City on Fire (119 page)

And is shoved. Then he is sprawling on hard concrete, while the skinheads pin him down. His fist shoots out and he feels it connect—not as it does in movies, with a crack, but with the fleshlessness of dreams. It feels good. As it feels good, in some weird way, to take one right in the nose.

As he gives and receives these punches, again and again, it is almost as if he is the other man, at war with himself, enjoying the taste of his own blood. All around him now, blows are being exchanged, as violence feeds on the crowd. Here is one to the jaw for all that is noble and valuable and conducive to dreams, and here comes one on the ear for all the suffering those dreams underwrite. He knows he’s getting woozy, drifting away from the copper in his mouth and the pain all over his face. Premonitions of paving stones whoosh near his head, but the guy’s companions must likewise be having a hard time figuring out who’s on top. Still, any minute … The stars that peek between the bodies are dimming.

And then a noise rips the night in half and it’s as if a bowling ball has barreled into pins. A can smashes against the asphalt, a bat is rolling, footsteps are scattering, and a voice, dreamily familiar, is commanding the skinheads to come back and retrieve their friend, who lies moaning some feet away on the sidewalk. When Mercer turns his head, that body’s being dragged away. At first, he thinks someone’s finally been shot tonight—but the gun that made the noise is aimed straight up into the air like a starter pistol. No, what has damaged the skinhead is Mercer’s own fists. The little pistol, a mere shadow, descends to a waiting purse. The purse itself descends. The rioters in the street’s broad center have resumed their march, if indeed they ever stopped it, and seem not to have noticed anything’s happening here at all. Hard to say, what future he’s ended up in.

Then a flame stutters to life far above his head, and above that, in smoke, floats the head of Venus de Nylon. She’s sitting now on the front steps of the school, legs crossed elegantly at the knee, and peering down at him with a kind of mild interest. Not a hair of her wig is out of place. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Mercer pulls himself into a sitting position, hugs his knees. He hurts all over. Especially his nose, which feels broken. His voice when he speaks is adenoidal. “Geez. Was that you? You were amazing.”

“If I had a nickel for every man who told me that, I’d retire to Aruba.”

Something occurs to him. “No, wait. You were back there in the park, too, weren’t you?”

“Now you’re just hypothesizing.”

“I had no idea you had it in you.” Is she some kind of goddess? A devil? A hallucination? The face that appears when the ember flares up again is sad, and somehow, beneath the lipstick and the rouge, infinitely old.

“No one ever does, Mercer, until they get pushed too far.”

He spits some blood onto the sidewalk beside him. “I guess tonight pushed me too far.”

“That’s funny,” she says. “Because I would have said you were just a baby. I hope they didn’t beat that out of you, by the way. Though it looks like they got everything else.”

“Is it that bad?”

This gets no answer, and he supposes she can’t see him any more clearly than he can see her, now that the flame is gone. He stands up.

“But if you’re here, where’s William?”

“Was I supposed to be looking? Big groups were never his scene, anyway, if you remember.” Of course he remembers, Mercer thinks, as he bends to retrieve his trampled glasses, and to feel for the rock that nearly bashed in his head. This must not be Venus’s scene, either, because once he straightens up, she is standing—towering really—and brushing off the seat of her micromini. “I should be getting home. Shoshonna’s not been well.”

“Wait,” he says. “I still have to find him. There’s something I needed to say.”

“See? Just a baby. It’s really not an unattractive quality, if you know how to wear it.”

“But you were his friend. Where else can I look?”

“Just ask yourself where you’d go, if you thought it was your last night on earth.” Without looking back over her shoulder she gives her fingers a little wave, Ta. Those long legs are tap-tapping away toward Union Square, and then she is just a faint smell of tobacco. It may perhaps be getting light now, because the rock in his hands is actually a brick. He sets it on end in the center of the limestone steps—Dr. Runcible can stumble over it in the morning, and at least know or wonder how close it came to the glass—and then returns to street level. And as the multitude hisses in a million tongues around him, as if a pan had been placed under cold water, Mercer Goodman hobbles off north, in the direction of what is now, or once was, his home.

BROOKLYN HEIGHTS—2:35 A.M.

