City on Fire (103 page)

THERE WAS NO CHOICE LEFT BUT TO PURSUE THE HAMILTON-Sweeney angle. The next morning, then, I gave the picture in the paper a twice-over. Took a shower. Grabbed a nearly clean shirt, figuring a few wrinkles here and there would make me seem less of a threat. Put on a tie. Folded a sheet of A4 into eighths, tucked it into my breast pocket, took from its hook my old fedora, and headed across town to the Hamilton-Sweeney Building, where I would try to get a meeting with William Hamilton-Sweeney II on the spot. It was better, sometimes, not to give a potential subject too much time to think. The first impulse of even the loftiest chieftain, offered the bullhorn of mass media, is to grab it.

Rather than waving me up to the 30th floor, however, the tubby elevator attendant at whom I flashed an old credential told me to have a seat, his supervisor would have to call up to the press office. A few minutes later, an elevator expelled a small man who did not at all resemble any press officer I’d ever seen, much less the CEO depicted in the Times. His perfectly white hair gave a false first impression; as he drew closer, I saw that he couldn’t have been older than early middle age. At any rate, there were no wrinkles or superfluities. The man himself was bespoke. “Mr. Groskoph, I presume.”

Then a hand was at my back, steering me toward a busy outdoor plaza. I had a few questions, I told him, once we’d reached it. But he proposed to ask me one instead: “Mr. Groskoph, what do you suppose you’re worth?”

“Beg pardon?” I said, or words to that effect.

“I am asking you to imagine yourself forced to liquidate everything you own, today. How much capital might you come up with? What do you think you are worth?”

He never turned from the street to look at me, but I felt put back on my heels. Best, I decided, to be direct––to admit I had no idea.

“Understand, I’ve had my eye on you for some time. You’ve made inquiries concerning certain of our contracts.” There seemed to be around him a layer of cold, but maybe I was just hung over. “The Company has a pronounced interest in privacy. Time was, all Americans did. Now I can pick up a magazine and see the former Mrs. Kennedy in a bathing suit. Her affair, of course, but the Hamilton-Sweeneys do not intend to join her there.”

“In the bathing suit?” I said. “And would you mind if I got your name?”

“I see you haven’t finished inquiring. But I have. Since you called City Hall last summer, I’ve made it my business to read most every word you’ve written, Mr. Groskoph. Or rather, published. And may I tell you I’m impressed? The piece about the Apollo program, in particular. I said to myself, this is a man of considerable intelligence, at some point he will discover which end of the stick he’s got. Frankly, I am surprised it has come to this, but I am here to tell you, face to face: this is that point.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Which point?”

“The point at which you cease and desist.”

“It’s a free country.”

“Indeed. One whose civil code protects the legal person against harassment, libel, and other incursions against liberty. These matters are very hard to adjudicate, of course, very costly. Like paternity suits. Like calculations of palimony, child support.”

He had somehow found out, he was saying, about the child I’d fathered in Florida earlier in the ’70s, with an airline waitress whom I’d left on bad terms. She must have been three years old. The child, I mean. I still may not have believed this man would stoop to breaking into Carmine’s workshop for three measly grams of powder, even to send a message; it was beneath him. But there wasn’t anything at that moment I would have put beyond him.

“Financially, this family has long been prepared for such eventualities. What I’ve been trying to ascertain is whether you are, too.”

“I’m afraid there’s been some misunderstanding.”

“On the contrary; things couldn’t be clearer. Whatever story has brought you to our doorstep, as it were, ends this morning. Ends here. And now more pressing business calls.” He began to leave.

“But to whom should I attribute all this, for the record?” I called out, loud enough that it caused other people on the plaza to look over. But he didn’t turn around, and already the glare off the lobby’s glass was devouring him, a metal box arriving to whisk him back into the sky. The attendant, sweating through his uniform, must have seen something in my face as I pushed back inside, approached the velvet rope by the elevator bank, for he stopped me with a kind of demoralized shrug. “It’s not for nothing they call him the Demon Brother.” Then, when I pressed for an actual name, he told me he was sure a good reporter could figure it out. Besides, it was time I was on my way.

