City on Fire (114 page)

The cheesecake is the Italian kind, made with ricotta or maybe mascarpone, and as good as Jenny remembers from other times, but also more complicated, as the present so often is, with a sweetness that recedes deeper into richness the more she tries to savor it. With no fork, she has to use fingers. And as the lushly textured filling coats her palate, the stranger at her side seems to be remembering, too. “My girlfriend used to make something that tasted like this. Only Uzbek,” he adds, as if the taste were drawing him back. He takes a last bite. Looks for a trashcan. “Little blintzes, with the sweet cheese. After a night of dancing at the Odyssey, two in the morning, we’d come home and eat them straight from the fridge.”

He resumes their walk, fully under his own steam. “Now, bam, this is my life, on my own again. I never saw myself living solo in a basement in Manhattan, but I guess everything in this city is different than I imagined it would be.” He turns to her. “Sorry if I’m boring you. Same old story.”

No, she wants to say, keep going. But from up ahead comes a high whine, a crack, a conflagration of blue and red. “More light!” a child is crying on the far side of what should be either Broome or Grand. An old man bends to touch a long match to the mound of darkness before him. Out of its top erupt ten thousand sparks, like a waterfall in reverse, lighting the lower landings of fire escapes before succumbing to entropy and night. Reductive but true: at any given hour, the hawkers of Chinatown will be hawking, the mah-jongg players mah-jongging, indolent fish lazing in the tanks that front the seafood restaurants. And special occasions, all the way back to the Tang, call for fireworks. A pang of memory. Or is that the recollection of this other man studying her again, trying to pierce the dark? “What.”

“Nothing,” he says. “Just, this is my block.” As the light fizzles back down, he points to a sign for a street she didn’t know existed. Or an alley—asphalt running right up to the building fronts.

He limps into the closing shadows, and she falls into step behind. To people like her dad, watching from afar, overpopulation seems like the big problem of urban existence, but really, it’s desertion you have to look out for. Crowds teem under blazing sparklers a couple blocks away, but here all lights are off, all stores locked down. She should make sure he’s safe. Keys jingle, then stop in a doorway. “I guess we part ways here.”

“I’d at least like to see you get in okay,” she says, after a moment.

“But you can’t stand here waiting. Any lunatic could happen along.”

She knows they barely know each other, but if recent history is any guide, it’s Mike who should be nervous. “Looks like I’ll have to come with you, then.”

“My place is unimpressive.”

“Points for honesty,” she says, following him into a foyer ten degrees hotter than the street. It smells like someone’s been raising cattle in here. From two or three flights up comes the sound of an old person singing in Chinese, but without moon or stars she can see nothing. This is evidently not a problem for Mike, who finds her hand and places it on a railing angled down. Careful. The steps are narrow.

After a dozen or so of these they emerge into a room lit only by the pilot light under a water heater. As far as she can tell, it’s a cookie-cutter bachelor’s den. There is a small shelf of books, a minifridge. Along one wall, a kitchenette. “Let me get you some water,” she offers. But Mike has already lowered himself to his mattress, with a groan that might have been building for years. Unable to find where he keeps the glasses, she settles for a rag. She wets it in the sink and brings it over and kneels to place it on his forehead. He catches her wrist. His hand is steadier now. For a second, she is afraid. He says, “You don’t have to keep this up, Jenny.”

“Oh, stop.”

“I’m saying, with the shopping cart, that was already above and beyond.”

“I owed you that much.” Then she bites her lip. He is still holding on to her free hand, but where, she wonders, will she go if he releases it? Is she supposed to walk forty-odd blocks home in the dark? And why does she care? It can’t be any less risky than what she’s doing now. “Seeing as how I was responsible in the first place. Mike, I was the one who ran you over.”

The hand drops. “What? You said it was an accident—”

“It was.”

“I could have died. Shit. I knew there was something.”

“You’re fine, you said so yourself. Just a little banged up. And if you think back you’ll see I didn’t lie. I just … elided.”

“Talked your way in here on false pretenses, is what you did. Where do you get off?”

She stifles a huff. Refolds the rag to tuck the sweaty side away, but he’s propped himself up again, and won’t let her return it to his forehead. “Look. You were telling me how it’s a long way from Appalachia,” she says. “Well, imagine growing up outside L.A. with your dad designing airplanes and your mom barely speaking English. My whole life, I’ve been trying to get off the map that was laid out for me. You know the concept of utopia?”

