13

“ALL THE way!” Twisted tin-can voice crackling from the sound truck. Like a parody of a fifties football coach, saying the same goddamned things—this interminable pep talk. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re going all the way. The Red Army’s on the march. All the way to Harvard Square.”

Red Army? John thought. Give me a fucking break.

A lot of the people had gone home, but plenty were still left, still on the move. The asshole in the sound truck seemed to think that he was in charge of them, but this was not anybody’s army, and it was certainly not marching—a word that implied a strategy, or at least some tactical order. The only vibe John could pick up from the kids around him was a simple need to keep on going.

He was lousy at guessing crowd sizes, but he would have said a couple thousand were still left, maybe more. On the Common, he and Pam had seen lots of people they knew, the usual faces at demonstrations, the leftover politicos who’d lost their homes—old Resistance types, SDSers who hadn’t been able to go with either PL or Weatherman, RYM II people, or the just plain unaffiliated—now brought together temporarily under the flaccid umbrella of the November Action Committee. But they were only a fraction of this freaky parade; who the rest were was anybody’s guess. The ones right around them—Pam had been talking to them—were from Dedham High, fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds out on a lark. Some of them, girls as well as boys, had brought laundry bags stuffed full of rocks. Then, not too far ahead in the pack, was a knot of dudes the straight papers would have called “youth.” They were wearing leather jackets, construction boots, and football helmets. They were carrying baseball bats.

But John and Pam’s most intimate comrade in the Red Army, their constant companion—they’d tried, but they hadn’t been able to shake her—was a plump teenager in ripped black pants. When she’d told them her name, John had thought at first she’d said “Flashlight” but, waving her pale, dimpled, oddly lovely hands in the air, she’d said, “No, no, no, man . . . Flashline.” At first glance, her waist-length hair had appeared to be braided, but when John had got a closer look, he’d seen that it was merely filthy—matted into strands like tar-soaked ropes. He hoped that Flashline had grown herself a good set of calluses; she was walking from the Boston Common to Harvard Square barefoot, and she was tripped out of her ever-loving skull. “Oh, wow,” she said in her cheery little-kid’s voice, “conglomerate Kensington, farther than fetchington, out of the fencington, out of the . . . out of the . . . Blop.”

“Right on, Flashline,” Pam told her.

As Pam had pointed out to him, women’s lib was well represented— members of the groups she called “centrist”—but, except for herself, there were no women from the Collective. What was going on today was absolutely irrelevant to them. Why should they be interested in the struggle between the men in Hanoi and the men in Washington? “A point of view to which I am not entirely unsympathetic,” Pam had said with a wry smile. What she and John were doing at the demonstration was covering it for Zygote.

“What the fuck’s happening?” somebody yelled. They’d been walking slower and slower; now they bumped to a halt. John could see the end of the Harvard Bridge; it was just ahead of the sound truck. “Pigs,” somebody else yelled. John couldn’t tell if it was a warning or an explanation. Something about the parade permit.

“Get that lawyer dude up there. Where’s that fucking lawyer dude?”

“What the fuck is this? We’re cleared all the way to Harvard Square.”

The girls right around them started up a halfhearted cheer— “Hey, hey, all the way, Dedham’s going to win today!”—then collapsed into giggles.

“Oy,” Pam said to him, “this is the agency of change?” but she was grinning. She seemed to be enjoying this insanity. It was the first time in a hell of a long time that she’d seemed to be enjoying much of anything.

Pam looked as freaky as Flashline; she looked as freaky as anybody there. He didn’t know how many layers she was wearing at the end of this fine spring afternoon, still warm even though the sun was rapidly dropping out. Her top layer was an old duffel coat, the hood up, her hair hidden inside. In a thin jacket, unzipped and hanging open, he’d worked up a sweat walking, but she had gloves on—her navy-blue dress gloves, the ones with the tiny bows. She’d lost so much weight her nose looked damned near as sharp as a bird’s beak; her cheekbones were as clearly defined as tennis balls with pale pink rubber stretched over them. She looked like a scrawny scruffy starved little boy, a twelve-year-old with his eyes elaborately made up—a scary image. When you got right down to it, he thought, you’d have to say that she looked like hell.

Deep shambling roar—motorcycle cops turning around and beating it back to Boston. And cop cars right along with them—a whole phalanx of the Imperial Legions. “Piggy, piggy, piggy better GO now,” the helmeted youth chanted, banging out the time on the pavement with their ball bats, “Oink, oink . . . bang, bang . . . DEAD PIG.” Who the hell’s been organizing them? John thought. Weatherman? But no, Weatherman had gone deep underground, and these dudes didn’t have quite the fully cranked Weatherman craziness. Maybe they were the kids the NAC was supposed to be organizing—if you could call it organizing.

The clotted-up mass had been given the go-ahead, was moving again, was turning onto the bridge. Some poor son of a bitch had stalled his car there, and the kids flowed around it and sat down. Cars trying to get from Cambridge to Boston kept oozing forward; the kids pounded the fenders and windshields—nothing serious, just assing off, but the folks inside, windows rolled up, looked terrified.

“What the fuck is this?” an NAC marshal was yelling. “What the fuck is this? Is this the motherfucking front? Come on, move it. We’re going all the way to Harvard Square.”

Moving again. Leaving Boston, crossing the bridge and entering Cambridge. It felt like a significant moment, supercharged, but maybe it was just the bridge, the water, the archetype of it—“it behooves one to cross the great water”—and the sky must have dropped acid right along with Flashline, was supplying “portentous,” was supplying “ominous,” going pink-tinged and smoke-green, recreating itself as a painting from the cover of an old Galaxy magazine. John looked for Pam; she’d gone on ahead of him. He caught up to her now, saw only her silhouette, the stark outline of her hooded head with the sickly iridescent sky glowing behind her. The other silhouettes were the Dedham kids—and Flashline, of course: “Or if it’s constant, horrific content, more of it concrete, Mortifer comet . . .”

