“Did either of you catch that?” He waits for someone to refocus on the real problem here, but now D.T. and Sol just crouch and vomit, respectively, and this is all he needs to remember there may indeed be something binding them together. D.T.’s not as dumb as he acts, or possibly even as high. Maybe he’s convinced Sol they’ve been sold out, proposed a hasty plan B. Maybe to go join back up with Sewer Girl, wherever she ran off to. Sol will be too ill to go on, and they’ll make a play for the van, leaving him here like an animal, in the dark. “You know, the pigs aren’t going to go any easier on you for jumping ship after the fact.”
“Who said anything about jumping ship?” says D.T. “That’s what I’m telling you, man. We’re in this together. We’ve got to get Sol help.”
“Sol’s coming with me. Isn’t that right, Sol?” But Sol pretends to have passed out. What is even happening here? Why is everything always falling apart?
“You can go on, Nicky, if that’s what you need. But leave us the van, at least.”
Here it is, if he still cared: proof of their conspiracy. He looks across the clearing. There, between the kiosk and the little creek burbling in its defile, is a payphone on a stand, its lightbulb burned out, busted, or otherwise nonexistent. He now perceives with his higher faculties that D.T. lied at that last puke stop about not having a dime. The very first thing they’ll do after ditching him is call the cops. How long could he survive out here, in the woods, were it to come to a manhunt? Not long, is the answer, because he can’t get the city out of his blood. “Fuck you. It’s my van.”
He realizes he means it. If Operation Demon Brother has indeed foundered, then the Econoline and the books inside are all he has to show for his own existence, and he’s not about to give them up, even if the van is by most lights Sol’s. And before the thought can be finalized, he is moving to cut off lines of approach.
“Come on, Nicky. You’re in no shape to drive anyway. Why don’t you give me the keys?”
“You can’t have them,” he repeats. “They’re mine.”
“Will you listen to yourself?”
He almost falls for it. But consistency is as somebody said a hobgoblin, one you can’t let trip you up, not if you aim to get a single thing done in this world. And for how long has Nicky Chaos been trying to teach them not to be so credulous? They are even in their mutiny basically asking permission. When all there is, he’s been telling them, is the power to will. Quickly, before they can adjust, he’s back in the driver’s seat closing the door, fumbling with the key, that deeper darkness in the dark. Palms swat zombielike at windows, flatten pale against the glass. Someone yells over the static. Then the speed overpowers the pot, the engine catches, and he is fishtailing over the gravel, leaving behind his former vassals, D.T. and poor Sol Grungy of the doleful countenance. And finally just a long plume of dust to fatten in the moonlight.
LITTLE ITALY—??
IT’S NOT EXACTLY GOING TO SET THE WORLD ON FIRE, their hobbled pace, but in fits and starts, it’s quickened, as has the guy’s recall. Mike, is his name. Age? Twenty-seven. No, twenty-eight. From West Virginia, originally. And for the last few years, Bay Ridge. Asked why then they were headed toward Chinatown, he seems to sputter. He had to find a new place on short notice, he explains, and he was on a budget. His job—he reads government reports for a living, condenses them into slightly smaller reports—hardly pays. He’d been walking home tonight to save a subway token. But it could be worse; he had cousins who were carnies. Anyway, he’s fine to go it alone, he’s not in pain … though there is, Jenny thinks, something a little pained about Mike, or at least hangdog. And every so often he stops to kind of squint into the darkness where her face should be.
They’re just descending into the oldest and narrowest part of the city when they meet a more serious block. A knot of several dozen young men has gathered on the corner, muscle-shirted, sort of Knights of Columbus, lit by idling cars. Her instinct is to cut east, leave a wide berth, but already the chaos has begun to form itself into lines. There’s a strange New York compulsion, in moments of bewilderment or fury or fear, to queue, which must be hers now, too. As she steps closer, she sees something being passed hand to hand out of a storefront. Are these the orderly early stages of a riot? Or have the owners of this bakery, their refrigerator cases disabled by the power cut, decided to treat it as a promotional opportunity? At any rate, within a minute, some jayvee mafioso has handed her a paper plate. Then another. On them sweat heavy wedges of pale yellow cheesecake. Little groans of pleasure rise above the horns. “I’ll be damned.” She turns back to Mike, who’s propped himself on a parking meter. “Here. Eat. The calories will do us both good.”
The cheesecake is the Italian kind, made with ricotta or maybe mascarpone, and as good as Jenny remembers from other times, but also more complicated, as the present so often is, with a sweetness that recedes deeper into richness the more she tries to savor it. With no fork, she has to use fingers. And as the lushly textured filling coats her palate, the stranger at her side seems to be remembering, too. “My girlfriend used to make something that tasted like this. Only Uzbek,” he adds, as if the taste were drawing him back. He takes a last bite. Looks for a trashcan. “Little blintzes, with the sweet cheese. After a night of dancing at the Odyssey, two in the morning, we’d come home and eat them straight from the fridge.”
