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The large long-armed apish man had brought his own pen—he’d bought one expressly for the occasion of buying the store and brought it swelled with ink like he’d brought with him his own name swelled with suffering and his hopes and ambitions and strength and greed as intrinsic as his own hairy-knuckled hand, which smoothed the sheet atop the roughwood counter. He unscrewed the cap of the heavy smooth pen, thumbed the nib to coax the flow and pressing down, laboriously, character by character, stroke of each character by stroke of each character, inked the name that was legally his name but historically wasn’t, the name that had traveled with him from Russia and its alphabet of amputated spider limbs to become this inventory of signs in a rounder unctuous language, and gripping harder as if throttling the slicking pen put next to his belabored signature the date, remembering to do it in the adopted style, first the month, slash, then the day, slash, then the year, a discombobulated order, as confused as everything else—the streets, the weights and measures—in this neolatrous country. Which was why he needed to ground himself. And to ground himself, he needed this store. First a store and then a family. Though through the years he’d been working for other bosses and saving up, there were those including the bosses who’d told him backward: first a family and then a store. But if he’d heeded the advice of that inversion, he might never have saved up. Not enough. Storeroom, stockroom, bathroom where the toilet was cracked. Counter and shelves. Replace all until they were his. All his. And then his family’s, when family would come. Back in the olden days, you’d dip your thumb in ink to make your mark—that’s how his illiterate forefathers had signed for themselves, signed up for armies, signed out of armies, using that method today reserved for criminals, whose thumbs are guiltier than their faces.

Index

Direction, selection, guiding, conducting: the old man was instructing his son by pointing . . . that goes on this shelf, this goes on that shelf . . . over here, over there . . . separating taboos of the cold that must remain cold from the hot that must remain hot from the miraculously proliferating dominion of the room-temperature stable. . . . He and his son were native to different languages, so the pointing helped, the pointing was efficient. Put the eggs aside the milk. Arrange the milk by freshness with the soonest to expire first. All this was communicated by pointing. Grunts, harrumphs, slaps, flicks, pointing. Put the butter aside the cheese arranged the same with the soonest to expire first, the bread in its binning, the rolls with the rolls, the loaves with the loaves, the paper products scrolled higher up like contracts, leases, deeds, the sweets and taffies and suckers and gums laid out by the register due to their sinister tendency to slip into a pocket. The old man pointed, his son obeyed: the gnarled finger with the gnawed-down nail indicating placement of wares as much as the placement of blame, the assignment of fault on the slow days, the deflection and condemnation on the loss days, the days of violent theft and pettier stealing uncovered only after inventory. You, his father pointed, you is reason business is bad . . . you, his father pointed at him, don’t know how to make stock in store . . . you don’t know how to speak with customer, how you doing, how is day, a bag perhaps you need, and what about how good the weather, and more than everything you don’t know even how to get robbed in correct way, who ever heard such thing, man comes, says give money, you give him all money we have in till without checking is he serious, what is intention, what is motive, without checking maybe gun is not real, without checking maybe real gun has no bullets, a woman could rob you with a banana if you weren’t—pointing—if you—pointing—and the old man thrust his many-jointed pointer finger straight up in the air as if he’d just had the great idea that would destroy his son and save the establishment into which he’d invested his life, but then he fell back in the oils, vinegars, and preserves aisle and collapsed against a shelf and slid down like one of the sliding cans and bottles to the floor, where finger rigid in the air the old man died.

