The Stone War

by Madeleine E. Robins

  “You hear things in an old building like this when it’s empty. I’m glad you’re real and not just another shifting block of granite.” The man turned in the direction he had come from. “Come on, I’ll take you downstairs. Are you hungry? Of course you are. You’ll want to see what I’ve been able to save, won’t you? I was the Assistant Curator for Eastern Art, but of course now I’m sort of Curator Pro Tem. Until things get sorted out, you know.”

  Tietjen revised his first estimate; okay, a little crazy, but benign. The curator’s eccentric cheer made Tietjen feel more solid. What had the man called him? Real. And it rather cheered him to think that in the midst of all the destruction someone was taking care of the Met’s art treasures. “I’m John Tietjen,” he said, matching his stride to the curator’s.

  “Tietjen. Is that Dutch? Down these stairs. The emergency generator is working downstairs, so there’s light, but I’m afraid that the main stairs are flooded below this level—thank God most of the doors were sealed and nothing was badly damaged. This area is for staff only; acquisitions and restoration. Dutch, right?” He turned to smile again at Tietjen. “I suppose you’re hungry.”

  While Tietjen listened to the stream of chat, the curator led him down the narrow stairs. When the upper floors cut off the daylight from above, Tietjen heard for the first time since the night before the voice inside his head, a vague unhappy whine.

  He ignored it. I have to trust someone. Maybe he knows what happened.

  “Let me see, let me see,” the man was murmuring to himself.

  “Let’s feed you first, then we can see about getting you settled. It’s rather a responsibility being in charge of the whole museum. Of course, it’s more like a field promotion, as it were. I think the Board will approve what I’ve done, on the whole.”

  “I’m sure,” Tietjen said politely. “Look, were you here when all this happened? Did you see—”

  “Here in the museum? Lord, no, I was on my way home—I live in Greenpoint, but when I heard what was happening I turned right around and came back. Thank God I did, too. On my way back in I saw what was happening at other museums—bricks through the windows of the Whitney; the tower fell right in on top of MOMA—sort of poetic justice, I thought—” the curator nattered on.

  “I mean,” Tietjen broke in doggedly. “Did you see how all the—the damage started? What happened? Where did it start?”

  “Start? I don’t know. I was on the bus, but I got out—at an unsecured stop, too—and came right back. Someone had to stay with the museum. Here we are.” The man stopped before a large door marked STAFF ONLY, and opened it with a key from a janglingly overfull ring. Inside was a cluttered office furnished with gunmetal gray cabinets, files, desks. An old bulletin board covered in clusters of old notes and paper notices hung by the door, with a newer electronic board hanging beside it, its backlit screen dark; one desk had been turned into a makeshift kitchen with a pair of hot plates, a small store of dishes, glasses, and silverware, and neat stacks of cans and packages. In a corner behind two filing cabinets Tietjen saw blankets laid out precisely against the wall, with several books and a lantern neatly arranged on an upturned carton.

  “What would you like? There’s soup, stew, the usual things. I’m afraid it’s not haute cuisine, but it’s food.”

  Tietjen was suddenly giddy with hunger. It had been two days since he had eaten. “Anything at all. Do you have anything to drink?”

  The curator emptied a can of stew into a pot and put it on the hot plate. “There’s bottled water. I hope that will do. I took most of this from the restaurant kitchens. They do have a wine cellar, but I don’t want to encourage drinking during the crisis. One never knows where it might lead.” The stew began to bubble thickly, filling the close room with the smell of beef stock and onions. Tietjen’s mouth began to water. In a few minutes the man spooned the contents of the pan into a delicate porcelain bowl and handed it to Tietjen with a beautiful, delicate silver spoon, beaten so thin it seemed a touch would bend it. Seeing his guest examine the bowl and spoon, the curator laughed. “From one of the exhibits upstairs. Georgian. They were made to be used, after all. Besides, no one’s going to complain: the woman in charge of housecrafts and jewelry was crushed under an Apollo on the second floor. Eat up.”

  Tietjen ate, unquestioning. The stew was gone too soon, but it left a warm glow in his stomach and he found himself able to focus again on what the man was saying.

