ON THE SUBJECT OF HATE, Charlie’s Bible remained ambiguous. Which probably, given the ambiguity of every other power that might have guided his misguided life, he should have seen coming. Like how on the first day of high school his mother had told him to be himself, even as she reached out to straighten the clip-on tie she was making him wear. He could hear her upstairs now, her feet pressing faint concavities into his ceiling as she roamed from oven to fridge, humming along with the old countertop radio she hadn’t touched in years. She must have wanted something to fill the silence, since tonight the person she would normally have been on the phone with was speeding toward them through the dark. She’d sent the twins to the sitter’s; it was to be just the three of them at dinner. Any minute now, she’d call down for Charlie to come up, which meant he was running out of time to figure out how to feel. He continued to page halfheartedly through the little green Bible. Taken as a whole, the thing offered not much of the frictionless and abstract loving-kindness he’d found back in January in the eleventh chapter of Mark, the love of bumper stickers and old pop songs. Instead, God the father was largely a god of sticking it to your enemies—“Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones”—and even meek Jesus threatened the disloyal with everlasting fire.
A car door slammed outside. The doorbell was the same cheery two-tone that a few years ago would have summoned Dad to the front hall. The whole house was disloyal, Charlie thought. And here came Mom calling down for him. Well, screw that. Let them greet each other, shake hands, hug hello, whatever, he refused to be rushed. From along the baseboard, he retrieved the red tee-shirt he’d worn back in pee-wee league. There’d been only the one size, extra large, because no one wanted the fat kids to feel self-conscious. Some of the iron-on letters had begun to peel off, but you could still make out Charlie’s number, unlucky 13, and the name of the team, which had also been the name of the sponsor, Boulevard Bagels. (Go … Bagels!) Last summer, he’d cut the sleeves off and sliced big vents from mid-torso to armhole, exposing tufts of armpit hair. He appreciated the way the shirt turned his ugly body into a weapon against the world. The way it said, See what you did to me? It fit so tight now you could count his ribs. In the mirror, he mussed pomade into his regrown hair, got it to stand up in small orange hedgerows. He stuck out a sick-looking, grayish-pink tongue and placed on it an eggy white spansule. Disco biscuits, Nicky called these, which was why Charlie had to fight embarrassment every time he asked for more. Disco sucked and would always suck, Every Good Punk Preferred Speed—but the Phalanstery was a kind of potlatch for narcotics, and given a choice, Charlie would take the slow drown of downers every time.
The pill’s coating had started to melt on his tongue, and soon its bitter innards would reach his taste buds, so he swallowed it dry, relishing the little pain as it passed the Adam’s apple. He snapped shut the old mint-tin where the rest of his stash was stashed. (The ’ludes wouldn’t fit in his Pez dispenser.) He lifted his big, black combat boots and clomped slowly up the stairs, enjoying the tremendous noise each step made, imagining his mother and the faceless man cowering. He paused behind the door, hand on knob. Even now it wasn’t too late to fall back downstairs, to hurt himself bad enough for an emergency room visit. It might have been a respectable way out. Instead, he committed a disloyalty of his own: he opened the door.
The man in the foyer was neither as grotesque as Charlie had hoped nor as handsome as he’d feared. Just alarmingly chipper as he held out a hand. Charlie, a foot taller, could see down onto the lush carpeting of his head. And the toupée was only one of a number of ways in which the man was the opposite of Charlie’s father. They also included his rabbity front teeth and his Star of David medallion and his turtleneck; Dad never wore turtlenecks. “Morris Gold,” he said. “Call me Morrie.”
The drugs and the costume were doing their jobs: they gave Charlie distance and power. He ignored his appalled-looking mom and seized the hand and didn’t let go. “I was starting to think you were imaginary.” It oozed from his mouth like refrigerated syrup.
Mom chuckled nervously. “Charlie doesn’t normally dress like this.”
“This is fashion, Ramona, my daughter’s friends all wear this stuff.” The pressure of the man’s hand was perfectly calibrated, neither over-firm nor effeminately limp; he didn’t seem to realize that Charlie was crushing it into powder. In his other hand, the neck of a jug of pink wine looked diminutive, sweat dampening the label. “I wasn’t sure red or white, so I split the difference.”
“Should I get that into the fridge?”
