Antenna Syndrome

by Alan Annand

  I nodded at the ball game. “Who’s winning?”

  “Houston three, Miami zip.”

  I peered over his desk. “Where’s Werewolf?”

  “Out killing cats, I reckon.”

  Major shook a multi-vitamin from a bottle and popped it. He offered me one and I took it. I was feeling woozy today and didn’t know what to blame it on.

  “Hope he doesn’t get sick.”

  “It’s just fun. He knows better than to eat them.” No sooner had he spoken, a high-pitched shriek came over one of the wall speakers. Major believed in maintaining a secure perimeter so, aside from cameras, he’d planted microphones outside as well. We listened. Moments later, a low-pitched howl raised the hackles of my neck. Major clucked his tongue. “Got another one. That’s his victory howl.”

  I looked up at one of the screens and saw a wolfish creature slinking through the shadows of the service lane.

  Major opened the back door. Werewolf entered with a tattered grey cat in his jaws. He dropped it and laid a forepaw on its head like a white hunter posing with a dead lion. Werewolf was Major’s dog, part Irish wolfhound and part mastiff, a big speckled bastard with the personality of a hyena. He was a sly old bugger, but fairly good-natured with those few who’d made friends with him. I put a hand out slowly and rubbed my knuckles atop his bony skull. He half-closed his eyes and muttered like a worn-out chainsaw.

  Major put on gloves to take the cat away from Werewolf, sealed it in a plastic bag and pitched it into the dumpster out back. He shucked his gloves off and washed his hands at the sink of an adjoining bathroom.

  Werewolf was still breathing throatily as I rubbed his back.

  “He likes you, Savage,” Major said. “He won’t let anybody else lay a hand on him. Of course, not many people do, what with the mange.”

  “Right.” I pushed Werewolf away and washed my hands.

  “Working late tonight?”

  “Just dropped by to pick up something. See you later.”

  I went up to my office. After Dachshund’s account of plainclothes in Chelsea Park, I half-expected to find my office disturbed by a police visit, but there was no evidence of it. I pushed the fridge aside and opened my floor safe to take out another thousand bucks. After losing a grand at the police station, I was leery of carrying a wad but what could you do? I had to talk to people but they often didn’t talk back unless I paid them by the word. It was a cash-and-carry trade.

  Just as I pushed the fridge back into place, the lights went out. I looked out the window and saw darkness everywhere. Another power outage. With inadequate maintenance of public utilities on one hand, and relentless copper scavenging by day-strippers on the other, New York was an accident victim who’d also become an unwilling organ donor.

  Time to go home. I shouldered my tote bag and locked up. I went down the dark stairs with flashlight in one hand, spray can in the other. By the time I reached ground floor, the score was Savage 8, Roaches 0.

  Chapter 21

  Still avoiding the police, I left the building by the rear and retrieved my car from Mr. Kim’s. Back home in Clinton Hill, the power was on in my condo building. In the elevator I prayed it would hold until I reached the 15th floor. In the bathroom I saw myself in the mirror. After a night in jail, it wasn’t pretty. I showered and put on clean clothes.

  I checked the fridge and saw some hamburger that had turned black, some cheese gone green, and a brown bag of lettuce. A visual feast unfit to eat. I had a glass of wine with a few crackers and brushed my teeth. My support group met Tuesday nights. It was a sad comment on my social life that I looked forward to it.

  I walked to the high school on 56th where we met. Being so close, it left me with no excuse to miss a meeting. Not that I wanted to take a pass, but when the mood was on me, I could find reasons not to go. Sometimes I preferred hanging out with my friends, Johnnie Walker or Jim Beam, trying to forget.

  The first two years after the Brooklyn Blast had been a blur. I’d scratched together a living doing search and recovery work, clean-up, construction – mostly manual day labor because for awhile that’s all there was. I spent most of my paychecks on booze and pot. I lived in different places, usually close to where I worked at the time, trying to avoid transit costs because I didn’t have a car.

  I’d been an open wound of rage and sorrow. There were many like me who should have left town but couldn’t pull ourselves away. We’d died but couldn’t move on, like ghosts haunting the places we used to call home. Thirsty ghosts gathered in bars, back alleys and parks, drinking and smoking to numb our memories of what we’d lost.

