Magic Time

by Marc Scott Zicree

“You there!” The voice sliced through the humid air.

  Tina groaned. Cal turned to Sam Lungo as the smaller man bulled up, still in his long-sleeved white shirt buttoned tight at the wrist. Cal saw that Lungo’s woolen suit pants were dirt-stained at the knees, a fine patina of dust on his face and body. He seemed unaware of the dustpan he held, with its shards of what looked to Cal like something that once been a Hummel.

  “I need you to get my bookcases back against the wall. I’ve asked everyone, and no one will help me. My house is a shambles.”

  And the rest of New York, incidentally. Cal thought fleetingly of Mr. Stern, that similar, unnerving tunnel vision.

  Cal looked to his sister. Her eyes beseeched, beckoned toward home, and he felt his own exhaustion like a shroud.

  “We’ve been walking for hours. Maybe later . . .” Cal nodded to Tina, and they turned to move off.

  “Problem with you is you’re selfish!”

  Cal turned back.

  “I’m giving you a chance to make amends!” Lungo’s voice was that of a pleading, petulant child.

  Cal struggled for calm. “Did it ever occur, did it ever dawn on you there might be something in this world—” Exasperation overcame him, and he fell to silence.

  Lungo’s gaze faltered, slid off Cal to sweep over the street. Piles of wreckage. Empty cars. Neighbors helping neighbors, some bloodied, some in shock.

  “Is that yes . . . or no?”

  Ingrates, petty little ingrates, so self-involved, so important.

  It was every bit what he had expected, Sam thought, watching Griffin vanish into the brownstone with that pasty girl. Why, he looked like he’d just swallowed vinegar. And no word of parting, whatever had happened to manners? Holier Than Thou just yanked that Bound for Juvie sister of his and hustled off to his no-doubt crack-den hovel. It was pathetic, really, the sorts one was forced to live with, the insults one had to bear.

  Sam waited a moment, with the strange hope—one he didn’t even admit to himself, really—that the young man might come back, might help him, after all. But nothing happened, of course, nothing at all. Slowly, eyes still on the building, Sam withdrew pad and pen from his shirt pocket and began to write.

  At last, they found their way to their apartment, by the light of a donated candle. Cal unlocked the deadbolt, swung the door wide.

  Muted light filtered through the blinds. Several framed prints were askew, and three Perma-plaqued certificates had tumbled to the floor. All else seemed pretty much intact.

  Cal looked at his sister. She sagged on the doorframe. The consummate performer, she had retained her composure until out of her audience’s sight.

  “Let’s get you to bed.”

  “No,” she said grumpily. “I’m okay.” Then, cutting off his protest, offered a compromise. “Couch.”

  Cal ushered her into the room. They moved past the bulky old Grundig phonograph, an icon from their childhood still resting solidly atop the scarred oak end table by the sofa. He was relieved to see it unharmed. Mom had disdained television, refused to have one in the house, but had played endless LPs of Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, the magic rhythms that had first set Tina to movement, making a world to shut out the cold.

  But for now, like the lights, like every mechanism across the city, it was only an icon of the past.

  Cal moved to open the blinds. From the couch, Tina cautioned, “I’ve got this monster headache.”

  He glanced back. In the dimness, he could see the clammy sheen on her forehead and cheeks, the pain crease between her brows. And the air in here won’t help any. It was leaden and still. Keeping the blinds closed, Cal reached around and opened a window. “You eat lunch?” he asked.

  Tina hesitated. “I lost it somewhere.”

  He headed for the kitchen. “I’ll make you a sandwich.”

  She nodded absently, seized the remote. She aimed it at the TV, pressed useless buttons, then let her arm fall, a dead weight.

  In the kitchen, light sifted through the gauzy curtains, making it easier to see. Cal turned the taps on the faucet, switched on the range. No water, no gas.

  “This is so weird.” Tina’s pained voice was barely audible from the living room. “Everyone in the world with a direct line to everyone else . . . Now it’s just the street where you live. We can’t even see if Luz is okay or anything.”

