The City, Not Long After

by Pat Murphy

  The woman was watching the glitter drift through the city streets. “On my way into the city, I saw a crowd of men made of metal. When the wind blew, they muttered to each other.”

  “That’s a sculpture by Zatch and Gambit,” Danny-boy said. “They call it ‘Men Talking with Nothing to Say.’”

  “I heard music—deep hollow notes that moaned like the wind.”

  “That’s Gambit’s wind organ. It plays music when wind blows across the pipes.”

  “I saw a metal spider the size of a dog. It ran past me down the center of the street.”

  “The Machine built that. He builds a lot of independent machines. Some people don’t like the m, but they’re all right. They won’t hurt you or anything.”

  He glanced at her face. She wet her lips like a nervous cat, hesitating. Then she said, “I saw the angel that took my mother. Did The Machine build that?”

  “An angel? What do you mean?”

  She described the angel, her eyes shining with excitement. Reluctantly, he shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything like that. The Machine could have built it, I suppose, but I don’t think so. I’ll ask him for you.”

  She nodded eagerly and took the globe from his hand, slipping it back into the saddlebags.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked her. She nodded. “I usually do my cooking up on the roof. Come on—I’ll show you.”

  She followed him up the stairs to the third floor and out onto the roof. Back before the Plague, this had been a sort of roof garden, joining the old Saint Francis Hotel to the newer tower. It was wedged between the old structure and the new one, protected from wind on two sides. Danny-boy used the area as a kitchen and outdoor workspace. Against the wall of the old hotel, he had set up a hibachi. On fine days he cooked in the open air, building a fire with scavenged lumber. He started the fire and skinned the rabbit that he had snared earlier that day.

  The woman sat with her legs dangling over the edge of the roof, kicking her heels against the side of the building. Danny-boy sat beside her, waiting for the fire to die down to coals. Jezebel lay between them, asleep in a patch of sunlight.

  The sun was going down, leaving Danny-boy with the wistful feeling of imminent loss. The air was filled with possibilities. A gull swooped low over the edge of the roof, and the light of the setting sun tinted its wings with tones of purple and magenta. The sky was a deep blue. Here and there, plumes of dark smoke rose to paint lazy question marks on the blue. The streaks of dirty smoke only made the blue seem more pure.

  “How many people live here?” she asked him. “I don’t know. Maybe a hundred or so.”

  “How many used to live here?”

  He shook his head. “Better ask Ms. Migsdale that. Or Books—he might know.”

  The woman rubbed Jezebel’s ears, and the dog’s tail thumped against the roof in a steady rhythm.

  “You like dogs?” he asked her.

  She nodded. “We had a dog back home. He’s dead now.”

  “I found Jezebel. Her mother was a wild dog. I found her and her brothers in the basement of a house. They whimpered and yapped at me, and tried to suck on my fingers.”

  “Where was their mother?”

  Danny-boy shrugged. “Dead, I suppose. I watched for a day, and she didn’t come back. So I took the pups and fed them on milk until they could eat solid food. Duff has the other two: he took them in exchange for the milk. But Jezebel was the best of the litter.”

  Jezebel leaned toward the woman’s hand, and she scratched under the dog’s chin. “You always take in strays?” the woman asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “Wouldn’t you?”

  She thought for a moment. “Dogs maybe, but not people.”

  “Emerald took me in,” he said. “I was only about three when the Plague killed my parents. I remember seeing them lying there dead and I ran away, crying. Emerald found me and she took care of me. People are all right.”

  “My mother trusted people,” the woman said in a low voice. “I remember when I was a kid, a trader came to our house and offered to trade a few pints of kerosene for a sack of almonds. Said he had a craving for some nuts, and we needed the kerosene. My mother went into the shed to get the nuts. He followed her and when she set down her rifle to fill the sack, he grabbed her. I was not long outside, and I heard her scream.” The woman hesitated for a moment, her hand buried in Jezebel’s thick fur. “I grabbed the hatchet from the woodpile, and I hit him. Just the way I would have chopped a tree, I hit his legs, and when he fell I hit his head. My mother was crying; her shirt was ripped open. There was blood everywhere. We buried him in the garden with no gravestone. We took his horses and his wagon, and I learned to ride.”