BY THE TIME THE TAXI DROPS THEM OFF, the air in the apartment is black and soupy and about a million degrees because there’s no electricity to cool it down. Will lights some candles and starts opening windows. Brooklyn is passed out below. Cate, too, is sleepy. Her pigs especially are so tired she doesn’t know how she would have made it if the man in the undies and black hat hadn’t finally caught up to them and asked where they were trying to get to. Or on the other hand how he would have caught up at all if she hadn’t been so tired. Will had been grunting at her to hustle, but she was ready to lie down right in the middle of the sidewalk. Now she’s on the big new leather sofa that sticks to her arms and legs. She can hear from the kitchen her brother rattling open the fridge, pinging something made of glass against something else made of glass. Then he’s standing over her in the dimness with a beverage in his hand. It’s like her favorite word. Bev er ej. “Come on, kiddo. Time to brush.”

“You’re not brushing.”

“Someone’s got to stay up and wait for Mom.”

“You promise she’ll come home?”

“Of course she’ll come home at some point. She just didn’t plan on us being here, is all.” His voice has something funny in it. His breath smells like Mrs. Santos’s. “It’s her one night free of the rug rats.”

“You’re going to be in trouble.”

“What, this?” He looks at the beverage like someone else put it in his hand. “Everything in the fridge is going bad, anyway. Somebody might as well make use of it. Now come on. I’ll let you sleep in the big bed.”

Everybody knows that, since the move, Mom’s bed has been Cate’s preferred sleeping place. The best thing about it is actually not its bigness, but the windows on two sides of the room. They make pale gold angular shapes on the other two walls, streetlights and car lights from down below and lights from other buildings and the buildings across the water, and when Cate wakes up in the middle of the night they throw off enough light for her to see her arm by and know that she is real. Her favorite is when it rains and drops cling like stick-on jewels. Not tonight, though. Tonight there is no Mom, and no light. And you know how hard it can be to get to sleep sometimes if somebody startles you right when you are about to do it, to fall? Well, she has that. Will has left the door open only a crack. She lies there listening to his waiting. It’s the sound—just when she thinks maybe he’s fallen asleep like Mrs. S. and she can get up and wander—of more beverage splashing into glass, of little ice-cube air pockets popping.

There are a lot of shouldn’t-ofs Will has and does. He likes to save them up, and then when everybody has forgotten, to reveal one, like an uncle who does things with his arms and his voice to make you forget the quarter you gave him is not in his left hand but in the other one, the one slipping into his pocket. Vwa la! No quarter. Will’s favorite audience is Mommy. Vwa la! he will say. Dad lets us ride the subway by ourselves! Or Vwa la! Dad gave us each our own TV, for our rooms! That’s okay, Cate has her own secrets. For example, that Mommy is still in love with Daddy. Which is why Mommy can get so mad at him about stuff like this. Or for example, that there are all the shouldn’t-ofs she knows the benefits of pretending not to know.

The bad part is, with the lights out, there’s nothing to look at. That’s why she gets up and goes to the corner where the two windows meet. At first all she sees are two pink blinks on top of the towers across the water. Gradually, though, stars come out, and there are other towers of different heights and shapes huddled around below like kids around the legs of grown-ups, and the faint flush turns the water into water, moving. Is the sky getting lighter? Have they been gone that long? Or is this just her eyes adjusting to the dark?

Then she sees that the ledge outside the window is not stone but a lot of stone-colored birds. It jolts her so she might never get back to sleep. And down below in the little park where they wait for Daddy, the two trees: those aren’t leaves, they’re birds. There must be a thousand of them out there. Even as she withdraws a step into the dark, she knows that if they’ve come for her, it’s pointless to resist.

When she works up the courage to look again, there are even more than she thought. And now reinforcements course down out of the sky, as if on wires, falling into spaces on the fronts and roofs of apartment houses, finding room where none existed. The buildings look like faces, mobile, alive, and there are all kinds of kinds, pigeons but also sparrows starlings falcons and here, outside this very window, what she recognizes by moonlight as a blue parakeet. Some owls dive toward the playground equipment, and great colonies of gulls settle like foam on the harbor, and tiny dotlike crows blow up through the pulse of pink light way over there. There are too many for just her, she understands now. She feels they do not wish her ill or well, except maybe that parakeet, which with its rotating neck looks back at her as if warning her to keep quiet. Which she does. Is anyone else awake to see? Is she? There must be as many birds out there as there are people in her city, and they are all assembled, waiting for someone or something to appear on that playground, which is the center somehow. Then a great big old bald eagle with sooty feathers and one eye missing and wings sixteen feet across alights at the top of the slide, turns his head 270 degrees. She imagines him issuing marching orders: Brothers and sisters! Or else telling them that they are dismissed, their work here is done.

