City on Fire

by Garth Risk Hallberg

  “Places to go, people to see,” she said. “You know how it is.”

  “Who’s the beanpole?” He nodded in Charlie’s direction without looking at him.

  “This is Charles.”

  “Charles looks like a narc in that hat.”

  “Charles is cool. Say hello, Charles.”

  Charlie mumbled something but didn’t put his hand out. He was a little scared of black people in general, and in particular of this man who, if he’d taken the notion, could have snapped Charlie over his knee like kindling. If indeed he was black and not super-swarthy, or Turkish or something—the tattoos made it hard to tell.

  “Listen,” Sam said, leaning in. “Has anybody been asking for me?”

  “For you?”

  “Yeah, like … did someone ask you was I here? Preppy guy? Good-looking? Thirtyish? A little out of place?” She seemed to tremble, glossy with snowmelt, expectant. Charlie did his best to keep his own face blank. Never let them see you bleed, Grandpa had said, before disappearing into a DC-10 a week after the shiva.

  Meanwhile, something like pity, a Where are your parents? look, had slipped the bouncer’s jovial mask. “I don’t know, sweetheart. I’ve been on since eight, and, like I said, I wasn’t expecting to see you.”

  “Charlie,” she said, “can you just hang here with Bullet for a sec while I go in and check on something?” So he waited, shifting from foot to foot, trying to edge away from the bouncer. Pigeons brooded on the streetlight’s bent neck. A person dressed like a mime, only needing no makeup to chalk her face, blundered out of the door and fell on the icy sidewalk. She laughed and laughed, and Charlie wanted to go to her, but no one else moved. The bouncer shrugged, as if to say, What are you going to do?

  Which, what was he? That Bicentennial summer, the summer of Sam, had arrived like a glass-blue wave, picking up his godforsaken life in one steep rake and thrusting it forward at such an angle he’d had to look up to see the shore. But as all waves must, it had broken, and anyway, he’d always been scared of heights. He’d seen her once afterward, from the passenger’s side of the station wagon his mom would no longer let him drive. She was sitting at a bus stop in Manhasset. And maybe she’d seen him, but something in him had held back, and something had held her back, too—the part of her he now saw had stayed out here, riding a redoubled wave, testing the city to see if it was strong enough for her. Be cool, he told himself. Just be cool.

  “Charlie, listen to me,” Sam said, when she re-emerged. “If it turned out I had to run uptown, would you be all right on your own for an hour?”

  He would have done anything for her, of course. He would have missed Ex Post Facto, if she wanted, or whatever they were calling themselves these days. But what happened when what she wanted was for him to do nothing? “What the fuck, Sam? I thought you wanted to spend New Year’s with me.”

  “I do, but I’m going to feel like absolute shit if you miss the first set, and I just … there’s a problem here I can’t put off any longer.” Beyond the baffle of the warehouse wall, a struck drum signaled a shift from recorded music to live. “It’s starting. You’ll be okay?” She turned to the bouncer. “Bullet, can you look after Charlie here?”

  “He can’t look after himself? Charlie feeble-minded or something?”

  “This is fucked up,” Charlie said, to no one in particular.

  “Bullet—”

  The bouncer reached out and, pincering his massive thumb and forefinger, lifted the brim of Grandpa’s hat so Charlie could see his eyes. “You know I’m just playing with you, boss.”

  Charlie froze him out, focused on Sam. “What happened to ‘I need you, Charlie’?”

  “I do need you, Charlie. I’m going to need you. Look, if I’m not back by eleven, come and find me. You can meet me at a quarter to twelve on the benches by the 72nd Street IND station. You know where that is?”

  “Of course I know where it is.” He had no idea where it was.

  “Either way, I swear, we’ll ring it in together.” The flat of her hand between his earflap and cheek was like a cold pool on a hot day. Then she walked away backward, and for the first time since the LIRR platform, she seemed to actually see him. Despite the secrets she was plainly still keeping, he wanted to believe her. He wanted to believe it was possible for this wild free creature to need him. But she was gone. The bouncer, Bullet, swept open the door. Charlie thought of a car with open doors rolling through the parking lot at school, surging out of reach even as voices from within said, Come on, Weisbarger. Hop in. But that wasn’t real anymore—nor was it real that he’d kissed Sam already, back in the basement of that weird house on East Third Street all those months ago. What was real, in the vacuum she’d left, was the memory of her skin on his skin and the music now blasting from the maw of the club.

