Famous Men Who Never Lived

by K. Chess

  As they walked, the suspension cables on the river side rose to meet the second support tower. When they reached it, Hel said, “Stop here. Is anyone coming?”

  Vikram looked in both directions. It was really getting dark, but the sight lines were good. The jogger, a tiny speck now on the Brooklyn end of the walkway. “No.”

  “I was thinking,” Hel said. “The bike path is on the north side, right?” She pointed across the tracks. “So, anyone who approached us, they’d be on foot. No surprises—we’d see them coming a long way off.”

  “I guess. What’s your point?”

  She pushed him up against the support, the cold steel painted dull blue, then spray-painted in pink and silver bubble letters spelling something he didn’t know how to read—some other language, maybe—and tugged at his belt. “I wore a skirt,” she said, low and throaty. “Help me. Quick.”

  She nipped gently at his neck and snaked her hand into his briefs, stroking him awkwardly from a cramped, restricted angle that somehow charged the movement with eroticism. The roundhead bolts pressed into his back like a sentence in Braille. Over her shoulder, he could see the water and, on the Manhattan side, cars on the FDR, the baseball diamond, the Chinatown projects where they once bought a huge bumpy-skinned jackfruit and didn’t know how to eat it. He shimmied his pants and briefs down his hips and lifted her up onto him.

  The first card Hel found after the meeting with Ayanna Donaldson was a Queen of Spades, scuffed and bent. Fate dealt it out to her on the sidewalk outside the old Domino Sugar refinery complex, whose large brick edifice now housed the Museum of Modern Thought. The loading chutes Hel remembered had been demolished and newer buildings joined the smokestacks protected by the Landmarks Preservation Commission. She stood in the shadow of those stacks, still reeling from the meeting, and felt the sensation of being watched. But no one was here. No one lingering outside the museum, no one in the landscaped open space that joined the new buildings to the old. The card lay faceup, showing itself. Waiting.

  She bent to retrieve it, wondering what it meant. The suit of Spades—analogous to the Swords of the Tarot they used here and the Truth deck she remembered. Swords signified ambition, power, conflict, courage. And queens, of course, symbolized female authority.

  “It’s not going to work.” That was how Donaldson had said it, just ten minutes before. And the worst part was Hel’s lack of surprise. She had to admit that she’d expected all along.

  The museum director met with her, not in her office but in one of the workrooms at the back of MoMT. A steel-topped table stood in the center of the room, its surface covered with what looked like half a dozen archaeological relics. Chalky white, each one the length of a thumb, they lined up in a neat row, waiting to be catalogued. Donaldson wore blue latex gloves; otherwise, she was dressed all in white. “Give me another chance,” Hel said, aware of the artificial sound of her own words. Had she dreamed of this? Had she said them already? “Give me another chance. I lost control in the artists’ space. I shouldn’t have expected the painting still to be there, but it exists. You can believe me. Whatever Klay said to you—I’ll do better. I’ll behave myself. We’ll find it.”

  “I do believe you.”

  “Good. It can’t be hard to track down a painting that big.”

  Donaldson snapped off a glove. “Helen. You’re not grasping the issue here. I’ve given your concept more consideration since the first time we talked, and I’ve been taking the temperature. Asking some decision-makers—informally, of course. It’s not as popular as I’d thought it might be. No one seems to want to know more about UDP history. There’s actually a resistance, a hostility to the concept. You’re going to have a hard time selling this.”

  She was saying you now, Hel noted, not we. “Since when do you care about what’s popular? You’re in the business of presenting art, not making people comfortable or showing them what they already know they want. You’re supposed to broaden horizons, aren’t you? Are you scared to do that?”

  Donaldson’s face remained serene; Hel had not succeeded in needling her. “I said hostile, but that was the wrong word. I meant—forgive me—bored. Your audience is tired of you. The records from the Decontam questioning and the commission report and all that went up on WikiLeaks, what, a year ago? Everyone who wants to know about UDPs has read it already. Let me be honest: it’s frightening, to think about what happened to you. People prefer to keep it simple. To view you all as a problem.”

