“Stay back,” he says, and draws his weapon, and pushes through.AFTER THE LAST BLACKOUT, in ’65, eight of Manhattan’s nine major medical centers invested heavily in generator modernization. Guess which one didn’t. That’s right: Beth Israel, at present, still relies on a single, ancient, diesel-powered afterthought that dwells in an annex to the boiler room. The emergency plan on file with the city includes a courtesy call from Con Ed in the event of an outage, so that the main circuit can be switched over, but tonight no call comes, and the whole towering superstructure is struck momentarily blind. Then some janitor must take it upon himself to brave the infernal circles that are the subbasements of any urban hospital and find the manual bypass—for light is returning to the upper floors, along with a rumble that wasn’t there before. Windows tremble in their frames. Personal-sized tins of syrupy fruit cocktail jig across oblique eating trays. Albeit attenuated by layers of floor and thick-soled shoes, the rumble reaches even the nurses as they squeak along the surgical pink halls.
Wednesday night is generally the week’s slowest, and right now most of the physicians are finishing up dinner in Westchester. As with the cops, many will be called back to the city in the course of the next few hours. They’ll form little agonistic clots in the waiting areas, arguing about who’s responsible for what, but it’s the nurses, really, who are the pacemakers of this short-circuited heart. Their first order of business is to visit each of the 937 inpatient beds to check that its equipment has come back online. It’s a daunting task, but these same thickset Eastern European and West Indian women who can make your life hell if you’re perceived to take a tone with them have got protocols down cold. They check vital signs and change glucose drips and “bag” patients whose respirators went haywire when the power came back on. They move down the hallways with a briskness that to anyone watching would appear majestic, like firemen at the sound of a bell.
It’s doubly hard, then, to account for the hours it takes before anyone looks in on room 817B. Or trebly hard, as the eighth-floor nurses—Magdalena and Fantine and Mary and Mary Pat—have taken a near-maternal interest in its occupant, who at 193 days has been here the longest. They’ve closed the window on cool evenings when her father’s left it open, and cranked it open mornings when there’s something she would theoretically like to see. They’ve soaped her with golden sponges, the kind husbands use on the family wagon on weekends. They’ve changed her and wiped her and in a technical sense fed her, too. Fantine and Mary Pat have sung to her; the others are not the singing type. But all have touched her hand or cheek to say Hello in there and So long for now and Get some rest, Sleeping Beauty. It was Fantine who came up with the nickname. And maybe, on second thought, this was why it took her so long: the nearer a thing is to us—the more a part of us—the easier it is to lose sight of.
It is after midnight when Fantine finally wheels the new IV stand in, and she hasn’t made it three squeaks inside the door when a knife goes into her heart. It’s hard to say which she sees first: the respirator gone dead in the corner, or the mountain of golden flesh looming over the bed. A hospital gown is coming apart at the back, revealing inky claws or wings that ascend the vertebrae to the neck and skull. This must be the man who shot her, Fantine realizes—the Kneesocks Killer, come back to finish the job. His hands continue their strangling motions as he turns to take in the source of the gasp. The tattoos extend halfway onto his face; she’s never seen anything like it. From his ear hangs a tiny dagger. Then, like some predator too powerful to take notice of a morsel like her, he returns to his labors.
Back in January, that crooked little man from the police force had gathered the nursing staff together at the shift change and told them to keep special watch on Sleeping Beauty. It was like just because her skin was white they valued her more than other patients. Though the newspapers didn’t name her, they were already turning her into a kind of story about what was wrong with the city, when in East Flatbush walking home from the train late you heard gunfire more often than not and no one cared. Some anonymous philanthropist would soon step forward to cover the girl’s hospital bills. But that was back before the girl meant anything to her personally, and now Fantine sees the size of her own failure. Someone said there was some commotion here earlier in the day; she should have known to watch closer. She tightens her grip on the IV stand as if it was a harpoon. She tries not to think of what the man’s hands could do to her. Then they move again, and there is a sound she recognizes, like the crumpling of an empty milk carton. She glimpses the blue bag of a hand-operated breathing pump. And the man says, for all the world as if they know each other, “You going to take over, or what? My arms are killing me.”
His easy manner frees her to fly across the room as she wasn’t able to a moment ago. Who on earth does he think he is? What is he doing here? This isn’t his … she reaches for a powerful word. “This isn’t your jurisdiction!”
“Well, one of us better work this thing, sister, ’cause your breathing machine there’s been on the fritz for hours.” But as he offers her the bag, a reflex makes her slap his hand away, and the blue, life-giving bellows falls to the floor. Every other care in her mind clears before the horror of the pulse monitor starting to wail. She scrabbles on her hands and knees. Then she is up again, fitting the clear-plastic mask over the girl’s nose and mouth, pumping the bag furiously. After a few breaths, she orders the intruder to put a thumb on the girl’s wrist.
“Now count, damn you,” she says, bearing down again. “Don’t stop until I say.”
Her bosom is only six inches from his huge shoulders, his arms bursting like prize hams from the sleeves of a too-small gown. Among the tattoos is a swastika she pretends not to see. After fifteen seconds, she calculates a heart rate of forty-four beats per minute, which is what the electrocardiogram says, too. It stops beeping. Air flows in, out, fogs the plastic. In the glassy jar of the breathing machine, she can see her own scowl. “Visiting hours are over, you know. O-V-er.”
“I’m not a visitor. I’m a patient.”
“That so?”
“I reckon this dashiki you people put me in means I can walk the halls if I want to. And Samantha here happens to be an old friend. You’re lucky I came up for a visit, or I wouldn’t have heard that pulse-taker there beeping blue murder when the lights came back on.”
She cannot look at his face. “You should have called a nurse.”
“You see a phone up here?”
“There’s a call button. We’ve got special training. Do you have special training?”
“Hell, it don’t take a diploma to see Sammy wasn’t breathing. I spot this thing by the sink and I’ve been sitting here ever since, pumping away at her pretty face.” Fantine looks to see what kind of sauciness is in this devil, but the black ink curled crablike around the mouth and one of the eyes makes it hard to say he’s anything but sincere.
“These tattoos, they’re bad for you, you know.”
“That’s what Ma always said, God rest her.”
“The ink gets in your blood, it can give you hepatitis.”
“I’m not long for this world anyway, darlin’. Cancer of the nut.” He gives the front of his gown a gratuitous squeeze, but winces. “Got the old snip snip tomorrow. Maybe they’ll do the left one, too, just in case. But you wouldn’t tell anyone, would you? ’Cause I’d have to kill you. Or leave town, one or the other.”
She studies him.
“Then again, what do you care, right? That ain’t your jurisdiction, just like this ain’t mine. I’d better get back downstairs like a good boy and gargle my barium.”
“No,” she’s surprised to hear herself say. “You stay. You need to stay.” Here in 817B, this flaw of light above a dark city, she feels like a mollusk unhoused from its shell. A quivering gray life. One more meeting of the eyes or collision of skin and skin and this rude and twinkling man will know all the things she goes around trying to hide from the world, and from herself. How she felt when she’d stuck the butcher knife in her first husband that night he’d beaten her so bad. How she felt every day after that, knowing what she’d done. Wake up, a voice says somewhere, quite clearly. And she is trying. She is trying. “We need to see if there’s any damage. Someone’s got to work the pump while I go get the doctor.”