“You’re changing the subject.”

“I’m not, I’m trying to explain. I spent my pothead teens and my early twenties committed to this idea of a better world. After that I had to scale it down to the size of a city. Then even further, to almost nothing. But I guess I’ve stayed so wrapped up in the idea of like doing something for the people in my head that I ended up not paying attention to the people right in front of me. One of which ended up being you.”

“Jenny, did you have anyone check your vital signs? Because what you’re saying makes no sense.”

Well, obviously, because making sense would require further unpacking: Mercer and William, Pulaski and Charlie, and beneath that, those nights when she’d go over to Richard’s apartment and he’d move stacks of paper off the couch to give her room to stretch out. Always more to unpack. Out goes the breath. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever read the Upanishads.”

“I’m not some kind of Asia fetishist, if that’s how you have me pegged. I see that you’re—”

“American. My parents are Vietnamese.”

“I was going to say a would-be intellectual, or righter of wrongs. But I don’t understand what that’s got to do with you hitting me with a car and then jawing your way into my apartment.”

Something turns over in her brain. “Maybe I don’t understand myself.”

For another moment, he stays silent on the mattress. “You’re stuck with your version of the night, and I’m going to have to be stuck with mine, you’re saying.”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying, no matter where I start, or how I spin it, it’s not going to help either of us settle the question of guilt. So maybe sometimes it’s better just to follow your intuition that you’re no more or less real and free and fucked up than anyone else. I mean, we’re here in this apartment, you with your bruises and me with your impression that I must have some kind of cranial trauma, but at least you’re alive. Am I making sense now?” She reaches out to touch his face, his sad, wan, confused face. And then, perhaps confused herself, leans down to kiss him, full on the mouth.

MIDTOWN—2:19 A.M.

THIS IS JUST THE KIND of best-foot-forward shtick his orthopedist has warned about. The kid in front, the attendant in between, and himself, Pulaski, wincing along behind, in an endless black column getting hotter with his huffing. In fact, his foot keeps not making it all the way up to the next stair, knocking stupidly against the edge. If he’d been thinking more carefully, he would have brought some peanuts for energy. Also water. And another flashlight; at the start of their climb, Charlie had asked to requisition the elevator attendant’s, but Pulaski, feeling bad about having bullied the guy, had said no, that would be wrong. Now, if the kid should glance back, all he’s going to see are two white beams, and not the way Pulaski’s putting his poor body on the line.

Which is not even to speak of his pension. In the car on the way up here, the two-way kept crackling with calls for anyone off duty to report to the nearest precinct. Up to that point, Pulaski might have pled guilty only to some procedural liberties, but now he was crossing into outright dereliction of duty. Or, with the flash of his gun downstairs, Class D felony. And for what? A scenario so screwy it wouldn’t pass muster at a movie house, much less with Internal Affairs. How real can this bomb be, after all, if Charlie keeps stopping every few flights to suck on that inhaler? And here it comes again, a goony echo. Some partnership they make, the cripple, the asthmatic. And as they resume their climb, Charlie hews to the wall, away from the railing—acrophobic, to boot.

In his defense, though: you have to weigh probabilities against consequences. Even a single kilogram of gunpowder on an upper floor could bring the whole pile down on the surrounding blocks, overbuilt with residences in the boom years. Ash, dust, falling rock, fire. Not that he’d imagined it would be placed this high. Even so, the first thing Pulaski had done upon leading the kid out of lockup was call Sherri to warn her it might be a while. No, he couldn’t explain, honey, not right now—only there was no answer. As the line rang and rang, he knew that she’d finally done it. Gone to her sister’s in Philly. Left him. So add her, his only family, to the stack of chips teetering on this sorry table.

