City on Fire (105 page)

It’s strange though how under the right circumstances a certain shallowness turns out to be an asset. Because instead of falling to his knees right here on the asphalt—My daughter! My son!—Keith makes a decision. He strips off his jacket and starts running again. Like really running this time, potholes be damned, shouting their names toward the pinprick lights of cars he can pick out on what he hopes is Central Park West. “Will! Cate!” He must sound like a lunatic; startled birds go leaping like fleas through the hoops of the headlights, whirl up against the moon. But who cares how he sounds? It’s like, instead of deepening with his guilt, Keith Lamplighter has become even shallower than he suspected. No deeper than the pain in his trick knee. No thicker than the soles he’s now burning through.

UPPER WEST SIDE—9:28 P.M.

THE FIRST RULE OF CRISIS MANAGEMENT is just to get through the first three seconds. On the other side—once you’ve got some kind of story into which to slot things—you’ll forget what it felt like during these early moments when the future was whatever you feared most. And so, when the penthouse goes black, Regan begins to count. And by the time she reaches three, she knows the entire city must be powerless; otherwise light pollution would be silvering the library’s curtains.

Her brother isn’t, to put it mildly, the wait-and-see type. Whatever he’s feeling at a given moment is what he’s always been and always will be feeling. And so he’s gone ahead and charged out onto the balcony, imagining the thump he heard out there and the subsequent darkness are further aspects of a worldwide conspiracy against him. Even when he calls an all-clear back through the open door, his voice is a little shaky, as if he doesn’t quite believe what he’s seeing. Or not seeing, as the case may be.

“What happened …”

This is Daddy, sounding somehow diminished, behind Regan and to her left. She turns, thrusting her arms into the nothing. She finds a body: a shoulder. A hand, cool in the heat. She takes it in her own, fumbles for a chair she might guide him to. “It’s all right, Daddy. Just a blackout. You remember the one we had in ’65? They’ll have the lights on in a few hours, at most.”

A lone siren. “There’s no one out here,” William calls again.

“We know there’s no one out there, William, the universe does not revolve around you. Now could you come in and give me a hand?” To Daddy, seated, she says not to worry, she’ll find some light. She’s still effectively blind, but seems to remember a candelabrum over on the north wall. “Amory, I assume there are still candles up here?”

The moment she lets go of her father’s hand, though, he starts in again with this mutter, as from a faulty transistor (What is happening?), so that she has to narrate. “Follow my voice, Daddy. I’m just feeling my way over, very carefully, so I don’t run into anything …” In fact, the things she touches in the dark promptly thump to the floor. She must have hit a bookcase. But she gropes her way down until she feels the sturdy old credenza, salvaged from her great-grandfather’s place in Greenwich at some point deep in the past. “Okay, it seems like the candleholders are empty, so now I’m feeling in the drawers for replacements. Amory, William, would one of you please go help Daddy?”

The center drawer is empty except for some papers, but in the one on the right are waxy sticks, intact wicks. She locates her clutch. She’s still carrying around her hairdresser’s lighter, for some reason. The wheel yields only sparks. One … two … She runs a finger along the lighter’s tip, encounters a bit of fluff in the hole where the flame’s supposed to be, tweezes it out, tries again. At last: fire. Touched to a candle-tip, it’s bright enough to make her squint. She turns to see Daddy still in his chair and, just inside the French doors, making no move to go to him, William. She lights another candle off this one, pushes both into the candelabrum, holds it aloft, but there is no sign that anyone else was ever here.

“Where did he go, Regan?” William demands. “Where’s Amory?”

The light barely reaches the far walls. “Looking for flashlights?”

“Halfway to Penn Station, more likely. The Demon fucking Brother.”

“What would he be doing at Penn Station?”

“Snap out of it, Regan. Waiting for the power to come back on. Escaping, obviously.”

“From whom? From us? And if he is, so what?”

“I’m going after him, is what.”

“What are you going to do, make a citizen’s arrest?”

“You’re always enabling him, you ever notice that?” He’s close enough now to pluck a candle from its holder—close enough for her to see he won’t be reasoned with. “It’s time someone stopped letting him get away with this shit.”

