City on Fire (101 page)

What he felt guiltiest about was Carmine. The fireworker’s final abjuration had mostly to do with the shooting itself, clearly, but still it couldn’t have been wholly coincidental. Richard arrives on your doorstep one day, an emissary from the great world, and subsequently your orderly and secure life totally explodes. Father. Husband. Yet Richard had let himself believe the story he was pursuing could loft him clear of his own demons. This writing is saving my life, he’d been telling himself, right up until the last twist, the day before yesterday. Since then, everything had stopped. The fanzines yielded no more answers. SG was gone. Carmine wouldn’t return calls. Richard was never going to find out who’d pulled the trigger on New Year’s Eve, or what the Demon Brother had to do with anything. What was left in his head were the inklings he had or hadn’t succeeded in turning into art; profound doubts about whether it mattered either way; and the last song he’d punched up on the Wurlitzer this morning before setting off. The water had found a seam in his shoe, and his left sock was wet. The rest of him would meet the same fate if he didn’t soon take cover. Whistling to himself, he labored waveringly uphill.

The cemetery’s mausoleum was less grand than it sounded, a kind of elongated archway. A folly, you would have called it, in a less terminal context. Through the center ran a passageway just tall enough for Richard to stand in. The sky had darkened to number 3 graphite, and as he neared the dregs of the whisky it let loose with wilder rain. Deeper in the passage he saw evidence of other souls on other days. Empty bottles, a Pringles can, the inevitable condom wrapper. He realized he had to pee. The bodies here were in the walls, not under the ground; still, it would have been a desecration to water this earth. But could he really make it all the way to that stand of oaks, in the rain? Remembering a touring rock band he’d profiled once, he picked up a bottle. When he’d finished pissing into it, he held his hands out into the rain to rinse. Come on, Richard, he thought. Come back, good buddy.

It was when he lowered his hands that he saw the punk. He was out there among the gravestones, maybe four hundred feet away, a muscly kid with tattoos and what looked like little Trotsky glasses. He was underdressed, too, his crewcut soaked wet, but he didn’t seem to care about getting dry. Or avoiding being seen. Richard didn’t recognize him, but he recognized Richard. His gaze was naked, ominous. (And was this not what Richard had wanted? To know how it felt inside the story?) When he started to back out of the far end of the folly, the punk moved, too, as if some signal had passed between them. And it almost didn’t matter anymore who was the origin point of the signals, giving these various hoplites their orders. Of the last two people to draw their attention, one had been shot and one disappeared.

Richard turned, made to run, but found his feet heavy from liquor and the wet ground. He was out of shape. At the top of the next rise, he stopped to crouch behind a memorial, panting. Looked back. The boy was coming on, implacable, slipping from marker to marker without seeming at all hurried. Richard slid back down, leaned against the stone. The groundskeepers’ carts had all disappeared. They must have gone when the rain came, meaning he was on his own here, surrounded by empty acres, no outside witness against whom to judge his sanity. Unless you counted the punk himself. And when Richard peeked again, he saw nothing but other graves. Someone could have been hiding behind any of them. Then a hand was on his shoulder.

A dark-skinned man about his own age held a shovel. Soil on his boots. He wore a transparent plastic slicker, a matching hood over his hat. “Everything all right, mister?”

“You didn’t notice …” But Richard was struggling for breath, and saw how he might have looked. “Yes, I’m fine.” He allowed the man’s big hand to pull him to his feet. Ahead, directly downhill, was a muddy parking lot, a payphone box. Something occurred to him. “Bit wet for digging, though, isn’t it?”

“Better wet than frozen. It’s supposed to get down to thirty tonight.”

“I’ll leave you to it, then.” Richard walked off, too embarrassed to look back. Down in the valley, he stayed tethered to the payphone. If the punk showed his face again, Richard would alert the cops, maybe even Pulaski, but for ten minutes or more, the only sign of movement was that little speck up on the ridge, rainproofed and solitary, bending and straightening over a hole. A gravedigger, digging a grave. Still, Richard wasn’t going back for his bike, on the far side of the mausoleum. Not today. The safest thing was to call a cab.

