City on Fire (29 page)

The sky was by then pink with morning. The only viable tenant appeared to be an Orange Julius. For having so far husbanded his cash pretty well, Mercer rewarded himself with one of the eponymous beverages. He returned to find the bus’s luggage hold open and a G.I. in mufti doing pushups nearby. Two women too old for teddy bears played with teddy bears. The driver, a small, raisinesque Pakistani whose nicotine dependency had them stopping every forty minutes, stared out across the asphalt. In the absence of parked cars, the brushed-metal cobra-style streetlights seemed contextless and creepily regular, as though deposited there by UFO. A sunburned white kid with a ballcap and a zippered case of tennis rackets shifted from one sneaker to the other, waiting to board. He had a strong chin, clean cheeks, delicate little triangles of down on the back of his neck where the cap ended. Mercer knew in a flash the kid would be his seatmate.

Riding toward the coast, they exchanged not a single word. Then they crested the ridge of Weehawken, and there it was, New York City, thrust from the dull miles of water like a clutch of steely lilies. As they rumbled down past billboards toward the great churn of the tunnel entrance, the seatmate’s arm sort of flopped against his own on the armrest, so that they were barely, just barely, touching, the brown and the beige, a plane of contact one atom wide, and the huge opposed feelings inside Mercer swelled until he thought he might burst right here, a firework on the heights of New Jersey, never to reach his destination. But fifteen minutes later, watching the driver unload his typewriter in the oily gloom of the bus-station subbasement, Mercer would be squeezing the moment back into some inner oubliette. The kid had made off with his rackets, never to be seen again, though Mercer would ever after equate the Manhattan skyline with the smell of English Leather cologne.

He ascended through Brutalist atriums and Byzantine stairways, his arms feeling yanked from their sockets, his eyes that special brand of bus-ride dry. Mostly, though, New York was the people. He’d never seen so many as confronted him that morning. Before him on the sidewalk, at head height, were too many other heads to count, moving up and down with the bodies they were attached to, like ripe fruit bobbing in a barrel. Fat faces, thin faces, pink faces, brown faces, bearded and naked, hatted and bald, male and female and everything in between. Dazed unto stillness, his heart doing calisthenics in his chest, he was an obstruction, an abstraction; the masses could have trampled him had they so desired. Instead, they broke around him at the last possible second, jostling him bodily, perhaps, but leaving the essential Mercer Goodman untouched. Not to put too fine a point on it, but who the hell in this bustling city even cared who the essential Mercer Goodman was? It was this, as much as anything, that made him feel he’d stepped into a dream.

C.L.’S BUDDY CARLOS lived above a one-screen porno theater on Avenue B. The spare room he had to offer was more like a closet, only minus the privacy. There were chewed-out places in the doorframe where the hinges should have been and a discolored bedsheet to separate it from the kitchen. After some haggling, Carlos agreed to sleep there himself, and for the privilege of taking over the larger bedroom, with its locking door and ceiling fan and a mattress about which the less said the better, Mercer coughed up $220 for the month, which was $70 more than Carlos paid for the entire apartment. This arrangement worked out well enough for Carlos, who’d had trouble holding down a job since his discharge; unemployment checks and the vigorish he charged his roommates were his only visible sources of income. But it was an unforeseen blow to Mercer’s own budget. As soon as he’d settled in, to the extent that settling was possible, he called Wenceslas-Mockingbird to schedule a meeting.

Dr. Leon Runcible, recently installed there as Dean of Faculty, had been something of a legend on the campus of the University of Georgia when Mercer was there. He was about as eminent as it was possible to be without tenure. Head boy at Groton, chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets series while still in his twenties, subsequently the author of a well-regarded volume on the poetry of the metaphysicals.… His manner was still faintly Grotonian—especially the voice, declaiming iambs—but when Mercer’s Shakespeare class got to Lear on the heath, he’d raised his arms toward the ceiling and grasped at the air with an intensity that made the veins on his hands stand out. Then, just as quickly, he was back to that patrician poise, tossing off an allusion to Whitman Mercer would later pursue in the paper that won him the freshman English prize (making him the first Negro ever so honored). For a semester or more after that, Mercer had led his mother to believe he was still leaning toward an accounting major. In fact, most mornings found him in the second row of the modern language building’s great lecture hall, watching the young professor produce sentence after sentence of exegesis, like loaves from a bottomless basket.