Of course, Bullet could be the one to go, but she shows him proper technique on the bag, where to put your thumbs so you won’t strain the muscles of your wrist. Only from the doorway does she allow herself a full glance at this big octoroonish biker-type with his tattoos and his long chain of an earring. She wants to warn him to remove it before he submits to any scans, but the words are stolen from her by the metamorphosis she’s witnessing. With what impossible daintiness does he check again the seal on the mouthpiece. With what seriousness does he watch the wall clock’s lagging second hand, waiting for the next squeeze.
“TWENTY MINUTES, THEN I’M CALLING IT,” the inspector says, shutting Charlie’s door behind him, but it’s hard to know anymore what “twenty minutes” means. The clock on the bank across the way is stuck at 9:27. Inside the car, whose radio has once again died, the siren spins mutely. Bands of blue sweep uncollected garbage on the curb. Otherwise the dark is undisturbed until, a few feet shy of the lobby, Charlie sees a red flash above. And there they are, three football fields up: those birds last glimpsed from the townhouse miles away. It’s like time itself has been suspended. And this isn’t how a mystery is supposed to end, he thinks. But what if he’s right? How many tons of rock crashing down, leaving a stadium-sized crater in Midtown? How many people in surrounding apartment buildings taken out by the rubble, or the flame? He can almost hear the air ringing up there in alarm. At ground level, the inspector’s having no luck with the building’s revolving door, which any idiot could have told him would be locked. He flips open his badge, raps metal against glass. His flashlight barely penetrates. “Police!” Charlie fidgets, glancing around, another slurp of inhaler. These blocks are creepily quiet, without buses or motorized loading gates or a single plane overhead. Then there are feet, hard soles on a hard floor, and the answering eye of a light inside.
The light-bearer, when the door opens, is a fat guy with a crappy moustache. Lint on his velvet monkey-suit. These uniforms used to seem so sharp back when Charlie would come here for his annual tooth-cleaning. He can remember standing by the elevator bank, trying not to panic, Mom squeezing his arm. It’s Pulaski squeezing now, muttering for Charlie to keep his mouth shut. Then something cracks as the little inspector draws himself up to his full height. “We need to inspect the premises.” No way they’d get away with this by daylight.
“What are you, reporters?”
“NYPD.”
The inspector pulls the badge back as a hand reaches for it.
“So what’s with the camera?” Indicating Charlie.
“My partner here is undercover—”
“We need to see the fortieth floor,” Charlie says. It takes nerve, in the face of Pulaski’s dirty look, but he’s recalled something else: the brass directory board, and, a few spots above Dr. DeMoto, The Hamilton-Sweeney Company, Suite 4000. It’s as if, he thinks, nothing’s ever really gone—as if the shards just hide somewhere inside, waiting to be put back together. He might find this comforting, given time to linger on it, but the fat attendant’s still blocking the way.
“I’ll have to go get the building manager.”
“I’m afraid there’s no time for that,” Pulaski says.
“Then I’m afraid you’re going to have to show me a warrant.”
The deal with this city’s functionaries is, you want to keep them from establishing position, because once they do, they’ll defend it to the death. But the inspector is unsnapping something up near his armpit, flashing his beam there. His words stay courtly, but their timbre is tougher. “It seems to me there are extenuating circumstances. Our typewriters downtown are all electric. Not to speak of how hard it is to reach a judge at, what is it now, quarter to twelve? So let’s say in the spirit of civic cooperation you show me and my partner the fastest way up to the top floor. No, I mean physically guide us. And don’t fret about your boss. When the time comes, I’ll tell him what a stand-up guy you were.”
A skyscraper turns out to be a lot like a person. There is the outward face, with all its impressive ornament, and then suddenly vulnerability: in this case, a hinged maple panel behind the security desk. It swings open at the attendant’s touch. The two flashlights loop and dart over patches of unpainted concrete, ashtrays and scattered playing cards, a bucket of custodial orts. A stairwell leads up into a dark that might be infinite. Charlie’s lungs tighten again. “You mean your elevator’s not hooked to a generator?”
“Pal, if there was a generator, would I be dicking around with a flashlight?”
It’s a solid point, but then how to explain that warning light up top? That is, unless it really is the signal Charlie’s been waiting for all these months, summoning him in to begin his climb.
BUT MAYBE THEY SHOULD HAVE GONE TO ST. VINCENT’S. The man in the cart is so much heavier than she’s assumed, and the crosstown blocks so much longer. They’ve just come through one of the city’s two Lighting Districts; she’d thought it wonderful, once, that there should be enough of anything to constitute a district (enough flowers, enough fashion, enough diamonds). But tonight there was no light in the Lighting District, only dark, vaguely hominid shapes moving singly or in pairs, and then, drawing close behind, sirens, smashing, the odor of flame. The faster she and Mercer pushed, the more the sidewalk jolted the cart, until it almost seemed the body inside was stirring. There have been periodic pauses, too, to bicker. But now there is relief, trees, rustlings of leaf no longer quite invisible in their boxes—and above, the massive hospital, windows stacked and fully lit, the only real light in sight.
What she wasn’t expecting was the line. It seems to stretch all the way back to Second Avenue. Men in uniform flank the doors by the ambulance bay. Paramedics, with clipboards. “I’ll be back,” she tells Mercer, and goes to talk to them. She passes wheelchairs, splinted arms, clutched stomachs, a person leaning over to retch into a bush, another with what appears to be a club-wound to the head. The medics, by contrast, are crisp and untroubled. They could be twins. Where were you an hour ago, she wants to ask. And now, with all these people … ? She figures the ER must be understaffed—a supposition the medics confirm. Every exam room, every stretcher, every seat is full. Unless you’ve got something high up on the triage list, you could be out here till dawn. “It’s not me,” she says. “It’s one of the guys with me. A car hit him. He’s been unconscious since.”
“You saw the collision?”
How to put this. “In a manner of speaking.”
“He bleeding?”
“Not that I can tell, but—”
“As long as he’s breathing, he’s doing better than anyone inside. We’ll send someone over to do an assessment, but most likely he’s going to have to wait.”
Walking back toward the corner, she imagines a campaign to swap out the city’s entire disaster-response apparatus with conscripts, like jury duty. Well, not the fire department. Show her a firefighter, and Jenny will reach for her heart and sing you “The Star-Spangled Banner.” But just as she’s trying to explain to Mercer why they’ll have to stick around for a while, there’s a small electronic beep.
“What’s that?” Beeep. “It’s your watch, isn’t it?”
An indictment. She hands it to him. Her tongue feels stuck to the roof of her mouth. “It’s the little button on the side. But midnight doesn’t necessarily mean anything, Mercer. Don’t you think we’d hear it if a bomb went off in the East Village?”
“I don’t know anymore. I don’t know what we would have heard.”
“The timing was a guess, remember, and someone could have gotten there first to stop it. Didn’t you say—”
“But not the target, that wasn’t a guess! We’ve known all along William was in danger. Yet here we are, with this other guy.”
“Wait, listen—are those sirens?” Again, if she hadn’t known better, she would have said the figure in the cart had stirred. “No, sorry. Same one. As long as there’s not some big exodus of ambulances from the line up there …”
Another siren keens. Another pause. Five seconds. Ten.
“This has been a farce,” he says, “this whole expedition. I have to go.”
“Mercer, we can’t just leave this guy to suffer. At least not until a doctor comes.”
“Don’t you dare act like I’m indifferent to suffering. I’m telling you, I have to find William. I have to know, one way or another.”
“I didn’t ask for any of this,” she says, already hearing he’s right. How selfish it sounds. “But I guess that’s not your problem. I know you need to find out. Just be careful, okay?”