By the time it arrived to collect him, he was shivering. He hadn’t dressed heavily enough either, and had tapped out the warming potential of the booze. Nor could the car’s dryness touch him. They inched back toward the ferry in the early rush. Donna Summer on the radio. Between warehouses and carwashes loomed the towers of the Battery, swallowed halfway up by bleary crowns of snow. He turned to check they weren’t being followed. “You all right, buddy?” the cabbie said. Why did everyone keep asking him the same question? Then the cabbie cleared his throat. “You throw up in my cab, you pay to get it cleaned.”

There was, thank God, a liquor store by the terminal, and it seemed only prudent to secure a couple of airplane bottles while watching out the window for that buzz-cut, those glasses. At twenty-nine minutes past the hour, he made a sprint for the gangway. The gate banged shut behind him, the engines rumbled below, and he went to put the spare bottle in his jacket’s inner pocket, which reminded him: the ’zines, the fucking ’zines. He’d never taken them out of the satchel. It wasn’t even a complete set—Issue 3 was still missing. And hadn’t he known when he’d frozen the other two, really, that Pulaski, who might have made sense of them, wasn’t aware they existed? Now they were no good to anyone, bungeed to a Schwinn on Staten Island. Or rather, in the hands of the punk who’d run him off—who’d obviously come to steal them. For fuck’s sake, Richard. This one thing, this one simple concrete thing you could have done to protect Billy, to help Sam. And as with the writing, you’d failed.

With the boat in motion, the light around him had gone a sickly white. No one huddled on the other benches was going to meet his gaze, tell him it was all right. They were like one of those medieval crowd paintings. The White Death, everywhere. And here was another thing it was about time he admitted: Samantha Cicciaro was going to die. Maybe she would wake up first, maybe not, maybe it would be fifty years from now, but article or no article, she would at some point die, and so would Richard. Cosmically speaking, then, what had he even been running from? As an acolyte at Tulsa’s First Episcopal Church, waiting for the moment to toll the consubstantiating bell, he’d thought of death as one of those revolving bookcases that led to secret corridors in comic books. You lay down, crossed arms over chest, closed your eyes, and when you opened them again, it was to new and unending life. Shazam! It wasn’t really like that, of course, but if right-thinking people were right, and there was nothing at all after you died—nothing—well, how was he supposed to imagine that? As blackness? As emptiness? These were also metaphors, as fanciful in their way as a false-bottomed coffin. A true nothing had no precedent in this life. Yet he could feel it now, just behind his fellow passengers: the nothing that couldn’t be put into words. And maybe this had been the flaw in his writing all along. He’d wanted it to be about losing, about the things we’re born into loving and then lose. But if the things he’d written about were not called up out of nothing but willed up from the page, their loss was more like the loss of a well-tailored shirtsleeve than, say, of the arm inside it. Which was how real Richard, for better or worse, had always needed it to be. Had he honestly believed that, if he could make Samantha real enough on the page, he might trade one life for the other, ransom free the Sam captive in her metal bed?

