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Dark City

Page 2

by Hodge, Brian


  Her gratitude was tainted only by the shame she felt for needing it in the first place.

  Elsewhere on the marble counter—wide enough to land a helicopter on, it seemed—lay the photo her brother must have shown Barrett. It was nowhere near the note, so it didn’t appear he’d left it out for her. It was just there, an afterthought Blake hadn’t had time to put away. She propped it against a vase bristling with the husks of dead flowers, and there—now it looked deliberate. Mentally she began adding to his note.

  Hey, look what picture I found! I forgot all about that day. Never let it be said that band nerds aren’t their own special kind of hot. So just take it easy for now, and one of these days I’ll give you a call and say something in code, because you have to use code on the phone. “The mangos are ripe,” that’s a good one. I’ll say that, and you’ll know I’ve done you the best favor I know how to do and taken care of things. You don’t need to know particulars like where Logan is and how many pieces he’s in. Just know that I hired the best people I could find, and that he suffered. He suffered for a long time. He said he was sorry a lot, but we both know there comes a point when it’s way too late for sorry.

  Maybe she would feel different tomorrow, or next week. For the sake of anything she might have left resembling an immortal soul, she hoped she would. But today, that was the note she wanted to find.

  Soon, the Thai food came, and it was everything Barrett had promised. When she opened the plastic shell and saw how much there was, she wholly intended to leave half for later, but couldn’t help herself. Leftovers were overrated.

  That evening, she went to the windows, the treat she’d been saving for later.

  She’d imagined it on the plane: standing at Blake’s windows to gaze out at the nearby buildings, her brother’s nameless neighbors that he would still know by sight. They would leave their curtains and blinds open, a tacit invitation for her to see how they lived. Young and old and middle-aged, TV addicts and book lovers, romantics and individualists going it alone. She would see late dinners and animated conversations and people who danced when they thought no one was watching but hoped someone might. She would see boredom and sorrow and dread of tomorrow. She would spot people watching her, wondering how they had missed her before. She would see it all, and know she was normal too.

  Instead, there was almost nothing across the streets to observe.

  It wasn’t a matter of altitude. While Blake’s building towered over everything else close by, on the ninth floor he was low enough to be level with them.

  Despite that, in this city of millions, the neighboring buildings looked all but lifeless, windows as dark as deadened eyes, without so much as a glow emanating from behind curtains. The few windows that were lit up looked all the more barren for their isolation, like a handful of candles scattered across a mountainside where darkness lay dominant in between, ruled by whatever called the shadows home and shunned the light.

  She’d hoped for better, but then, it wouldn’t be the first time.

  She finished the night rummaging through the cabinets in the bathroom off the master bedroom, where she turned up a bottle of Lunesta, the prescription label dated two years earlier and bearing the name of a woman she’d never heard her brother mention. But then, had he ever?

  She counted them in her hand. Eleven. Just eleven. That probably wasn’t enough, and this was probably just as well. She let all but one tumble back into the bottle.

  It took a while for the pill to kick in. By then she’d rejected the guest bedroom as too impersonal, too unused, and slipped between Blake’s own covers. Making herself at home. The sheets were Egyptian cotton, thread count astronomical, and she sniffed at them to see if any scent of him remained. She couldn’t remember what he smelled like, but would know it when she found it, yet there was nothing. The sheets were fresh, the polite thing to do. She wished he were a little more thoughtless where it counted.

  She drifted.

  She drifted and her eyelids turned heavy, while the building, so big, so silent, creaked around her in ways she imagined only old houses did, where wood might take decades to settle, then centuries to complain.

  Other sounds, too, joined the night, and she chalked them up to the sleeping pill, something like a whisper of softest slithering, overhead and under the floors and up and down the walls, and below it all, where hearing fled the ears and turned to a feeling in the pit of the stomach, a kind of unhurried grinding, like the restless dreaming of tectonic plates.

  She doubted she would remember any of it in the morning.

  And didn’t.

  ««—»»

  Please explain to me how this is not a big waste of my time. What good are your dreams if you’re not even in them? Shouldn’t you be the star of your own show? Of what I remember from last night, I don’t think I was even actively present as a spectator. Kind of a slap in my own face, isn’t it? So it’s footage, right? Someone else’s footage.

  Except I can’t even think of where this would be taking place.

  There was no one around. It felt like no one ever had been. Literally, it felt like a world without people, anywhere. Is that why I wasn’t in the dream? I wasn’t allowed? Wrong species, is that it? For all I know, my perspective was the perspective of a rock, or a plant or tree.

  Maybe it’s Iceland. I’ve thought lately I’d like to go to Iceland, because I hear it’s fun and the people are great and the nightlife in Reykjavik is worth checking out. They say the interior is awfully wild, though, actually one of the youngest spots on earth, what with the volcanic rifts and all. Like the whole island is still a work in progress. I’m sure it’s beautiful, if you like that sort of thing, but it’s not really the draw for me, so I can’t think of a single reason I should be dreaming of it. High-maintenance city girls don’t dream of volcanoes and steam and sulfur.

