The Best of Lucius Shepard (69 page)

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*
* * *

Only
Partly Here

There are legends in the pit.
Phantoms and apparitions. The men who work at Ground Zero joke about them, but
their laughter is nervous and wired. Bobby doesn’t believe the stories, yet
he’s prepared to believe something weird might happen. The place feels so
empty. Like even the ghosts are gone. All that sudden vacancy, who knows what
might have entered in? Two nights ago on the graveyard shift, some guy claimed
he saw a faceless figure wearing a black spiky headdress standing near the pit
wall. The job breaks everybody down. Marriages are falling apart. People keep
losing it one way or another.

Fights,
freak-outs, fits of weeping. It’s the smell of burning metal that seeps up from
the earth, the ceremonial stillness of the workers after they uncover a body,
the whispers that come when there is no wind. It’s the things you find. The
week before, scraping at the rubble with a hoe, like an archaeologist
investigating a buried temple, Bobby spotted a woman’s shoe sticking up out of
the ground. A perfect shoe, so pretty and sleek and lustrous. Covered in blue
silk. Then he reached for it and realized that it wasn’t stuck—it was only half
a shoe, with delicate scorching along the ripped edge. Now sometimes when he
closes his eyes he sees the shoe. He’s glad he isn’t married. He doesn’t think
he has much to bring to a relationship.

That
evening Bobby’s taking his dinner break, perched on a girder at the edge of the
pit along with Mazurek and Pineo, when they switch on the lights. They all hate
how the pit looks in the lights. It’s an out-take from
The X-Files
—the
excavation of an alien ship under hot white lamps smoking from the cold; the
shard left from the framework of the north tower glittering silver and strange,
like the wreckage of a cosmic machine. The three men remain silent for a bit,
then Mazurek goes back to bitching about Jason Giambi signing with the Yankees.
You catch the interview he did with Werner Wolf? He’s a moron! First time the
crowd gets on him, it’s gonna be like when you yell at a dog. The guy’s gonna
fucking crumble. Pineo disagrees, and Mazurek asks Bobby what he thinks.

“Bobby
don’t give a shit about baseball,” says Pineo. “My boy’s a Jets fan.”

Mazurek,
a thick-necked, fiftyish man whose face appears to be fashioned of interlocking
squares of pale muscle, says, “The Jets...fuck!”

“They’re
play-off bound,” says Bobby cheerfully.

Mazurek
crumples the wax paper his sandwich was folded in. “They gonna drop dead in the
first round like always.”

“It’s
more interesting than being a Yankee fan,” says Bobby. “The Yankees are too
corporate to be interesting.”

‘“Too
corporate to be interesting’?” Mazurek stares. “You really are a geek, y’know
that?”

“That’s
me. The geek.”

“Whyn’t
you go the fuck back to school, boy? Fuck you doing here, anyway?”

“Take
it easy, Carl! Chill!” Pineo—nervous, thin, lively, curly black hair spilling
from beneath his hard hat—puts a hand on Mazurek’s arm, and Mazurek knocks it
aside. Anger tightens his leathery skin; the creases in his neck show white.
“What’s it with you? You taking notes for your fucking thesis?” he asks Bobby. “Playing
tourist?”

Bobby
looks down at the apple in his hand—it seems too shiny to be edible. “Just
cleaning up is all. You know.”

Mazurek’s
eyes dart to the side, then he lowers his head and gives it a savage shake.
“Okay,” he says in a subdued voice. “Yeah...fuck. Okay.”

*
* * *

Midnight, after the shift ends,
they walk over to the Blue Lady. Bobby doesn’t altogether understand why the
three of them continue to hang out there. Maybe because they once went to the
bar after work and it felt pretty good, so they return every night in hopes of
having it feel that good again. You can’t head straight home; you have to
decompress. Mazurek’s wife gives him constant shit about the practice—she calls
the bar and screams over the phone. Pineo just split with his girlfriend. The
guy with whom Bobby shares an apartment grins when he sees him, but the grin is
anxious—like he’s afraid Bobby is bringing back some contagion from the pit.
Which maybe he is. The first time he went to Ground Zero, he came home with a
cough and a touch of fever, and he recalls thinking that the place was
responsible. Now, though, either he’s immune or else he’s sick all the time and
doesn’t notice.

Two
hookers at a table by the door check them out as they enter, then go back to
reading the
Post.
Roman the barman, gray-haired and thick-waisted,
orders his face into respectful lines, says, “Hey guys!” and sets them up with
beers and shots. When they started coming in he treated them with almost
religious deference, until Mazurek yelled at him, saying he didn’t want to hear
that hero crap while he was trying to unwind—he got enough of it from the
fuckass jocks and movie stars who visit Ground Zero to have their pictures
taken. Though angry, he was far more articulate than usual in his demand for
normal treatment, and this caused Bobby to speculate that if Mazurek were
transported thousands of miles from the pit and not just a few blocks, his IQ
would increase exponentially.

