City on Fire (107 page)

Back at the mint factory, an engine revs. A bike bumbles down the street like some venom-swollen bee. It seems about to smash right through the security gate, but at the last second it stops, and the rider walks it back around until the rear tire nearly touches the bodega. Someone offers a chain from his regalia, and within a minute, the bike is lashed to the gate. How enterprising are these Angels! Set them up with brokerage licenses in place of bikes, and you’d have millionaires. There’s a single rev, the throttle engages, and with a shriek that can be heard all up and down Tenth Avenue, the sheet metal is folding and tearing like the wings of a pinned moth, and then sparking on the street where the rider drags it along.

He has gone off to make a victory lap when a ’Rican with a familiar-seeming face bolts from the car that’s just screeched to a stop. Angels scatter semicircularly, to a perimeter a shotgun barrel sweeps across. In high-pitched esoteric English, the man who wields it tells them they’ve just cost him a thousand dollars in repairs, and basically to fuck the fuck off.

There’s a moment here when things could get grievous and/or bodily. The ’Rican has sealed his fate, or the Angels have, depending on who’s responsible. Or maybe neither is responsible; it’s this city, after all, that’s smashed them together. But if there’s one thing an Angel can respect, it’s the individual standing up for hisself. They back away, trusting to the guy’s shaky hold on the language to keep him from spreading word of their mercy. They rumble off in search of provender.

The bodega owner, meanwhile, enters his store, locks the door behind him, and sits on a stool in the dark, weeping. The shotgun he clings to like a lapdog—too late, but who knows? There may be other vandals. As for those Angels: Never again does he trust them. Nunca jamás. Across the street, they’re still pouring in from the outer boroughs, Angels upon Angels converging like heat-seeking missiles on the flaming West Side. And on the rooftop, the bare-chested vestals haven’t stopped shimmying—Aaaah … Freak out!—waiting for the Maximum L., their off-white Wotan, to ride out and rally the dead.

91

LOWER WEST SIDE—10:27 P.M.

AS FOR JENNY, IT’S NOT AT ALL CLEAR what she’s waiting for in the dark, with this liquid arrhythmia beating down on the cracked windshield before her. Or even clear, really, if she’s waiting. That last collision must have been with the hydrant. The seatbelt saved her on the trip forward, but she hit pretty hard on the recoil, and it’s done something to her sense of time. Ten minutes may have passed, or one. Then a voice comes, like a pirate signal jacking her frequency. Wake up. She turns, surprised to find her neck only slightly sore. A flicker at the mouth of a nearby street etches the shadow slumped in the passenger’s seat. “You all right?” she asks. For a while, there’s no answer.

Then Mercer reaches up to feel the back of his head, as if surprised to find it still there.

“I was out for a minute,” he says slowly. Or what seems slowly. “No broken bones, if that’s your question. But one hell of a knot. What do you have back there, tire irons?”

“Squash rackets,” she admits. “Bruno’s.”

Maybe he’s too stunned to assimilate. “How about you—are you okay?”

“You mean other than the fact that I’ve probably cost myself a job?”

“This is why they don’t run drag races on cobblestones, in a blackout. Jenny, what were you thinking?”

“I was thinking, pretty reasonably, it seems to me, that maybe we should hurry. And then I don’t know. With the water, I couldn’t see. Now can we just get this over with?”

Mercer, unable to open his door, has to clamber out over the driver’s seat. Still, it seems like her side has gotten the worst of the accident. From the hydrant the headlight’s smashed against, water shoots straight up, a silver plume streaking into nothing and then hammering back down. A small flame over the front tire gutters and goes out. The cascade of droplets on the headlights makes the paintjob itself seem to burn. And beneath, the accordioned hood. Yep, Bruno’s never going to speak to her again. Her shoes and clothes already half-soaked, she moves out of range of the water. And that’s when she spots the form crumpled at the curb, like a sapling felled by the bumper. That first thud she’d felt. Oh.

Mercer, instantly at the body’s side, is acting strange again—feeling for blood, she realizes. “Please tell me he’s breathing.”

The person she’s struck is tall, trim, slender in an open-collared shirt. His face, inert in the half-light, seems drawn with worry. Or is that pain? Mercer’s hand moves into the headlight beam. Just water. “He seems intact physically, but he’s totally unresponsive.”

“We should call an ambulance.”

“With what? The payphones down here are all missing their receivers.”