Mass Ave was lined with cops; some were just ordinary cops, but others were in full riot gear. “They got dogs,” somebody yelled.

“Dogs? What the fuck? Dogs?”

“Dogs. You know, woof woof.”

Far behind them in the crowd, a chant started up: “Free Bobby Seale, Free Bobby Seale!”

The kids right around them answered with: “Hey, hey, what do you say? Rock and roll is here to stay!”

Pam laughed. “Too fucking much.”

He didn’t know what to do about her—if there was anything he could do. She was freaking him out, had been freaking him out for a while now. In some bizarre way, they’d never been closer; except when they were asleep, their two-person council was engaged in constant dialogue, and she seemed to be working through all the shit that had been dumped on her lately, doing it the way she did everything—by adjusting her theory—but she didn’t seem to be grooving on it the way she used to. It seemed to have turned into a grim interminable job for her, and he didn’t know where she was going half the time—quoting not only Vaneigem and Debord, Emma Goldman and the sainted Rosa, but Freud, Reich, Adler, Karen Horney, Erich Neumann, Lukacs, Marcuse, Laing, Szasz, and Rollo May. Although he couldn’t quite see the big pattern yet, the things coming out of her mouth were always fascinating.

“‘Polymorphous perverse’ is an incorrect label,” she said. “Like ‘sissy’ and ‘dyke,’ it’s pejorative, just slimy with pre-judgments. A good label might be ‘nascent androgyny.’”

“Dig it,” she said, “the archetypal significance of the looking glass. Neumann says consciousness first manifests itself in girls by an attention to their own appearance. I always thought he was just another male chauvinist pig, but if you can tear the term ‘girl’ loose from biological sex, then he’s got a point.”

But everything was theoretical these days. They hadn’t made love since the townhouse explosion, and it had been damn near that long since he’d seen her naked. It had taken him a while to admit to himself that she was really doing what she was obviously doing— hiding from him. Adding layer upon layer of clothes. Changing her clothes in the bathroom with the door locked. Sleeping with her clothes on. She didn’t seem to be eating anything—unless you could count the gallons of black coffee.

Tech Square was packed with cops. Hundreds of the fuckers. Riot helmets, tear-gas guns, stone blank faces. Simply standing there, watching the crowd go by—“Piggy, piggy, piggy.” They didn’t seem to give a shit. But, no, that wasn’t right. John could feel their thick male energy, pent up and hungry for release, but they still didn’t move even when some of the kids started chucking rocks through windows of MIT buildings. Not impassive, not indifferent, certainly not bored—no, it was more like, “Go ahead, punks, we’ve got more time than you’ve got.” The sound truck—“Don’t get hung up. We’re going all the way to Harvard.”

“They thought we were going to do MIT,” Pam said. She was a small black shape with an invisible face, the lurid sky a backdrop. “The dumb shits. Who does their intelligence work, the Smothers Brothers?”

More trashing in Central Square. The Cambridgeport Bank was getting its windows remodeled. “Good choice,” Pam said. NAC marshals worked their way back through the crowd—“Hey, dig it, working people live here. Cool it, cool it. We’re going to Harvard Square where the pigs are,” and the crowd took up the chant: “Cool it, cool it, cool it.”

“The motherfuckers just don’t get it,” Pam said.

“Yeah,” John said, “nobody gets it. Tomorrow the straight press is going to blame it on Abbie.” In his speech on the Common, Abbie Hoffman had told the crowd exactly what it had wanted to hear: “Boston was the cradle of liberty . . . How many hands going to rock the cradle? How many hands going to cradle a rock?” A nice turn, John had thought—although he doubted that Abbie would be out on the street backing up his words with his body.

Through Central Square and moving steadily, nearly there. The famous end of the road, John thought—Shangri-La, Mecca, lair of the dragon, the eternal playing field where everything would be revealed. The kids were catching each other’s vibe and firing it back, the collective tension rising to whistle pitch. Shit, and it was the same damn thing that always happened to him when the action was coming down—keyed-up and frightened, he couldn’t shut off his smart-ass mouth: “OK, folks, anybody got any chickens that need their heads bit off? The Geek Army is slouching toward Harvard Square to be born.” He didn’t know if Pam had heard him over the noise—or had heard him right—but she laughed anyway. He couldn’t see any good coming out of this.

There were no cops in Harvard Square. Well, on second glance, he saw a few cops, maybe a dozen, but plain ordinary Cambridge cops. They weren’t ready, and there weren’t enough of them, and they looked scared shitless. A whole hell of a lot of people were walking into the Square. The sound truck made a last squawk—nobody could hear the message—then turned around and scooted into the thickening twilight. So much for the leadership. “Shit,” Pam said, “I don’t believe this. It’s ours.”

• • •

DENSE PRESS of the crowd, no way to go but forward—“Trash it, trash it, trash it!”—cheering from the high school kids, the women’s libbers doing the weird ululation out of The Battle of Algiers, and everywhere now, from all the shops on all the streets, that brilliant sound of windows—John heard it in silly cartoon capitals: POW, WHAM, SMASH—the shattering of clear shiny glass. Pam was yelling, quoting some famous asshole, “We are a force,” and, for once, it was true; they really did have the numbers. Demonstrators, the straight press might call them—no, probably rioters—thousands of moving bodies, more than enough to fill up the Cambridge Common, to clog the Square itself, to stop the traffic dead, to outnumber the pigs so badly they couldn’t do a thing but watch. Night had closed down the sky, and hundreds of young voices defined the Square—“One, two, three, four. We don’t want your fucking war”—and a single old voice, distant, was pleading on a bullhorn—some forlorn Cambridge cop doing his best—“I’ve got a son in Vietnam. I want to see this over as much as you do.” Jeers and boos from the Red Army.

