Jamestown (35 page)

“There is so much of it.”

“It goes on and on.”

“We are right next to it and it is huge and we are tiny.”

“Look at those children playing jumprope by it.”

“They're smiling, but their feet and ankles and knees are covered in black soot.”

“It is crawling up them.”

“They are becoming it.”

“Soon it will reach their brains and they'll be naught but it.”

“Soon we'll all be naught but it.”

“That's an ugly thought.”

“What's a beautiful thought?”

“Gimme a minute.”

“You should always have one ready for times like this.”

“The Chrysler Building itself was once beautiful.”

“That is not a beautiful thought, that is a beautiful building.”

“Same thing.”

“But many died in the making of it. And many more were spiritually crushed by it.”

“At its top it had a stack of gleaming arcs on each of its four sides, eight arcs per stack, I believe, times four equals thirty-two arcs, each arc polished to reflect the sky around it, man's literally highest achievement reflecting God's grandeur. Back when it was built you could stand at the top and feel the clear, clean, cold, blue, crazy-ass air hit your skin like—like—like—like—like—air.”

“But each gleaming arc you mentioned had fangs.”

“Those weren't fangs, they were the points of a crown, or they were triangular representations of radiant light.”

“God gave us light and we have to keep making more.”

“Let's not fight by this mile-wide pile of night.”

“Little children playing next to it.”

“But not in it.”

“Oh they're in it. We're all in it.”

“We're almost past it.”

“We'll never be past it.”

“Let's forget it as soon as we can't see it anymore.”

“Which will be never.”

“Or very soon.”

It's good to get a little New York history. I always like to know the history of the places I visit, even though I've never visited anyplace before. Did I mention my father just died and I'm sad and away from home for the first time even though there isn't really any home for me anymore so I'm nowhere and everywhere at once? Look, the bicyclists are slowing down.

“I guess we're here.”

‘“La Petite Marmite.'”

‘“The Little Cooking Pot.'”

“He's meeting us at a restaurant?”

“Disused restaurant.”

“Speaking of pot, I could use some pot.”

“We left our source of pot tied to a cot,
ach mein Gott
, I love Sal a lot. Chances are that now he's not.”

This erstwhile restaurant that we are being led through on foot by those nondescript guys who led us through town on bikes sure is dank and grim. The once-white swathes of cloth that cover the two dozen small tables we are walking past seem to have absorbed so much dust, smog, ratshit, and anguish that they are now dark gray and hard like the bones of the folks who ate off them before they died. Through a dank and grim door, up a dank and grim stair, down a dank and grim hall, up more stairs, some more dank than grim, others the reverse, chipped, mottled, cracked, worn down, worn out, broken through, home repair a vanished art, home décor a distant dream of the people of my boyfriend's town, it seems. A golden door, rimmed by red light, glows at the end of the hall. I continue not to feel so good, I think I gotta puke, would prefer not to go through the door, don't like what I believe awaits me there, must go through the door, not to go through the door that glows at the end of the hall is to shun life, die unfulfilled, haunt the earth as neither mood nor thing.
I'll wait in the hall:
a coward's motto.

“I'll wait in the hall,” I say and cop a squat on a cobweb.

“Come on, you have to meet the CEO,” my boyfriend says, “and then we'll let you ride the fever out on the prow of a bed of down softer than any dreamt of in your people's bedmaking philosophy.” He hauls me up by the arms.

‘“Let me'? Let this,” I say, and show him the bird that flies from the northern edge of my palm.

We're through the door. The air in this big room is red and hot to the touch. Finally a room that's not the remnant of a room. The degree to which this room is
done
seems to want to make up for how undone the others all across this city are. The walls are covered with a soft red cloth that adheres to them; likewise the couches and chairs. A bouquet of electric lamps—I've heard of these—hangs from the high ceiling and its light's refracted through hard-edged teardrops of glass, each attached to the bouquet by a little hook that lets it dangle and sway with the motion of the air in the room, which makes the light buzz around my eye like a substanceless bright fly. The fuel that lights their chief's electric lamps is what these guys went south to find, and in the end will kill whoever has it, though no one has a lot of it since ain't a lot of it left in Earth, and I must admit these lamps are pretty enough to kill for, as is this rug that is red and clean and soft and soothes my hard and tired and fevered feet.

