’re a puppet in your own mind. That is how you see yourself: a puppet of fate. Or destiny if you prefer, or whatever the word is in Polish. With your strings being pulled by that god up there.”
    I looked at him with all the compassion I could muster, given the fact that my face was hamburger.
    “But