  “People can learn from problems.”

  “Only if they want to. Helen, I’m sorry.”

  And that was it. That was supposed to be good-bye.

  Hel had never learned to swim. Seff, who’d had lessons in the crawl and the backstroke when their mother was still around, had no patience for her younger sister’s caution around water. One summer, Seff pushed her under the line of buoys as they waded at Coney Island, right when a wave was coming. Hel’s head went under for some count of seconds before she emerged, coughing and choking and spitting out dirty brine. “Don’t be a baby,” Seff told her. “I was about to grab you.”

  Even as her sister wrapped her in a towel and hugged her tight, full of remorse, Hel wasn’t sure whether to believe her. But it didn’t matter—she’d rescued herself. That was why some part of her blamed Sleight. She blamed him for not making it out.

  Hel had looked around at the stark white walls, the polished concrete floor. In her world, the old refinery still operated, dirty and workaday, sometimes blowing sweet-smelling winds along the waterfront. She stared down at the table, realizing that what she had taken for archaeological samples were, in fact, small models. Trains? She picked one up from its place on the table to examine it.

  “It’s the lunar module Eagle, from Apollo 11,” Donaldson told her. “That was the first spacecraft to land people on the moon.”

  She might have heard something about that, in Debrief maybe, or in a movie here. “So, they’re all spaceships?”

  “Each one carved from lunar rock the artist bought in an online auction. We’re negotiating with NASA for permission to display them.”

  Hel turned the piece toward the light, somewhat awed.

  “Would you put it down, please?” the director asked. “They’re delicate. And it’s time for you to go.”

  So when Hel saw the Sword card, just after that, she wondered: upright or reversed? She still had all the mystical significances of the Truth deck memorized. Depending on the card’s orientation during a Truth reading, the Sword Queen could mean clarity, logic, matters of intellect. Or emotional bias, poor decisions. Which was it?

  Hel put the first card in her pocket and kept walking, considering that question. Then, she spotted the second. Facedown, this one, and blown up against a construction barrier where it lay half-obscured beneath a grease-stained pizza box. Yet the card’s old backing design was familiar, even from a distance. A gambling parlor card, the two cupids on their bicycles mirror images of each other, like someone riding through a reflecting pool or puddle, slowly, so as not to disturb the surface. She would recognize that anywhere.

  Wonderingly, she picked it up. Flipped it over.

  The Eight of Hearts.

  Now she pulled the queen back out of her pocket. Its reverse showed a photograph of the Statue of Liberty.

  Playing cards from two separate decks, then.

  Hearts were the cards that told of emotional conflicts, corresponding with the Cups suit of the Truth deck’s pips. Upright, the Eight of Cups signaled the desire to escape, feelings of abandonment, or voluntary withdrawal. When reversed, the card told of a drifting hopelessness.

  Like it or not, the card said, it was time to go. As a message, it couldn’t be clearer.

  How might the cards have come to be here? She forced herself to think of a logical explanation. She imagined someone walking along Kent Avenue, two different decks of playing cards shuffling innocently in a pair of hands, the wind ripping these particular two away. Or two people, ea
ch with a separate deck. A massive game of war, played in the gutter by a brace of careless hobos. None of it made sense.

  When she was reading Truth for her sister, when there was some kind of coincidence—all pips and no trumps, or all cards of the same suit, or the same face again and again—Seff said the cards were making urgent contact. Seff, who hadn’t believed at first, began to keep the Truth deck in a silk scarf in the top drawer of her dresser, but Hel was the only one who could force them to speak.

  She kept her eyes down as she walked. She didn’t stop searching for other signs until she got to the spot where Vikram waited.

  “I’ve been up here before,” Hel said, after they disengaged on the bridge.

  Caught up in wonder, Vikram didn’t immediately understand her words. Fucking out in the open, like those teenagers he discovered every month or so in the sweep of his flashlight—it excited him. Normally, the idea of being watched held no sexual appeal, but it was different high in the air like this, with distant Lady Liberty and the ghost buildings and every anonymous soul in the tenements below. He felt as if he was the one who’d been overlooking them. He felt as if their lovemaking could work a protective incantation, could keep these homebound sleepers safe and innocent.