Then he spotted the punk again, killing time behind a pillar. And Richard was indeed going to vomit. As the engines churned up the harbor, he fled out onto the deck. The freak April snow was now heavy enough to hang a porous screen a few yards to starboard, and had driven off anyone else who might have been out here. Yet he couldn’t feel the cold. The door behind him took too long to shut. The punk had passed through, though he remained in shadow. Why didn’t these Posthumans just come for him already? The notional little banister that had been welded here for safety was slick from snow. He made it over without incident, onto a lip two or three feet deep. It seemed reasonable this might give him an advantage. He was taller, after all. Once the struggle was joined, he’d only need to move his opponent that little distance. Or maybe he was trying to draw them out. Nothing happened. In windows, people stared at newspapers or the floor. The tattooed boy was no longer visible. Nor were the waterfowl that usually worked the wake at the back of the boat. There was only Samantha, watching from the safe side of the rail a few feet away. Any second, the punk would take her place; right now, though, she was as she’d been in that picture of his, the one she’d clipped inside the third issue, dark dye, porkpie, what had he done when he’d taken the photo out? Her face was drawn and sad and silent. Or was this his neighbor Jenny Nguyen, reproaching him for what it might do to her if Richard went down? He saw again the state he’d left his desk in that morning. At the center of the Groskoph mess sat a neat sheaf, thirty-three sheets of 28-lb. bond. Were this struggle to end with him being pushed off the boat, they might form an X-ray of the inside of his head. Jenny might read them and see why he was the way he was, and they might have a future. But this was a fallacy, another form of literary wishful thinking, and anyway, there was a paradox in there somewhere. She could almost have been his own kid. Assuming it was a girl. He always had. Leave me alone, he thought. Get out of the way of what has to happen. As ever, though, there was hesitation. Never to face your own offspring. Never to touch the black silk of Jenny’s hair. Never to feel again the heat rising off a woman, or off the summer pavement. The sidewalks he’d run along on his way home from church with his arms outstretched and a spitfire stutter he’d made with his mouth, like the one he made now when he’d had too much. Which he had, he was lurching pretty badly here with the movements of the boat and all the strife and indecision erupting in his head. The punk continued not to come, but now a voice like “Dr.” Zig’s was sounding under everything: fuck it. Fuck cabbies and neighbors and plutocrats and social engineers and Capote and the Pulitzer Committee and rent control like a Chinese fingertrap. Fuck fighting this so hard for so long. Fuck it, Richard. Fuck it fuck it fuck it. The boat hit another swell, and he felt an ancient tug—a promise of some final decision being taken from his hands. An answer or the lack of one. This is just the booze, something in him said. You should lie down and take a nap instead. There’s no one out here with you. There isn’t even any snow. But the hands hanging on to the rail could have been someone else’s. The feet could have been someone else’s. The strip of lit windows on the side of the boat was a ribbon threading through black water. He was standing now on the lip’s very lip, unfolding himself, as if anyone could read the end of his own story. What had happened, what was happening? Was there really no one else besides himself who would come to hurt him, or help him? Was there even a difference anymore? But this was New York. All those tightly wrapped lives. And for a moment, just before the next wave hit and Richard Groskoph let go of the rail, this city he loved and hated spread before him on the horizon, all his again, so that contrary to what anyone might have thought, he was feeling nothing like alone at the instant he began to fall.

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BUT THEN, THERE WERE TWO OF EVERYTHING. TWO MIDNIGHTS, two Cicciaros, two bullets, two workshops … two charges for each shell bursting up in the sky, and technically, two fuses. It was a mystery I’d confront again and again in those months Carmine’s daughter lay in the hospital, and one that would complicate considerably my attempts to understand how she’d got there: every single thing that touched her seemed entangled with some ecliptic other half.

Toward the end of that January, for example, I would come into possession of a complete print run of the fanzine Samantha’s father had mentioned, Land of a Thousand Dances. Far from alluding to the legends of Southern soul, as I initially thought, the title turned out to be a tribute to the rock singer Patti Smith. And the essays and reviews and diaristic little fragments within tracked an acolyte’s search for a life large enough to sustain her––a search only hinted at, theretofore, by Samantha’s edgy haircut and those pictures on her bedroom wall.

She’d begun work on the fanzine during her senior year at a private high school in the city. By Issue 2, she’d fallen in with a group of kids on the fringes of the new subculture emerging nearby. “Punk rock” offered a lens through which to examine both herself and the wider world. The view was complicated, as views tend to be, by sex and class and ideology and attitude, but slowly, haltingly, Samantha had given herself over to the tumult of “Downtown.” While her father and I had sat on a patio in Flower Hill, speculating about her classes, the daughter was more likely smoking marijuana and listening to records somewhere in the East Village. In the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas of 1976, she seems even to have moved into a squat there.

The fanzine recorded no house number or street name; still, the first thing I did upon reading that winter of the squat’s existence was set out to find it. I spent the day after her birthday walking the length of every block between Houston and 14th Street, from Lafayette to the housing projects along the river. Like the house she’d grown up in, the one I was looking for would have an outbuilding behind it. There was also, reportedly, a one-foot gap between it and the next house. This was the sort of thing Samantha had found beauty in––guillotined parking meters, psoriatic postboxes, cars missing windows and wheels, the fact that behind the rhumb face New York turned to the world, nothing was quite in kilter––but it was hard to muster an aesthetic appreciation when the daytime high was 17 degrees Fahrenheit. I hoped instead to use the gap as an identifying mark, but it turned out such gaps were everywhere. Odd, that I’d never noticed this before. In the shops I stopped into for warmth, no one I mentioned the squat to seemed to speak English, or at any rate understand what I was asking. By nightfall, I gave up and headed back home.