Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  That’s how it was and how it is again. Only the memory remains: of the year of the Second Smoke. It came to New York late. Quarantine kept it at bay; the necessities of trade smuggled it in. Whoever it was that walked the Second Smoke into the city—whether it came by cart, by sea, or steamed down the East River—it took New York in a matter of days. A few neighbourhoods—Murray Hill, Gas House—defended their scars by force of weapon. It was hopeless: a chance gust, an inflection of the wind, would transform defender into prophet. Once in the Soot-soaked streets, the bricks themselves would spread the Smoke’s message. The deep blank of Central Park halted it until servants sneaked south to visit family, then carried it back into the pantries of the wealthy. It moved north. Yonkers caught like a match. Only the great emptiness of the woods beyond it proved an effective barrier. Much of New England remained clear.

  It did not last, of course. The Second Smoke burned itself out. Normality returned: the rule of law, reinforced by money and arms. But like everywhere else, the memory lingers, of those months of communion, of passion and blood. Even now people will pass each other, in the width of an avenue or on the narrowness of a shared landing, and there will flicker between them the recognition that once they knew one another. That strange erosion of all thresholds; the immediacy of need and desire; skin speaking to skin. Some long for it now, preach ideologies of Smoke; stand on street corners, half naked, guttering like greasy candles. Many others have left the city. It is not easy, living with the shamelessness of the past. As people leave, others enter, fleeing their own revelations, seeking dissolution in the crowd. Manhattan, a holding cell for transients, absorbing strangers like the sea absorbs the rain. Nil is its perfect disciple: a man-boy without past or allegiance, changeable down to his very soul; angry and hungry and full of pluck.

  [ 4 ]

  Nothing, Nought, Nil—he has adopted the brisk version of the name, prefers it over others for the limited dialogue he holds with himself. Around town he is known by many names, as Maka and Mani; Fernando and Vikram; Carlito, Mohammed, Ezekiel, and Joe. He passes as Mexican, Red Indian, Hindustani; as an Eskimo, an Arab, a Negro half-breed who has ironed the kink out of his hair. As anything and everything—only never as white. It is all that holds him together: a palimpsest of names and the dark hue of his skin, a reddish brown, stretched over a facial geometry he has never found mirrored in anyone else. For it is true what Riedl said. He is an orphan; a man without people, without past. Stolen from his parents at an age that left him with few memories; used for an experiment that failed its progenitor; then raised by a man who did not teach him how to love (his foster mother succumbed to illness while he was still very young). He had a name, growing up, borrowed from a storybook, and a dream of revenge. When this failed, he left his second homeland and became a traveller, an imposter, a thief.

  A man without a face.

  For this is what life is to him: the donning of masks—of words and temperaments and Smoke—each adopted to suit a given situation, each day an angry reinvention of the self. His transformations are not a lie, exactly, for behind them he finds nothing, a void. When on his own he finds himself reduced to a vacant kind of fury from which he escapes only through sleep. Nil takes care to spend very little time alone with himself, awake.

  How much better then to have a plan.

  This one starts in an experiment of architecture. It is like a beacon of the future. For in the southernmost tip of Manhattan, flush with the docklands at the mouth of the East River, something new is being built, a cluster of buildings that reach twenty, thirty storeys into the sky. The Spires. Only one Spire has been completed at this point, but the others are to follow the same outline. The first few floors are given over to garages, workshops, and clerical offices, many of which are connected to the business of the nearby docks. The middle floors stand empty. In fact, it is wrong to think of them as floors at all: they are windowless pockets of pure space, vertical scars, bridged by enclosed stairwells and the metal skeleton of elevator shafts. Above, where the city’s Smoke is dispersed by the wind, are the offices proper, separated from the city streets by a wall of air and money. The Company men come here from their uptown houses by boat; are delivered to harbour berths for which they hold thousand-year leases.