Kids swarming onto the roof of the MTA station. Trash cans set ablaze. The news stand ripped to shit, the boards chucked into the bonfire the kids had made. A constant rain of rocks through windows—razor-brilliant splinters of light, ice on the sidewalks, the rioters’ rhinestones. Add the smoke and crackle of fires going up, more yelling and running, more chanting, more windows—POW SMASH. Krackerjacks, that purveyor of glitz and psychedelica—its elaborate stained-glass windows gone in an instant. Dudes in helmets made the first pass, smashing with their ball bats; the looters were right behind them, young kids, pouring through the broken windows, flinging out the commodified images of spectacular capitalism—skirts and tops, flamboyantly colored pants, gleaming dress shoes, purses and coats, even goddamned underwear. From Saks Fifth Avenue, from Bobbie Baker, from the Harvard Coop, from the Andover Shop. Window mannequins thrown into the street—stylish effigies of straight decadence. Kids running by with portable radios, TVs, stereo components, armloads of records. Somebody had thrown Flashline a looted peasant skirt; she’d pulled it on over her black pants, was whirling in circles, singing her song from another galaxy—“Confusion of stains, contusion of rains, conclusion of pains . . .”

“Tell me again,” Pam said, “what the fuck we’re doing here,” then, smiling, gave him Proudhon’s line from when he’d first seen the mob on the streets of Paris—“But they don’t have any ideas.”

“Yeah?” John said. “Maybe most of them don’t, but Flashline’s got plenty.”

“Right on.” They were coming up to the Northeast Federal Savings Bank. Pam stopped.

She looked at the bank, and then she looked at him. She said it in exactly the same tone she would have used for any of her flipped-around Hegelian pronouncements. She might as well have been saying, “We need a theory of incoherence to deal with the incoherence of theory,” but what she said was, “Fuck ideas.”

“Hey,” she said to one of the Dedham kids who was toting a bag, “lend me some rocks?”

Pam didn’t throw like a girl. Why was he surprised? She glanced back at him over her shoulder—self-conscious, embarrassed, excited. Christ, she was cranked to the eyeballs—and something else. Figure it out later, he told himself, and she’d already turned away from him—was throwing rocks as fast as she could haul them out of the laundry bag. Helmeted dudes joined her with bats. The bank had just become an open-air facility, and Pam was darting by him quick as a wasp.

He shambled along behind her—what, me worry?—but then saw her clawing at the burning trash in a blackened can. “Pam. Jesus!” She shot by him again before he could begin to make any sense of it, waving a burning board in her gloved hand, and sent the fire spiraling through the window of the bank. Stopped, bent over, panting, her hands on her knees.

“Pam. Pamela. What the fuck are you doing?”

“Jesus, man, that felt good.” She straightened up.

Now he saw the little kid she’d once been—the sparkling eyes, the flush, the dangerous excitement—staying up too late after the birthday party, staying up long past her bedtime And he saw the ancient crone she’d one day become, if she lived long enough—the pinched skin, the sunken cheeks and sunken eyes, the stretched flesh ready to rip away with a breath. Saw both images, each showing through the other, neither dominant. Christ, he thought, she’s sick. She’s sick as a dog. “What do you mean, fuck ideas?” he said.

She didn’t answer him. “That’s motherfucking Weatherman,” he said. “That’s what we criticized them for. Action-faction horseshit. Incoherence.”

He was waiting. He wanted to hear the theory—if there was a theory. “What are we going to say in Zygote? ‘And then we burned the bank?’”

But her torch didn’t seem to be catching. Maybe she hadn’t burned the bank after all. “What?” she said. “We’re supposed to be objective? Fuck, man, the illusion of objectivity merely objectifies the illusion.”

He was furious. “Jesus, Pam, I don’t even know what that means.”

As they stood there staring at each other, the lights went out.

It felt like he’d done it with his mind, but that wasn’t possible, was it? That wasn’t the way the real was supposed to work. “What the fuck?” he said. “Somebody cut the . . . ?”

“Oh, hell, no. The pigs have turned off the street lights, that’s all.”

“Why would they do that? Now they can’t see worth a shit.”

“What they’re going to do, they’re going to do in the dark.”

“Hey, that’s good,” he said. “That’s positively Shakespearian.”

“Oh, it’s going to be Shakespearian, all right,” and, grabbing his hand, tugged him along to check out the action. The pigs that were showing up now weren’t pathetic Cambridge cops. These were pigs from somewhere else, in full riot gear, lining up in front of the Hayes-Bick. If they kept on coming, pretty soon there might be enough of them to get the job done. “Yeah,” Pam said, flat and declarative. “Don’t worry, we’ll have plenty to say in Zygote.”

Keeping well back, a knot of demonstrators was chanting: “Where are your badges, where are your badges?” The pigs paid them no mind. But a last car—God help the crazy fuckers—was trying to inch through the Square. The pigs surrounded it, jerked the doors open, hauled the passengers out by their hair. Middle-aged guys in suits—protesting, pleading, waving their arms. Without a moment’s hesitation, the pigs clubbed them down.

The Hayes-Bick was still lit—so were the other restaurants—but on the street only smoky fires with fat sparks going up, trash cans and one honest-to-God bonfire. Up to this point, it had felt like nothing more serious than a sports event gone out of control—the Academy versus Raysburg High—but the game had changed, and things were about to get heavy.

• • •

“WALK, WALK, walk.” He slowed to a jog, looked back for Pam. He’d got a good healthy whiff of gas that time—burning eyes, churn in the belly—and it had scared the bejesus out of him. If he ever got the full dose, there’d be no choking it back, he’d barf up his guts for sure—and, Christ, what was happening now? Pam had sunk to her knees. He ran back for her, scooped her up. Jesus, she felt little. “Fuck. Are you all right?”

“Yeah. Yeah, sure.” She was panting.

What was happening to his dancer, his quicksilver girl? He wanted her off the street. “Are you OK? I mean really?”

“Yes, I’m OK, for fuck’s sake.”

