Zelda is double-high, climbing the steps to work Tuesday morning. There’s the actual high, of some good meth her little mystery man handed off, the kind that slides into your bloodstream slow and easy, raising the pulse without sending it through the roof, just enough to make you hyperaware and alert and aglow. She took some before her morning coffee and she’s hard into that sweet post-buzz phase where she’s the smartest person on the planet and pity the fools who try to start a conversation with her because they will be destroyed by some Wu-Tang level verbal assassin stuff.
And then there’s the figurative high, the euphoria of conquest, of bliss, of You were right, Zelda, all the people who wouldn’t take her calls before but they’re sending text messages now, since they saw that sick fucking video, asking what they can do to help. Last night she got word that a very important package was delivered by the pharmacist over at Walgreens. Confronted with real monstrosity, Hudson is awake. And ready to fuck shit up.
So she isn’t surprised to find Attalah sitting in her office when she arrives. She saw it in her eyes the other day, the curiosity, the hunger to know what she was up to, but her professionalism prevented her from stepping up her game. From seeing what Zelda saw: that the half-assed measures Attalah had taken weren’t going to be nearly enough. Now, though. Now she’s ready.
“You gave Heather back her kids,” Attalah says. Her dreads are coiled up in a wrap, which is what she does when she doesn’t have time to do them right. “Because she did something for you. Right?”
Zelda is smart enough not to answer. High enough to know not to smile. Holy fuck, why isn’t everybody on meth all the time? It makes you so much better at absolutely everything. Politicians needed it. Lawyers. CEOs. Anybody whose job involved outthinking someone. She could outthink anyone right now.
“It just clicked,” Attalah says. “She came by last week, even though she’d been in the week before. I figured maybe the situation had been such that you needed her to come in for something else, but, no. I checked her file. There’s nothing. Just a passed drug test, and a recommendation for reunification. What was it?”
Zelda sits down behind her desk. There’s bliss in not answering right away. Like being close to orgasm but holding off, wanting to ride the ecstasy of the moment a little further.
“It was the rotten meat,” Attalah says. “Through the window of the antique store. Wasn’t it?”
Zelda grins. No reason to be cagey about it. Maybe Attalah’s recording all this but probably not. She’d know that whoever heard that recording would hear some things about her they wouldn’t like. “You’re smart, A. Brains like that, you could be a real help to what we’re doing.”
“What you’re doing is what I started,” Attalah says, smiling, but a smile that’s clearly a cover for some other facial expression.
You’re playing checkers and I’m playing chess, Zelda wants to scream, but instead she just smiles, too. “Well, you might have started it, but we’re the ones who are going to finish it. All that shit with the buttons and the billboards—that was cute for phase one. But we’re looking at phases five through fifty right about now. It’s cool, though, don’t get me wrong. We need lots of help. You down? To help?”
“I am,” Attalah says. “What can I do?” Her face is steely but also angry, and not at her—Zelda knows exactly what is happening. Her rage at the invaders has eclipsed everything else. She’s angry enough, now. Everyone is, since that video started circulating.
“You got any idea where we can get a pig?” Zelda asks. “Or . . . just a bunch of pig’s blood?”
* * *
JOHN HA HAS only been interning at the Hudson Walgreens for a short while, so he’s not familiar with the protocol for reporting stolen medication. And pharmacy school up in Albany is so grueling. When he discovers there are three bottles of Rohypnol missing from the shelf, he tells his supervisor, and then he forgets it ever happened. He doesn’t notice how unshocked Mrs. Slauson is, by the news.
* * *
LILLY SCROLLS THROUGH her Instagram history until she finds it, and when she finds it she feels physically sick.
First week on the job, five-years-ago Lilly a little slimmer and her hair a little longer—back before she’d bought her beloved rhinestone cat-eye glasses—sitting at her desk, whose signature heap of chaotic paperwork is still in its larval stage. Jark Trowse standing behind her, one hand on her shoulder. Both of them smiling to beat the band. A proud moment, back when it happened. She’d never gotten more likes and more comments on a photo, before or since. Everyone had been impressed. Even her dad, who resolutely refused to understand what it was that Penelope’s Quilt did, no matter how many times she explained it.