Mercer is almost to the corner when she notices that the white guy in the shopping cart is sitting up, watching him go. “You’re awake!” But by the time she looks back to Mercer for a reaction, he has passed beyond the light.
“Who are you?” the guy asks. “Do I know you?”
“Damn … You can talk, too! You’re at the hospital.” Maybe it’s for the best that he doesn’t seem to remember why. “There was an accident, a car. Look. How many fingers am I holding up?”
“I can’t see for shit. What did you do to the light?”
“It’s a blackout. Wait, stop moving, you’re not supposed to move.” But he is already standing, so tall in the cart that others on line turn and gape. He looks nothing so much as surprised at their sheer number—the way a ghost might on discovering there’s an afterlife after all. Which in a sense is the case, Jenny just has time to think, before he leaps to the ground, falls. Rises and begins to lope off down the street. He is graceful in the air, but less so on the hoof. When he collapses again, a half-block south, she is only a few yards behind. Deeper back, people watch, mystified. “Hey. Hey.” She takes his arm. “Are you familiar with the phrase ‘the triumph of hope over experience’? Somebody practically drove over you. We’ve got to get you checked out.”
In the light of a passing car, he looks younger than before, his mouth as sensitive as a child’s. It pinches in concentration. She can hear the machinery of his brain ratcheting into gear, until that turns into someone trying to start another car stalled down the block. Ayuh yuh yuh. “I’ve got to get home.” He has a little twang, like Mercer. Git. If I can’t physically compel his return to the ER, she thinks, I can at least out-talk him, but then a further voice speaks up again—or not actually a voice so much as an idea, implanted in her head. How does she know it isn’t her own? Because it is to Let it drop, and Jenny’s never done any such thing in her life.
“Well, how is that going to happen? You can’t walk unsupported, obviously.”
He tries to demonstrate he’ll do just that, but his knee crumples again after a few more yards. “Damn it!”
She waits for him to ask for help, lets him hang there a minute. Does she have to do everything herself? Then she sighs and pulls his arm over her shoulder. It will be much later in the night, or at least seem to be, before it even occurs to her to ask where they’re going.
DEEP DOWN, WILLIAM HAMILTON-SWEENEY has always believed that were he ever to give his father an honest accounting of his feelings, the world would spontaneously combust. What happens instead is precisely nothing. The library’s walls do not collapse, nor is there even any change in Daddy’s audible breathing. He presses on. “It’s true. I’m sure Regan’s come up with a million reasons why I stayed away, she’s the champion rationalizer, but the reality, Daddy, is just that simple: you’re an asshole. And if I’ve got to sit up here—which I only agreed to do as a favor to her, by the way—I don’t want there to be any temptation for either of us to pretend not to know what’s in the other’s heart.”
A dozen little beads of flame glimmer behind the divan where his father perches. Unless the word is settee. The domestics seem to have jumped ship before Amory did (assuming he didn’t have them whacked as well), so Daddy must have been the one to settle himself like this, propping expensive cushions under his elbows in the manner of some Old Testament judge. No candles having been lit on his side of the room, though, his grimace at William’s impropriety remains barely perceptible. “Although that would be the Hamilton-Sweeney way, wouldn’t it? I should have known you’d just sit here and not say a word.”
And in a sense, silent disapproval is worse than any explosion. William moves toward the chest of drawers on the north wall, ostensibly looking for more light, but actually awaiting another infusion of courage, or candor, or whatever this is. It’s as if a great inscrutable force, the higher power to whom he’s been addressing himself these last few weeks, has steered him back to where everything started, and now he badly needs it to tell him what to do. He cocks his head, tries to lose himself in the spines of books. Amends, is the word Bill W. uses in the Big Book. Maybe he’s supposed to use his own silence to wrench from Daddy the amends he wants, but all he gets is Daddy’s cleared throat, this cartilaginous tic that was always annoying as hell.
“The irony is, I was only a couple miles away all these years. Amory didn’t mention that either, did he? But trust me, I’m sure he kept abreast. The drugs, all of it. You could have found me easily enough, but why do that? I was doing you a favor by not being around to remind you of things we both knew. It’s like we’ve been living in two different cities. You up here in all this marbled comfort, and me down there, killing myself in slow motion.”
It is one of Bill W.’s precepts that talking about your most shameful behaviors, exposing their undersides to the air, will make you feel better. In practice, though, as long as he won’t do more than harrumph at the possibility that they’re worth listening to, it’s Bill H-S who has the upper hand. And he knows it, they both know it.
“One of those things being that I’m a homosexual, Daddy. Or what was it you used to say when Liberace was on TV? A queer duck. I know this comes as no surprise, but for the record: I am attracted to men. I have sex with them,” William hears himself say. “And since I’m laying my cards on the table, I did end up finding someone I could fall in love with. Do you want to guess what happened next? I fucked it up, is what. I lied. I withheld. I was cold and prideful and within myself. All this shit I’ve been carrying around because of you, I couldn’t let go of, because I no longer knew where it stopped and the rest of me started. I clung to it like a guy who’s shipwrecked and doesn’t trust he can swim.”
There’s a rush of heat now on the back of his neck, like someone else has brought a torch into the room, but when he turns, he finds only more darkness. It’s just him and the inscrutable face before him, a contest of wills. Of Wills, he thinks. He lapses into silence, which he manages to keep up for an impressive time, whole minutes, maybe. But every impulse becomes unbearable sooner or later.
“Did you notice how you never touched me, Daddy, after Mom died? It was like I had contracted some disease. You had plenty of chances to like tousle my hair, or hug me, or punch me, even, but the best I ever got was a handshake. I used to think I remembered my shoulder being squeezed at the burial, but that was Uncle Artie. I’m sure this sounds like more childishness, but back then, I still looked at you like a god whose big hands could rescue me, if only I could get them to touch me.”
There’s a single candle left in the rightmost drawer, and a book of matches he uses to light a cigarette. He squints against the smoke.
“One of the things recovery has helped me see is how I was always trying to put myself in a position to be rescued. Regan was usually the one who rode in on her white charger, but one day, I thought, if I could just make it so the trouble was too big for her, you would have to step in. But you couldn’t even do that for Regan, could you.”
What he himself can’t do, having crossed again to within a half-dozen feet, is meet Daddy’s gaze. There’s a sour-sweet smell like ammonia, but he ignores it.
“I think you know I was right that day, by the way, no matter what Regan decided to hold back. The day we came to you, before the rehearsal dinner. You always did have feelings, where she was concerned. And you’re not a stupid man. Your daughter was left pregnant, without good options, and entirely on her own.” He’s had half a lifetime to circle around what a just resolution might really have looked like. “You should have called off the merger, at least, if not your marriage. You should have had the guy’s head on a pike, and Amory’s. Don’t tell yourself that keeping Regan close, making her a Director or however you say it, was the same as giving her what she needed. She was suffering so much with what happened that she used to make herself throw up. Did you know that? I hadn’t seen her for fifteen years, and I pretty much knew. You like to think of yourself as a man of duty, but when you’ve got one kid with a finger down her throat and another shooting his inheritance into his veins … you kind of have to wonder. And now Amory’s got you poised for the fall, from what I can see. Not to mention trying to have me taken out. And what’s your first instinct when I come to tell you? You stick up for him.”
Somehow, though, the closer William gets to justice, the worse he feels. There’s that “condition” people keep alluding to; maybe Daddy doesn’t remember any of this. Maybe, in fact, it was grief over William’s running away that began his decline. In which case who, really, owes amends to whom? And who is that enormous impersonal consciousness he senses out there beyond the edges, watching, expecting, disapproving? Maybe it’s none other than himself. Maybe out there is in here.