TO THE INNER LEAF OF THE THIRD AND FINAL ISSUE OF HER fanzine, or at least my copy of it, Samantha Cicciaro clipped a photograph of herself as a freshman, a new arrival to the city. The issue itself has vanished inconveniently among my papers, but the photograph must have fallen out beforehand, for I found it in February on the floor––and tonight, having sat for too long in one place, grasping after a language not compromised by time, I have it propped on the desk before me. There on the median of Houston Street, the sun is so intense that it’s hard to make out details of her upturned face. It will be even harder, I know from experience, if I turn off the lights in my apartment. Then, in the shifting glow of the jukebox across the room, she’ll become my colleague, co-conspirator, lost daughter, best friend. But say I really could know her. Say I could find the perfect wording for what flashes now on my mind’s eye: the rusted-out deckchair where she sat on the last day of 1976, preparing herself for whatever the new year would bring. The swallows blown off-course over the yard where her mother used to hang the clothesline. The secret cigarette stubbed out on the bricks of the patio. The girl herself, hunkering down deeper into her formless winter coat. Then where would it stop? How many column-inches would it take to get her from there to the little municipal train station, the train, Central Park? I could fill a whole book with that one day––I could find out who shot her––and it wouldn’t do justice to the quiddities of human life, much less reveal what they mean. A miracle, a universe, I heard a rabbi say once. Any of us, plucked out of the eight million. The several billion.

No, that man, whoever he was, was right. I’ll never reach the end of her story. Never find out who wanted to hurt her, or Billy Three-Sticks. Never be allowed to get that close to either again, or to find that second house, or the other, smaller house behind it, or the awful truth or truths I now feel sure Samantha or her phantom twin stumbled upon. There are too many of everything. Too many of me, even. I set out here to write a profile that would mirror the enigma it sought to unravel: how, from canisters of inert material the size of coffee urns, patterns of blazing color come to fill the sky. I imagined myself engineering out of discrete pieces a singular explosion. Instead, I find now I’ve been trying to work backward from one, to reconstruct from a random dispersal of elements a single shell. An impossible shell, in fact, insofar as there is no such thing as a perfect phrase, or a private language, and insofar as time only runs the one way.

I’LL ADD ONLY THAT I DID MAKE IT OUT TO THAT HOUSE IN Nassau County to see Carmine Cicciaro once more. This was at the beginning of April, weeks into my slump. How often in the previous months had I imagined returning in triumph, with a typescript that would instantly expunge my distraction and my disregard. Yes, yes, I neglected you, but look what I found! Instead, I’d brought only a pair of confessions: first, that I’d stolen the fanzines from his daughter’s bedroom back in January; and second, that in my fog of this morning, I’d forgotten to take from their place of safekeeping the two remaining issues––that I’d noticed my own empty-handedness only halfway out to Flower Hill.

I found Carmine Cicciaro sitting out on the back patio, almost as if it were still August. He was no longer the immovable object, though, who back then had nearly forced me off his property. On the bricks between his shoes was a beercan, and without a word for my long absence, he reached into the cooler and fished me out one. We clinked cans reflexively and then sat silent on our matchingly grimed deck furniture, gazing down toward the expressway, lost in our respective thoughts. Out of nowhere, he said, “I ever tell you how the Chinese name their shells?”

I shook my head, no.

“They look at the sky and just make up a story about what they see when the bomb goes off. Pure bullshit, but you get these beautiful names. Flower Scattering Child, Golden Frog Bangs a Gong––I always loved that one.”

What would they have called us? I wondered. I didn’t know what to say.

When he spoke again, it was to tell me he was closing up shop, putting the house on the market. The mortgage was nearly paid off, and he was looking to sublet a place in the city where he could be closer to the hospital. And I decided then, if I hadn’t already. What good would it do to confess I had broken his trust? To add a breach of faith to his sorrows?