  Like the members of a particular subspecies of bird, the participants in this daily migration all look the same. They wear dark suits and hats, bowlers for the most part, invariably black. They carry umbrellas and satchels; starched collars spill from the tops of their lapels. There is to them no overt sign of wealth other than the gleam of the occasional watch chain, rich solid gold. All of them are men. It might as well be a monastery they are hurrying to—for hurry they do, as though fleeing their home lives for the rigours of work, only to rush home again at the end of the day to submit to the necessities of sleep and nutrication.

  There is one other kind of person who can be seen entering and leaving this new constellation of buildings. These, too, are all men. But where the Company men wear black, these men sport loose, colourful shirts that fall to midthigh, and their heads are covered by cloth wrappings or brimless round caps rather than hats. They, too, hurry to and from the building, but it is a different sort of hurry, born from outer circumstance rather than inner compulsion: someone is hurrying them. They carry no satchels but parcels, boxes, papers, tools. Some are armed: with pistols or with slender, machine-tooled clubs. When out of earshot of their masters, they chatter with one another in two or three different tongues; gossip and joke and saw the air with gestures borne from another shore.

  One more thing. Every one of them, from doorman to manservant, handyman to cleaner, soldier to messenger, bears a skin the colour of coffee, some watery and as though yellowed, some tempered with rich cream, some as black as the dregs at the bottom of your cup.

  [ 5 ]

  All this Nil knows from watching; from walking the neighbourhood and talking to tradesmen; from drinking with clerks and shadowing Company men all the way back to their homes; from bribing their maids and charming their daughters; from stealing a satchel and reading through the mail. If asked the value of all this information, he would but shrug; likewise in response to any query about the details of his plan. An intention, really, more than a plan; a thing whose shape must never be spelled out.

  It is now six weeks old, ripened in some part of him that he takes care not to interrogate and fuelled by a motivation he would be hard-pressed to name. The hope for wealth, naturally, some discovery that will help him fill his belly for a month or six. But there is more to it, an anger and a yearning, tied up with the Company flag. The sun never sets on the Company’s holdings. It trades in spices, in opium, in gemstones, in cloth. In knowledge, too. The Company is not who ordered him stolen from his parents, but he who did may well be working for it now. It employs geographers, mapmakers, explorers. Somewhere in Nil there slumbers the thought that the Company must know where he is from.

  If there is no plan, articulated and committed to paper, there is nonetheless a sense of system, of steps that have to be taken in deliberate order to secure success. Nil follows them with a relentless focus that brooks no hesitation or doubt. First, he retires to the lodgings he rents in a boardinghouse south of Houston. It is a luxury, this, securing a whole room rather than merely a bed, but Nil did not query the expense, just as he did not begrudge the price for the new and well-spun cotton cloth he unpacks once the door is closed behind him and secured with a nail and hook. He has identified, in his observation of the buildings, five separate styles of turban amongst the Company servants and has paid a man on the East Side docks to show him how to tie the one most frequently employed. Now, in the squalid room, in front of a square of looking glass he counts as one of his few permanent belongings, Nil tries to imitate the man’s deft movements. It is a process of wrapping and unwrapping, trial and error, that he performs with an animal patience, neither smoking nor swearing nor b
reaking for food, for close to three hours until a tight high-crowned turban is firmly in place.

  Next he dons Riedl’s garments and combines them with a hip-length waistcoat he has acquired from a clothes and rags vendor in Chinatown; changes his shoes for the kind of leather loafer he has seen Hindustani men wear. It is still only early afternoon by the time he finishes his preparations, and without pause or another glance at the mirror he steps out the door. A moment later he is in the street, then amongst the shrubs and rubbish of the scar. By the time he emerges on the other side, his gait and posture have adjusted to the role, and he strides purposefully southwards, every inch a Company serf.

