The Stone War

by Madeleine E. Robins

  The boy mumbled something. “What?” Tietjen asked.

  “End of th’ worl’, ma’. Fuckin’ end of the worl’.”

  “But what happened?” Tietjen felt a spasm of excitement: the kid must know something. “What happened?”

  “Buildin’s fallin’; fires; rats in the street like dogs and rain fallin’ like shit. Monsters, ma’. ’M tellin’ you, ’s end of the worl’.” The boy’s face was shiny with cold sweat. “Din you see it? Or you come out early wit’ Uptowns?”

  “I didn’t—I’m trying to get back—I was—” The words stuck in his mouth. “I was out of town.”

  The boy coughed, laughing, trying to keep the consumptive rattle quiet. “Nob‘dy goin’ in, baby.” The word ended in another cough. “Nobody. New York dead. You don’ go in’ere nomore.”

  “I do,” Tietjen said.

  “Hear ‘em up there? Think ’ey leave, was somethin’ lef’ inna city?”

  “They maybe don’t want what I want.” The boy thought about that for a while, his lips tight-pressed. Tietjen asked him, “You cold?”

  “Shit, yeah, col. Wha’ you think?” He seemed to have made up his mind that Tietjen was crazy or stupid or both. Turning himself with painful slowness, the boy stared out at the shadows of the crowd. Over his shoulder Tietjen watched the day grow colder and later.

  Even when, hours past, the last wave of people had vanished, the air seemed haunted by an echo of voices. At last Tietjen tried to move the boy.

  “Ey, where you goin’? You can’ lea’me ’ere.”

  “I have to get to the city. Do you think you can make it on your own?”

  The boy’s glance was fretful and feverish. “I tol’ you, assho’. Can’ go dere no more. You can’ lea’ me ’ere neither.” He paused, pulling his strength together. “You lea’ me down’ere, I die sure.” The boy’s cockiness faded for a moment. “Jesus, ma’, don’ lea’ me down’ere.” His eyes, huge and dark in a dark face, searched Tietjen’s without bravado. “Leas’ you help me up dere, ma’. I be okay onna road.”

  Tietjen nodded. They began, haltingly, to reverse the process that had secured them in their hiding place hours before. The boy squirmed and Tietjen pushed, edging out behind him. When he shoved at the boy’s shoulders he thought that the body, even through the leather jacket, seemed too tough and wiry for death. Still, Tietjen recoiled from the thought of the boy lying alone under the bridge in the cold of the night. Would he be any better alone on the road? Perhaps he should try to bring the boy with him, back to the city.

  The choice was not his. When they reached the roadside the boy stood drunkenly away from him. “Gonna be okay, now, ma’. I make it all right.” He gave no salutation, no backward look. He began walking, limping after the crowd long past.

  Tietjen did not waste time watching the boy disappear. It was almost twilight, the light was nearly gone, and he had a long way to go yet.

  It took him eight hours to walk twelve miles, through dusk and darkness. Through Mount Vernon, west toward the Hudson, trying to make out the faces of disfigured signs. Perhaps the boy had been right and that last, frightening parade had been the end, the last of the people of New York. Down the Saw Mill Parkway, past the empty tollbooths with signs hanging askew, dangling and rattling in ghost-town winds, and into the Bronx. New Jersey, when he caught glimpses of the river and the land across in the dark, glittered serenely, safely distant across the water.

  It was a long, cold walk, and Tietjen was more aware of being alone than he had ever been in all his life. When he reached the bridge that spanned the Harlem River and was the last barrier to Manhattan he had no idea what time it was, only that it was dark and had been dark for hours; that he was hungry and had not eaten for almost two days; and that he was very nearly home. He saw stars overhead, the first stars he had seen over his city in years. By their light he could see shadowy obstacles on the bridge that stretched its crippled arms across the river. In the distance there was the uneven moving glow of fires, great Beltane blazes in the darkness.