“Come on, enough’s enough. For what? Let’s go home.”

“Fuck that shit,” she said. “We’ve got to see how it ends.”

The pigs had cleared the Square four times. They always did it the same way—formed a military line, held it a minute or two, and then advanced. They fired gas canisters. The demonstrators fired back paving stones and bricks and bottles. The pigs weren’t bothering to make more than a handful of arrests; they just beat the motherfucking shit out of anybody they could catch. And they must have wanted the game to go on forever; they never blocked any of the side streets, left the demonstrators free to melt away through those open passageways, regroup, and take the Square again. It had been going on for hours. John hadn’t liked capture-the-flag much when he’d been in summer camp, and he liked this warped-out grown-up version even less, but he couldn’t do what he’d done at camp—simply walk away to the crafts table and join the girls.

Now they were back at Harvard, hard to know where they were, hard to keep track of anything in the dark, following the crowd— coughing, guts churning. The gas by these dorms was as thick as the London fog in a Fu Manchu book. “Water! Water!” Some helpful souls were passing out soaked towels. He took one and wrapped it around his mouth, and they were walking away from the worst of it; he could breathe again, or almost breathe.

Pam, pressing a towel to her face, gestured with her head—rows of yellow lit windows, Harvard boys, leaning out like jack o’ lanterns, giving them the V sign. “Music, music,” somebody yelled, as the good guys, pig-free for the moment, were streaming through the gentle lanes of Harvard University. Laughing, chanting, yucking it up, taking a break before going back to the action.

They’d asked for music, and music’s what they got—sixty watts at full crank, the Stones bawling out “Street Fighting Man.” The kids cheered, waved clenched fists or V signs—“Right on!” A street fair, a frat party, a freshman’s conception of the revolution, a Mardi Gras, for Christ’s sake—all these loony adolescents, some of them wearing looted finery tied around their waists, on their heads. A tall boy just in front of them was wearing a pair of pink lace panties stretched over his football helmet. So damn young, and they kept on coming. More now than when they’d started. Where the hell were they coming from? Riding in on the MTA?

Everybody knows what a mob is, he thought. Yeah, he could write that in Zygote—a mob is something really scary. A mob is a dark, anarchic, murderous, terrifying mass with all the orderly laws of civilization stripped away—humanity reduced to its lowest level, a seething amorphous blob of pure animal evil. But whatever they were in now—this living civic body—it was not a mob. There was no name for it—or no name that he knew. It was a fluid, flexible organism, continually in motion, continually redefining itself, and yes, of course it was frightening, but it was also exhilarating. Polarization had made things simple, the sides as clearly defined as the “shirts” and the “skins” at camp, and you had to trust the people on your side, whoever they were, because you didn’t have any choice—just as they had to trust you. There was no room now for bystanders. If you were on the street, you were in the game—as the straight reporters found out when the pigs clubbed them to the pavement.

He sensed a motion coming down the line—a diversion, something heavy. Then saw it—off to one side, three cops in full riot gear. The motherfuckers had gone freelance, were chucking bricks through the windows of a Harvard dorm. The helmeted youth were not about to let that one go by—“Hey, pigs, having fun? Piggy, piggy, piggy.”

The cops swung around to confront the kids. “Come on, chicken shits. Come on, come on, come on,” making clucking noises, gesturing—come on, come to me, come to daddy. From the broken Harvard windows, a rain of beer bottles erupted onto the pigs’ heads, and the helmeted youth waded in, half a dozen of them, swinging ball bats. John saw one pig go down. From somewhere else—“Pigs, pigs, pigs.” He shot Pam a look. They turned and ran.

• • •

HE DIDN’T have a clue what street they were on, but they were free and clear again, slowing to a walk. Dark shapes were clotting up, and he bumped into the back of one of the Dedham kids, a tall boy with the beginnings of a wispy beard—“Hey, man, what a fucking trip.” Voices assembling all around him, laughing, yelling. They must have run far from Harvard—no more jack o’ lantern faces—and it was darker than the city had any right to be, no light but stars and a hunk of moon. The shapes were congealing into individual people he was getting to know pretty damn well—yeah, their affinity group. Pam had stopped again to bend over and pant. “You all right?” he said, his hand on her shoulder.

“Yeah,” she said. “Sure. You all right?”

“Yeah, I’m all right, but . . . Jesus, the gas. Come on, Pamela, let’s go home. This shit’s going to go on all night.”

“No. Not yet.”

A shaft of light from a high window—it was making a long, large shape on the street gleam like patent leather. As they came abreast of it, they saw what it was—a cop car. Parked. Not a pig anywhere around it. Big and official and deadly and black. Shiny. “Motherfuckers,” Pam said and kicked the fender.

“Come on,” he said.

“Hey,” she said, “if we get separated, go straight back to the apartment, you dig? Like fail-safe. No matter what happens, you dig? I’ll meet you there.”

Oh, he thought, you’re planning on losing me, are you, Pamela? Think again, babe. “Yeah, sure,” he said.

Now they were walking into music, but what music? Weird. And there was a crackle of fire coming up. He was sure that he’d been everywhere in and around Harvard Square, but he’d never seen that particular street before—yellow lights high up in the medieval black, and a smoky bonfire in the middle of everything. A Breughel painting, an ancient wood block, a city that lived at the edge of dreams, and the music was more than merely unlikely—it was fucking impossible—but he couldn’t deny what he was hearing. It was Greek music. A single man was dancing to it.

Acid flash. Jagged edge where the real had sheared off. An old man with white hair. Rapt, intent, inward face. Body drawn upward into an elegantly focused line. Arms raised. Stepping in a ritual pattern that might have been thousands of years old. A Greek man doing a Greek dance to Greek music, lit by a bonfire set somewhere near Harvard University in the Year of Our Lord Nineteen-Hundred and Seventy. “Beautiful,” Pam said. “Motherfucking beautiful. You see why we’re still out here?”