  It didn’t work. My memories were still intact. I still couldn’t see a tricycle without getting a lump in my throat. I couldn’t listen to Alison Goldfrapp. I couldn’t play hopscotch or go out dancing. The things I associated with Gwen and Lily were too painful. But I could drink and get high. No one could take that away from me. No one cared enough to try.

  I arrived at the High School for Environmental Studies. Ironically, it’d been around since well before the blast. At its inception, their concerns had probably been urban pollution and garbage disposal. What was their curriculum now? Radioactive landfill, contaminated ground water, mutant vermin...?

  I entered the classroom. Our moderator was a chemistry teacher named Bill. Someone had nicknamed him Walter in reference to an old HBO series everyone said I should watch. But I didn’t do drama. I’d had enough for a lifetime. I preferred documentaries, preferably about pre-atomic ancient civilizations – the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. Veni, vidi, didici. I came, I saw, I learned.

  Bill greeted me with a nod. I took my seat with half a dozen other people in desks arranged in an open circle. I looked at my watch, thinking I was early, because usually there were twice as many attendees, but I was on time.

  “I don’t know where everyone is tonight,” Bill said, “but we start on the hour. Discipline is the foundation of a responsible life, and one of those disciplines is punctuality.”

  We took turns checking in. Our group, like thousands of others that sprang up in the wake of the blast, had no specific focus. Gone were the days of groups dedicated to alcoholism, drug use or sex addiction. Nowadays, we all had lots of baggage, and our aberrant behaviors were part of the post-traumatic stress disorder from which an entire society was trying to recover.

  “Since there’re so few of us here, let’s do something different tonight,” Bill said. “I know many of you suffer recurring nightmares. But if you think about it, we’ve all been living a nightmare. The challenge is to acknowledge it. Since we can’t run away from it, we might as well embrace it. Anyone want to share?”

  Colin, a former investment banker now working as a store clerk, described being chased by a giant rat through maze-like city streets. Every night Colin set traps in his ground-floor apartment and drank a pint of bourbon in hopes of dream-less sleep.

  Next was Trish, a former model who now worked as a seamstress. She had a recurring nightmare of a black snake coming out of her toilet. Fearful of using the bathroom at night, she drank no fluids after dark. She’d installed a bolt outside her bathroom door and spent more on anxiety patches than food.

  Many recurring nightmares involved vermin of one kind or another – bed bugs, rabid bats, giant worms, feral cats, flea-infested raccoons. New York residents were no longer in control of their environment; the lesser species were out to get us. It made my nightmare seem almost trivial.

  Bill gave me the nod to speak if I wanted.

  “As some of you know, I moonlight as an exterminator,” I began, “so I’ve seen everything you’re afraid of. Giant rodents, snakes, alligators – I’ve hunted and killed them. But for the past year I’ve had a recurrent nightmare involving cockroaches. This is it:

  “A Village brownstone sits abandoned because it’s infested. In desperation the owner hires me to clean it out. Other exterminators have tried, but the roaches in this house are immune to DDT. So I do a little reco
n with night-vision goggles.

  “As soon as it’s dark, the roaches emerge. They’re organized like ants, forming platoons, leaving the house to forage in the neighborhood for food. Within hours they’re back in the woodwork, partying like it’s 1999.

  “I put an optical fiber under the floorboards to get a closer look. To my horror, the roaches have human faces. Even worse, they’re scientific geniuses – DaVinci, Einstein, Newton, Pavlov …

  “Suddenly I’m blinded by a burst of light through the optical fiber. Like being hit by lightning. When I wake up, I’m strapped to a gurney with an IV drip in my arm, my brain wired to a computer. They’re reprogramming me to be one of them.”

  “Man, what have you been smoking?” someone said.

  Bill laughed along with the rest. Then someone else volunteered a nightmare and we continued around the circle until everyone had coughed up their hairball.

