City on Fire (118 page)

MIDTOWN—2:20 A.M.

FOR A WHILE, Keith keeps slowing to talk to passersby just loud enough for Regan to hear that he’s still behind her, that she hasn’t succeeded in making him give up. Eventually, though, he stops bothering. He’s known all along that no one will have noticed two little kids in this outer dark. It is probably no less effective, all things considered, to go back to what he was doing forever ago, before the lights went out: cupping hands to mouth and shouting their names. “Will! Cate!” A half-block ahead, near a cataract of brakelight, Regan stiffens. He is drawing attention. But that’s exactly the point, and soon she’s doing it, too. “Will! Cate!”

They’re a peculiar team, her ahead, him behind, separated by the street between them. They could be strangers, were it not for the way their voices cross and part in the garbage-smelling heat. (Will, Cate. Willcate. Late. Kill. Wait!) Cars crawl by but do not honk, and sometimes offer a little bit of visibility. He can see, for example, that they’re now less than a block from the Lickety Splitz Gentleman’s Club at Fifty-Third and Third. If she turns left, she’ll lead them past the very spot where he stood in the snow on New Year’s Eve and decided not to go meet his mistress downtown. Time was he would have wanted to pause here, to genuflect, but when Regan heads straight he merely sends the names of his children clattering back among the fire escapes and trashcans.

For an hour, they zag north and south, east and west, past increasingly unlikely places. Past the Plaza’s eponymous plaza, the entryways of S.R.O.s, the whited sepulchers of the U.N. He’s never thought of these as having any commerce with each other, but in the dark it’s all surprisingly close together. Maybe the vastness of Manhattan is just a kind of accounting fiction you use to justify your own insignificance, your own helplessness, the fact that when you call, no one answers. A sense of constraint is already creeping in when Regan plunges into the cavern of Grand Central, darker even than the night outside. “Will! Cate!” He’s never heard a silence like the one that comes back. The ceiling is gone, but starlight dimming through the vaulted windows at either end of the concourse reveals shapes like vultures huddled under the departure boards. Or possibly these are highwaymen, alert to their presence. They rustle, ready to bar the exits, but he takes it up, “Will! Cate!” He is finding there is no hell into which he would not follow her—

And they are out again into the warm open air. They pass a slab of shadow he recognizes as the library, and the park behind it, where scholars score heroin. There’s a car crash on Sixth Ave.; someone has rammed into a storefront. Cops scuttle through the disco whirl of red and blue, but they seem preoccupied with the car hanging half-out of the smashed glass, and Regan ignores them. The next block, if memory serves, should be a gauntlet of electric come-ons, peepshows and X-rated theaters, but the blackout has obliterated it, and without the promise of live flesh, foot traffic is thin. Farther on, though, it thickens. He is able to make out faces. And then suddenly, between the black shoals of office buildings: the light.

There is always light in Times Square, true, but it should be an incandescent custard coming from the marquees above. Instead, this light is white and mineral in its intensity, and as Forty-Second debouches into Broadway he can see it’s streaming from two king-sized discs that hang from cranes several stories above the ground. Below mill certifiable masses of people, tens of thousands, filling the streets where cars normally go. Traffic islands puncture the crowds at intervals, and on each is a raised platform, draped in red, with an old-fashioned circus cage on top. One houses a lit-up panther. Another, a bald eagle on a branch. Nearest him and Regan, a few dozen yards away, is a ruffed black bear who must be ten feet tall, even slumped on his little stool. In his years in the city, Keith has stumbled upon enough movie shoots to know this must be one, but the scale here is like Cecil B. DeMille, or that Soviet version of War and Peace. Plus where are the cameras? And are the people around him people, or actors hired to play people? Have any of them seen his son?

He’s about to ask when a long chord sounds from atop the army recruiting center. He hasn’t noticed, but there’s a whole choir up there, ranked in gray robes he can just see the shoulders of. A tuxed conductor gesticulates with his back turned. As if at his command, the rest of the square goes silent and still, all except a shopping bag aflap on an updraft. Keith could yell out, and probably the whole square would hear, but he feels under some tremendous pressure to stay silent. Regan must, too, for even she has stopped shouting.