  “I’ve been up here before,” Hel said again. “Just once, I think. Only I walked the opposite way, started in Manhattan and walked to Brooklyn.”

  “Way back BV, you came up here? That means Before Vikram,” he explained, keeping a straight face.

  “Yeah, I get it.” Her warm shoulder, pressed up against his as they looked out in the same direction. “I did. I walked here BV.”

  Hel on the Manhattan Bridge, in the other world. Had she been by herself? With her friends, or some previous lover? With her ex-husband?

  “Did you ever come here with your son?”

  Why had he said that out loud?

  She stepped out of his arms abruptly, ending their contact. With held breath, Vikram watched her shake out her hair and then put it back into its messy bun. Briskly, she began to walk toward Chinatown. He stood in place, watched the distance grow, the downward-sloping path toward the old-fashioned arch with its tribute to the Spirits of Commerce and Industry at Manhattan Bridge Plaza. She didn’t answer his question.

  She would leave him to go back, if she could. Of course she would. He would send her back himself.

  After Hel was robbed, how she’d lain on her back in the black of Jonas’s room listening to the thunderstorm. Her eyes were open and parts of her body stung—not the places where she was most wounded but other unexpected parts. Her bruised throat. Her left shin, where her attacker had kicked her. The corner of her mouth, where he’d demonstrated the sharpness of his blade by poking her. It was her hand that should have hurt, but she had no sense of her stitched fingers at all. Perhaps this was an effect of the drug they’d given her at the emergency clinic. Through the bandages, her hand felt warm against her chest, heavy, like it belonged to someone else.

  At the time, she and Raym lived in the apartment in Park Slope on Fourteenth Street in between Fourth and Fifth Avenues, five rooms and a kitchen. Jonas’s bedroom was in the corner, his child-sized mattress wedged in where the walls met. That night, craving comfort, her son had climbed up into his parents’ big bed. Hel stole out.

  The thunder did not come in bursts but expressed itself as a continuous growl, a giant, threatening dog, warning them all. In Jonas’s room with the shades drawn, she didn’t see the lightning itself as it came, but the covered windows flared white—first the one on the north wall and then, a fraction of a second later, the one on the east wall, by her son’s pillow and his soft toys. She kept her eyes open and her tongue still and let it all roll by and let the room return to darkness. She was tired but afraid to go to sleep, and it was easy to pass time, awake.

  Easy except for the stinging. She was a surgeon; she knew her living was her hands. Yet she did not worry about her bandaged extremities. Instead, she lay there and concentrated on that inconsequential but specific pain just below her lower lip. A sharp awareness, as if the blade were still there even now, the needle tip wiggling, digging around while she strove with all her energy to stay quiet and will him away.

  Jonas. The fervent, unspoken messages she’d tried to send to him during the attack.

  She realized, after some length of time, that the growling had stopped while she wasn’t paying attention. The only sound was the rain falling and the heavy-duty trickling of water past that north window—the rain channeled into one particular path by an unseen system, no doubt, draining from the flat roof two stories above, the musical song and spatter below, no longer drowned by other sounds—and the shades stayed dark and the room stayed black and reluctantly, exposed and unprotected, she fell asleep.

  What if you don’t really love me? she wanted to ask Vikram. What if you love me because I’m the only one left to you? What if you love me, like Asyl loved John Gund, because I’m the only one you’ve ever known?

  All the stories that were gone. But The Pyronauts survived.

  She’d been so fixated on the painting that she’d nearly forgotten.

  The Pyronauts. Donaldson had The Pyronauts.

  INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT: GREGORY “WES” WESTMORLAND, AGE 38, MANHATTAN

  It would be funny now, if it hadn’t been on my neck.

  It took me a while to even realize what the problem was. I saw them all staring at it and I thought, what if people don’t do body art here? This was right at the beginning. None of my lotmates knew anything about where we’d ended up, confined like we were in an old vocational school they’d converted into dorms. We never got to go outside, so the only people I saw who weren’t UDPs, those first couple of days, were NYPD sticks they had babysitting us.

