The Swing Voter of Staten Island

by Arthur Nersesian

“If I do, my husband never told me about it,” she replied. “Then again, he was usually sleeping with some underage, overweight assistant.”

  Uli put his half-stamp down and said, “Keep your cash and buy me coffee tomorrow.”

  The clerk handed him a key and two towels.

  They marched up two flights of steps and down a corridor filled with various creaks and bangs coming from the rooms they passed, until they located their door. Inside they found a narrow, ancient bed with a ridiculously springy mattress.

  Feeling sore all over, Uli didn’t want to sleep on the filthy floor, especially considering he had paid for the room. Before he could prepare some suitable compromise, Mallory kicked off her shoes, unbuttoned her shirt, and said, “You want the wall or the outside?”

  “Either’s fine,” Uli replied gratefully.

  She stripped down to her bra and panties and brushed an accumulation of sand off the bed. Then she jumped on the mattress, pulling a threadbare sheet over her. For a moment there was an awkward silence as each of them listened to the other’s slow breaths. Uli tried once again to remember anything about his past, but all he could think of was his assassin’s mantra—Walk to Sutphin Boulevard, catch the Q28 … It was driving him nuts.

  “So how’d you like your first day in Nevada?” she finally murmured with her back to him.

  “Carnival and his wife or whoever that couple was, they didn’t look black to you?”

  “No, the light was just playing tricks on you,” she answered with a yawn.

  “How did a national refugee camp turn into this polarized prison yard?”

  “During the first year they talked about building a monorail connecting us to Vegas. Hell, we could even make calls off the reservation. Then, while monitoring phone calls, they discovered they had accidentally shipped half a dozen different terrorist cells here, but they didn’t know exactly who or where they were. The attorney general’s explanation was that the baby was the bathwater. He eventually used it as the basis to end our right to communicate with the outside world until they could figure out who the bad guys were.”

  “How did they get professionals out here? Doctors, lawyers, and so on?”

  “A.S.—Alternate Service volunteers.”

  “Alternate Service?”

  “The government allowed conscientious objectors to serve here instead of Vietnam.”

  A moment later, now much more at ease, Uli yawned. Within ten minutes they were both fast asleep.

  The strange nude woman was holding his naked body so tight that he had stopped trembling and was starting to sweat. Although she was beautiful and he sensed that she liked him, she was reluctant to be intimate. Lying in her arms, he was wildly attracted to her. They were watching some strange wild animals in the darkness. He wasn’t sure what the creatures were doing, but while watching them, he felt himself slipping and thrusting into this tall beautiful woman.

  Awakening, Uli found he had become intimate with Mallory—though she wasn’t the woman from his dream. He was grasping her thighs and slamming himself against her while she slept.

  “Oh god!” she gasped. Before he could apologize, she reached around, clutching his hips, clawing his ass cheeks, and pulled him into her. Her head turned and their lips locked together. She was plunging her tongue into his mouth. He unclasped her bra as she pulled off his boxers, then he tugged off her panties and they pressed on feverishly.

  “No … I don’t want you to get pregnant,” he muttered, remembering that it could be a death sentence in this strange place.

  “My tubes were tied long ago.”

  They spent the next hour screwing. There was something incredible about this woman, even though he couldn’t recall ever having sex before. Finally, in unison, they trembled into a shivering orgasm. Uli knew he probably wasn’t a virgin, yet he couldn’t imagine a more intense and joyful experience. Holding each other tightly, they fell fast asleep.

  10/28/80

  Walk to Sutphin, Uli thought as soon as he woke up, catch the Q28 to Fulton Street, change to the B17 and take it to— He couldn’t remember where. Opening his eyes, he saw that Mallory had already dressed and left the dank room. After using the communal bathroom for a quick sink-bath, Uli dressed and went down to the shabby lobby. There, surrounded by prematurely old retirees and a bizarre number of amputees, he found Mallory sitting next to two gawking seniors, feverishly working on her endless election form.

  “I would’ve woken you up with a frothy cappuccino,” she said without looking up, “but they don’t have room service here at the Bad Smell.”