The song that now begins is slow and mournful and in a language not their own. Russian, he’d guess, from the deep double basses. The buildings loft the sound toward the sky and smear it, blurring the edges. Keith wonders if somewhere back in the Lamplighter family tree are some Slavs, because it calls to him, this elegy, if that’s what it is. Requiem. He wants, suddenly, to be standing on some great precipice, overlooking something huge—the way he used to put on his Best of Scottish Pipes and Drums LP to buy a few minutes to think at the end of the day, to send the kids running for the far corners of the apartment with hands over ears while he stood by the window, the light in his heart the color of the light through the Scotch in the glass. Below, on the street, rush-hour people hurried home. His own individual life had felt like a shirt shrunk in the wash … but now he would welcome such straitening. Why must he always be running from some place he never was to some place he’ll never be? What would it take for him to just be where he is? He wants, almost, to be his own ghost, casting his shadow on the little world these other people move in. And he wants Regan beside him—where she is, only a few feet away. She makes no attempt to hide the tears rolling down her spotlit face. She is frozen there, in a note that places them outside of time. And the honey so long withheld from him is given: Keith can hear, he thinks, what’s inside her. Honey, she’s thinking. I’m afraid.

He wants to tell her not to be, but it’s only fair that he not be able to hide from her his own fear.

Where can they have gone? What’s going to happen here?

I don’t know, he thinks. Who knows? But I have to believe, Regan, they’ll be okay. We’re going to find them.

I wish I was strong enough to believe, she thinks.

It is baffling, and he can’t quite say why, until he can. But you are, he thinks. You’re the strongest person I’ve ever known. You’re the only one who could have been strong enough to bring me through.

To bring you through to what?

It forces him to think harder. She needs him to think harder. And if he can think this hard without her hearing, can he reach her at all? To this, Regan. To a life without protection.

Then, abruptly, the held note ends, and someone yells “Cut!” The song is over, the planetary discs of light clicking off overhead and shadows moving over their faces. The bear growls once, dejectedly, in the gathering dark, as if to say, I knew it all along. And then Times Square, that insane monument, has vanished around them, which really is almost enough to break Keith’s heart. He can’t find her hand. “I’m sorry,” is what he’s left with. “I am so, so sorry.”

“No, I’m the one who dragged you into this,” Regan says, somewhere.

“I mean for all of this. Always.” But out loud, it sounds like more self-regard.

Then her hands are clamping around his. “We can talk about that later, Keith, but it’s not going to help us find the kids.” It is the old Regan and the new one together, honest, responsible, long-suffering—the real self she’ll only let you see under the direst of circumstances. Which may be true of everyone. He really wishes he could see her face. “The best we can do now is go back to Daddy’s and stay there. Give them a stationary target. Get a couple hours of rest, clear our heads, and if they still haven’t turned up by dawn, we start working the phones again. But no more magical thinking, okay?” She squeezes his hand once, with what proportions of the maternal and the connubial it’s hard to tell. And she begins to pull him through the extras, who are stirring now, as from a dream. The whole city seems to stretch, to sigh. He hears for a moment the beat of wings, a flock of birds passing overhead like incompetent demiurges, no longer able to stitch this world together. It’s as if the pagan order is crumbling, making way for whatever’s next. But probably this is what she means by magical thinking.

GREENWICH VILLAGE—3:22 A.M.

ONCE UPON A TIME, MERCER GOODMAN HAD A VISION OF HIS OWN. This was back in those early months after moving in with William, when the sex so intoxicated him that he couldn’t get to sleep for hours after. He’d lie awake thinking about a city where people might actually be able to communicate their longings and disappointments and dreams, and so move beyond the illusion of being unknown and unknowable, as in the lights of passing buses, the half-finished self-portrait flared up and died. But later, Mercer had begun to wonder if the sense of illusion was itself an illusion. Because there were so many things he’d never understand about William. And there was his own work, the manuscript he never talked about. One of the reasons he started avoiding it in the first place was the swelling contradiction between the world and the novel as he imagined it. In his head, the book kept growing and growing in length and complexity, almost as if it had taken on the burden of supplanting real life, rather than evoking it. But how was it possible for a book to be as big as life? Such a book would have to allocate 30-odd pages for each hour spent living (because this was how much Mercer could read in an hour, before the marijuana)—which was like 800 pages a day. Times 365 equaled roughly 280,000 pages each year: call it 3 million per decade, or 24 million in an average human lifespan. A 24-million-page book, when it had taken Mercer four months to draft his 40 pages—wildly imperfect ones! At this rate, it would take him 2.4 million months to finish. 2,500 lifetimes, all consumed by writing. Or the lifetimes of 2,500 writers. That was probably—2,500—as many good writers as had ever existed, from Homer on. And clearly, he was no Homer. Was not even an Erica Jong. He had been writing for all the wrong reasons, for the future, for The Paris Review, for the cover of Time (the peak of cultural attainment, so far as the other Goodmans were concerned)—for anything but the freedom he’d once discovered in ink and paper.

