IX

TS FINAL S FLICKERING, the STREET’S MILK & THINGS sign lit the parking lot in a milky pallor. The store’s lights were off. Debbie tried the door, found it locked, cupped her hands to the glass, and looked inside. Pop sat behind the counter, the great mound of him motionless in the dark. His hands were not madly gesticulating, no invectives poured from his mouth, no perspiration darkened his poncho. He seemed sad and hunched, a shadow of himself. She’d never seen him like this.

Debbie knocked. He looked up. Fear flashed in his eyes. She waved. The look faded, he nodded and came around to let her in.

Mr. Street, hi, sorry, said Debbie, trying to steel the boozy slur from her voice. I rushed here as quick as I could.

I dilated your phone number, I spoke to someone —

Adine.

— whom told me of your presence at this drinking bar. After localizing the number I called recurrently, and called. Ultimately upon the midnight hour a man responds, and thence you are. Should I have slept in my store, what of the Movement then?

Mr. Street, sorry. I would’ve come quicker if I’d known —

They took my house. After a quartered century hencefrom, they took my house.

I know. I know.

The men who took it — I lend you insurance, was I younger . . . With his hand Pop made the chopping motion of a cheese slicer.

We should try to catch the last train. Do you have stuff?

He held up a plastic bag. It seemed to be filled with candy.

Pop locked up and led Debbie around back. Where the houseboat had been a handpainted LAKEVIEW HOMES RESTRIBUTION MOVEMENT placard lay in the gravel, which Pop collected and stroked as a sad dad might a photo of his lost child. My domicidal return can be petitioned on Monday, he said. After this Jubilee has transposed.

This is so unacceptable. I’ve got a friend who’s a lawyer —

They are desirous for my eradification. Sincerely! For I am the lone recalcitrant of history, of what presupposed what is. I’m the sole one who cares anymore.

Debbie, following Pop down the path into People Park, said, Well.

Lark! I’m the sole one.

Are we supposed to be in the park after midnight? I thought there were Helpers —

They can’t tell me whence to be or not be, said Pop.

Okay, said Debbie, swaying down the path behind him, still drunk.

They bulldoze my home and then sagefully proclaim this park better? Bah. To whom did they consult among us, the populace, the impersonatory people? This Mayor cares about people as the eagle of malignancy cares about the earth from which it plucks the worm of hope — the earth this worm has toiled, stay mindful.

I will, said Debbie.

The night sky had clouded over, the moon glowed dully behind a smoky scrim. Debbie followed Pop into the lightless common — a vast pool of spilled ink.

This here, he said, was the beginning of the alley behind F-Block, I impersonated unit F-802. All the way aghast this hill were backyards. Of course it was planified then also, there was no hill. Perhaps difficult to visualize from here.

I think Adine’s family was in Block H, said Debbie. That was near your shop, right?

But Pop was on the move again, heading around Crocker Pond to the Slipway, which they’d climb to Parkside West Station. At the boathouse he stopped to catch his breath. The clouds parted: a perfect full moon splashed little crags of silver upon the pond.

You okay?

He nodded, produced a blowholish grunt. Atop the hill the train station glowed like a spaceship. See, you see? He gestured vaguely with his bag of candy, gasping. Thence was my place. You see?

Do you mean when you had your boat in Crocker Pond or —

They made me move from the pond! Claiming that upon my own property would be an endurable arraignment! And now the squab has come home to roast.

I know, but was your house near here too? Sorry, I’m just confused.

The hawk, he whispered, and grinned. I’d forgotten about him, what was his name, what did we call him? The walls were so thin that if you heard mice you couldn’t be sure if they were from next door or your own unit. And if you had mice there was a hawk, someone had tamed a hawk. This man brought his hawk to your house and you would go out and come back and the mice would be gone, all of them. But what was his name?

The man’s?

No, said Pop. The hawk’s.

He had grown so lucid. He even breathed more easily — but he snorted and wheeled. Lark, why am I pontificating this story? About a hawk! Not exactly utilitary.

It’s a great story. Our cat Jeremiah’s useless with mice. He —

Cats, bah.

Clouds slid over the moon.

Climbing the slipway, between gasps Pop muttered, Stories are just stories.

I thought it was nice. Crazy maybe, a hawk let loose indoors —

Nice and crazy maybe is not utilitary.

Well it’s just nice to hear a story that’s not about how dangerous it was here. In the Homes, I mean. You hear about the violence —

Pop grunted. You entreat me of violence? Of course there was violence. Whence is there not? But is it not just as violent to force citizens from their homes? To uproot us like so many roots from the soil, with the spade of unjustice?

I wasn’t —

Violence. Bah.

Debbie and Pop cut through a final thicket of shrubs onto the sidewalk. Ahead loomed the monorail station, up on stilts and halogenically lit, tracks extending north and south, and into which an escalator rose, whirring.