  The curator had stopped talking while Tietjen ate, and sat with his ankles crossed, watching his guest with a musing stare. “All done?” he asked. “Splendid. Would you like to see the others?”

  Tietjen looked up. “You’re not alone down here?” He felt suddenly edgy, cautious. He wanted to trust the man, the first person he had met in the city. The guy’s okay. Defiantly, I’m okay.

  “Of course I’m not alone. I’m just the curator. Come on, I’ll show you.” Tietjen stood to follow the other man. Back out to the corridors again. Deliberately, the man pulled out the weighty key ring and locked the office up. “It’s going to take a long time to get the collection back to where it should be.” He murmured to himself. “Dutch, you did say Dutch?”

  The curator started off deliberately down the hall and stopped before another locked door. “The Asian wing was badly damaged. It’s going to be a problem.” He seemed preoccupied with other thoughts. Again he brought out the key ring and went through a self-important process of unlocking the heavy door. “Hello! I’ve brought someone.”

  The door swung heavily open; Tietjen smelled dust and the faint trace of decay he was beginning to recognize. He blinked in the dim light of one yellow emergency light at the back of the room. It was a large storage space: frames and exhibition easels stacked against each other, a few canvases, their faces turned to the wall, shelves that divided the room into small aisles. There was movement from different sides of the room; farthest left Tietjen saw first a glitter of eyes in the amber light, then a restless, shrugging motion. Tietjen stood, disbelieving. The voice cried in his head: too late, too late. Behind Tietjen the curator clicked a switch and an overhead light flickered on.

  “Hello,” the curator repeated amiably. “How are you today?”

  The man he addressed, swarthy, young, dressed in the institutional whites of a food services worker, stared at the curator with dumb hopeless eyes. A rope was tied to one of his wrists and to a heavily laden metal shelving unit. The knot could easily have been untied, but the prisoner looked in shock and quite helpless; Tietjen doubted he was capable of it. He stole a look at the curator, who was professional, enjoying the role of docent. Be easy, Tietjen told himself. Wait for the right moment to run like hell.

  “Italian, but not the best. Primitive.” The curator pushed aside a box that stood partially in front of one of the small areas to reveal a black girl, maybe seventeen years old, dressed in street leathers. The gaunt beauty of her face warred with feral rage in her eyes. There was a dark slash of dried blood across her forehead and both her hands were tied. Tietjen would not have vouched for his own life or the curator’s had she been able to free herself.

  “Primitive,” the man behind him repeated appreciatively. “A little damaged, but still quite valuable. Actually, there are three, but the other two are damaged.”

  Tietjen looked beyond the girl to see a grotesque grouping against the back wall. Two black men, one in the same leathers the girl wore, the other somewhat older and dressed in a business suit; they were obviously dead.

  The girl followed the curator’s movements, her eyes flickering like a cat’s at every gesture. “Bastard,” she muttered. “You wait, bastard. Gon’ rip you bare-hand; gon’ drink you blood, motherfucker bastard. Bastard—”

  It was as if the curator had not heard. From another aisle a woman’s voice, quiet and ironical, said: “Don’t waste your breath. He won’t answer us.”

  This time it was Tietjen who pushed aside the boxes to reveal an older woman, her hands tied behin
d her, sitting on a carton. She was still blinking in the light. Her glance at Tietjen held sympathy and—weirdly—faint amusement, as if she were embarrassed to have been found in such a condition. She and Tietjen looked at each other for a long moment; he liked her. For a moment the nightmare unreality of this cellar room, the mad curator close enough behind him so that Tietjen could feel his breath on his neck, the harsh mutterings of the black woman, faded in the face of this older woman’s rueful smile. Then her expression changed. Before he had time to understand the message her eyes conveyed, or to hear the warning she yelled, something heavy came down on the back of his head. He heard the curator behind him drop whatever he had used as a club; the older woman’s shout rang in his ears, mixing with the black girl’s stream of threats and abuse. The sounds together flowed into the high keening in his head: too late, too late. Tietjen lost consciousness altogether.