The kids were pouring into the scene, clapping along with the music, chanting, “Go, Zorba, go,” and another bunch, farther back, responding in the same rhythm, “One two three four we don’t want your fucking war.” The old man danced on, deep into his own thing, and John thought how profoundly and naturally and eternally people were meant to be utterly harmless.

“Pigs, pigs, pigs.”

“Oh, fuck,” John said, “here we go again.” The heavy-duty ones, the mean ones in full-riot-gear—coming from the far end of the street, from the direction where the crowd had been headed, pacing forward slowly in one of their orderly, military, street-clearing lines. John looked back to where the old Greek man had been dancing, and there was nobody. The music was still playing, but the old man was gone.

“Let’s split,” John said. Pam didn’t answer him. “What’s the fucking point?” he said, but he knew it was hopeless.

The organism called “our side” was already forming its own ragged line, gathering up bricks and rocks and paving stones, preparing to make a stand—for however long it could make one—and here was Flashline right on time, trailing a dozen teenage girls behind her. She whirled into the empty space where the old man had been, dancing to the beat of his ancient music, the girls whirling along behind her, circling the fire.

The pigs were firing gas—PWAK, PWAK, PWAK. It took John a moment to figure out what they were doing. They weren’t aiming in front of the crowd, but higher, firing their canisters behind the crowd. Yeah, they were laying down gas on the only way out. When the crowd ran, it would have to run through it. “The bastards,” he said.

Now one of the pigs—John couldn’t believe it—was aiming directly into the people. PWAK. A canister hit a boy in the chest, sent him sprawling, howling. Somebody grabbed it up—hissing evil—and threw it back. The kids were throwing everything they had at the pigs. Dudes in helmets, NAC people, even some crazy teenagers—running toward the police line. Jesus, insanity—the air full of bricks and stones. The pigs stopped, holding their formal line, drew themselves up, waiting to absorb the charge and then roll on through the demonstrators, flatten the goddamned punks—and that same pig, that rotten sadistic prick, was aiming directly at the people again. PWAK. That time he got no one, the canister shooting back at him like a volleyed tennis ball.

The son of a bitch was aiming again. Flashline was dancing in front of the fire, facing the pigs, her arms raised, imitating the vanished old man. Oh, fuck. “Flashline!” John yelled, and the canister struck her full in the face.

John ran for her. Sprawled on her ass, her mouth a huge O, scream pouring out of it, explosion of blood—oh, God, her fucking nose. John grabbed her to haul her up. She clutched his shirt. A helmeted dude grabbed the other side of her—a bearded NAC guy. Flashline had become a siren they couldn’t turn off. “Get her the fuck out of here,” Pam yelled.

NAC dudes, three or four of them. Picked up Flashline, ran with her. John and Pam ran along with them. “Shit. Fucking bad, man. Bummer. Infirmary.”

“She’s tripping,” John yelled at them.

“Holyoke?”

“No. Pigs. Won’t let anybody through.”

“The church?”

“Yeah. Move it.”

Pam just ahead of him. Stumbling, crying—“Shit, shit, shit.” She stopped, and he slammed into her, nearly knocked her down. She spiraled away, howling, clawed at herself, yanked her hood back, shaking out her hair. Unknown stretched face gleaming with tears. “Fuck,” she yelled at him. The NAC dudes were running with Flashline straight into the cloud of gas. They vanished into it. For a second or two, he could still hear Flashline screaming. “Pam?” but she was already gone. She’d spun again—a fabulous pirouette. She was running straight at the police line.

He ran after her. Jesus, she was fast. The pigs were throwing shit back. A rain of shit. Bottles smashing. Rocks and bricks. Pam was grabbing up shit and throwing it—softball girl, outfielder, star of the team. Coiling with each throw, her whole body into it, and, Jesus, she wasn’t going to stop—a goddamned kamikaze charge. She was going to run straight into the pigs, and they’d beat the piss out of her.

Mouth full of lead. Sprinting nightmare. Almost had her. But fuck, she was gone again—one jump ahead. Coiled back to throw, and he grabbed her waist, lifted her off the feet—howling, kicking. “Pamela! Jesus fuck, Jesus fuck, Pamela.” PWAK, PWAK, PWAK— canisters falling all around them. Gas, fucking gas. Set her down. Spun at him, clawing.

“Pamela. Fuck.” Pushed her back, pushed her the way he wanted her to go. The other way.

Jolt of something in her eyes. Then she was running. The right way, thank God. He was right behind her. But no way he could keep up. Pamela—that darting needle he’d seen before. Hey, great stuff, he thought. She could thread any crowd—and she’d got the message, was making her break. Darting through kids and NAC dudes. Those fuckers were running full tilt, but she was running faster. She ran into the gas cloud and was gone.

Fast, fast, fast, he chanted to himself, gulped air, held his breath, hit the cloud, ran into it, and the gas bit down. Nothing. Fog. Blind. Running. Kicked stone, brick, some goddamned thing. Nearly down. Caught balance. Staggering. Had to breathe. Poison. Lungs ripped, slaughtered. Just keep running. Breathing Clorox and steel shards, running free of it, but he was done—slowing to a jog, shuffling forward, bent at the waist. He jerked his head, twisted his head, and barfed his guts out. Firing it away from him, BWAH. Had to stop, panting. Sweat. Swimmy misery. Impaled on a drive shaft. Wiped barf off his jeans—stinking clumps—flung it off his fingers. Stomach still jerking in on itself. Don’t fall, for Christ’s sake. Keep moving. Sounds of kids barfing. “Jesus, Jesus. Oh, fuck. Water. Oh, Jesus Christ,” and a girl’s voice going, “Mommy, mommy.” Other voices—heavy, male—“Move it, move it, move it.”

