chapter
SEVENTY-ONE

A storm of noise and confusion.

The sidewalk was packed. And now the presence of this crowd seemed wrong. They had invaded a city that for a while had been our own.

Nena pulled me toward the street. For a moment I got tangled with someone shouting: “The sins of man are but nothing compared to the sins of geese!” I came unexpectedly close to his face and his ruddy unshaven complexion. “Geese are the real sinners,” he cried at me.

I pulled myself free and clawed my way across the sidewalk. Nena had somehow hailed a drongle and was shouting the address into the horn.

We both clambered in and sat down.

Wires hung from the panels in a long, dripping shroud, but finally we moved away as the screens struggled to life with a grouchy cough of static.

“Hi, I’m Dan Cicero, Mayor of Safety. You might have heard of me!” said the mayor, and then the picture froze, with his eyebrows at right angles to each other.

“Yeah, we’ve heard of you,” said Nena.

“Did that really happen?”

“At the moment, I’m thinking that it did.”

“Yeah, so am I.” But there was also a part of me that had already washed its hands of the whole thing. It wanted to think about other, smaller and far more uncomplicated things instead. The drongle dodged on through the traffic as an H and S announcement about cushions began to play.

My mind skidded every time I tried to think about what we had seen. “They had a Fiorentina pizza without an egg,” I said finally as I stared outside.