Frank’s lobby
Winner: Editor’s Choice Award
Tamas Dobozy
The nights I couldn’t sleep, I held the baby, and watched the smear of lights on the Empire State Building—orange, magenta, green. We were on the thirteenth floor, off Washington Square Park, but we wouldn’t be in New York long. It gave the usual longing I feel in cities a fatal twist, as if transience itself was the source of feeling, or, worse, what I loved was passing because I loved it. Our night doorman, Frank, was from Queens. He said, seeing my sleep-deprived face, that no matter what time of night it was, I was welcome in the lobby. I liked Frank, he let me feel as if I was alone even when we were together. We could stay dead quiet, we didn’t need to talk, we could share our solitude and nothing more. My son, Henry, was three weeks old when we moved to Manhattan, and often woke at two, three, four a.m., crying for a breast, or a clean diaper, or someone to rub the pain in his gums, and after that I’d be up for hours, tossing and turning, my brain filled with thoughts so ugly that later, the next day, after the sun came up, I had a hard time believing it had been me, the morning light making it so easy to dismiss the old grievances. Once Henry was done feeding I’d sometimes carry him down to hang out with Frank, leaving my wife to her dreams. Frank would get up from his console and take the baby, though it was not a gesture that came naturally—Frank would have been a perfect extra in a Scorsese movie—as if he was trying to prove he could do it, supply consolation. You and me both, he’d say, telling me that
FRANK’S LOBBYin the darkest hours his mind also turned to lashing itself, over and over, about his divorce and loss of custody and estrangement from his son and daughters. Through the window we watched solitary figures pass along the sidewalk, doubly refracted in the glass, neither here nor there, trying to catch up to themselves until they passed from view. Frank said that more than once he’d been approached on the street, tapped on the shoulder by a stranger— it had happened earlier that week—who’d mistaken him for someone they knew. I have that kind of face, Frank said. You get it from being a doorman, not wanting to startle people, to present any expression that makes them uncomfortable, that keeps them from the business, most of them, they’re rushing to get to. He looked sideways at me with a practiced anonymity and rubbed Henry’s back, soothing his sleep. The worst thing, he continued, was that not once, not a single time, had he ever mistaken any of those people who tagged him on the street for the kids he’d abandoned ten years ago. In fact, Frank said, he never even felt, as you thought he might, a single second of hope—not even by reflex, that murmur in the mind—that the person who’d tapped him on the shoulder might be his son or daughter passing by coincidence, recognizing him, reaching out. That, he said, is how much of a shit father I am. He turned and looked around the lobby at the bank of security monitors, the array of knobs and switches. That’s why I work here, he said. As long as I stay awake, I can keep sleeping, you understand? As long as I’m up all night, I have dreams instead of that other thing. As long as I’m watching the other insomniacs out there, I’m dead to the world. He patted Henry again, settled into deepest sleep on his shoulder. He was anyone’s child, then, I thought, still in that perfection of life that lets you sleep, long before you’re part of anywhere or anyone, long before you’ve created the story you have to stay ahead of.