“It was rape, Daddy. Rape that got her pregnant. The son of the man you merged with. Rape that I brought to you in your office that day, when all I could think about was wrecking a fucking wedding. Wrong after all, both of us—and if I managed to set the usurpation back a decade or two, so what? However it went between Regan and his protégé, Amory was always going to end up with strings to pull. But he wasn’t pulling my strings when I stood there in front of you, unfeeling, using Regan’s suffering for my own selfish purposes. I convinced myself that if you refused to see a problem, maybe it would go away. Daddy, I know you understand. I know you understand me.”
In truth, though, he knows no such thing. Because when, at last, on an impulse, he reaches out to touch his father’s hand, what shakes free is not an apology, or a condemnation, but a snore. Daddy has been asleep for some time now, to say nothing of that smell. Which means (William thinks—and it kills him) he’s going to get away with everything.
EAST VILLAGE—12:12 A.M.
CRUMMY ORPHEUS THAT HE IS, Mercer has resisted a last look back at the hospital. Even if the shopping cart weighs more than you’d think, even if the man inside it is paralyzed, Jenny will be okay, he knows; this side of his own Mama, he’s never met a more stubborn girl. Anyway, what has today taught him if not that all he can do for other people essentially amounts to very little? If William is dead, he is dead.
Yet a strange thing happens as he drifts south and east: nothing. Or rather, everything. There is more than one way to be out of time, it seems, and now he is stranded between two worlds, one in which a bomb has gone off and one in which it hasn’t, at least not here. To judge by what stands around him, William still lives. But to the extent that it only means less finality and more heartache, Mercer is no longer even sure if this is the world he wants to be in. If he’s ever loved William enough.
In the breast pocket of his shirt is the last joint from his motherlode. He’s never quite adjusted to the fact that in New York you can walk down the street smoking this stuff openly, but now he thinks what the hell, he’s invisible anyway. He lights it. Coughs. Inhales again. It doesn’t fail him. Where usually a high creates thought-connections that lead elaborately away from the moment he’s in, this one pulls him back from the brink of the future. A façade on Fourteenth Street has sprung a hole, through which other holes shuttle in and out, laden with free groceries. Alarms and sirens wail in clashing keys, but no one notices until the cops are upon them.
He walks on, past flashlights and floating cigarettes, sticking as close to the street as possible. He hardly recognizes these as the same sidewalks he wandered back when he lived with Carlos, not only because of the blackout, but because so much of what he’d seen then he’d refused to admit to seeing. The denim boys on roller skates, the hustlers in twos and threes with their come-hither glances. All of them, like William, were willing to endure a certain quantum of danger in pursuit of pleasure, or vice versa. A solitary moped whizzes past, its headlamp streaking the bars of a wrought-iron fence. The word that occurs, spectral, is probably not the right one for how Mercer feels. How he feels is: like a human pinball. Then a voice out of the darkness rasps, “Hey, you.” Meaning me, he thinks. Meaning him.
He has made his way, as best he can determine, to the northern entrance of Tompkins Square Park, where he once heard Ex Post Facto play. It’s a wonder he hasn’t thought to look here for William before tonight; the place is notorious (he’d subsequently pretended not to have learned) as a spot for cruising and drugs and worse. From the dense shadows beyond the gate comes the smack of skin on skin, followed by laughter and swift steps ebbing among the trees. Music somewhere. The voice speaks up again. “Yeah, you. You got any more of that?”
“Any more of what?”
“ ‘Any more of what,’ he says.” Mercer’s unsure whether this is meant for him or for some third party, also invisible. “Of what you’re smoking, Your Majesty.”
He hesitates. “How do I know you’re not a cop?”
At this, the laughter ramifies into what’s definitely more than one voice. They sound half-stoned already. Mercer’s roach makes a neon arc as he extends it, less out of a sense of camaraderie than in hopes of satisfying them and thus ending the interaction. The joint flares, crackling, and he can just make out liquid eyes in a face his mother would have called “high yellow.” Then, like the Cheshire Cat’s, they’re gone. Instead of returning to him, the joint drifts farther back, to be inhaled by another man, or boy, it sounds like. Mercer’s face is heating up, but why be embarrassed? Mama’s not around to see him, nor could she, were she. “Just so you know, I don’t have any money,” his mouth says, because some rational part of him still thinks it’s worth getting this out there. But his interlocutors apparently don’t give a shit. “The end is nigh, brother. We’re just trying to have a good time.”