Only now does she remember the bird they found there last winter, her and Mommy and Will and Will’s friend Ken. Oh, she thinks. Oh. It has taken the others this long to find where he fell. Are they mad at her for taking the body? No, she decides. They have just come to—what is it Mommy said, when they went to that funeral for Daddy’s Mommy, and Daddy yelled at Cate and some cousins for grabassery at the VFW hall where the meal was? To pay their respects. By morning, when the light comes and wakes her up, the birds will have scattered, so that no one will believe her if she tells them. And anyway, being half Hamilton-Sweeney, she won’t.

94

FINANCIAL DISTRICT—8:46 A.M.

AS THE YEARS PASSED, then parceled themselves into decades, William’s feelings about the great blackout of 1977 would recede into fuzz. His sister speaking sharply to him when the lights went out—this he remembered. He remembered, too, that whatever she’d said had stung. But the words themselves would remain inaccessible, like the past more generally, upon which he’d learned not to brood.

Then one morning he found himself in the offices of a bond-trading firm at 7 World Trade, supervising the hanging of some portraits shot back during the plague years. Anything ’80s, anything downtown, had lately acquired a kind of millennial cachet—particularly among the people responsible for downtown’s ruin. Clients, was the technical term. His motto had been Non serviam, but darkroom supplies weren’t cheap these days, nor (various liabilities having cannibalized Daddy’s estate) was rent. Besides, anyone who might have accused him of selling out had either beaten him to it or died. And didn’t the Medicis underwrite Raphael? Hadn’t his own father subsidized the Rothko kids’ therapy bills? “A little lower,” he told the art hanger, a blue-eyed ectomorph who, two years out of Bennington, was clocking sixty-five dollars an hour. William popped another bitter square of Nicorette from its foil-backed sarcophagus. Then, catching himself watching for the strip of lower back that showed whenever the kid’s shirt rode up, he knelt to pry open the last crate.

You reach a certain age, you can encounter old work without feeling much of anything. He must have seen these images a thousand times, in tearsheets and blowups and magazine layouts: old friends and lovers, most no longer living, staring balefully up from the silver gelatin. Or okay, maybe it was inaccurate to suggest that he didn’t feel something, but whatever it was glimmered behind layers of numbness, like the sensations of dental work. You felt the pressure, but not the pain. And of course he’d been holding something of himself aloof even then from the faces on the far side of the lens.

It was exactly this quality of abstention, or “maturity,” that had finally won him the esteem of the art world at the end of the long string of personal and professional disasters that had been the 1970s. Even before Artforum declared him a born photographer, he’d set up a darkroom and dumped all his stiff-bristled brushes into plastic bags and put them out on the curb for Tuesday garbage collection. Mercer would have objected, but Mercer was by that point in Europe somewhere. And maybe this was why that last, unfinished painting had never worked: without Mercer, there was no one left in New York who believed in capital-A Art. William himself was already losing his ability to think like a painter, but he gave it one last shot—this would have been the summer of ’81—working from memory, passing up the chance he usually relished to hire a model to stand in front of him and disrobe or more, depending on what signals passed back and forth. He started this time with newspaper bound to canvas. He painted it black, but not so black you couldn’t make out the ads. He stapled a triangular scrap of white shirt to it, off-center, with big, visible staples. He’d always liked the Rauschenbergy effect of an actual thing approximating a representation, rather than vice versa. Let this fabric stand for the body, the torso it was shaped like, racing out of negative space. But when it came to the painterly part, the face, he couldn’t quite get it to resolve, because the dark had been so dark that night, despite the ferocity with which he’d tried to see. He felt like Whistler laboring over the proto-Ab-Ex fireworks in Nocturne in Black and Gold, which John Ruskin, his supposed buddy, had likened to “a pot of paint thrown in the public’s face.” Who needed the aggravation? Still, it now seemed to William, stranded amid the whisper and click of fictitious capital, that something had gotten lost back there. His addiction, to be sure, but also something else, something possibly of value. “You happy with that?” the art hanger asked, as the name for it trembled near the root of his gum-numbed tongue.