And there's their main man, the My Dad of Their Side. He's smaller than my dad, but looks strong. He smiles on his soft red chair. He has blonde hair. White suit. His penis lurks egregiously beneath his pants. All men's dicks lurk to some extent, I guess, but some let you know it right away—who knows how?—and he's one of those. He's in the I-have-a-penis camp, the let-my-penis-be-a-central-feature-of-the-initial-impression-I-make-on-a-heretofore-unmet-interlocutor crew. Who hasn't met a ton of guys like
that
before? Oh, the penis, what would the world be like without you? We may never know.

“Hi! How's it going?” he says, marking him further as a “Hi! How's it going?” kind of guy.

Smith says, “This is Pocahontas, an Indian princess. Pocahontas, this is our chief, James Stuart.”

“Isn't the communications officer supposed to do the talking?” says their chief.

“He don't like to talk,” Smith says.

“How's a guy supposed to run a business?” Stuart says.

I guess I ought to do a greeting dance for him but feel too ill and slow so I just bow. I say, “I think I gotta take a shit,” which makes him rearrange the fabric of his whitish suit a little bit.

“Lead her to her shit,” he says, and I am taken from the room, and since a lady never shits and thinks at once, suffice to say that for the next while the me that thinks flees down a dark hole.

Johnny Rolfe

“Holy shit, the toilets here are made of gold!” she said from offstage left.

“That's
their princess?” Stuart said.

I said, “She's grieving.”

“I think I'm in love,” he said, “and I think the princess just shit in my tuba.”

He said
I think I'm in love
lightly, casually, indifferently, and will no doubt pursue her in just that way, and she'll succumb, but a schmuck like me will bust a gut for love and still fuck it up. No, she won't succumb; well, maybe for political advantage; no, she doesn't think that way, and loves me; well, maybe for the wicked sort of thrill a girl will allow herself on holiday; no, she loves me, despite my flawed and gimped-up love of her. The Pocahontas of my mind betrays me every day. The one on the ground, I hope, will not.

“Well, so,” Stuart said, the signal that business was to begin. He had been sitting with his taut, lean ass on the left side of the seat of his red armchair, his torso leaning back and to the right, right elbow holding nearly half his weight on the right armrest. He stood now and smoothed down the white arms and legs of his suit, brushed each limb repeatedly with long, brisk strokes of his palm. “So, so, so, so, so. You're not supposed to be here now, are you? You're supposed to still be down there so what the hell happened and how about let's hear it from the communications officer this time?”

“Don't you fucking touch my girl,” I said.

“Well then let's hear it from Jack Smith.” Stuart nodded to two of his seemingly endless supply of square-jawed men in dark blue clothes, who punched my chest, arms, shoulders, and neck till I fell down.

“Sir,” Smith said, “the communications officer's a romantic. Civilization needs its romantics.”

“If you mean that a state can make no progress without a modest percentage of civilians bloodied and crumpled on the floor at all times then I agree with you. Your report, please.”

“We've lost a lot of men.”

“And?”

“What very little oil they have they trade for.”

“With who?”

“Don't know.”

“What
do
you know?”

“They have trees.”

“I've seen the trees Newport brought back.”

“How is Newport?”

“Dead.”

“Of what?”

“Some disease or bomb or gun, or was pushed into the sea and drowned, I knew how he died and meant to keep it in mind but I've got a thousand worries, each more vicious than the next, and Brooklyn at the door of my ass clamoring to be let in. Trees and what else?”

“They grow crops and catch fish and eat them.”

“How?”