She’ll drive him to the ER herself, she says, if he’ll fit in the Gremlin.

“The hell you will.” The keys are still in the ignition, but before he pockets them, he discovers the engine won’t start. It could be the sparkplugs are wet, he says, but the only way to know for sure would be to wait and see if they dry out. And what about the East Village? It’s like an hour until midnight. Is there really enough time?

Just her luck, she thinks, to have landed doctorless in a deserted part of the city. Or nearly deserted, because there’s that leap of fire again at the cross-street, and she keeps smelling kerosene. “Okay, fine. Fuck. You stay here for a second. I’ll be back.”

Triangulating between the headlights and the burning, she ducks down a tributary street that doglegs toward the river. This neighborhood was once an active port, but now feels, as she scours the dark, like a game preserve for muggers. Moist weeds, waist-high, spring through gaps in the pavement. There isn’t a single pedestrian except the one whom, in her zeal to save lives, she’s maybe just killed. What is she even looking for? An off-duty paramedic? Loose painkillers? A kindly old lady who’ll invite her in to use the phone? Each idea seems stupider than the last, yet Jenny apparently still needs to believe some invisible hand’s at work, balancing accounts. Any minute now, this fucked-up present will crack, and her real future will return to her, the one in which she redeems her life, or Richard Groskoph’s. Or maybe she’s supposed to be the one to crack it. To turn back. But here comes the kerosene again. Dogs barking. Smashed glass. More than righteousness, or charity, it is fear that spurs her on. Then another crash sends her assover-teakettle among the grasses. There’s a bright mild ache where she’s fallen, but that doesn’t matter, because above her, backlit by the stars, looms the thing she’s just tripped over: an abandoned grocery cart.

Of course, every solution bears the seeds of new problems. In this case, there’s the noise the cart makes on the street. She’d rather not attract attention, but near the place she’s left Mercer, paving stones push through patches of tonsured asphalt, and when the wheels hit these she might as well be whaling on sheet metal with a crowbar. But fuck it. She gathers her breath and sprints, pushing the cart ahead of her into the brightening intersection. “Quick, help me get him into this.”

“A shopping cart?”

“It’s what I could find.”

“You’re not supposed to move a body like this.”

“Mercer, I’ve had a chance to scope the area. Power to the people aside, I would really like not to be here when those torches you’re seeing down there arrive.” She tips the cart on its flank. There’s no gentle way to get an adult body inside, and it takes their combined strength—blocking the wheels in place with their feet and heaving at the handle—to get the thing upright again. She wishes there were some scrap of cardboard or old shirt she could use to cushion the guy’s vertebrae, but if he’s bleeding internally, he’s not going to care. There ensues a brief argument about whether to head toward the hospital closest to here or continue to the East Side, and an even briefer argument about whether to take a couple of the squash rackets. Her position is, she’d feel safer with them; his is, having seen what she’s capable of unarmed, he’d feel safer without. The torchlight is very close now, though, so she lets him win this one, too. “Come on. Push.”

The added weight should make the damn cart quieter, but all it does is amplify the noise. She makes Mercer share the handle with her, and together, they find a speed somewhere between trot and sprint. “Quit groaning,” she says. “You’re giving us away.” But he must not hear her over the approaching din, a clanking of chains, the sharp inhalation of more flames. He doesn’t wait to find out if the sound is marauders, or revolutionaries, or citizens who just want to know where their power went. “Push!” she yells, and the handle surges forward, almost out of her grasp. She wouldn’t have thought Mercer Goodman had it in him. At any rate, whoever is bringing this hellfire out into the street must be transfixed by the weird missile of the shopping cart, or the weirder duo trailing along behind, because just as another collision becomes inevitable, the noise softens, the flames draw apart, and Mercer and Jenny and the body before them are allowed, untouched, to pass.

UPPER EAST SIDE—10:49 P.M.

THEY ARE CAREFUL not to jostle each other as they move up stairs and down halls, past doors the neighbors have locked tight for fear of some disruption on the streets below—unless these same neighbors have gone out to join in. Either way, the vibe is of evacuation. The man fumbles for his keys, but the woman already has hers out. (What can it mean that she’s held on to them?) Then her flashlight is sweeping through the open door and into a foyer he wishes he’d prepared for her coming. One thing he almost certainly would have done is try to make it look like he’s capable of living without her. As it is, the critical beam seems to land on all the crap he’s kept exactly the same since she left. The framed harlequin. The dish of New England pebbles. The row of shoes by the door, to which he now adds his loafers. On the other hand, not having changed anything means the emergency supplies are still where she always kept them, on the lower shelf of the hall closet. No sooner does he remember this than she’s handing him a flashlight of his own. A flick of the button, and a second beam races out to lose itself in hers on the floor. “Will?” he calls. “Cate?” There’s no answer. “I told you they weren’t here.”