You rock star
Omg I can’t believe you know him
First step: become friends with a billionaire; Next step: become a billionaire
Reading through the comments, she can feel the thrill of power and success she felt back when she first saw them, and that thrill makes her even sicker.
He was a monster, the whole time. I fell for it. We all fell for it.
She deletes the photo, but deletion feels insufficient.
I helped him. His whole greedy sick rapacious enterprise—I worked my ass off helping him build it.
“I’m going for a walk,” she tells Bergen, who looks shocked to be the one working hard while she fucks off.
The sweet river stink of Hudson usually makes her smile, fills her chest, buoys her up. Not today. Today it further unsettles her stomach.
They’re so linked: the love she feels for Hudson, the love she feels for Jark. The pride in who she is, it’s so bound up in this place, this job. All of this is mine, she’d think, sometimes, this spooky weird lonely kingdom frozen in time by the river, this flashback to eighty years ago. While her friends wasted their lives on the hamster wheel of Brooklyn, still in the Matrix, she’d popped the red pill and awakened in the grit and back-alley mud of reality.
But Hudson isn’t hers. And the city Jark wanted to make, the one she was helping him build—it wasn’t real. It wasn’t love or appreciation, like he said. It was conquest, invasion, exploitation, corruption. A car slows to a stop at the red light on Columbia and Fourth Street, and the driver turns to look at her.
Lilly gets it, then. All in a flash: enlightenment beamed telepathically by the hate in a stranger’s eyes. She knows what this woman sees, when she sees her standing on the doorstep of Penelope’s Quilt. A hipster invader who works for the pedophile monster. A no-longer-twentysomething who still dresses like she’s trying to find herself. Lilly’s glasses have never felt so wrong on her face. She takes them off, puts them in her pocket, but can’t bring herself to turn and walk away from this stranger’s withering stare.
* * *
THE MAYOR PICKS UP, midway through the first ring. Anyone who owns any real estate in Hudson, Mayor Coffin always takes their calls. Those are his donors, after all. He knows where his bread is buttered. “Hi, Treenie,” he says, sounding like shit.
“Nate,” she says, remembering his son just in time. “I’m so sorry for your loss. How are you doing?”
“You know,” he says. “Getting through it.”
“Anything I can do?”
“Put me out of my misery.”
Outside her office, people hurry by. Looking scared, looking angry. “Sorry, bud. You gotta be mayor for a little while longer. We really need one, right now. Do we even know what happens, if our newly elected mayor isn’t able to take office because he’s come down with a slight case of life in prison?”
“Trust me, I’ve been familiarizing myself with the nuances of the Hudson City Charter more in the past twenty-four hours than in my whole time in office up to now. Common Council has to select someone to fill the seat until a special election can take place.”
“Is that going to be you?”
“God, I hope not. But, yeah, probably.” He sounds more human than he’s ever sounded before, and Treenie remembers: he didn’t only lose his son. He banked everything on Jark Trowse. Gave him tons of cushy deals over the years, then handpicked him as his successor. A politician leaving office thinks of little else than his legacy, and now his was going to be drinking the Kool-Aid of a perverted monster. Like that British politician whose name Treenie couldn’t recall, whose chumminess with the Third Reich became his only historical importance.
“He fooled all of us, Nate. And we’ve all been fucked by what he did. Don’t take it personally.”
“You know how many death threats have been called in to Penelope’s Quilt since yesterday? A fucking hundred. More, probably, in the time we’ve been talking. Any kid, and it would have been bad. But the pastor’s kid?” He clucks his tongue, like, Duh, Jark, pick better targets for your child sex needs. “At any rate. Is this strictly a condolence call, Treenie, or was there something I could help you with?”
“People are saying the Pequod Arms is dead now,” she says, “but that’s not true. Not by a long shot. All the signatures are in place. Equipment secured, for the groundbreaking after the Winter Fest. But we’re vulnerable to a reconfiguration. Investors asking for terms to be reexamined. And we can’t let any of that happen. You know that, right, Nate?”
“Of course. I want the project to happen as bad as anyone, obviously.”
“Why did you take Jark to the police station on Tuesday afternoon?”
The mayor sighs. “How did you know about that?”