  “That’s Bedmill!” shouted the same bulbous clerk who had checked them in the night before.

  Oric and the driver appeared moments later, before either Mallory or Uli could so much as mention last night’s indiscretion.

  “If you’re all heading up to Manhattan, the nearest bus stop is over in south Sunset Park,” the driver offered. “It’s not too close, so we should probably get started.”

  The four spent the next twenty minutes hiking alongside the drab semi-occupied, Soviet-style projects of New Utrecht Avenue, which grew increasingly desolate. At one demolished intersection there was evidence of a major gun battle. Uli couldn’t tell if it was from an old military training exercise or a recent gang conflict.

  Mallory, who was walking ahead of the others, abruptly froze and seemed to stare up at the blue sky. Uli saw, however, that her eyes were closed. She was smelling the air. Without warning, she bolted full force down an empty street.

  “Hey!” the driver shouted.

  Fearing that she was in some kind of danger, Uli dashed after her. He seized a rusty pipe on the ground in case he needed a weapon. Mallory came to a dead halt roughly two blocks away, before a sandy field that looked like it had once been the parking lot for an old factory of some kind. There, she dropped to her knees as if she were about to be executed. Uli looked up, trying to spot the enemy, but the vast industrial complex was eerily deserted.

  “What’s going on?” he cried out.

  She signaled over to him frantically, instructing him to back away. He approached timidly, nonetheless, trying to follow her sight line. That was when he spotted it, about ten feet away, hopping slowly toward her. It was a small kangaroo, possibly the joey she had lost yesterday. It was unlikely that the baby marsupial could have hopped all the way to this neighborhood without being attacked by dogs or hit by solarcars, yet the animal seemed to know Mallory. Uli watched as it tentatively sniffed her face. She picked it up and set it snugly into her bag.

  “What the hell is that?” Uli asked, pointing to the three stone smoke stacks rising from a long, flat building that looked like some kind of plant. A hooded conveyor belt angled out of it in the distance.

  “It was modeled after a famous steel mill in Leningrad and used for battlefield simulation.”

  Moments later they returned to New Utrecht Avenue, where Oric and the bus driver were waiting for them. They resumed walking.

  “Is there any connection between these various military training zones?” Uli asked.

  “I think they were built as three different scenarios,” answered Mallory. “The Japanese architecture is back that way, and the Soviet structures are clumped here in western Brooklyn. Manhattan is largely Germanic.”

  “What about Bronx and Queens?”

  “There were no rivers or swamps back then, so they were both long stretches of land. The Air Force did a lot of bombardment there. Because the area was so heavily blitzed, it had to be redeveloped later on from the ground up. So for the most part, those pricks got all the best houses.”

  “Where are the newest houses?”

  “The newest are here—they were hastily built when we were still coming in—but the the best ones are up in Queens. They were built in the fall of ’71.”

  “How do you know all this stuff?”

  “Construction workers were still working when we arrived. We struck up friendships with some of them when we got
here, and they told us all about their work.”

  “How about Staten Island?”

  “They have gorgeous houses over there along the shoreline. People believe they were meant for Feedmore administrators and the military. Proof that they had intended to stay and oversee Rescue City.”

  “And when were those built?”

  “That’s the funny thing. The workmen claimed they were built during the first wave of construction in ’71, but after the flooding, when the water went back down and some of the houses collapsed, we found newspapers behind the walls and in the floorboards that were dated from as early as 1968.”

  “Why is that funny?”

  “Manhattan was hit in 1970—why would they build housing before the bombing?”

  “Maybe they needed an administration center back then.”

  “I suppose.”

  “So when the administrators and military pulled out, who moved in?”

  “Pigger officials mainly, but that didn’t last too long. When the sewer got blocked and the area flooded, the homes became uninhabitable, even after it drained. The rest of the borough is strictly Third World. I stayed down there for a while after Shub came to power …”

  The first sign of Sunset Park was a food stand where for a sixteenth-stamp the driver bought a piece of deep-fried dough covered in powdered sugar—a donut without a hole. Although Oric and the others watched him eat, no one else ordered anything.