  I’m breaking the rules already. Dr. B tells me I shouldn’t try to interpret or assign meaning or identity to these things that aren’t clear. Or even when they seem totally clear. Going down the wrong rabbit hole, he calls it. In the language of symbols, things may not be what they appear to be. I hate this.

  So let’s just call it a younger earth, then, and if that’s still too specific, a younger planet. I’m not sure there were actually any volcanoes anywhere. It just felt like there was the potential for them somewhere. I was dreaming of a world where there would be volcanoes, if I spent enough time exploring it. Which I couldn’t, of course, because I was stuck where I was as a stupid rock or something.

  It was more tropical than anything…shallow seas and unspoiled beaches, and what looked like stumpy little palm trees. That’s one thing I remember clearly, how beautiful and clear the water was, like blue liquid glass. I could see things on the sandy bottom, spiral shells and I guess horseshoe crabs moving around. It was the kind of setting you might come up with if someone was talking you through a guided meditation to find your Happy Place.

  There was no sense of time. Measureless eons…for some reason, that phrase comes to mind.

  I’d like to go back there. If I knew of a place exactly like that on earth now, I’d book a flight so fast I’d create a vacuum behind me as I fled.

  ««—»»

  Wendy holed up for the first couple of days, acclimating, having food delivered and reluctant to set foot past the door until the world got New Year’s out of its system. Let everybody else celebrate. She was just lucky to be alive, and waiting to feel that way.

  The third day she ventured back out onto East Seventy-Second to really see where she was, to get a better idea of what was around than she’d been able to glean from a careening taxi. She’d thought the immediate area might liven up by day, but it hadn’t, and she allowed this might be a factor of the cold.

  It was the worst of winter, the deep, frozen bottom of the trough after the season had delivered everything people wanted to wring from it. The Christmas wrapping paper was ash, the candles of Hanukah extinguished, the New Year’s noisemakers
swept into landfills and the hangovers survived. It was January now, harsh and real, the distractions left behind and fresh beginnings back to being an illusion. That’s what January was: a return to the unrelieved normal, coated with months of ice.

  The Upper East Side tower where Blake had transplanted himself was called the Krammer Building. If she recalled the elevator buttons correctly, it stood forty-two stories tall. From the outside, the Krammer was an imposing spire of reflective glass and dark metal. She supposed it was gorgeous on a clear day, stained blue by the sky, but this morning it looked dour, the glass façade gray with clouds that looked as sullen and solid as granite.

  She returned toting a deli bag weighed down by a bagel thick with cream cheese—might as well start with a quintessential NYC breakfast—but not a lot of appetite to eat it yet. Barrett didn’t seem to mind if she lingered in the lobby.

  “Doesn’t it get lonely down here?” Wendy asked him. “It seems like you’d be mostly staring at people’s backs as they’re walking away.”

  “They have to walk up first,” he said. “And you’ve stopped. You’re here.”

  He looked the same as he had the other day, not a hair out of place nor a crease in his gray suit any different. Day in, day out, he would make a point of looking the same. He would know how important continuity was to some people.

  Barrett pointed to the deli sack. “You’ve found Plotzke’s, I see.”

  “You were right about my brother’s supply levels.”

  “And how are you finding everything else?”

  She looked past him, out the glass doors to the street. Cars lined the curb, their windows opaque with morning frost. They might stay that way for hours, sunk in the shadows of the buildings around them. The sun might not reach them until it was directly overhead.

  “I thought it would be more…I don’t know…vibrant, I guess,” she said.

  Barrett gave her a smile that had just the right touch of incredulity. “I’m sure that’s the first time I’ve heard someone accuse New York of failing to be vibrant.”

  “Around here, I mean. This place. The ones across the street, and the others I see from the windows. It’s not as obvious by day, but at night, it’s like only one window in ten has a light in it. The entire neighborhood, if you can even call it that, it’s like a ghost town. A deluxe ghost town. Is it like this all the time?”

  “Ah, here. Well. That’s different,” Barrett said. “Your brother is a rarity, as these things go. It’s true, he does travel a lot, but at least he does live here. He really does call it home. That puts him in a minority.”

  “I’m not following you. It’s mostly office space, you mean?” But no, that wasn’t right either. If it were, things should feel a lot less desolate this morning.

  “No, it’s still all condos and apartments. They’re just not intended to be actual homes, as it turns out,” he said. “They’re investments. They’re currency. The developers come in and tear down so they can build taller, or they gut what’s already standing and rework it from the inside. The places go on the market and soon they’re all gobbled up as if by hyenas scavenging a carcass. By which I mean that they consume, these buyers, but they don’t really appreciate. So many of these places are bought up by people who never intend to live in them themselves. They’re often bought by people who don’t care if anyone lives in them. Ever.”

  Good god. She would never have guessed that so much prime real estate could sit as fallow as the fields of an abandoned farm, by design. And she certainly didn’t understand.

  “The buyers aren’t just from here. For all I know, the local buyers are in the minority, too. There are people in Paris and Rome and Geneva and who knows where all whose job is to come over and buy up properties for their company. I know for a fact that two right here in the Krammer are owned by Russians. One’s a gangster for sure, the other may only be an oligarch, but as I comprehend it, the distinctions between one and the other can get blurry. It doesn’t matter what they are, though, just that Manhattan real estate is a more stable form of currency than what’s available back home.” Barrett stopped, letting a rare blank expression slip through. “What is it in Russia, again?”

