So I finished my beer quickly and stood up, knowing that if I stayed, I’d have to have another. Carmine crumpled his own can and whipped it down the hill, toward his workshop. A rusty chain, looped through the place where the handle had been, held the door impressively closed. The fans were off for good. Even the workshop was to be abandoned. For what Carmine Cicciaro had learned by then, and I suppose I had, too, concerned not only the baffling multiplicity of all things, but also their no less baffling integration. No amount of art, even of the Great American variety, can elevate you above, or insulate you from, the divisions, the cataclysms, of ordinary life. Still, as I turned to shake his hand and tell him I’d be seeing him, I couldn’t quite get free of how it used to feel, waiting for the July 4th display, back on the humid town common of the Tulsa where I was a kid. How, down on the bandshell, a local vocal quartet would be warming up, their candy-striped jackets a pink mess in the heat. How I would lie on my back on the blanket, slightly apart from my cousins, dreaming. At some point, the Rutabaga Brothers and the Lemon Sisters would rouse us to our feet and lead us in patriotic song, and then it would begin: signal lights ascending the sky, two, three, a dozen, a hundred. I had no other associations then for the sound of mortar fire, for the cascades of color swimming up to meet their counterparts in the face of the swollen brown river. All I wanted was more, more, more. I’d ask myself at each volley, in an ecstasy of anticipation, was this the last one? Was this? But maybe that is what, in the end, brings this particular art closer to life than its more mimetic siblings can ever manage––what I’d glimpsed in the summer of 1976, watching the Bicentennial on a TV 3,000 miles away: each display of fireworks is utterly time-bound. A singularity. No past and no future. Save for the fireworker himself, no one ever knows the grand finale is the grand finale until it’s over. And at that point, wherever one is, one won’t ever really have been anywhere else.
BOOK VII
IN THE DARK
[ July 13, 1977–∞ ]
Wandering through the shadows, we listen to the breath
That makes the darkness shudder;
And now and then, lost in unfathomable nights,
We see lit up by mighty lights
The window of eternity.
—VICTOR HUGO
The Contemplations
In the dark,
It’s just you and I.
Not a sound—
There’s not one sigh.
Just the beat of my poor heart
In the dark.
—LIL GREEN
“In the Dark”
90
SOMEWHERE UNDER MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS—9:27 P.M.
AT THE INSTANT THE BLACKOUT HITS, “Dr.” Zig Zigler is staring at a pair of sandhill cranes that have found their way onto the CC local. Or maybe they’re spoonbills. In any case, it’s mesmerizing, this sort of beaky, wised-up look they have. And clearly a kind of intelligence, possibly the only kind there is, has been involved in negotiating turnstiles and platforms and boarding the rearmost car of an actual train. It happened at Thirty-Fourth Street, and ever since, they’ve been minding their business like proper New Yorkers, perched at the far end of a scuffed plastic bench, ruffling wings every so often as though shaking folds from a paper. The other passengers keep the same ten-yard buffer they would if these were panhandlers, so Zig’s the only one noticing, but that’s fine, he’s used to it. He’s been noticing stuff for weeks now it’s probably saner not to see. Peacocks in crosswalks. A great blue heron, once, perched on the steeple of Grace Church on Broadway. It could just be the Dexedrine talking, but he likes this conceit of the walls between nature and culture breaking down, the animals taking over the zoo: this will be perfect, he thinks, for the show tomorrow. If there is a show tomorrow. If by that point the FCC hasn’t yanked his card and the animals in question haven’t torn apart the WLRC studios … which is when the world goes dark and the brakes start to screech and his ass goes sliding into the void.