  3

  THERE WAS NOWHERE ON EARTH more desolate than a Gristedes on New Year’s Eve. Sprigs of limp parsley clinging to the holes of the grocery baskets; dreary fluorescent bulbs, one of them gone gray, like a dead tooth; the palsied old man at the head of the checkout line, shaking out his coin-purse. It was the last place you wanted to take stock of your life. Indeed, for most of the last decade, Keith Lamplighter had managed to avoid thinking about groceries at all. He marched off to Lamplighter Capital Associates in the morning and returned home around this time, seven or eight, to a replenished fridge—as if heads of lettuce had just sprouted there while the door was closed, Regan had claimed, there at the end. “You don’t even know where the store is.” Which wasn’t true; Keith did. It was just that the numbers escaped him: between Sixty-Fifth and Sixty-Fourth? Or Sixty-Fourth and Sixty-Third? He’d walked by it often enough, but it took up no space in his consciousness, as the number of his extension at the office took up no space, because he never had occasion to call it. Now he was getting to know the Gristedes the way you know a person with whom you are really angry: intimately, from the inside, he thought, as a bell shot the cash drawer out from its hiding place.

  No, Regan had been right, as usual. Success in America was like Method acting. You were given a single, defined problem to work through, and if you were good enough in your role, you managed to convince yourself of its—the problem’s—significance. Meanwhile, actors who hadn’t made the cut scurried around backstage, tugging at ropes, making sure that when you turned to address the moon, it would be there. You told yourself you were the only one who ever labored, even as the curtain behind you rippled, as from the swift soft movements of mice. How many times recently had Keith resolved to bear in mind his beaten-down supporting players? To be a better and more Christlike person? But it was as if some allergic reaction to the Gristedes was blocking him. The light had a lurid green in it that made everything it touched seem sickly. Perhaps it was to irradiate the food, to keep microscopic spores from spreading across the surface of Keith’s bachelor provisions—pretzels and Sabrett franks and Air-Puft buns—until he’d made it out of the store. If he ever made it out of the store.

  The old man at the head of the line having tottered out the door, the only other people around were women. They stared at the colorless flecked-tile floor or the soap-opera stars on the magazine racks. Directly ahead, some wisps had freed themselves from the drab ponytail of a teen mother already pregnant with her next kid—a hairstyle for someone who had no time for a hairstyle. She seemed not to see the daughter tugging at her trailing scarf, begging pretty please for an Almond Joy. For a second, the curtain was about to part, Keith’s heart was in motion … That could have been his scarf-end, once. That could have been his hand feeling for the quarter he surely would have come up with had this been his little girl. But he’d believed he had better things to do, and the girl seemed to know this; when he flashed her what was meant to be an anodyne smile, she nuzzled into the leg of the mother, who glanced back at him with an expression that pretty clearly said, “Pervert.”

  It took several more lifetimes to reach the cashier. The checkout, the kids would have said. Will
had wanted to be a checkout when he grew up. This was when he was three or four, and Regan had still been home with him all day, barring some business with the Board. She’d blushed, though Keith hadn’t meant to signal disapproval. “That’s not what you said yesterday, honey. Tell Daddy what you said yesterday.” Keith could feel something welling up inside him. He wanted to be like his dad! But when Will didn’t respond, Regan said, “Fire truck. He wanted to be a fire truck.” Well, of course he did, because how, at four or however old he was, could he have understood what a wealth adviser did? Keith himself didn’t understand, it turned out. But it would become one of those moments, one of those little domestic moments he’d let slip behind the curtain while he was busy center-stage, Succeeding. And now, trying hard to meet the eyes of the surly teenager totting up his purchases and to remember that she was as real as he was, he was doing it again. Thinking only of himself, of how to get to where he was going. And of how he would now be late.