“I’ll do it.” Charlie watched his own hands, at the end of hundred-foot robotic extensions, grab the bottle. Mission Control, his brain, had to issue distinct commands to get him safely through the swinging door. Rotate 110 degrees. Extend left foot. Extend right foot. Lower arm. And then the long bulbs in the kitchen were lighting the countertop like porn: rods of sweaty cheese prodding cocktail olives, spinach lolling in wooden bowls, pale crisp lettuce leaves cupping ice-cream scoops of tuna salad. There were six of these, in case anyone wanted seconds, and for dessert, her famous apricot balls, toothachingly sweet. And amid it all, irrigated by a paddy of its own juices, the brown bulk of the brisket. The smell was too much for Charlie. He braced himself over the sink for a minute, waiting to throw up, but had the presence of mind to reach out and turn off the radio, so that if the voices now moving into the dining room were to rise above a murmur, he might be able to hear what kind of impression he’d made. When it turned out he wasn’t going to puke up the pill, he decided he needed a drink. He removed the wine’s little foil collar and stared at the corkscrew until it became apparent how to use it. David and Ramona had never been drinkers. He hadn’t even known they owned proper wineglasses, honestly, but there they were, in a cabinet above the range hood. He poured three, one substantially fuller. He drained that one down to match the others. He turned the radio back up, turned it to a station playing one of the hirsute wanker bands beloved of his peers. It had the virtue of being loud, at least. Activate thumbs. Two hands around three stems. Back through kitchen door; rotate.
One look at his mother’s flushed face told him they’d forgotten him completely. Had there even been, as he turned, the flash of a hand retreating from tablecloth to lap? He set the glasses down hard, imagining the stems breaking loose from their vessels, the vessels toppling, but they didn’t. Nothing was ever to Charlie’s satisfaction, any more than he ever was to anyone else’s. As he loomed over the lovebirds, a gawky obstacle, Mom was obviously weighing whether to say anything about the wine in his hand; he’d never drunk alcohol in front of her before, not counting the Manischewitz at Passover. In the end, though, she was the picture of sophistication. Morris raised his glass. “To old friends and new.” Only when his mother went to start bringing out the food did it occur to Charlie that maybe she was as scared as he was. And now he was alone with the suitor.
Silent treatment didn’t work. Morris Gold was one of those people who was comfortable with silence, believing he could make it stop at any time. “So, Charlie,” he said, after a while. “Your mom tells me you’re a musician.”
“Nope,” Charlie said, and took a gulp of wine. The glass clinked against his teeth.
“Now where did I get that idea?”
Charlie resented the mildness of his adjustment, the way he sought to dispel the friction by treating Charlie as an adult. Trying to offend this man was like trying to offend a coat-rack! “But I listen to a lot of music,” he blurted, finally. “My mom hates it.”
“I remember when I was a kid, the grown-ups all thought our music was the devil, too. Bo Diddley on the Ed Sullivan Show. I figure it’s one of the great privileges of youth, to cut loose from your folks. That about how it seems to you?”
He had that well-meaning, man-to-mannish thing that good junior athletic coaches have, and Charlie’s traitor heart longed to respond. He tried to feel the monitory shade of his father nearby, but he felt so little of what he wanted to feel these days. Luckily, his mom chose that moment to come back with the tuna salads, resuscitating his anger, like a hand around a guttering flame.
Right up through the main course, Charlie did his best to be unresponsive, and to savor the weird holes this punched in the grown-ups’ talk. It was mostly vapid anyway: What a long winter it’s been! Heating oil’s spiking. Did you hear the County might cut the school year to 180 days? He felt almost sorry for Mr. Gold. How could he stay interested in a woman whose idea of conversation was to recite the contents of that morning’s paper? Then Mom surprised him by changing the subject to the City. It had gotten so bad, she said, she was afraid to send Charlie in even for a doctor’s appointment. There had been that thing on the news. From right here in Flower Hill. Had he seen it? Charlie tried to focus on what she was saying, but his head felt packed with gauze. Like no one could reach him in here, where it hurt.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Mr. Gold said. “I think if you keep your wits about you, and stick to the good neighborhoods … I was just last week at Russ and Daughters. You know Russ and Daughters, Charlie? Whitefish like you wouldn’t believe.” He inspected his coffee with a twinkle, as if he expected to find a whitefish swimming there. Then he pushed his dessert plate, streaked with the entrails of apricot balls, out onto the tablecloth. “Delicious.”
