The Stone War (9 page)
“Primitive,” the man behind him repeated appreciatively. “A little damaged, but still quite valuable. Actually, there are three, but the other two are damaged.”
Tietjen looked beyond the girl to see a grotesque grouping against the back wall. Two black men, one in the same leathers the girl wore, the other somewhat older and dressed in a business suit; they were obviously dead.
The girl followed the curator’s movements, her eyes flickering like a cat’s at every gesture. “Bastard,” she muttered. “You wait, bastard. Gon’ rip you bare-hand; gon’ drink you blood, motherfucker bastard. Bastard—”
It was as if the curator had not heard. From another aisle a woman’s voice, quiet and ironical, said: “Don’t waste your breath. He won’t answer us.”
This time it was Tietjen who pushed aside the boxes to reveal an older woman, her hands tied behind her, sitting on a carton. She was still blinking in the light. Her glance at Tietjen held sympathy and—weirdly—faint amusement, as if she were embarrassed to have been found in such a condition. She and Tietjen looked at each other for a long moment; he liked her. For a moment the nightmare unreality of this cellar room, the mad curator close enough behind him so that Tietjen could feel his breath on his neck, the harsh mutterings of the black woman, faded in the face of this older woman’s rueful smile. Then her expression changed. Before he had time to understand the message her eyes conveyed, or to hear the warning she yelled, something heavy came down on the back of his head. He heard the curator behind him drop whatever he had used as a club; the older woman’s shout rang in his ears, mixing with the black girl’s stream of threats and abuse. The sounds together flowed into the high keening in his head:
too late, too late.
Tietjen lost consciousness altogether.
too late, too late.
Tietjen lost consciousness altogether.
JIT
woke to the buzz of voices: faint, very far away or very weak or very few. He was so glad for the noise in his mind that for a moment he missed everything about the voices, the bad things even, the feelings so complex and hateful and angry and frightened that Jit had wondered how he could live, hearing them. He was lonely without the feelings. He was frightened. For the first time in his life Jit was hearing his own thoughts in a peculiar clear way, like pennies dropped one by one on a stone floor. Nothing filled the emptiness, he could not hide from it in games, talking back to the squirrels, making the dead trees leaf again. The fuzzy echo of the voices in his mind now was welcome. He croaked a laugh, sitting up before the cold ash of his last night’s fire, and stretched for the voices, welcoming them, seeking their direction.
woke to the buzz of voices: faint, very far away or very weak or very few. He was so glad for the noise in his mind that for a moment he missed everything about the voices, the bad things even, the feelings so complex and hateful and angry and frightened that Jit had wondered how he could live, hearing them. He was lonely without the feelings. He was frightened. For the first time in his life Jit was hearing his own thoughts in a peculiar clear way, like pennies dropped one by one on a stone floor. Nothing filled the emptiness, he could not hide from it in games, talking back to the squirrels, making the dead trees leaf again. The fuzzy echo of the voices in his mind now was welcome. He croaked a laugh, sitting up before the cold ash of his last night’s fire, and stretched for the voices, welcoming them, seeking their direction.
Outside it was still dark. The voices were dark, confused, angry, strange. Not the night voices of the park dwellers, he knew those well enough. They had been angry, violent, crafty in the way that the squirrels and rats were crafty. But there was a flavor to these new voices that Jit liked but did not understand, dangerous but curious. The voices tasted like anything could happen. And for once he could easily pick out individual voices with individual feelings, clear and distinct. That was something new: from his first memory Jit had been awash in so many voices, so many feelings, that he had only been able to pick out strands of meaning, themes.
“Hello,” he said to the darkness, to a mad voice that was howling somewhere in the night. Someone was locked up in a dark room, listening to someone else crying and muttering.
Jit giggled. He reached out for something else. A voice full of pain, incoherent with it, its owner ground beneath some heavy thing—a piece of building—was slipping in and out of consciousness. Jit played tag with the voice until it whispered away to nothing. Bolder still, he flitted from voice to voice, tasting each, stopping long enough to sample the different, singular flavors, all a little crazy, all a little strange in the darkness.
The novelty did not wear off until the morning light began to seep down to Jit’s tunnel and the voices became quieter, the game less exciting. Jit was hungry. If the voices were true, something had happened outside the Park, and he was curious. He had met images of emptiness, open streets, skyscrapers brought down and lying like fallen giants. A new playground, a wonderful new place to explore. It was time he found more food, anyway; even the squirrel that chattered when he reached for its voice knew that the hot-dog and souvlaki men would not stand on Fifth Avenue today.
The day was clear and bright. Instinct urged him back to the tunnel in daylight, but the voices said he would be safe today in the city. Jit experimented, walking coolly down the center of a path, watching from the corners of his eyes but claiming the path, the whole Park as his own.
He went west. When he listened particularly he could hear new voices, not so interesting as the night voices, but good. A woman was trapped somewhere in the dark, facing a sea of tiny eyes. Rats, Jit knew. Did she? Yes, he could taste her funny terror as they surged forward, burying her in musky scent; the tiny scrabblings of their feet against her skin before they went to work and tore into her.
