City on Fire (117 page)

“Is that you, William?”

Using towels from the bathroom, he does his best to blot the urine from the coverlet. He spreads some more towels and has Daddy sit on those instead. It’s terrible, what happens to a man’s body. It will happen to William one day, too, except, at the rate he’s going, he probably won’t live that long, so let no one say there’s no silver lining. He kneels to unlace the shoes, to pull the bunched pants over the feet, helps with the undershirt. He drapes a towel over Daddy’s shoulder and sends him into the bathroom with a clean pair of briefs from the dresser. The door he leaves open, hoping the candle will throw enough light for Daddy to finish undressing without falling and breaking his hip. At any rate, William’s not going to change his father’s pissed undershorts. He has undressed men before, scores of them, but there are lows below which even he will not go.

As the splashy noises of the toothbrush commence, he lights a cigarette off a candle. These death-tubes, these little crutches or fuses: useful for getting through all sorts of things you don’t want to get through. It’s why they’re so popular at the halfway house. Each time he inhales, a balloon of heat inflates in the immaculate room. But it’s already a million degrees in here. He flicks some ash on the carpet, screw Felicia, and moves over to the curtains for air.

Why she would covet such a place is obvious. The height means you can see everything. There’s no balcony off this room, but when he leans out the window he can see all the way up to the reddish northern fringes of the park, Harlem and the Bronx burning in the night. That’s where he should be: in his studio, behind three deadbolts, with a great flame coming and no radio and no phone under his actual name, and so no way for anyone to warn him he’s about to be incinerated.

Then he turns to find Daddy standing in clean underwear by the bed, looking unsure what it’s for. “Oh, for Pete’s sake.” William goes and helps him slip between sheets of recklessly high thread count. Some further ceremony seems called for, but what’s he going to do: lean down and peck him on the forehead, as if Daddy really were a child? He can’t even see the face anymore. In his dreams, this is always a deathbed. “I don’t hate you, you know,” is what he says. Daddy’s line is supposed to be, “I’m so sorry.” But for a second now, William sees himself as his father must see him, backlit by candles and curtains, and he understands that what Daddy’s thinking would probably be closer to “Hate me for what?” The same old father-son bullshit, as if nothing else in the world existed—no sisters, no lovers, no mothers. And in fact what comes next is the snorting noise again. Make that snoring.

Only later, when William has blown out all the candles save one, to light his way back to the library, does a voice croak from the shadows. “There’s something for you on the dresser.”

Has he imagined it? William listens for more, but the snore has resumed, the world gone back to what it was, and all he can find on the dresser is the little rosewood lock-box Daddy used to keep his cufflinks and shirt-studs in. It is unlocked, though, and inside is an envelope, his own full name written across the front in schoolhouse cursive. The paper looks positively ancient, yellow with age, but it’s just possible to glimpse a shadow inside. There’s a shadow inside everything, he’s starting to feel. Maybe it’s best not to look too close. Then again, he already knows that, whatever this document is, he’s likely to sit up until dawn poring over it by candlelight. That’s assuming dawn ever comes.

BETH ISRAEL—2:35 A.M.

BY THE TIME THE STRANGER APPEARS, the respirator’s been repaired, albeit with an anxious squeak midway through each stroke where the bellows chafes the glass. Or conceivably it’s Bullet who’s anxious. Still stationed in a chair by the door, he feels the hour’s lateness with a keenness reserved for the dying. As does this unshaved dude in the doorway, it seems. Bullet has an unwonted sensation of not being sure he could take the guy in a fight, if it came to that. But then some recognition passes between them—that is, Bullet recognizes this must be Sammy’s father, and the father decides to assume nothing funny is going on. Bullet hauls himself to his feet with a grunt. “She’s all yours, chief.”

It would be physically impossible, even with the extra-wide doorway, for the tattooed man to squeeze past Carmine Cicciaro without forcing him to move. He can’t weigh less than three hundred pounds, and Carmine, no beanpole himself, has put on an extra fifteen or twenty this last half-year, from all the junk food. But he’s already spent hours fighting his way here, and he’s not about to retreat.

