Karen leaves early that evening—which, because she’s a consummate professional, really means she leaves on time for once. Usually, she’ll stay late, especially if her AC is broken, and they’ll all end up at Josie’s, which is refrigerated to near Arctic temperatures from May to October. But tonight, she has clearly had enough of both Nelson and Murdock.
Foggy does stay late, organizing statements related to a rent strike and pointedly ignoring Matt, who stays because he’s waiting for Foggy to tell him what’s wrong. Finally, he hears Foggy’s spine crack as he stretches, the dry, light sound of pages being gathered into folders. Matt’s not quite sure how to start the conversation—Foggy usually does it for him—but he goes to stand in Foggy’s doorway anyway.
“So. I don’t…” Matt shrugs again. He’s been doing that a lot today. “I don’t like deep water. Never learned to swim, never wanted to learn. Lots of people don’t. It’s hardly a crime.”
“Matt,” Foggy takes a deep breath and blows it back out. “It is just. Too. Goddamn. Hot for me to sit here and discuss your potential crimes.” He punctuates by stuffing folders into his briefcase; when he’s finished, his voice goes cold. “Although I have no doubt they are many and varied.”
“Hey!” Matt tends to forget, because Foggy doesn’t get angry very often, that when he does, the gloves come off. “That has nothing to do with any of this! I thought we were talking about swimming.”
“Might’ve escaped your notice, Matt, but Manhattan is an island. Let me define that for you: a landmass surrounded entirely by water, in this case, the Hudson and the East Rivers.”
“Lived here all my life, Foggy, so…?”
“I have asked—I pleaded…I have begged you, as your best friend and as a pretty damn good lawyer, not to do what you do, Matt.”
“I don’t want to talk ab—”
Matt feels the current of air as Foggy holds up both hands. Surrender. “I know. I know you don’t, and I know when I’ve lost a case. Your Honor, let the record show: there is nothing I could do or say to persuade Matt Murdock to stop taking on dangerous criminals in hand to hand street brawls. But, seriously, how many of those criminals have centered their activities on the docks, Matt? Sixty percent? Seventy? There are reasons the gangs are in Hell’s Kitchen and not out in Armonk. For you to keep fighting criminals on an island when you don’t know how to swim, when you’re afraid of water…”
“Foggy, it’s not like I hang out on the docks for fun!” Matt doesn’t like having the word afraid thrown in his face. “You want to ask a human trafficking ring to change their transportation method? Be my guest. Ditto with the drug cartels. Double for the—”
“Matt, four days ago, the police pulled a body from the water at the Manhattan Cruise Terminal. That’s 52nd Street, Matt, practically right down the block.”
“I had nothing to do with that,” Matt says immediately and he hears Foggy’s shock. It sounds like a sudden stillness; Foggy literally doesn’t breathe for a moment. Denial had not been the response his friend was expecting.
The old office chair, bought as a job lot during a fire sale, squeaks as Foggy sags in to it.
“I didn’t mean,” Foggy starts. Then, “Jesus, Matt, I never thought you had killed the guy,” he says quietly. “But I did think, for a split second when they first announced it on 1010-WINS…I did think it might be you. Daredevil-you. And that was before I even knew about the water thing.”
“Foggy, I’m careful. You know I am. And you know what I can do.”
Matt had once observed that Foggy’s breathing changed when he was about to say something important. It changes now.
“Honestly, Matty, I’m a laissez-faire kind of guy. If you were just a regular citizen, I’d say you were welcome to any phobias you wanted to indulge in. Me? I’m not nuts about mice. But if you keep doing what you are doing—in this waterfront neighborhood on the island of Manhattan—some day, sooner or later, it will be you on a pier, or a dock, or a barge. On the water. And if you’re scared…that might not be an emotion you’ve got a lot of experience with, so believe me when I tell you: you won’t be able to concentrate and you will get hurt. And I will—I’ll hear on the radio that a body was found floating in the river, and…” Foggy’s voice sounds water-logged.
“I’ll learn,” Matt says, suddenly, without thinking. He’d say almost anything to soothe the anxiety vibrating in Foggy’s throat. “Okay? I’ll, I’ll learn. To swim.” And he means it, even though he regrets the words as soon as he says them. He hates deep water: it distorts temperatures, muffles sound, obscures distances. Immersed in water, you can’t taste or smell the right kinds of information. Every movement is warped by waves and ripples. Swimming will be like being newly-blind all over again. But for Foggy, he’ll try.
“You bet your crime-fighting ass you will,” Foggy confirms. Matt is so distracted by the enormity of what he has just agreed to do that he almost misses the plastic bag that comes flying at his chest. He grabs it just before it falls to the floor.