Uh-oh. Walk away now, Mercer thinks. Trouble is, he’s grown attached to this joint. And so, as if some more powerful narcotic has been mixed in with the dope, he’s following the voices and the dwindling orange bloom of it back along the path. There’s a bend, which as he rounds it gives way to more light, a thousand feathers curling through the leaves. Then the vegetation clears, and he can make out bodies, beefy, hairy, some of them sans shirt. Music thumps from a ghetto blaster wedged into the crotch of a tree. An exfoliated disco ball dangles among the branches, and a man in leather chaps and a train conductor’s cap plays a flashlight across it, which is where the light comes from. Well, that and a trashcan someone has set unfragrantly ablaze. Where the flicker barely reaches, men hold each other and sway. Mercer blinks to see if they’ll go away. “You want a beer or something?” says the boy holding the joint. His shirt’s open at the chest, which glows like molded brass.
“I guess.” Mercer hopes the diversion will allow him to turn and go. But he finds he can’t, even after the boy has disappeared into the dark behind a bench.
Waiting, he tries not to look out of place, to make too much eye contact or too little—tries, that is, not to see the melding of bodies in the underbrush, most of them dark like his own, the shocking pink flashes of tongue and palm. At not seeing, he’s had lots of practice. There used to be a path made of flagstones between Mama’s kitchen and the vegetable garden. One spring, heavy rains had loosened them in their footings, so that you could see around each one a little black gap just perfect for a penknife. He’d gotten the idea to pry one up, and when it came free—a wet, sucking sound—he’d found the verso teeming with shiny-backed creepy-crawlies asquirm in the blacker mud. One of the things he fears most is that beneath the masonry of his own consciousness lies some similarly primeval carnival of appetite, and so, from the moment he first passed through Port Authority, he’s been patrolling the borders of his thoughts, tamping down the flooring, keeping things cool and dry and orderly. And perhaps (it occurs to him) cutting himself off from what’s available for his art. Or does it explode?
“I brung you this.” The boy is back. A beer bottle, its label damp and peeling, insinuates itself into Mercer’s hand.
“Brought.”
“Huh?”
“The participle.” The boy stares puzzled at his flame-licked profile. Mercer wonders if William used to think of him this way: as a boy. I don’t drink, he wants to say now, as he said then, but what would Walt Whitman do? Obviously, Old Walt would take up the burden, bear the brunt. Bringing the bottle to his lips, he nearly chips a tooth.
“You’ve got to … here, let me …”
The boy does a thing where he uses his own bottle to dislodge the cap of Mercer’s. Mercer repeats the swigging motion more cautiously. What’s inside might as well be beechwood-aged horse piss, but in the last twenty-four hours, he’s been chased, cross-examined, and nearly sent through a windshield, all without eating; he can be forgiven if his mouth is dry. “How old are you?”
“How old are you?” the boy asks.
“I asked you first. Twenty-five.”
“Nineteen,” th
e boy says, which, Mercer not having been born yesterday, probably means the same age as his students, fifteen, sixteen. Former students, rather.
“And this is where you spend your time, at nineteen?”
“You mean with my friends? Why wouldn’t it be? I’m not some window-shopper who has to hustle back to my closet every night.”
“I’m sorry. I just don’t have much experience of how this is supposed to go.”
“We could dance, for starters. You like to dance?”
Not anymore, Mercer is thinking, when the boy shoves him out into the churn of bodies. Between two tenements beyond the treeline, the moon should be luminous and precise, except oily smoke from the trashcan keeps interfering. You can dance…, the radio insists, but the best he can manage is a sort of shuffle from foot to foot in time to the boy’s more expressive gyrations. The closer they get to the flames, the hotter it is, and the boy undoes yet another button of his shirt. The Dionysian torso moves closer. Mercer takes several more swigs of beer, trying to use his bottle-arm’s elbow as a baffle, but the boy, a dab hand at seduction, finds his way through, and even as Mercer’s heart clenches, his lower body brings him close enough for wrists to rest on shoulders, for a finger to loosely trace the nap at the back of his head. He closes his eyes in what might be perceived as surrender. Maybe the point here is that he does not see clearly. That he never saw clearly.
