The Nervous System (2 page)

—Former mayor is in business with Russian/Chinese/Ukrainian crime outfits, and collects his pound of flesh from each and every construction firm in town. Shockeroo! I recognize some names in there, particularly the Ukrainians.

—Current state senator (representing the 15th Congressional District, just a touch over from the territory of my childhood) sired a child with a certain Korean hooker, who was then, most conveniently, found dismembered (along with the kid) in a barrel of kimchi. This led to the quote-unquote 32nd Street Massacre, which the NYPD has always claimed was triggered by their well-intentioned if clumsy attempts to quell a Korean turf war.

Et-fuckin-cetera.

All flavorful stuff, none of it the least bit surprising or useful, unless I wanted in on the blackmail game.

Ha. A slow horse if ever there was one, blackmail, in these times. Not much of a racket. Nobody around to preserve your good name for.

After the large-scale destruction wrought upon New York City last February (known as the “Valentine's Occurrence”), the town stands at about one-tenth capacity. And since elections have been suspended, those in power can simply kick back and hang in. Who's gonna say different?

No, the blackmail thing just isn't my bag. Plus, I dig life too much, so I mind my own.

Yawn, stretch.

All these goddamn documents, but I'm no wiser with respect to my own status, and I'm in need of a piss break. Handy that the office has an en-suite half bath.

Mirror, mirror. Wringing my hands with rubbing alcohol over the sink, I spy a thin dark-skinned male of mixed piedigree, in a hat, tasteful dark brown suit, knitted charcoal tie. Maybe midforties, though that's hard to say, given that those of us who survived this far now possess that dried-up look of the malnourished yoga obsessive. Or a late-stage HIV sufferer. The blue surgical mask perhaps clashes, but it isn't an accessory; it's for my own protection.

Lean in for a closer inspection of my mug. My nose won't ever be exactly the same, and the amateur stitch job on my cheekbone has left behind a jerky swipe of discoloration. Lower the mask. The scab on my lips is constantly cracking, even now, so it remains practically an open wound.

If you observed me walking, you'd see that I have a fairly pronounced limp, and favor my left leg. You would too if you'd had your kneecap blown off.

Otherwise, I like to imagine I cut a dashing figure. Even the limp bestows a certain casual elegance. See me on the street, perhaps taking in the virulent air, you'd reckon I got a style all my own and tony places to be. Exclusive spots way out of your league.

Add the rubber gloves, the face mask, I reckon it lends a whiff of the mysterious. That is, yo, I like to think so.

Flip the lens and I present as just another black vagrant, rough-sleeper a couple inches from death, overdressed in bespoke kit. Stone crazy in SARS gear.

All in all I must say I've done okay for a bookish (if violent, as my environment dictated) ghetto child of the South Bronx. Survivor of wars domestic and foreign.

Check my left breast: the Beretta under my jacket helps fill out the sunken cavity where my heart used to be. The Sig Sauer achieves the same effect on my right side.

Symmetry. That's the System working for me, people. Watch and learn.

I pop a pill, get a smidge misty. Reminisce on it: Jew Rosenblatt used to keep my pill supply flowing, part of our quid pro quo. Now I get my shit from a military doctor in exchange for “protection,” which is pretty hazily defined. I think the guy is under the misimpression that I'm CIA or mobbed up—or both. What's the difference anymore? And who's to say he's wrong?

Regard the late DA's papers and dig in again. My third pair of gloves. I hit the loose piles.

Driving me nuts is the lack of any perceivable pattern or methodology. I like logical processes. I
live
logical processes.

See, Decimal is my handle. Dewey Decimal.

The dead DA dubbed me thus. In reference to my life's work: getting the gargantuan collection of books organized back at my crib, the Main Branch of the New York Public Library.

It's not my real name, this should be no surprise. My Christian moniker, and much of my past—most of this is information I don't have access to. Can't recall. Not like I try that hard. I'm man enough to admit it: from what little I do know, I'm afraid of what I might find, and see no reason to fixate on that which is done.

And yet here I stand, waxing full nostalgic now.

