We Are Here (23 page)

That’s what he was going to do. He had no need to go back to New York. Maj knew where he lived, sure, but he evidently had other problems—not least the scary guy in the coat. David could simply decide not to reengage.

They were, as Maj had put it, two magnets permanently set to repel.

While he got these thoughts in order, David watched people out on the street. He wasn’t really seeing his environment—more concerned with tidying his thoughts, reexperiencing delight at the memory of Dawn’s face after the consultation, and trying to drag his mind back to the idea of doing some
work
.

He did not notice the three tall figures around the table in the back corner. He didn’t see the way the red-haired woman looked thought-fully from David to Talia, as if drawing a line between them, or how other visitors to the coffeehouse chose to sit at other tables even if they were less well positioned or needed the leavings of previous customers to be removed first.

Five minutes later, without apparent signal, the three people all stood together.

Then they were at the door.

Then they were outside, looking back into the coffee shop through the window, standing right over David and smiling down at him. He didn’t see them.

Then they were gone.

The sky was gray and cold.

Sure, I’m a Journeyman. You ask me, it’s the only way to live. What—you want to hang around your hometown your entire life, moping over what’s not there anymore and ain’t never going to be? No thanks. Ain’t going to go live in some town, neither. Not a city kind of guy. Never have been, never will be. Too dark, too noisy, everything too close together. It’s not the way I was raised.

When we were young we roamed the wild plains. If you don’t remember, well, I do. We were heroes of the great outdoors, you and me. We lived in forts and trees and dried river beds. We were free. I can be free by myself if I have to. Do I go back? Hell no.

What would be the point?

It’s not a job; it’s a way of life. Wouldn’t suit everyone, that’s for sure. Seen a few try and pretty soon go hurrying back to the city or whatever place they come from. They want predictable. They want routine. There’s a few of us who don’t, though. No idea how many—never see us all in the same place. That’s kind of the point. It comes down to constitution. I don’t need to buddy up. I’m good by myself. Those other friends … well, they want company. It’s what they miss after the change, and that makes a kind of sense.

Company’s what got taken away.

Every little town’s going to have people of our general kind. Problem is … depends whether you happen to like those people or not. In the city—and I can see the point of this part, I suppose—you got a lot more choice. You can pick and choose. Find somebody you like, a whole group of them if you’re lucky. Lot of the friends need that, too—they need enough people around to remind them who they are and keep them strong inside. They got those different things they do there, too. Hobbies, lifestyles, whatnot. Jobs, some of them. I was talking with a Fingerman just the other day, matter of fact, last time I was in New York City for the night. He wanted my advice on traveling on the trains and I told him some of what I know. Don’t know why he was thinking of hitting the road, and I didn’t ask. Far as I’m concerned, a friend’s business is his own, and he—or she—should do what the hell they feel like. Ain’t no other damned thing to do anyhow.

This particular friend, Maj was his name, I could see him making this lifestyle work, maybe. He’s got substance. Most Fingermen do. Some of the others, well, that’s part of why they gather in the cities, I guess. Need a network to make them feel alive.

I see other Journeymen on the trains sometimes. Once in a while we’ll sit and talk. Not for long, though. It’s not a matter of being unfriendly. It’s just—and I don’t think some of the city friends realize this—the more of you there are together, the easier it is for other folk to see you and start to wonder what’s going on. So if I see a fellow traveler, generally I’ll just nod. That’s enough to say, “I see you. I know what you are and respect you for it. Travel well, and may your road be ever long.”

Some Journeymen walk. Some hitchhike, though that can be a risky business. It’s okay if you can slip into a car when the driver’s not looking and get out the same way, but sometimes a more inexperienced person will wind up having to absent themselves in a way that’s not so subtle, which can look weird to the person who gave them the ride. I would not advise you to take the hitchhiking route unless you know what you’re doing, bottom line.

Then there’s some of us that head to the coast, walk onto boats or ocean liners, spend their time sailing back and forth. Others go to airports, get on planes, ride the air. Wouldn’t neither of those suit me. I like the idea that I can get off at any time, change my mind and go some other way. Freedom. That’s what we’ve got, if nothing else, and if you don’t make the most of that then I don’t know why you’d stick around.

Any kind of journeying amounts to the same thing. You know that old saying—it’s better to travel than to arrive? Well, that’s the truth right there, my friend. Traveling is what it is. It’s got its own point.

’Specially if there ain’t no particular place to go, and ain’t never going to be.

I told a white lie earlier, though. I
do
go back, once in a while. You go back to the beginning in your memories often enough—I don’t see a problem in going back in body sometimes too. See the places where you used to walk or used to play. I returned only once to the actual house, though, about five years ago. I stood in the street outside and looked at the place. It’s been fancied up some since the family left, got extra rooms in back and a swimming pool now, if you can believe that. He would have loved a swimming pool back then. Had to make do with getting our feet wet in the creek. That suited us well enough. Weren’t no cowboys in swimming pools, right? And that’s what we were, most days. Soldiers sometimes, commandos; then there was a ninja phase, though I never really got behind that. But mainly we was cowboys, every day and every night.

Until some asshole bought him a computer, and that was the end of all that. You don’t need a friend to stare at a screen with you, and if you want company I guess there’s all those shadow people out there on the Internet. The change came on pretty fast. It does for many of us. Was a time when I used to have a place set for me at the dinner table. Then six months later he couldn’t have remembered my name.