Not too far back, gas guns firing, and he was jogging, wobbly, dizzy. Eyes burning, saw Pamela. The first one to get there. To the shiny death machine. Of course she was the first one to get there, to that motherfucking police car. There was nothing left in her head to slow her down. She was hammering the windshield with a brick. The smash. Her voice. Lower-pitched than a scream but loud enough. Shocked him because he’d never heard a voice like that come out of her. Yeah, it was plenty loud enough. “TRASH IT.”

“Pamela,” he yelled, running toward the car. She hadn’t broken through yet, glass spiderwebbing out from her blows. “TRASH IT.”

Some kids too sick, but helmeted dudes drawn like filings to a magnet. Rocks on the windshield, the windows, the fenders. Guys using ball bats. Glass. POW, SMASH. There went the headlights, the taillights. Metal, the car a huge drum. Pam lifted her brick high over her head and brought it straight down. It penetrated. She stood there openhanded. Perplexed. Saddened kid in the playground. Lost her toy. Brick had gone straight through, was inside the car. She looked up, looked right at him, but he didn’t know if she could see him. He shot a look back for pigs, but none yet. He ran toward her.

“FLIP IT,” she yelled. Bent her knees, grabbed the bottom of the car like she could lift it herself. Then so many kids swarming over the car, it was blotted out. Seething boiling mass of people, and, miraculously, the goddamn thing began to rise, to levitate, and faster than he would have thought possible, the fucker was on its side. Glass shattering, metal tearing, and it was over, was upside down. The goddamned fucking police car was upside down. Kids cheering like somebody had just scored a touchdown. John smelled gasoline, pouring out, pooling. “TORCH IT,” Pam yelled. She was running straight at him. “MATCHES.”

“Jesus, Pam.”

“Fucking matches, man. Matches, matches, matches. Give me the fucking matches.” She was all over him, pawing in his pockets, a bird pecking, a bony flurry. Gone, her bootheels hammering, jeans flapping, right to the edge of the spreading pool. “Get back,” kids were yelling, “Jesus fuck.” The crowd got bent the other way, surged back, away, as Pam knelt to the gasoline, lit a match and threw it. Out. “Pam!” Nothing. “STOP IT.” He was just too fucking slow.

She was bending down, inches away. Gasoline sheet, spreading— Jesus, the smell of it. Already lighting. The next match. Memorize fire-trickle from her gloved fingers.

Flame at the pool licked itself, curled. John grabbed at her and yanked. Flame cleared its throat and coughed—a deep throaty HUMPF. She pulled away from the flame, pulled away from him, ran ahead. Turned back, reached for him, and he risked a glance back. Saw—useless blip—a mythic image, tower of fire.

Looped and jerked, something at his hips. She was. Dragging him by his belt. “John, John, John.” He stumbled, she caught him— stutter of bones, too fucking little—they both went down, knees and elbows on the pain. Up again, go.

Flame took a breath and inhaled itself—CAWOOMF, FWAH— blew through the real. Heat there, faster than they were, running motherfuckers. Solid broken, disestablished and whizzing, metal hail, black high, and another look saw the black curling. Flame, street lit, bonfire, car’s ruined core to the fog hole. Open. Through. Pigs poured like shit.

Stench. Gasoline, burning rubber, fucking gas. Boots pounding. FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU. Thud, nightsticks, ball bats. Thud, thud. Screaming. MOTHERFUCKER. And heat. FUCK YOU, MOTHERFUCKER. Thud, thud, thud. No mind. Run.

• • •

NOT A clue where he was—Mt. Auburn Street, maybe, was where he was—but far from Harvard, avoiding crowds, watching for pigs, ducking into shadows at the first sign of another human being—any human being. He’d been walking. He’d been walking for a long time. Fighting to reassemble himself. Maybe he should just keep on walking, point himself away from this insanity and walk until the city lit itself up again. His head was stuttering with a million ragged thoughts, but he couldn’t get them to stick together. Here was one thought: if he got through this shit, he’d never be afraid of anything again, not ever, not in his entire life—fear so big now the entire world was fear. And here was another thought: just how fucking much adrenaline could his system take before all his circuits blew? Maybe they’d already blown. He should do something serious and meaningful, but he couldn’t figure out just what that might be. He’d given up searching for Pamela, his lost Maenad. Meet her at the apartment, she’d said. Yeah, right. How the fuck was he supposed to get there? Pigs everywhere.

When he’d felt the club on his head, he’d thought, hey, that’s not bad. “A light glancing blow,” his absurdly chatty mind had labeled it. He touched it now, winced—a lump the size of half a tennis ball just behind his left ear. It left blood on his fingers. Shit. Should he try to see somebody? Like a doctor dude? Where? At one of the beleaguered infirmaries? But he hadn’t been knocked out. He’d just been knocked down—flattened, face on the pavement—and kicked. They hadn’t even kicked him that hard. Not really. If they’d wanted to cream him, they could have done it—but they’d had other things on their minds. Fighting off NAC dudes, for starters. But he was OK. Well, maybe he was OK. Fuck, he didn’t know if he was OK. Anybody out on the street tonight without a helmet was just fucking nuts.

A plan, that’s what he needed. Something coherent. The coherence of our critique implies the . . . Oh, fuck, give me a break. OK, start looping back toward home. Don’t go directly. Stick to the side streets, get back to the apartment by any means necessary. Shit, and he’d been wrong, his judgment badly off. He hadn’t wandered very far from Harvard. The Yard was right over there, through that gate—closed and locked. The sidewalk was slippery with vomit, and a dozen kids were stumbling toward him—teenagers. The boys holding up the girls, the girls weeping. They must have been gassed. Yeah, he was getting a whiff of it again—the fumes of the barf machine—and he knew exactly where he was. The apartment was not even half a block away, thank Christ.

