Brooklyn, 2002.
The air smelled like radiator steam and pan-fried American failure. The July sun bleached every brick of Crown Heights into the color of singed flesh, and the sidewalks pulsated and vibrated, as if some bastard angel beneath the pavement was trying to claw its way up and remind you what hell was.
Frank, or the man who would be Frank for the next few hours, leaned on the buzzer with a crooked finger and no small amount of shame. The name hadn’t arrived yet — that came later, in the apartment, after the woman asked and he looked to the wall and saw a pale, screaming face in oil — Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X — and told her, “Frank.”
She said nothing, just blinked. Clarissa Greene.
Sixty-eight years old, with a face like rusted sheet metal and a voice that had been dipped in ash and wrapped around too many Parliaments. She wore a threadbare lilac housecoat that gave off a smell like talcum powder and gin, and her hair — steel-grey and brittle — floated around her scalp in a disheveled aura of absence.
Her apartment was the sort of place where furniture went to die — dusty ottomans with one leg too short, sagging floral couches that had sucked in decades of spilled grief. A bulb dangled from a bare fixture in the ceiling, glowing like a jaundiced eye.
Frank was here to sell a dream. A whisper of silicon salvation.
That’s what the briefcase was for.
Inside: the guts of a dozen junked computers, rearranged and spray-painted and given fake serial numbers. “QuantumFire” was the name of the model. A made-up brand, complete with a stolen logo from some Taiwanese fan club’s website. He never sold to kids. Never to anyone under fifty. It was always the elderly, the grieving, the slow-moving, and the over-trusting.
Clarissa opened the door not with suspicion, but with a kind of exhausted tolerance. She let him in before he said a word.
She motioned toward the table. Sat. Lit a cigarette with the practiced click-flick-drag of a woman who’d survived the better part of the twentieth century and had nothing left to prove.
“So,” she said. “Show me your miracle machine.”
Frank opened the briefcase. He launched into the pitch. Pentium-class processor, Windows XP Professional, WiFi ready. She nodded without listening. Smoked without blinking. Her eyes were not on him but on the window behind his head.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
He blinked. Looked at the wall. Saw the Pope.
Bacon’s violence, the ribcage of color, and the scream trapped in its frame like a soul vacuum-sealed in paint.
“Frank.”
She nodded again.
He noticed the egg halfway through the performance.
It sat on a shelf behind her, gleaming in the dusty sun like something that didn’t belong in this world. A Fabergé. Real. There was no mistaking it — blue enamel with golden webbing. Tiny silver doves mounted on hinges along the base. It was worth more than the entire apartment. More than Frank had ever held in his hands in one place.
She noticed him noticing.
“That was Alfred’s,” she said. “My husband.”
Frank said nothing.
“He used to say, if the world ended, we’d still have that egg to trade with the angels.”
There was a moment then — a stillness.
The type you don’t get in the city unless somebody’s died.
Clarissa stubbed the cigarette into an overflowing tray and looked him dead in the eyes.
“I had a son,” she said. “His name was Aaron. He worked at Cantor Fitzgerald.”
The words landed with the weight of concrete.
“I had him until September.”
She didn’t say “eleventh.” She didn’t have to. The date was unnecessary.
Frank’s hands were still on the fake machine. They were trembling.
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
“I… I can show you how it works,” he said lamely.
She leaned back, smiled without warmth.
“You know it’s a scam,” she said, not accusingly, but like someone saying the weather was humid. “I know it. You know it. Doesn’t matter.”
Then she got up, crossed the room, and took the egg from its perch.
Held it like it was alive.
“Here.”
Frank blinked.
She pushed it into his hands. Her palms were soft and cold.
“Why are you giving me this?”
“Because I don’t need it anymore,” she said. “I’m going to Switzerland.”
That made him pause.
The phrase echoed strangely in his mind.
He’d heard it once, years ago — maybe in a diner, maybe on a train — spoken low and sideways by a man in a coat too clean for his teeth. Switzerland is not a place for skiing or chocolate, but for leaving. People with the means, or the nerve, or the grief.
He didn’t ask for clarity.
Didn’t want it.
Instead, he placed the egg carefully on the table.
“I’m not going to take it,” he said.
She nodded.
“I’m not going to sell you this computer either,” he added.
Another nod.
He sat there a long time, breathing in her smoke and her grief. She lit another cigarette. Offered him one. He declined.
Outside, a garbage truck rumbled past, howling.
When he finally stood to leave, he looked at her one last time. There was something in her eyes — not gratitude, not sadness, but a kind of grim, tired peace.
He didn’t shake her hand. Didn’t hug her. Just gave a slight, respectful nod — the kind you give a soldier, or a priest, or someone about to do something courageous.
Then he left.
The July heat swallowed him as he descended the stairs. His shirt stuck to his back. The pavement burned.
The egg stayed on the table.
The Pope kept screaming.
Clarissa kept smoking.
And somewhere, high above the skyline, a plane curved gently over Manhattan, disappearing into the blue.
Switzerland was oceans away, and yet right there.
J Christopher Motta: Jibril ibn Kr?st?far is a lifelong reader and writer whose work blends literary fiction, horror, and philosophical inquiry. A graduate of SUNY Ulster with a degree in liberal arts, he draws on a deep well of literature, theology, and American decay to craft that are at once intimate and mythic.
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