Mom dabbed her mouth with her napkin—the good kind, linen. Softly, she said, “Those were always David’s favorite.”
“No they weren’t,” Charlie blurted. “They weren’t his favorite.”
It was like he’d snapped his fingers in front of a hypnotized person; it was the first thing out of his mouth all night she seemed to have heard. “I beg your pardon?”
Dad’s name had been another knife to the solar plexus. Or no, it wasn’t the name. It was the ease with which she tendered it, with which Mr. Gold took it, as if they had talked about David Weisbarger before. All this time had passed with Charlie and his mom avoiding the subject, which he’d told himself was because it was still so painful to her. “His favorite was German chocolate cake, with the coconut.”
“It’s a figure of speech, honey. He always liked the apricot balls, you know that.”
“Stop that.”
“Stop what?”
“Stop turning him into a figure of speech!” Charlie was rising now, and rising and rising, thin as a wisp of smoke.
“Honey, are you okay? Your hands are shaking.”
“Don’t turn this on me! You’re the one using Dad.”
At which point Mr. Gold spoke up. “Charlie, why don’t you take the dishes in and let your mother and I have a word before I go.”
It was clear Charlie had won. The word would be soon, as in, Maybe it’s too soon, Ramona. But instead of triumph, he felt a kind of helplessness. “God hates an adulterer, just so you know.” An elbow attached to Charlie knocked over a glass, spraying dregs of rosé. Impossible to say if this was intentional, but some of it got on the white turtleneck of Mr. Gold, who was standing now, too, looking down at the spreading stain.
“Jesus Christ, Charlie,” his mother said. But he was already stomping downstairs, sucked into some black hole where he could barely see what he was doing. He scooped up a wad of clothing from the floor and stuffed it along with his seven-inch of “Kunneqtiqut”/“City on Fire!” into his bookbag. Almost as an afterthought, he grabbed his Gideon Bible.
In the front hall, Mom was apologizing. “Where do you think you’re going?” she asked as Charlie stormed past, but her voice was just a noise in his head. He plunged into the damp spring night, not bothering to pull the door shut. He thought about making a dash for the car, but she’d taken his keys from him. And his bicycle had a flat, God damn it. Then he spied, leaning against an unpruned bush, one of the too-big BMX bikes Grandpa had bought the twins. He had to pedal furiously to muster any speed, and his knees kept clipping the handlebars. The training wheels groaned and squeaked. But it was mostly downhill to the train station. He kept waiting for someone to call him back, to jog after him, but no one did. So what, he thought. Good riddance.
AN HOUR AND A HALF LATER, he was on the crumbling stoop of the Phalanstery. The rain running down into the corners of his mouth had a sawdusty taste that reminded him of his special red pillow, sucking on the corner of which had been his trick for getting to sleep when he was five, or eight. That’s what he must have looked like now, a five- or eight-year-old with a scanty bag of supplies and a face slick with what could have been tears. But Nicky Chaos had always seen deeper. He was blocking the doorway, only a step up from Charlie but also as tall as a god. From behind his tatted shoulders came a corona of light made strange from the yards of supermarket foil designed to jam up cameras, microphones, whatever. Or were the drugs in Charlie’s system causing him to see things? That reggae record Nicky liked so much was playing somewhere. There was a faint wistful whiff of pot. “You said I’d know when I was ready,” Charlie said. “I’m ready.”
“Good,” Nicky said. “Because something’s happened to force our hand.”
Inside, a party was under way, people Charlie didn’t recognize shuffling like vagabonds from parlor to kitchen and clogging the stairs and hallways. Musician-types and druggie-types and the slumming philosophers of the universities. A beautiful black girl in an Afro and a shirt the size of a moist towelette slid past without appearing to see either of them, but Charlie had no time to feel upset about not having been invited; they were already out back, Nicky backhanding the door of the little garage. He muttered something through the peeling wood, and various bolts and locks clicked open. A wall of cinderblock had been put up, screening off the far end. On the near side, on the colorless carpet, Sewer Girl and Delirium Tremens sat in black hooded sweatshirts, passing a j. Between them was a newspaper with a picture, worryingly, of … Sam? Nicky placed a hand on his shoulder. “The Prophet here’s got something to say.”