This had led to the first of several resolutions to set aside his dreamcity and the wild ambitions that had led him north.

But it all keeps coming back, doesn’t it? The old desires, the old fears and delusions, like a maze you’ll never find your way out of—not because of how it’s built, but because of who you are. All this time he’s believed himself free, he’s really been tethered to fate, or whatever is its opposite, the force that’s returned him to his Waterloo. A light flickers in one of the school’s high windows. Someone who has a life of his own, about which Mercer can know no more than anyone else does of him. Or he does of himself. Or of the quartet of skinheads now catching up behind him. It’s possible, even, that they’re not skinheads at all, but off-duty Marines, or alopeciacs—in the moonlight it’s hard to see much beyond the cropped scalps. He braces himself as they come right up to the base of the steps. One flicks a lighter, which sparks but does not catch. Then Mercer’s sense of return is turned inside out, as is his sense of opacity. As are those scalps, it seems, and for a minute, they are naked consciousness, trembling in each other’s presence. Fag, they’re thinking. Hick. Jigaboo. But again this is an illusion; it’s not him they’re after. One asks, “What is that, a fungo bat?”

Another one laughs. “Out of the way, friend. We’ve got business to attend to.”

The person who speaks is holding a cinderblock. No, a gasoline can. Oh. They mean to … And they must think he’s … But the condescension, the disregard, shake something loose in him that open hatred would only have reinforced. “What’s this place ever done to you?” he hears himself ask. “It’s just a school.”

“Are you kidding? Where do you think the ruling class gets the idea they’re better than us in the first place?”

“I mean done to you personally.”

“It’s nothing personal. Though it should be for you. You think they admit your kind?”

“Well, actually, the administration has made serious efforts in that regard. I worked here for a while—”

“Remove head from ass, bro. Look around. This whole fucking city’s like an injustice factory. Maybe they buy you off with a little something you’re afraid to lose, a paycheck or a color TV, but you’ll never get where they are. Meanwhile, your brother’s rotting in a cell somewhere. Your sister’s pouring water on the kids’ cereal ’cause she can’t afford milk. Do you really need me to do the whole bit, in the middle of a riot? The short version is, you’re hung up on something that’s never going to love you back.”

It’s an oddly educated diagnosis, but that’s not the main problem. The main problem is that it is in most points correct. For what is Wenceslas-Mockingbird, if not an armory for the existing order? An order both unjust and untrue. And as long as the world is stuck being this particular world, he is stuck being hapless old Mercer. So he stands aside, and the mob in the background refocuses itself to batter down the doors. Total pandemonium. Rioters from all corners surge through halls and classrooms, splashing gasoline, burning walnut paneling and oil paintings and the leather-bound volumes of the library. And then it is on to City Hall, to Wall Street, to the Empire State and Hamilton-Sweeney Buildings. When the sun rises a few hours from now, it is on a city where no trace of the past is legible.

Except that’s not what happens. Mercer doesn’t in fact stand aside, but looks up again at the one lit window above. It could be Dr. Runcible, that old closet case, communing with Matthew Arnold by candlelight. It could just be a janitor. Still, amid all the fucked-up ossifications of the whole concept of liberal Enlightenment, there is the human person. A soul you may not be able to save if you don’t destroy its body first, but that you almost certainly can’t save if you do. This is ridiculous, he thinks—is he really defending prep school? Still, Mercer has wasted months on the bird in the bush, and when the man tries to push him aside, he pushes back.