by Chris Weitz
I let it sit there.
Me: “Tell me what happened.”
Welsh: “It would be better if you read the communiqué. I don’t want to get the details wrong.”
I don’t want to touch it. Maybe if I don’t look at it, nothing it says will be true.
Of course not.
Me: “If you’re my friend like you say, then tell me.”
Welsh nods.
Welsh: “Fighters from the Ronald Reagan were launched to shadow the hijacked helicopter. It appears that at some point during the pursuit, it was mistakenly reported that the helicopter had opened fire upon the jets. They discontinued their pursuit, and a sea-to-air missile was launched from the USS Higgins.”
Outside, birds are chittering at each other in the Master’s Garden. Laughter from the river.
I rub the tears from my eyes.
Me: “Tell me the rest.”
Welsh: “The missile hit its target. Air-sea rescue was sent to the site of the crash, several miles off the coast of Long Island.”
He clears his throat, looks at his cup of tea, sets it down. He continues.
Welsh: “The bodies of all onboard the helicopter were recovered. There were no survivors.”
Jefferson. Peter. Brainbox. Theo.
Welsh: “I’m very sorry.”
Me: “You’d better go now.”
Welsh: “Donna… if it is any comfort, it would have been quick.”
Why is he still here?
Welsh: “If you had stayed with them… Well, you are alive. And you have so much to experience…”
But really, all I can think of experiencing is the loss of them. So long as they were alive, in some pocket of possibility in my mind, I was from somewhere.
So long as Jefferson was alive, I might live to see him again. I hadn’t realized that I was thinking this, because I had told myself so many times that he was as good as dead—or I was as good as dead to him. But I had been wrong.
Me: “I would appreciate it if you would go now.”
Welsh: “Of course. If there is anything I can do—”
Me: “There’s nothing you can do.”
He gets up, pauses as if contemplating some gesture of compassion. I pray that he doesn’t think of one, and thankfully, he only nods and leaves.
I sit there for a long time. Then I stand up and look down at the communiqué sitting on the table, a slip of paper practically glowing with pain.
I can’t touch it. I can’t read it. I can’t destroy it.
I leave it there and walk to my bedroom. I lie down and pull the covers over me.
I DO A LOT of thinking about Donna every day, like what she would do if she were here, what I would do if I were there, wherever there is, if there even is a there. She only has a there if she’s still alive.
I think about whether it’s worth keeping going, since I’ll never see her again. Because I still haven’t managed to slip the bonds of the pain that takes over every waking hour of her goneness. Like it’s replaced the Sickness in my bones. Only there’s no cure for it. Oh, I know they say that time cures everything. Maybe so. Not yet.
I try to shake it off and put my mind on the task at hand. I lay the barrel of the rifle on the cushion at the edge of the roof. I work out a good comfortable position on the mattress we dragged upstairs. I do a quick scan through the scope of the spots where the others are. The girls are slipping from Fifth Avenue onto Washington Mews, just parallel to Washington Square North. Chapel and Peter are waiting for Brainbox on West Eighth. My view of them jerks this way and that in the long lens of the scope.
I check the time on my Hello Kitty windup. Donna used to have the same kind. Now we have three of them, one with each team, synchronized to the second. Two minutes to go. I put my eye back to the scope and look in on the Square.
I can make out three or four Uptowners right away. The others must be obscured behind the buildings on Washington Square North. I dwell on their features, trying to distinguish one from the other so that we’ll know how many are left if things go our way.
When I skip from one to the other for the third time, I see him—shaggy blond hair and high cheekbones. Evan. Brother of my dead occasional lover Kath. Murderer. Torturer.
I have him in my sights now. I can put a bullet in him if I just make a little beckoning gesture with my finger. I flick my eyes up to Hello Kitty. Still a minute and a half too soon. If I shoot him now, the others won’t be in place.
I follow him around in the scope, hoping that he’ll stay in view for a couple of minutes longer. But he slides under the cover of one of the townhouses. So I take hold of another Uptowner. He’s on top of the school bus that serves as the north gate to the square, chilling in a puffy chair, his assault rifle across his lap. He seems to be sunning himself.