  3

  JIT woke to the buzz of voices: faint, very far away or very weak or very few. He was so glad for the noise in his mind that for a moment he missed everything about the voices, the bad things even, the feelings so complex and hateful and angry and frightened that Jit had wondered how he could live, hearing them. He was lonely without the feelings. He was frightened. For the first time in his life Jit was hearing his own thoughts in a peculiar clear way, like pennies dropped one by one on a stone floor. Nothing filled the emptiness, he could not hide from it in games, talking back to the squirrels, making the dead trees leaf again. The fuzzy echo of the voices in his mind now was welcome. He croaked a laugh, sitting up before the cold ash of his last night’s fire, and stretched for the voices, welcoming them, seeking their direction.

  Outside it was still dark. The voices were dark, confused, angry, strange. Not the night voices of the park dwellers, he knew those well enough. They had been angry, violent, crafty in the way that the squirrels and rats were crafty. But there was a flavor to these new voices that Jit liked but did not understand, dangerous but curious. The voices tasted like anything could happen. And for once he could easily pick out individual voices with individual feelings, clear and distinct. That was something new: from his first memory Jit had been awash in so many voices, so many feelings, that he had only been able to pick out strands of meaning, themes.

  “Hello,” he said to the darkness, to a mad voice that was howling somewhere in the night. Someone was locked up in a dark room, listening to someone else crying and muttering.

  Jit giggled. He reached out for something else. A voice full of pain, incoherent with it, its owner ground beneath some heavy thing—a piece of building—was slipping in and out of consciousness. Jit played tag with the voice until it whispered away to nothing. Bolder still, he flitted from voice to voice, tasting each, stopping long enough to sample the different, singular flavors, all a little crazy, all a little strange in the darkness.

  The novelty did not wear off until the morning light began to seep down to Jit’s tunnel and the voices became quieter, the game less exciting. Jit was hungry. If the voices were true, something had happened outside the Park, and he was curious. He had met images of emptiness, open streets, skyscrapers brought down and lying like fallen giants. A new playground, a wonderful new place to explore. It was time he found more food, anyway; even the squirrel that chattered when he reached for its voice knew that the hot-dog and souvlaki men would not stand on Fifth Avenue today.

  The day was clear and bright. Instinct urged him back to the tunnel in daylight, but the voices said he would be safe today in the city. Jit experimented, walking coolly down the center of a path, watching from the corners of his eyes but claiming the path, the whole Park as his own.

  He went west. When he listened particularly he could hear new voices, not so interesting as the night voices, but good. A woman was trapped somewhere in the dark, facing a sea of tiny eyes. Rats, Jit knew. Did she? Yes, he could taste her funny terror as they surged forward, burying her in musky scent; the tiny scrabblings of their feet against her skin before they went to work and tore into her.

  That reminded him that he was hungry. For that, best to go farther north on the West Side; too far down was only towers and stores filled with things whose uses Jit could not understand. The security walls of steel mesh and old brownstone were crumbled into each other where Jit reached the Park’s edge, at Sixty-seventh Street. He scaled the pile of debris, moving agilely from displaced stone block to a doubled-up steel column, making a game of it. As he climbed it seemed the wall itself was playing with him, growing higher as he climbed. It took longer to reach the top than he had thought. In places the steel mesh grew out of the stone like a weed.

  At the top of the wall Jit balanced carefully, scanning along the street, Central Park West, looking for movement, people. Uniforms. People in uniforms had taken him that one time. Now he saw nothing but the occasional skirl of a piece of paper or the lopsided roll of a hubcap down the center of the street. Emboldened, Jit slid down the face of the wall and started a cool saunter down Sixty-seventh Street, toward Broadway. At the corner, gazing across the broad knot of avenues, he stopped. There was a circle of people in the plaza, handfast and moving in a slow, deliberate dance, crying out in low voices. Jit could not hear their words, but touched their minds and found confusion and pain and a somber, bizarre hope that the dance they did round the fountain in the plaza would placate an angry god. Jit understood that; his world had always been ruled by dark forces, erratic gods. Still, he stayed clear of the dancers.