  [ 6 ]

  It is a question of timing. The afternoon mail arrives between three and four in the afternoon. The mailmen are couriers really, part of an internal Company network spanning the world. They come by boat, always in twos, their bags bulging with letters and parcels. The men are uniformed and well-known to the doorman, who will wave them straight around the back. That’s where the drivers, errand boys, and lowest order of clerks dwell, sealed off from the building’s higher levels. It is the back door: tempting, ill-guarded, the only place people of Nil’s colour may pass.

  But it is not the way in.

  All that connects it to the top of the building, Nil has learned through bribes and careful probing, is a small service elevator in which letters and parcels may be sent up. It will not admit a body even as small and flexible as Nil’s and, at any rate, is operated strictly from above. There is also a connecting door that provides access to the main stairwell, but this is bolted from the far side. In short: the back door is barred.

  Which only leaves the front.

  Here the security arrangements take a rather different shape. All there is is a single doorman, sitting stiffly on a little stool just outside the main gate. The men who walk past him show no badges or papers, and rarely acknowledge the guard by more than a nod. For the longest time this puzzled Nil, until he came to the grudging conclusion that the doorman simply recognised each of the hundreds of people passing his post. Indeed, whenever a newcomer seeks admittance, he must be accompanied by older hands, never fewer than three, who make a point of stopping in front of the doorman so that the old man can scrutinise the new man before stepping aside.

  Nil has watched this doorman very closely. He must be sixty-five, perhaps seventy years old; is rake-thin and holds himself very straight; has a long grey beard, knotted under the chin, a saffron-coloured turban, and a uniform of light beige. Twice each day he is spelled from his duties for a precise hour by a man emerging from the nearby guard hut who is similar in aspect but twenty years younger: a relative, perhaps even a son. The younger man does not have the older man’s certainty, squints and glowers at anyone walking up to his gate, and at times can be heard to inquire about a name or to exchange a few words with his employers. He is nervous, uncomfortable, hard to predict. He will not do.

  The older man then, the afternoon mail. A question of timing: when the mail boat has docked and the two mailmen are walking quickly towards the building; not so close upon their heels as to encourage their noticing, turning to him, hailing him in the singsong of their speech, but close enough for their proximity to suggest their shared origin and purpose; while the sun beats down and the hum of the generators fills the air with a tension almost tactile—

  Now.

  Nil steps out onto the paved, barren killing zone of a square that surrounds the base of the building and begins walking to its front gate.

  [ 7 ]

  He walks quickly, loosely, a man with a task to perform and no weight on his mind. Nil does not slow when the doorman takes longer than usual to direct the couriers to the back; takes in the swirling pattern of the marble steps, the sight lines of the twin lions squatting to either side of them, cast in pigeon-soiled concrete, maned heads heavy on front paws; is conscious of the heat and the length of his shadow, keeping pace with him to his flank.

  The old man turns before Nil has reached the top, caught in the process of resettling on his stool. His umbrella is in his dark hand, spread against the fierce May sun. It is an interesting touch, that, an eccentricity running against the grain of his spare, military bearing, and it made Nil like the old man from the first. He will trick him from there, this place of sympathy and warmth, where lies feel like kindness and are easy to dispense. Not that it will show on his face, this kindness. Nil’s manner is brisk, bored, haughty. In his hand he carries a prop.

  “Special courier, personal delivery, Mr. Smith, twenty-three.”

  He gives to the speech just a touch of the accent he has studied, a matter of running the words into each other and shifting their music, so light it is barely there at all. The old man, already in the process of waving him around to the back entrance, stops, folds down the umbrella, then stretches out his unencumbered hands to take receipt of the slender envelope Nil holds out to him.

  It comes down to this rectangle of paper then: to its handwritten address and the red wax mark that seals its flap. There are only three types of servant ever admitted to the front of the building. The first are cleaners, closely supervised, who come at eleven each night, and are publicly searched on exit out into the square. The second are valets or personal secretaries who shadow their employer. The third—and there have been only a handful of these in all the weeks of watching—the third are mailmen of a special sort, bringing missives too sensitive or too urgent to be entrusted to the mailroom.

