City on Fire (100 page)

Then, in the morning, when he was gone, she was back to herself again. Back, almost, to twelve, to thirteen, trying to figure out how to put a life together. She got out her typewriter and her X-Acto and her glue pot and the various pieces of what was to be Issue 4 of Land of a Thousand Dances. But when she took down the pictures from that fall to edit them, the dozens of photos she’d pinned to the slack length of clothesline on her wall, they, too, were reminders. Their meaning was all tangled up somehow with a stack of family pictures she’d buried in the yard at fourteen, because there were some things—most things—she couldn’t bear to burn. She didn’t remember studying them beforehand, but how else had they seared themselves like this on her inner eye? Her mom in rolled khakis on a beach in a color-corrected dusk, holding a stick with a marshmallow on the end and laughing—was this possible?—at something her dad had said. Or in a two-piece near an open hydrant somewhere in Queens, not much older than the toddler splashing through puddles behind her had now grown up to be.

And then Flower Hill: she must have been the most incandescent thing ever to hit these streets. Sam wondered if incandescence was a heritable trait; if the weird way people in this town treated her didn’t predate her delinquency, her funky new haircut, her tattoo. She’d go out to buy more cigarettes at midafternoon, and the blinds of neighbor women would twitch as she passed. Other times they pretended not to notice you at all. Once that fall, she’d seen the Weisbarger family station wagon slide past, driven by the woman she’d spoken to on the phone. It was impossible to know if Mrs. Weisbarger’s refusal to turn her head was intentional or not. And how much easier things might have gone, Sam thought, if she could have just been in love with Charlie back, rather than merely loving him, in the way of an older sister or glamorous cousin. Maybe her mother had seen herself from this angle, too: a character stuck in the mechanistic hell of Greek mythology. To have this accidental power over every boy you met (Charlie, Keith, Sol, Brad Shapinsky) and, when you exercised it, to see them dissolve away to nothing.

AND THEN THERE WAS NICKY CHAOS. The first commandment of punk, Kryloned on the wall above Loud fast rules and Die, hippie scum, was Don’t rat out your friends. Nicky was counting on her to remember this, she knew. It was possible that the theft of that mess of powder was just his latest test of whether she was loyal. But loyalty, like any other theoretical value—freedom, justice, beauty—cut against itself in practice. She was a punk, but also a Cicciaro. The difference was that the Post-Humanists were more vigilant than Dad. For all she knew, Sol’s van was out of the shop again, idling in the cul-de-sac outside, monitoring the batik curtains of her room. If she was feeling torn here behind them, a dilemma’s horns prodding her rebel ass, she had to keep her friends from finding out.

Christmas had been a Saturday. On Tuesday, she called the Phalanstery. Nicky had always avoided the phone, like someone was going to be listening in. Now she could hear him choosing words in shades of vanilla. “I thought you might get in touch sooner.”

Why’d you really do it? she wanted to ask. Why risk a second theft, a felony? Is this just to spite me for only bringing back three grams at Thanksgiving? “Yeah, no,” she said, equally cautious. “I’ve just had some family shit I’ve got to manage out here.”

“I can imagine. But family shit isn’t going to, like, change anything, is it?”

“Don’t be a jackass. I’ll probably be stopping by tomorrow, in fact. I think I left my camera in the basement the last time we were hanging out.” Attention, wiretappers: that was code for fucking. “Or anyway, it wasn’t in my bag, somehow. I’ll need it if I’m still going to shoot Ex Post Facto on New Year’s.”

“It’s Ex Nihilo now, Billy refuses to play along. But you are going to shoot it. And when the time comes, you’ll shoot our Demon Brother, too.” What that was code for she had no idea. “Should be a real spectacle. Meantime, we’ll be here, if you want to, you know, hang out some more.”

She thought of the glinty, mineral quality of his eyes lately, like the coke had whittled them down to pure pupil. In one sense, the scale of the damage Nicky aimed to do was an academic question. With as much bursting powder as was now doubtless sitting in that little house out back, you’d have to be an expert not to get someone killed. Plus just look what he’d done to her. “Seriously, don’t be a stranger, Samantha.”

“I won’t,” she promised, and rang off. But how straight she was being with him depended on how straight he’d been with her. Was everything he said a lie, or only half of it? The evidence now languished inside her camera, and could anyway, as with Mom’s departure, probably be read several ways.

