After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia (24 page)

Dare listened and said, “Okay, you’re right,” and I reached up and kissed her. Dumb
girls have boyfriends; smart girls have other girls. And smart girls and gay boys
are natural allies.

The street we were walking on had a lot of burned houses and an old railroad overhead
that had mostly fallen down. Eighth Avenue when we crossed it had people. An open
market about ten blocks uptown was breaking up; people loaded carts and trucks. Downtown,
a UN Peacekeepers armored car was crossing the avenue.

On the next block a bicycle boy whizzed past, turned a hundred feet away, and looked
us over. Another bike boy was on the other side of the busted street, then a third
and a fourth. All of them thin with faces like the vultures you see sometimes near
the river. They knew us and that we were coming back with gold; they called us faggots
and dykes.

But the Peacekeepers shoot people like them if they see they have guns, and we’d handled
these guys before. Our boys had their knives out, Dare had her hand on the jump pistol
under her caftan, Not and Hassid yelled that the bike boys would starve soon. We never
stopped moving, and they kept circling but never closed.

Then because it felt like the right time, I looked one in the face and caught sight
of us in his eyes, caught the way he saw us: we were gold, we were sex. Then he knew
something was inside him and freaked, almost fell off his bike before he and the rest
of them faded away.

My mother knew some stuff about getting by. When there were still parties, when there
was the thought of getting close to the ones running things and running with them,
my mother was on the job. But wherever I got this skill, I didn’t get it from her.

I never met my father but she told me he was someone who traveled in important circles.
He must have been some kind of prospect, because I think the reason she had me was
to try and make him marry her.

People my mother’s age were big on names. When there’s no money, people do things
like that. Dare’s mother named her only daughter Virginia Dare, after the first European
baby born in the USA. The Virginia part got discarded since anything you hear about
Washington and Virginia sounds worse than here.

But she kept the Dare. It’s an old word meaning tough, which is what she is: tough
and beautiful. “Real!” she said, and I looked where she was looking. We were almost
at our place. But on the next corner a building had fallen down last winter and blocked
most of the street, and on the wreckage were Regalia and her crew.

Regalia was a six-foot-tall queen with paint on her face and an ax in her hand. A
couple of years ago she had this giant boy Call who followed her like a stray dog,
and her crew was IT.

But Call was dead white and got too much sun, which did him in. They say his face
is partly gone and he’s a skeleton. I haven’t heard he’s dead but I haven’t seen him
either.

In the last few weeks the city seemed to go desperate. For the second time in two
blocks a gang wanted to take us on for a few gold coins. Again Dare took the lead
and we came on like they weren’t even there. Her blade was in her right hand and her
left was under her robe. Two steps more and she’d have drawn the jump gun and put
a slug in Regalia’s stomach. I was reaching for Regalia’s brain.

It would have been better if we’d gone in and snuffed Regalia right then. Instead
a truck with guys standing on the back and packing rifles came out of the twilight.

Regalia’s people saw this, and a couple started to back away. Then out of the cab
jumped this bear, looking mean and huge in that light. One of Regalia’s crew yelled
and started to run, another followed him, and Regalia went back howling at all of
them.

Dare turned to face the bear, but I already knew what this was about. Caravaggio always
had chimeras around him. The bear pulled himself up and said, “I am Ursus. I have
a message for Real.” The voice was mostly human and hoarse and old. When I nodded,
he said, “Caravaggio wishes that you come with us.”

Dare didn’t take her eyes off the bear and the guards on the back of the truck. “It’s
okay,” I said. “This is what Depose talked about.”

Dare said, “I need to come with you.”

“I’d like that too. But we need you to guard the money. To make sure our place is
defended. To come get me if something goes wrong.” I reached inside and showed her
what we’d do together when I came back.

Finally she nodded, and I climbed into the truck and headed downtown to Studio Caravaggio.
I know about the studio and about him.

That name is some artist hero in the past. Lots of old people took big artist names.
We still got Mozart in the streets playing the same tune every day on a busted clarinet.

