(First published in the December 1991 issue of OMNI Magazine)
Like flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods.
They kill us for their sport.
William Shakespeare -- King Lear
A rank, sulfurous halo hangs low over Manhattan. Driven by icy gusts, tentacle-like fingers of swirling amber gases swoop toward the slime-slick pavement, probing deep into yawning doorways, arcades and atria, seeking out the specters that lurk within their drafty expanse.
It’s Christmas Eve in the Big Apple. Chiming in the distance in pious unison, ethereal and uninvolved, church bells summon the faithful. Chiming? No, tolling -- a lugubrious knell for a swarming, moribund metropolis, for the one thousand and one night creatures that stalk its streets, for the living dead I get paid to hunt down and kill.
It all came together half a century ago or more when politicians, anxious to save face and give voters the impression that justice was being served, let the long simmering rancor, the restive hatred burst like an ugly abscess. Violence, sporadic and extemporaneous at first, grew bolder and deadlier with each secret municipal emergency meeting.
No one complained. Not a single cry of horror was ever heard. It was too late. Justice -- like truth -- the stronger of two conflicting arguments, justice, the paradox suspended on the tip of a sword, put on its most fearsome face. The Lady took off the blindfold and winked lasciviously at the oligarchs. And the carnage began.
‘Tis the season of all folly, falalalala … and the blood of the young, thinner than water, cheaper than hogwash, coalesces with the putrid rivulets of swill and excrement that hug the curb and cascade into the storm drains.
Torn by crime, soaring unemployment, triple-digit inflation, homelessness, merciless slashes in social services, suffocated by Orwellian federal statutes, America’s big cities are putrefying and crumbling like the toes of a leper. For every child who wakes up poor and hungry, another dies of neglect or abuse. One-parent families are now the norm, each producing its quota of junkies and juvenile offenders. America has the world’s largest and fastest growing prison population. More than four million minors are in custody on charges ranging from truancy and drug use to petty theft and prostitution. Two million more serve hard time for capital crimes: murder, rape, aggravated assault, armed robbery and home invasion. Most are incarcerated with hardened adult criminals -- ten to a cell. There is no more room.
As the chasm between rich and poor widens, a larger number of affluent urban dwellers move out to escape the squalor, the skyrocketing city taxes, the violence and the decaying infrastructure. The exodus turns cities and towns into tracts of depravity, disease and social unrest.
Sparked by a growing demand for slave labor and conscripts, immigration from the Third World keeps adding to the ranks of the poor, the marginally educated and the culturally estranged segments of society. Many future felons start out as street children. Most of the minors who live on the streets and in the catacombs and sewers beneath subway and railroad tunnels suffer from mental disorders. Drug-induced dementia and a form of premature Parkinsonism blamed on raging air and water pollution, afflict thousands of others. Thousands more have perished at the hands of vigilantes, sexual psychopaths and agents of the state, all meting out their brand of justice. There are simply too many kids out there.
Inexplicably, in one last spasm of puritanical fervor, bolstered by an apostate Supreme Court and a Church obsessed with the unborn but indifferent to the living, “pro-lifers” at last succeed in reversing Roe vs. Wade and in making abortion a federal crime punishable by death. The oligarchs must be assured a steady supply of cheap labor; the Church a steady supply of dues-paying penitents.
I get paid to pluck the fruits of this incestuous union.
It’s eleven forty. Byron is thirteen, resourceful, clever. I’ve shadowed him day and night for nearly a month, clambering up and down the byways and alleyways he and his cronies scour in search of shelter or easy prey -- old folks or stragglers stranded in the night.
Midnight. Christmas is greeted with spontaneous acts of vandalism and drunken displays of nudity. There is little cheer. Off of Eighth Avenue, behind the Port Authority Bus Terminal’s mazelike network of ramps and underpasses, a band of nine- and ten-year-olds take turns scrounging through trash bins and peeking through the windows of a dingy motel where couples come to risk procreation in exchange for the shallow reward of a brief grunt of pleasure. A block away, a pedophile barters with a twelve-year-old. Envious and resentful, four urchins encircle and pounce on their competition.
It’s now two fifty a.m. Alone, leaning against a pile of cardboard boxes by the wharf, near the old Fulton Fish Market, Byron is hallucinating. It could be glue or crack or the new rage in town -- stalactites -- a deadly mix of acetone-imbibed cannabis, rubber cement and denatured alcohol. Byron is armed and dangerous.
Byron spots me. He freezes. I unsheathe my revolver and point it at him, slowly, confidently, with the panache granted men whose conscience is stilled by the exigencies of job and duty. Byron spreads his arms, Christ like, and rests his head against his shoulder. He smiles. Defiance, stoicism, relief are all etched in his life-hardened baby face, in those glassy eyes where night’s eerie scintillations shimmer. He looks at me without rancor, a martyr without a cause, a sacrificial lamb whose sacrifice brings about no redemption. I squeeze the trigger, repeatedly, remorselessly, thankful that another street child, alone and hungry since birth, abused and abandoned by his family, mistreated by his peers, another boy nobody smiles at, nobody cuddles, nobody protects, nobody comforts, nobody loves, will never again sully the society that begat him.
Childhood is when the future begins. Death is when memories expire. Byron never had a future. I revoked his past. It’s a living. I must not philosophize. I obey orders. The cost of a family Christmas dinner keeps going up. Thank God I get overtime.
(From the secret diaries of Lt. Joe Krolick, NYPD, December 24-25, in the Year of Our Lord, 2062).