The hand of Hello Kitty is closing down on him. One more circuit, and I’m supposed to fire. I take in his slightly pudgy face, his dirty brown hair, his patchy growth of stubble. He’s maybe sixteen. A kid like me. I think about who he was, his family, his friends, who he might have been if the Sickness hadn’t happened. Maybe a life without harm, among loved ones, maybe even, with a little grace, a life with value and meaning.
Can I take the risk of sparing him? A half measure? A merciful blasting apart of his thigh? A generous symbolic maiming?
No. My people come first. When the second hand hits the twelve, I bear down on the scope and pull the trigger. Through the optics I see his head explode.
The kick of the shot shoves his body backward, and his chair tips over, spilling him down the side of the bus and onto the ground. The echo pulses around the Square, and everyone in the ten-acre expanse looks up, transformed suddenly into a passel of meerkats.
The Uptowners scurry to take cover in the school bus, where we want them. Ayesha, Holly, and Elena have made their way through the connecting back alleys of Washington Mews and Washington Square North, then through a basement hatch that only we know. Now they filter out into the Square, behind the defensive line of the gate. Ayesha and Holly cover the bus, while Carolyn and Elena drop to the ground about fifty feet from the door to Donna’s old house. I hear the crack of gunfire; the first Uptowner must have tried to come out to help the guys in the bus. Carolyn and Elena keep plugging away at the unseen doorway while shouting for our people—any of them left in there—to get out.
I keep up my fire on the school bus, not certain if I’m hitting anything, but drawing a ragged return fire from the Uptowners inside. They don’t realize they’ve been flanked until Ayesha starts yelling for our people to clear away from Donna’s, and when they try to escape from the bus, Holly opens up on them.
A couple of our people stumble out from under the part of Donna’s house blocked from my view; moments later, Carolyn sends up a flare that cuts the sky with a burning point of pink.
This is the signal for Brainbox, who has made his way to the back of Donna’s building with Peter and Chapel from West Eighth Street.
A smack like two pieces of marble slapped together. A second later, a concussion wave blows my hair back. The black powder has lit up and ignited the propane through the carefully filed scoring on its tank, and the immolation of all the liquefied gas in the cylinder of metal tore it open and is spitting out a fearsome wave of pressure, pounding the air, smashing everything around it outward, heaving apart the tattered old supporting walls of the building on the other side.
The top of the building, loose of its support, sucks downward like sand through a funnel, and a titanic rumbling announces the floors beneath collapsing, collapsing, crushing.
After the rumbling, a hush.
I jump straight off the roof and take the fire escape down, the metal ladders clanging as they roll. As I reach the ground, I can hear shouting, the girls ordering the Uptowners still inside the bus to throw their guns out the windows.
“How do we know you won’t kill us?” says a voice from inside. Broken and piteous.
“You don’t,” says Car
olyn.
Nobody is looking north, so I make my way quickly to the bus. Peter, Brainbox, and Chapel are nowhere to be seen.
By the time I reach the bus, one of the kids inside is making a run for it, one leg already out a window. He sees me and in his panic gets stuck.
I take his gun, which is conveniently dangling out the window, and hit him in the face with the butt of the sniper rifle. He figures out a way to fall back into the bus.
Inside the Square, I find Brainbox, Peter, and Chapel entirely unscathed, accepting the congratulations of the rest of the tribe. The boys we left behind are gray and sallow-eyed, animated by the victory but lapsing occasionally into a glassy indifference.
From the front, Donna’s old building looks like a movie façade, the sockets of the windows blank and staring, a frighteningly compact pile of rubble deposited in the middle. An autumn-like gust of paper and dust and scraps dances down through the air.
The three remaining Uptowners chunk down the steps of the bus, hands over their heads. “On your fucking knees!” says Carolyn, and they comply, their shinbones cracking into the ground. They look over at the collapsed building in astonishment. They’re struck dumb, bovine. I don’t see Evan among them. Maybe he’s somewhere in that pile of stone.