  “The ruble, I think.”

  “That’s the one,” he said. “So they buy it up, these people. Then the places sit empty the whole time, and they appreciate in value, so after a few years the owners sell and make their profit, and then it’s the new buyers’ turn to hold onto them for a while.”

  “They don’t even rent them out?”

  Barrett shook his head. “These aren’t people who want to be landlords. They just need something to do with the money they already have. Besides, if you let people actually live in them, who knows what damage they’ll do? Living, god forbid, that can only dirty the place up. Scuff the floors, clog the toilets. But if you leave them empty, or maybe furnished to a degree, they stay pristine. Not a home, just an incredible simulation. And so the views from their windows are never enjoyed. The pianos are never played. The fireplaces stay cold and free of those filthy ashes.”

  She still couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “That’s sad.”

  “It’s very sad,” Barrett said, and she could tell he meant it. “It’s terribly, terribly sad. So between them, and the ones like your brother whose work keeps them traveling, and the snowbirds who go south for the winter, and the ones who divide their time with other homes…well, that’s why you can look up and down the street and see dead spots instead of lights.”

  Now they were only depressing each other, and Barrett knew it too.

  “Enough of that,” he said. “I’ve never met a chocolatier before. I dare say I was hoping for a sample.”

  As if that was going to elevate the mood.

  “Former chocolatier, more like. My partners are buying out my share of our shop. It’s…” She paused, not sure how to finish this and hating that she had to. “It was kind of a sudden decision. One of those best-for-everybody decisions.”

  While that appeared to come as news, he still nodded with more understanding than he should’ve. “You don’t have to be so circumspect. I’m aware of the situation.”

  God. If ever there was a time she’d wanted the floor to open up and swallow her, it was now.

  “Your brother was only doing the responsible thing. The other doormen and I, we all got a picture. We know who to watch for, in case he shows up here. If he does, we’ll deal with him at whatever level he brings upon himself.”

  “Go one or two levels more,” she said, and found she could do it with a laugh.

  It was a start.

  ««—»»

  So I did end up going back there. Take me down to paradise city, where the seas are shallow and the palms or palmettos or whatever they are are purty. Dr. B wants to see what patterns and themes are coming up? I think it’s obvious already. I NEED A TROPICAL VACATION! I’m paying him to tell me something that my least attentive friend (it’s a contest) could tell me over coffee?

  It was genuinely nice to be back there. I only wish I could do the lucid dreaming trick where you’re aware you’re dreaming and can exert control. I’ll refrain from going down the wrong rabbit hole and speculating on the first inaccessible celebs whose bones I’d jump, guilt free. If I could’ve, I would only have tried to get a closer look at what was in the water.

  Last time, I thought of them as horseshoe crabs, and maybe they were, but Dr. B thought it was interesting, considering the setting and the associations it had for me…those measureless eons…and couldn’t help being curious. He said he really shouldn’t steer me like this, so soon, but was it possible that what I was seeing were trilobites?

  I had to be reminded what trilobites were. I don’t think I’ve given them another thought since whatever primary school science class it would’ve been that first mentioned them as a big part of the early fossil record. They showed up more than half a billion years ago, so if that’s what they were, then no wonder I get that feeling tha
t what I’m dreaming about is a world with a refreshing lack of rude, scheming people.

  But I couldn’t verify. Sorry, Dr. B. I’m trying here.

  It’s probably irrelevant, anyway. It’s the Jungian in him that’s interested, I’ll bet you anything. “Mein Gott in Himmel! She iss tappink into der kollektiff oonkonscious!”

  So, honestly, I can’t report one way or another on the crabs (oh god, what if all this just turns out to be a fear of pubic lice?), but the dream did take a very different turn this time.

  That infinite sense of calm and tranquility? Kiss all that goodbye. The sky filled with white fire, like the sun suddenly got untethered. I don’t know if it was a comet or an asteroid or a meteor, or what exactly, just that it looked like my Happy Place was about to get butt-fucked from outer space.

  I’m making light of the terror.

  Nothing in my education or experience has ever left me with the conviction that rocks or trees or plants have feelings and awareness, let alone anticipate something, but if that’s what I was, I was still scared of what looked to be about to happen. I saw that blazing white fire streak across the sky, getting bigger and bigger, and knew a cataclysm was coming. Everything was going to end, and then everything left was going to change.

  It’s happened before. It’s what I was always taught did in the dinosaurs.

  But in the dream I don’t think I knew anything about dinosaurs (actually, I don’t think this world had dinosaurs yet), or about other impacts that shook the globe. I was just awareness and helplessness, something that couldn’t run, and could only watch in fear as…

  Well, as nothing actually happened.

  Call it a graze? A near miss? It just crossed the sky from one side to the other, until it disappeared over the horizon and must have returned to the depths of outer space. No harm, no foul, nothing. Some other planet’s problem.

 

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