City on Fire

by Garth Risk Hallberg

  On the other hand, she couldn’t be sure that the previous PR chief’s departure hadn’t been arranged by Amory, for arranging, above all, was what he did. You never actually saw the arrangements taking place, of course; you simply noticed him darting along the edges of a room, deft as a cuttlefish, darkening the medium around him … and then you might infer his intervention from the fact that things had gone his way. The Demon Brother, the junior execs called him. You worked long enough at the firm, you came to feel that he was everywhere and nowhere, like a Deist’s conception of God. Though part of his genius, she had come to realize, was that he only actually intervened on occasions when it truly mattered. Just once, that long-ago weekend on Block Island, had she personally felt the power of his arrangements. He had still been youthful then, his face alive with the flicker of torches as he brought her fruity drinks in cups shaped like tiki gods, his hand soft and insistent against her lower back. She hadn’t noticed the black stormclouds that had begun to pile up over the darkling blue strip to the west.

  In a sense, they’d never gone away. And when she heard his voice now in the hallway a dozen feet off, his unmistakably high, soft voice, calling back to someone that he would “be right in to check the score,” she could feel herself shrinking. She pressed the champagne flute to one cheek to regulate her temperature, and the stem got caught in the rubber band of her mask, snapping it free from its staple. The mask fell. One of the wives turned to look at her disapprovingly. Fine, maybe she was tipsy, but whatever happened to solidarity among the sexes? Then the bathroom door was closing in the hall, and she saw her chance to escape. She bolted the last of her drink, put the glass down on the nearest surface, and stole out of the room. Amory was nowhere to be seen. Behind her, the reception hall was a madhouse. In the other direction, the swinging door of the kitchen was outlined in white. She hurried toward it, hoping to be out of sight before Amory emerged from the bathroom. But the guests seemed to be multiplying, surging back toward the party’s center. Worse, she was unmasked. They had in years past been content to talk to Keith, with whom one could talk about anything. For Regan, they’d had nary a word. Now that it was imperative that she reach the far end of this hall, however, hands pawed the sleeve of her dress. Regan, you look fabulous, so trim. How’s Keith? Where’s Keith? By which was meant, she assumed, Are the rumors true? Her gift for stonewalling seemed to be failing her. She thought she heard the toilet flush. “Terrible, actually, we’re getting divorced,” she blurted. And, not waiting for a reaction, reached for the swinging door.

  The kitchen was a long, narrow galley that didn’t seem to match the rest of the apartment, until one considered that it was the only room not meant to be gawked at by guests. Regan early on had had fantasies of spending afternoons here, commiserating with Doonie, but Felicia had fired her in favor of her own cook, and Regan eventually resigned herself to remaining an outsider, lumped in with the rich folks on the far side of the door. There were now six or eight dark-skinned women working at the various counters, drying dishes, thawing dough that perfumed the air with yeast. Unlike the waiters flitting in and out, they did not wear masks. And at the far end of the room, sitting at a little table crowded with wine-bottles, unnoticed by anyone, was a black man in a white jacket. He had pushed his false face up onto his head, and even in her intoxication it took her only a second to place the real one beneath: round cheeks, unstylish glasses, overbite. “Mr. Goodman! Is that you?”

  She had forgotten that black people could blush. He murmured something she didn’t quite catch, and then she pulled him to his feet and offered him her cheek to kiss. The nearest cook glanced over disapprovingly. Regan sat down, determined to make it seem that she and William’s lover—for that’s obviously what he was—were old friends. “I can’t believe you got him to come! Where is he?” She looked around.

  “William? He, uh … doesn’t exactly know I’m here.”

  Her heart sank. “Doesn’t exactly?”

  “Doesn’t. I kind of thought I’d come in his place. It’s a long story.” He studied one of the bottles. Humidity from all the cooking had begun to curl its label. His apparent chagrin distracted her from her own.

  “What are you doing back here, then? You should be rubbing elbows with the beautiful people. You know Norman Mailer’s out there.” She chucked him on the sleeve of his too-small jacket. Maybe this was overly familiar, as she’d only met him that once, but at least there was someone here who owed no loyalty to the Goulds.