  Afterwards, Bill locked up and we all went out into the schoolyard to sit on benches under a three-quarter moon. Someone had brought a bottle of red wine and a dozen plastic cups, someone else a pack of contraband cigarettes. We shared the bottle and lit up and savored the moment like the survivors we were. For an hour and a half, we’d been a family, and there was something hopeful about that.

  Then we all said goodnight and went back home, each to his own nightmare.

  Chapter 22

  When I got back home, I had another glass of wine and sat out on the balcony. Up here at night the air wasn’t bad. The lights were still on in my neighborhood, but south of 42nd were huge swaths of darkness on the west side. I sat there drinking, watching planes on their descent into LaGuardia.

  My stomach growled. I should eat before I drank more. Rather than go grocery shopping at this hour, I decided to kill two birds with one stone and clock some more time in search of Marielle Jordan. See what was cooking at Crabner’s favorite deli.

  I drove the Charger down Broadway. The traffic lights were working and there were people on the streets. Most of them were probably looking for sex, dope, money and excitement, but some were certainly in search of lost family members, lost lovers and lost dreams. I wished them better luck than I was having finding Marielle.

  In Times Square I saw lots of people going in and out of movie theaters, bars and sex clubs. Mostly white folks. Even though the race war was three years ago, most Afro-Americans didn’t venture south of 110th Street any more, unless it was broad daylight and they were packing, like the guys I’d rented parking space from in Chelsea.

  After the Brooklyn Blast, the Russkies had invaded Manhattan, tried to take Harlem, but settled for pockets on the Upper West Side. We’d always known the Russian mob was ruthless but nobody knew the extent of it until the Kalashnikovs came to Morningside Park. For a while in 2023, the body counts from bombings and shootings were as bad as the sectarian violence in Iraq. But after the NYPD and National Guard joined forces, demarcation lines were drawn, and a new segregation took hold.

  The Afro-American community had come out of it okay. Harlem was secure at its end of Central Park, outside the 15-mile limit decreed by FEMA to be a safe distance from Brighton Beach. Property values had remained stable or improved.

  I rode Broadway down to Houston and turned east. I’d just passed Essex when I saw the big neon crescent moon and Luna Deli in blinking blue letters. Houston was full of parked cars, like a herd of cattle bunched for the night under the watch of armed auto wranglers parked nearby. It was like this all over the city – if you couldn’t afford off-street parking, there were zones to rent protection by the hour, day or week.

  I circled the block and parked halfway down Norfolk. It was just past midnight. I locked the car and walked back to Houston. A guy with a pump shotgun across his knees sat on a chair outside Luna Deli. Deterrent for anyone who thought robbing the till was the road to solvency. More like, a ride in an ambulance.

  Inside, the deli was doing a ripping business. Two white-bibbed guys worked the counter, slapping sandwiches together, scooping sauerkraut and pickled eggs into take-out cartons, while a girl at the cash took the gelt from a steady flow of customers.

  A few patrons sat in a row of booths, enjoying their deli fare. I went to the coolers in back, fetched a Heineken, ordered a chicken salad with mozzarella on rye, and had it in my hand within a minute. I paid and sat in the last booth at the rear.

  I’d had about two bites of sandwich and a sip of beer when a tall guy in a black coat entered the deli. Although it was pitch dark outside, he was wearing wrap-around shades. He passed me without a glance, fetched a six-pack of beer from the cooler and stopped at the service counter. He had high cheekbones and a strange mouth, which fit Jack’s description of the AC repairman who’d spirited Marielle out of the house. Even more disturbing, he looked like the bodyguard who’d overpowered the gunman at the media center this afternoon. Buzz, Dr. Globik had called him, the same name Jack Randall had seen stitched on the AC repairman’s coveralls.

  “Oyster, onion and Swiss on pumpernickel, right?” said one of the countermen. “Three pickled eggs on the side?”

  The tall guy nodded and went to the cashier.

  By then I was out of my booth and through the door. I looked up and down the street but saw no cars with engine running nearby. I crossed the street and stood in a shadowed doorway. I bagged the unfinished sandwich and put it in my jacket pocket. I finished the beer and put my hand in my other pocket with my pistol.