She would ask him where he gets off, and also maybe where he came up with this word, “enable,” which she thought was trademark Dr. Altschul, except he’s already on his way out the door. “Daddy—,” she says, as though her father were still a figure to appeal to, the grave-faced idol of her youth. But candlelight has eaten away the solidity; he is a confused old man. And William III, the brother she thought she’d restored to safety, is now just a glimmer in the dark beyond the jamb.

ON THE ROAD—9:58 P.M.

BY THE TIME the rendezvous went down, they’d be all the way to Chicago, Nicky promised. Or at least to South Bend. And before the NYPD could start looking for them—before the pigs had reassembled enough pieces to know there was even a “them” to look for—they’d be lying low in the land of the maple leaf, up in Manitoba. So far away from what they had done, thought D. Tremens, that it would be almost like it never happened. But the curse that’s descended on them these last couple months isn’t going to lift just on Nicky’s say-so. If anything, Murphy or Gumperson or whoever’s up there calling the galactic square dance tonight seems to be expending extra ingenuity just to fuck with the PHP.

There’s the van, for instance. The first time D.T. ever saw it, he cracked a joke about baling wire and old rubbers, and Nicky said, Nope, what was holding it together was the single most important world-historical force, the human will. He must have cribbed it from a book somewhere; he had a ton, full of these impressive-sounding vocables that made you want to follow him, even if you weren’t sure you knew what they meant. Counterhegemonic. Quaquaversal. Even if you weren’t sure he knew what they meant. But those books are now only fifty-pound cartons that jounce around dangerously with every pothole and keep the van from attaining a top speed of more than forty-seven miles per hour. And then, just when it does seem about to break free, they have to pull over to let Sol puke. On the curb of Canal Street at rush hour. At a gas station on the far side of the Holland Tunnel. (Don’t get D.T. started on the Holland Tunnel.) And an hour later, here they are in this strip-mall parking lot in—where the fuck are they again?

“Parsippany.” The answer floats across vacant asphalt from the open window of the van. Then Nicky resumes whistling an off-key version of “Right Back Where We Started From.” And of course he would whistle, with a joint in his hand and his map spread in streetlight on the dash and his little battery-operated alarm clock he got from who knows where. D.T.’s the one who has to help Sol over to the grassy place where New Jersey’s underfed bugs chirr all around like the thoughts in his brain. Because this is the other thing: the Prophet Charlie has flaked (true to form), and Sewer Girl, when it was finally time to leave, was nowhere to be found. At the end, it’s just the three of them, the primary trio, the true Post-Humanists. Which would have sounded cool, in the beginning. Three’s all you need to change the world. Look at the Bolsheviks, or the Jimi Hendrix Experience. But no, it’s not cool to be sweating your balls off in Manhattan as the sun begins to drop, just because Nicky’s got some last-minute errand to run with the van. And it’s not cool to be smelling the dried pus on your infected friend’s coveralls as you help him to his knees because he can’t find them on his own. And it’s really not cool to know that stretching all the way from here to Canada, if you ever reach it, will be a string of stops like forty miles apart where any witness might have seen him, a Negro with green hair dragging another boy, singly gloved and clutching his stomach, to right where you see that pink spatter, Officer.

Actually, that’s bullshit. If D.T.’s honest with himself, the doubts now swarming within go back to last night when Nicky led him out to the cinderblock divider in the garage and gave him his first-ever look at what was behind. All you had to do was see the size of it, the pregnant bulge, to know what kind of suffering it was going to inflict. As he tried to look appreciative, he wondered if Sewer Girl had seen it, too—if it was the deciding factor. She’d been acting weird at least since May. D.T.’s perspective at the time was you did what you had to do, and they could hardly expect Nicky to be exempt. But this Demon Brother obsession was taking them far beyond the tactical, beyond culture and revolution and even revenge, and it was hard to say when Nicky had crossed that last line, or where it would stop. D.T. was awake past midnight replaying all the cloak-and-dagger they’d kept up after Billy went to ground. And early this morning, with Sol moaning in the parlor and Nicky out back soldering the batteries to the fail-safe, D.T. had taken the van on the pretense of an oil change and driven it up to the Bronx. He couldn’t imagine what, aside from a mountain of smack, might be powerful enough to coax Billy Three-Sticks down to the Village again. Still, D.T. was going to warn him to stay as far uptown as he could get for the next twenty-four hours. And seeing the studio remained faded, abandoned, he swung back through Hell’s Kitchen. Billy would probably never return there, either, but the memory of that tweedy soft homeboy, the boyfriend, seemed to speak to D.T.’s condition. You put more than one person together in a room, you got a monster of oppression, fine. But alone, almost everybody felt some kind of boot on the throat. Which maybe explained the boyfriend’s reaction to D.T.’s admittedly poor choice to scout around with binoculars first, rather than going straight to the loft door to knock. And now there’s no warning any of them, he’s stuck here with the miasma of puke in his nose, the heavy body he’s lifting into the van—to the degree that Sol’s ever been liftable—and hey, when did the stars get so bright? He swings around toward the east, or what should be east, and the sky above the shuttered strip mall is exactly as dark and as light as every other patch of sky. It’s like the whole bright side of the planet has been zeroed out. A universe equally empty in every direction.