On a lot of levels, Rosenblatt understood my methods. Sure. For as much as he used me, for all the dirty business I did at his behest, the DA gave me context, and a connection to the outside world. Sure, he was a white man. A Jew. Sure, he was a crooked ambulance-chasing attorney turned opportunist politician.

Was a sad part of me that recognized a sad part of him, and vice versa. A kind of color-blind, sicko kinship founded on mutual need.

After my active military service, and my subsequent escape from the torture labs at the National Institutes of Health near Washington, D.C., Rosenblatt was one guy willing to throw me the kind of work that played to some of my less savory strengths.

No questions asked. Not that I had answers, or wanted them.

Naturally, none of this was on my mind as I hefted Rosenblatt's corpse over the lip of one of the many open fire pits that appeared across the city after the Valentine's Occurrence, usually reserved for industrial garbage but equally well suited for the disposal of bodies.

In the end, it came down to him or me, with a woman caught in the middle. Faced with this kind of moral conundrum, the outcome is a no-brainer for your humble narrator.

Lest you've already diagnosed me as a hopeless psychopath, irredeemable, I do have a Code. Which sets me apart from the bulk of the animals in this town and elsewhere.

Shake off this digression. Focus. I sigh, hunker down again over this train wreck of documents.

Another hour of this noise creeps by. My bad knee giving me deep grief, lower back barking, yeah, I'm more or less convinced there's no paper trail with respect to yours truly.

It's entirely possible. Rosenblatt never paid me in cash as such. Not like I ever got any W2s. I was taken care of in other ways, like the pills. It was a unique arrangement, very much in groove with our brave new environment.

Empty the file cabinets, deposit their contents on the floor with everything else. I can never be positive I'm not mentioned anywhere given this impossible fucking mess. This is a serious concern.

Fact in mind, I withdraw a bottle of Grey Goose vodka from the lower left-hand desk drawer, and a couple of loose Cohiba Coronos Especiales. Look around, yeah, here's that cigar clipper. With the man's engraved initials. Jackass.

I've been organizing the papers a bit as I go along. Can't help it, really. Force of habit.

Almost as an afterthought I nudge a box of aforementioned files, the tabloid-y shit on the big operators, toward the exit. Remember tabloids? Remember newspapers? A quaint thought.

Yeah, I know what I said about the blackmail racket not being what it once was. But hey now: you never know when spicy intel like this might serve some future purpose. Make a good bartering tool—but would never want to deal in this firsthand, are you crazy?

Place the set of folders out in the hall, empty and silent this late Sunday afternoon. Not that one would notice, and not that Monday will look much different. Wonder if anyone works up in this building, period. Anymore.

Douse the place in spirits, around in a circle twice.

Take a final look about. Out the window, the great Woolworth Building visible due northeast, about to be outdone (again) once they wrap up that new Freedom Tower piece of shit.

Frisk myself, locate a book of matches, reading:
Millennium Hotel
. Gives me a little zing. Obviously I haven't been smoking much lately.

There in the doorway, I take a moment to scrub those paws good with the Purell
^TM
, and kit-up with a fresh mask and set of gloves.

Lower my face mask, clip the tip off a Cohiba. Jam it between my split lips and spark a match. With the flame applied I rotate the cigar, getting a nice even cherry going.

Flick the match back into the office, it hits a stack of documents, whoosh, manila and paper go up in hot blue, the flame charges right, chasing its tail.

The room blossoms fire.

I kick the door shut, pick up the box, and head toward the elevators, huff-puffing on the expensive cigar. Trying not to inhale.

Waiting for the alarm, the sprinklers, cops, movement, something, anything. Doesn't happen.

Because like most of everything and everybody in this ghost town, like my knee, like my head, like my heart: everything is broken, and barely there.

_______________

Cause I'm afraid of what I might have done.

Memory, it's said, is either cruel or kind depending on who you're talking to.

In my case I can't say it's not cruel, as I'm only allowed a peek at a pile of fragmented snapshots. It's rerun material, rotating past my mind's eye with agonizing sameness, over and over ad infinitum.

