City on Fire (113 page)

“How old are you?” the boy asks.

“I asked you first. Twenty-five.”

“Nineteen,” the boy says, which, Mercer not having been born yesterday, probably means the same age as his students, fifteen, sixteen. Former students, rather.

“And this is where you spend your time, at nineteen?”

“You mean with my friends? Why wouldn’t it be? I’m not some window-shopper who has to hustle back to my closet every night.”

“I’m sorry. I just don’t have much experience of how this is supposed to go.”

“We could dance, for starters. You like to dance?”

Not anymore, Mercer is thinking, when the boy shoves him out into the churn of bodies. Between two tenements beyond the treeline, the moon should be luminous and precise, except oily smoke from the trashcan keeps interfering. You can dance…, the radio insists, but the best he can manage is a sort of shuffle from foot to foot in time to the boy’s more expressive gyrations. The closer they get to the flames, the hotter it is, and the boy undoes yet another button of his shirt. The Dionysian torso moves closer. Mercer takes several more swigs of beer, trying to use his bottle-arm’s elbow as a baffle, but the boy, a dab hand at seduction, finds his way through, and even as Mercer’s heart clenches, his lower body brings him close enough for wrists to rest on shoulders, for a finger to loosely trace the nap at the back of his head. He closes his eyes in what might be perceived as surrender. Maybe the point here is that he does not see clearly. That he never saw clearly.

Then a blue light throbs inside his eyelids. He has a feeling its source is something he doesn’t want to know about, but as the outer world grows noisier, he can’t help opening his eyes. Beyond the shoulders of this stranger, high beams are zooming along a path into the park, rendering it not nearly so tangled or secret as Mercer’s been imagining. Another flash of blue. The park is closed, says a voice over a loudspeaker. And then what sounds like: Don’t eat ’shrooms. At the circle’s edges, some men dive for underbrush, but most stand their ground, stunned in the lights of the Finest. And among them, a dozen yards away, he notices for the first time a lone woman: Is she some kind of cop, too? It seems at any rate improbable that he should cross paths with the law multiple times in a single day. But then, what if this isn’t the law, and his search for William has just been one more projection? What if it’s really him they’ve been after all along, these powers in their various disguises?

ON THE ROAD—?

AS FAR AS THE DEMON BROTHER WENT—or Ghoul, or whatever he was to himself in his secret life—that part had been simple enough. The man came on like some master of the black arts, but really extortion was just a function of the strength of your material. And the material he had on Amory Gould would make even an angel cry. He’d kept a careful archive of their entanglement from the start; what he’d sent along yesterday had been, as he’d put it in the attached letter, “just a taste.” But he could no longer be sure how he’d ever hoped to lure Billy Three-Sticks, too, to a high floor of the family building. Or quite remember why. From certain angles, it looked downright ungrateful. In the wasteland of metro Boston, at thirteen, fourteen, his big dream had been of a gun to his own head, putting him out of his misery—a misery that by sophomore year of college was indistinguishable from everybody else’s. Brass Tactics had pointed the way out of all that. Out of college, but also out of formlessness, powerlessness, the brute facticity he’d been beating his head against. Can’t make it better? Make art. So yeah, there had been a time when, to protect Billy, he’d have thrown himself on the blast. But his education must be ongoing, because now he’s on the run, and he can’t even say for how long; his clock’s stolen battery died somewhere back near the Delaware Water Gap. He was searching for the time on the radio, in fact, when he’d picked up that little blip about a blackout. It explained the snuffing of the city lights—and seemed to cement his triumph. Then more foothills turned the signal to crap. He’d pre-rolled a dozen joints to take the edge off the pills, but has since been burning through them to mark time until the zero hour. Only now there’s just one left, and he’s getting this vibe of insurrection from the back of the van. Maybe what’s needed is a breather, at least until morning, when they can get themselves organized again, the unruly phalanges closing into a fist. And look: right up here’s a rest stop.

He pulls off the highway and onto a ramp that cuts back among some trees. Sees an empty gravel lot, picnic tables under a lone streetlight. The little lavatory kiosk is locked for the night, but the vending machine out front’s still lit, just waiting for someone with a disregard for property and a bad case of the munchies to come along and smash the glass. First, though, he can’t help turning the radio back on and flipping around for further word from Manhattan. Out here you get evangelical preachers and album-oriented rock and ad after ad—and as the analgesia of the pot wears off, he discovers a pit in his stomach. Or a pit in the pit he’d carried out of that building. He’s sure it will go away once he confirms he’s finally accomplished something—an explosion at the heart of civilization. No gimmes, no takebacks, the kids used to say. Antacid tablets coat as they soothe. Crystal Blue Persuasion, hey hey. We will make buying a new or used car truck or van so easy. But he’s too jacked up to stay with anything anymore, the dial keeps turning. Then amid the contextless barrage of information the sense of the roach singeing his fingers awakens him to the fact that he is alone. He opens the door. Leaves it open, so the blown speakers can keep filling his head with crap in which maybe the nugget he waits for waits. The thing he’s done: revenge for the Blight Zone, for Sam, for the general fuckedness of this life. He climbs down to join his friends.

