City on Fire (45 page)

Apparently, the outbuilding in the backyard had sprung a leak. Some kind of crack in the foundation had let snowmelt seep in, and it was going to be essential, Nicky said, that the floor stay dry. Real temperamental equipment out there. So what they were going to do was put down a tarp and then repurpose the carpet that was in the basement. This was what a Phalanstery meant, by the way: meeting your own needs. Each according to his means. “You ever ripped up carpet?”

Charlie was afraid that if he said no they wouldn’t let him come back, plus Nicky had a way of putting things that made you really not want to disappoint him. So he followed Nicky down to the very basement where six months ago, for the first and only time, he and Sam Cicciaro had kissed. Most of the furniture—a cracked mirror, the gutshot couch where he’d sat with her head in his lap—was now gone. And so, when he turned around, was Nicky Chaos.

It took Charlie over an hour, working with needle-nosed pliers and a boxcutter, to get the carpet up, and the moldy foam padding, and the vicious-looking staples that held it down. It was sweaty work, despite the chill of the house; first his jacket and then his sweatshirt came off. By that point, his arms ached. His throat was tight, his eyes rheumy from dust and fiber particles. The big roll of carpet and padding was too heavy to carry out in a single trip, so he sliced it into sections, like cutting up a hot dog for his brothers’ beanie weenies. When the last section had been hauled to the top of the stairs, the basement was featureless. Then again, you couldn’t live inside a memory. And there was the small bathroom built out of the wall, where he’d helped Sam clean herself up. He went in looking for something to wipe off his sweat, but when he pulled the pullcord, there was still no towel, no bathmat. Instead, the shower was filled with plastic crates of what looked like milk bottles, like a milkman’s unrefrigerated and slightly watery milk. The exhaust fan couldn’t quite suck out the same chemical tang the kitchen had had last week. He killed the light and backed out, but not before being spotted by Nicky Chaos, who again stood at the bottom of the basement stairs.

There were maybe ten seconds when neither of them said anything. Charlie felt like he’d been called before the principal, though he didn’t know for what. Then Nicky squatted to pluck something from the folds of Charlie’s sweatshirt. He brandished the little green Bible. “What am I thinking, Prophet, assigning you to manual labor? We’ve got to work on your head, man.”

The house out back, to which he led Charlie, was still serving as a rookery for pigeons—even more of them, if possible—and Charlie had to pretend not to be bothered by the smell. Inside, its windows had been covered over with tinfoil, blocking out the day completely. The only light came from a single, bare bulb. Massed at one end of the concrete floor, opposite where the rolls of carpet and padding had been deposited, was a mountain of gear—guitar cases, amplifiers, mixing boards, tangles of wire. Hard to say if these were the same instruments from the New Year’s show, or if any of this stuff had been used to record Brass Tactics. It was like one of those barricades the French were always throwing up in European History. A thicket you couldn’t see too far into.

Stacked atop one of the amplifier heads were wobbly towers of books, which Nicky could reach only with the help of a stepladder. He plucked them off one by one and handed them to Charlie: Nietzsche, Marx, Bakunin. Charlie kept taking them until the books got too heavy and he had to find a dry place to set them down. Maybe this was supposed to be a test, like on Kung Fu, where David Carradine had to stand all day with a bucket of water on his head. But when he looked back up, Nicky was dragging two rolls of carpet out into the center of the room. He sat on one, drawing his legs up under him, and Charlie understood that he, Charlie, was to take the other. Finally, Nicky held out the Gideon Bible. Right up until the moment his hand closed around the binding, Charlie wasn’t sure Nicky wasn’t going to yank it away.

“Look. I know what you’re thinking,” he said, doing his best to mimic Nicky, to fold his own ungainly legs into a lotus. There was something disquieting about sitting like this, with no barrier between them. His thumb stroked the pebbleized binding for comfort. “But Jesus was into some pretty punk stuff.”

“You mean that ‘love thy neighbor’ shit?”

“I mean giving hell to the moneychangers. Raising the dead.”

