City on Fire (116 page)

It seemed to go off on its own, she thought the safety was on, these were things Sewer Girl would tell herself later, but really, Sam was always a threat. She claimed everything, when S.G. had practically nothing—except, contrary to what everybody seemed to think, volition. In spades. So had she known what would happen when she pulled the trigger? Maybe what she’d wanted all along was to find out. And there her friend was, on the snow, blood pumping out of her, a rasp like she was dying. There was just enough light to see D.T. take the gun and bring it close to Sam’s ear and, turning his head away, fire the second round. This was because the first one had done such a crappy job, he would say, and sometimes you had to be cruel to be kind. It turned out D.T. had done a crappy job himself, but they didn’t know that then, as they took off toward the subway, counting on the snow to fill in their tracks. As it would, provided all that lay between it and the tunnels below was grass, concrete, a little dirt. But Sewer Girl was already coming to understand the true substance she’d left her mark on. Or wasn’t this city really the sum of every little selfishness, every ignorance, every act of laziness and mistrust and unkindness ever committed by anybody who lived there, as well as of everything she personally had loved?

And all this she had come within a whisker of blabbing to the reporter guy on the loading dock. Something about the face beneath the beard said he knew a thing or two about survival. She’d looked down at the piece of greasy wax paper turning around and around in her hands. Wanted to tell him about that instant of almost joy, feeling the gun jump, knowing it was too late to undo. It was possible even now she didn’t totally believe that … but when her mouth opened, it was to find a reason to go.

Her confessional urge would swell throughout what followed. When the reporter turned up dead, she knew in her bones it was Nicky who whacked him. Which made two lives she was responsible for, two not very happy lives, it seemed, but still. And his black powder was going to destroy what was left, when nothing that could have driven him to it was worth the cost. But the night the two sevens clashed, something had changed again. The Prophet Charlie had seen, she thought, what she’d been going through. She’d gone up to the attic meaning to take his virginity, as a kind of apology, and then she would rob him of his cluelessness, too, and maybe together they could do something to stop the Demon Brother. Or Brothers.

Maybe she still could stop it, even on her own. It was what had brought her this afternoon to the Hamilton-Sweeney Building. Only there were no offices on 40, as the blueprint said there should be; just this big press room. Once the cameramen had cleared out, she’d locked herself in and looked high and low for the bomb. She kept imagining a ticking sound, but couldn’t find where Nicky had hid it. Eventually, it dawned on her that this was to be her fate—to die up here alone. So she shut off the lights and lay down in darkness to wait for what she had so amply earned. Responsibility, guilt, and freedom, hurtling back together. Disaster and shame and renewal. She hadn’t realized that the rest of the world had gone dark, too, until the sound of voices roused her and brought her out into the hall. And now, as the flashlight beam swings away from her again, she sees Charlie Weisbarger standing on an open window’s ledge, his hands braced on the frame. The cripple with the flashlight is charging toward him, or staggering, yelling Don’t. But it’s doubtful Charlie can hear him amid the churn of what must be ten thousand gulls or pigeons whirling outside. Nor will he see any of this, because his eyes are squinched shut, as if he’s on a direct line to the cosmos. As if he really is an honest-to-god prophet, about to take the step that will change all their lives forever.

“HERE”—2:30 A.M.

DETONATIONS CRASH IN FROM NEARBY like walls she’s a void at the center of. Or waves crashing down on the change she has tried to be, in the city she has longed to become. It is the concussion of other people, of ten thousand spires now crumbling to the sea. As if a radio went suddenly untuneable. Or as if something in the heart were breaking. Then again, everything is always breaking, and crashes can also celebrate: glasses stomped or tossed into hearths, concentric ringings of spoons on glassy tabletops, with jags of laughter after. So take a breath, Jenny. Gather these leaves into the cupboard of the self and attempt some arrangement. What do you believe now? You believe this boiling blackness to be a basement. You believe the body below you to know things you do not. Feel your way back through the black for whichever damp face and pull it to your own again. She is too tired at this ungodly hour to make any more sense than she does, but a tongue is a language, too, even one that tastes of not having eaten, of gum about to lose its flavor. You were gone, she says, coming up for air, I swear …