Middle

A developer was buying up the block, a bloated man constantly quoted in the press, a legalized criminal the color of the sun. He was buying up the buildings while retailing the lie that they’d be refurbished, but the refurbishment involved tearing them down. He worked in from the scruffy corners, buying and then demolishing the buildings and then rebuilding replacements—uglier replacements, rebuilt taller and wider—and then continuing on to the buildings of the inner block, until the only older building that remained on one side of the block was the narrow single-floor building that housed the family’s store, whose current generation of ownership—the man who’d been the son and who was now the father—refused to move. He watched as his fate grew up around him on both sides. And then across the way, on the street’s opposite side, the whole block suddenly disappeared, the entire facing row of buildings one week vanished in a massive disembowelment of the earth and by the untrafficked weekend a vast pit declived to receive their memory. The noise, the dust, the grinding vehicles. A huge tower was clawing up across the way. It was to be mixed-use, a new itself-mixed term in the cement-aggregate-just-add-water lexicon, a mongrel mix of residential units and officing above a stretch of ground-floor shops. The tower spired, reproduced itself in units like bank deposit boxes with billionaire views, blocking the developer-colored sun from coming into the store, blocking the dwindle of customers who would have come into the store with all the loading and unloading and idling trucks and vans and barriers. The work never stopped until it unexpectedly stopped and the ditches filled with rainwater, snow and ice and their melting. And then just as unexpectedly, it started again, work rattling the jars on the shelves, work rattling the walls and the floor even, and the dust from the site whitened the windows, and the cranes swung their shadows over the door. But still the owner held on. Delegations sent by the developer and his organization kept calling and offering him sums to sell out. Like the tower across the way the sums continued to rise, but never quite as high, and the son who was now a father turned them down. Why? the delegations wanted to know and the man said, I like how it smells here, even though the store’s habitual pickling smell had been replaced by gas and diesel and the wafture of noxious putties. My father died in this store, he said. Where those tiles are discolored. Or where the rest is discolored and those tiles are not. He died there. The man’s wife pressed him to sell, the man’s daughter urged what the wife urged, but the man was stubborn in his conviction that the store was worth more than even the peak they were dangling over him and that there would be more value in staying in business and catering to all the new tenants of the new tower than there would be in selling out and leaving, despite the new grocery and druggist slated to open across the way. That’s what the posters pasted to the hoardings promised, pasted and already peeling: Coming in Spring! Thank You for Your Patience! We’ll have things they won’t have, he told his wife and daughter in a bid for reassurance and when they announced themselves curious to know what those things were, he thought about honesty and integrity and heritage and tradition and imported-from-war-zones figs and dates and nuts and homemade Russian relishes in his father’s style that now Mexicans called Hector prepared but instead he said, We’ll have us, which was a line he was quoting from a popular dating show his wife and daughter liked to stream and they groaned. You’ll have nothing. At the crass ceremony to mark the tower’s completion, the developer showed up and resembling himself from his media appearances to a remarkable degree of fidelity that might have been his only fidelity stood high above the street in the midst of an artificial roof glade of microphones and cameras. Below was the old store’s damaged roof like a pooling wound surrounded by the new buildings that had displaced the cobbler-and-key-copier (moved back to Turkey), the tailor (retired, promptly died), the laundry-dry-cleaner (put all their children through college), the diner (sunk the proceeds into some peccant investment, promptly lost all), and the reformed Hungarian church whose congregation now met in a school basement across the bridge. At the conclusion of his brief and prefabricated remarks, the developer lifted his livid hand to wave to the crowd of his paid supporters and journalists and in the coverage that circulated after, only one finger was clearly raised. Some commentators said it was an accident—of the developer’s, of the angle of recording—others said it was an observational bias or libel, and while the developer himself offered no comment at all, the publicity occasioned by the digit was undeniable: certain buyers and renters liked the tower even better because of it. They enjoyed the thought of living within a vulgar singularity, sticking up from the middle of the block. They enjoyed the thought of living inside an obscene gesture.