The massive desk of a dean’s office now did nothing to reduce the Runcible dazzle, but Mercer felt his undergraduate laurels as a withered garland upon his brow. As a secretary brought tea and cookies, he heard himself venture a Freudian reading of Countess Olenska, arguably the heroine of the book Runcible had enclosed with the letter. He had just begun to generate real insight when Runcible sighed. “Hearing you talk, Mercer, makes me wonder why I left the classroom for the thanklessness of administration.” He gestured with the back of his hand as if to dismiss the leather-bound books, the fieldstone hearth, the huge windows onto Fourth Avenue. “But my late mother was an alumna and donor, and I suppose in some sense I hoped to honor her devotion to her alma mater. Now about the position. The board here, the prior administration, they can be rather old-fashioned in their thinking on certain matters. They do not always hear the varied carols I hear. The carols that for that matter the city council, on whom we depend for certain zoning exemptions, increasingly hears.”

Wait a minute; it was Mercer’s mind they were after, right? Runcible swept on.

“As I’m a newcomer to the school, it only makes sense for me to install some exemplars of my point of view. For instance: I look at you, Mercer, and I see an articulate young scholar, to have whom any graduate program in the country would be lucky. But as circumstance has it, here you are, available, and here we are with an opening in fourth-form English—that’s an Anglicism for tenth grade—and I have only one concern, really.”

“It’s okay. I’m used to being the only black guy in the classroom.”

Runcible coughed, as if a shard of cookie had gone down his windpipe. It went on long enough to be alarming, ten or fifteen seconds, and when he’d recovered, the face behind his hand remained claret-colored. “Oh, no, Mercer. For me, it’s not a question … Rather—can I speak in confidence? It’s that you are a male.” The word landed with an odd spin. “Adolescent girls can have the appearance of women, but they still see teachers as figures of great power. I speak from experience. The fellow who would be your predecessor departed under certain clouds. A line had been crossed, if you follow. I need to be sure you follow.”

Mercer promised Dr. Runcible there was no reason to worry. If given a chance here, he would do nothing to reflect poorly on his patron, or on the school, or on the memories of Wenceslas and Mockingbird (whoever they were). “On that you have my word.”

HE WASN’T TO BE ADDED OFFICIALLY TO THE PAYROLL—wasn’t expected to turn in a syllabus and prep a classroom—until the week before Labor Day. And so, for the rest of the summer, he had all the time he should have needed to make serious headway on his first opus. There were only two problems. The first was that he could barely afford to feed himself. The second was the apartment. All day, moaning and warmth from the movie theater below wafted distractingly through the floorboards. And Carlos seemed never to leave, not even to do laundry. His habit of sitting in the living room, studying his own shadow in the mud-gray screen of the unplugged TV, was unnerving, as was the cigarette perpetually asmolder between his swollen knuckles. After Mercer came back from a coffee run one day to find his Waterman pen missing—it had been a graduation gift from his mother—distraction shaded over toward paranoia. And when he worked up the nerve to tell Carlos to stay out of his things, Carlos just shrugged and said the rent would be going up in September.

Mercer began locking his room in the morning and heading for the big library on Forty-Second Street, where you could call up any of three million books from the basement. He sat facing away from the clock, under a powerful vent blasting marble-cool air. A shabby woman in fingerless gloves sat nearby, filling stacks of paper with huge words, five or six of them to the page, letters so big Mercer couldn’t quite read them. If he could fill a page with his own normally sized words, the day was a success. It had taken Flaubert a week, after all, to manage that much. Provided you believed Flaubert. Afternoons, he made notes for the next day’s work and, in the name of research, sank himself into The Red and the Black and L’Éducation sentimentale and nibbled at the edges of Combray.