He resumes their walk, fully under his own steam. “Now, bam, this is my life, on my own again. I never saw myself living solo in a basement in Manhattan, but I guess everything in this city is different than I imagined it would be.” He turns to her. “Sorry if I’m boring you. Same old story.”
No, she wants to say, keep going. But from up ahead comes a high whine, a crack, a conflagration of blue and red. “More light!” a child is crying on the far side of what should be either Broome or Grand. An old man bends to touch a long match to the mound of darkness before him. Out of its top erupt ten thousand sparks, like a waterfall in reverse, lighting the lower landings of fire escapes before succumbing to entropy and night. Reductive but true: at any given hour, the hawkers of Chinatown will be hawking, the mah-jongg players mah-jongging, indolent fish lazing in the tanks that front the seafood restaurants. And special occasions, all the way back to the Tang, call for fireworks. A pang of memory. Or is that the recollection of this other man studying her again, trying to pierce the dark? “What.”
“Nothing,” he says. “Just, this is my block.” As the light fizzles back down, he points to a sign for a street she didn’t know existed. Or an alley—asphalt running right up to the building fronts.
He limps into the closing shadows, and she falls into step behind. To people like her dad, watching from afar, overpopulation seems like the big problem of urban existence, but really, it’s desertion you have to look out for. Crowds teem under blazing sparklers a couple blocks away, but here all lights are off, all stores locked down. She should make sure he’s safe. Keys jingle, then stop in a doorway. “I guess we part ways here.”
“I’d at least like to see you get in okay,” she says, after a moment.
“But you can’t stand here waiting. Any lunatic could happen along.”
She knows they barely know each other, but if recent history is any guide, it’s Mike who should be nervous. “Looks like I’ll have to come with you, then.”
“My place is unimpressive.”
“Points for honesty,” she says, following him into a foyer ten degrees hotter than the street. It smells like someone’s been raising cattle in here. From two or three flights up comes the sound of an old person singing in Chinese, but without moon or stars she can see nothing. This is evidently not a problem for Mike, who finds her hand and places it on a railing angled down. Careful. The steps are narrow.
After a dozen or so of these they emerge into a room lit only by the pilot light under a water heater. As far as she can tell, it’s a cookie-cutter bachelor’s den. There is a small shelf of books, a minifridge. Along one wall, a kitchenet
te. “Let me get you some water,” she offers. But Mike has already lowered himself to his mattress, with a groan that might have been building for years. Unable to find where he keeps the glasses, she settles for a rag. She wets it in the sink and brings it over and kneels to place it on his forehead. He catches her wrist. His hand is steadier now. For a second, she is afraid. He says, “You don’t have to keep this up, Jenny.”
“Oh, stop.”
“I’m saying, with the shopping cart, that was already above and beyond.”
“I owed you that much.” Then she bites her lip. He is still holding on to her free hand, but where, she wonders, will she go if he releases it? Is she supposed to walk forty-odd blocks home in the dark? And why does she care? It can’t be any less risky than what she’s doing now. “Seeing as how I was responsible in the first place. Mike, I was the one who ran you over.”
The hand drops. “What? You said it was an accident—”
“It was.”
“I could have died. Shit. I knew there was something.”
“You’re fine, you said so yourself. Just a little banged up. And if you think back you’ll see I didn’t lie. I just … elided.”
“Talked your way in here on false pretenses, is what you did. Where do you get off?”
She stifles a huff. Refolds the rag to tuck the sweaty side away, but he’s propped himself up again, and won’t let her return it to his forehead. “Look. You were telling me how it’s a long way from Appalachia,” she says. “Well, imagine growing up outside L.A. with your dad designing airplanes and your mom barely speaking English. My whole life, I’ve been trying to get off the map that was laid out for me. You know the concept of utopia?”
“You’re changing the subject.”
“I’m not, I’m trying to explain. I spent my pothead teens and my early twenties committed to this idea of a better world. After that I had to scale it down to the size of a city. Then even further, to almost nothing. But I guess I’ve stayed so wrapped up in the idea of like doing something for the people in my head that I ended up not paying attention to the people right in front of me. One of which ended up being you.”
“Jenny, did you have anyone check your vital signs? Because what you’re saying makes no sense.”
Well, obviously, because making sense would require further unpacking: Mercer and William, Pulaski and Charlie, and beneath that, those nights when she’d go over to Richard’s apartment and he’d move stacks of paper off the couch to give her room to stretch out. Always more to unpack. Out goes the breath. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever read the Upanishads.”
“I’m not some kind of Asia fetishist, if that’s how you have me pegged. I see that you’re—”
“American. My parents are Vietnamese.”
“I was going to say a would-be intellectual, or righter of wrongs. But I don’t understand what that’s got to do with you hitting me with a car and then jawing your way into my apartment.”
Something turns over in her brain. “Maybe I don’t understand myself.”
For another moment, he stays silent on the mattress. “You’re stuck with your version of the night, and I’m going to have to be stuck with mine, you’re saying.”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying, no matter where I start, or how I spin it, it’s not going to help either of us settle the question of guilt. So maybe sometimes it’s better just to follow your intuition that you’re no more or less real and free and fucked up than anyone else. I mean, we’re here in this apartment, you with your bruises and me with your impression that I must have some kind of cranial trauma, but at least you’re alive. Am I making sense now?” She reaches out to touch his face, his sad, wan, confused face. And then, perhaps confused herself, leans down to kiss him, full on the mouth.