  Danny-boy made an involuntary move toward her, and she looked up, a warning clear in her eyes. “People aren’t all right. They never liked us. We were strangers and they never liked us.” Jezebel nudged the woman’s hand, and she continued stroking the dog.

  “Sometimes people are all right,” Danny-boy said. She shrugged, but did not reply.

  Danny-boy checked the coals and placed the grate over the fire. He cut the rabbit carcass into pieces and laid the meat on the grate. Juice hissed on the coals.

  “Look there,” the woman said suddenly. A hummingbird, attracted by the woman’s red shirt, hovered a few feet from the edge of the roof. Danny-boy could hear the buzz of its wings. The feathers at its throat were the iridescent blue-green of a dewdrop on a blade of grass.

  The woman smiled at the small bird. It circled once, then darted away. “He thought I was a flower,” she said. “He got that wrong.” Danny-boy tended the fire, and the meat cooked. After a time, they ate dinner. The rabbit tasted of wood smoke and they ate with their hands from china plates that Danny-boy had taken from the hotel kitchen long ago.

  The sun set and twilight breezes played over the roof. The sky had darkened, but the stars were not yet visible. The street below was empty, except for a cat that ghosted along the gutter, heading toward the garden where it might find mice among the vegetables. “Sometimes I feed the cats,” Danny-boy said.

  The woman scraped the leftover bones onto one plate. “I’ll do that,” she said. Danny-boy watched without comment as she took the plate and headed down the stairs. From the edge of the roof, he watched her step through the hotel’s side door. She seemed a part of the twilight.

  The woman set the plate down and sat on the edge of the curb, becoming motionless, a part of the street. Danny-boy watched from the roof. In the doorways and gutters, he thought he saw movement. Cats were gathering: lean shadows with whiskers, sneak thieves, scavengers who were battered like boxers who had seen better days. They slipped like flowing water from the bushes, from the doorways. A black tomcat crept up to the plate, seized the largest bone, and retreated. The woman did not move. A slim gray female moved in, her belly against the ground. Keeping her eyes on the woman, she picked at the scraps delicately. A scrawny calico darted from the gutter to join her.

  Danny-boy watched from the roof. Tiger had said of the woman: “She acts like she was raised by wolves.” Danny-boy had denied it, defending the woman and saying that she was just shy: it would take her some time to get used to having so many people around. As he watched the woman and the cats, together in the twilight, he doubted his own words.

  PART 2

  The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street

  “A general definition of civilization: a civilized society is exhibiting the five qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art, peace.”

  —Alfred North Whitehead

  “We are mad in a very different way.”

  —Max Ernst

  CHAPTER 9

  THE WOMAN WOKE UP SLOWLY, drifting lazily toward consciousness like a hawk soaring on a thermal updraft. She was warm and something soft was beneath her. Her shoulder ached, but the pain was distant, and she had grown used to it. She wondered vaguely where she was.

  She opened her eyes and saw a white ceiling. On a carved woode
n border where the ceiling met the wall, plump cherubs flitted among wreaths of flowers.

  Silently, she slipped from bed and dressed. She peered through the window. The sun wasn’t up yet. Union Square was dimly visible in the faint light that preceded dawn. She found her crossbow and knife on a chair in the corner of the room.

  In the outer room Danny-boy, wrapped in a blue wool blanket, slept on a pile of Oriental rugs. Jezebel lifted her head to watch the woman go, but did not follow.

  Outside, the city was gray with fog. The skyscrapers of downtown caught the first few rays of the rising sun. Reluctant to return to the bleak canyons of downtown but too restless to stay put, she headed away from the tall buildings. It was a good time of day for rabbits, if she could find the right place to hunt.