With his hands on his knees Pop rested, candy bag hanging. Sweat dripped from the end of his nose and splattered the sidewalk. Across the street, the Cinecity marquee read: JUBILEE LIVE FRIDAY/ALL IN TOGETHER NOW STARTS SATURDAY! Beyond it, the Podesta Tower lofted high above everything, twirling twin searchlights into the night sky.

Debbie never came downtown at this hour, the abandoned streets reminded her of afterhours at the Bebrog bar where she’d worked before signing on to In the Know. At the end of each night, with everything hosed down and the stools stacked and the place vaultlike and the morning lurking outside, it never seemed that the night’s revelry, or anything resembling life, could ever happen there again. And now, with the streets empty and the office towers vacant and the escalator winding up and down, untrafficked, the absence of people in this world they’d built filled her with that same melancholy.

Something moved under the Cinecity marquee. A strange shape jerked through the shadows with a scraping, rattling sound. At first Debbie thought it might be a person in a wheelchair, but the figure seemed too tall — a homeless person piloting a shopping cart maybe. But there were no homeless people downtown, not anymore.

Pop toed the escalator, retreated. How does one make an ascension?

What do you mean? said Debbie.

You think, with all I do, that I have time to gallivate around the city? Pollycock!

Wait — you’ve never taken the train?

Across the street the figure had heard them: it melted inside the entryway to the theatre. There’s someone there, Debbie whispered, but Pop was edging onto the escalator.

No problem, he said, swept upward, here I go.

With a glance over her shoulder — the person across the street cowered, motionless — Debbie followed Pop, the escalator lifted them to the turnstiles. Up the tracks a train eased south from Guardian Bridge Station. Good timing, said Debbie, and Pop nodded, eyes fixed upon it in terror, as if what approached were a shuttle to his own grave.

THE MAYOR WAITED until the train pulled out before moving. With a dust shovel scavenged from the banquet hall fireplace she land-paddled out from under the marquee and wheeled right onto Paper Street. From atop the dessert cart she punted along, legs heaped on the lower tier. One foot had lost its pump and dragged on the pavement, the tights split, big toe flaking skin like sparks.

At Municipal Works’ executive entrance the Mayor keyed in her code. The doors opened, she paddled down a long, empty hallway, out into a marble-pillared rotunda, surveillance cameras blinked red lights, past the security guard, Betty, to the elevator at the base of the Podesta Tower. And then she was lifted into the sky: the island swelled glittering to its edges, where it ceded abruptly to the lake.

Released one hundred storeys up, the Mayor flicked on the lights and rolled out onto the viewing deck, a bubble enclosed by glass on all sides that turned, languidly, clockwise. And though the viewing deck boasted the best and most comprehensive panoramas of the city, at this hour, with the lights on inside, the Mayor saw none of it: not the sleeping city, not the night sky, not the polished coin of the moon, not, as the viewing deck rotated south, the vast emptiness of the water, a second sky hollowed out beneath the sky. Everything was lost in the room’s reflection.

And at the heart of this reflection the Mayor saw herself, spectral and translucent, floating out there in space, a thousand feet above downtown. The dark shapes of her eyes hovered in a gaunt face, every wrinkle a gulley, her hair a tussled silver nest. She stared into the eyes out there, on the other side of the glass, her eyes, but couldn’t see her own eyes: they were just absence, two holes punched into the night.

Had she left the lights off, as the deck swivelled north, then east, she would have been treated to a straight shot over People Park, and across it, the tower of the Grand Saloon Hotel, the clockface a sort of second moon, the hands at right angles where the illustrationist had frozen them that morning. On the roof’s edge sat his helicopter, nosing out over the brightly lit penthouse suite. The balcony doors had been cast open, the curtains billowed in the A/C’s steady draft. And with each ruffle they revealed the illustrationist atop the sheets in his tracksuit, fast asleep.

He needed cold air to sleep and light, lots of light. The penthouse was all marble and polished dark wood and brass, everything gleamed in the brilliance sprinkled down from a row of crystal chandeliers. Atop the nightstand was the CityGuide that lived in every guest’s bedside drawer, bookmarked with a feather four pages from the end.

Raven’s position atop the bed’s black silk sheets was perfect symmetry: on his back, arms at his sides, legs a fist apart, face to the ceiling. His baldhead gleamed. His tracksuit was velvety. His eyes were open, yet he was sleeping, this was how he slept, and his eyes seemed to have no irises but just pupils swollen into pits, and his body produced no movement or sound, his chest did not rise and fall, there was not even a hiss of breath, and anyone happening upon this person would have assumed him dead.

The illustrationist seemed to stare upward, but his brain registered nothing of the outside world, only his dreams — if he had dreams. But Raven did not dream.

And when he had called them together, he spake as follows —

— Plato, Critias