Nor, having planted himself in the still-warm chair, will Carmine get up even once to visit the vending machines that hum in an alcove off the waiting room. This is a place he can sit for long periods of time without thinking much of anything. Some of the things he’s not thinking about now: his own body flying between his daughter and the gun, instead of weighing down a fireworks barge in bumblefuck New Jersey. The empty cans of Schlitz surrounding him a few hours later, when the ringer forced him from his bed. The man who’d whisked his wife away, and how that face, as Satanically youthful as Dick Clark’s, had returned to him just before he’d answered the phone, at four a.m. on day one of the new year. Her yogurt constructor, he’d thought she’d said, that first airy mention. But then, he’d been only halfhearing her for years. He’d been too busy clamoring for space … and even after she left couldn’t get it. Baby-fat fallen away, Sammy was the image of her mother, right down to the secretive way her lips pursed at rest. You’ve done your best for her, the reporter had said. Sacrificed a lot for her education. But what had Richard known, in the end? Not shit. Carmine was never more than halfway present to his daughter, either, and sees this is all his fault—or would, were he to think about it, which he doesn’t. And does she? Not if the doctors are to be believed.

Here comes one now, looking like a young Jawaharlal Nehru. “Let’s take a look,” he says, consulting the chart he carries. “Ah. Cicciaro.” The clipped efficiency with which he pronounces every syllable exposes his warmth as a pretense. Carmine has a vivid fantasy of shoving the paperwork down the man’s throat. Instead, he asks the same question he does every time he meets a new doctor, as if it might change the answer. How long will this last?

The ve-ge-ta-tive state? asks Nehru. There’s an absence of gesture here, of the head-scratching and turning away Carmine’s gotten used to. There are cases, mi-ra-cu-lous cases, where a patient wakes up, but the data are very much against this. And Carmine isn’t a re-li-gi-ous man, is he? No, he hadn’t thought so. She might go on like this for years, in body, but without these machines, she would already be dead. “I am sorry,” the man then says, as if a different and deeply pained person has commandeered his larynx, but when he tries to touch Carmine’s arm, all Carmine can think of is getting him down on the floor among the wheeled bases of the equipment and horse-whipping him with his stethoscope until he needs a machine to help him breathe.

Sammy’s in no pain, of course—of that Nehru is certain. The grimace Carmine sometimes thinks he sees is just a combination of muscular reflex and his mind’s own drive to make meaning. The doctors are constantly reassuring him of this: she is neither warm nor cold, neither angry nor forgiving, and certainly not in pain. And for months now, instead of grieving for the soul, he’s been trying simply to see her as this, a vessel, a shell. The shiny petroleum jelly the nurses apply around the nostrils, the chapstick he puts on the lips, the cracking it can’t quite prevent. Dehydration is a danger. Bedsores a danger. Weight loss: a constant danger. He untucks the sheet at least once per visit to inspect her legs, which is where you’d really expect to see it. Each time he imagines she’ll have held steady thanks to the doctors (who now come to check on her every ten minutes, you could set your watch, because apparently there’s been some trouble earlier with her breathing apparatus). And each time, instead, there’s a little less of her. He looks again. With their down grown back, the legs could be a skinny boy’s. The ankles like pencils. No matter what they say, she’s suffering, and it’s the sins of the father, his sins against the very idea of fatherhood, she is paying for.

All he would have to do would be to ask them to unplug the machines, and no one could blame him; this, he sees at last, is what Nehru was too green not to imply. Is what they’ve been implying one way or another since January. She is never going to recover. But Carmine knows he would blame himself. Would live the rest of his life as if he’d been dipped in polverone and white arsenic and lit on fire, tossing off sparks.

Nehru, returning with a colleague, pretends no longer to see Carmine. The colleague frowns as he examines the connections on the respirator. Nehru makes tiny marks on the chart and says something about how long the machine was off, the potential for further brain damage. Carmine can’t quite make it out, because a chant has arisen outside the window. Three beats: Da da DAH. It’s that protest march he heard about on “Dr.” Zig this morning. It must still be going strong, but when he gets up to look, all is dark out there, save for a blip on an office tower a half-mile away, like an eye that sees him—that sees what’s in his heart. It would see even if everyone else was eager to accept that somehow, in the power failure, the technology keeping her alive had failed too. Mechanical error, one of those things, her time, the Lord’s will, not in pain anymore. For the best. Is he man enough, is the real question. Is he man enough to sit here and watch his own daughter gasp like a fish on a line and not turn back? Because if he does it, he isn’t going to leave the room till it’s over.