“I’ll tell you something else. I keep having this fantasy about some wide river or channel I’m on the bank of. I can look up, and on the far side is another, better self, holding hands with Mercer—that’s his name, my ex—and both of them are watching me flail over here, watching me from the life I’m supposed to have had. When did it become impossible to get there from here? When did that bridge get burned? Until tonight, I would have said it was the day before your wedding, with Regan and the toast and all that, but right now I’m thinking it’s right now. I mean, here we are for the first time in years, I’m talking about you never having touched me, and meanwhile your hand is right there, three feet away, and you still can’t reach across whatever separates us and just touch you. Me.”
He sits there for a while feeling the implications of this error, like a man running his tongue over a loose molar. Time is doing this funny thing where he can’t tell how much of it is passing. Also space: the darkened walls seem to have slid back on tracks, like scenery into the wings, leaving the two of them alone in this flickering circumference. There has to be some way to wound Daddy. To make him feel the cruelty Amory Gould had presided over. But it had taken William years to riddle out its intricacies himself, and then only after he’d been able to put aside the belief that Amory had marshaled resources beyond his grasp of human nature. Years Daddy wouldn’t spend. Or didn’t have. Meaning Amory hadn’t had to preside, not really. And somewhere, William must still be seventeen, the boy rushing to throw himself athwart the tracks of his fate, because he feels that at last he’s reached it, the part that matters, the thing that must be seen. (As somewhere else, he turns away, because he cannot bear to look.) Try again, William. Make it all connect. Grip the knife and twist.
“It was rape, Daddy. Rape that got her pregnant. The son of the man you merged with. Rape that I brought to you in your office that day, when all I could think about was wrecking a fucking wedding. Wrong after all, both of us—and if I managed to set the usurpation back a decade or two, so what? However it went between Regan and his protégé, Amory was always going to end up with strings to pull. But he wasn’t pulling my strings when I stood there in front of you, unfeeling, using Regan’s suffering for my own selfish purposes. I convinced myself that if you refused to see a problem, maybe it would go away. Daddy, I know you understand. I know you understand me.”
In truth, though, he knows no such thing. Because when, at last, on an impulse, he reaches out to touch his father’s hand, what shakes free is not an apology, or a condemnation, but a snore. Daddy has been asleep for some time now, to say nothing of that smell. Which means (William thinks—and it kills him) he’s going to get away with everything.
CRUMMY ORPHEUS THAT HE IS, Mercer has resisted a last look back at the hospital. Even if the shopping cart weighs more than you’d think, even if the man inside it is paralyzed, Jenny will be okay, he knows; this side of his own Mama, he’s never met a more stubborn girl. Anyway, what has today taught him if not that all he can do for other people essentially amounts to very little? If William is dead, he is dead.
Yet a strange thing happens as he drifts south and east: nothing. Or rather, everything. There is more than one way to be out of time, it seems, and now he is stranded between two worlds, one in which a bomb has gone off and one in which it hasn’t, at least not here. To judge by what stands around him, William still lives. But to the extent that it only means less finality and more heartache, Mercer is no longer even sure if this is the world he wants to be in. If he’s ever loved William enough.
In the breast pocket of his shirt is the last joint from his motherlode. He’s never quite adjusted to the fact that in New York you can walk down the street smoking this stuff openly, but now he thinks what the hell, he’s invisible anyway. He lights it. Coughs. Inhales again. It doesn’t fail him. Where usually a high creates thought-connections that lead elaborately away from the moment he’s in, this one pulls him back from the brink of the future. A façade on Fourteenth Street has sprung a hole, through which other holes shuttle in and out, laden with free groceries. Alarms and sirens wail in clashing keys, but no one notices until the cops are upon them.
He walks on, past flashlights and floating cigarettes, sticking as close to the street as possible. He hardly recognizes these as the same sidewalks he wandered back when he lived with Carlos, not only because of the blackout, but because so much of what he’d seen then he’d refused to admit to seeing. The denim boys on roller skates, the hustlers in twos and threes with their come-hither glances. All of them, like William, were willing to endure a certain quantum of danger in pursuit of pleasure, or vice versa. A solitary moped whizzes past, its headlamp streaking the bars of a wrought-iron fence. The word that occurs, spectral, is probably not the right one for how Mercer feels. How he feels is: like a human pinball. Then a voice out of the darkness rasps, “Hey, you.” Meaning me, he thinks. Meaning him.
He has made his way, as best he can determine, to the northern entrance of Tompkins Square Park, where he once heard Ex Post Facto play. It’s a wonder he hasn’t thought to look here for William before tonight; the place is notorious (he’d subsequently pretended not to have learned) as a spot for cruising and drugs and worse. From the dense shadows beyond the gate comes the smack of skin on skin, followed by laughter and swift steps ebbing among the trees. Music somewhere. The voice speaks up again. “Yeah, you. You got any more of that?”
“Any more of what?”
“ ‘Any more of what,’ he says.” Mercer’s unsure whether this is meant for him or for some third party, also invisible. “Of what you’re smoking, Your Majesty.”
He hesitates. “How do I know you’re not a cop?”
At this, the laughter ramifies into what’s definitely more than one voice. They sound half-stoned already. Mercer’s roach makes a neon arc as he extends it, less out of a sense of camaraderie than in hopes of satisfying them and thus ending the interaction. The joint flares, crackling, and he can just make out liquid eyes in a face his mother would have called “high yellow.” Then, like the Cheshire Cat’s, they’re gone. Instead of returning to him, the joint drifts farther back, to be inhaled by another man, or boy, it sounds like. Mercer’s face is heating up, but why be embarrassed? Mama’s not around to see him, nor could she, were she. “Just so you know, I don’t have any money,” his mouth says, because some rational part of him still thinks it’s worth getting this out there. But his interlocutors apparently don’t give a shit. “The end is nigh, brother. We’re just trying to have a good time.”
Uh-oh. Walk away now, Mercer thinks. Trouble is, he’s grown attached to this joint. And so, as if some more powerful narcotic has been mixed in with the dope, he’s following the voices and the dwindling orange bloom of it back along the path. There’s a bend, which as he rounds it gives way to more light, a thousand feathers curling through the leaves. Then the vegetation clears, and he can make out bodies, beefy, hairy, some of them sans shirt. Music thumps from a ghetto blaster wedged into the crotch of a tree. An exfoliated disco ball dangles among the branches, and a man in leather chaps and a train conductor’s cap plays a flashlight across it, which is where the light comes from. Well, that and a trashcan someone has set unfragrantly ablaze. Where the flicker barely reaches, men hold each other and sway. Mercer blinks to see if they’ll go away. “You want a beer or something?” says the boy holding the joint. His shirt’s open at the chest, which glows like molded brass.
“I guess.” Mercer hopes the diversion will allow him to turn and go. But he finds he can’t, even after the boy has disappeared into the dark behind a bench.
Waiting, he tries not to look out of place, to make too much eye contact or too little—tries, that is, not to see the melding of bodies in the underbrush, most of them dark like his own, the shocking pink flashes of tongue and palm. At not seeing, he’s had lots of practice. There used to be a path made of flagstones between Mama’s kitchen and the vegetable garden. One spring, heavy rains had loosened them in their footings, so that you could see around each one a little black gap just perfect for a penknife. He’d gotten the idea to pry one up, and when it came free—a wet, sucking sound—he’d found the verso teeming with shiny-backed creepy-crawlies asquirm in the blacker mud. One of the things he fears most is that beneath the masonry of his own consciousness lies some similarly primeval carnival of appetite, and so, from the moment he first passed through Port Authority, he’s been patrolling the borders of his thoughts, tamping down the flooring, keeping things cool and dry and orderly. And perhaps (it occurs to him) cutting himself off from what’s available for his art. Or does it explode?