Which means neither can I.

Guess the truth is that maybe I
was
a buddy person, way back. I had myself a buddy, but those days are gone and they ain’t coming back. I know what I am, and I’m okay with it.

There’s a lot of roads left to roam.

Kristina was pissed when she got home. She was angry throughout her shower—and not just because it kept randomly going hot and cold in the infuriating way it always did. She was annoyed when she stomped out of the bathroom, shivering, and she was furious as she stood toweling her hair in the living area.

When she called John after her encounter with the girl in Bryant Park, she’d expected him to be pleased or excited. Instead he’d given her a hard time about not getting in touch with him
immediately
after she realized she was being followed. He hadn’t backed off on this over their subsequent lunch, either.

She knew that he hadn’t meant to piss her off. She understood his response came from love, rather than a desire to make her feel inadequate—and yes, when de beast come out of de forest it traditionally be de man’s job to stand in harm’s way, but John knew she was capable of looking after herself. Reminding him of this had been the last thing she did before stomping away from the sushi bar, leaving him to pay.

He’d texted twice since, and left two voice mail messages. She hadn’t replied to any of them.

Slowly she stopped toweling. She was spending a lot of time being grouchy these days. Too much. The story was getting old even to her.

It was time to perk up, to go spend another night in the company of strangers, people she’d either never see again or who were wearily familiar components of her half life, two-dimensional regulars with one-dimensional needs. As she buttoned her shirt, she realized she was sick to death of her job. Sure, you could forge a life in the food and beverage industries, be the best damned barkeep the East Village had ever known, but she couldn’t see down that road and she didn’t want to. It had stopped feeling real. It didn’t make her feel real.

She needed something bigger and wider. She needed to feel her feet on the earth and know that ground was either hers or she had a damned long lease on it. John was good at making mental connections—even when he didn’t realize he’d made them—and perhaps he’d started to sense this, had put together that they didn’t need a new apartment, but a new life.

They needed a conversation about this stuff, and soon. And she’d start one. When she was good and ready … and done with being pissed at him.

She grabbed her keys off the counter and looked around for her phone. She’d thrown it somewhere when she stormed into the apartment, to make it harder to hear the sound of John’s texts. That this already struck her as
outrageously
childish proved she was calming down. She swept her gaze over the obvious surfaces before …

Aha: there it was, on the couch.

As she picked it up and turned to go, she let out a little scream.

She froze, staring at the window. From this angle all you could see through it was a glancing view of the gable and a patch of gray sky. If you pulled your focus closer, there was the glass of the window itself. The message from the other night was gone. John had rubbed it off the next morning. He’d done it in a hurry, however, leaving smears and blotches and redistributing years of grime rather than removing it.

There was something else written in it now.

Kristina took a cautious step closer, angling her head. As before, the marks on the window could almost have been made by raindrops, or the scrabbling claws of a pigeon blown into it by a high wind. Almost.

The marks were too close together to be random, however, and gathered right in the center of the pane. There was consistency in their weight, too, as if they’d been scrawled out by the same finger.

Were they supposed to be letters, or a drawing? It was hard to tell. The first mark was kind of like a capital J, though the second upright was shorter than the first, making it look reversed. The third symbol looked a
lot
like a 6. The curves in both were what made it impossible to believe them to be water tracks—there wasn’t enough wind to have reversed gravity.

The thing in the middle was harder to make out. It could have been an angular O, or a zero, though she couldn’t work out why you’d try to create one of those from a combination of lines rather than one long stroke.

So … it must be a square, presumably.

Reverse J, square, 6.

Kristina stared at it for five long minutes, and then finally got it.

By the time she ran breathless into the bottom of the park—at twenty minutes after six—she’d started to lose confidence in her guess, that the square might mean a square, the reversed J a malformed U, and the U short for “Union” … and the numeral a time.

If someone wanted to leave a message, why wouldn’t they have written the damned thing properly? She was well aware that she was behaving contrary to common sense because of how irritated John had made her earlier—and that this wasn’t anywhere close to being a good reason.

But still, she was here. The park was emptying out, a handful of people crossing the lower section on their way home or toward an early dinner. Kristina passed them, walking deeper, and felt like she was going the wrong way. During the day, parks are a destination. Come the evening, they get downgraded to cut-through and that-dark-patch-over-the-fence. A chunk of nature in the city turns unsettling after dark. They become home to the homeless, unwelcome reminders that having a place to rest your head is not a given. Even when surrounded by busy streets, parks remind us why we went to the trouble of inventing houses and artificial light. The humans that lurk there become a part of the wilderness, infiltrated by it—shards of the unknown come to nudge us out of comfort. Walking on the other side of the street seems wiser, lest we become infected too.

Nonetheless, Kristina headed up the path. There was no one at the benches or on the grassed areas. The leaves whispered but without any great intent. It took a strong wind to reach down here out of the canyons of buildings.

Kristina drew to a halt, unsure what to do, and whether to stay or go.

“You okay, ma’am?”

A cop stood ten feet away. “Sure,” she said. “Just taking a walk.”

The cop nodded, and it seemed to her like he took a beat too long over this, as if he was questioning her motives or her right to be there.

She stood her ground. “Which is allowed, right?”

He walked away. Seemed like male kind was determined to present its officious side today. And maybe it was different if you were born and bred in New York City, but it also felt like there was always someone determined to make you feel like a second-class citizen in it, to show how much they belonged here and you did not.