And can he know for certain she isn’t right? It’s possible he was never even here. There was that very first day he spent in this room, unwilling to move any further. Unmoving to will himself to the temperature of the empty minifridge, of vodka that burns when it is after all only doing its job. But how to explain this other person now finding her way inside? Ribcage to ribcage, soft small breasts, mouth on his mouth. How can you ache like this all over but still not stop her reaching for your belt? He feels as a cage, opening, feels. As a gaunt and captive tiger, however much it costs the tiger each time he is seen. And wanting rushes in as a pressure, as a hunger to press her painlessly to any handy wall. The trained tiger would carry a dove in its jaws without breaking a single feather. Or is he still the one being carried? Hard to know anything for certain save her body in the dark, her smell, small tongue, hot breath finding the inner ear. He is scared of being still on the floor but to find the button of her jeans is to be down and under to the slick heat that fits just under the hand it is made for, proximal to that deeper fire. To be back in the wiry black ununderstanding of woods he used to wander in, in the fog where you lose and find yourself. Her breath like the sea in a shell, find it. Find what’s hidden. Find the crux where outer disappears in secret and in secret disappear there.

I mean I thought you were dead. I thought, I am watching him die.

For a second, her white underpants burn like a candle in the dark. Her head aims toward the ceiling where headlights swim through the squat window, triangular whiteness at the throat. She is simultaneously below, a second person. Then they merge again. She is aware of the friction of the mattress on her knees, but also, strangely, on her back, as one of them moves the other across the bedding. They are like the ladder that climbs itself. Like kids crossways on a swing, pushing higher and higher. There is a power inside you that has never been expressed. That is not perhaps expressible. And this must be why sometimes fucked is the most beautiful word in the language. A white flare pains as a shoulder bitten into and a flock of bright dots upwelling blots out what they’ve seen there can be no end to … and then once again, she is only herself. Free to make all the noise in the world.

EAST VILLAGE—2:30 A.M.

A POP LIKE A BURST BULB jerks Mercer back out of his lucubrations. A parking meter off to his right has been beheaded. At the corner of Avenue A, some men with penlights shout: “No! Not that way! This way!” He can barely hear them over the chanting (Take It Back! Take It Back!) but as the whole crowd surges west, it overtakes him.

Fires are erupting from the crumpled trashcans along Houston. Farther on he spots a phone booth tipped across the entrance to a sidestreet, presumably to block the cops, and then a barricade of sawhorses. The rending of metal can be heard every now and then amid the chants. At the corner of Broadway is a Modell’s whose big security gate won’t hold out for long against the contingent of teens now climbing it. A roar goes up as it comes crashing down, and again as plate-glass drops like a heavy curtain to the ground. A tall man rushes into the firelight in a tee-shirt covered with white dots. He runs along on tiptoe, like a panther darting from one tree to the next, carrying a Louisville Slugger. Then come croquet mallets and tennis rackets. Someone presses something into Mercer’s hand, and when he raises it to his face he sees a fungo bat.

Next to him, a man his own age argues with a woman with kerchiefed hair. “Please!” she’s saying. “What if someone breaks into the apartment?”

“Leave me alone,” the man replies. “I’ve waited years for this. You know where the gun is, you can hold down the fort.”

A bearded white guy beside them lectures anyone who’ll listen on Hegel’s theory of history, all the while swinging a golf club, knocking out the windows of parked cars as methodically as a jeweler with his little hammer. A boy’s voice asks if there are any extra golf clubs. “Get lost, kid,” the guy says. “It’s a revolution, not a shopping spree.”

Fire breeds fire, and escalation escalation. As the mass surges up LaGuardia Place, delis and newsstands are targeted. Some particles break off to avenge themselves on mailboxes. A faction has somehow gotten the high beams to work on a taxi and hoisted it into the air like the world’s largest flashlight. Brightness sweeps across Washington Square, which is full of people. Great rolls of toilet paper arc like ejaculate through the black sycamores. Spraypaint—Fascists Out! My City Right Or Wrong!—blossoms incoherently on the triumphal arch. As to actual fascists, which is to say the fuzz, they appear here and there on the periphery, but only with rollers off, under orders to stand down.