MIDTOWN—2:19 A.M.
THIS IS JUST THE KIND of best-foot-forward shtick his orthopedist has warned about. The kid in front, the attendant in between, and himself, Pulaski, wincing along behind, in an endless black column getting hotter with his huffing. In fact, his foot keeps not making it all the way up to the next stair, knocking stupidly against the edge. If he’d been thinking more carefully, he would have brought some peanuts for energy. Also water. And another flashlight; at the start of their climb, Charlie had asked to requisition the elevator attendant’s, but Pulaski, feeling bad about having bullied the guy, had said no, that would be wrong. Now, if the kid should glance back, all he’s going to see are two white beams, and not the way Pulaski’s putting his poor body on the line.
Which is not even to speak of his pension. In the car on the way up here, the two-way kept crackling with calls for anyone off duty to report to the nearest precinct. Up to that point, Pulaski might have pled guilty only to some procedural liberties, but now he was crossing into outright dereliction of duty. Or, with the flash of his gun downstairs, Class D felony. And for what? A scenario so screwy it wouldn’t pass muster at a movie house, much less with Internal Affairs. How real can this bomb be, after all, if Charlie keeps stopping every few flights to suck on that inhaler? And here it comes again, a goony echo. Some partnership they make, the cripple, the asthmatic. And as they resume their climb, Charlie hews to the wall, away from the railing—acrophobic, to boot.
In his defense, though: you have to weigh probabilities against consequences. Even a single kilogram of gunpowder on an upper floor could bring the whole pile down on the surrounding blocks, overbuilt with residences in the boom years. Ash, dust, falling rock, fire. Not that he’d imagined it would be placed this high. Even so, the first thing Pulaski had done upon leading the kid out of lockup was call Sherri to warn her it might be a while. No, he couldn’t explain, honey, not right now—only there was no answer. As the line rang and rang, he knew that she’d finally done it. Gone to her sister’s in Philly. Left him. So add her, his only family, to the stack of chips teetering on this sorry table.
And now his hands are tightening their grip on the railing, hauling him up with muscles years of backyard laps have hardened. The elevator attendant lingers on a landing, panting, but Pulaski prods him along. And when Charlie takes advantage of another pause a half-dozen flights up to snatch away the attendant’s weakening flashlight, Pulaski lets him. Who gives a poop anymore about Internal Affairs? This overworked muscle, his mind or heart, feels freer than it has in years. And of this, at least, the Sherri who used to know him might approve. He reaches out now through the solid walls of the stairshaft and over the eight million stories and the harbor and the landfills to where she’d be by now, a pair of headlights zooming south on the Jersey Turnpike. Come back, he thinks. I’ll be better. That is, if he doesn’t end up in jail. Or dead. By the time Charlie’s ill-gotten flashlight starts to peter out ahead, even the dark has ceased to matter. Larry Pulaski carries his own light. It streams through his pores, he feels, lets him read the number on the door the attendant leans against, wheezing: “Stay back,” he says, and draws his weapon, and pushes through.
He isn’t sure what he’s expected, but not this: a bulletin board with a few announcements, a dead electric fan, and a strange whirring sound, as of an engine. He can’t find the source anywhere, and otherwise, the hall appears empty. “Where are we?”
“Dunno,” the attendant manages between breaths. “I brought some reporters up here earlier today. But aside from press conferences, I don’t think anybody’s really used this floor since ’75. The executives all moved down to 30 so they could start the renovations.”
“You couldn’t have mentioned this ten flights ago?”
“You had a gun.”
The whirring grows louder, and when Pulaski turns, his flashlight finds a window that should be shut but is canted open like a door. A shape breaks away from the streaks of light on the glass and comes winging low across the hallway. It is huge and black, as if dipped in tar. And as the three of them duck, a new voice, female, pipes up from the shadows. “Oh!” The light swings around, back and forth. When it settles, it is on a
girl in a Rangers home jersey, crouched behind the stairhead door.
EAST VILLAGE—CA. 2:00 A.M.
… AND WHAT YOU’RE FEELING THEN IS—
Despair. Absolute despair.
Which you’re suggesting is connected to the tragic sense, which up to that point you’ve said you felt deficient in.
Is that what we’re talking about?
It is.
I’m sorry, Mercer thinks, but I seem to have lost the thread.
It is years later, and it isn’t. He is backed up against a transformer box in an East Village park, shielding his eyes against the blue waves of the police lights. He is also, simultaneously, in a crimson-carpeted room somewhere, in a folding chair placed opposite the folding chair of the man asking the questions. In his time away, the imaginary interviewer has changed again—he is now a slight, dark-haired man, graying at the temples, with a closed-off posture and some kind of radio in his breast pocket. Only the face (and of course the ontological status of any of this, of Mercer’s feeling of great compassion for and wisdom about himself, looking back) remains obscure.
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