  She walked steadily, glad of the cool air. A few blocks from the hotel, the neighborhood changed—instead of shops and restaurants, houses stood shoulder to shoulder along both sides of the street. She stared at the houses as she walked. In a way, she found them more disconcerting than the skyscrapers. People had lived in these houses, but surely there could never have been enough people to fill them all. She could not imagine so many people. House after house after house—each one reflecting a different personality.

  From the tiny yard of a red brick house, low juniper bushes stretched their wiry branches across the cracked sidewalk stones. Broad-leafed hedges blocked the windows and the front door of a boxy stucco apartment house. In the flower bed beside a turreted Victorian, English lavender struggled for space among the grass and wild mustard. Two molded concrete lions glared from a riot of rose—great, bug-eaten, scraggly bushes with long thorns and a few dark red blossoms.

  The woman felt uncomfortable, surrounded by the evidence of so many strangers. As she walked, she found herself glancing up at the empty windows, half expecting to see faces watching her, noting her invasion of their territory.

  She had never minded being alone. She had spent most of her life wandering alone in the farm country. But this place was different. She did not feel alone. The street was crowded with memories that were not her own. She caught herself looking back over her shoulder, but no one was following.

  She skirted a block where a fire had left blackened beams and twisted wreckage. Wherever she had a choice, she headed uphill, looking for high ground that would give her a better view of the city. The streets climbed steeply, and several times she thought about turning back or finding an easier route. But the top of the hill always looked so close. She kept climbing, despite the ache in her shoulder.

  Just as the sun broke through the fog, she reached the top of the hill and looked down on a sea of green leaves. Ivy blanketed the street. The sturdy vines had enveloped the cars and overrun the houses. The foliage softened the lines of the buildings, blurring the hard angles. It had erased all but the most prominent features: the peak of the roof on one house, a jutting bay window on another. The lampposts were towers of ivy; the cars were mounds of leaves. A radio antenna rose from one such mound, the only visible sign of the car below. A single strand of pale young ivy climbed the antenna, reaching for the sun.

  The woman descended the hill, picking a path through the plants. She could have turned back, but there was something inviting about the leafy canyon between the ivy-covered houses. The air held a cool green scent, like the overgrown banks down by the creek near the farmhouse. The place reminded her of a story her mother had once told her, something about a princess who had slept for a thousand years. The rose garden that surrounded the royal castle had grown wild, making walls of thorns to protect the sleeping princess.

  The wind blew and the leaves nodded. They brushed her ankles gently as she stepped among them. The rustling leaves seemed to be whispering softly, telling secrets that she could not understand.

  The ivy had sealed the doors to most of the houses, permanently barring entry with networks of interlocking vines. But halfway up the block was a house with an open door. The ivy surrounded the opening, leaving a dark gap, like the entrance to a cave. Somewhere in the ivy a bird sang three high notes. The ivy leaves swayed, as if beckoning.

  She was at the bottom of the stairs, looking up into the doorway, when she heard the rhythmic sound of metal on metal, a harsh inhuman noise that grew louder as she listened. She hesitated, then climbed the stairs and ducked inside the doorway.

  A four-legged mechanical creature ran past the house, heading uphill. It reminded her of the alligator lizards that had sunbathed on the stone wall near the farmhouse, scurrying for cover when she approached. The creature’s hide glistened with moisture from the fog; its legs moved jerkily, carrying it forward at a startling speed. The metal vanes that sprouted from its back rattled against one another. The creature seemed oblivious to its surroundings, hurrying past the house where the woman hid.

  She watched the creature pass, then looked around the entryway. The ivy stopped at the doorway, not venturing into the house itself. Just inside the door, other plants had sprouted in the carpet: clover, wild grasses, miner’s lettuce, and sorrel. The white walls of the foyer were laced with dark green: algae grew within the paint, spreading along cracks too fine for the eye to see.

  Cautiously she stepped into the living room. Sunlight shone through the leaves that covered the windows, filling the room with dim green light. The clock on the mantel had stopped at twenty to three.