Earlier, Mercer had watched them try to cordon off that shadowed grocery up on Fourteenth Street. While supervisors called for backup, while higher-ups waffled about strategy, women kept emerging with carriages full of Similac and Pampers. Some people laughed or whistled from doorways. Others sold batteries for three dollars apiece. Still others attacked these profiteers, jabbing fingers in faces. The night watchman, surveying the wreckage, cried, “Oh, those scum, those animals, those rotten bastards!” To and fro the squad cars went, but Mercer had felt even then the futility of attempts to restore order; there was something wrong deep within that order itself.

Now he gives the fungo bat an experimental swing—its swish sounds brutal. Alarms clang on University Place, and drums begin to beat, unless that is his heart. The crowd surges into administrative offices, carrying out typewriters and sheaves of scattering files. Mercer finds himself bearing an ergonomic deskchair like some kind of trophy until, after a block or two, his arms get tired. Up ahead is Union Square. A needle park, they call it; maybe William is there? But no. None of that, now. By way of punctuation, he takes the fungo bat and smacks it into a parking meter. The head stays on, but the little kidney-shaped glass cracks, strewing change on the street. A cheer goes up from the men around him. They have all turned white—skinheads, it seems—but maybe he has, too. The physical world keeps dissolving into darkness, and the very last scraps of Mercer’s sense of who he is appear to have disintegrated along with it. There is no imaginary interviewer left to ask him how this feels, but were there still a Mercer to answer, he might call it a relief, the way it must have been a relief for C.L. at boot camp the first time he threw himself out of a plane. As if he were at once looking down from a transcendent height and giving himself up to gravity.

But is giving up the self really possible? For here, ahead of the little vanguard he finds himself in, looms a something in the nothing: a pile of lapsed-high-Anglican limestone glowing in the moonlight. He doesn’t need to look at the inscription chiseled into the lintel to know what it says. For he can feel the building returning him to his body, pinning him to the past, passing judgment; it is the Wenceslas-Mockingbird School for Girls.

UPPER WEST SIDE—EARLIER

BY THE LIGHT of the branchy candle-thing William’s taken up, his father’s closed eyelids are like glass in an old window, thin near the top and gradually thickening downward with gravity. The heavy body, always so correct, looks uncomfortable, its kneecap way out to one side. Feigned sleep is an excellent defense against the slings and arrows of responsibility. Like a four-year-old who covers his ears and says I can’t hear you over and over. Only how feigned is it? Daddy’s pants are darker at the crotch, and the velvet of the divan is damp to the touch. William brings his fingers to his nose. Yep. That’s piss. Well, fuck him. Fuck him. Let the servants deal with this. But again, there are no servants. Bringing the candles closer gets no response from the sleeping father. It is sweltering up here. He tries snapping his fingers near one ear, then the other. Only when he grips Daddy’s withered biceps do the old windows flutter up. “William? Is that you?” It’s as if the last hour and a half—the last decade and a half, for fuck’s sake—never happened. He’s heard nothing.

The phones are working; he could call the doctor, if he could find a number, but part of him clings to the belief that Daddy’s faking. Still, he has to actively tug to get Daddy to his feet, and then the eyelids are wavering again, the blue eyes panicking in the gloom.

“William?”

He sighs. “Come on, old man. Let’s get you to your room.”

Of course, he has no idea where said room might be, but at certain junctures Daddy’s gait grows fluid, and William feels himself being led, down some stairs and up some others and down another corridor to a bedroom that has all the charm of a convention center. The bed looks unslept-in; maybe he and Felicia move to a new room each night, like affluent bedouins. He positions Daddy in front of a bureau’s mirror, orders him to undress, turns away. Blades of light angle up between the white curtains from the cars that again pass below. Youthful hoots carom off the street. This opulent shell is as thin as an egg’s—he’s learned that much, if nothing else. Still, when you’re inside, it is so fucking persuasive. And he feels so powerless. Powerless, e.g., not to glance back at the Bermudas bunched around the ankles, the palsy in the arms, the way his father gets hung up on a shirtbutton, even when it seems no one’s looking. He used to imagine Daddy’s head would fall off like one of Bluebeard’s wives’ if he so much as loosened his necktie. Now he’s just a pathetic old man, with a tuft of wiry hair sprouting from the neck of his undershirt and that wet patch down near the hem. William puts the candle-thing down and goes to help him balance. “No, Daddy, no, don’t sit on the bed, you’re going to—”