  Cal nodded, said nothing. He opened the ancient, defrost-it-yourself fridge and saw that it had done a pretty good job of defrosting itself, water dripping from the freezer and inundating most of the food. There was some veggie baloney, though, sealed up tight. He tore it open, sought out bread and lettuce.

  Reaching for a dull bread knife from the drainer, he recalled the sword from his dream. Whatever that was, you ain’t it. As he laid slices of rye on the breadboard, tore hunks of lettuce, the tumult of the unseen dream crowd again pressed into his consciousness. Certainly it had been a day of tumult. And earlier, leading all those people safely through the darkness, there was that strange sense of being exactly where he belonged, becoming who he—

  “Cal?” Tina stood in the doorway behind him, a paler shadow in the gloom. “You think it’s just here, or bigger?”

  “I don’t know.” He smelled the mayo; it was still okay, so he started slathering it on the sandwiches.

  “Think it’ll last long?”

  “I don’t know, Tina.” He managed a reassuring tone. “Let’s hope not.”

  She nodded, hugging herself. He laid aside the knife and went to put an arm around those delicate shoulders. “It’s okay to be scared. You’d have to be crazy not to be.” Then he added, “And you’d need your bookcases put back against the wall.”

  She smiled. He gestured at the two identical sandwiches. “Any preference?”

  Her smile faded. “Sorry. Guess I’m not hungry.”

  Cal almost said, But you always are. Instead, he offered, “Probably the heat.”

  “Yeah.” As she averted her eyes from the kitchen window, Cal felt her shudder. “The heat . . .”

  WEST VIRGINIA

  It was Ryan Hanson who said it first. “What if they don’t come?”

  “What if you just shut the fuck up, asshole?”

  “You shut the fuck up for a change.” Ryan’s voice was sharp in the darkness. “Look, I mean, let’s face it. Somethin’ weird’s goin’ on.”

  “No shit, Sherlock, when’d you get the first clue?”

  “Sonny,” Hank said wearily, “cool it, okay? I think you’re thinking what I’m thinking, Ryan. Anybody else thinking that?”

  There was silence, as if their thoughts were in danger of bringing their fears to pass.

  Every one of them guessed that no ordinary power outage, no Arab terrorist or Chinese bomb, could account for the failure of the radio, the headlamps, the electric power of the tram. After three hours of waiting in darkness at the foot of the downcast, every one of them guessed, too, that whatever was wrong was wrong up top as well.

  Most of the Cokes and coffee in their thermoses had been consumed. Gordy had gone out and unscrewed one of the water pipes in the tunnel, refilling as many thermoses and cans as he could. The men were saving their SCSRs, but Hank felt dizzy and sleepy and knew they’d have to start using them soon.

  And then what?

  “So what do you think?” asked Llewellyn the engineer.

  Hank said quietly, “I think we maybe need to think about ways to get out of here.”

  “What’re we gonna do, climb the fuckin’ elevator shaft?” demanded Sonny. “Be like fuckin’ Bruce Willis and go up hand over hand for a fuckin’ mile?”

  “You rather stay down here?” retorted Hillocher. In the past hour or two the camaraderie had worn thin as the darkness had seemed to thicken, weighing on every man. The close, stale air of the tiny vestibule stank now of sweaty coveralls and machine oil, of coal and the cigarette smoke that permeated the hair and clothes of half the men.

  “Bite me, asshole.”

 
; “Hey!” Hank interposed, for the dozenth time. “Whoa! We’re in enough trouble; let’s not start taking pokes at each other.”

  “Well, this guy’s an asshole.”

  “So don’t talk to him.”

  “I don’t even wanna breathe the same fuckin’ air as him.”

  “So don’t,” snapped Hank, feeling as if a steel ball bearing were growing like a cancer somewhere in the middle of his brain. “Get the fuck back into the tunnel if you’re so goddam picky about who you want to sit next to.” Hank’s bones ached as he crawled to the manual door crank again, and there was a quick burst of yellow light as Gordy, who had a lighter, rekindled the little torch so he could see.

  Grimes, shrinking back from the flame, seemed even more repellent to Hank than ever.

  “You stupid fucker, you want to blow us all up?”

  “You can blow me . . .”

