City on Fire (59 page)

It was clear Charlie had won. The word would be soon, as in, Maybe it’s too soon, Ramona. But instead of triumph, he felt a kind of helplessness. “God hates an adulterer, just so you know.” An elbow attached to Charlie knocked over a glass, spraying dregs of rosé. Impossible to say if this was intentional, but some of it got on the white turtleneck of Mr. Gold, who was standing now, too, looking down at the spreading stain.

“Jesus Christ, Charlie,” his mother said. But he was already stomping downstairs, sucked into some black hole where he could barely see what he was doing. He scooped up a wad of clothing from the floor and stuffed it along with his seven-inch of “Kunneqtiqut”/“City on Fire!” into his bookbag. Almost as an afterthought, he grabbed his Gideon Bible.

In the front hall, Mom was apologizing. “Where do you think you’re going?” she asked as Charlie stormed past, but her voice was just a noise in his head. He plunged into the damp spring night, not bothering to pull the door shut. He thought about making a dash for the car, but she’d taken his keys from him. And his bicycle had a flat, God damn it. Then he spied, leaning against an unpruned bush, one of the too-big BMX bikes Grandpa had bought the twins. He had to pedal furiously to muster any speed, and his knees kept clipping the handlebars. The training wheels groaned and squeaked. But it was mostly downhill to the train station. He kept waiting for someone to call him back, to jog after him, but no one did. So what, he thought. Good riddance.

AN HOUR AND A HALF LATER, he was on the crumbling stoop of the Phalanstery. The rain running down into the corners of his mouth had a sawdusty taste that reminded him of his special red pillow, sucking on the corner of which had been his trick for getting to sleep when he was five, or eight. That’s what he must have looked like now, a five-or eight-year-old with a scanty bag of supplies and a face slick with what could have been tears. But Nicky Chaos had always seen deeper. He was blocking the doorway, only a step up from Charlie but also as tall as a god. From behind his tatted shoulders came a corona of light made strange from the yards of supermarket foil designed to jam up cameras, microphones, whatever. Or were the drugs in Charlie’s system causing him to see things? That reggae record Nicky liked so much was playing somewhere. There was a faint wistful whiff of pot. “You said I’d know when I was ready,” Charlie said. “I’m ready.”

“Good,” Nicky said. “Because something’s happened to force our hand.”

Inside, a party was under way, people Charlie didn’t recognize shuffling like vagabonds from parlor to kitchen and clogging the stairs and hallways. Musician-types and druggie-types and the slumming philosophers of the universities. A beautiful black girl in an Afro and a shirt the size of a moist towelette slid past without appearing to see either of them, but Charlie had no time to feel upset about not having been invited; they were already out back, Nicky backhanding the door of the little garage. He muttered something through the peeling wood, and various bolts and locks clicked open. A wall of cinderblock had been put up, screening off the far end. On the near side, on the colorless carpet, Sewer Girl and Delirium Tremens sat in black hooded sweatshirts, passing a j. Between them was a newspaper with a picture, worryingly, of … Sam? Nicky placed a hand on his shoulder. “The Prophet here’s got something to say.”

What did he have to say? The Prophet had forgotten.

“He’s ready. He’s going out tonight with us on our run.”

“He’s going to stick out like an asshole in that shirt,” said Solomon Grungy, looming from behind the cinderblock. There must have been another stereo, another copy of the record, because the song was playing out here, too. Culture, “Two Sevens Clash.” Which, viewed from a certain angle, was exactly what the PHP logo looked like. And Sol had done something to his eyebrows. Shaved them off, maybe? Nicky was telling him to shut the fuck up, but Sol was right: red cotton shrilled between the zippers of Charlie’s windbreaker like a warning. Sewer Girl dug into a duffelbag. “Here’s something black.”

SINCE THE LAST TIME CHARLIE HAD SEEN IT, the van had acquired a busted rear window. Someone had taped a piece of cardboard where the glass should have been. It had been someone else, presumably, who’d spraypainted PUSSYWAGON in red over the name of the window-washing company on the side—unless this was some elaborate head-fake (wheels within wheels) so that no one would suspect the Post-Humanists of whatever it was they were really plotting. Tablets of speed were distributed, swallowed dry. Then Sol and D.T. climbed in back, while Nicky told Charlie and Sewer Girl to double up in the shotgun seat. They must have loaded up the cargo area earlier; that chemical odor was coming from back there, and every time they took a corner, bottles clanked invisibly. Nicky kept the window down and his arm propped on the door, so Charlie did the same. Sewer Girl was a squirming warm mammal on his lap. If she could feel him getting hard, she didn’t seem to care. Indeed, she shifted around so much he got the idea she might be doing it for his benefit.