So I finished my beer quickly and stood up, knowing that if I stayed, I’d have to have another. Carmine crumpled his own can and whipped it down the hill, toward his workshop. A rusty chain, looped through the place where the handle had been, held the door impressively closed. The fans were off for good. Even the workshop was to be abandoned. For what Carmine Cicciaro had learned by then, and I suppose I had, too, concerned not only the baffling multiplicity of all things, but also their no less baffling integration. No amount of art, even of the Great American variety, can elevate you above, or insulate you from, the divisions, the cataclysms, of ordinary life. Still, as I turned to shake his hand and tell him I’d be seeing him, I couldn’t quite get free of how it used to feel, waiting for the July 4th display, back on the humid town common of the Tulsa where I was a kid. How, down on the bandshell, a local vocal quartet would be warming up, their candy-striped jackets a pink mess in the heat. How I would lie on my back on the blanket, slightly apart from my cousins, dreaming. At some point, the Rutabaga Brothers and the Lemon Sisters would rouse us to our feet and lead us in patriotic song, and then it would begin: signal lights ascending the sky, two, three, a dozen, a hundred. I had no other associations then for the sound of mortar fire, for the cascades of color swimming up to meet their counterparts in the face of the swollen brown river. All I wanted was more, more, more. I’d ask myself at each volley, in an ecstasy of anticipation, was this the last one? Was this? But maybe that is what, in the end, brings this particular art closer to life than its more mimetic siblings can ever manage––what I’d glimpsed in the summer of 1976, watching the Bicentennial on a TV 3,000 miles away: each display of fireworks is utterly time-bound. A singularity. No past and no future. Save for the fireworker himself, no one ever knows the grand finale is the grand finale until it’s over. And at that point, wherever one is, one won’t ever really have been anywhere else.

IN THE DARK

[ July 13, 1977–∞ ]

Wandering through the shadows, we listen to the breath

That makes the darkness shudder;

And now and then, lost in unfathomable nights,

We see lit up by mighty lights

The window of eternity.

—VICTOR HUGO

The Contemplations

In the dark,

It’s just you and I.

Not a sound—

There’s not one sigh.

Just the beat of my poor heart

In the dark.

—LIL GREEN

“In the Dark”

90

SOMEWHERE UNDER MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS—9:27 P.M.

AT THE INSTANT THE BLACKOUT HITS, “Dr.” Zig Zigler is staring at a pair of sandhill cranes that have found their way onto the CC local. Or maybe they’re spoonbills. In any case, it’s mesmerizing, this sort of beaky, wised-up look they have. And clearly a kind of intelligence, possibly the only kind there is, has been involved in negotiating turnstiles and platforms and boarding the rearmost car of an actual train. It happened at Thirty-Fourth Street, and ever since, they’ve been minding their business like proper New Yorkers, perched at the far end of a scuffed plastic bench, ruffling wings every so often as though shaking folds from a paper. The other passengers keep the same ten-yard buffer they would if these were panhandlers, so Zig’s the only one noticing, but that’s fine, he’s used to it. He’s been noticing stuff for weeks now it’s probably saner not to see. Peacocks in crosswalks. A great blue heron, once, perched on the steeple of Grace Church on Broadway. It could just be the Dexedrine talking, but he likes this conceit of the walls between nature and culture breaking down, the animals taking over the zoo: this will be perfect, he thinks, for the show tomorrow. If there is a show tomorrow. If by that point the FCC hasn’t yanked his card and the animals in question haven’t torn apart the WLRC studios … which is when the world goes dark and the brakes start to screech and his ass goes sliding into the void.

Blackness persists even after the train has stopped. There are smells and sounds but nothing to stitch them together. The absence of engine noise is never a good sign. Sheeyit, a voice says, but it doesn’t seem like anyone’s hurt, or panicking—at least anyone save “Dr.” Zig himself. When the birds rustle again, that little click of beak or claw, he wonders if they too are about to turn on him, because frankly it’s been that kind of year: the shooting of the girl in the Park, this thing with his old adversary. And finally the uprising of his listener base, which turns out to be not some savvy cognoscenti, grooving on the ironies of his self-presentation, but the same Not-So-Silent Majority that jams up the Yackline each day. He can feel them massed out there now, agitating to take New York back to an imaginary 1954. Can’t anyone hear past the spleen to his bleeding heart? 1954 was terrible! He has been misunderstood! Though probably this, too, is the drugs.

Gingerly, so as not to incite the birds, he gropes for the overhead bar and picks his way forward in the dark. He can feel the sheath of heat around each unseen straphanger. By the time he reaches the car’s front end, he’s swimming in amphetamine sweat. Around him conversations spark or resume, quiet at first, then louder, black and Spanish voices this part of town. Somebody wants to open the windows; like birdshit, is what it smells like.