  “Shut up!” roared Hank. He got the door open a crack, and Grimes was through it like a roach under a baseboard. “Anybody else want out?”

  “Yeah,” grumbled a man—Dayton—“I gotta breathe better air or I’m gonna die.”

  Three or four others joined them, crowding and pushing from the back of the group while others cursed or muttered. Hank doggedly cranked the vent door shut, then cranked open the next set, and so shut and open to the next, all the while wondering why the hell he got suckered into doing work like this for assholes. He’d been eating aspirin until he was nearly sick to his stomach, for all the good it did him, it was as if the part that hurt wasn’t a part that any medication could touch.

  He itched, too. The conversation in the tiny room had gotten on his nerves, and in his heart of hearts he was annoyed that Sonny and the others had had the idea of going outside before he did. Damned if he was going to sit out there in pitch darkness in that company.

  He cranked the doors shut, but it was a long time before he opened the next set to rejoin Ryan and Llewellyn and the others in the vestibule before the elevator doors.

  Until Ryan had spoken, Hank had been half-dreaming about Wilma. Dreaming about the sixties: the summer before she left for college, the summer when it had seemed, for a time, that they really would get married. The Summer of Love, people called it later. And he’d been so sure of her love. The last time he’d been really sure about anything. Maybe the last time he’d been dumb enough to think he knew what was going on in another person’s head, just because he wanted so badly for her to be thinking the way he was thinking.

  Dreaming about the tunnels. About being alone in the cool darkness with the tommy-knockers. When Hank dreamed about being in the mine—really dreamed—more often than not it was the old Green Mountain pit he dreamed about and going down the steep-slanting galleries with the skip cars heaving and rattling on their narrow-gauge track to the top.

  Crouching in the darkness between one set of doors and the next, Hank realized that there was a part of him that didn’t really want to leave the mines. That didn’t want to go back and deal with whatever was happening above the ground.

  Let’s not go there, he told himself grimly. When Wilma had gone away to college—when he’d faced the fact that she’d been trying to tell him, most of that summer, that she didn’t really want to settle into the life of a miner’s wife— he’d gone through a bad time, a time when it had been hard to even get himself out of bed in the morning.

  At intervals in the ensuing years he’d gone through similar times. Times when all the people in the town had seemed to him distant and trivial; when he drank a lot, watched a lot of TV. Only the concerns and conversations of those idiots in the 4077th or the Hill Street police station had proven equally unreal and unimportant, equally unable to pierce the darkness inside. The staff therapist, after Applby Mining had gotten a staff therapist, had pointed out to him that it was during such times that he signed on for a lot of overtime. But she’d connected this fact with a desire to lose himself in the only work he knew.

  What he’d sought, he understood now, was being in the mine itself. Being in the darkness. Not having to deal with anything but the dark, and the rock, and the silence.

  With a sensation like waking up, he realized he’d been dreaming again. He cranked the door open and wormed through to the warm room that smelled rankly of his friends and fellows.

  “I think I can get us through the old part of the mine to where it connects up with the Green Mountain works,” he said. “The air here’s bad, and we’ve got, what, three or four SCSRs apiece? That’s three or four hours, and I’m willing to bet there’s not gonna be anybody coming down that shaft. Gene,” he said to the engineer, “what’s the gas situation in the old part of the mine? Do you know?”

  “Pretty good, as far as I know, there’s been no seepage reported,” Llewellyn’s voice came through the close darkness. “But we’re talking about miles of tunnel down there.”

  “Then we take turns being canary,” Hank said quietly. “We use the respirators as long as we can and work our way in the dark as long as we can. I’m pretty sure I know the way: there’s only a couple of long mains, since they robbed out the last of the rooms and brought the ceilings down. If our canary passes out, we backpedal like hell. If he doesn’t, we light up every now and then and see where we are.”

  Greg Grant said, “You’re shittin’ us. You know your way around in the dark like that?”

  “Kid,” Hank said softly, “I was born in the mine.”

  “Besides,” said Ryan, “you want to end up like those cats you read about, where somebody dies and they starve to death in the apartment or wherever because nobody’s remembered they’re there?”