And now his hands are tightening their grip on the railing, hauling him up with muscles years of backyard laps have hardened. The elevator attendant lingers on a landing, panting, but Pulaski prods him along. And when Charlie takes advantage of another pause a half-dozen flights up to snatch away the attendant’s weakening flashlight, Pulaski lets him. Who gives a poop anymore about Internal Affairs? This overworked muscle, his mind or heart, feels freer than it has in years. And of this, at least, the Sherri who used to know him might approve. He reaches out now through the solid walls of the stairshaft and over the eight million stories and the harbor and the landfills to where she’d be by now, a pair of headlights zooming south on the Jersey Turnpike. Come back, he thinks. I’ll be better. That is, if he doesn’t end up in jail. Or dead. By the time Charlie’s ill-gotten flashlight starts to peter out ahead, even the dark has ceased to matter. Larry Pulaski carries his own light. It streams through his pores, he feels, lets him read the number on the door the attendant leans against, wheezing: “Stay back,” he says, and draws his weapon, and pushes through.

He isn’t sure what he’s expected, but not this: a bulletin board with a few announcements, a dead electric fan, and a strange whirring sound, as of an engine. He can’t find the source anywhere, and otherwise, the hall appears empty. “Where are we?”

“Dunno,” the attendant manages between breaths. “I brought some reporters up here earlier today. But aside from press conferences, I don’t think anybody’s really used this floor since ’75. The executives all moved down to 30 so they could start the renovations.”

“You couldn’t have mentioned this ten flights ago?”

“You had a gun.”

The whirring grows louder, and when Pulaski turns, his flashlight finds a window that should be shut but is canted open like a door. A shape breaks away from the streaks of light on the glass and comes winging low across the hallway. It is huge and black, as if dipped in tar. And as the three of them duck, a new voice, female, pipes up from the shadows. “Oh!” The light swings around, back and forth. When it settles, it is on a girl in a Rangers home jersey, crouched behind the stairhead door.

EAST VILLAGE—CA. 2:00 A.M.

… AND WHAT YOU’RE FEELING THEN IS—

Despair. Absolute despair.

Which you’re suggesting is connected to the tragic sense, which up to that point you’ve said you felt deficient in.

Is that what we’re talking about?

It is.

I’m sorry, Mercer thinks, but I seem to have lost the thread.

It is years later, and it isn’t. He is backed up against a transformer box in an East Village park, shielding his eyes against the blue waves of the police lights. He is also, simultaneously, in a crimson-carpeted room somewhere, in a folding chair placed opposite the folding chair of the man asking the questions. In his time away, the imaginary interviewer has changed again—he is now a slight, dark-haired man, graying at the temples, with a closed-off posture and some kind of radio in his breast pocket. Only the face (and of course the ontological status of any of this, of Mercer’s feeling of great compassion for and wisdom about himself, looking back) remains obscure.

You said—

And here a white beam from the police cruiser makes a wound in the night. It rolls across strangers in varying degrees of dishabille who stand around waiting to see what will happen, as bits of charred paper drift through from somewhere, paraffin-thin. Meanwhile, the imaginary interviewer flips back through his notes. He apparently has a record of every stray thought Mercer’s ever had. There must be two dozen legal pads stacked in his corduroy lap. An amplified voice from behind the light says something that includes the word “disperse.” Mercer can’t quite hear it over the interviewer. Who has chosen, admittedly, a strange time to return.

You said that for you, the poet’s job, “preeminently” was the word you used, was to find things to praise, but that the praise had to have a background, a canvas to exist upon. And here you say that this background has to be, quote, “a sense first-hand of the overwhelming probability of there being nothing at all.” A.k.a. the tragic sense. Whereas what you had was merely “adolescent self-pity.” End quote.

I said that?

I can give you a date, if you like. This was late October of 1977.

But it’s only July.

Hmm …

The interviewer withdraws into an archival fog. Still, Mercer wonders, does he have it now, this tragic sense? When he looks at the crowd dispersing here, is the loneliness he feels really an aberration, or is it the norm? Except the crowd has stopped dispersing. In fact, one of the onlookers is marching toward the police cruiser: the lone woman, the one he thought was in disguise. Her posture is grim, resolute, like a celluloid cowboy’s, and if there remains something covert about her, he can’t place it; that beer has gone straight to his head. “Hands up! Hands up!” the squad car says. And now in its polished hood her reflection can be discerned, backed by liquid flames from the trashcan. Tall in life, she looks impossibly small when doubled in light, the blue, the orange. She reaches down to hike up her miniskirt. Or rather, he does. Mercer sees what’s next a beat ahead of its actual happening.