Ring

Even before the redevelopment, his wife had been telling him if he didn’t slow down, if he didn’t make plans to contribute more generously to her happiness and their pensions, she would leave him. And then when the redevelopment struck, when the improvements descended to improve them, she told him this was his chance: he had to take the offer or she’d be gone from him. Her voice, when she delivered these threats, tended to fade into the sirens and mixers, into all those other voices that rang on the phone with their threats, those voices some of robots and some of Bangladeshis impersonating robots telling him you must pay now, your bill is overdue, your account is overdrawn, you have thirty days, you have sixty days, you have ninety days, penalties are being assessed, your case is being referred to a collection agency, this is our last attempt to contact you, and then the script repeated, you must pay now, your bill is overdue, your account is overdrawn, this is our last attempt to contact you. But after a certain number of last attempts, this is the issue, it becomes difficult to take them seriously. Life becomes an intensifying barrage of penultimata, fading into connubial beratement, fading into the mix of sirens. He found it especially difficult to take his wife’s threats seriously, because without him, what would she do? Find another husband? You have one wife who gave you one daughter and the daughter’s not going to continue in this business, no. Done. Finished. She’s going to university. She’s going to be a professional. Lawyer, doctor, office person, she’s not going to stand here like I do all day with the swollen toes, the puffy feet, the pain in my veins, breaking my bones against the filthy counter. Tell her she will and never see her again. Never see her marry, never see the grandkids she’ll give birth to. If you let this place eat you like it ate your father, we’ll bury you in the cheapest hole they’re digging for whatever’s the newest next construction and take the deal they’re offering. So take the deal yourself. Accept it before you lose me too. Such was the daily tirade, which every day he thought meant something else, or something less, along the lines of please spend more time at home, please don’t go in on weekends, please don’t hurt your leg again and make me take another shift, you have thirty days, you have sixty days, you have ninety days. She was taking strange and gutting liberties, showing up late to relieve him and what was worse, bringing herself and even him steaming lunch from one of the new restaurants in the tower across the street. Then she didn’t come in to relieve him, canceling at the last moment. Then she didn’t come in to relieve him and didn’t cancel, didn’t even bother. And late that night he slogged home from closing up and found his house tumbled and empty. All the rooms he’d been supposed to paint, empty. All the space under the shedding eaves, empty. There was still furniture, though some of it was missing, and there was a note that had been left on the kitchen table but that had fallen below a kitchen chair, so he called. The toaster was missing. The microwave. The blender. He called and kept calling and she didn’t pick up, she just texted him back with long pauses between texts that made him wait like for red lights that would never change, I took Serena and went to my sister’s . . . pause for a few minutes . . . I left you a note . . . pause for a few days . . . you should probably fill up the fridge and do the wash. . . . That was three weeks ago. That was six months ago. Some of his customers who were employees of the tower, not residents of the tower but its security and maintenancers and support staff who were his customers because he had no problem selling loose cigarettes and individual beers asked after her—how’s your wife? how’s the missus keeping?—and he always said some variation on I can’t complain, because complaining’s her department . . . she’s got the night off but’ll be in tomorrow . . . and he said that every day that came before a tomorrow for over a year and on his scaly hand he still wore his ring and it tapped like a false coin against the register whenever he rang some rare patron up.

Pinky

The last time he’d left the city, he’d gone to sell his better car to a geriatric-care nurse on the far side of the bridge and gotten lost and the Hectors he’d left the store with had closed early and staged a party that trashed the premises and it had taken days to clean up the breakage and rehabilitate the bins and shelving and recoup the money lost. Someone had fallen or been beaten or both in the course of the party and was suing him from a wheelchair. He, apparently, was suing the Hectors and suing his insurance. He had three different lawyers. He had five separate doctors for his knee. This time leaving the city he was driving to Pennsylvania in his worse and only car and found himself worrying about the store: who was watching it, what they’d do to it or let be done to it, and his hand shifting and twitchful reached for his phone to check in with them, until he momentarily recovered his senses while drifting across the dotted-line lanes on the highway and realized, there was no one to check in with, there was no store anymore. It didn’t belong to him. It didn’t exist. It had been a year since he’d finally sold out to the organization that used to be controlled by the developer for less than he’d initially been offered. The developer no longer controlled the organization or no longer controlled it officially—his children did—because the developer was now the president of the country. He, our man driving, hadn’t voted for him but his wife surely had: she’d taken half the sum her husband had received for the store and used it to found a podcast where she talked about how much she admired the developer (“totally”) and how hard it had been to leave her husband (“deadbeat,” “abusive”) and how easy it had been to become somebody else’s girlfriend (“my savior”) and what it was like to live with him in a house down the road from her sister’s house in some lost forested corner of the Poconos (“paradise no ghetto”). He switched the podcast off. The trees were woody slits spattered with green. The road was undulating, nauseating, rising and falling with the density of the trees, the less dense the more flat and the denser with the rising. He felt unwell. His ears kept popping. It was too bright and his sunglasses were an irrelevant prescription. The nature—which was how he thought of all the world outside the city—spooked him. There weren’t enough people. There were too many trees. The roads had few intersecting roads and kept going up. The house was larger than he expected and even his daughter had grown. Serena was beautiful. His wife too had grown more beautiful, by her own account due to a new exercise regimen and these peptide supplements she sold online and tried to sell to him: at cost, she insisted, at cost. They had a meal together too late to be lunch but too early to be dinner, because he’d arrived late and he was expected to leave early before the return of the boyfriend who’d charitably absented himself to go hunting. After the meal, which was really just a selection of warmed-up frozen appetizers and an unwashed foraged salad, he sat alone with his daughter as she told him about her studies and what prospects she had for a career and in the middle of her account of studying for the C.P.A. exam, he cut her off and asked, When I get old and can’t take care of myself no more, you got to promise no matter what you’ll take care of me, and he held out to his daughter his waggy little finger like she used to do when she was just a waggy little finger herself, promise?, though she made no move to reciprocate or assuage, promise?