Blackness persists even after the train has stopped. There are smells and sounds but nothing to stitch them together. The absence of engine noise is never a good sign. Sheeyit, a voice says, but it doesn’t seem like anyone’s hurt, or panicking—at least anyone save “Dr.” Zig himself. When the birds rustle again, that little click of beak or claw, he wonders if they too are about to turn on him, because frankly it’s been that kind of year: the shooting of the girl in the Park, this thing with his old adversary. And finally the uprising of his listener base, which turns out to be not some savvy cognoscenti, grooving on the ironies of his self-presentation, but the same Not-So-Silent Majority that jams up the Yackline each day. He can feel them massed out there now, agitating to take New York back to an imaginary 1954. Can’t anyone hear past the spleen to his bleeding heart? 1954 was terrible! He has been misunderstood! Though probably this, too, is the drugs.
Gingerly, so as not to incite the birds, he gropes for the overhead bar and picks his way forward in the dark. He can feel the sheath of heat around each unseen straphanger. By the time he reaches the car’s front end, he’s swimming in amphetamine sweat. Around him conversations spark or resume, quiet at first, then louder, black and Spanish voices this part of town. Somebody wants to open the windows; like birdshit, is what it smells like.
Somebody else says no, they’ve got to hold in what little AC is left.
¿A quién le importa? This always happens, we’ll be moving soon anyway.
Where are the conductors? Why aren’t they fixing it?
Sheeyit. Motherfuckers couldn’t fix a ham sandwich.
Time has its own way of moving down here. Still, it’s got to be close to ten. In order to be up at the crack of three—one of the perquisites of pre-drive-time radio—Zigler should have been in bed hours ago, but he hasn’t had a good night’s sleep since May, since the news about Richard. Anyone who’s spent so much as ten minutes listening to Gestalt Therapy (and even its producer, Nordlinger, who usually pops in earplugs after the opening theme and spends the remainder perusing porn) has to have figured out that “Dr.” Zig’s planning to punch his own ticket one of these days, to make a final point. And then the one-time National Magazine Award Nominee goes and one-ups him again. Diet pills have always been Zigler’s secret for getting through four hours on air, but these days he lets them blast him right out of the broadcast booth at the end of the show and into the shift bars south of Times Square where you can be drunk before noon. Sometimes, early evenings, there comes a point where the speed wears off and he feels his meter running, but his sleep deficit is already so far beyond anything he’ll ever be able to earn back that he figures he might as well pop another pill, have another drink, because what’s another hour at the bar in the face of a million hours? What’s a little hangover in the face of the infinite grave?
Someone lights a match, coaxing faces from the dark, and dimly, at the deserted end of the car, feathers. When the blackness is restored, Zigler smells tobacco. He should have checked his watch when he had a chance. There has to be a natural limit to how long anyone can spend like this, in a black aluminum suppository lodged in the asshole of the earth. Like: How much does body heat have to build before people start keeling over? And how long before someone starts to really freak?
He unbuttons a button, luffs shirt from chest. The air refuses to move. Then, through the window of the communicating door, he sees one of those deep, eyeless fish with the hypodermic teeth, a brighter light approaching. Zigler steps aside just as the door opens and a flashlight floats in, followed by a cool dank gust of tunnel air. Shapes play weirdly on walls and windows. One cuts around in front of the light. It’s the Chinese man who came through earlier selling batteries from a trashbag. There were apparently cigarette lighters in there as well, or maybe this is a different bag he’s offering side to side. Anyway, as soon as a lighter’s been taken, he passes on to the next person. When Zigler reaches for his wallet, the Chinaman shakes his head. Meanwhile, from behind the flashlight, a booming, island-ti
nged voice announces that they can’t be more than (kyant be more dan) a couple blocks from 110th Street. The stress falls oddly. “If we’re care-FUL, we can exit through the front car, walk up the track to the sta-SHUN.” The flashlight swings around to touch the door to the next car, the bodies in motion beyond. “Women first, unless there’s babies.” I’m a baby, Zigler wants to say—Me first!—but were anyone to recognize his voice, it would inevitably lead to blows over some bullshit he’s said on air. Which is why every time he rides this train home now, he’s afraid to speak a word. The shock jock’s vow of silence. What if the power comes back on? someone says. “What if it doesn’t?” booms the Jamaican. “You been down here forty minutes already.” This seems to settle things. People flick their Bics, move toward the forward door. But “Dr.” Zig Zigler, for reasons even he would have a hard time articulating, is fighting his way back to the cranes at the rear of the car. Maybe they’ll attack him, tackle him, peck out his ravaged liver, but so what? It would at least be an exit Rich Groskoph couldn’t steal. He supposes he means to prop open the aft door, in case what the birds want is to escape. But when he gets there and gets the new lighter working, they appear to have vanished completely.