He doesn’t mention it to Nicky as they rattle back toward the highway. Instead, he announces that blood has started to mix with the vomit.

That’s a good sign, Nicky says, medically speaking. “Like when you have a cold and start to clear the dark stuff. Productive.”

“Unless what’s eating away at your burnt hand is closer to gangrene,” D.T. points out. “In which case, it’s pretty troubling, in terms of signage.”

By the light of a toll plaza, he peels back the glove Sol wouldn’t have let him touch before. The tissue around the blasted fingers is nearly black, and the swelling has spread all the way to his shoulder. This should be Sewer Girl, doing the Flo Nightingale. But then, she was fucking Nicky for months there at the end. Maybe this was the betrayal she couldn’t live with anymore. Or maybe she’d discovered that she, too, was just a substitution in some larger chain of substitutions. Sewer Girl wanted Nicky; Nicky wanted Sam; Sam wanted Loverboy, whom Nicky had never met but loathed anyway; and Sol, even after the advent of Sam, had never really stopped loving Sewer Girl. That had been his .32 kiped from the van that night—but the possibility had never occurred to Sol, and it was back under the passenger’s seat before the last flashpot fizzled at the Vault. Love is everyone’s blind spot. Or love and fear. It’s like they’ve all underestimated the power of pure feeling to fuck up the most perfect system. And as they push deeper into America, even Nicky seems to sense his ability to hold together the PHP through sheer will waning. He’s got two or three joints going now, to bring him down off the speed. “Hey, Nicky?” D.T. says, finally. “Should we still be able to see city lights out here?”

“How the fuck should I know?”

“You’re the only one with a map.”

Nicky turns the radio back on and starts skimming the ghost-channels for news. Of course, it’s impossible to know anymore how much is for show. Maybe he’s already heard the answers he seeks, and that’s why he’s so confident his operation will go off—or has gone off already. D.T.’s worst fear is that it is somehow even bigger than he’s surmised, bigger than Billy and bigger than the uncle. Oh man it is fucking not cool to have that thing ticking down in the middle of your head, and to know there’s nothing you can do about it anymore. Yet he’s not sure he’d feel better if they were any closer to whatever might have been asked of them to stop it. And would it be so wrong at a time like this for D.T. to drop the wrist he’s been holding and reach forward for a toke? To crack another beer, and then another? Even for the hardest of the hard-core, knowing you’ve just destroyed a bunch of lives is a lot to have on what an old-fashioned humanist would call the conscience.

Or really, even knowing you’ve destroyed just one.

DOWNTOWN—10:01 P.M.

IN HIS MIND Mercer is already miles to the north, dithering before a shadowy penthouse, when the realization that they’ve missed a turn pulls him back to the electric molasses of Centre Street. Jammed headlights play off street signs. “Wouldn’t it have been a lot faster to cut left? From Hudson, it’s a straight shot uptown.”

Jenny seems to flinch, but maybe that’s an illusion. “You picked a hell of a time to have a pissing contest about directions, Mercer.” Then she apologizes. There’s something she wishes she’d had the guts to tell him five blocks or fifteen minutes ago, whichever—when the power was still on. “Even if the blackout lifts, I can’t take you all the way up to the Hamilton-Sweeneys. I’ve reached a decision. I’ve got a date with the East Village.”

He waits for clarification, but none is forthcoming. “You’re going to drag me to every godforsaken neighborhood in this city, aren’t you?”