  “I didn’t last ten minutes. One woman handed me this.” He pulled from a pocket a crumpled napkin, a tiny bindle of half-eaten food. “I think she thought I was a waiter.”

  “That dinner jacket can’t have helped. Is that William’s?”

  His smile, even embarrassed, was lovely, she saw. “You think it’s too much?”

  “At least you get a nice story to tell, when you go back to your other life. Me, I don’t get to go back to anything else. This is my other life.”

  “It seems to agree with you.”

  “Does it?” She raised her hands to her face. One of them—hands or face—was still hot, but she couldn’t have said which for certain. It was generally a warning sign when her body and her head disconnected from each other. “That’s just the booze. Speaking of which, we should have a drink.” She had taken a wine-bottle from the table between them and was scanning the countertops for an opener.

  “Are you sure you need another drink?”

  She rummaged through an all-purpose drawer, ignoring the peripheral consternation of the servers. “To celebrate finding each other. It really is a nice surprise.”

  She couldn’t locate a corkscrew, but there, among rubber bands and wire whisks and paintbrushes, the hidden disorder of Felicia’s household, was an underweight Swiss Army knife. She flipped out the various appendages. Corkscrew, corkscrew … You would have thought the Swiss would have prepared for this contingency, but the best she could find was a long, narrow blade. She plunged it into the cork and began a little manically to prize it out.

  “Uh—Regan?” Mercer said, and reached for her. And that was when the knife folded back toward the handle. There was a moment after the cutting edge had already gone through the skin and into the meat of her thumb (but before the alarm signals out in the neurochemical vastness had reached her) when it could have been someone else’s finger caught there, or a piece of anatomical wax. Geez, she thought. That looks deep. And then there was a nearly audible fizz as the future she’d been projecting for herself—a glass of wine; a toast shared with Mercer Goodman; a flight from the party, undetected by Amory—dissolved, and the thumb became hers. Blood came, a gout, a freshet on the gray-white marble between them. It was shocking that something so thick and red could come from her body. Here she’d been thinking that her life was not her own, and all the while it beat on within her. There was that second of almost giddiness, always, before you felt the pain.

  7

  CHARLIE’D BEEN TRYING TO ACT like tonight was no big deal—like he went to nightclubs all the time—but in fact he’d been counting on Sam to sherpa him through the country of velvet ropes and mirror balls he imagined waited. Instead, here he was, utterly alone, at the back of a hot black room packed like a subway car. The stage was invisible; all he could see up there were shoulders, necks, heads, and in the spaces between, a nimbus of light, a sporadic microphone stand or fist or spray of—what was that, spit?—rising into the air. The music, too, was murky, and without the deciduous rings of an LP to study, it was hard to tell where one song ended and another began, or whether what he was hearing were actual songs. The best he could do was face the same direction as everyone else, bop up and down in some semblance of rhythm, and hope no one noticed his disappointment. And who was going to notice? The bartender was the only person farther from the stage. Charlie stripped off his jacket and tried to knot its sleeves around his waist the way kids at school did, but it fell to the floor, weighed down by the pajama bottoms in the pocket
, and now there was someone watching, a girl, so he had to pretend to have meant to let the jacket fall, that’s how passionate he was about the music. He put on his most impressive scowl and tried to imagine what it might look like to be transported.

  “Fuck,” the girl said, when the band’s set finally ended.

  Was she talking to him? “What?”

  “Groovy, right?” Recorded music now blasted from the PA; a snarl of Christmas lights above the bar had been plugged back in, doubled by those parts of a long mirror not covered in spraypaint, and the crowd was surging toward them, water in a sloshed bowl. The girl was tall—though not as tall as Sam—and plumply curvy beneath an oversized Rangers jersey. Her features were soft and womanly. “But I think you’re standing on someone’s coat.”

  “Oh, I … that’s mine.” He stooped to retrieve it from a puddle of what he could only hope was beer. When he stood back up, the girl was exchanging frantic charades with someone across the room. Probably making fun of him; Charlie thought he’d detected the international symbol for drunk—thumb to mouth, pinky lifted like an elephant’s trunk. Well, screw her. “I’m going to go stand over here now,” he said.