1 POLICE PLAZA—9:27 P.M.
“SEE?”
“See what, Charlie? I can’t see a blessed thing. Let me see if I’ve got some matches.”
“This is like the oldest trick in the book. You put out the lights at the fuse box, or you unscrew all the lightbulbs before the person gets home—”
“This is Con Ed, kid. This is eight million people running air conditioners off an eighty-year-old grid.”
“—and when they come in, wham! Or did you not see Godfather II?”
“Look around you, Charlie. Or I guess these don’t put out enough light, but you’re sitting in one of the most secure rooms in New York City. It’s exactly where you’d want to be if someone was trying to bump you off. Which no one is. And if you would just cooperate with me a little about Samantha’s shooting, I might be able to look out for you on some kind of longer-term basis. Ouch!”
“You don’t give up, do you? It’s like a fixation.”
“Well, the lights are going to come back on sooner or later. Real life will resume.”
“How many times do I have to tell you it wasn’t me who shot her?”
“Okay. Have it your way. Let’s say for the sake of argument your invisible friend, Mr. Chaos—”
“It wasn’t Nicky either. He wouldn’t. With anyone else, I know, a bomb points to that, but not with Sam.”
“Again with the bomb, though, Charlie! You should know, the only thing I’ve seen that makes any sense with your story is a throwaway line in Richard’s article, some gunpowder missing from Flower Hill.” Another flame dies. The air is thick with sulfur. “I suppose if she knew about the theft, that could have put the girl at risk.”
“Well, there you go.”
“But only from your phantom perpetrator, kid, who you just ruled out. Anyway, three grams is barely a thimbleful. Certainly not enough to reliably kill this William fellow, even granting you the larger plot.”
Nor was Billy Three-Sticks in danger so long as he steered clear of his uncle, D.T. had said. And inside Charlie now, a thimble begins to empty: a little anthill of black dust, a tiny, ineffectual anticlimax. But then why would Nicky spend months puzzling over circuits and timers? Something breaks from him. A sob-slash-manic-cough. “I’m not insane, okay?”
“No one said you were.”
“And I’m not a criminal. I’m a loyal person. Be nice to me, and I’m loyal.”
“Charlie, I’m trying to be nice. Do you not see me sitting here burning my blessed fingers so you can see no one’s coming to get you?”
“But no, that’s not true, I’m the worst thing. A rat. You hear that? It’s footsteps—they’re coming to give me what I deserve.”
“That’s just bodies in the other cells getting restless, and honestly, kid, better they beat on the cinderblock than each other. Here, can you see this?”
“No.”
“I’m on my last match, so look close. That’s St. Jude. He’s been around my neck since long before you were born. In other words, I’ve had years to think about this. Justice doesn’t mean stomping out a person just because he’s done something wrong. Sometimes it means giving him a chance to set it right. I’m trying to give you—oh, for the love of …”
“Wait, say that again.”
“I’m going to need a salve.”
“No, the other. About justice. Oh, shit. Holy shit. I can see it now.” Because forget D.T.; what Nicky had said last week, in that house cleared of even its meager valuables, was that everybody had it coming. Charlie had thought it must be another figure of speech—Nobody escapes in the end—but if it wasn’t, that solved the timing problem right there: while the other Post-Humanists fled toward their fates, Nicky would remain in light. “That’s why you’d use a bomb and not a knife. That’s why you’d steal gunpowder … multiple victims, all at once.”
“Boy. One of us is sure fixated, I’ll give you that, Charlie. But all this pedaling is taking you farther away. Grams, is what the article says. It wouldn’t blow up a kewpie doll.”