Then a blue light throbs inside his eyelids. He has a feeling its source is something he doesn’t want to know about, but as the outer world grows noisier, he can’t help opening his eyes. Beyond the shoulders of this stranger, high beams are zooming along a path into the park, rendering it not nearly so tangled or secret as Mercer’s been imagining. Another flash of blue. The park is closed, says a voice over a loudspeaker. And then what sounds like: Don’t eat ’shrooms. At the circle’s edges, some men dive for underbrush, but most stand their ground, stunned in the lights of the Finest. And among them, a dozen yards away, he notices for the first time a lone woman: Is she some kind of cop, too? It seems at any rate improbable that he should cross paths with the law multiple times in a single day. But then, what if this isn’t the law, and his search for William has just been one more projection? What if it’s really him they’ve been after all along, these powers in their various disguises?
ON THE ROAD—?
AS FAR AS THE DEMON BROTHER WENT—or Ghoul, or whatever he was to himself in his secret life—that part had been simple enough. The man came on like some master of the black arts, but really extortion was just a function of the strength of your material. And the material he had on Amory Gould would make even an angel cry. He’d kept a careful archive of their entanglement from the start; what he’d sent along yesterday had been, as he’d put it in the attached letter, “just a taste.” But he could no longer be sure how he’d ever hoped to lure Billy Three-Sticks, too, to a high floor of the family building. Or quite remember why. From certain angles, it looked downright ungrateful. In the wasteland of metro Boston, at thirteen, fourteen, his big dream had been of a gun to his own head, putting him out of his misery—a misery that by sophomore year of college was indistinguishable from everybody else’s. Brass Tactics had pointed the way out of all that. Out of college, but also out of formlessness, powerlessness, the brute facticity he’d been beating his head against. Can’t make it better? Make art. So yeah, there had been a time when, to protect Billy, he’d have thrown himself on the blast. But his education must be ongoing, because now he’s on the run, and he can’t even say for how long; his clock’s stolen battery died somewhere back near the Delaware Water Gap. He was searching for the time on the radio, in fact, when he’d picked up that little blip about a blackout. It explained the snuffing of the city lights—and seemed to cement his triumph. Then more foothills turned the signal to crap. He’d pre-rolled a dozen joints to take the edge off the pills, but has since been burning through them to mark time until the zero hour. Only now there’s just one left, and he’s getting this vibe of insurrection from the back of the van. Maybe what’s needed is a breather, at least until morning, when they can get themselves organized again, the unruly phalanges closing into a fist. And look: right up here’s a rest stop.
He pulls off the highway and onto a ramp that cuts back among some trees. Sees an empty gravel lot, picnic tables under a lone streetlight. The little lavatory kiosk is locked for the night, but the vending machine out front’s still lit, just waiting for someone with a disregard for property and a bad case of the munchies to come along and smash the glass. First, though, he can’t help turning the radio back on and flipping around for further word from Manhattan. Out here you get evangelical preachers and album-oriented rock and ad after ad—and as the analgesia of the pot wears off, he discovers a pit in his stomach. Or a pit in the pit he’d carried out of that building. He’s sure it will go away once he confirms he’s finally accomplished something—an explosion at the heart of civilization. No gimmes, no takebacks, the kids used to say. Antacid tablets coat as they soothe. Crystal Blue Persuasion, hey hey. We will make buying a new or used car truck or van so easy. But he’s too jacked up to stay with anything anymore, the dial keeps turning. Then amid the contextless barrage of information the sense of the roach singeing his fingers awakens him to the fact that he is alone. He opens the door. Leaves it open, so the blown speakers can keep filling his head with crap in which maybe the nugget he waits for waits. The thing he’s done: revenge for the Blight Zone, for Sam, for the general fuckedness of this life. He climbs down to join his friends.