That reminded him that he was hungry. For that, best to go farther north on the West Side; too far down was only towers and stores filled with things whose uses Jit could not understand. The security walls of steel mesh and old brownstone were crumbled into each other where Jit reached the Park’s edge, at Sixty-seventh Street. He scaled the pile of debris, moving agilely from displaced stone block to a doubled-up steel column, making a game of it. As he climbed it seemed the wall itself was playing with him, growing higher as he climbed. It took longer to reach the top than he had thought. In places the steel mesh grew out of the stone like a weed.
At the top of the wall Jit balanced carefully, scanning along the street, Central Park West, looking for movement, people. Uniforms. People in uniforms had taken him that one time. Now he saw nothing but the occasional skirl of a piece of paper or the lopsided roll of a hubcap down the center of the street. Emboldened, Jit slid down the face of the wall and started a cool saunter down Sixty-seventh Street, toward Broadway. At the corner, gazing across the broad knot of avenues, he stopped. There was a circle of people in the plaza, handfast and moving in a slow, deliberate dance, crying out in low voices. Jit could not hear their words, but touched their minds and found confusion and pain and a somber, bizarre hope that the dance they did round the fountain in the plaza would placate an angry god. Jit understood that; his world had always been ruled by dark forces, erratic gods. Still, he stayed clear of the dancers.
Fifteen minutes’ walk up Broadway brought him to the neighborhood of small shops, butchers and bakers and greengrocers. Ordinarily Jit would have found these places just after dark, stealing and running in the confusion of closing time. This was a different world, and he gawked and peered in the shattered windows and wrinkled his nose at the rank smell of spoiling meat, rotten vegetables, the dusty smell of stale bread and pastry. He was hungry enough to snatch a few rock-hard doughnuts from a baker’s counter; when he bit in he found tiny black bugs cutting tunnels in the sugary cake, and threw the doughnut down.
He kept walking. A fireplug gushed water into the street and down the steps of the Seventy-ninth Street subway station. Cars and buses were piled into each other, turned on their sides or completely over. Looking up once, Jit saw something dangling from the railing of a fire escape down Eighty-first Street: a child dressed in jeans and a knit shirt, hanging by one ankle, unmoving. The boy was wrapped or tangled up in clothesline; Jit could see towels and underwear still clinging to the line. Jit watched the dead child curiously, without horror or amusement.
Finally he found a supermarket, both doors slammed open invitingly. The air inside was heavy with the same ripe, sickish smell of rotting food he had met in the butchers and greengrocers. The frozen food was defrosted and spoiled, and what meat there was left was silver-green in its wrinkled plastic wrapping. The bread was gone, and the milk that had not been taken was bad. Jit fought through the thick foul smell around the dairy case and stuffed packages of cheese into the bag he had brought, different colors and shapes as they caught his eye. A few aisles over he found Saltines and animal crackers, brightly colored bags of chips and cookies, and started pulling them down from the shelves into a pile. He would have to find a way to bring it all back to the Park. Did he dare take one of the shiny plastic carts with him? Jit grabbed the handle of one and tugged it over toward the crackers, tossing things in, watching with satisfaction as the cart got fuller and fuller.
Canned foods. He selected by picture and color: gave preference to the red and brown foods and took fewer of the yellow and green foods. Soups and stews, anything with meat in them. Fruit in sticky syrup, tiny black beans in heavily spiced sauce, corn and olives and anything else he remembered by label or illustration. The cart moved more and more slowly as Jit piled things into it. At last he thought he had enough. Opening a box of sugar-dusted cookies, he munched on one while he tugged the cart one-handed toward the door. There was an anti-theft barrier there, wide enough for Jit to pass but too narrow for the cart. Jit looked anxiously around, afraid someone would come and try to stop him. At last, quickly, he emptied everything from the cart, bent and crawled under it and slowly stood with the thing on his shoulders. The barrier did not extend high; Jit brought the cart through the barrier, then went back through and laboriously transferred the food to the cart again.
Then it was a matter of pushing or tugging the cart through the streets, watching for people, guarding his treasure. He crossed east and entered the Park at Eighty-first Street, reaching out for voices nearby. But there was no one near, no one in the Park at all, only a few voices on the edges, someone huddled under the gratings that hid the Columbus Circle entrance, voices from the east side where someone was crying. Jit reached out to find that voice and explore it, keeping his hand and half attention on the cart he was pulling. The crying came from the dark, a mind as small and terrified as one of the Park squirrels, watching as things changed and moved in the dark. People in the shadows, one voice dark and rich with hatred, muttering words like those of the Park people Jit recognized. He changed his focus from the small keening mind to the angry one.