He could hear the same old shit going down—the pigs versus our side going into overtime. Close, maybe just a few streets over—and for what? Hey. Some pigs, wandering loose, aimed his way. He jumped back, felt for a wall, found it, found something even better, a doorway, made himself into a black paper cut-out. He counted six of them. They were actually talking to each other like normal human beings. He couldn’t make out what they were saying. They walked right on by him. He couldn’t stand it anymore, sprang out of his hole and ran. Knew he shouldn’t be running—he was calling attention to himself by running—but he just fucking didn’t give a shit. Mindless, made it to the front door of Pam’s building. Worried his key into the lock, jumped through the door, slammed it behind him, pulled until he heard the lock click into place.

She was sitting huddled on the stairs. Lit by the single harsh overhead light, she looked like a small burrowing animal, all eyes. “Jesus,” he said, “are you all right?”

She didn’t answer but stood up. He wrapped his arms around her and squeezed, felt all the padding she’d wrapped around herself. After a moment, she hugged him back—lightly. It felt what? Perfunctory? Tentative? “Yeah, I’m all right,” she said—quiet, composed, absolutely expressionless voice. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, sure. I got hit, but fuck. I think it’s . . . Yeah, I’m all right.”

She allowed him to lead her up the stairs and into their apartment. “I was so worried about you,” she said in the same spooky voice. “I was afraid something had happened to you.”

The fear had been like a tourniquet; now that he was safe inside their familiar white box, he felt it loosening, the first trickle coming back that might eventually resemble human life. Words seemed to be coming with it—“Jesus, that was heavy . . . That’s as close as I want to get to . . . Jesus Christ, Pam, you scared the absolute living shit out of me.” He pulled off his boots, was halfway through stripping off his stinking jacket, and he was stopped. She’d fallen to her knees as softly as a pillow. Jesus, he should do something about that. His mind wasn’t working. She’d extended one hand, the palm pressed against the wall. “Hey,” he said.

He picked her up. She was so fucking light. “You stay here, baby,” she said. “I’m going to go back.”

“What? Are you fucking nuts?”

“It’s not over yet.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

She hung limply in his arms. She smelled as foul as he did. He should get them both into a shower. Yeah, it was that simple—he had to start somewhere. He pushed her hood back and released a pungent nasty smell. The stench of burnt hair. Horrified, he pawed at her hair, ran his fingers through it. No, it hadn’t burned, but it had been close. He could smell the fire in it. “Don’t,” she said.

She wanted to be free. It would have taken scarcely four ounces to hold her, but he let her go. She pulled back from him and sank to the floor. Only someone that ballet-limber could have arrived in such a sadly splayed, hip-sprung collapse. “Nobody hit me,” she said. “Jesus, those motherfuckers kept trying. They really wanted to. But none of them got me.” She laughed. “I’m unscathed. Jesus, man, they were beating the fucking crap out of everybody, and they didn’t get me once. Not once. I’ve got to go back.”

Oh, fuck, he thought, she’s in shock. Badly. “Pamela,” he said as gently as if he’d been talking to a sick child, “you can’t even stand up.”

“Yeah, I can’t, can I?”

He peeled off his vomit-soaked jeans, threw them behind him, and his shirt. Yeah, shower. That was right. He sank to his knees in front of her. “Come on, baby.” He tugged at one of her boots.

She tried to crawl away from him. “Don’t. Please don’t.”

“For Christ’s sake, Pam, you’re not going out there again.” He pulled her boots off. She made a crying sound like “Oh, oh, oh, oh,” crawled away, rolled up, hugging herself. “Come on, baby, you’re filthy.”

He took one of her hands, drew it toward him. She let him do it. The navy blue glove was cut in a dozen places, blood in the cuts. He peeled off her gloves. Her hands were cut and scraped. He lifted her up. He wasn’t sure that she could stand on her own two feet—that is, simply stand there, erect, like a primate—but she did it. He unfastened her duffel coat, and she started to cry—not just making the sounds but for real, her head hanging down and tears pouring into her eye sockets. “It’s OK, it’s OK,” he said and tugged at her coat.

“Please don’t,” she said, but she raised her arms like a child.

Her took her coat off. And then her sweater, and then a boy’s shirt and a t-shirt and another t-shirt. Naked, she pushed him away, crying, and turned away from him. He stared, paralyzed. Well, what the fuck had he expected? She hadn’t been able to hide her face. Yeah, fuck, he’d been seeing her face. He could have guessed what her body would look like—

No. That was wrong. There was no way he could have guessed what her body would look like. Stripped. Bone. Hideous deep pockets in her like holes. And bone. She’d turned away, but he’d seen the horrible shapes of her hipbones, the deep hole under her ribcage, her stomach muscles exposed under stretched white skin—a vivisection, an anatomy lesson still miraculously kept alive.

She wandered away from him, hugging herself—“Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.” Her knees and elbows were lumps of bone. Just by looking, he could count her vertebrae. For God’s sake, don’t exaggerate, he told himself. He was a witness, and he had to see, and remember, and tell the truth—to himself, and to her if she would ever listen to him—so he had to be exact. She didn’t look as bad as a Dachau victim—not yet, she didn’t. But she was close, and that was exactly where she was headed, and once she got there, she wouldn’t be able to come back, and then she would die. She crawled into bed and pulled the blankets over herself.

• • •

I CAN’T deal with this shit, he thought. The whole rotten works fell on him then, an unbearable load. It was all just too fucking much, and he couldn’t understand how he could have made it that far. Yeah, he was fucked good, he was nothing. Christ, he had to lie down. He got into bed with her. She was still crying. She didn’t maintain her one foot of space, pressed herself into him. Weird. She was as cold as something dragged out of the river. “Oh, baby,” he said and rubbed her hollowed-out back. Her breath stank. It was the smell of her body eating itself.

John fought to stay awake. He should think of something to do, something to say. He should study the situation, make concrete plans. He should tell her that she goddamn well had to start eating. He should tell her that things were going to get better. But his body was desperate for sleep. The soft blurring of her breath, the cold hard shape of her, the memories of the street—all of it kept winding itself around him like thick dark cords binding him to the bed. Every few minutes he’d wake with a start, not sure where he was. First he’d think, Christ, what do I do now? Because he knew he had to do something. Then he’d think, no, everything’s ruined, totally fucked. Everything’s so wrong it can never be fixed.