“Charlie, that’s liberal accommodationism, is all that is.” Whenever Nicky’s fingers moved, the tattoos on his thick arms swam. There were so many they were like sleeves, basically. Maybe that’s why he could wear a muscle-shirt and not get cold. “Look, you seem pretty serious to me, a serious kid. And Sewer Girl tells me you want to know about our little project here. What’s tricky is, you know, knowing about something and understanding it aren’t the same thing. I did five semesters at City College, but it took coming downtown, starting the house here, to sort of get my head around the difference. And we’re not even beginning at the same place. Me, my old man was half-Guatemalan, my mom only speaks Greek. You and Sam are from what, like Great Neck or something?”

“Flower Hill.”

“Flower Hill.” While he was speaking, Nicky had removed his belt. Now he tapped what looked like baby powder from a vial onto the back of the big silver buckle. He lowered one nostril to the buckle, then the other, pinched his nose, shook his head; sighed deeply. “What I’m saying, Charlie, is you’re still at level one. Your defenses are up.”

“They’re not.”

“See what I mean? And the thing you’ve got to figure out before you can really understand what all this is, is, exactly what are you defending? Here, mi casa es su casa.”

Charlie waited for something to stop him from bending to the beltbuckle in Nicky’s palm, but then realized there wasn’t anything. It was surprisingly easy. Surprisingly quick. From somewhere behind his hard palate came a cool metallic tingle, like licking the top of a double-A battery. Nicky was still talking.

“Tell me—look around you. I don’t mean right now, I mean in general. What do you see? The land is exhausted, corporations control our brains, the politicians are criminals. I could cite you chapter and verse, but that’s what the books are for, and anyway, you know it’s true, or you wouldn’t be much of a punk.”

Charlie nodded gingerly, like a guy on a rope bridge he wasn’t sure would hold his weight.

“And what do we do, Charlie? We react. We defend. We surrender our birthright, which is the power to define our own field of action.” Taking another big rip of the cocaine. “I mean, on the one hand, there are, what, forty katrillion nuclear weapons out there to secure the status quo. On the other, nice, bright college kids read One-Dimensional Man and think, Hey, I’ll go lobby my … whoever … and then we’ll get rid of the warheads. Without seeing that what they’re doing is shoring up the very system that brought us the warheads in the first place. I mean, you can vote for the donkey or the elephant, or you can stay at home, sucking on the cathode tit, but any way you analyze it, you’ve consented to an immoral system. The can of shaving cream you buy at the Duane Reade, that money goes to manufacture napalm. The system’s whole goal and raison is to be total, you know what I’m saying? A closed loop. Speaking of which …”

Over among the snaking extension cords and foamless speakers was a television set, which Nicky now got up to turn on. It must have been after five, the early news was on, images of that afternoon’s inaugural in Washington. Had so much time passed? Nicky snorted, without really interrupting the rhythm of his words. His shoulders bobbed like a boxer’s.

“I’m getting to the part where I explain about the Phalanx, Charlie. But first, ask yourself: This immoral system, how do you get outside it? Option one, you drop out, sever the connections. They got that far in ’68, okay? People went as far with that as they could, to say, I’m free, you’re free, kumbaya and barbaric yawp and yadda yadda, and look what happened. The problem with the whole Rousseau trip is that man is primordially a social animal, in the sense of clan or tribe. Marx says this somewhere. You detach completely, you not only find yourself way out on a limb, against your nature, but you’ve lost any power for group resistance. And eventually, you come crawling back, clutching credit-card applications, begging to be let in.”

The man from Georgia had one hand on the Bible, silently pledging to uphold or defend or what have you. The screen, weirdly, kept going white, as if something was interfering with the signal.

“Option two: organized resistance. But the problem with any organization is that it recapitulates the system. Hierarchies and parameters. The Bentham, the Mill, but also the Barthes and Marcuse. Ontogeny and phylogeny, you see what I’m saying? Look at Heidegger and the Nazis. Prepare to be incorporated. Or this is how I started to feel, anyway, Charlie, pursuing my little philosophic studies up in Hamilton Heights. There’s ghetto all around City College, did you know that? As far as the eye can see. And I’m supposed to tell myself I’m making things better, just ’cause I’m not following my old man into the Marines? All I’m doing is smoothing over the tensions. Making the system more efficient. The energy all stays within the system, is why it’s a beautiful system. The system of liberal humanism.”

He was talking faster now, or Charlie was listening faster, all of the words miraculously falling into the sweet spots of his brain, as if he were the world’s greatest all-purpose utility fielder, with eighty-two arms and as many mitts and always positioned exactly under the pop-ups Coach was sending out to center field.