  I am home, he thought. I am home. For the first time in two days the voice that had driven him was quiet. Another hundred yards and he would be on his own ground again. He took the first step, but it was difficult to negotiate in the dark: the wind was strong on the bridge, and he could only see shadows and the moonlit glitter of twisted steel, things to terrify. So close to home he found himself wanting to wait until morning, when the shadows would be gone. Then he could see the city as it was. Make plans. Learn the truth.

  For the first time in two days, common sense overweighed obsession and the driving need inside him quieted. He could wait until morning. The city was within reach, a fact. It would guard his sleep as he guarded it. Shivering in the March wind, Tietjen settled himself against a stanchion of the Hudson Bridge, pulled his grimy topcoat close, and huddled down to dream and to wait for the light.

  PART TWO

  1

  JIT woke, recalled from a very long distance, breaking through the surface; very tired. His eyes fluttered open and yellow light from stolen Park Service lanterns washed over him. He had been dreaming about the door.

  Slowly Jit sat up, rolling his head, touching big ears to sharp bony shoulders, staring down at his legs, willing them to move too. His knees were so knobby they made his legs look like pipes. He swung his legs over the side of the old wooden bench and dragged himself standing. He felt empty. Not hungry—well, always hungry—but empty. Something happened, he thought dimly. He could not remember what it was, but something had happened. Had he done something? He reached out, listening for the others.

  There was nothing there. For the first time he could remember, he was alone. It made him panicky, like a man in the dark who wakes and thinks he is blind.

  He reached out again, fumbling, and finally found something, a nice squishy disorganized thing: the taste of dried grass, hungry hungry cold balance on the limb of this tree gray world. A squirrel. Jit rarely heard the animals in the Park; sounds of people were always too loud, drowning out animals, sometimes drowning out Jit himself. He listened to the squirrel for a minute or two, comforted by the creature’s small hungry warm thoughts. The silence wasn’t in him, after all: he could still hear.

  But where were all the others?

  Usually when Jit woke it was to a dull roar of thoughts, things. They were in his dreams, too, always there. Good, sometimes, but mostly bad things. When the thoughts got too loud, too bad, when he could not stand them anymore, he threw them behind the door, slammed the door shut on them, to make them go away.

  He had been dreaming about the door. In his dreams the door had been flung open, burst its seams, and all the things, anger and fear and murderous feeling, years and years and years of things, had come flooding through him, pouring out the door and through him, and back at them. He shook his head tiredly.

  Hungry. The squirrel’s hunger had quickened his own. Moving shakily on his stick legs, more awkward today than usual, Jit followed the tunnel to his kitchen. He was proud of the stove, which he had stolen from the cart of a hot-dog vendor who had been stabbed near the Park. The man had been hollow as an empty can, all the thoughts gone. Jit had lived high on hot dogs and rolls and sharp yellow mustard for a week. When he looked at the stove he could almost taste the hot dogs. Good memory. Now he lit the tiny lamp and looked over the small collection of cans and jars on his shelf. Soon he would have to make another raid on one of the food places. A good, scary thought.

  He took a can of soup—he knew which foods went with which pictures—and opened it and put the can on the heat. The label around the can immediately lit and burned away to nothing as Jit watched. This quiet scared him. Even in the middle of the night he had never felt alone like this; there were the night people, the ones that walked in the Park, the ones that stalked the streets. Even sleepers’ thoughts had their own sound, the noise of dreams a white whisper against the dark noise of the night people. Jit did not know the words for these things
but he recognized them. There were the good things and the bad things. Only now, there were no things at all.

  A hot sizzle from the little stove brought him back from thinking: the soup was beginning to bubble in the can. Jit looked through the magpie collection of spoons on his shelf, picked one that was not too dirty, and took the sleeve from a discarded shirt to wrap around the heated can.

  Then he took his meal with him and clambered agilely to the upper level of the tunnel where the cold sunlight of afternoon filtered down from a grating thirty feet overhead. He settled himself against one of the stone walls, pulled his bony knees up tight to his chest, and spooned hot soup into his mouth.

  He missed the people stuff. He had never tried to imagine what it could be like without the thoughts canceling each other out until what Jit heard was an undistinguishable roar of emotion, most of it the loudest things: anger or fear. This quiet should be peaceful. But the silence was not so nice. It was lonely.