The quarter moon was up so there was some light, people slipping through the shadows
where there were buildings standing. We passed a convoy of cars full of tourists and
guards. The driver moved the truck around the holes and piles of rubbish in the street.
He slowed when a religious crowd from the projects carrying torches and saints’ pictures
and chanting crossed town on Fourteenth.

I saw Caravaggio when I was small and he drove by in a big car, had a gray beard and
hair and dark eyes that stared out like a hunter’s, and someone told me he was looking
for kids, and if he liked you and brought you home, you never worked or went hungry.
Someone else said he took your soul first.

Years after that, they had this film festival and he showed a movie against the wall
of a building at night. It was pieces of old past century movies with people crashing
cars and blowing up buildings, making jokes as they broke glass, gunned down people,
and wrecked New York and dozens of other places just for their own amusement.

All the kids watching it screamed and threw things at the stupid grinning twelve-foot-tall
guys and women, the destroyers who used up our city and our world. Caravaggio was
there nodding approval at our anger.

3.

Studio Caravaggio is downtown on some blocks of old buildings still in good shape
with generators and lights. Neighborhood guards with rifles stood on roofs and watched
us come down the street. Their guns meant the Peacekeepers respected them like they
did Depose.

Ursus went to a big metal gate, reached through that to a brass knocker on an iron
door. He slammed the knocker a few times and a spy slot opened. “I brought Reality
Girl.”

The spy slot closed, the iron door opened, dim light spilled out, and a feathered
chimera in slippers appeared, unlocked the metal gate, and stood aside. We entered
this huge space like a warehouse, with old historic furniture, gold Chinese screens,
long tables covered with lenses and tools. One wall was painted to look like a faraway
city with tall buildings.

The chimera took me past rooms with lights from screens where people watched and worked.
Others were dark with humans and chimeras lying on mattresses. Some watched us pass.
At a worktable a fox, a cat, and a lizard chimera showed some human kids how to polish
models of the old empire building and the statue of the lady that was in the harbor
and stuff.

Those get sold to tourists, and the metal they’re made of is supposed to be from the
original buildings and statues. And I guessed this studio was where they got made.

A guy was cleaning the floors, and I smelled food cooking. Right then I wanted some
of this for me and Dare and our crew.

From somewhere deep in Studio Caravaggio, a voice, hoarse and kind of shaky, said,
“Visitors from the Orient encounter visitors from the future and fight it out in the
ruins of New York while the natives dive for tourist gold is what it’s about. Where
did I get the story? My dear sir, it’s my life. I look out my window and it’s what
I see.”

Ursus turned a corner, and down a short hall, bright light shone out a doorway. The
bear stopped at the door and we both looked at Caravaggio.

Before when I saw him, he was old but strong and dangerous and needing to be respected.
Now he was in a white robe with stains on the front, spilling wine as he drank out
of a long glass. His face was thin and he slumped in a big soft chair with a fan playing
on him. What I thought was a boy in silk shorts held a bowl of something and a spoon
like he’d been feeding him.

Caravaggio’s eyes moved, focused on me, and he said into a tiny disc in his open hand,
“That’s the scenario, Assad. As always, I’m interested in financial backing. My health?
I’m not going to die before I complete this, I promise you. But now I’ve got to talk
to someone.”

When the boy put down the bowl and took a plug-in from behind Caravaggio’s ear, I
saw he was maybe pushing thirty, and I recognized him as Tagalong, who was on the
street with a gang when I was small. He nodded to me.

“I’ve brought Reality Girl,” said the chimera.

“Depose says you wanted to see me,” I said.

Caravaggio said nothing, just stared at me through eyes that looked like he was crying.
But his face didn’t move. Tagalong tried to feed him from the bowl. Caravaggio brushed
it away. He drained the glass, picked up a bottle with both hands, and drank out of
it. Wine dribbled out the side of his mouth.

“My scouts talked about you,” he said.

“You want to use my boys diving for the tourists?”

“The boys sure, but mostly it’s you I’m interested in.” He moved his hand over a glass
surface then pointed at something behind me, wanting me to turn and look. I wasn’t
doing that, but I stepped back, kept him and Tagalong in my sight. Tagalong shook
his head like he couldn’t believe me.