  The tall guy came out of Luna Deli and headed east on Houston. I paralleled him from my side of the street. We passed Norfolk, Suffolk... He looked back, and I worried that he’d sensed a tail. I ducked into another doorway. He stepped off the curb, still looking my way, and I figured he must have spotted me. I drew my pistol and thumbed off the safety.

  He raised an arm and stepped out from between parked cars. A dark blue van with a rooftop bubble stopped beside him. He climbed in and the van shot away. I stepped into the street and tried to flag down a cab. Three passed me – all occupied – and by then the blue van was gone. I walked back to where I’d left my car.

  As I turned onto Norfolk, I saw broken glass littering the sidewalk. On this side of the street three houses were boarded up. Punks had sprayed the plywood sheets with swastikas and hate slogans. Up ahead, a Nazi banner hung from a third floor window. I heard martial music and a chorus of beer-laden voices singing the Horst Wessel song. I cursed the gangs that were turning this part of the city into a fascist cesspool. The Bowery had become a flophouse for neo-Nazi runaways who’d left their Midwest homes and come to New York where the movement was raw. They didn’t boycott Jewish merchants; they stalked dark-haired girls and sent them home crying to their fathers with warnings to leave town.

  Half the streetlights had been shot out. It was so dark I didn’t see the punks around my car until I got within twenty feet of it. They smelled of beer and pot. Three of them sat on the hood while a fourth was trying to open the door with a shim. They were white boys but dressed in dark clothes and wearing smudge on their faces.

  “Scram.” I drew my pistol and racked a load. Since I often encountered situations requiring a warning, the first slug in the magazine was always a rubber one. But they didn’t need to know that.

  “Essen mein arse,” said the one with the shim.

  I shot him in the knee. He screamed and clawed at the door handle as he crumpled to the sidewalk. I gave him a kick in the nuts. He yelped and crawled away from me. I brandished the pistol at the three other shit-birds. They took flight from my fender, picked up their buddy and fled down the street. I unlocked the Charger and slid behind the wheel.

  I drove east on Houston, down Roosevelt Drive and back on Delancey past LeVeen’s apartment building. That oyster paste sandwich Buzz had ordered must have been for Crabner. Eddie could have been the one driving the dark blue van. Maybe he’d stayed in the neighborhood, even after moving out of LeVeen’s place. I hoped I’d get lucky and spot the van, but if the Lower East Side was still C
rabner’s ‘hood, the van was nowhere to be seen. I unwrapped my sandwich and headed back uptown to my own roost, one hand on the wheel, the other feeding my face.

  Chapter 23

  I went up Tenth Avenue with little traffic, pausing briefly at the dark intersections to avoid collisions, and didn’t encounter any traffic lights until I was north of 42nd Street. After that, I noticed the radio started fading in and out. And the street lights. When I went through a red light without stopping, I realized it wasn’t the lights that were fading, but me.

  A sudden hot flash left me with sweaty palms trying to keep a grip on the wheel. The next one gave me a two-second blackout and a moist sensation like I’d just wet my pants. I was having another attack. I pulled to the curb, made sure the doors were locked and turned the engine off. I felt another surge of black lava flood my brain, and then a curtain of darkness cascaded over my vision. When I came out of it I saw from the dashboard clock that I’d lost ten minutes.

  I changed my vaporizer cartridge and administered a dose of 3G, a blend of gotu kola, gingko biloba and ginseng. I waited to see if there’d be another attack. I’d seen a few doctors about this but apparently not enough of them to form a reliable consensus. One said it was obviously post-traumatic stress. Another said ambient radiation had affected my nervous system. Another said it was DDT in the water supply, and even if I drank only bottled water, every time I showered, my skin sucked it up. I felt like an undecided octogenarian on election day, not knowing which politician to believe.

  All I knew was that I had to get off the street before I had an accident. Luckily, home was just around the corner. I started the car and drove another five blocks to the corner of 57th, where I entered the underground garage of my condo building.

  I was exhausted just getting from the car to the elevator. I rode up to the 15th floor. Before I made it to the end of the hall, another attack drove me to my knees. As I fell, I banged my head on the door of my neighbor. I lay on the floor, not meaning to look as pathetic as I felt, until the door opened and I looked up the skirt of Darcia Collins.