“I brung you this.” The boy is back. A beer bottle, its label damp and peeling, insinuates itself into Mercer’s hand.
“Brought.”
“Huh?”
“The participle.” The boy stares puzzled at his flame-licked profile. Mercer wonders if William used to think of him this way: as a boy. I don’t drink, he wants to say now, as he said then, but what would Walt Whitman do? Obviously, Old Walt would take up the burden, bear the brunt. Bringing the bottle to his lips, he nearly chips a tooth.
“You’ve got to … here, let me …”
The boy does a thing where he uses his own bottle to dislodge the cap of Mercer’s. Mercer repeats the swigging motion more cautiously. What’s inside might as well be beechwood-aged horse piss, but in the last twenty-four hours, he’s been chased, cross-examined, and nearly sent through a windshield, all without eating; he can be forgiven if his mouth is dry. “How old are you?”
“How old are you?” the boy asks.
“I asked you first. Twenty-five.”
“Nineteen,” the boy says, which, Mercer not having been born yesterday, probably means the same age as his students, fifteen, sixteen. Former students, rather.
“And this is where you spend your time, at nineteen?”
“You mean with my friends? Why wouldn’t it be? I’m not some window-shopper who has to hustle back to my closet every night.”
“I’m sorry. I just don’t have much experience of how this is supposed to go.”
“We could dance, for starters. You like to dance?”
Not anymore, Mercer is thinking, when the boy shoves him out into the churn of bodies. Between two tenements beyond the treeline, the moon should be luminous and precise, except oily smoke from the trashcan keeps interfering. You can dance…, the radio insists, but the best he can manage is a sort of shuffle from foot to foot in time to the boy’s more expressive gyrations. The closer they get to the flames, the hotter it is, and the boy undoes yet another button of his shirt. The Dionysian torso moves closer. Mercer takes several more swigs of beer, trying to use his bottle-arm’s elbow as a baffle, but the boy, a dab hand at seduction, finds his way through, and even as Mercer’s heart clenches, his lower body brings him close enough for wrists to rest on shoulders, for a finger to loosely trace the nap at the back of his head. He closes his eyes in what might be perceived as surrender. Maybe the point here is that he does not see clearly. That he never saw clearly.
Then a blue light throbs inside his eyelids. He has a feeling its source is something he doesn’t want to know about, but as the outer world grows noisier, he can’t help opening his eyes. Beyond the shoulders of this stranger, high beams are zooming along a path into the park, rendering it not nearly so tangled or secret as Mercer’s been imagining. Another flash of blue. The park is closed, says a voice over a loudspeaker. And then what sounds like: Don’t eat ’shrooms. At the circle’s edges, some men dive for underbrush, but most stand their ground, stunned in the lights of the Finest. And among them, a dozen yards away, he notices for the first time a lone woman: Is she some kind of cop, too? It seems at any rate improbable that he should cross paths with the law multiple times in a single day. But then, what if this isn’t the law, and his search for William has just been one more projection? What if it’s really him they’ve been after all along, these powers in their various disguises?
AS FAR AS THE DEMON BROTHER WENT—or Ghoul, or whatever he was to himself in his secret life—that part had been simple enough. The man came on like some master of the black arts, but really extortion was just a function of the strength of your material. And the material he had on Amory Gould would make even an angel cry. He’d kept a careful archive of their entanglement from the start; what he’d sent along yesterday had been, as he’d put it in the attached letter, “just a taste.” But he could no longer be sure how he’d ever hoped to lure Billy Three-Sticks, too, to a high floor of the family building. Or quite remember why. From certain angles, it looked downright ungrateful. In the wasteland of metro Boston, at thirteen, fourteen, his big dream had been of a gun to his own head, putting him out of his misery—a misery that by sophomore year of college was indistinguishable from everybody else’s. Brass Tactics had pointed the way out of all that. Out of college, but also out of formlessness, powerlessness, the brute facticity he’d been beating his head against. Can’t make it better? Make art. So yeah, there had been a time when, to protect Billy, he’d have thrown himself on the blast. But his education must be ongoing, because now he’s on the run, and he can’t even say for how long; his clock’s stolen battery died somewhere back near the Delaware Water Gap. He was searching for the time on the radio, in fact, when he’d picked up that little blip about a blackout. It explained the snuffing of the city lights—and seemed to cement his triumph. Then more foothills turned the signal to crap. He’d pre-rolled a dozen joints to take the edge off the pills, but has since been burning through them to mark time until the zero hour. Only now there’s just one left, and he’s getting this vibe of insurrection from the back of the van. Maybe what’s needed is a breather, at least until morning, when they can get themselves organized again, the unruly phalanges closing into a fist. And look: right up here’s a rest stop.
He pulls off the highway and onto a ramp that cuts back among some trees. Sees an empty gravel lot, picnic tables under a lone streetlight. The little lavatory kiosk is locked for the night, but the vending machine out front’s still lit, just waiting for someone with a disregard for property and a bad case of the munchies to come along and smash the glass. First, though, he can’t help turning the radio back on and flipping around for further word from Manhattan. Out here you get evangelical preachers and album-oriented rock and ad after ad—and as the analgesia of the pot wears off, he discovers a pit in his stomach. Or a pit in the pit he’d carried out of that building. He’s sure it will go away once he confirms he’s finally accomplished something—an explosion at the heart of civilization. No gimmes, no takebacks, the kids used to say. Antacid tablets coat as they soothe. Crystal Blue Persuasion, hey hey. We will make buying a new or used car truck or van so easy. But he’s too jacked up to stay with anything anymore, the dial keeps turning. Then amid the contextless barrage of information the sense of the roach singeing his fingers awakens him to the fact that he is alone. He opens the door. Leaves it open, so the blown speakers can keep filling his head with crap in which maybe the nugget he waits for waits. The thing he’s done: revenge for the Blight Zone, for Sam, for the general fuckedness of this life. He climbs down to join his friends.
It’s cool out here, a smell like a lilac bush or something. Enough starlight to see D.T.’s got Sol laid out flat on the ground. And the stars, they’ve always creeped Nicky out, made him feel like a nothing. “I say we make camp. We can push on in a few hours, once we see how the land lays back there.” He’s aware of some shakiness in the formulation, but can’t identify what it is. It’s like when he was a little kid that year in Guatemala and Dad broke his jaw because he’d come back from the PX with jamón instead of jabón.
D. Tremens looks up from where Sol’s puking. “Get a grip,” he says, so gently it’s like he’s been practicing. “I know you heard that thing about the blackout.”
So the signal hadn’t died fast enough, after all. Maybe that accounts for the whispering. D.T. feels it too: the sense of destiny achieved. “Yeah, but who cares, D.T.? If the city’s in an uproar, that just gets us closer to where we want to go.”
“It doesn’t make you wonder if something’s gone wrong back there?”
“I’m telling you, something’s gone right—Weltgeist in action.”
“The newslady didn’t say anything about a bomb. We’re way past midnight now.”