“And now I know it’s true.”

The beams separate. Hers probes deeper into the apartment; his turns toward the kitchen. There’s no sign that anyone has touched the room-temperature fridge since this morning, and no note on the door. When he doubles back to their—his—bedroom, it is aglow. Regan sits on the big horsehair bed, her back to him, an address book beside her. He’s hesitant to intrude on whatever thoughts she might be having, but then he sees she’s got the bedside phone to her ear. “Emergency services keeps giving a busy signal.”

“Could the kids possibly have gone back to Brooklyn?”

“I just tried my place, and the Otanis’. No answer. And you already called, remember? You said you tried everywhere. They didn’t have subway fare.”

“They could have borrowed subway fare.”

“And then gone anywhere. They could have gone to the game without you.”

“The tickets are right here in my pocket.”

“It’s not like they’re hard to get, Keith. It’s the Mets.” She doesn’t turn, nor does her flashlight move from the mustard-colored bedspread where she’s placed it, but things around them are becoming clearer. “Goddammit, where were you?”

“Hung up at work.” It’s the same shuck-and-jive he’d used about Samantha, but telling Regan he’s already dealt with the cops once today would raise all kinds of questions he doesn’t want to answer. Anyway, she doesn’t seem to notice. She’s unbuttoning her blouse.

“Well I’m not going back out in the dark in this suit, with a target more or less on my back. Where are those sweats I used to exercise in? And does Will have sneakers over here?” His flashlight stays on her as she plucks off her silver earrings and drops them on the bed and reaches back to remove heels barely worn. She has dressed to impress whoever she was supposed to spend the night with. Embarrassed to discover how much he’s gleaned, he turns to the armoire and sends the sweats arcing through the dark. Then he finds his own jogging shorts. Puts his flashlight on the bed between them and removes his belt, his pants. When his shirt comes off, their eyes meet. Her navel is a slim caesura between her lacy slip and brassiere; he’s down to his briefs. They’re like kids playing truth or dare, he thinks—and then, given the gravity of the situation, feels ashamed again. “What?” he says. “It’s going to slow you down if I change, too?”

She ignores him and pulls on the sweatpants.

“But what are you proposing to do, exactly?”

“If I can’t get the cops on the phone, I’ll get them on foot.”

“And if you can’t do that?”

“Turn the city upside down myself.”

Doubtless she means it as a brush-off, but he sees a chance here to reassert himself as the husband he still technically is. “Then give me a minute to find my running shoes, too,” he says, “ ’cause you’re right, things could get a lot worse out there, and I’m damn sure not letting you wander around in it alone.”

UPPER EAST SIDE—EARLIER

MOST EVERY OTHER AFTERNOON that summer, Will and Cate have been parked in aftercare, while Mom toils away at the office to save Grandpa, and Dad does whatever Dad does. This particular day, though, they’re conducted at the end of regular camp to the cafeteria, from which the normals get dismissed. Absent the school-year complement of lunch ladies and clattering trays, certain things become clearer. That loneliness, for example, smells of barfed-into chocolate milk. It is extra-pronounced for Will, who is one of the oldest kids here and far too proud to fraternize with C-Formers. This leaves his sister to practice on her own the string game she learned in Arts & Crafts. “Quit it,” he says each time her elbow quote-unquote accidentally jostles his. Then the Assistant Head Counselor comes in to retrieve another camper or cluster of campers whose punctual parent or nanny has arrived.

There are like forty kids to start with. Then there are twenty-eight. Then fifteen. Then five. Then it’s just him and Cate, and they are led back out of the cafeteria, recidivists denied parole. At the threshold of the aftercare room, the A.H.C. asks if Will is sure their dad knows to pick them up today. Sure, Will’s sure. Didn’t he hear Mom say it on the kitchen phone last night, while he pretended not to listen? At least twice she’d asked Dad to repeat it—she had “plans for the evening,” and not to be late. Then again, sometimes it takes more than repetition to remind Dad of his responsibilities.