  IN TRUTH, he’d been looking all along for some excuse to blow off the annual Hamilton-Sweeney gala. Uncle Amory had signed his invitation personally, but even the five-minute intermezzi in which he and Regan met to hand off the kids were unbearable, and though it should have been possible in a crowd of several hundred guests to avoid each other, he knew it would never happen. Regan would keep close to him, ostensibly because they were adults and could behave like adults, but really as a kind of self-punishment. He’d lately come to understand that she’d been punishing herself for a long time.

  Though now that she’d taken Will and Cate and moved to Brooklyn, he felt as if he were being punished, too. He wandered the old apartment like some wraith with no power to alter anything he saw. Absent her half of the books, those remaining had collapsed into decrepit piles on the shelves or fallen to the floor. She’d taken the lamps, too, and her million framed photographs. Sometimes at night, in the dark, he heard phantasmal children sliding down the hallways in their socks. They might have been living here still, had Regan not eventually learned about the time he’d brought his mistress into the apartment. It was the one bit of information he’d left out of his confession, knowing the pain it would cause. (Well, that and her age. And her name.)

  He’d sworn never to bring Samantha here again, and, since breaking things off, had refused to take her calls. Then, earlier this week, she’d reached him at work. She’d somehow found the number—the one he didn’t know himself. She was coming into the City for New Year’s; could they meet? He got a kind of helpless hard-on thinking about her, or the ghost of her, kneeling on the couch in her white cotton panties, elbows on armrest, looking back over her shoulder, like a dare. “We have to talk,” she said. “I’m not pregnant, so you know. But it’s important.” He said his in-laws were expecting him at the gala. It was true, technically, and in case she thought she’d ruined his life, he wanted her to understand that she hadn’t. But he might, he added, have a little time earlier in the evening, so long as they met in a public place. “You don’t have to worry, Keith,” she said. “You’re not that irresistible. And I’ll be bringing a friend.” And so it had been established that they would meet at 9:30, at a nightclub downtown called the Vault.

  COOL NIGHT AIR summoned him back out of himself. The avenue lay hushed under the first snow. He stood for a minute, breathing it in, listening to the meticulous tick of flakes hitting the grocery bag propped against his hip. Half a block away, a figure with a shopping trolley had doddered out into the crosswalk. The signal flashed DON’T WALK, staining the snow red. Keith noticed the headlights of a school of taxis farther north, carrying speed downhill. Could the cabbies see, in this weather?

  He reached the stranded shopper just in time to hustle him across to the far curb. It was the old man from the store, a little bald fellow in a soiled fisherman’s cap. “Jesus. You’ve got to be more careful,” Keith said. The man blinked up at him through thick glasses, his eyes wet and uncomprehending as a farm animal’s. He said something in a high-pitched voice that sounded Spanish, but the consonants had all been gummed away. Keith caught himself replying at half-speed, and in an accent, as if that would make his English any more intelligible. Finally, he managed to establish through a ridiculous pantomime, pointing to things and holding up certain digits, that the man lived a few blocks south.

  In fact, it was a hell of a lot farther than that. The old man was obviously capable of forward progress, but on Keith’s arm, and in deepening snowfall, he locomoted only in tiny, truculent shuffles. It took ten minutes to travel the first hundred yards; crossing Fifty-Ninth was even slower. Keith wondered if in fact he was terrifying the man rather than helping—if the man perhaps understood himself to be being kidnapped. He appealed silently to passersby for help, but they had engagements of their own to get to, and, knowing the obligation he aimed to put them under, they pretended not to see him. Clearly, God meant the old man to be Keith’s responsibility.

  By the time they reached the no-man’s-land east of Grand Central, Keith’s bare hands were numb, his waterlogged grocery sack starting to split. He had no idea what time it was; Samantha might already have given up waiting on him. Finally, before a run-down building, the man ceased to move. “This?” Keith said. “This is where you’re going?” Zees where yoor go-ing? “Domicilia? La casa?” Tentatively, he released the sleeve. The man slumped against the bars of the little fence that protected the garbage cans from whatever garbage cans needed protecting from. His hands curled around the bars. “Zay hallah ear,” he said, it sounded like, and licked spittle from his lips.

  Keith shook off a little shiver of déjà vu. “Come on, sir. Let’s get you inside.”