A ring of boys from the tribe collects, staring at the Uptowners, gathering the courage for murder. For now, the compressed air of violence holds them back, but soon it will explode out, and nothing will save the prisoners. I’m not sure I want to save them.
Then Carolyn takes a knife from her belt and steps forward to loom over them. And I remember a picture of a man in orange, on his knees before a man in a salwar kameez, his beard poking from under a hood with two holes for eyes. The man in orange has a knife in his hand, not much bigger than a butter knife.
“Stop it,” I say.
Carolyn turns to me. “Mind your own business.”
“This is my business,” I say. “I’m the head of this tribe.”
“You were the head of the tribe!” Carolyn marches up to me, her voice breaking with anger. “You left!” Her knife hand is dancing with tension.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
She spits on the ground in front of me.
“Carolyn, you’re going to live a long time.” I turn to the others. “You’re all going to live a long time. What you do today lives inside of you.”
Confusion. “Brainbox, show them.”
He swings his backpack off his shoulders. “The Cure,” he says.
The hatred starts to leak from their eyes. But Carolyn turns back to the Uptowners. I raise the rifle.
“Me?” she says. “You’re pointing that at me?”
“You’ll thank me,” I say. “For keeping you from doing this. Someday you’ll thank me.”
She opens her fingers, and the knife drops to the ground.
“Get up,” I say to the Uptowners. They don’t move. I’m suddenly seized with rage. “Get the fuck up!” It seems they only understand abuse now. They find their way to standing.
“Go tell your tribe. Your ‘Confederacy.’ Tell them that the fighting is over. They send a representative to the UN. Ten days from today, at noon. If you want a chance to live past eighteen, you pass that message on.”
CHEERS,” SAYS the beautiful guy from the noodle place, setting down his pint of beer.
They say “cheers” for pretty much everything here—it means “hi,” and it also means “thanks,” and it also means “good-bye.”
And it also means “cheers.” So—“Cheers,” I say, for want of something better. I hold up my bottle of Bud. Clink.
True confession? I’m still only seventeen. So, back in the Old Country, this would have been against the law. Then again, the Old Country doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s the Young Country now. Anybody who would have taken away my fake ID is dead.
Anyhow, the drinking age is eighteen here, and since I look eighteenish, they don’t bother to check. And the craziest thing? I am in the college bar. They actually have an official drinking establishment inside the college where you can get effed up.
All around, kids are doing just that, pounding pints of uncarbonated, hardly-more-than-room-temperature brown swill that they call “bitter,” which tastes sort of like microbrew that somebody left open for days until it went flat. They love the stuff. When I ordered my Bud, the bartender said something about how American beer was “like having sex in a canoe—fucking close to water.” But I don’t drink it for the taste. I drink it to remind myself that the great American institution of Budweiser, shaggy advertising horses and all, has survived the apocalypse.
One gets the idea that Americans aren’t too popular in these parts, probably on account of the huge influx of the Diaspora—which is what they call the Americans who were out of country when the Sickness hit. It’s pronounced “die-ASS-poor-uh,” and means a group of people who have been scattered. So basically I’m one of “the Dispersed.” I’m a Disperson.
There’s a whole undertow of feeling that I sense every time somebody finds out I’m part of the Diaspora. Like, there’s some resentment, for sure. Like we’re stretching the population too much, or taking people’s jobs, or living off the government. Sort of the way people used to be dicks about undocumented immigrants back in the US. But beneath that, there’s a sort of guilt. Like, sometimes people talk about internment. And even further beneath that is a sort of fear—like it’s not just the Sickness that might be contagious, but also shitty luck, or a foul destiny. Like I’m some kind of monster.
With the result that I have not been able to Make New Friends that easily. It’s not just the American Cooties, of course. I’m still trying to get my head around Jefferson being dead. All my friends. It feels like a betrayal to just go and make new ones. I’m a passenger in a fast car called grief, taking me who knows where. How could anyone get up to speed with me?