What did he have to say? The Prophet had forgotten.
“He’s ready. He’s going out tonight with us on our run.”
“He’s going to stick out like an asshole in that shirt,” said Solomon Grungy, looming from behind the cinderblock. There must have been another stereo, another copy of the record, because the song was playing out here, too. Culture, “Two Sevens Clash.” Which, viewed from a certain angle, was exactly what the PHP logo looked like. And Sol had done something to his eyebrows. Shaved them off, maybe? Nicky was telling him to shut the fuck up, but Sol was right: red cotton shrilled between the zippers of Charlie’s windbreaker like a warning. Sewer Girl dug into a duffelbag. “Here’s something black.”
SINCE THE LAST TIME CHARLIE HAD SEEN IT, the van had acquired a busted rear window. Someone had taped a piece of cardboard where the glass should have been. It had been someone else, presumably, who’d spraypainted PUSSYWAGON in red over the name of the window-washing company on the side—unless this was some elaborate head-fake (wheels within wheels) so that no one would suspect the Post-Humanists of whatever it was they were really plotting. Tablets of speed were distributed, swallowed dry. Then Sol and D.T. climbed in back, while Nicky told Charlie and Sewer Girl to double up in the shotgun seat. They must have loaded up the cargo area earlier; that chemical odor was coming from back there, and every time they took a corner, bottles clanked invisibly. Nicky kept the window down and his arm propped on the door, so Charlie did the same. Sewer Girl was a squirming warm mammal on his lap. If she could feel him getting hard, she didn’t seem to care. Indeed, she shifted around so much he got the idea she might be doing it for his benefit.
Then they were flying over the East River, amphetamines kicking in, the lights of the City dwindling to toy size, smaller than nightlights, smaller than Lite-Brite, and the breeze was whipping S.G.’s hair into his newly arid face. They swung out onto a scythe-blade expressway. “Music,” Nicky demanded. “Music is essential.” S.G. leaned forward to wire the radio into the dash, though the metal frame of the van and the girders of overpasses and the shitty FM signals of metropolitan New York messed with the reception. When the snags of static did yield to an identifiable sound, it was Donna Summer. “I hate this shit,” Sol groused from the back. Charlie was ready to hate it, too, but Nicky reached out to stay Sewer Girl’s hand. “No, this song is genius.”
“And shouldn’t we be there by now?” D.T. added. “Magellan I’m not, but …”
“You know Nicky likes the scenic route,” Sewer Girl said.
Energy was streaming and colliding all around, but Nicky seemed to have withdrawn into his own cool microclimate in the driver’s seat, and Charlie could hear him crooning falsetto, Aaaah … love to love you, bay-buh, his eyes never leaving the road. They’d scooted off a hairpin exit now and were coasting past desolate hulks of buildings. These were not the good neighborhoods. Nicky slowed to a near-stop. “You see that?” Beyond was an old tenement with a charred façade. The top story looked stove in, and most of the windows were missing. Something twitched on a sill: a bird tucking its head away in shame.
“What happened there?”
“What do you think happened, Charlie?” There seemed to be no one else in the van but him and Nicky.
Oh, Charlie realized. We happened there.
“When I said we were readying for revolution, I was serious. But don’t worry,” he said, sensing Charlie’s unease. “No one was living there. No one got hurt.”
As they drove on, Nicky pointed out other buildings in similar estate. It was like a filmstrip: one flame-licked sight flicking away, another taking its place. “We weren’t the first crew up here, Charlie, and we may not be the best, but we’re the only ones with a program.”
So this was Nicky’s big rebellion? And had Sam known about this? Did she know?
“Obviously she did, Prophet,” Nicky said. “Just think about where she was found.”
Through the haze, Charlie glimpsed a time when thinking about her was all he had cared about. He tried to make contact with that person. “In Central Park?”
“Central Park West. Like a thousand feet from that party.”
“But maybe she was just going there to meet Loverboy,” Sewer Girl said.
“Yeah, maybe she was going to rat out your change in plans.”