What I saw was a flat screen. It took a second to know I was watching myself. First
I was on the riverfront that summer with Dare and the boys. Then Dare and I walked
through the early morning streets before the sun got bad, and we kissed. Next we were
at the UN clinic in Times Square getting ointments and medicine.

Don’t get scared, get mad
was Dare’s motto and mine. “You and your freaks followed me!”

“If we meant you harm we could have done it many times,” Caravaggio said. “I’ve been
thinking of you, imagining you in a film. The tourists you saw today were impressed
by these pictures and were impressed by you.” Mai Kin’s face popped up on the screen.
“At my suggestion Mai Kin has been redone in your image.” Seeing her again, she didn’t
look that much like me.

Next I saw myself in the evening, walking all alone down an empty Fifth Avenue. This
was fake; none of us ever went anywhere alone. Caravaggio talked on the sound track.

“Once this was the most famous city in the most powerful nation in the world,” he
said. “Then the bombs fell, the earth quaked, the waters rose, the government collapsed.
Around the world, cities and nations fell, but none fell further. Mighty Gotham is
a ruin at a crossroads, with local warlords like Liberty Land and the Northeast Command
fighting for possession.”

He touched the surface again, and I disappeared. Color and faces exploded on the screen.
A girl in leather smashed mirrors in some huge bathroom. Maybe it was a party, maybe
it was a riot, but the camera spun around in an enormous space. A mob dressed better
than anyone in the city is now, poured fuel on chairs and set them on fire, smashed
glass doors, shot out the lights high overhead.

“A fiesta of destruction made a ruin of Madison Square Garden,” Caravaggio told me.
“Caught for my first full-length film. But places remain on this planet where people
are still rich and bored. The films I’ve made have kept the eyes of that world on
us, and that’s what I’m still doing.”

The city opened before me. Buildings were down, but ones I’d never seen before stood.
The streets were full of people. Cars went by; I saw a bus! It was New York after
the bombs but before the quakes. A girl in a silk dress walked arm in arm with a chimera
gorilla.

“What did you bring me here for?” I asked.

“I want you in a film. I’ll use you as Mai Kin’s body double. She’s more a prop than
an actor. You’ll stand in for her in certain scenes. But it will be more than that.
They think to use me to film the New York sequences for an episode of that idiotic
series.

“But I’m going to use THEM to tell the story of kids on the waterline. I want you
and your crew. Anything can be faked, but what’s true will always stand revealed.”

“I want a hundred gold pieces a day,” I said, because that’s as much money as I’ve
ever seen at once and because gold is the only thing everyone trusts. “I want the
first day’s pay up front,” I said, because that’s what I know about doing business.

“I created the legend of Jackie, the angel of divers,” he said, like he hadn’t heard
me. “Now I want to give the tourists a taste of the desperation of diver kids’ lives.”

I said, “What about the money?”

“Once I dreamed of showing Jackie returning to the city like an avenging angel come
to save the place,” he said. “My new vision of the city will be you and your friends.”
Again his hand moved over a glass surface in front of him.

A boy in long hair and shorts stood on a pier in the full light of day. Big crowds
of people watched as a coin was flung and the boy leaped, seemed to flicker like silver
light in the gold sun. He skimmed over the water and caught the coin in his hand.
It looked fake.

What got to me was how the riverfront wasn’t all smashed up. The water was lower than
the walks. New Jersey was wrecked but not totally. Boats sailed and people didn’t
look scared. I remembered some of that from when I was real little, and got angry
it was gone.

I wanted to see more but the screen went blank. I got careless and reached for Caravaggio,
wanting to see what he remembered. I touched his brain and saw a jumble of faces,
heard a tourist talking about a hundred-million-yen deal, tasted the wine he had just
drunk, caught the smell of Silken Night, a perfume he remembered.

Caravaggio looked startled and confused. He tried to stand, and knocked over the wine
bottle. Tag caught it, stared at me wide-eyed like he had a hint of what just happened.