Then they were flying over the East River, amphetamines kicking in, the lights of the City dwindling to toy size, smaller than nightlights, smaller than Lite-Brite, and the breeze was whipping S.G.’s hair into his newly arid face. They swung out onto a scythe-blade expressway. “Music,” Nicky demanded. “Music is essential.” S.G. leaned forward to wire the radio into the dash, though the metal frame of the van and the girders of overpasses and the shitty FM signals of metropolitan New York messed with the reception. When the snags of static did yield to an identifiable sound, it was Donna Summer. “I hate this shit,” Sol groused from the back. Charlie was ready to hate it, too, but Nicky reached out to stay Sewer Girl’s hand. “No, this song is genius.”

“And shouldn’t we be there by now?” D.T. added. “Magellan I’m not, but …”

“You know Nicky likes the scenic route,” Sewer Girl said.

Energy was streaming and colliding all around, but Nicky seemed to have withdrawn into his own cool microclimate in the driver’s seat, and Charlie could hear him crooning falsetto, Aaaah … love to love you, bay-buh, his eyes never leaving the road. They’d scooted off a hairpin exit now and were coasting past desolate hulks of buildings. These were not the good neighborhoods. Nicky slowed to a near-stop. “You see that?” Beyond was an old tenement with a charred façade. The top story looked stove in, and most of the windows were missing. Something twitched on a sill: a bird tucking its head away in shame.

“What happened there?”

“What do you think happened, Charlie?” There seemed to be no one else in the van but him and Nicky.

Oh, Charlie realized. We happened there.

“When I said we were readying for revolution, I was serious. But don’t worry,” he said, sensing Charlie’s unease. “No one was living there. No one got hurt.”

As they drove on, Nicky pointed out other buildings in similar estate. It was like a filmstrip: one flame-licked sight flicking away, another taking its place. “We weren’t the first crew up here, Charlie, and we may not be the best, but we’re the only ones with a program.”

So this was Nicky’s big rebellion? And had Sam known about this? Did she know?

“Obviously she did, Prophet,” Nicky said. “Just think about where she was found.”

Through the haze, Charlie glimpsed a time when thinking about her was all he had cared about. He tried to make contact with that person. “In Central Park?”

“Central Park West. Like a thousand feet from that party.”

“But maybe she was just going there to meet Loverboy,” Sewer Girl said.

“Yeah, maybe she was going to rat out your change in plans.”

Nicky, scratching furiously at his chin-beard, ignored these theories from the back. “No way, not our Sam. Those bullets were a shot across our bow—they changed everything. Preparing for the new target is taking longer than I thought. But we might as well hit back, now that he knows we know. By the time he’s calculated angles of response, we’ll be ready to hit again, even harder.”

For Charlie, much of this was confusion. What new target? And what was the point of torching these derelict buildings again? Before he could ask any more questions, though, Nicky had cut the lights and was snapping at S.G. to turn the radio down. They’d pulled alongside a section of plywood fencing that seemed to run on for miles, blocking whatever was behind it from view. LIBERTY HEIGHTS PHASE ONE. A HAMILTON-SWEENEY PROJECT, a sign said, with a picture of glassy towers. IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU’D BE HOME BY NOW. And maybe Charlie did see the point after all. There was a shadow with a weapon running swiftly along the fence, and he almost called for Nicky to watch out. Then he saw it was Solomon Grungy, who’d bailed from the back of the van, and the weapon a bolt-cutter he was even now applying to the gate. A chain snapped like a wishbone; its loose ends fell. Sol gave the gate a shove and then hurried back to the van, which rolled toward the opening.

The excavation inside was massive, a hole probably a quarter-mile long, filling all the acreage between road and river. Trailers and port-a-johns skirted the rim, along with a line of pickup trucks. In the hole itself, in yellow moonlight, sat a dozen or more bulldozers and backhoes. Here and there, rebar jutted from concrete.

Charlie followed his fellow Post-Humanists. His legs had pins and needles where S.G. had squashed them; on the plus side, his stiffy had subsided. She and D.T. knelt behind the van, stuffing rags into the necks of bottles. Sol unloaded more milk-crates from the back. Nicky was somewhere far away and feeling no pain. He stooped, retrieved a bottle, pulled a lighter from his pocket, and then hesitated. “You want to do the honors, Charlie?”