Later he woke from a murderous sleep and knew he’d been out for hours. His head was pounding like hell, and he was dying of thirst. He got up, drank two glasses of water, brought a glass to Pam. Her eyes were open. He was afraid she wouldn’t drink the water, but she did. He crawled back into bed with her. She started to say something. Her voice was hoarse. She cleared her throat. “You know what my mother used to tell me? She’d say, ‘Pamela, you should have been scraped from the side of my womb.’”

• • •

HE WOKE to thick oppressive heat. The pain in his head was beating him damn near blind. He sat up, and the movement hurt him, the blast of light. Searing. When was he going to stop drinking so much? Sweat it out, you asshole, he told himself. The Seventeen he’d been reading was lying next to him on the bed, and there was something seriously wrong with the cover, something peculiar and disturbing. The model was wearing white ankle socks with navy Mary Janes, a cute navy winter coat with tight little navy dress gloves—and that wasn’t right. But then he thought, oh, wait a minute. They’re just showing the fall clothes. That’s all it is. There’s nothing wrong with that.

He threw the magazine aside, jumped up, and stepped out onto his balcony. The day was huge, close, and stifling. He lit a cigarette and stared down at Front Street. It was empty and silent. The light was appalling, a hideous smeary dazzle, and he heard—from far away, maybe from all the way out in the middle of the river—a sound like a car horn. Well, not like that but something like that. It didn’t make any sense, but the message was clear enough. He had to get out of there.

He walked quickly down the hall and found his father in the living room reading the paper. “Hey, Dad,” he said, “can I have the car?”

His father looked up—freshly shaven jaws, sparkling chocolate-brown eyes, big con-man’s grin. He smelled like Vitalis and Chesterfields and whiskey. He fished the car keys out of his trouser pocket, spun them around his finger once—a twirl of light—and tossed them. John felt the hard metal land in the palm of his hand. “You’re only young once,” his father said with a wink, and John woke to the stink of the bed. He was too hot under the blankets, sweating, and Pam was clinging to him. He didn’t know what time it was, but it was full daylight—maybe afternoon. The knot on his head was damned near killing him, and he thought, I’ve got to get out of here.

He disentangled her bony arms, slid out of bed, pressed his bare feet into the hardwood floor—feeling for the real. Shit, the dream had been just as real as this real. Why should he be stuck with this real when almost any other real would do?

Out from behind the Japanese screen, confronting the what? He paced back and forth, swinging his arms, hauling the air down to the bottoms of his lungs, trying to get himself back into himself— whoever the hell that was. Sore in a dozen places. Jesus, his head. He drank a glass of milk, took two aspirin. His body was telling him he needed salt. He stripped a banana, salted it and ate it. Back behind the screen to check on her. Eyes open. Huge shining eyes surrounded by black smears. Not sad or frightened. Not anything that he could see. “Are you awake?” Nothing.

He paced to the front window and back again. “Hey. This is motherfucking ridiculous. You’ve got to eat something.” Nothing.

She was looking right at him. “What the fuck are you thinking?” Nothing.

I can’t deal with this shit, he thought.

He walked to the front window and stood, looking out. The sun was shining merrily away just as though everything in the universe was just Jim dandy, just peachy keen. Jesus, his father in the dream had been as real as anybody. When his mother had called to tell him that his father was dying, he hadn’t flown into Pittsburgh but into Detroit—a logical destination for a Canadian. Every card in his wallet had identified him as Don McCann from Mississauga, Ontario. That’s how he’d got to Raysburg, and that’s how he’d got back to Toronto. Christ, he had to get back to Toronto now. It was too late to do it today, but maybe tomorrow.

He went to look at her again. “How do you feel? Are you all right? Do you feel like hell?” Nothing.

When John’s father had been dying, he hadn’t been conscious most of the time. He’d been fighting emphysema. During those brief periods when he’d seemed to be awake—his eyes open, searching, obviously aware of something—he’d done nothing but try to breathe. If he’d known that John was there, it hadn’t seemed to matter to him one way or the other. He’d said a few things, things like, “Gotta shit,” and, “Hurts.”

“Pamela,” John said. “You’ve got to talk to me.” Nothing.

Oh, fuck this, he thought, I’m gone.

Back at the window, staring at the damnably cheery sunshine. He wasn’t a Christian, so he didn’t believe in sin, but as a Buddhist— even a half-assed Buddhist—he’d always tried to find Right Action. He knew that if he left her now, it might be the worst thing he’d ever done in his life. “Pam,” he called to her. “Where the fuck are you? Come on, give me a sign.” Nothing.

No, he really could not deal with this shit. He grabbed up Ethan’s old Stella, sat down on a kitchen chair, and kicked into “Spike Driver’s Blues” hard and fast, stamping out the time with his bare left foot. That tune slid right on into “Reuben” and, after that, he didn’t bother to think of the names of the tunes. He didn’t give a shit about making a mistake because there were no mistakes. Everything he was playing was right—even these strange twisty variations with their unexpected pull-offs and loopy slides and bass runs, even the tunes that were like nothing he’d ever heard before. The music rolled on, nameless and wordless; he could never get to the end of it. He played for over an hour. He set the guitar aside, jumped up, and ran directly to her. “Pamela,” he said, “you’re not a mistake.”

She closed her eyes. Then opened them. Back of the real, something changed. The light. She made a gesture—pushing. It took him a moment to get it. She didn’t want him to see her naked.

He walked to the window, heard her get up, heard her cry, making that terrible “oh, oh, oh, oh” sound again.

He had to see. Her sad stripped body was standing directly in the center of the bathroom scale by her bed. Her eyes were searching for him. She pointed down. The scale read 89 pounds. She seized his hands with her cold hands. “Help me.”