And it’s true there are a couple of loose ends he couldn’t bring himself to clip so neatly. (What had Sewer Girl taken him for, some kind of monster?) But this was why you compartmentalized in the first place. D.T., for example, had been kept in the dark not only about the location, but also about the real time everything was to go down. Midnight would have been more symbolic, ideally the stroke of 7/7, if he’d managed to track down Billy, but every system, if it’s not to collapse under its own contradictions, needs some randomness built in. A clinamen. Sometimes a system will even generate its own.
“D.T., you genius. You’re still carrying a watch? I could kiss you. Have we hit 2:30 yet?”
“Nicky, I’m just going by the fact that we’re in the middle of Pennsylvania. You guys trashed every timepiece we had getting the thing to work, remember?”
Fuck.
“But sure, say it’s 2:30, it’s 2:45, it’s four in the morning, what difference does that make? Can’t you see we’ve got to get Sol to a doctor?”
Sol himself doesn’t speak, but his eyes supplicate upward, like a puppy’s who thinks you must be its master just ’cause you’ve given it a kick or two. Maybe D.T.’s been right all this time, maybe they should belay three thousand years of Western thought and make room for the comrade to lie down properly on the ratty carpet back there. But he’s got a few choice volumes to share with anyone who thinks History is made of a thousand little kindnesses.
“Yep, get some shut-eye and keep trucking. What say, Sol—you up for it?”
It takes Sol only a few seconds to hoist his undamaged thumb in a feeble thumbs-up.
“See? Sol understands the magnitude of what we’ve achieved. We’ve got to keep moving, this is part of what you—wait. Quiet.”
“Nobody’s talking but you, Nicky. Nobody’s been talking.”
Except he is already crouched by the driver’s-side door, the better to hear a news flash. The bomb? No, what he hears again is just: power failure. Eastern seaboard in midst of largest blackout in history. Only this time with a cause, lightning strikes in Westchester, a pair, a freak coincidence. And now it’s coming back to him, that other flash of pure stochasm. The orange of that boat. The white. Those little bottles. Not that you shouldn’t act to eliminate a threat, but he’d known from watching the reporter sit and brood behind a pillar that he’d never really been one. Just another drunk, like D.T. Another loser, like S.G. A failed artist, a poor dreamer, and far too easily scared. He didn’t mean for the guy to die—who hadn’t even had the third ’zine. But then out on the deck, there was the lanky body going over the side. And as he looked down into the fast black water, it seemed once again that there was no outside, no end to the emptiness. The world was the world, perpendicular to any attempt to make or do anything but damage. And fuck Billy, he’d thought, for dreaming otherwise. For the way he could just stare at his shoes and fill any space he was in. That had been the moment he knew why he had to hunt Billy down again, to inveigle him onto the scene, too. Which means, simultaneously, the instant the wheels had begun to come off. As they are coming off his attention now, because right as a voice is saying, At the tone, the time will be—Sol begins to yack again, loudly, on the gravel. And as quickly as it came, the signal goes back to static. Fuck. It was a single syllable they’d said, right? Two o’clock? Or is it already three?
“Did either of you catch that?” He waits for someone to refocus on the real problem here, but now D.T. and Sol just crouch and vomit, respectively, and this is all he needs to remember there may indeed be something binding them together. D.T.’s not as dumb as he acts, or possibly even as high. Maybe he’s convinced Sol they’ve been sold out, proposed a hasty plan B. Maybe to go join back up with Sewer Girl, wherever she ran off to. Sol will be too ill to go on, and they’ll make a play for the van, leaving him here like an animal, in the dark. “You know, the pigs aren’t going to go any easier on you for jumping ship after the fact.”
“Who said anything about jumping ship?” says D.T. “That’s what I’m telling you, man. We’re in this together. We’ve got to get Sol help.”
“Sol’s coming with me. Isn’t that right, Sol?” But Sol pretends to have passed out. What is even happening here? Why is everything always falling apart?
“You can go on, Nicky, if that’s what you need. But leave us the van, at least.”
Here it is, if he still cared: proof of their conspiracy. He looks across the clearing. There, between the kiosk and the little creek burbling in its defile, is a payphone on a stand, its lightbulb burned out, busted, or otherwise nonexistent. He now perceives with his higher faculties that D.T. lied at that last puke stop about not having a dime. The very first thing they’ll do after ditching him is call the cops. How long could he survive out here, in the woods, were it to come to a manhunt? Not long, is the answer, because he can’t get the city out of his blood. “Fuck you. It’s my van.”
He realizes he means it. If Operation Demon Brother has indeed foundered, then the Econoline and the books inside are all he has to show for his own existence, and he’s not about to give them up, even if the van is by most lights Sol’s. And before the thought can be finalized, he is moving to cut off lines of approach.
“Come on, Nicky. You’re in no shape to drive anyway. Why don’t you give me the keys?”
“You can’t have them,” he repeats. “They’re mine.”
“Will you listen to yourself?”
He almost falls for it. But consistency is as somebody said a hobgoblin, one you can’t let trip you up, not if you aim to get a single thing done in this world. And for how long has Nicky Chaos been trying to teach them not to be so credulous? They are even in their mutiny basically asking permission. When all there is, he’s been telling them, is the power to will. Quickly, before they can adjust, he’s back in the driver’s seat closing the door, fumbling with the key, that deeper darkness in the dark. Palms swat zombielike at windows, flatten pale against the glass. Someone yells over the static. Then the speed overpowers the pot, the engine catches, and he is fishtailing over the gravel, leaving behind his former vassals, D.T. and poor Sol Grungy of the doleful countenance. And finally just a long plume of dust to fatten in the moonlight.
IT’S NOT EXACTLY GOING TO SET THE WORLD ON FIRE, their hobbled pace, but in fits and starts, it’s quickened, as has the guy’s recall. Mike, is his name. Age? Twenty-seven. No, twenty-eight. From West Virginia, originally. And for the last few years, Bay Ridge. Asked why then they were headed toward Chinatown, he seems to sputter. He had to find a new place on short notice, he explains, and he was on a budget. His job—he reads government reports for a living, condenses them into slightly smaller reports—hardly pays. He’d been walking home tonight to save a subway token. But it could be worse; he had cousins who were carnies. Anyway, he’s fine to go it alone, he’s not in pain … though there is, Jenny thinks, something a little pained about Mike, or at least hangdog. And every so often he stops to kind of squint into the darkness where her face should be.
They’re just descending into the oldest and narrowest part of the city when they meet a more serious block. A knot of several dozen young men has gathered on the corner, muscle-shirted, sort of Knights of Columbus, lit by idling cars. Her instinct is to cut east, leave a wide berth, but already the chaos has begun to form itself into lines. There’s a strange New York compulsion, in moments of bewilderment or fury or fear, to queue, which must be hers now, too. As she steps closer, she sees something being passed hand to hand out of a storefront. Are these the orderly early stages of a riot? Or have the owners of this bakery, their refrigerator cases disabled by the power cut, decided to treat it as a promotional opportunity? At any rate, within a minute, some jayvee mafioso has handed her a paper plate. Then another. On them sweat heavy wedges of pale yellow cheesecake. Little groans of pleasure rise above the horns. “I’ll be damned.” She turns back to Mike, who’s propped himself on a parking meter. “Here. Eat. The calories will do us both good.”
The cheesecake is the Italian kind, made with ricotta or maybe mascarpone, and as good as Jenny remembers from other times, but also more complicated, as the present so often is, with a sweetness that recedes deeper into richness the more she tries to savor it. With no fork, she has to use fingers. And as the lushly textured filling coats her palate, the stranger at her side seems to be remembering, too. “My girlfriend used to make something that tasted like this. Only Uzbek,” he adds, as if the taste were drawing him back. He takes a last bite. Looks for a trashcan. “Little blintzes, with the sweet cheese. After a night of dancing at the Odyssey, two in the morning, we’d come home and eat them straight from the fridge.”