“Me?”

“You’ve got about five seconds after you light the rag.” Charlie took the lighter and bit his lip. “The dozers are a little far. Try aiming for that trailer over there. Vengeance is mine, saith the Prophet.”

Nearby, Sewer Girl stopped her work to watch. Not wanting to seem like a pussy, he took the bottle from Nicky. It was either light it soon or pass out from the fumes. But he’d always been told he threw like a girl. Sam, the star by which he was navigating, offered no direction. Nor did any god. He hadn’t even touched the flame to the rag, he still thought he was making up his mind, when there was a whoosh and a wave of heat like the grill when his dad would squirt on lighter fluid. He eyed the distance to the trailer. Imagined Sam standing in this very spot. This had to be for her, somehow. And then the bottle bisected the night, end over end, the perfect pitch he’d never before been able to muster. It shattered on the roof of the trailer, just wide of the wall, and sent waterfalls of fire streaking down the side.

“Beautiful,” Nicky said, and handed him another bottle.

Still others were whistling through the dark around him, ten, twenty, fifty bottles; he soon lost track of which were his own. To the crash of shattered glass, blue flowers of flame bloomed all around the yard, consuming the trailers, the dozers, the electrical box of the crane, two dirt piles, and a truck bed. A port-a-john buckled sideways and began to melt. Small shadows he realized were rats scurried up the flickering walls of the foundation pit. The various sounds of the fires became one hungry hiss, and the flames merged, too, until he could see quite clearly the faces of the people he was with, no longer stoned.

As Charlie looked on, empty-handed, Nicky stripped off his own tee-shirt, doused it with liquid from one of the bottles. They were all watching now; Nicky was their captain, primordial, savage. He was shoving something into the gas tank of one of the trucks. Lighting the shirt. There was a shift in the air, a thickening in the quality of attention. When he glanced up, he looked almost surprised, Charlie thought. Almost frightened by his own daring. Then they were all running hell-for-leather for the van.

They barreled out of the yard with one of the back doors agape, swinging on its hinges, he could see it appearing and disappearing in the sideview, and here was the first whoop of a siren, like a game, like his brothers playing the game they called Emergency in their room upstairs. If Mom could see him now, he thought, or if Sam could—the power he had to strike back at the world that had struck him. And then there was the deep cannonball thud of the gas tank going behind them, a concussion he’d still feel in his chest in the morning. A blue blaze he’d see again when he closed his eyes, shot through with weird sparks of green.

50

SO HOW’S LIFE IN THE BIG CITY?” Mama said, rumbling away from the airport in the truck that had been Pop’s. Her face was worn but handsome, with that dignity folks of their generation had, and when she reached across the gearbox to pat Mercer’s knee, his squirm was reflexive. Her opener, back in the terminal, had been, “You smell like a brewery.” He’d discovered on his last flight home a lack of faith in the physics that kept planes aloft, and so an hour into this one had caved and ordered a beer. But it had quickly receded into the larger universe of his failings. Down in Georgia, late April could pass for June, but the arm he offered for support in the tropical parking lot got swatted off. There were still rules, apparently: the arrow of need pointed only one way.

“Oh, you know. Plus ça change.” He cracked a window. Sown fields exploded in his nostrils. He had a sudden vision of his parents aging in time-lapse, crumpling into matched rockers angled toward a window unit. “Listen, I was up late last night grading papers. Do you mind if I catch a little shut-eye?”

“Why on earth would I mind? That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? To get some rest?” You’d have thought he’d accused her of infanticide.

“I appreciate it, Mama.”

“You know, when you were a baby, Pop used to have to put you in the truck and drive around the back-roads at bedtime to settle you. Your little mind was always working.”

Invisible hands were trying to squeeze him back down to the size of his prepubescent body, that container he’d worked so hard to escape. “Mama? I’m just going to try to sleep.”

He feigned slumber for the couple hours it took to reach Altana, and the ten minutes from there to the farm. When he opened his eyes, he was facing a plain, tin-roofed house, pale in the dusk. It might have been someone else’s except for the complicated things it did to his heart. Pop, who was watching TV in his Barcalounger, naturally didn’t speak when Mercer came in. But maybe he was just waiting for his son to go first—to offer an account of himself—because when Mercer asked how he was, he started squeezing the nubby arms of the chair. “Oh, can’t complain.” They were the first words he’d spoken to Mercer in almost two years. “Your mother says you got yourself in some kinda trouble up there.”