The
slim brunette in the business suit is down at the end of the bar again, sitting
beneath the blue neon silhouette of a dancing woman. She’s been coming in every
night for about a week. Late twenties. Hair styled short, an expensive kind of
punky look. Fashion-model hair. Eyebrows thick and slanted, like
accents
grave.
Sharp-featured, on the brittle side of pretty, or maybe she’s not
that pretty, maybe she is so well-dressed, her make-up done so skillfully, that
the effect is of a businesslike prettiness, of prettiness reined in by the
magic of brush and multiple applicators, and beneath this artwork she is, in
actuality, rather plain. Nice body, though. Trim and well-tended. She wears the
same expression of stony neutrality that Bobby sees every morning on the faces
of the women who charge up from under the earth, disgorged from the D train,
prepared to resist Manhattan for another day. Guys will approach her, assuming
she’s a hooker doing a kind of Hitler office-bitch thing in order to attract
men searching for a woman they can use and abuse as a surrogate for one who
makes their life hell every day from nine to five, and she will say something
to them and they will immediately walk away. Bobby and Pineo always try to
guess what she says. That night, after a couple of shots, Bobby goes over and
sits beside her. She smells expensive. Her perfume like the essence of some
exotic flower or fruit he’s only seen in magazine pictures.

“I’ve
just been to a funeral,” she says wearily, staring into her drink. “So, please....
Okay?”

“That
what you tell everybody?” he asks. “All the guys who hit on you?”

A
fretful line cuts her brow. “Please!”

“No,
really. I’ll go. All I want to know.. .that what you always say?”

She
makes no response.

“It
is,” he says. “Isn’t it?”

“It’s
not entirely a lie.” Her eyes are spooky, the dark rims of the pale irises
extraordinarily well-defined. “It’s intended as a lie, but it’s true in a way.”

“But
that’s what you say, right? To everybody?”

“This
is why you came over? You’re not hitting on me?”

“No,
I...I mean, maybe...I thought....”

“So
what you’re saying, you weren’t intending to hit on me. You wanted to know what
I say to men when they come over. But now you’re not certain of your intent?
Maybe you were deceiving yourself as to your motives? Or maybe now you sense I
might be receptive, you’ll take the opportunity to hit on me, though that
wasn’t your initial intent. Does that about sum it up?”

“I
suppose,” he says.

She
gives him a cautious look. “Could you be brilliant? Could your clumsy delivery
be designed to engage me?”

“I’ll
go away, okay? But that’s what you said to them, right?”

She
points to the barman, who’s talking to Mazurek. “Roman tells me you work at
Ground Zero.”

The
question unsettles Bobby, leads him to suspect that she’s a disaster groupie,
looking for a taste of the pit, but he says, “Yeah.”

“It’s
really....” She does a little shivery shrug. “Strange.”

“Strange.
I guess that covers it.”

“That’s
not what I wanted to say. I can’t think of the right word to describe what it
does to me.”

“You
been down in it?”

“No,
I can’t get any closer than here. I just can’t. But....” She makes a swirling
gesture with her fingers. “You can feel it here. You might not notice, because
you’re down there all the time. That’s why I come here. Everybody’s going on
with their lives, but I’m not ready. I need to feel it. To understand it.
You’re taking it away piece by piece, but the more you take away, it’s like
you’re uncovering something else.”

“Y’know,
I don’t want to think about this now.” He gets to his feet. “But I guess I know
why you want to.”

“Probably
it’s fucked up of me, huh?”

“Yeah,
probably,” says Bobby, and walks away.

“She’s
still looking at you, man,” Pineo says as Bobby settles beside him. “What you
doing back here? You could be fucking that.”

“She’s
a freak,” Bobby tells him.

“So
she’s a freak! Even better!” Pineo turns to the other two men. “You believe
this asshole? He could be fucking that bitch over there, yet here he sits.”

Affecting
a superior smile, Roman says, “You don’t fuck them, pal. They fuck
you.”

He
nudges Mazurek’s arm as though seeking confirmation from a peer, a man of
experience like himself, and Mazurek, gazing at his grungy reflection in the
mirror behind the bar, says distractedly, weakly, “I could use another shot.”

*
* * *

The following afternoon Bobby
unearths a disk of hard black rubber from beneath some cement debris. It’s four
inches across, thicker at the center than at the edges, shaped like a little
UFO. Try as he might, he can think of no possible purpose it might serve, and
he wonders if it had something to do with the fall of the towers. Perhaps there
is a black seed like this at the heart of every disaster. He shows it to Pineo,
asks his opinion, and Pineo, as expected, says, “Fuck, I don’t know. Part of a
machine.” Bobby knows Pineo is right. The disk is a widget, one of those
undistinguished yet indispensable objects without which elevators will not rise
or refrigerators will not cool; but there are no marks on it, no holes or
grooves to indicate that it fits inside a machine. He imagines it whirling
inside a cone of blue radiance, registering some inexplicable process.

He
thinks about the disk all evening, assigning it various values. It is the
irreducible distillate of the event, a perfectly formed residue. It is a wicked
sacred object that belonged to a financier, now deceased, and its ritual
function is understood by only three other men on the planet. It is a beacon
left by time-traveling tourists that allows them to home in on the exact place
and moment of the terrorist attack. It is the petrified eye of God. He intends
to take the disk back to his apartment and put it next to the half-shoe and all
the rest of the items he has collected in the pit. But that night when he
enters the Blue Lady and sees the brunette at the end of the bar, on impulse he
goes over and drops the disk on the counter next to her elbow.

“Brought
you something,” he says.

She
glances at it, pokes it with a forefinger and sets it wobbling. “What is it?”

He
shrugs. “Just something I found.”

“At
Ground Zero?”

“Uh-huh.”