“I stopped at one of those tourist t-shirt places on the way back from the clerk’s office,” Foggy explains as Matt’s questing fingers encounter the synthetic, waterproof fabric of swim trunks. “There’s a heart and a big red apple printed on the butt.”
Matt sighs. “Classy.”
“Beggars and choosers,” Foggy replies, unsympathetically. “And I looked up swim classes at the Y. Forwarded the dates to you. If you open up the Outlook calendar, your computer should read them out.”
But Matt shakes his head at that. “No.”
“No?” Foggy’s voice rises, like he’s going to make something of it. And in the mood he’s in, Matt figures, he just might.
“I’m not going swimming for the first time at the Y.” Sometimes, after a long period of meditation, Matt likes to think he has almost, almost made peace with the many things he will never be able to do as well or as independently as others. But he is not going to face this particular fear in a public pool full of kids in water-wings and grannies enrolled in water aerobics. “I have a better idea.” *** Wilson Fisk’s sudden incarceration has had a sobering effect on real estate in Hell’s Kitchen, and the Citiwide Development International hasn’t yet started accepting bids on its new condos. The place smells new, reeking of paint and plastic. It even sounds new: lots of hard, glossy surfaces to bounce the noise of traffic through empty, echo-chamber interiors. It nearly gives Matt a headache from a block away. He suspects CDI is going to lose money on this venture.
Foggy whistles. “Babatunde’s right: they do leave the pool lights on all night.”
Matt drops Foggy’s arm for a moment to run his fingers over the raised hands on his watch. Almost 7:00: the lights would just start to be visible in the summer evening. “Doorman?”
“Some sort of security…rent-a-cop, right inside the front door. Just for show, probably, especially if there’s no one in the building yet.”
The security guy smells like cigarettes and Gatorade—the blue kind. “C’n I help youse?”
“Good evening,” Matt gives his most innocuous smile. He is wearing his jacket and his glasses, standing a half-step behind Foggy. “We’re the disability consultants. Here to meet Ms. Lopez?” The last time Manhattan published a phone book, there were fourteen alphabetical pages of Lopezes. No way an organization as big as Citiwide doesn’t have someone by that name on the payroll.
The guard’s chair squeaks as he swivels from Foggy to Matt. “Huh?”
“The disability consultants?” Foggy repeats. And then, channeling the many bureaucratic drones he’d met at the city clerk’s office. “Oh, God. Don’t tell me. She cancelled.” He huffs. “Did she cancel? This is the third time. Do you know how much Citiwide is going to lose if we don’t sign off on this building?”
Matt can see hot, red shadows swaying faintly when the guard shakes his head.
“Well, there’s a little piece of paper called the Americans with Disabilities Act, my friend,” Foggy begins, expansively. “And Citiwide has hired us to make sure this building is in compliance with that piece of legislation, before they open it to the public. Because afterwards? Man, have you ever tried to put toothpaste back into a tube?”
The guard chuckles and this is a real superpower—one that Matt can only covet. Foggy has been talking to this guy for, what, sixty seconds, and already they’re on the same side: low-level worker bees dicked around by a corporate overlord that has more money than sense. So what if the guard has never heard of a ‘disability consultant?’ Citiwide has probably had consultants for every other aspect of construction, and Foggy did show up with an honest-to-God disabled person.
“I’d letcha in, I would,” the guard says sympathetically, “but they only got the safety lights turned on in the building. Just the pool and the elevators; none of the other electrics is up.”
No security cameras, Matt calculates. It’s almost too easy.
“No prob. My guy here, he can see in the dark.”
Matt wiggles his eyebrows above his glasses and they all have a good laugh at that. The security guard’s heartbeat is regular and unsuspecting.
Foggy’s weary sigh. “Look, buddy, this is our last stop. We should’ve been finished two hours ago, but have you ever tried to take the subway during rush hour from Red Hook?!”
The guard chuckles again. “Yeah, my sister-in-law, she lives out there and she always says…”
“Uh-huh,” Foggy manages to convey agreement and brotherhood without ever actually hearing what the security guard’s sister-in-law likes to say. “Give us…whaddaya say, fifteen minutes?” Matt nods. “Fifteen minutes, we’ll be out of your hair. File the papers tomorrow, first thing, and if Ms. Lopez ever does bother to show up, you can just send her right in to find us.”
The smell of primer and vinyl increases when the security guard holds open the door.
By Matt’s watch, it only takes twelve minutes and fourteen seconds for them to find a convenient fire security door at the back of the building and…unsecure it. They leave the building with an impressive stack of ‘disability paperwork’ borrowed from the Murdock and Nelson recycling bin, wave goodbye to the friendly security guard, walk around the block, and enter the building through the firedoor. Matt almost wishes things hadn’t been so simple.