  Jit had lived alone as long as he could remember, making contact with one of them only rarely; like the kid who had given Jit a name. Jit had watched that kid play handball against the stone of the boathouse face, watching first from the bushes, drawn there by the rhythmic thud of the small pink ball; later he began to edge out behind the stone columns. The kid had seen him, talked to him, laughing. Up close, Jit had been able to hear him individually, decide to trust him. The kid had seemed amused by the audience, called him jitters or jitterboy or, finally, Jit. And Jit had liked the sound and the boy enough to keep the name. He had a friend. He made sure to be there every day in case his friend was there, watching from the bushes until he was certain that no one else was around, ducking back behind if a passerby interrupted the older boy’s monologues.

  “Jitters, why you so cra-zee?” the boy asked sometimes. Jit had no answer, but he liked the sounds of the words. Sometimes, sitting alone behind a grating watching people move warily through the Park, Jit would repeat the words to himself: Jitters, why you so crazy?

  Some of the soup was burned on the bottom of the can. Jit scraped doggedly until he had it all, burned or no. He glanced up again, out at the deserted walkway and gray lace of the leafless bushes. It had been light for a long time, he thought.

  When he had finished eating and the soup was a warm liquid ball in his stomach, Jit decided to scout the Park. Going out in daylight meant taking one of the crawl tunnels to the old skating-rink house, and working himself through the boards that covered the windows so that he could appear magically on the hillside behind the building. Jit rarely left his home the quickest way; it was too dangerous. It would be too easy for someone to follow him, find the warren he had made for himself from old Park furnishings, scavenged bits and scraps, stolen things. He had a dozen routes from the tunnel and could come up half-anywhere in the Park. Now Jit grabbed an old jacket, sloppy on his stick frame, and climbed down the ladder into the tunnel, making his way toward the skating rink by memory in the dank, moist air.

  Even out in the daylight the loudest voice Jit heard was that of the squirrels. There was a sense of wrongness that confused him; it took him several minutes to understand that something was wrong with the Park itself, something was sick. The unkept mass of trees and shrubs around the skating rink was dead, not just winter barren and gray but dead; the earth looked as if it had been scorched. Jit wrinkled his nose. There was a taste of fire in the air, something was wrong but he could not tell what it was. He wondered again: where were all the voices?

  He didn’t like the deadness. Jit picked up a stick that lay at his feet and switched it at the trees. Grow, he thought idly, angry at the deadness. Grow. In his hand the stick felt warm. As he watched, the rusty gray bark began to move, forming like clay into a tiny shoot. A leaf unfurled, and another. Jit stared at the stick in his hand, puzzled.

  Grow, he thought again. Another shoot pushed from the stick, two more tiny leaves.

  He turned his gaze on one of the dead trees, a bleached white skeleton of a maple. Grow. He thought wistfully of the tree full of green, boughs heavy with leaves, saw himself improbably swinging in the branches. Laughing. Grow, he thought again. In his imagining he was not hiding, the Park was not peopled by streetgangs and the babbling homeless, there were people under the trees picnicking, playing games; a young woman feeding a baby, the boy who had named Jit playing ball with other leather-jacketed kids, an older group of gang-kids circled and talking intently, removed from the pastoral; over all of them, high in the generous green of the maple, Jit himself watching like a benign godling. Grow, he thought one more time at the tree.

  By the time Jit had turned his back on the tree, satisfied, a few fragile buds of green had begun to show on the white branches, and death was receding from the limbs of the tree. This was a new game, but he was very pleased with it. If the magic stayed, he would work on the other trees later. Now he set off in his nervous scuttle, dodging from tree to lamppost, exploring. A squirrel chittered by in the distance, its simple incoherent thoughts loud in the silence. Still no trace, no taste of people. The air was cold and clear and sharp enough to scour the skin inside his nose. There were no human smells, not the sour tang of ozone and exhaust, not the more localized odors of hot grease and meat from the vendors who ordinarily lined the Fifth Avenue wall of the Park; not even the individual scents of people, fearful, swaggering, sexual, that Jit normally picked up in the Park. The air was as dead as the trees. As quiet as the place in his mind where the voices usually were.