“Except. Except Fourier, Charlie, not the utopian but the other one, the scientist, he tells you there can be no such thing as a total system. There’s always energy escaping. Tension. Friction. Heat. The Western gestalt is like, hey, bring that energy back under control somehow. Aestheticize it. Market it. Jujitsu it into an identity, a product, a political party, a romance, a religion, like your little Bible there. Something, anything other than what it is, which is the possibility of change. But what I start thinking, looking out those classroom windows, is, what happens if instead of trying to palliate the friction you make it worse instead? This is the ’70s now, the death trip, the destruction trip, the internal contradictions rumbling and grumbling, the return of the repressed. It’s the system, having swallowed everything, having indigestion. Through the miracle of dialectics, a third path appears, which is, you nudge it along. You make things better, people relax. You make things worse, they revolt. I mean, things have got to get worse before they get better. So it is written.”

“I don’t understand, though. What does any of this have to do with the band?”

“No more band, Charlie. No more art. No more trying to change the culture with culture.”

“You can’t do both?”

“We tried, and look what happened. Look where Sam ended up.” His face darkened. “Call it a New Year’s resolution. We’re starting over again. Defining a new field of action. We refuse to be duped anymore. We refuse any further complicity with a corrupt system. Because you know who was complicit? The Germans. The French.”

“You’re saying Ex Nihilo is like Vichy France?”

“Charlie, we are beyond all that art shit. That Walter Pater shit. We are Post-Humanists. The Post-Humanist Phalanx. We redeem the claim of disorder on the system. And we’re just getting started. You dig?”

Did Charlie want to dig seemed the more relevant question. He thought for a minute. I work in the darkness for him who will come in the light.

He realized he’d said it out loud only when Nicky asked, “What’s that?”

“Just a thing I read somewhere.” He was still flying, but sober enough to turn down another bump of cocaine. It was already dark out; the emergency AV Club meeting he’d concocted for his mom’s benefit would have to be over now, or close to over, depending on the scale of the AV emergency.

“Thus endeth the lesson then, I guess,” Nicky said. “I want you to take those books, though. Educate yourself. Reach your own conclusions.” Charlie was a little worried that, as with the voice of You-Know-Who, this would be the only hard sell he got. Still, he carried with him all the books that fit in his bookbag. He even left his History texts behind, to make room—though not, in the end, his Bible. Nicky made a compelling case, but Charlie couldn’t be sure yet what would be required, if there was to be any hope of saving Sam.

32

THE FACE BEFORE HIM was hardly a face. More like a tissue of bruises, Keith thought. A sack of bone china, cast before bulls. Then he hated himself. This was supposed to come later: the flight into metaphor, the escape from the phenomenal world. He forced his mind to be still and simply see what was there. To see the lines of stitches creeping down from her gauze-covered forehead. To see the eyes bruised shut from where they’d broken her nose getting a tube in. To see the tube itself, striped by the shadow of the blinds, like the sheet it lay on, the bellows pumping robotically under glass, the birthday cake gone stale on the bedside tray. There was another tube, this one opaque, less flexible, running into her throat. Her name, when he said it, was too loud in the empty room, and he worried that someone would come running. He knew on some level he was the bad guy here. But on another level—the level on which he’d always been the golden boy, whose every action was good a priori—he still couldn’t quite imagine this. As he hadn’t quite been able to imagine, short of seeing her in the flesh, that it was really his Samantha who’d been shot.

Maybe this was why, in the weeks after New Year’s, he’d failed to make any connection between his twenty-two-year-old paramour and the nameless minor in the tabloids. Or maybe it was that he didn’t read the tabloids, and had other things on his mind; all you saw in The Wall Street Journal were headlines about Regan’s dad. In fact, when the doorman had buzzed one evening to tell Keith he had visitors, his first thought was of the Feds. There would be two of them, as in the movies, in cheap haircuts and matching black suits. One would do all the talking; the other, at the pivotal moment, would unsnap a briefcase of documents related to the unloading of eight and a half million dollars’ worth of municipal debt. Margin requests, pricing history, records from the trusts. He’d plucked his coat off the hook and buzzed back down to the doorman. “Can you tell them I’ll meet them out front?” At least this way he might avoid the indignity of being manacled in his own building, paraded before the neighbors.