NICKY WASN’T ALL BAD, of course. He’d suffered growing up, and had been one of the first people she’d met who understood how Brass Tactics had changed her life. (The lyrics, he said, had heavily influenced his own thought.) But now, when she turned to that record for ideas, for hope, it seemed tainted by the association. All she could hear anymore, behind Billy Three-Sticks’s rage and bravado, was the despair he was audibly trying to escape.

What she did still have—what never let you down, Charlie had once argued—was Patti. For Horses, even at its darkest, wasn’t about escape, or not only. Yes, life was filled with pain, as Patti now sang from the record player. And life was full of holes: looking at the snippets jumbled on her pile carpet, Sam couldn’t agree more. But there was also the warrior stuff, the priestess stuff, the Catholic stuff, like some misplaced Joan of Arc. Or like this: And the angel looks down at him and says, Oh, pretty boy, can’t you show me nothing but surrender?

TWO DAYS BEFORE THE SHOOTING, Samantha dreamed of Patti Smith. She herself was in a pitch-black room somewhere. She could not see the walls or reach them—she was unable to move—but the room felt small. And there was a window nearby, she sensed, a vista of mountains and seas and tiny humans paddling around in canoes and just generally going about their business, if only she could see it. And then Patti appeared above her in a caul of low blue wattage and informed her that a time was coming when she would have to choose.

Choose what? Sam asked.

Choose for them to be saved, Patti explained—meaning all those little people, paddling and paddling—or for you to. That is, Sam could move upwards into the blackness, or down into the vista, but the moment was fast approaching when loitering in between would no longer be permitted.

Sam felt that this was totally bogus. Not to mention arbitrary. Plus what did that even mean, loitering. Or for that matter, saved?

Good point, Patti conceded, in a voice that now sounded suspiciously like Sam’s mother. But that’s where we find ourselves. Having to choose, on the basis of imperfect information. If it comforts you at all, I can also tell you that time is only in your head.

You’re telling me either I go or they go? That’s all you came back to say?

What I’m telling you, honey, is that you, personally, can only apply for an exemption for one or the other. And there will be a time, as it were, when you have to choose.

And this exemption you’re saying I get— —Apply for.

—Whatever. You’re saying if I use it up on someone else, I don’t get to stick around to see what happens?

If you go, Patti said, all I can really tell you is that you will get to be very, very close to people. You try to be in life, and you can be, for a moment, but the moment has to pass. A better way of saying this is that time isn’t in your head, exactly—I said that mostly because I wanted it to be true—but that it’s a synonym for life. Beyond one, beyond the other. Beyond everything you’ll be holding on to.

Sam thought about this. Wouldn’t I miss it, though? Life?

Oh, yes. This, quietly. Most certainly.

I don’t understand. Why me?

Because shit happens, Samantha. Every once in a while, people get stuck in between, and they’re either the lucky ones or the unlucky ones. That’s why it’s called a condition. Will be called, rather. You get to choose, one way or the other. But also, you have to.

Did you have a choice?

I wouldn’t have been strong enough to let you go.

But you did let me go. Or was it a question? Wait a second, aren’t you supposed to be somewhere out west, Mom?

Mom? Is that who you need me to be?

Sam either didn’t quite follow or didn’t quite want to. So after you go, the people you love can still know how close you are to them?

No, honey. Only you who are close can know. It’s one of the Paradoxes.

But I know you’re here right now.

This is a dream, Samantha.

Mom? (Patti?) They feel us only rarely, mostly in dreams.