It’s cool out here, a smell like a lilac bush or something. Enough starlight to see D.T.’s got Sol laid out flat on the ground. And the stars, they’ve always creeped Nicky out, made him feel like a nothing. “I say we make camp. We can push on in a few hours, once we see how the land lays back there.” He’s aware of some shakiness in the formulation, but can’t identify what it is. It’s like when he was a little kid that year in Guatemala and Dad broke his jaw because he’d come back from the PX with jamón instead of jabón.

D. Tremens looks up from where Sol’s puking. “Get a grip,” he says, so gently it’s like he’s been practicing. “I know you heard that thing about the blackout.”

So the signal hadn’t died fast enough, after all. Maybe that accounts for the whispering. D.T. feels it too: the sense of destiny achieved. “Yeah, but who cares, D.T.? If the city’s in an uproar, that just gets us closer to where we want to go.”

“It doesn’t make you wonder if something’s gone wrong back there?”

“I’m telling you, something’s gone right—Weltgeist in action.”

“The newslady didn’t say anything about a bomb. We’re way past midnight now.”

And it’s true there are a couple of loose ends he couldn’t bring himself to clip so neatly. (What had Sewer Girl taken him for, some kind of monster?) But this was why you compartmentalized in the first place. D.T., for example, had been kept in the dark not only about the location, but also about the real time everything was to go down. Midnight would have been more symbolic, ideally the stroke of 7/7, if he’d managed to track down Billy, but every system, if it’s not to collapse under its own contradictions, needs some randomness built in. A clinamen. Sometimes a system will even generate its own.

“D.T., you genius. You’re still carrying a watch? I could kiss you. Have we hit 2:30 yet?”

“Nicky, I’m just going by the fact that we’re in the middle of Pennsylvania. You guys trashed every timepiece we had getting the thing to work, remember?”

Fuck.

“But sure, say it’s 2:30, it’s 2:45, it’s four in the morning, what difference does that make? Can’t you see we’ve got to get Sol to a doctor?”

Sol himself doesn’t speak, but his eyes supplicate upward, like a puppy’s who thinks you must be its master just ’cause you’ve given it a kick or two. Maybe D.T.’s been right all this time, maybe they should belay three thousand years of Western thought and make room for the comrade to lie down properly on the ratty carpet back there. But he’s got a few choice volumes to share with anyone who thinks History is made of a thousand little kindnesses.

“Yep, get some shut-eye and keep trucking. What say, Sol—you up for it?”

It takes Sol only a few seconds to hoist his undamaged thumb in a feeble thumbs-up.

“See? Sol understands the magnitude of what we’ve achieved. We’ve got to keep moving, this is part of what you—wait. Quiet.”

“Nobody’s talking but you, Nicky. Nobody’s been talking.”

Except he is already crouched by the driver’s-side door, the better to hear a news flash. The bomb? No, what he hears again is just: power failure. Eastern seaboard in midst of largest blackout in history. Only this time with a cause, lightning strikes in Westchester, a pair, a freak coincidence. And now it’s coming back to him, that other flash of pure stochasm. The orange of that boat. The white. Those little bottles. Not that you shouldn’t act to eliminate a threat, but he’d known from watching the reporter sit and brood behind a pillar that he’d never really been one. Just another drunk, like D.T. Another loser, like S.G. A failed artist, a poor dreamer, and far too easily scared. He didn’t mean for the guy to die—who hadn’t even had the third ’zine. But then out on the deck, there was the lanky body going over the side. And as he looked down into the fast black water, it seemed once again that there was no outside, no end to the emptiness. The world was the world, perpendicular to any attempt to make or do anything but damage. And fuck Billy, he’d thought, for dreaming otherwise. For the way he could just stare at his shoes and fill any space he was in. That had been the moment he knew why he had to hunt Billy down again, to inveigle him onto the scene, too. Which means, simultaneously, the instant the wheels had begun to come off. As they are coming off his attention now, because right as a voice is saying, At the tone, the time will be—Sol begins to yack again, loudly, on the gravel. And as quickly as it came, the signal goes back to static. Fuck. It was a single syllable they’d said, right? Two o’clock? Or is it already three?

