City on Fire (67 page)

THAT NIGHT, when he returns from drying his clothes—they sat in the coin-op washer around the corner for hours before he remembered, but were apparently still gross enough no one wanted to steal them—it’s like old times again. The doors have been thrown open, figuratively speaking, and on the floor of the denuded parlor, the grad students eat rubbery pizza straight from the box. They recognize Charlie now as one of the chosen ones, and nod at him as he picks his way through with his knapsack of laundry. At first, he thinks the Post-Humanists are partying for the benefit of whoever might be watching. A diversion-cum-alibi: nothing to see here, Officer; just kids having a good time. But then from the kitchen floats the scent of Sewer Girl’s pot brownies, which isn’t what you’d serve if you thought there were cops nearby. He’s sampled these brownies once before, but this time she’s made them special for him, remembering his asthma.

“What’s the occasion, though?” he says, around a mouthful of acrid chocolate. “Is it somebody’s birthday?”

She spins him by the shoulders until he’s facing the doorway he’s just come through. Above it, someone’s spraypainted on the wall Two Sevens Clash! attended by winged iterations of the PHP logo. Of course, he thinks. July 7. 7/7/77. “It’s like our last hurrah,” she says, as he reaches for another brownie, hoping it will cover over the pit opening in his stomach, “now that the timing problems have been worked out. Well, actually, Nicky says getting another meeting set up may still take a week. Tonight would have been perfect synchronicity, but, you know … laissez les bons temps rouler.”

Out in the parlor, swollen green jugs of wine are going hand-to-hand around a circle, and Charlie, already stoned and seeking further refuge, drinks twice his share. No one seems to notice when he dribbles some down his chin. Even Charlie himself hardly notices. This shirt, now on its fourth consecutive day of wear, smells like bad bologna or steak gone blue on its surface, so the spreading stain is at best a remote concern. As is the conversation. There are ten or twelve people, mostly boys, thrice as many as have ever comprised PostHumanism proper, and the stereo that is the room’s only remaining equipment is wailing reggae. The words spoken over it decay into a tone-poem:

I know Hegel says somewhere …

… wants to see ID, I’m like, motherfucker, I’m trying to get ID …

… stumblebum was too drunk to even play …

… missing a piece off the …

… stencil it on the …

… why do I need ID? Nobody checks those things, anyway.

Nicky sits unusually quiet in a corner, licking pizza grease from the side of a pinky, the only person with enough distance to make sense out of what everybody’s saying. I can see with my own eyes, goes the singer of this album he loves so much, It’s a scheme that divides. Charlie is convinced for a second that Nicky has orchestrated everything this way, kept them all in their separate compartments. And for just the smallest subslice of that second he wonders if he’s content to be on the receiving end of Nicky’s benevolent administration. (And if this would really constitute freedom. (And like, what’s the difference between that and liberation? (And is true freedom even possible? (And all kinds of stuff like that, the pot has screwed up time again and his thoughts are slo-mo billiard balls.)))) But then Nicky catches him looking down and takes a long swig from a passing jug and says to D. Tremens, “Turn the music down. We’re forgetting something.”

“What is it?” Charlie can’t keep himself from asking.

“Well, if this is really going to be our Last Supper, don’t you think somebody should bless it? Or what good was all your Bible study for? Invoke for us, Prophet.”

The request catches him off guard, like a pop quiz. Like being shoved out onto a spotlit highwire above a crowd that didn’t realize you had any training. He’s not even sure what Nicky means by “invoke.” Does he want a confession? A renunciation? Or more characteristically, a plundering of someone else’s language for his own ends? Would it be cheating to just read something aloud? This is a moot point; he’s hidden the Bible in his laundry pile in the attic, along with the camera he decided to take from Sol after all. Charlie rises, sees he’s the second-tallest person in the room. To cover his embarrassment, he lowers his head, looks at his feet. He thinks about begging off entirely—indeed, maybe that’s what he’s being pushed to do—but it seems equally possible that backing down would be the only way to fail the test. A snatch of Scripture, read over and over after the shooting, flutters around inside his skull: The Lord, your God, is in your midst, a warrior who gives victory. It’s got the militant note Nicky likes; even D. Tremens would approve. And then what was the next bit? He has come to overturn. Ye Ethiopians also—Nope, not really germane, reggae or no reggae. What else, what else. Uh … the flocks will lie down and the cormorant will sing in the window, for, uh … No, wait. Here is something. Woe.