He resumes their walk, fully under his own steam. “Now, bam, this is my life, on my own again. I never saw myself living solo in a basement in Manhattan, but I guess everything in this city is different than I imagined it would be.” He turns to her. “Sorry if I’m boring you. Same old story.”
No, she wants to say, keep going. But from up ahead comes a high whine, a crack, a conflagration of blue and red. “More light!” a child is crying on the far side of what should be either Broome or Grand. An old man bends to touch a long match to the mound of darkness before him. Out of its top erupt ten thousand sparks, like a waterfall in reverse, lighting the lower landings of fire escapes before succumbing to entropy and night. Reductive but true: at any given hour, the hawkers of Chinatown will be hawking, the mah-jongg players mah-jongging, indolent fish lazing in the tanks that front the seafood restaurants. And special occasions, all the way back to the Tang, call for fireworks. A pang of memory. Or is that the recollection of this other man studying her again, trying to pierce the dark? “What.”
“Nothing,” he says. “Just, this is my block.” As the light fizzles back down, he points to a sign for a street she didn’t know existed. Or an alley—asphalt running right up to the building fronts.
He limps into the closing shadows, and she falls into step behind. To people like her dad, watching from afar, overpopulation seems like the big problem of urban existence, but really, it’s desertion you have to look out for. Crowds teem under blazing sparklers a couple blocks away, but here all lights are off, all stores locked down. She should make sure he’s safe. Keys jingle, then stop in a doorway. “I guess we part ways here.”
“I’d at least like to see you get in okay,” she says, after a moment.
“But you can’t stand here waiting. Any lunatic could happen along.”
She knows they barely know each other, but if recent history is any guide, it’s Mike who should be nervous. “Looks like I’ll have to come with you, then.”
“My place is unimpressive.”
“Points for honesty,” she says, following him into a foyer ten degrees hotter than the street. It smells like someone’s been raising cattle in here. From two or three flights up comes the sound of an old person singing in Chinese, but without moon or stars she can see nothing. This is evidently not a problem for Mike, who finds her hand and places it on a railing angled down. Careful. The steps are narrow.
After a dozen or so of these they emerge into a room lit only by the pilot light under a water heater. As far as she can tell, it’s a cookie-cutter bachelor’s den. There is a small shelf of books, a minifridge. Along one wall, a kitchenette. “Let me get you some water,” she offers. But Mike has already lowered himself to his mattress, with a groan that might have been building for years. Unable to find where he keeps the glasses, she settles for a rag. She wets it in the sink and brings it over and kneels to place it on his forehead. He catches her wrist. His hand is steadier now. For a second, she is afraid. He says, “You don’t have to keep this up, Jenny.”
“Oh, stop.”
“I’m saying, with the shopping cart, that was already above and beyond.”
“I owed you that much.” Then she bites her lip. He is still holding on to her free hand, but where, she wonders, will she go if he releases it? Is she supposed to walk forty-odd blocks home in the dark? And why does she care? It can’t be any less risky than what she’s doing now. “Seeing as how I was responsible in the first place. Mike, I was the one who ran you over.”
The hand drops. “What? You said it was an accident—”
“It was.”
“I could have died. Shit. I knew there was something.”
“You’re fine, you said so yourself. Just a little banged up. And if you think back you’ll see I didn’t lie. I just … elided.”
“Talked your way in here on false pretenses, is what you did. Where do you get off?”
She stifles a huff. Refolds the rag to tuck the sweaty side away, but he’s propped himself up again, and won’t let her return it to his forehead. “Look. You were telling me how it’s a long way from Appalachia,” she says. “Well, imagine growing up outside L.A. with your dad designing airplanes and your mom barely speaking English. My whole life, I’ve been trying to get off the map that was laid out for me. You know the concept of utopia?”
“You’re changing the subject.”
“I’m not, I’m trying to explain. I spent my pothead teens and my early twenties committed to this idea of a better world. After that I had to scale it down to the size of a city. Then even further, to almost nothing. But I guess I’ve stayed so wrapped up in the idea of like doing something for the people in my head that I ended up not paying attention to the people right in front of me. One of which ended up being you.”
“Jenny, did you have anyone check your vital signs? Because what you’re saying makes no sense.”
Well, obviously, because making sense would require further unpacking: Mercer and William, Pulaski and Charlie, and beneath that, those nights when she’d go over to Richard’s apartment and he’d move stacks of paper off the couch to give her room to stretch out. Always more to unpack. Out goes the breath. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever read the Upanishads.”
“I’m not some kind of Asia fetishist, if that’s how you have me pegged. I see that you’re—”
“American. My parents are Vietnamese.”
“I was going to say a would-be intellectual, or righter of wrongs. But I don’t understand what that’s got to do with you hitting me with a car and then jawing your way into my apartment.”
Something turns over in her brain. “Maybe I don’t understand myself.”
For another moment, he stays silent on the mattress. “You’re stuck with your version of the night, and I’m going to have to be stuck with mine, you’re saying.”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying, no matter where I start, or how I spin it, it’s not going to help either of us settle the question of guilt. So maybe sometimes it’s better just to follow your intuition that you’re no more or less real and free and fucked up than anyone else. I mean, we’re here in this apartment, you with your bruises and me with your impression that I must have some kind of cranial trauma, but at least you’re alive. Am I making sense now?” She reaches out to touch his face, his sad, wan, confused face. And then, perhaps confused herself, leans down to kiss him, full on the mouth.
THIS IS JUST THE KIND of best-foot-forward shtick his orthopedist has warned about. The kid in front, the attendant in between, and himself, Pulaski, wincing along behind, in an endless black column getting hotter with his huffing. In fact, his foot keeps not making it all the way up to the next stair, knocking stupidly against the edge. If he’d been thinking more carefully, he would have brought some peanuts for energy. Also water. And another flashlight; at the start of their climb, Charlie had asked to requisition the elevator attendant’s, but Pulaski, feeling bad about having bullied the guy, had said no, that would be wrong. Now, if the kid should glance back, all he’s going to see are two white beams, and not the way Pulaski’s putting his poor body on the line.
Which is not even to speak of his pension. In the car on the way up here, the two-way kept crackling with calls for anyone off duty to report to the nearest precinct. Up to that point, Pulaski might have pled guilty only to some procedural liberties, but now he was crossing into outright dereliction of duty. Or, with the flash of his gun downstairs, Class D felony. And for what? A scenario so screwy it wouldn’t pass muster at a movie house, much less with Internal Affairs. How real can this bomb be, after all, if Charlie keeps stopping every few flights to suck on that inhaler? And here it comes again, a goony echo. Some partnership they make, the cripple, the asthmatic. And as they resume their climb, Charlie hews to the wall, away from the railing—acrophobic, to boot.
In his defense, though: you have to weigh probabilities against consequences. Even a single kilogram of gunpowder on an upper floor could bring the whole pile down on the surrounding blocks, overbuilt with residences in the boom years. Ash, dust, falling rock, fire. Not that he’d imagined it would be placed this high. Even so, the first thing Pulaski had done upon leading the kid out of lockup was call Sherri to warn her it might be a while. No, he couldn’t explain, honey, not right now—only there was no answer. As the line rang and rang, he knew that she’d finally done it. Gone to her sister’s in Philly. Left him. So add her, his only family, to the stack of chips teetering on this sorry table.