And then, to save subway fare (and to forestall his return to Carlos, and the armpit heat of Avenue B), he walked. Manhattan turned out to be situated on a series of barely perceptible hills. They lifted you up every half-mile or so, offering a vista of foreshortened intersections, a fleshtoned sea. The busiest crossings—Seventh Avenue and Fourteenth Street, Sixth Avenue and Eighth—acted as catchments for panhandlers and street vendors and West Indian women like the one from the bus holding out little tracts like takeout menus, warning Mercer that the end was nigh, that only cheeses could save him. The farther south he walked, the more godless the city became. He occasionally even saw men holding hands, as if daring anyone to say something. It was fascinating—just anthropologically—that they could coexist with the traffic cops and the streetcorner preachers, in universes that overlapped but somehow did not touch. And every so often, someone must have become confused about which of these universes Mercer belonged to, because he would feel that he, too, was being picked out of the crowd. He’d turn and see a Hispanic in white jeans appraising him frankly across an avenue, or an older man in tweed watching from a sidewalk café, cigarette floating in lazy semaphore. It would be Mercer who had to lower his gaze. But this lowering apparently signaled something, too; once or twice he even felt himself followed, and couldn’t be sure he hadn’t invited it, however accidentally.

One ominous evening in August, under the first thunderheads in weeks, he was mooning around the labyrinth where West Fourth Street crosses West Eleventh Street, absorbed in not being absorbed in these things, when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned to find a mussed-looking white guy grinning up at him. “Hey, I think you dropped something.” With his dark hair and lynx-like features, the fine white clavicle showing between the lapels of his leather jacket, he was … you wouldn’t say classically handsome, but striking. In one hand was a guitar case; in the other, a yellow pencil, held eraser-end first. It took Mercer a minute to shift his frame of reference. “Oh,” he said, taking the pencil. “Thanks.” And snuck another look at the storm-colored eyes before turning to go.

He wondered now if he hadn’t been unfair to Carlos; if he hadn’t just dropped his Waterman somewhere. On a deeper level, he wondered if perhaps he wasn’t, like those curiously incomplete protagonists he’d been reading about, the Luciens and Juliens and Marcels, somehow wrong about himself. Then he wondered if he hadn’t had the frame of reference right after all, because there, a block behind him, was that small man, in pursuit.

Mercer ducked into a shop, short of breath. He was embarrassed to find that it mainly sold sex toys. He grabbed from a shelf of books the most plausibly literary title—For Whom the Balls Toiled—and waited by the front window for his pursuer to pass. The man seemed in a hurry now; the guitar case trailed along behind him. That he didn’t so much as glance in the window came as a curious disappointment. Before he could think about what he was doing, Mercer had laid aside the erotica and hurried back out of the shop and was following the man east, toward the lettered streets, as if there were something he could not wait any longer to find out.

At the entrance of Tompkins Square Park, though, his quarry disappeared. The pathways under the trees were jammed with teenagers, white boys and girls in dingy shirts and do-it-yourself hair. He was wending his way forward (Pardon, Excuse me) when a metallic shriek nearly deafened him. All around, hands spiked up into the greeny air, as if to call down the storm. And then the noise began.

In a clearing near the base of a streetlamp, a drummer bashed away, dwarfed by speakers. A large Hispanic man in a sexy-nurse costume bent over a small electric organ. A shirtless singer—shouter, really—barely touched the guitar around his neck. Tattoos bulged and jumped on his chest as he screamed his weird manifesto into a megaphone. Connecticut, it sounded like he was saying. Connecticut. Connecticut. The layers of sound that nearly drowned it out, though, were coming from the other guitarist, Mercer’s pursuer, who aimed his face upward at the boiling clouds, the tendons of his throat a startled, ghostly white. As he flailed at his instrument, the kids around Mercer shoved and bounced. “What is this?” he asked a fellow with green hair who pogoed nearby. But any response was inaudible.

There would be five more songs that day (the last five songs, as it turned out, that Ex Post Facto proper ever played). Then the sky flashed white and ripped and the rain began, a real five o’clockalypse, and when the guitar stopped, whatever cohesion or pressure had held the audience together dissipated. Kids hustled back under the sheltering trees. Mercer joined them, straining to see through the steam rising off the pavement what was happening there in the clearing. The bedraggled drag queen had already started to break down the organ, to coil the orange extension cords. The singer continued to shout into his megaphone, but you could hardly hear him over the pounding rain. Then came police lights, whirling. Mercer watched the singer get right up in the face of an officer, like a baseball manager bumping chests with the umpire. He noticed the other guitarist leaning against a nearby treetrunk with his case in his hand. The kids closest to him were too awed to approach, though they clearly wanted to. What would it be like, Mercer wondered, to wield that kind of power? Though maybe, were such a gift entrusted to you, you wouldn’t have any idea. He moved closer. “I just wanted to tell you, that was … It was really something.”