“Woe to her that is filthy and polluted,” he hears himself say to the now-quiet room. “To the oppressing city.” And when no one responds, more lines come mysteriously back. “The city that dwelt carelessly and said, I am: how she is become a desolation! But fear not.” Fear not! Yes! They always say that, that’s essential. But how to get around the embarrassing stuff about Hashem? Well, what about this? “On the day of festival, there will be exultation and loud singing,” he says.

At first, when he looks up, there’s only more silence. Then Nicky starts to clap, slowly—“Right on, Prophet”—and then Sewer Girl, and a couple of the outsiders, and even feverish Sol Grungy, it seems, with his maimed appendage. “Prophet! Prophet!” the novices chant. A wave of noise you wouldn’t even know was a goof, if you couldn’t see their faces. But inside, Charlie feels unsteady again. Menaced, somehow, by his flock. Maybe it’s the drugs, but this wasn’t supposed to be ironic, it was supposed to be about sanctifying what they were doing. He excuses himself and goes upstairs to take a pill and lie down.

LATER, Sewer Girl will appear alone at the head of the attic stairs. Her bikini top is already off, is what makes him feel like he’s dreaming. In the moonlight through the ceiling’s trapdoor, her tits look like soft blue balloons. The nipples are bigger than he imagined. Even her bellybutton screams sex—an inny, a shadowy ellipse. Before he can ask what she’s doing, she has crossed the room, and is reaching for his beltbuckle. He’s afraid if she sees him without his clothes on, she might not want to. But she already has his jeans around his ankles, and one hand is foraging matter-of-factly in his briefs, as though reaching into a bowl for a goldfish. With her free hand, she moves his hands to those tits and shakes her hair to one side, and then her mouth is on his and they are falling back onto the mattress.

How often and in what infinite varieties has he imagined this moment? But something is off. “Wait,” he says, gasping, and gropes among clothes for his inhaler. Takes a big hit.

S.G. looks at him with an expression he can’t quite see, her own breath coming steady. “What is it?”

“I can’t do this.”

“Why? Don’t you like me, Charlie?”

“Of course I like you. But …” He’s sitting up now, peering into the dark, the blanket of his moldy bedroll covering his exposed lower half. “But it’s loyalty, you know?”

She stares at him for a minute. Then she starts laughing. “Oh, Charlie, is this about me and Sol?”

“I thought you were with Nicky now.”

“Who do you think sent me up here?”

“Nicky sent you? Well, that’s just great. I thought you liked me.”

“No, that didn’t come out right.” Her voice softens. “Listen, that stuff you said earlier, Charlie, the reproach and the shame … You were right. I could just feel it shifting even as you talked. Like something being lifted. I wanted to find a way to say thank you, and Nicky said this would be cool. Said he hopes you see now you’re tougher than you think.” She runs her fingers through his hair like a mom, and he can feel himself recoiling, irritated.

“What about Sol? Your boyfriend? Does he know about this?”

“Well, does Sam? Or is she not your one and only anymore?”

“Who do you think I’m being loyal to?”

“Charlie …” She reaches under the covers for his crotch, but he rolls away to face the wall, burning like a furnace in the night. Sewer Girl lies behind him, not touching him, and will stay like that for a long time. She’s not all bad. Her slave name, she told him once, was Jain, with an i. But when the morning comes, she’ll be gone from his side, as everyone always is, which seems to suggest that it’s not so much insecurity that plagues him as foresight.

HE MUST NOT BE TOTALLY RESOLVED, though, because when a week passes without anything further happening, he both is and isn’t disappointed. Mostly, he feels on his own again. The twelfth of July’s supposed to be when Sam’s film is ready for pickup, and that morning he goes over to the camera store. In exchange for his last worldly dollars and some pocket-change, they hand him a red cardboard sleeve of single prints, three-and-a-half by five, the cheapest. For some reason, though, he can’t bring himself to open it. If the pictures are Sam’s, they’re all he has left of her, and once he looks at them, consumes them, she really will be gone.

He returns to the Phalanstery to find Nicky waiting. There’s one last job needs doing, he says, a two-man action; he wants to know if Charlie’s up to it. Charlie slips the photo sleeve into a pocket, hoping Nicky won’t ask about it, and half out of guilt says, Why wouldn’t I be up to it? How much damage can two people do, after all?