  Gradually, Jit gathered the courage to walk openly on a pathway. There was no one to see, report him, turn him in to the Uniforms. Jit had no memory of how he had come to live in the caves and tunnels under the Park; it was as if he had always been there. Long ago there had been an old man who took slipshod care of him, but old Nogai had drifted away over time. And there was a woman who had wanted to take him home with her, who used to come to the Park every day and sit, staring straight in front of her and talking to Jit in a low voice of how it would be, how she would civilize him. She had stopped coming too, when the cops stopped patrols inside the Park walls.

  Worst was the time when one of the Uniforms found him asleep inside a maintenance shed; Jit had wakened in the echoing din of a police station, washed in voices and thoughts, unable to make them understand his halting pidgin speech. There had been words about Homes and Law, questions that made no sense. Whose Little Boy Are You? Jit had heard a jumble of thoughts, perhaps well-meaning, all terrifying. At last he had blasted out at them, all the people who bent solicitously over him. He cut through Who’s Your Mommy with his fear and his anger, knocking them all back away from him, and in the confusion he had escaped, run through the maze of corridors and out to the street, run until he found one of his hiding places. He had stayed there for three days, until hunger drove him out to forage, and he had never been caught again.

  There were many people living in the Park, but Jit had the neatest hiding places, the best home. Those others lived in nervous packs; everything they did was makeshift, a pale imitation of life remembered from somewhere else. Jit only remembered the Park and his tunnel, a warm burrow, secure and comforting.

  In the waning afternoon light Jit made a circuit of the lower Park, ready at any moment to dart behind a tree, disappear upward or downward at the sight of another person. No one. A few times he stopped and played with a tree, thinking at it until pale green buds began to cluster on the dead white limbs. The game grew easier as he played it. He heard thoughts, meatier than the squirrel’s but not human: a pair of dogs running through the Park, disoriented without People, maddened by the subsonic howl of the earth in their ears. Briefly Jit thought a kind of peace at them, but the dogs’ grief would not be quieted. He turned his attention back to the trees.

  This was all right for now, the silence. But he would grow lonely. Where was everyone?

  When darkness started to close in on the Park Jit returned to the skating rink, squeezed between the boards again, and started through the
tunnels to his cave. He heated another can of stew—when he went to a food place to find food he would have to find cans of fuel for the cooker—and ate it in the sputtering yellow light of the lanterns. He made a fire to cut through the chill, neat stacks of dry twigs piled on the brick floor under the tunnel shaft. He fed the small blaze with carefully gathered and rolled sheets of paper. Every few minutes, staring at the shapeless shadows dancing on the far wall, Jit would reach out again, listening. No one there.

  Finally, bored, he curled up near the dim glow on the hearth and went to sleep. He dreamt of the door again, closed on an empty room.

  2

  SUNSHINE woke him: Tietjen moved rustily against the stanchion, cold and stiff, unwilling to untuck himself from the tight curl that had kept the chill out. He shook out his shoulders and wiggled his fingers gingerly: they still worked, that was something. He had rarely slept outdoors. Irene loved camping; during their marriage she had kept brochures on trails and camping equipment; they were always going to spend a week walking the Appalachian Trail or camping in the Blue Ridge, her chance to impress him with the beauty of plants, water, and natural stone.

  He looked at the gnarled mess of the bridge, whole girders skewed and twisted from position, cables waving in the wind. What would Irene make of this?

  When his shoulders were unknotted, Tietjen rose, sliding his back against the girder. He flexed his legs, stiff and sore, discovering new muscles that protested as he crossed the road to look out over the side of the bridge. The day was beautiful, clear and cold like autumn, the sky china blue with large showy clouds that sailed effortlessly toward the Jersey horizon. If he did not turn his head, if he looked straight across the water at New Jersey, Tietjen could believe that nothing had happened. Then he took a deep breath. Morning air stung his nose; there was a strong acrid taste of fire in it, traces of gas, of other things less easily defined but no less frightening. He turned his head for his first daylight glimpse of Manhattan since leaving.