Don’t, the crowd outside is shouting, as the doctors retreat again. Don’t do that, or maybe Don’t turn back. He used to think sacrifice meant giving up his own life. Nope. It means giving up hers. And he wants it to hurt more than anything has ever hurt, more than she’s hurt, if she’s hurt, and to annihilate him with hurting. He wants the black powder all over, consuming him from the outside, but never quite finishing off the core, which will stay screaming inside for all eternity. Those other fathers were man enough. Abraham. Jehovah. And now here is Carmine Cicciaro, reaching for the mask.

THE FOUR VISIONS OF CHARLIE WEISBARGER

THE FIRST VISION, PROLOGUE TO THE OTHERS, is of the narrowness of all previous visions—the way they never reached much beyond the limits of Charlie’s skull. Meaning they must not have been visions at all. Or anyway, not like this. For it is the outside world that transforms itself now. What seemed to be a window becoming a door.

THE SECOND IS A NOISE. A voice. You have to decide whether to step through, it says. To awake. But there’s a problem: the birds are blocking the doorway, so he can’t see what’s beyond with any clarity. The others distracted by the presence of Sewer Girl (as he too might have been, under different conditions), he closes his eyes and pulls himself up onto the window ledge. The strap of the camera forces breath from his lungs. An iron fist squeezes his heart. He doesn’t have to look to know how far it is down to the street, and these birds seem pissed. They thrum just beyond the window like a vengeance machine, the tight wind they churn up blowing his hair all around. But he cannot bring himself to open his eyes. Or maybe he doesn’t need to. Maybe it would just detract from the next vision, the one now unfurling inside.

THIS ONE INVOLVES A FUTURE, OR FUTURES. He is floating above Midtown, the office tower below him an ancient ruin, along with everything in a several-block radius. Farther off, beyond the intact wall of the Financial District, is the harbor. The waters are placid at first, glinting, but then they stir under the pressure of something coming from the north and west. What Charlie witnesses when he turns, from the top of what was once the Hamilton-Sweeney Building, is incredibly fast and bright, even twenty miles off, a pair of little suns, gold flaws in the blue. They leave too little time for anything to be done to stop them—just enough for him to understand that July 14 was only the leading edge, that the KGB or the PLO or some other letters will be blamed, and struck, and strike back, and be struck back, until ultimately everything he’s ever known is consumed. What does the end of time look like? His mom, in her kitchen window, watching the sky go white like a flashbulb. His brothers, sleeping, turned to ash or air. Everything he has not loved as he should, everything he has forgotten to be choosing at every second, because this is evidently the only life one gets: the skyline and the bridges and the grasses of Long Island, and the granite slab that was to bear his dad’s name into the future, all dead. In this future, Sam is dead, too. And these last seconds he spends utterly alone with what he knows. And in the other one—the one he chooses if he goes through?

THE LAST OF THE FOUR VISIONS OF CHARLIE WEISBARGER is just a glimmer of where his error was. He’s been looking for a way to change what is, but it is never going to arrive from outside. This was in the Gramsci Nicky gave him, and the Marx, and even in his Bible somewhere. “No man hath seen God at any time.” The only available change has been inside him all along, where the lines between indication and invocation get hopelessly unclean. He’s been waiting for a finger to point, but God is more like the meaning of the pointing—a thing whose existence depends on the observer. Act like there’s nothing larger than yourself, no justice or mercy or community or whatever, and there won’t be. Or you can try somehow to call it into being. There are Paradoxes here you could disappear right up the butt of, and he does for a second, but then he’s feeling again the flashlight making that pink cave on the backs of his eyelids, and he can hear the rubber tip of the inspector’s crutch striking the floor, once, twice, coming to rescue him, and when he opens his eyes he can just make out beyond the light’s white spot the fat attendant and Sewer Girl. Don’t do that! Now’s not the time! But time is just the language of God. Or so he’d tell them, only he doesn’t want his last words to be bullshit, and there’s no time to decide if this is. There is no time, even, really, to be afraid anymore, as Charlie turns to face the outer world and the feathers caress his face and he gathers his last breath and hurls himself into them, the wings, the arms that are also the void.