Nicky, scratching furiously at his chin-beard, ignored these theories from the back. “No way, not our Sam. Those bullets were a shot across our bow—they changed everything. Preparing for the new target is taking longer than I thought. But we might as well hit back, now that he knows we know. By the time he’s calculated angles of response, we’ll be ready to hit again, even harder.”
For Charlie, much of this was confusion. What new target? And what was the point of torching these derelict buildings again? Before he could ask any more questions, though, Nicky had cut the lights and was snapping at S.G. to turn the radio down. They’d pulled alongside a section of plywood fencing that seemed to run on for miles, blocking whatever was behind it from view. LIBERTY HEIGHTS PHASE ONE. A HAMILTON-SWEENEY PROJECT, a sign said, with a picture of glassy towers. IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU’D BE HOME BY NOW. And maybe Charlie did see the point after all. There was a shadow with a weapon running swiftly along the fence, and he almost called for Nicky to watch out. Then he saw it was Solomon Grungy, who’d bailed from the back of the van, and the weapon a bolt-cutter he was even now applying to the gate. A chain snapped like a wishbone; its loose ends fell. Sol gave the gate a shove and then hurried back to the van, which rolled toward the opening.
The excavation inside was massive, a hole probably a quarter-mile long, filling all the acreage between road and river. Trailers and port-a-johns skirted the rim, along with a line of pickup trucks. In the hole itself, in yellow moonlight, sat a dozen or more bulldozers and backhoes. Here and there, rebar jutted from concrete.
Charlie followed his fellow Post-Humanists. His legs had pins and needles where S.G. had squashed them; on the plus side, his stiffy had subsided. She and D.T. knelt behind the van, stuffing rags into the necks of bottles. Sol unloaded more milk-crates from the back. Nicky was somewhere far away and feeling no pain. He stooped, retrieved a bottle, pulled a lighter from his pocket, and then hesitated. “You want to do the honors, Charlie?”
“Me?”
“You’ve got about five seconds after you light the rag.” Charlie took the lighter and bit his lip. “The dozers are a little far. Try aiming for that trailer over there. Vengeance is mine, saith the Prophet.”
Nearby, Sewer Girl stopped her work to watch. Not wanting to seem like a pussy, he took the bottle from Nicky. It was either light it soon or pass out from the fumes. But he’d always been told he threw like a girl. Sam, the star by which he was navigating, offered no direction. Nor did any god. He hadn’t even touched the flame to the rag, he still thought he was making up his mind, when there was a whoosh and a wave of heat like the grill when his dad would squirt on lighter fluid. He eyed the distance to the trailer. Imagined Sam standing in this very spot. This had to be for her, somehow. And then the bottle bisected the night, end over end, the perfect pitch he’d never before been able to muster. It shattered on the roof of the trailer, just wide of the wall, and sent waterfalls of fire streaking down the side.
“Beautiful,” Nicky said, and handed him another bottle.
Still others were whistling through the dark around him, ten, twenty, fifty bottles; he soon lost track of which were his own. To the crash of shattered glass, blue flowers of flame bloomed all around the yard, consuming the trailers, the dozers, the electrical box of the crane, two dirt piles, and a truck bed. A port-a-john buckled sideways and began to melt. Small shadows he realized were rats scurried up the flickering walls of the foundation pit. The various sounds of the fires became one hungry hiss, and the flames merged, too, until he could see quite clearly the faces of the people he was with, no longer stoned.
As Charlie looked on, empty-handed, Nicky stripped off his own tee-shirt, doused it with liquid from one of the bottles. They were all watching now; Nicky was their captain, primordial, savage. He was shoving something into the gas tank of one of the trucks. Lighting the shirt. There was a shift in the air, a thickening in the quality of attention. When he glanced up, he looked almost surprised, Charlie thought. Almost frightened by his own daring. Then they were all running hell-for-leather for the van.
They barreled out of the yard with one of the back doors agape, swinging on its hinges, he could see it appearing and disappearing in the sideview, and here was the first whoop of a siren, like a game, like his brothers playing the game they called Emergency in their room upstairs. If Mom could see him now, he thought, or if Sam could—the power he had to strike back at the world that had struck him. And then there was the deep cannonball thud of the gas tank going behind them, a concussion he’d still feel in his chest in the morning. A blue blaze he’d see again when he closed his eyes, shot through with weird sparks of green.