“Did either of you catch that?” He waits for someone to refocus on the real problem here, but now D.T. and Sol just crouch and vomit, respectively, and this is all he needs to remember there may indeed be something binding them together. D.T.’s not as dumb as he acts, or possibly even as high. Maybe he’s convinced Sol they’ve been sold out, proposed a hasty plan B. Maybe to go join back up with Sewer Girl, wherever she ran off to. Sol will be too ill to go on, and they’ll make a play for the van, leaving him here like an animal, in the dark. “You know, the pigs aren’t going to go any easier on you for jumping ship after the fact.”

“Who said anything about jumping ship?” says D.T. “That’s what I’m telling you, man. We’re in this together. We’ve got to get Sol help.”

“Sol’s coming with me. Isn’t that right, Sol?” But Sol pretends to have passed out. What is even happening here? Why is everything always falling apart?

“You can go on, Nicky, if that’s what you need. But leave us the van, at least.”

Here it is, if he still cared: proof of their conspiracy. He looks across the clearing. There, between the kiosk and the little creek burbling in its defile, is a payphone on a stand, its lightbulb burned out, busted, or otherwise nonexistent. He now perceives with his higher faculties that D.T. lied at that last puke stop about not having a dime. The very first thing they’ll do after ditching him is call the cops. How long could he survive out here, in the woods, were it to come to a manhunt? Not long, is the answer, because he can’t get the city out of his blood. “Fuck you. It’s my van.”

He realizes he means it. If Operation Demon Brother has indeed foundered, then the Econoline and the books inside are all he has to show for his own existence, and he’s not about to give them up, even if the van is by most lights Sol’s. And before the thought can be finalized, he is moving to cut off lines of approach.

“Come on, Nicky. You’re in no shape to drive anyway. Why don’t you give me the keys?”

“You can’t have them,” he repeats. “They’re mine.”

“Will you listen to yourself?”

He almost falls for it. But consistency is as somebody said a hobgoblin, one you can’t let trip you up, not if you aim to get a single thing done in this world. And for how long has Nicky Chaos been trying to teach them not to be so credulous? They are even in their mutiny basically asking permission. When all there is, he’s been telling them, is the power to will. Quickly, before they can adjust, he’s back in the driver’s seat closing the door, fumbling with the key, that deeper darkness in the dark. Palms swat zombielike at windows, flatten pale against the glass. Someone yells over the static. Then the speed overpowers the pot, the engine catches, and he is fishtailing over the gravel, leaving behind his former vassals, D.T. and poor Sol Grungy of the doleful countenance. And finally just a long plume of dust to fatten in the moonlight.

LITTLE ITALY—??

IT’S NOT EXACTLY GOING TO SET THE WORLD ON FIRE, their hobbled pace, but in fits and starts, it’s quickened, as has the guy’s recall. Mike, is his name. Age? Twenty-seven. No, twenty-eight. From West Virginia, originally. And for the last few years, Bay Ridge. Asked why then they were headed toward Chinatown, he seems to sputter. He had to find a new place on short notice, he explains, and he was on a budget. His job—he reads government reports for a living, condenses them into slightly smaller reports—hardly pays. He’d been walking home tonight to save a subway token. But it could be worse; he had cousins who were carnies. Anyway, he’s fine to go it alone, he’s not in pain … though there is, Jenny thinks, something a little pained about Mike, or at least hangdog. And every so often he stops to kind of squint into the darkness where her face should be.

They’re just descending into the oldest and narrowest part of the city when they meet a more serious block. A knot of several dozen young men has gathered on the corner, muscle-shirted, sort of Knights of Columbus, lit by idling cars. Her instinct is to cut east, leave a wide berth, but already the chaos has begun to form itself into lines. There’s a strange New York compulsion, in moments of bewilderment or fury or fear, to queue, which must be hers now, too. As she steps closer, she sees something being passed hand to hand out of a storefront. Are these the orderly early stages of a riot? Or have the owners of this bakery, their refrigerator cases disabled by the power cut, decided to treat it as a promotional opportunity? At any rate, within a minute, some jayvee mafioso has handed her a paper plate. Then another. On them sweat heavy wedges of pale yellow cheesecake. Little groans of pleasure rise above the horns. “I’ll be damned.” She turns back to Mike, who’s propped himself on a parking meter. “Here. Eat. The calories will do us both good.”