  “No, wait.” She grabbed the upper part of his sleeve. “I like the way you dance. Like you don’t give a shit who sees you. You’re not one of these grad-school poseurs just trying to fit in. People are afraid to let themselves go crazy like that anymore.”

  She must be on something, Charlie thought, to make her eyes glassy like that, with the Christmas lights glimmering there like cheap stars; something that made her seem older and cooler than he was. He shrugged. “They’re only like one of my favorite bands.”

  “Get the Fuck Out?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “If you like Get the Fuck Out, wait till you hear the headliner.”

  His mistake embarrassed Charlie. No wonder he hadn’t liked it that much. “No, that’s what I meant,” he said. “Ex Post Facto. Or Nihilo.”

  “Nihilo,” she said, with a short i.

  “Sure. They’re the best.”

  “Really? My boyfriend does their sound. I could probably get you backstage. But you’d have to do something for me in return. Oh, fuck. I love this song. Come dance with me.”

  “I don’t even know your name.”

  “Call me S.G.,” she said over her shoulder as she forced her way past eddies of punks.

  “Charlie,” he said, or mumbled. Then the record changed. A voice like an old friend’s came over the speakers: Jesus died / for somebody’s sins, / but not mine. In the graffiti’d mirror above the bar, he still looked a mess, but someone apparently thought different, and who cared if she was a little overweight? His only regret was that Sam wasn’t around to see him.

  They danced near a chest-high two-by-four running along the wall. Charlie might not even have noticed it except for the lemminglike rows of plastic cups crowded there, ice in various colors melting against the sides. He took one of the drinks so S.G. wouldn’t see he was underage. It was hard to remember himself that he was only seventeen, a timorous weed sprouting from his combat boots. As the song neared escape velocity, Charlie did, too. Impossible, that this was the same place he’d felt so lonely minutes before. In every direction were people, musky, funky, undulant. And here was this broad soft broad in her oversized jersey, boogieing closer, and when his chest accidentally smooshed against her tits, she just smiled, like there was a TV on the wall behind him and she’d seen something funny. Charlie tipped back the last of his translucent blue goo and with it still numbing the roof of his mouth and luffing the surface of his face away from his skull, he put an arm around her. “I’m glad you decided to talk to me,” he yelled. He was just assaying the wisdom or stupidity of explaining how he’d been stood up when she raised a finger to his mouth.

  “Wait. This is the best part.”

  He leaped over the half-second when his feelings might have been hurt and gave himself to the rest of the song, the blissed-out drone in the flashing smoky room with his sweaty hair stuck to his forehead and his jacket in his hand like a pom-pom.

  When the record ended, Charlie looked at the Nazgûls circulating around them, any of whom might have been the boyfriend he’d just remembered. He was unsure what he was supposed to do next; his crotch bestirred itself happily when, in the invisible understory below shoulder height, she let the back of her hand rest against it.

  “So hey, Charlie, about that favor. Are you holding?”

  “Holding?”

  “Like more of what you’re on. ’Cause whatever it is I definitely want some.”

  “Um … fresh out,” he said. Sam had been the one who bought the drugs, when there were drugs. He wouldn’t have known who to talk to besides the guys at school who sold Valiums snuck from their moms’ medicine chests. And now the girl would pull away, disgusted; her hand had already drifted from between his legs.

  “Bummer,” she said, tossing her long hair. “I totally would have made it worth your while.” She didn’t sound especially crushed, though. Maybe she was already too high to care. “But Sol can probably scrounge up something, if you want to come backstage with me. I just need ten bucks.”

  Sol was the name of that lunkhead Sam knew; it must have been him outside, after all. “Wait. Solomon Grungy is your boyfriend?”

  “Yeah, the sound engineer. I thought you said they were your favorite band.”