“Food purification technology.”

“Did you see it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“They keep it well hidden.”

“So?”

“We had inadequate men and supplies. We'll need more to get what we want from them.”

“I don't have more. Every man and gun and scrap of food and ounce of fuel I send down south I have to give up here. Habsburg's made massive kills in the past three weeks. He's suddenly outweaponing me, I don't know how.”

“A hundred men deployed down south now, Sir, would let us plant crops this spring that we could eat next fall.”

“We can't eat if we're dead.”

“We could fish and eat this winter.”

“Fish where, the East River? The Hudson? There's not a fish alive in either place.”

“The ocean.”

“I send a fishing boat into New York Harbor, Phil Habsburg will smash it to bits, besides which no one here has ever fished.”

“So we could go down south again and bring back truckloads of dried fish, or fishermen.”

“No.”

“Sir, do you mean to say food is within our reach and you won't commit resources to procuring it?”

Stuart strode toward Smith and stood a foot from him. “I don't have resources to commit!” His spittle reached me where I fell. “Where's John Ratcliffe anyway?”

“He's among the unfortunate majority of our men who died, Sir.”

“How did he die?”

“Sir, with all due respect, the world is topsy-turvy when you care how Ratcliffe died but not how Newport died.”

“How did he die?”

Smith told him.

“Stop calling me ‘Sir,' you sound like an obsequious idiot.” Our middle-aged chief had meant to say that loud but said it faltering and soft. His pale peach face grew gray. “Please—” he said, “please wait here.” He left the red room by a different door than the one we'd come in.

Smith made to help me to a chair. I let him know I liked the floor. My neck hurt and I watched the worn, scraped, diverse footwear of the corporate guards. Some had cracked jackboots, others ancient rubber sandals fragilely encasing woolen socks smeared and bleared with toil; inside their socks, their actual, put-upon feet. I tried to call to mind the feet of everyone I'd known and everyone I hadn't known, two by two: the beleaguered work appendages of my race; their skin, sinew, and bone, their blisters and calluses, their bunions and corns, their brittle toenails, their arches fallen and erect; those mostly misshapen chief points of contact with the hardness of the world, what we use to haul our fond and petty hopes from infancy to death.

Poc's feet, unshod, came back into the room. “Whew,” she said, “I think I crapped out my brain. Hey, what you doing on the floor, oh no.” She ran to me; before she could arrive, a long and awful wail came from far beyond the door, and again, and then again, followed by a sob, a rest, another sob—sounds not unlike the ones the son of the woman who now made them had made when he was killed a sliver at a time.

The redoubtable Penny Ratcliffe, wailing, retreated or was carried to a part of the building still more remote from us until we couldn't hear her any more. Poc sat murmuring beside me on the rug. Heat from an unknown source warmed my hurt neck and head. The room was red and dim. We stayed still in wait. Jimmy Stuart reentered absent his phallic poise. His hair and white suit were mussed and he sat in his soft executive chair.

“Martin,” he said, sighing, eyes softly closed, his eyelids' engorged capillaries uttering what he could not, “what about Martin?”

“He's here.”

“Who else?”

“Father Richard Buck and Bucky Breck.”

“Get Martin.”

Two sandaled guards left and came back. Martin waddled in on bare hands.

“Jesus Christ, get up, would you?” Stuart said to me. I slowly did.

“What happened to you?” he said to John.

“What do you think?” Martin said.

Stuart thought about that. His silence was an apology of sorts. He wasn't on top of things and couldn't pretend to be now that his concubine had grieved so loudly in his ear. He was not an idea, as I'd thought when we came in. He was mortal, and Martin's presence seemed to make him more so.

“Please have a seat.”

“I've got one,” Martin said.

“Do you want to tell me what happened to you?”

“What good would that do?”

“Well. You've been on this expedition and seen things I haven't. What advice do you have for me?”

“Do everything.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do everything at once.”

“Can you be specific?”