And on the other hand, I can't say memory is not kind, because if the images I am shown mean what I think they mean, I'm better off never knowing the whole story.

Yeah, I am afraid of what I might have done, and what might have been done to me. And I am forever stuck between gears, with the clutch grinding uselessly. Grinding itself down.

So with nowhere to land, and to get myself through the goddamn day, I've adopted a System of behavior. Adherence to it is the last shred of structure I have available in an otherwise chaotic maze.

Yeah, I'm afraid of what I might've done.

_______________

Limping up the marble stairs that lead to the Main Branch, I shift the box of files to one arm and tap the southern-most lion's stone ass.

That's System protocol: a tap on my way out, and a tap on the way in. Balance, people.

Twin monster cats, keeping vigil over my home here at 42nd and Fifth Avenue. Again: balance.

I take a moment to groove on it all, applying Purell
^TM
as I do so. Clean of hand is clear of mind.

Just made that shit up. I mouth the words, repeat it to myself.

By some miracle, the beaux arts façade of the library remains as magnificent as ever, pretty much unblemished. In the darker hours, such as this Sunday evening in mid-September, automated floodlights illuminate the building. Even now. One or two have burned out, and I wonder how long the surviving lights have yet to live. I will mourn them, believe me.

I look south. You could roll a skull down Fifth Avenue. Absolutely zero traffic. Dead quiet, with the exception of a distant industrial hubbub, a construction site to the east, the night-crew going at it.

Get itchy around crowds. That's where true believers go to blow themselves up, right to the dead center of a nice crowd.

This is why today's New York City couldn't be a better spot for a cat like me.

In this sense the town is much improved. I should know, I'm the original native son.

The air? The air is getting steadily worse, if that's possible. Or at least that's my perception. The Stench, which has been brutal since February 14, is now actively
visible
: a jaundiced haze of burnt plastic, burning oil, and smoldering trash. Hard to go more than five blocks without feeling a tightening in the chest, shortness of breath. Comes off the water, out of the ground. It rains from the rancid sky. Gets in the eyes and nostrils as well, glassy little particles and fat snowflakes of ash.

I can see it in the floodlights, a slow-moving yellow fog. Shiny bits wink at me like glitter.

You can learn to live with anything. That's the real.

Upstairs in the grand hall known as the Reading Room, I shove the box of documents beneath the bench nearest the corner where I keep my shit.

Make positive nobody else is around. Funny. Ever since that drama with the Ukrainians went down nearly two months back, I haven't seen a soul up in here. Usually there would be at least one or two ghosts looking to flop. Maybe it's cause the weather's holding steady, a touch chilly but not particularly cold yet. Maybe word spread that folks got themselves killed in these rooms. No matter. Happy to be on my lonesome.

Strip down to my boxers, shrugging off my shoulder holster, which stinks of sweat. Stow the guns. Carefully hang up my suit on a plastic Century 21 hanger.

Consider doing a little work.

Man, just when I reckon I'm getting somewhere, I discover a whole new cache of books in the twisty underground cathedral that houses the library's collection. Sets me back freaking weeks.

As much sense as the decimal system resonates with me, as much as I dig its logic, there are difficult days; I will not lie.

Coming up on seven months, and I am at classification number 004: “Data Processing and Computer Science.” This can be found within subheading 000, known as “Computer Science, Information, and General Works.”

Now Melvil Dewey, the father of this ingenious methodology, and its subsequent editors could not have possibly known how many volumes would come to fall under the heading “Computer Science.” It's seemingly infinite. Might just take the rest of my natural life to log everything in this sub-subheading.

Check it: a good analogy is the U.S. Constitution. Essentially suspended, per Amendment 30. The one after the close-the-borders amendment, number 29. Championed, I should add, by husband-and-wife Senators Clarence Howard and Kathleen Koch.

Look at the Second Amendment. Think about all these frothing delusionals, running around hopped-up on meth and/or religion, armed to the freaking gills—I'm talking
before
2/14. All bets are off now.

As a kid in the Bronx, I saw close to a hundred situations in which shit went south just cause some stupid fuck had a heater and an inferiority/Napoleon complex.