Re: Fill: Matt & Foggy; Foggy teaching Matt how to swim-Part 2
Foggy does stay late, organizing statements related to a rent strike and pointedly ignoring Matt, who stays because he’s waiting for Foggy to tell him what’s wrong. Finally, he hears Foggy’s spine crack as he stretches, the dry, light sound of pages being gathered into folders. Matt’s not quite sure how to start the conversation—Foggy usually does it for him—but he goes to stand in Foggy’s doorway anyway.
“So. I don’t…” Matt shrugs again. He’s been doing that a lot today. “I don’t like deep water. Never learned to swim, never wanted to learn. Lots of people don’t. It’s hardly a crime.”
“Matt,” Foggy takes a deep breath and blows it back out. “It is just. Too. Goddamn. Hot for me to sit here and discuss your potential crimes.” He punctuates by stuffing folders into his briefcase; when he’s finished, his voice goes cold. “Although I have no doubt they are many and varied.”
“Hey!” Matt tends to forget, because Foggy doesn’t get angry very often, that when he does, the gloves come off. “That has nothing to do with any of this! I thought we were talking about swimming.”
“Might’ve escaped your notice, Matt, but Manhattan is an island. Let me define that for you: a landmass surrounded entirely by water, in this case, the Hudson and the East Rivers.”
“Lived here all my life, Foggy, so…?”
“I have asked—I pleaded…I have begged you, as your best friend and as a pretty damn good lawyer, not to do what you do, Matt.”
“I don’t want to talk ab—”
Matt feels the current of air as Foggy holds up both hands. Surrender. “I know. I know you don’t, and I know when I’ve lost a case. Your Honor, let the record show: there is nothing I could do or say to persuade Matt Murdock to stop taking on dangerous criminals in hand to hand street brawls. But, seriously, how many of those criminals have centered their activities on the docks, Matt? Sixty percent? Seventy? There are reasons the gangs are in Hell’s Kitchen and not out in Armonk. For you to keep fighting criminals on an island when you don’t know how to swim, when you’re afraid of water…”
“Foggy, it’s not like I hang out on the docks for fun!” Matt doesn’t like having the word afraid thrown in his face. “You want to ask a human trafficking ring to change their transportation method? Be my guest. Ditto with the drug cartels. Double for the—”
“Matt, four days ago, the police pulled a body from the water at the Manhattan Cruise Terminal. That’s 52nd Street, Matt, practically right down the block.”
“I had nothing to do with that,” Matt says immediately and he hears Foggy’s shock. It sounds like a sudden stillness; Foggy literally doesn’t breathe for a moment. Denial had not been the response his friend was expecting.
The old office chair, bought as a job lot during a fire sale, squeaks as Foggy sags in to it.
“I didn’t mean,” Foggy starts. Then, “Jesus, Matt, I never thought you had killed the guy,” he says quietly. “But I did think, for a split second when they first announced it on 1010-WINS…I did think it might be you. Daredevil-you. And that was before I even knew about the water thing.”
“Foggy, I’m careful. You know I am. And you know what I can do.”
Matt had once observed that Foggy’s breathing changed when he was about to say something important. It changes now.
“Honestly, Matty, I’m a laissez-faire kind of guy. If you were just a regular citizen, I’d say you were welcome to any phobias you wanted to indulge in. Me? I’m not nuts about mice. But if you keep doing what you are doing—in this waterfront neighborhood on the island of Manhattan—some day, sooner or later, it will be you on a pier, or a dock, or a barge. On the water. And if you’re scared…that might not be an emotion you’ve got a lot of experience with, so believe me when I tell you: you won’t be able to concentrate and you will get hurt. And I will—I’ll hear on the radio that a body was found floating in the river, and…” Foggy’s voice sounds water-logged.
“I’ll learn,” Matt says, suddenly, without thinking. He’d say almost anything to soothe the anxiety vibrating in Foggy’s throat. “Okay? I’ll, I’ll learn. To swim.” And he means it, even though he regrets the words as soon as he says them. He hates deep water: it distorts temperatures, muffles sound, obscures distances. Immersed in water, you can’t taste or smell the right kinds of information. Every movement is warped by waves and ripples. Swimming will be like being newly-blind all over again. But for Foggy, he’ll try.
“You bet your crime-fighting ass you will,” Foggy confirms. Matt is so distracted by the enormity of what he has just agreed to do that he almost misses the plastic bag that comes flying at his chest. He grabs it just before it falls to the floor.