  After another block they passed a strip mall of small businesses: a body-art parlor called Tattoo You; a barber shop, Unkindest Kuts; a homemade brewery, Fine Fermentations; and a diner called Hamburgeriffic. Lastly, there was a Chinese takeout place, operated by two scantily clad Asian women, entitled Food Ho’s.

  “They got awful versions of every major cuisine here,” Mallory told Uli.

  If there was a sauce covering their beefy bones, Uli thought, it’d be chocolaty, curried, MSG’d, chilied, oreganoed, all under a milky base. Everyone seemed a bit ethnically homogenized. All the blacks he’d seen were fairly light-skinned. Whites looked tanned. Asian eyes appeared relatively oval. If any details established clear heritage, it was the styles of dress and the haircuts, which varied wildly from person to person. Caesars, crew cuts, dreadlocks, ricebowls, as well as age-old mullets all defined individual cultures more clearly than skin tone.

  Throughout this area Uli spotted betting parlors. In addition to the Council-operated OTDs—off-track dog races—Uli saw slot machine and blackjack parlors, not to mention scratch-and-match tickets for sale everywhere.

  “This place has a serious gambling problem,” Uli observed.

  “The five mob families that ran things in the old city had wiseguys who came here and divided up everything,” the driver imparted as they marched westward.

  “Did you lose your arm in Vietnam?” Uli asked. The two of them were walking ahead of Mallory and Oric.

  “Why, you find one there?” the driver countered. When Uli didn’t laugh, he said, “About eight years ago I got into an alley fight and shanked some dude.”

  “Must’ve been a heck of a fight,” Uli muttered.

  The bus driver led the tired group to an establishment with a sign that read, SIXTEENTH-STAMP STORE. The driver and Oric entered.

  Next door was the Sunset Park Crapper headquarters. Mallory dashed inside. Explaining her vital mission and dire situation, she was able to appropriate ten stamps for official business. Then she entered the general store and surveyed the largely addictive impulse items lining the shelves. Candy, mentholated cigarettes, and various liquors—all of which fit into sample-sized wrappers or narrow containers so they could be sold for a sixteenth-stamp apiece. Mallory purchased fruit-named soft drinks for everybody.

  As Uli sipped his bright pink “strawberry” beverage out front, a beat-up minivan screeched to a halt and the driver hastily tossed out a small bundle of the Daily Posted New York Times.

  Uli surveyed the headlines: Big Antiwar Rally Today. A smaller article announced, Antiwar Folksinger Fillip Ocks Hangs Self in Rockaway, CIA Involvement Strongly Suspected.

  Uli read the latest listing of crimes and their terrorist links. Like in the issue he had read on the bus, they were all supplied by nameless sources. A truck bomb had blown up in Rego Park, killing eighteen. Members of the Shining Path were suspected. Six middle-aged women from Howard Beach—who had somehow pissed off members of an extremist cyclist group, the August 30th MassCritters—had been raped and strangled. The Symbionese Liberation Army was suspected of shooting and killing a dozen people in Far Rockaway. According to the paper, the Black Liberation Army had engineered a string of jewelry heists in Staten Island. The list went on.

  The single detail that the Times failed to mention, Uli noticed, was how these crimes—particularly the violent ones—served each of the revolutionary organizations’ higher ideals. How could raping middle-aged women from Howard Beach help the cause of the notorious August 30th MassCritters? What did the B.L.A. do with cheap bracelets, paste-gem amulets, and imitation diamond tiaras to further its cause of racial equality?

  Inexplicably—since there was no official communication between the residents of Rescue City and the rest of the world—the newspaper also included a lively page of national and international news. One misspelled headline screamed, Reagan Orders Secret Bombing of Louse and Terroran! A second article proclaimed, Religious Cult in Go’on’ya Commits Mass Sewercide.