  Which was when the lights went out again. The recorded music stopped mid-syllable. People began to surge forward, nearly knocking him down. “Listen up, scuzzballs …,” said a voice, and the rest was lost in the roar rising all around Charlie. It swept him forward, and though the crowd grew denser with every step—his advance was checked several yards short of the stage by a wall of spike-studded leather jackets—he was now closer than he had ever been to live music, save for at his bar mitzvah. The sheer monophonic power of this sound blew away any impression those tuxed fucks had left. It was an avalanche, hurtling downhill, snapping trees and houses like tinkertoys, taking up every sound in its path and obliterating it in a white roar. As Charlie felt himself being taken up into it, totally, unable to decide whether it was good or bad—unable, even, to care. On record, in their Ex Post Facto versions, the songs had been taut and angular, with each instrument playing off the others: the spastic drumming, the laconic bass, and Venus de Nylon’s summer-bright Farfisa. It was, in particular, the gap between the arch, faux-English talk-singing and the passionate squall of guitar that had drawn Charlie in. It was like the guitar was articulating the pain the frontman, Billy Three-Sticks, couldn’t allow himself to name. Now everyone from the record sleeve was gone except the drummer. One guitar was in the hands of a black guy with green hair, and the other was around the thick neck that had just appeared above him. It was the new lead singer, Sam’s latest friend. He was buzz-cut, dark-haired, savage, powerfully built. A person who did things, she’d said on the phone, ambiguously. His wet white straining face was only a few feet away, leaning out over all of them. He seemed to promise complete freedom, on the condition of complete surrender. And surrender happened to be what Charlie Weisbarger did best. His hands were on the shoulders of strangers. He was launching himself toward the singer to chant back at him the words that had once belonged only to Charlie and Sam: City on fire, city on fire / One is a gas, two is a match / and we too are a city on fire.

  EVENTUALLY, IT WAS OVER. The lights were up, the room deflating. A disembodied voice was saying the band would be back at midnight for the second set, and Charlie felt himself contracting painfully back to the size of his regular body. By way of medication, he grabbed another half-empty drink from the rail along the wall, but it was mostly ice-melt. Then he spotted S.G. at the side of the stage, talking to another biker-looking guy. It was Charlie’s turn to grab her arm. It seemed to take her a minute to remember who he was. “What?” she said.

  “We’re going to go backstage, aren’t we?”

  “I thought you’d split.” />
  “I’ve got a twenty in my wallet. Don’t make me beg.”

  She shrugged and turned back to the biker. “Cool if my friend comes, too?” The guy yawned and unhooked a mangy velvet rope from its bollard.

  Backstage turned out to be a labyrinthine subbasement lit by bare bulbs and so crowded with staples and tags and tatters of old fliers that you couldn’t see what color the paint had been. They came to a squat room with a drain sunk into its floor. The only concessions to hominess were some votive candles and a snot-green sleeper-sofa, on which the singer was slumped. From the doorway, he appeared foreshortened, a narrow waist swelling into sturdy legs, legs giving way to massive shit-kicking boots. He had a chin-beard and a chipped front tooth and was covered from the neck down with tattoos. On the front of his sleeveless tee, the words Please Kill Me were scrawled in black marker. The sight of S.G. seemed to bring him to life. He patted the cushion beside him. “Hey, you. Get over here.” In two steps, she was across the room and landing knee-first on the couch. She put her arm around the singer’s shoulders and stared back at the doorway, obscurely victorious. Charlie couldn’t remember all of a sudden what people did with hands.

  “You guys were righteous. Oh, Nicky Chaos, this is, ah …”

  “Charlie,” Charlie said. Should he say something else? Great show? Oh, no, not Great show—anything but that! But Nicky Chaos wouldn’t have cared anyway. He had put his head close to the girl’s to whisper something. Charlie was confused; he’d thought her boyfriend was Sol Grungy. He couldn’t leave without showing weakness, but couldn’t stay without calling attention to his lack of a reason for doing so. Members of Get the Fuck Out were moving guitars and amps in the hallway behind him. From farther off came the buzz of the crowd, distorted by the cement floor. Then Nicky’s eye was on him again. “Are you gonna say something, Charlie, or are you just going to watch?”