  But the man would not let go. “Day allah here,” he insisted. Or was it a question? He looked past Keith’s shoulder, eyes widened fearfully. A gypsy cab slipped past on the snow-slick street. Obstinate old thing. Keith detached himself and went to peer into the lobby, hoping to find someone who knew the man and could let him in, assuming this was his building. He saw smoke-damaged carpet, stacks of yellowed phone books along one wall, an elevator light stuck on the fourth floor, but no people. Who left a deranged old man alone like this?

  He recalled, out of nowhere, a book of the Arabian Nights he’d bought Will for Christmas one year. Or rather, that Regan had bought on his behalf. Laminated covers, watercolor plates, the smell of glue from the binding. Sometimes, when he got home in time, he had to read to Will from it. The story Will asked for, over and over, was about an old man who asked a traveler to carry him across a river. Once he was on the traveler’s back, the man refused to let go. Will hadn’t seemed perturbed, but Keith found it creepy, especially the illustration: the old man’s pale blue skin, his sinewy legs squeezing the air from the chest of his patron, now his slave. An allegory of paternity, maybe, or of romantic love. Nor could he recall how the spell finally got broken, as in stories all maledictions must at some point break. Was this only a feature of stories?

  Suddenly a young woman was beside him, precipitated out of the snow. She was full-lipped, Dominican or Borinquen, in a short skirt and fishnets that wouldn’t help with the cold. “Isidor,” she said. “You bad boy.” She coaxed the old man off the iron fence as you might a rose from a trellis. “You’re playing your trick on this fine gentleman, aren’t you?” The old man’s palsy, at this distance, resembled triumphant nodding. She turned to Keith. He could see that she was not young at all—she was probably his age—but was so thickly rouged and mascara’d that in the headlights of a passing car, say, she might look like an extra from a porno film. The roll of fat peeking between her waistband and her parka, like excess material left over from her manufacture, only made his feelings toward her more tender. “He does this to people. I don’t know why. He walks fine.” They watched the old man shuffle pigeon-toed toward the door of the building. A painted nail circled around an ear. “La locura.” And then, after sizing Keith up once more, she sashayed off toward the corner.

  Watching her go, Keith was struck by the
supreme joke: he knew this block. There, on the corner, was the strip club called Lickety Splitz. And just next door was the by-the-hour hotel where he used to bring Samantha, outside of which off-duty go-go girls would mingle with cross-dressed hustlers from over on Third Avenue. He squinted against the snow. Something in him deflated. Downtown, uptown; what was the point of trying to decide anything? He dumped his bag of groceries inside one of the battered ashcans and set out after the stripper. It was as if, he told himself, the decision had been made for him. As if this were not his own brain telling him that every avenue away from his sins led him deeper into them. The sound of the white touching down all around him was like the sound of feet behind an arras, or like tiny, glottal laughter, if not of God the father, then perhaps of one of his angels, archangels, principalities, thrones, dominions, powers, seraphs, he’d known them all by heart as a choirboy in Stamford. What was the last one? A bird arced high above him, rooftop to rooftop. Oh, right, the cherub, the cupid, the little laughing boy.

  4

  BUT WHAT HAD HE BEEN DOING THERE to begin with? Why that day, at that particular hour? (And behind that, like a faint perpetual wind-chime: Why me, and not nothing at all?) Soon enough, William Hamilton-Sweeney would have cause to revisit these questions. At the time, though, he would have said he’d gone to Grand Central for exactly the reason he’d given Mercer: to be alone. For years, he’d been coming here when he needed to think, or not think, or to act or not act on the things he did or didn’t think about. Granted, there was also all the architectural whatnot that used to knock him out in his youth, the arches, the sconces, the vaulting blue zodiac at the center of everything where pigeons roosted among the stars. But grime had long since dulled the color and advertising ruined the lines. What abided was the sense of any one person’s life tapering amid the crowds to a meltingly thin slice. Proximity to the forty-story office tower bearing the family name had once raised the possibility of scandal, or pity, but any suburb-bound underling of Daddy’s he’d bumped into on his way up from the lower level likely wouldn’t even have lowered his eyes from the departure board before rushing on. And if anything, the years had rendered William’s anonymity here more vivid and complete. In the circles he now moved in (to the extent that he still moved in circles at all) to cross north of Fourteenth Street, at least east of Eighth Avenue, was to sail right off the edge of the earth.