  Fifteen minutes’ walk up Broadway brought him to the neighborhood of small shops, butchers and bakers and greengrocers. Ordinarily Jit would have found these places just after dark, stealing and running in the confusion of closing time. This was a different world, and he gawked and peered in the shattered windows and wrinkled his nose at the rank smell of spoiling meat, rotten vegetables, the dusty smell of stale bread and pastry. He was hungry enough to snatch a few rock-hard doughnuts from a baker’s counter; when he bit in he found tiny black bugs cutting tunnels in the sugary cake, and threw the doughnut down.

  He kept walking. A fireplug gushed water into the street and down the steps of the Seventy-ninth Street subway station. Cars and buses were piled into each other, turned on their sides or completely over. Looking up once, Jit saw something dangling from the railing of a fire escape down Eighty-first Street: a child dressed in jeans and a knit shirt, hanging by one ankle, unmoving. The boy was wrapped or tangled up in clothesline; Jit could see towels and underwear still clinging to the line. Jit watched the dead child curiously, without horror or amusement.

  Finally he found a supermarket, both doors slammed open invitingly. The air inside was heavy with the same ripe, sickish smell of rotting food he had met in the butchers and greengrocers. The frozen food was defrosted and spoiled, and what meat there was left was silver-green in its wrinkled plastic wrapping. The bread was gone, and the milk that had not been taken was bad. Jit fought through the thick foul smell around the dairy case and stuffed packages of cheese into the bag he had brought, different colors and shapes as they caught his eye. A few aisles over he found Saltines and animal crackers, brightly colored bags of chips and cookies, and started pulling them down from the shelves into a pile. He would have to find a way to bring it all back to the Park. Did he dare take one of the shiny plastic carts with him? Jit grabbed the handle of one and tugged it over toward the crackers, tossing things in, watching with satisfaction as the cart got fuller and fuller.

  Canned foods. He selected by picture and color: gave preference to the red and brown foods and took fewer of the yellow and green foods. Soups and stews, anything with meat in them. Fruit in sticky syrup, tiny black beans in heavily spiced sauce, corn and olives and anything else he remembered by label or illustration. The cart moved more and more slowly as Jit piled things into it. At last he thought he had enough. Opening a box of sugar-dusted cookies, he munched on one while he tugged the cart one-handed toward the door. There was an anti-theft barrier there, wide enough for
Jit to pass but too narrow for the cart. Jit looked anxiously around, afraid someone would come and try to stop him. At last, quickly, he emptied everything from the cart, bent and crawled under it and slowly stood with the thing on his shoulders. The barrier did not extend high; Jit brought the cart through the barrier, then went back through and laboriously transferred the food to the cart again.

  Then it was a matter of pushing or tugging the cart through the streets, watching for people, guarding his treasure. He crossed east and entered the Park at Eighty-first Street, reaching out for voices nearby. But there was no one near, no one in the Park at all, only a few voices on the edges, someone huddled under the gratings that hid the Columbus Circle entrance, voices from the east side where someone was crying. Jit reached out to find that voice and explore it, keeping his hand and half attention on the cart he was pulling. The crying came from the dark, a mind as small and terrified as one of the Park squirrels, watching as things changed and moved in the dark. People in the shadows, one voice dark and rich with hatred, muttering words like those of the Park people Jit recognized. He changed his focus from the small keening mind to the angry one.

  A woman. Something was—she couldn’t move her hands; the world looked strange, yellow-colored and oddly refracted through her eyes. She hated, she wanted to kill, visions of bright blood and vengeance drove the words away. For a moment it felt so familiar to Jit that he welcomed the anger. But it was too strong, undiluted, washing through him so that he could hardly see his own reality: the blue plastic cart before him, the gray earth and bristle of leafless trees. He recoiled, trying to untangle himself from the voice, but it followed, hating him as much as the others, all the others, everyone. Itself. The hatred burned hot and fierce, a pain that lanced through his head. Jit pushed, shoved the cart away from him, trying to shove the voice from his head. “No!” he yelled, and his voice echoed baldly among the trees. “Stop! Stop!”