Plus, I’m not exactly geographically desirable. I’m the only student who lives in Nevile’s Court. That’s the library courtyard where I woke up the first time. My rooms—that’s what they call it—and, in fact, I actually have a bedroom and a living room, it’s mad luxurious—are up L staircase. That’s just to the side of the workaday student library, as opposed to the razzmatazz version, the Wren Library, which has all the old stuff and manuscripts that would have given Jefferson a book boner. Anyhow, this must be handy to Welsh and Titch and everybody from a security point of view, but it sucks for social integration. Like, half the friends you make in college are supposed to be the fools who live in the same dorm as you.
Plus, the social life here is kind of lame. The college parties are these disgusting events called “sweaties,” where you all jam into this basement room and the moment people start dancing, it gets superhot and all the vaporized sweat collects on the black stucco ceiling and drips down on everybody. This is considered a good time, but the one time I took a look, it gave me flashbacks to the Moles and the firefight in the subway tunnels by Grand Central, and I just couldn’t deal.
Still, after weeks of lying in bed crying, then dry of tears, practically force-fed by Titch, I realize I can’t just let myself die. Even though it seems like the easiest thing to do—the hunger is nothing I haven’t known, and Death cozies up to me and licks my face like a Labrador puppy.
But I can’t, even if it means walking around with my guts hanging out. Like, that would be a waste of everything we did, everything we sacrificed. I realize Jeff would tell me I am being stupid, that here is a chance at a real life. And I like the idea of being part of the whole campus (they don’t call it that) community (that either) and whatnot. So of late I have been setting myself up in a snug little corner of the college bar and nursing (get it? nursing?) a couple of Buds through the evening, being generally lonely and miserable.
And now Beautiful Guy has come and spoiled everything.
Me: “I’ve seen you at Wagamama.”
Beautiful Guy: “Yeah. Mine’s the number forty-one. You?”
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Me: “Forty-two with rice noodles.”
Beautiful Guy: “Hmm.”
He says it like it’s an interesting reflection on my character. Then, “My name is Rob,” he says. Which doesn’t really seem right, since he doesn’t look or sound like a Rob. More of a Vikram.
Me: “Rob?”
Rob: “No, Rab.”
He says it with a slight a sound. Like with a Chicago accent.
Rab: “It’s short for Rabindranath.”
Me: “Whoa. Rabindranath.”
Rab (of my pronunciation): “Not bad. Still, it’s a little too much work for most people. So, Rab.”
Me: “My name is Donna. It’s actually short for Madonna, not the mother of Jesus but the pop star.”
Rab: “That’s even worse.”
Me: “Yeah, tell me about it.”
Rab: “So, not to sound cheesy or whatever…” There’s a cute little nasal thing going on with the r sound at the end of his words—I mean, it’s miles from Apu on The Simpsons and everything, but there’s just the tiniest bit of a twist to the otherwise fancy-pants accent. “But I’ve noticed you hanging around. By yourself.”
Me: “Yeah.”
I want to explain myself, since I guess it’s sort of nice for him to notice and say hi and whatnot, and besides he is gorgeous, not like I want to get with him or anything, but you sort of can’t help wanting beautiful people to like you sometimes. But I don’t. Explain myself, that is.
Rab: “Okay. So then I’ll tell you a little about myself.”
He doesn’t say this in a snarky way, just as though he is indicating, I’ll do the heavy lifting for now, to make you feel more comfortable. It’s very unselfconscious and disarming.
He tells me about how his fam is from Kolkata, which is the city they used to call Calcutta, which is famous for being incredibly poor and miserable except it’s not all that way. In fact, it is the literary hub of West Bengal, which is the most artistic state in India, and his family is old and wealthy. He doesn’t make a big deal out of this, doesn’t act like it should make me like him or as though he wants to throw them under a bus so that he can seem more normal or whatever. Just telling things like they are. So for centuries his family has sent kids to England to get educated, and Rab went to this brainiac school called St. Paul’s, where at first he was sad and homesick and then he started to like it. So now he’s at Trinity reading history, which he loves.