Only Charlie’s hardly here anymore; he’s pushing down deeper in the darkness, thinking again of Mrs. Kotzwinkle on the importance of units. Hearing voices through the floor. “So how much powder would you need to kill three people at once, and maybe take out a house? Would kilograms do it?”
“Charlie, that’s not funny. With a kilo of the stuff, you could take out a city block.”
“But is that much enough to fill a duffelbag?”
For the first time, Pulaski sounds anxious. “Now you’re talking a whole neighborhood.”
“I saw the Rangers bag myself, going into the little house out back. Shit. I even helped prepare the way, dried out the floor, cleared the way for the fans. And when I left Nicky yesterday, he was on his way to deliver an invitation to Billy’s uncle. For tomorrow. Or tonight. Operation Demon Brother. The duffel’s full of black powder, kilograms of it.”
“Motive again, though, Charlie. Give me a motive for any of this.”
“Because he was in love with Sam. You said yourself that’s the best motive. They were in love, and she got shot, and Nicky thinks it’s the Hamilton-Sweeneys’ fault somehow, but also his own for getting mixed up with them. He was fucking her, okay?”
“That’s not the same thing.”
Yet Charlie knows blowing himself up is what he would have done, too, if he’d really loved her enough, or ever been serious about atonement. “Maybe not, fuck if I know. But I’m telling you, that’s his idea of justice now—to hell with everything. This Demon Brother guy’s going to come to East Third Street, and he’ll find a way to draw Billy Three-Sticks down there, too. As soon as all three of them are in the house, Nicky’s going to blow them all to kingdom come. And you still haven’t sent those cops.”
“I don’t have cops to send, Charlie. Not now that we’re in a blackout. Not for a story like that, without a shred of evidence.”
“I’m your shred. Why can’t you listen to me? You’ve got to listen.”
Again, there is the pounding noise. Like a giant at a fortress door. Then: “Geez, kid. I really wish you could have put all that together before the lights went out.”
DOWNTOWN & POINTS NORTH—CA. 8:00 P.M.
THE FIRST THING KEITH DOES after leaving the cop shop is find a payphone. He knows no one at the day camp’s going to pick up; the aftercare program’s start and end times, heretofore so hard to remember, are now emblazoned in neon across his frontal lobe. But after getting no answer, he takes a cab up to the school anyway, in case the kids are still waiting on the front steps … which they aren’t, because when has anything ever been as simple as Keith needs it to be? He does manage, however, via persistent pounding, to get someone to unlock the door. The streetlamps have come on, and a glinty whistle dangles in the dusk. A
ttached to it is a manchild in gym shorts whose every sentence ends up a question. Maybe there’s a simple explanation? Maybe Will and Cate decided just to walk home? Seeing Dad was two hours late? Or went over to their granddad’s, like last time? The even temper Keith prides himself on is evaporating. Anger comes pouring out, as yet uncut by fear. There are intimations of liability. He may even use the phrase “educational malpractice.” When it is proposed, though, that the manchild lead him back to the Assistant Head Counselor’s office so they can try getting in touch with the mother, Keith sees he’s in checkmate. No, yes, he is overreacting; they are indeed probably back home. Where he agrees now to betake himself, and no need to drag Regan into it again.
But that home—apartment, really—is as lifeless as a crypt. His message service has no messages. An impulsive call to her place goes unanswered, too. He has a sudden vision of an entire city of unused phones, receivers dangling from cords like hanged men in vacant houses. Of course, if the kids have tried to call here at any point in the last twelve hours, they will have gotten no answer, either. Where would he go, were he Will? What goes on behind that watchful face has always been a mystery. But Will is his mother’s child, rational above all else, and since no one’s at Regan’s, the rational thing, Keith sees, would indeed be for them to go wait at their grandfather’s, where there are sure at least to be servants to let them in, and which is infinitely closer, not a mile from the day camp if you cut across the Park. Yes, they’ll be there waiting at Bill and Felicia’s, or they’ll be en route, in which case maybe he can overtake them before any of this gets back to his soon-to-be-ex-wife.
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