A woman. Something was—she couldn’t move her hands; the world looked strange, yellow-colored and oddly refracted through her eyes. She hated, she wanted to kill, visions of bright blood and vengeance drove the words away. For a moment it felt so familiar to Jit that he welcomed the anger. But it was too strong, undiluted, washing through him so that he could hardly see his own reality: the blue plastic cart before him, the gray earth and bristle of leafless trees. He recoiled, trying to untangle himself from the voice, but it followed, hating him as much as the others, all the others, everyone. Itself. The hatred burned hot and fierce, a pain that lanced through his head. Jit pushed, shoved the cart away from him, trying to shove the voice from his head. “No!” he yelled, and his voice echoed baldly among the trees. “Stop! Stop!”
Blindly, he did what he had always done, reaching inside himself until he found the door. He would put the voice there, with the others, the bad feelings. There was something about the door—he had dreamt about the door, what was it? He found the place in his head, frantically swept up the killing rage that filled him and, finally, opened the door to put the rage behind it, away with all the other horrors and terrors and furies.
There was nothing there.
From inside the swirling anger that filled him, Jit saw: the place behind the door that had always been dark with the emotions he had placed there was white empty. Where did it go? For a moment he stood still, around him the Park and the clear bright day, inside him the woman’s anger churning, and farther inside, a kernel of dry curiosity, wondering what had happened to the door in his head and the feelings he had hidden there. Then Jit got smart. He could not bear the anger: put it behind the door and slam the door shut on it and do not worry where the other things have gone to. If the things did not come back to trouble him, why should he care?
From inside the swirling anger that filled him, Jit saw: the place behind the door that had always been dark with the emotions he had placed there was white empty. Where did it go? For a moment he stood still, around him the Park and the clear bright day, inside him the woman’s anger churning, and farther inside, a kernel of dry curiosity, wondering what had happened to the door in his head and the feelings he had hidden there. Then Jit got smart. He could not bear the anger: put it behind the door and slam the door shut on it and do not worry where the other things have gone to. If the things did not come back to trouble him, why should he care?
His head hurt. Jit blinked in the sunlight and saw the blue grocer’s cart rattling in the breeze ten feet away, where he had shoved it. He should get back to his place before someone found him. He shoved the cart in front of him. He tried to eat another cookie, but his stomach hurt, clenched hard with the anger that had swept through him.
What had he dreamed? He tried to remember again. The door burst open, swept open by the force of what he had put behind it.
“Wha’ you do?” he said aloud to the door, as if it somehow had destroyed itself. “Wha’ happen?”
No answer. It was too much to think about, the door spilling all those things out again, back into the city. Filling up people with all their old angers, with new angers. “Wha’ you do?” he asked again, accusing.
The steely afternoon sun shone on him, on the grocery cart with its burden of good eating. There was nothing he could do if the door had burst its seams. All he could do was take his food home and put it away. And eat, his stomach reminded him. He could eat. “O-kay, Jitters, you gon’ eat,” he said aloud. The words whispered all around him in the air of the Park; he was not alone. “O-kay, Jitters!” he shouted, and the words rang in the trees. He started trotting with the cart pushed before him, singing tunelessly under his breath, thinking of what he would eat when he got back to his place.
He had always known about the voices; he had to be taught about the door. Old Nogai had told him about it, and the wall, and the places in his head to find the feelings and put them. Old Nogai had lived in the Park for a while when Jit was small, and had talked to Jit with a funny singsong, all the time drinking from a bag and twisting pieces of paper into shapes. Jit had found Nogai one afternoon, twisting paper and talking to the pigeons that paraded arrogantly around the Wollman Rink fence. Ducks, he called them. In a high-pitched singsong he rebuked them for laziness, for disrespect. “Bad ducks! Whyou come bother an old man, ducks? Away!” For a while Nogai, as shy as Jit himself, had refused to talk to the little boy. Gradually a few words were spoken from the side of the mouth and the two had edged together. Old Nogai called Jit Duck as often as not, and Jit would giggle way up high.
“Bad feelings all over this city,” Nogai had said. “Bad feelings, you find them, boy?”
Jit had nodded solemnly, not at all understanding what the old man meant.
“Sick feelings, make your gut hurt, you understand, boy?”
This time Jit did understand, sort of. The things that washed through him, they made him hurt sometimes. Did they belong to the city?
“Only one way for bad feelings, boy. You find the place somewhere and bury them deep quick.” Nogai threw a handful of pebbles at the uninterested pigeons. “Find a wall and throw them bad feelings over. You find a door and lock them safe away. You understand me, boy?”
Jit had giggled high, shaking his head in imitation of the old man. Nogai wheeled around fiercely: “You understand, you duck? Bad feelings get all twisted up in you, make you old like me. You pitch them bad things ’hind the door, you understand?”
“Understand?” Jit echoed. The old man’s mind was rich with a thousand confused, scented images: the searing taste of the liquor he drank, the baffling flurry of movement from the pigeons, even Jit’s narrow white face. Everything itched with the irritable need to be understood. Jit tasted old Nogai’s thoughts and wondered at them. “How?” he asked at last, less about the door Nogai spoke of, than about the old man’s thoughts as a whole.
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