“It’s a small town. You thought something like that wouldn’t be noticed? Talked about? People are saying you knew about the tape, before it went public.”
They’re not, but it wouldn’t take much to get them started.
“Fuck, Treenie, you know I didn’t.”
“So tell me what was up. Let’s make sure these vile rumors get nipped in the bud.”
Mayor Coffin’s voice gets high, the way it does when he’s upset, which is often. “Ah, fuck, Treenie, are you fucking kidding me right now?”
“Relax. Hardly anyone knows about your little trip to the police station, and then him walking out of there a free man. But something was up, even before all this broke.”
“Stupid shit. Weird, but stupid. Ohrena Shaw said that Rick Edgley assaulted her, threatened to fuck her up worse if she didn’t move out of the apartment where she lived. In a building Jark Trowse owned. One that’s part of the Pequod Arms. Crazy, we thought, but when they went to talk to Rick? He confessed, and said he was acting on Jark’s orders. And a witness heard the two of them talking about it at Helsinki a couple of nights before.”
Silence.
“Who’s the witness?” Treenie says. “Because to be honest, it sounds like bullshit to me. Skilled bullshit, but bullshit all the same. Rick and Ohrena are both friends of Attalah Morrison’s. She could have—”
“Chief wouldn’t tell me who the witness was, and to be honest, I didn’t want to know. I agree, I think it’s bullshit. At the time, I figured it would all fall apart in a day or two. Which I guess it has, since all this shit came out.”
“Have the cops talked to Attalah?”
“No, not to my knowledge—nor to any of the other hundred and fifty people Rick and Ohrena have as friends in common.”
“Don’t joke. Someone is behind all of this YOU ARE HATED shit. Maybe more than one person. Am I wrong?”
“I don’t know what’s going on here,” Mayor Coffin says, and she can hear the politician’s effortless evasiveness take charge. “The police are working on it. That’s all I know. I have to trust to the common decency of my fellow Hudsonians that this will all get sorted out.”
“At least tell me that the chief is exploring the roots of this conspiracy. Not running around putting out fires while ignoring the woman with the metaphorical can of gasoline and the matches, like Hudson cops have always done.”
“This town was already a powder keg,” the mayor says, not answering. “Jark might have just provided the spark. That rhymes, but I didn’t mean it to.”
“I know, Nate. Don’t worry—no one who knows you would ever accuse you of having a poetic bone in your body.”
“And I appreciate that.”
“And I appreciate your time, Mayor. Do let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.”
“Fucking harpoon me and put me out of my fucking misery.”
Treenie hangs up. Night is taking back Warren Street. Rain makes the streets shine, like the river is rising to swallow them all.
* * *
HEATHER WAKES UP WET with (seawater) sweat, disoriented, confused. She looks for the starry sky and the gentle waves but finds only bare wide windows with amber light bleeding in from the street.
It’s always this way, when she wakes up. Even after all these years away from it, she looks for the seascape that was painted on her childhood bedroom walls. Bright stars; calm waters.
You’re not at home. You’re crashing with a friend on State Street—for now—but it’s like the fifth friend you’ve crashed with since getting evicted and you know how this goes, how there’s always a ticking clock, a matter of time before your welcome gets worn out and you gotta move on, and that’s another friend you can scratch off the list of your friends.
This is not your city anymore. It hasn’t been, since your father lost the scrapyard to tax foreclosure.
She takes out her phone, cycles through the photos of her girls. Soon she’ll have them back. Soon everything will be okay.
* * *
NO ONE SEES THEM. It’s an accomplishment, really. To visit so many places—to engage in so many tiny acts of vandalism—and to never be noticed. It feels eerie even to them.
Ten teams of three, evenly distributed across the city. Each with a small map of five blocks, and a list of addresses. And a bucket of pig’s blood. One team member to do the thing, two more for standing lookout in both directions. A couple of times a late-night pedestrian or passing car requires them to shift into the “cover story stance”—three friends stumbling home drunk, and lost—but no one even looks closely enough to notice that it’s strange how they all wear black nondescript baggy clothes, let alone wonder why one of them is carrying a bucket and a paintbrush.
Two hours is all it takes.