It’s cool out here, a smell like a lilac bush or something. Enough starlight to see D.T.’s got Sol laid out flat on the ground. And the stars, they’ve always creeped Nicky out, made him feel like a nothing. “I say we make camp. We can push on in a few hours, once we see how the land lays back there.” He’s aware of some shakiness in the formulation, but can’t identify what it is. It’s like when he was a little kid that year in Guatemala and Dad broke his jaw because he’d come back from the PX with jamón instead of jabón.
D. Tremens looks up from where Sol’s puking. “Get a grip,” he says, so gently it’s like he’s been practicing. “I know you heard that thing about the blackout.”
So the signal hadn’t died fast enough, after all. Maybe that accounts for the whispering. D.T. feels it too: the sense of destiny achieved. “Yeah, but who cares, D.T.? If the city’s in an uproar, that just gets us closer to where we want to go.”
“It doesn’t make you wonder if something’s gone wrong back there?”
“I’m telling you, something’s gone right—Weltgeist in action.”
“The newslady didn’t say anything about a bomb. We’re way past midnight now.”
And it’s true there are a couple of loose ends he couldn’t bring himself to clip so neatly. (What had Sewer Girl taken him for, some kind of monster?) But this was why you compartmentalized in the first place. D.T., for example, had been kept in the dark not only about the location, but also about the real time everything was to go down. Midnight would have been more symbolic, ideally the stroke of 7/7, if he’d managed to track down Billy, but every system, if it’s not to collapse under its own contradictions, needs some randomness built in. A clinamen. Sometimes a system will even generate its own.
“D.T., you genius. You’re still carrying a watch? I could kiss you. Have we hit 2:30 yet?”
“Nicky, I’m just going by the fact that we’re in the middle of Pennsylvania. You guys trashed every timepiece we had getting the thing to work, remember?”
Fuck.
“But sure, say it’s 2:30, it’s 2:45, it’s four in the morning, what difference does that make? Can’t you see we’ve got to get Sol to a doctor?”
Sol himself doesn’t speak, but his eyes supplicate upward, like a puppy’s who thinks you must be its master just ’cause you’ve given it a kick or two. Maybe D.T.’s been right all this time, maybe they should belay three thousand years of Western thought and make room for the c
omrade to lie down properly on the ratty carpet back there. But he’s got a few choice volumes to share with anyone who thinks History is made of a thousand little kindnesses.
“Yep, get some shut-eye and keep trucking. What say, Sol—you up for it?”
It takes Sol only a few seconds to hoist his undamaged thumb in a feeble thumbs-up.
“See? Sol understands the magnitude of what we’ve achieved. We’ve got to keep moving, this is part of what you—wait. Quiet.”
“Nobody’s talking but you, Nicky. Nobody’s been talking.”
Except he is already crouched by the driver’s-side door, the better to hear a news flash. The bomb? No, what he hears again is just: power failure. Eastern seaboard in midst of largest blackout in history. Only this time with a cause, lightning strikes in Westchester, a pair, a freak coincidence. And now it’s coming back to him, that other flash of pure stochasm. The orange of that boat. The white. Those little bottles. Not that you shouldn’t act to eliminate a threat, but he’d known from watching the reporter sit and brood behind a pillar that he’d never really been one. Just another drunk, like D.T. Another loser, like S.G. A failed artist, a poor dreamer, and far too easily scared. He didn’t mean for the guy to die—who hadn’t even had the third ’zine. But then out on the deck, there was the lanky body going over the side. And as he looked down into the fast black water, it seemed once again that there was no outside, no end to the emptiness. The world was the world, perpendicular to any attempt to make or do anything but damage. And fuck Billy, he’d thought, for dreaming otherwise. For the way he could just stare at his shoes and fill any space he was in. That had been the moment he knew why he had to hunt Billy down again, to inveigle him onto the scene, too. Which means, simultaneously, the instant the wheels had begun to come off. As they are coming off his attention now, because right as a voice is saying, At the tone, the time will be—Sol begins to yack again, loudly, on the gravel. And as quickly as it came, the signal goes back to static. Fuck. It was a single syllable they’d said, right? Two o’clock? Or is it already three?
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