  Of course Ryan would think about cats, Hank thought resentfully, his bitterness surprisingly strong, even after all these years. Sneaky little vermin. And with the bitterness, the old sense of angry bafflement, that Wilma would rather be a sour spinster living in a houseful of cats than have a real marriage and a real husband.

  Who has days and weeks when he can’t get out of bed, he thought. And who doesn’t want to put two words together to talk to anyone he hasn’t known since he was a kid.

  Llewellyn asked wonderingly, “You think you can do it?”

  Hank considered for a moment, tracing his memories of all those years underground. In spite of his feeling of fever, they were clearer in his mind than ever before. Each area opening into each older area. What mains had been collapsed, what mains only abandoned when the digging had moved on. Even the really nasty areas they’d worked back in the seventies, where there’d been three feet or less of seam, where they’d dug those god-awful tiny rooms and scraped coal bent nearly double—they were all as vivid to him as the rooms in his apartment, in the trailer he’d occupied before that, in his dad’s cheap little company-built shack.

  “Yeah,” he said, amazed a little at himself. “Yeah, I think I can.”

  Hank had a drink of water, the thermoses were low again and would have to be refilled before they started their hike. Most of the men took a final pee into the elevator shaft (“Hey, you shoulda thought of that before you left the house!” joked Gordy), and Hank turned his attention to the tedium of cranking the manual controls on the doors once more. The air in the vestibule was sour and stale, and there seemed little point in conserving air that wasn’t moving anyway, but the locks that prevented air loss were still in place: crank open, through, crank shut, crank open, through, crank shut. . . .

  It had been at least an hour since he’d put Grimes and his like-minded pals out into the tunnel. They’d gripe, almost certainly, about the long trudge ahead of them, and Hank found himself looking forward to knocking Sonny’s head against the nearest wall.

  The third door opened, and Hank thought, Just say anything, Sonny. Anything at all.

  But there was only silence as the doors opened. Hank stood, trembling, wondering if they were dead of methane gas and then wondering, as he lit the spill again, whether he’d go up in a bellowing blast of flame.

  But there was no gas.
And there were no bodies. In the light of the single flickering flare, the tunnel outside was empty. Sonny Grimes and his five companions were gone.

  Chapter Ten

  NEW YORK

  Jesus, it’s like a cave in here. As Colleen Brooks entered her apartment, what she half-laughingly thought of as her spider sense snapped onto full alert. When she’d left that morning, the drapes had been open. Now they were shut tight, the place dark as night. And what was that smell? Dank, musky, something she could almost but not quite place. “Hey,” she called out, “any survivors?”

  “Hi, babe.” It took Colleen a moment to locate the sound, make out the shape on the lounger. Rory sat like a pile of stone.

  “Why’s it so dark in here?” She strode toward the drapes, grabbed the pull.

  “Don’t. My eyes are killing me.”

  Colleen’s foot bumped something that rolled into the near wall, made a glassy clink. She felt around with her toe, nudged more of the same. Empties.

  “Three in the afternoon. Man!” She glared at Rory, knowing full well he couldn’t see her in this gloom.

  He chose not to respond or was too fogged out to get it. “Pullin’ a half-day?” he asked dully.

  Shit, yes. Case you haven’t noticed, the whole friggin’ city’s closed. Don’t get into it, girl. She sighed, unstrapping the heavy tool belt, feeling her way to the sofa to lay it down. “Yeah, but there’s gonna be an elephant’s dump to clean up when they get the power back on.”

  He said nothing to that, so maybe it had occurred on his radar screen that something was going on in the larger world. She added, mostly thinking aloud, “But it’s the cars, too. Like a damn graveyard. You looked outside?”

  “Huh?” he responded vaguely.

  This was getting old even faster than she was. Stepping cautiously—she didn’t need to tear her foot open on some damn Budweiser shard and add stitches to this royally cocked-up day—she headed for the bathroom. “I’m gonna take a shower.”

  “Good luck. Water’s off.”

  Great. “And I don’t suppose you thought to go out and buy some?” She caught the acid edge in her voice, just like her mother, and hated it.