And now his hands are tightening their grip on the railing, hauling him up with muscles years of backyard laps have hardened. The elevator attendant lingers on a landing, panting, but Pulaski prods him along. And when Charlie takes advantage of another pause a half-dozen flights up to snatch away the attendant’s weakening flashlight, Pulaski lets him. Who gives a poop anymore about Internal Affairs? This overworked muscle, his mind or heart, feels freer than it has in years. And of this, at least, the Sherri who used to know him might approve. He reaches out now through the solid walls of the stairshaft and over the eight million stories and the harbor and the landfills to where she’d be by now, a pair of headlights zooming south on the Jersey Turnpike. Come back, he thinks. I’ll be better. That is, if he doesn’t end up in jail. Or dead. By the time Charlie’s ill-gotten flashlight starts to peter out ahead, even the dark has ceased to matter. Larry Pulaski carries his own light. It streams through his pores, he feels, lets him read the number on the door the attendant leans against, wheezing: “Stay back,” he says, and draws his weapon, and pushes through.
He isn’t sure what he’s expected, but not this: a bulletin board with a few announcements, a dead electric fan, and a strange whirring sound, as of an engine. He can’t find the source anywhere, and otherwise, the hall appears empty. “Where are we?”
“Dunno,” the attendant manages between breaths. “I brought some reporters up here earlier today. But aside from press conferences, I don’t think anybody’s really used this floor since ’75. The executives all moved down to 30 so they could start the renovations.”
“You couldn’t have mentioned this ten flights ago?”
“You had a gun.”
The whirring grows louder, and when Pulaski turns, his flashlight finds a window that should be shut but is canted open like a door. A shape breaks away from the streaks of light on the glass and comes winging low across the hallway. It is huge and black, as if dipped in tar. And as the three of them duck, a new voice, female, pipes up from the shadows. “Oh!” The light swings around, back and forth. When it settles, it is on a girl in a Rangers home jersey, crouched behind the stairhead door.
… AND WHAT YOU’RE FEELING THEN IS—
Despair. Absolute despair.
Which you’re suggesting is connected to the tragic sense, which up to that point you’ve said you felt deficient in.
Is that what we’re talking about?
It is.
I’m sorry, Mercer thinks, but I seem to have lost the thread.
It is years later, and it isn’t. He is backed up against a transformer box in an East Village park, shielding his eyes against the blue waves of the police lights. He is also, simultaneously, in a crimson-carpeted room somewhere, in a folding chair placed opposite the folding chair of the man asking the questions. In his time away, the imaginary interviewer has changed again—he is now a slight, dark-haired man, graying at the temples, with a closed-off posture and some kind of radio in his breast pocket. Only the face (and of course the ontological status of any of this, of Mercer’s feeling of great compassion for and wisdom about himself, looking back) remains obscure.
You said—
And here a white beam from the police cruiser makes a wound in the night. It rolls across strangers in varying degrees of dishabille who stand around waiting to see what will happen, as bits of charred paper drift through from somewhere, paraffin-thin. Meanwhile, the imaginary interviewer flips back through his notes. He apparently has a record of every stray thought Mercer’s ever had. There must be two dozen legal pads stacked in his corduroy lap. An amplified voice from behind the light says something that includes the word “disperse.” Mercer can’t quite hear it over the interviewer. Who has chosen, admittedly, a strange time to return.
You said that for you, the poet’s job, “preeminently” was the word you used, was to find things to praise, but that the praise had to have a background, a canvas to exist upon. And here you say that this background has to be, quote, “a sense first-hand of the overwhelming probability of there being nothing at all.” A.k.a. the tragic sense. Whereas what you had was merely “adolescent self-pity.” End quote.
I said that?
I can give you a date, if you like. This was late October of 1977.
But it’s only July.
Hmm …
The interviewer withdraws into an archival fog. Still, Mercer wonders, does he have it now, this tragic sense? When he looks at the crowd dispersing here, is the loneliness he feels really an aberration, or is it the norm? Except the crowd has stopped dispersing. In fact, one of the onlookers is marching toward the police cruiser: the lone woman, the one he thought was in disguise. Her posture is grim, resolute, like a celluloid cowboy’s, and if there remains something covert about her, he can’t place it; that beer has gone straight to his head. “Hands up! Hands up!” the squad car says. And now in its polished hood her reflection can be discerned, backed by liquid flames from the trashcan. Tall in life, she looks impossibly small when doubled in light, the blue, the orange. She reaches down to hike up her miniskirt. Or rather, he does. Mercer sees what’s next a beat ahead of its actual happening.
Then the first splash of urine hits the cruiser’s hood, and with all due respect to the engine, the ABBA, and the murmur of the men around him, it is the only sound. It positively thunders. Mercer can see the precise look on his mother’s face when the vice squad calls to say her son has been picked up in a dragnet. Public lewdness, possession of a controlled substance, resisting arrest … No, not that son; the good one. Still, he cannot help admiring what’s happening. The transvestite is patiently waggling off the last drops in full view of the faceless black windshield. Then, from somewhere under the trees, someone wings a bottle at the cop car. It goes wide of the mark and shatters on the path, but the next one hits square-on, knocking out a light. And you have to hand it to the man in the miniskirt. Even when the siren bloops, even when the megaphone sizzles to life again, s/he stands his/her ground. A fusillade of further bottles makes effervescent bursts all around.
Whereupon the cop car reverses in a hurry, engine whining, misery lights still a whirl. People salute with middle fingers, and when they are gone break into cheers. And as the vacuum the cops have left draws people in, the applause does not die, but becomes general, rhythmic, gathering strength as those who have fled into the bushes return. Someone climbs on top of a bench and clasps hands like Muhammad Ali, and a roar goes up that can probably be heard for blocks.
“They thought the old rules still applied, but they fucked up, didn’t they?” Voices shout unintelligibly in response. Mercer can’t quite tell which is his own—only that the one now exhorting the crowd is not the transvestite, whom he’s lost track of. There’s something about power. Something about belonging. And ultimately: “Tonight, we’re taking this city back.”
Already a formation is flowing toward the park gates, as though there might be other cops out there to confront. Or formation is the wrong word, it’s more like a force of nature, pressure bursting from an underground spring. The guy is right: the streets out here belong to them now, if they didn’t already. And it’s not just the queens of the East Village; when Mercer looks he sees punk rockers, shorn of head, and some Latinas from around the way, and even a couple of insalubrious old hobos falling into line, howling at the moon.
But then at the corner of Houston, they encounter a howl equal and opposite to their own, and headed in the other direction. It’s that law-and-order demonstration from earlier today, and it’s ten times as large. Candles and flashlights and torches, tee-shirts soaked in kerosene and tied around broomhandles, bob like little boats on a sea of darkness. Or one big boat, a Flying Dutchman, aimlessly haunting downtown for the last however many hours, waiting for something to collide with. Here, in the middle of backed-up Houston, they’ve found it. From one side of the boulevard or the other, a chant arises. TAKE IT BACK! Which half of the crowd it’s coming from is hard to say, because the other half picks it up, more echo than answer. TAKE IT BACK! TAKE IT BACK! Mercer is not so intoxicated as not to notice the ambiguity around just who is supposed to do the taking, and from whom. But maybe this is a virtue, because by the fifth or sixth iteration, mirabile dictu, the opposing crowds have merged. It’s hard in the darkness to tell anymore the boho hobos from the petit-bourgeoisie—or to know which camp he might fall into himself. It’s as if the two halves are aligned at last, and oriented, as most hive-minds are, toward restoration.