“I stopped at one of those tourist t-shirt places on the way back from the clerk’s office,” Foggy explains as Matt’s questing fingers encounter the synthetic, waterproof fabric of swim trunks. “There’s a heart and a big red apple printed on the butt.”
Matt sighs. “Classy.”
“Beggars and choosers,” Foggy replies, unsympathetically. “And I looked up swim classes at the Y. Forwarded the dates to you. If you open up the Outlook calendar, your computer should read them out.”
But Matt shakes his head at that. “No.”
“No?” Foggy’s voice rises, like he’s going to make something of it. And in the mood he’s in, Matt figures, he just might.
“I’m not going swimming for the first time at the Y.” Sometimes, after a long period of meditation, Matt likes to think he has almost, almost made peace with the many things he will never be able to do as well or as independently as others. But he is not going to face this particular fear in a public pool full of kids in water-wings and grannies enrolled in water aerobics. “I have a better idea.”
***
Wilson Fisk’s sudden incarceration has had a sobering effect on real estate in Hell’s Kitchen, and the Citiwide Development International hasn’t yet started accepting bids on its new condos. The place smells new, reeking of paint and plastic. It even sounds new: lots of hard, glossy surfaces to bounce the noise of traffic through empty, echo-chamber interiors. It nearly gives Matt a headache from a block away. He suspects CDI is going to lose money on this venture.
Foggy whistles. “Babatunde’s right: they do leave the pool lights on all night.”
Matt drops Foggy’s arm for a moment to run his fingers over the raised hands on his watch. Almost 7:00: the lights would just start to be visible in the summer evening. “Doorman?”
“Some sort of security…rent-a-cop, right inside the front door. Just for show, probably, especially if there’s no one in the building yet.”
The security guy smells like cigarettes and Gatorade—the blue kind. “C’n I help youse?”
“Good evening,” Matt gives his most innocuous smile. He is wearing his jacket and his glasses, standing a half-step behind Foggy. “We’re the disability consultants. Here to meet Ms. Lopez?” The last time Manhattan published a phone book, there were fourteen alphabetical pages of Lopezes. No way an organization as big as Citiwide doesn’t have someone by that name on the payroll.
The guard’s chair squeaks as he swivels from Foggy to Matt. “Huh?”
“The disability consultants?” Foggy repeats. And then, channeling the many bureaucratic drones he’d met at the city clerk’s office. “Oh, God. Don’t tell me. She cancelled.” He huffs. “Did she cancel? This is the third time. Do you know how much Citiwide is going to lose if we don’t sign off on this building?”
Matt can see hot, red shadows swaying faintly when the guard shakes his head.
“Well, there’s a little piece of paper called the Americans with Disabilities Act, my friend,” Foggy begins, expansively. “And Citiwide has hired us to make sure this building is in compliance with that piece of legislation, before they open it to the public. Because afterwards? Man, have you ever tried to put toothpaste back into a tube?”
The guard chuckles and this is a real superpower—one that Matt can only covet. Foggy has been talking to this guy for, what, sixty seconds, and already they’re on the same side: low-level worker bees dicked around by a corporate overlord that has more money than sense. So what if the guard has never heard of a ‘disability consultant?’ Citiwide has probably had consultants for every other aspect of construction, and Foggy did show up with an honest-to-God disabled person.
“I’d letcha in, I would,” the guard says sympathetically, “but they only got the safety lights turned on in the building. Just the pool and the elevators; none of the other electrics is up.”
No security cameras, Matt calculates. It’s almost too easy.
“No prob. My guy here, he can see in the dark.”
Matt wiggles his eyebrows above his glasses and they all have a good laugh at that. The security guard’s heartbeat is regular and unsuspecting.
Foggy’s weary sigh. “Look, buddy, this is our last stop. We should’ve been finished two hours ago, but have you ever tried to take the subway during rush hour from Red Hook?!”
The guard chuckles again. “Yeah, my sister-in-law, she lives out there and she always says…”
“Uh-huh,” Foggy manages to convey agreement and brotherhood without ever actually hearing what the security guard’s sister-in-law likes to say. “Give us…whaddaya say, fifteen minutes?” Matt nods. “Fifteen minutes, we’ll be out of your hair. File the papers tomorrow, first thing, and if Ms. Lopez ever does bother to show up, you can just send her right in to find us.”
The smell of primer and vinyl increases when the security guard holds open the door.
By Matt’s watch, it only takes twelve minutes and fourteen seconds for them to find a convenient fire security door at the back of the building and…unsecure it. They leave the building with an impressive stack of ‘disability paperwork’ borrowed from the Murdock and Nelson recycling bin, wave goodbye to the friendly security guard, walk around the block, and enter the building through the firedoor. Matt almost wishes things hadn’t been so simple.