Soon they are barreling uptown with the windows down and the radio up full blast, the empty rear compartment thunking every time they hit one of Sixth Avenue’s savage potholes, a legal-sized mailer sliding from side to side on the dash. He’s riding shotgun again, for the first time in months. Not Sol, not D. Tremens, but him, Charlie Weisbarger. Or McCoy, if you’re going by the name on his uniform. Perhaps, he thinks, this could even be the time to ask Nicky about Operation Demon Brother. But when he does, Nicky just touches the envelope and smiles. “We’ll post the invitation on our way back.”

They narrowly miss the meter they park at. Charlie plugs a nickel in and Nicky checks the diver’s watch he sometimes wears, now that the van has no clock. Then he hands Charlie an army-surplus backpack that feels like it’s full of groceries. “What’s in here?”

“Awful curious today, aren’t we, Charles?” Nicky takes from the backpack another pair of coveralls and pulls them on over his jeans. No one passing pays him any mind. Someone has scrubbed PUSSYWAGON from the side of the van, so that it once again looks like a window-washer’s, Charlie sees, and now Nicky, too, has the uniform to match, although it’s Sol’s old one, and consequently several sizes too large. Greenberg is stitched across the pocket. Wait a minute. Is Sol Jewish? To ask, though, would be to prove Nicky right.

He follows Nicky down to Twenty-Third Street, a broad confluent of traffic. The huge apartment house on the corner has a construction scaffold running around it between the first and second stories, a plywood catwalk with waist-high walls. Half the buildings in the city have these things, yet nothing ever seems to get finished. The shadows beneath are cool. “You first,” says Nicky, nodding at the metal struts. This seems to run counter to the incognito vibe; it’s rare to see workmen actually working on anything. But probably Charlie could start screaming he was being murdered, and no one would bother to pay attention.

He gets stuck four feet off the ground, clinging to the crossed X braces. It’s about as high as he can free-climb before his acrophobia kicks in. Nicky is looking tensely around. “Go on,” he hisses. “Pull yourself up.” Charlie reaches up, up, and grasps the edge of the plywood. Most likely, his arms will give out first, the same skinny chicken arms that were his undoing when it was time to climb the rope in gym class. At some point, though, fear of being caught overpowers his fear of heights, and maybe yields an adrenaline rush, for here he is wriggling over the lip and flopping onto the catwalk, one flight up, hidden from view.

In seconds, Nicky is beside him, on his back. They are staring up at a sky raveled with cumulus but otherwise a superheated blue. It seems to be not the clouds but the buildings that are moving, swooning, waiting to fall. Then Nicky is telling him to sit up a little, not to crush the backpack. From it, he draws a thin strip of metal. Charlie watches him work its silver length between the sashes of the nearest window. The meaning of a term that has never made sense snaps into focus: cat burglar. It has that kind of quickness. One moment, Nicky is here; the next, Charlie is alone.

There must be at least a hundred windows above and on the other side of the street. He says a little prayer, that none of the people who live or work behind them will look down to where he lies. Of course, if he could just act like he belonged here, no one would think twice, but Charlie Weisbarger has never, at least since his brothers were born, known what belonging felt like. Instead, he’s always afraid that this world that envelops him—the ordinary music of street life below, the oily burn of nuts roasting on a cart—will at any moment be snatched away. And that there will be no other. The truth is, when you get right down to it, the Prophet Charlie is a moist, gaping wuss. His fears are a rock so large God Himself couldn’t lift it. Which means, of course, that he is unworthy of mercy. He rolls so that he is stretched out along the foot-high lip of plywood and wedges himself as tightly as possible into what should be its shadow, were the sun not beating down like a spotlight from a prison wall. When he looks back to where he was lying, he notices the red envelope of photographs from his pocket. It has ripped open on a staple or something, and a stack of pictures has started to slide out.

They are of burnt buildings, glassless windows, scorch-marks on walls, he sees, but never, for some reason, of the PHP, or of the fires themselves. In one picture, an ambulance streaks past a sporting-goods store and a sidewalk blurred by smoke—unless it’s the frame itself that’s blurred. The lens has been jostled. Flicking forward, he can hear Sam’s voice, bell-clear and hoarse, calling to him from somewhere as near as the back of his own head: Wake up, Charlie. The last shot is of a basement. Deep focus, early light. Sam naked on a rumpled mattress, startled, the sheets pulled off. This would seem to expose something about her and the person taking the picture, a tattooed action figure in the mirror, but who it really exposes is Charlie. Nicky was fucking her, too. What else has he refused to see? Wake up, she says again, as Nicky comes clambering back out the window. In his hand is one of those glow-in-the-dark alarm clocks. “Couldn’t find what I was looking for,” he says. “But you can’t have too many of these.”