  Uli turned to the sports/politics page:

  WEEKLY CITYWIDE ELECTION RESULTS

  MANHATTAN:

  Total Pigger districts: 1

  Total Crappers districts: 9

  No change from last election

  STATEN ISLAND:

  Total Pigger districts: 0

  Total Crapper districts: 0

  Total Independent districts (Verdant League): 10

  No change from last election

  THE BRONX:

  Total Pigger districts: 9

  Total Crapper districts: 1

  No change from last election

  BROOKLYN:

  Greenpoint (Pigger) invaded

  2,124 Crappers, 2,122 Piggers

  Outcome: Crapper

  Councilman Guido Basilicata (P) removed

  Councilman Antonia Basilicata (C) reelected

  Total Pigger districts: 2

  Total Crapper districts: 18

  One change from last election

  QUEENS:

  Far Rockaway (Pigger) invaded

  2,438 Crappers, 2,435 Piggers

  Outcome: Crapper

  Councilman Ted Kostiyan (P) removed

  Councilwoman Carmen D. Sapio (C) reelected

  Howard Beach (Pigger) invaded

  1,335 Crappers, 1,332 Piggers

  Outcome: Crapper

  Councilman Newton Underwood* (P) removed

  Councilman Dwight Valone (C) elected Total Pigger districts: 16

  Total Crapper districts: 4

  Two changes from last election

  *Former President of the City Council

  The Crappers had won in both Howard Beach and Far Rockaway by only three votes. And in Greenpoint, they had beaten the Piggers by two votes. All were paper-thin victories. Yet the number of people killed in those three districts nearly mimicked the figures that Oric had been nervously barking out during the previous day’s trip through Brooklyn.

  The newspaper report set Uli’s thoughts into a paranoid tailspin: If that cross-shaped object buried in the back of Oric’s shaggy-haired skull was harnessing the man’s psychic abilities so he could predict the slim margins of Pigger victories, then the late Jim Carnival—the overzealous Crapper—could travel into the designated neighborhoods and “correct” the Pigger constituencies, disguising the casualties as typical crimes, thus altering the outcome of the local elections.

  And if Oric did have special abilities, this potentially answered the question of why the Flatlands pursuer had been coming after them.

  Uli reentered the
sixteenth-stamp store and discreetly guided Oric out to the street, then delicately asked, “What exactly does correction mean?”

  Oric looked at Uli strangely. Without warning, the man bent over and grabbed Uli around the waist and playfully pulled him down.

  “What are you doing, Oric?” Uli said, shoving him away. “Stop it!”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t let go,” Oric replied.

  “Listen to me,” Uli tried to regain the challenged man’s attention, “what does correction mean?”

  Oric paused a moment, then pointed his chubby index finger at Uli and said, “Bam!”

  “What’s going on here?” Mallory asked as she came out of the store, seeing the incompetent man shooting off an imaginary pistol. While she fed the baby kangaroo a succession of celery stalks she had just purchased, Uli filled her in on his little theory.

  Taking a deep breath, she said, “The majority of this city is registered as Crappers, yet through strategic invasions and pork-barrel patronage, the Piggies under Shub have managed to stay in charge for the past decade.”

  Uli considered this, then asked, “Why are you sharing this with me?”

  “Well, since you openly stated you were programmed to kill Dropt, I can’t accuse you of guile. In fact, after risking your life to cover for me with Chain, and having monitored your actions over the past twenty-four hours, I think I can trust you.”

  “Trust me with what?”

  “I have to get back to Queens to turn in this Affidavit of Electoral Inventories by the 3 o’clock deadline, so that Dropt will have a shot at getting a fair election next week.” She held up her fat book. “This theory about Oric kind of changes things. I need you to bring him to the Manhattan Crapper headquarters in the Lower East Side pronto.”

  “You want me to bring him to the guy who I was programmed to kill?” Uli said, amazed.

  “You won’t be going anywhere near Dropt. You’ll just bring Oric to the heavily guarded building and then leave. And only because I have no one else to turn to. This bus fiasco has been a major setback. I’ve been trying not to show it, but I’m starting to really freak out about the election. I can give you some stamps to cover your expenses and put a little cash in your pocket.”