  The old man holds the envelope very close to his face. Nil has watched him do this before. He would bet good money that the man cannot read. But he is an expert in other things, in types of ink and seal wax; in how dirty or clean an envelope can be expected to be; in the idiosyncrasies—the slant, the symmetry, the preponderance of flourishes—of Company pen hands practised in the art of address.

  “Smith, twenty-three,” Nil repeats into this scrutiny, with the impatience of a bored man. In truth, he is not worried about the inspection. The envelope is real, the seal repaired by an expert forger with a special skill for wax. The Company is very careful about who and what is allowed to enter the building. It is much less careful with what goes out with its trash. It was a simple matter of finding the dustman who holds the contract; a trifling bribe to be permitted to riffle through his bins. Two weeks of patient rooting produced this prize. A name and a monogrammed seal. Alexander Smith, Esquire. It was considerably more difficult to find out any information about this Smith. A newcomer, that’s all Nil has learned; import and export, come in from abroad. That and his address. The twenty-third floor.

  An office at the top.

  And still the old man won’t let Nil pass. His gaze has dropped from the envelope onto Nil himself. Something about his clothes appears to irritate him, some nuance in the combination of trousers, long shirt, waistcoat, and turban that snags on his mind. We know our own, it flashes through Nil in a wave of anger. He pours it into his most clipped delivery, the English of a butler addressing a scullery boy, filled with a consciousness of relative status that would make his master blush.

  “Stop jabbering, man,” he snaps into the question—in Hindustani, Urdu, some other far-off tongue—the guard directs at him. “I must deliver this promptly, yes? So kindly let me through.”

  Still the doorman hesitates. His skin is so dark, even his lips appear black, his tongue and gums a shock of pink as he bends it around unfamiliar words.

  “Where from?”

  “What do you mean, where am I from? Overseas. The Bristol Station. Come now—Smith, the new man, twenty-three. Kindly step out of my way.”

  The old man blinks and does not respond.

  Nil expected this, has counted on it in fact. For he knows the old man’s secret, has lip-read it across fifteen yards of empty square in the many hours of quiet watching. When addressed by a Company man, no matter by whom and wi
th what words, he always answers with one and the same phrase; if questioned further he smiles and bends into a bow. The man knows no English but pretends he does.

  Now he’s wounded in his pride.

  “Where from?” the doorman asks again, torn between his suspicion and his reluctance to reveal his ignorance.

  “Bristol,” Nil answers once more. “England, you clod, England. A government communiqué.”

  He can see the man has understood but one word of his answer, but it is the one word that can explain all strangeness in this world, even incongruities of dress.

  England.

  The Isle of Smoke.

  Nil digs in his pocket, frowning as though finally cottoning on to the reason for the man’s resistance; finds some coppers, and shoves them carelessly into his hand. The old man, in turn, drops the coins in shock at the thought of him, a Company employee and guardian of its most sacred gates, being mistaken for a mere flunky holding out for a tip. Nil is past him by the time he speaks again, standing very erect now and hiding the spilled change under the heel of his boot.

  “Good day!” he barks after Nil. “Elevator right.”

  “Yes, yes, I know.” Nil does not break stride.

  [ 8 ]

  There are two elevators, facing off across the expanse of a marble-floored hall. The hall itself is shockingly empty but for the statue of an elephant, eight feet high. Three figures sit astride: a scrawny, seminaked native, straddling the beast’s broad neck and holding the reins; above him, in a contrivance half viewing platform, half sedan chair, an armed officer in a wide-brimmed, tropical helmet; and, next to him, a burgher in a suit and top hat, his nose buried in a long-stemmed flower. The whole thing is cast in bronze. Nil passes in its shadow and veers right. He has never ridden an elevator before.