WHEN SAM WOKE, it was Wednesday, and her pillowcase was damp, and she was alone. Dad had gone back to work, if he’d ever come home, and beyond her window lay another gray day. Every day out here on the Island was dull and melty like this, a trough of drippy gray ice cream. But having pulled back the curtains, Sam felt weirdly elated, because she saw out there what she never could have before: the ghost of her fierce self stalking these streets for all these years, refusing to give up or out or in. The moment she’d come closest was on Christmas, when she’d wandered into the front hall, still sick from news of the theft, and found, in the mail basket, the ’zine the post office had returned. That was the night she’d called Keith at home and he’d hung up on her, angry. But today she saw that, as with her father, he would be at work. Which is where, if she phoned right now, she would reach him: the closest thing to an actual adult in her life and also the single most persuasive person she knew. And this must be the choice Patti or whoever had meant, for one who seizes possibilities, sees all possibilities. Keith would feel too guilty not to agree to meet her at New Year’s, if Sam applied the right pressure. (For he was guilty, in his own way, for delivering those envelopes, the ones he couldn’t be bothered to look inside.) There, at the Vault, she would explain to him what had happened, and then bring him together with the PHP at last, and Keith, who could sell bifocals to a blind man, would speak for Sam. The powder would be returned anonymously to Willets Point, no questions asked, and the fires in the Bronx would stop. All fires, everywhere. There was only one piece missing, one more possibility, and her brain must have seized it, because when she picked up the phone, instead of dialing Lamplighter Capital Associates straight away, her fingers picked out a different number, and miraculously, it was not his mother but Charlie Weisbarger himself who picked up. Before she could even blurt out that it was urgent she see him, that she was going to need his help saving the city, he gave her that marvelously rude greeting she hadn’t heard since the summer: “Another day in paradise, how may I direct your call?”

89

THE PLAN WAS SIMPLE. Especially after a drink or two to drown out any dissent. Open the freezer. Retrieve the plastic bucket from in back. Turn it over, flex its sides as if it were an ordinary ice tray. The foggy block within broke on contact with the floor, leaving a baggie half-protruding from the ragged ice. The next step was for Richard to get on the subway. Having finally finished his article, he would deliver the fanzines to his friend Larry Pulaski. Only here came that other friend, Complication. Pulaski wasn’t at his office, where Pulaski always was, but at home on Staten Island, said his secretary. Richard could have just dropped a package in the mail, but the fanzines kept some hold on him, demanding to be entrusted to familiar hands. Besides, it always helped with the postpartum blues to get out and move. Slight adjustment to plan, then: pack the baggie in a satchel and affix to bike-rack. Maybe along with this bottle here.

Despite a late-April cold snap, Richard pedaled down to the ferry slip at Bowling Green, wincing against the wind. Even on the far side of the harbor, though, he wasn’t quite ready to give up the ’zines. Sometimes you weren’t yet the person you needed to be to do the work you needed to do. And at such times, he’d found, the best thing for it was to go to a nearby cemetery and spend an afternoon tramping among the graves. He wasn’t far, in fact, from one he used to frequent before he’d left New York.

It was an old place, the earliest dates on the markers stretching back to the 1700s, the surrounding oaks not yet cleared to make way for malls. The burials had tapered off decades before he started coming here, so there was seldom anyone around save the dead. Evelyn Steward. Edward Woodmere. Hibernia Ott. These names, civilized, soothed his fear of having amounted to nothing. Amid them and amid the obdurate angels and the wildflowers pushing up through the earth, Richard could again be one among many.

This was what the work in Scotland had been about, too, he recalled as he wandered: the anonymity, the paring away. But trying to recover his discipline this last month since the leak had been like trying to nail together shelter in a hurricane. Candlelit vigils, updates at ten, a possible serial killer on the hypothetical loose, all this sturm and drang, this dreamwork, and only Richard had any sense of what was really at issue. Well, Richard and Zig Zigler. He’d been a dunce to write off the a.m. jeremiads Zig delivered with the same brio he’d brought to the poker table. But then again, what good had Zig done? His manic kibitzing about the dying girl and the Just City never ripened into specific demands. It was as if specific demands were a relic of a former age. Or as if, Richard thought, we had never moved on—as if the veil of the present had been cast off, and we were back in the desert fiefdoms of three thousand years ago, where the dead got honored with rent garments and a howl. Ivory St. James. Pierre Motell. He ran a hand along the rounded tops of headstones glazed with rain. It had begun to fall an hour earlier, light at first, then thickening. Beloved wife. Delivered unto rest. All paths of glory. Where a tendril of damp ivy had covered a phrase, he pried it loose. Then he took another belt of whisky.

No, he’d been suffering from a kind of blindness, dismissing Zig as obsessive, when really Zig had been right, that last time: Who was more obsessed than Richard? It could make you see more clearly than other people, or not at all. He still retained as a sense memory the excitement of spotting “SG” on that loading dock, back in March. His feeling, the moment he saw the flash of jersey between her lapels, that something was about to break, and how he’d wanted whatever it was all to himself. He wondered if this, and not his professional code, was why he’d failed to work her into the back half of what he’d decided to call “The Fireworkers.” But the rain was really coming down now. The thermometer was plummeting. He reached again for the bottle.