  I noticed that although some of the officers were tattooed, none had cutting scars or cicatrization patterns like mine. So that was the conclusion I leapt to: that the marks themselves were what made everyone so concerned about me. I never considered that the design could be the problem. The swastika.

  When it was my turn to get debriefed, it seemed like the investigators gave me extra attention. They kept asking me about my political beliefs and about what I thought of Jews and stuff. They asked me what I thought of black people, too. They asked me what I thought of gays, which is funny, in retrospect—I didn’t know that was the same thing as a vert, so I couldn’t tell them I was one. None of us knew about the clandestine vetting built into the evac plan by its engineers, the way the supposedly randomized lottery was rigged to exclude anyone with an Extreme Crime convic or a gang affiliation. That secret only came out later. As far as my debriefers knew, I could have been any kind of antisocial monster.

  One of the sticks finally cleared up the mystery for me as he escorted a couple of us back to our dorms after the daily questioning. Nice guy, PO Goncalves. He wasn’t obsessed, like some of them were, with cuffing us while walking us from place to place. After all the bad trouble we’d been through, the realization that we were seen as maybe dangerous ourselves—that was like a whole extra kick in the eggsack. Anyway, I was at the front of the line and Goncalves asked me did I know what the symbol means, the one on my neck. I said of course. You don’t just get an electrosurgical brand without thinking about it first, because for one thing, that shit is expensive. I told him about the swastika’s history in ancient Asia, about how it was an auspicious symbol you’d paint on stuff you wanted to be lucky. I told him about the Santa Clara Swastikas, our national basketball champions four years running, and about the lotto tickets printed with the sigil. I told him that for Buddhists all over the globe, the swastika is a graphic representation of eternity itself. Goncalves got this blank look on his face. So then I started to explain to him about the Buddha, in case old Siddhārtha Gautama had somehow lost his place in the Western popular consciousness in this strange new world, but that wasn’t the problem, of course—Goncalves waved me off.

  He was like, “Don’t you know abo
ut Nazis?”

  “No,” I said.

  Then he showed me a picture of all these shoes piled up at Auschwitz. He called it up on his phone right then and there. Where I’m from, we thought that what the KomSos did to the Slavs was bad. We had no idea how much worse it could get.

  I don’t have an education or any particular skills, but I’m big and strong. When I was young, I never used to have any trouble getting a job guarding the door at clubs, or unpacking vacuum trains or work like that. Then, I met Bronson and we fell in love, and after that I worked for his family business. But here, the swastika problem made it hard to get hired to do anything. People aren’t jumping to hire someone with the UDP designation on his or her ID anyway—they think we’re stupid or damaged—but for me, it was even harder. The bosses didn’t like my mark, and no non-UDP wanted to sweat next to me.

  You can see where it used to be—right here? Positioned too high for a turtleneck to really cover, drawn too big for a bandage.

  For a while, I worked at a liquor store owned by a guy who I think hired me because he was a bigot himself and got a sort of charge from it. Every once in a while, tough guys with their own tattoos would come in, look me over, say things to each other in Spanish. Every once in a while, one of them would get in my face and he would ask what the hell my story was.

  Goncalves had prepared me for that. He told me what to say: They did it to me in prison. They held me down and did it to me. I didn’t want it.

  Shameful, but it worked. Worked every time.

  It reminded me of when I was ten and I was messing around in the woods behind my aunt’s house in the country and I got poison ivy on one arm and all over my face. Big angry blisters oozing pus. After a week, they deflated, leaving me with a scaly red rash on my skin like the surface of Mars. I didn’t mind how it looked, not until I was at the food store, picking up milk, and this old pensioner came up, practically crying, and asked me if I was the boy who’d been in a house fire and if I was getting on OK. I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I yelled, “No!” Then I turned and ran. I ran home and hid out in the chicken house until my aunt came and found me and asked me what was wrong, and I didn’t have an answer.