  A Scrabble board lay on the low coffee table. Words crisscrossed the grid pattern: BLANKET, HELLO, GLOVE, GRAVE. Beside the board, the lid of the game box held wooden letter tiles placed face down. A layer of mold had grown on the tiles, turning the wood the color of tarnished copper. The woman studied the game board and wondered about its purpose. She read the words, but they made no sense together. Leaving the board untouched, she explored the rest of the house.

  Long ago, rodents had chewed open all the packages in the kitchen, devouring the contents, scattering the wrappings, and defecating on the wreckage. A few rusting cans stood in one cupboard, surrounded by the tattered remnants of plastic bags. In a corner of the linoleum floor lay scraps of fur and scattered bones, the gnawed remains of a cat’s feast.

  She wandered upstairs. Framed photographs hung on the white walls of the hallway: a smiling man and woman and their two daughters watched the woman stroll through their home. She poked her head into the upstairs bathroom and was startled by a movement within the room. She raised her crossbow before realizing that the person who glared at her from across the room was only her reflection in a full-length mirror.

  The bedroom door opened when she turned the knob. Wind blowing through a broken window sent dead leaves scurrying across the hardwood floor. Two skeletons—perhaps the man and the woman from the photos in the hall—lay in the bed. Birds and small animals had picked at the decaying flesh, tearing holes in the blankets that covered the bodies. Ants and beetles had cleared away the bits of flesh, leaving dry bones in a nest of tattered rags. The woman left them alone, closing the bedroom door tightly behind her and returning to the living room.

  Outside the living room windows, the ivy rustled in the wind. Shadows swam around the room, wavering on the ceiling and darting into the corners. The patterns on the wallpaper seemed to move, as if they were blown by a breeze that she could not feel. The flickering green light made her think of the patterns of light and shadow that played on the bottom of the creek. Breathing was difficult; the air seemed thick and heavy. The shifting light made her feel dizzy and light-headed, and her injured shoulder ached.

  She sat in a wooden chair beside the coffee table. The chair was mottled with the same greenish mold that covered the Scrabble tiles. She could hear a bird singing outside the house, a sweet soaring song stretched thin by distance. She sat quietly and listened. The house spoke: a soft sound like a floorboard creaking underfoot. A windowpane rattled, shaken by the same breeze that stirred the ivy. Wind blew through the open front door, and the house sighed.

  Until now, she had been insulated from the city
by Danny-boy, by Tiger, by Ms. Migsdale. Alone, she felt the city around her: a fragile and elaborate construction; a maze of streets as complex as the strands of a spider’s web; houses in which people had lived and slept and made love, each individual leaving an indelible mark on the place. The city surrounded her, touching her with a subtle pressure, like the pressure of water on her skin when she swam in the creek. She could feel currents shifting this way and that, nudging her, pushing her.

  She closed her eyes for a moment. Outside, the bird fell silent. The wind in the ivy sounded like beating wings. In the sudden hush, she heard a tiny click. And another. A third. She waited, but the room was quiet.

  Her dizziness passed and the air seemed to lighten. Breathing became easier. She opened her eyes. The moving shadows were simply patterns caused by light through the leaves. The green light played on the lid of the Scrabble box. Three tiles were now face up, exposing pale wood that was untouched by mold. The woman leaned forward to look at the three letters: J, A, and X. JAX.

  She said the word aloud and liked the sound of it. “Jax.” She took the tiles from the box and slipped them into her pocket. “Jax,” she said again, accepting her name. It felt right. She knew that it belonged to her.

  When Jax left the house, she closed the door neatly behind her. She stood at the top of the stairs, looking at the ivy-covered houses across the street. The morning sun had burned away the fog. She felt strangely at home here. “Thank you,” she said to the ivy and the sunlight. “Thanks for my name.” She waited a moment, but nothing happened.

  She turned back, climbing again to the top of the hill. From the crest, she could see what had once been a small park, now more like a miniature jungle. She made her way toward it.

  Three rabbits dashed for cover at her approach. She slipped a bolt into her crossbow and sat quietly on a park bench that was upwind from where the rabbits had been grazing. One of the braver rabbits ventured out to feed. After a few moments the others joined it. She waited until one was quite close and got it with her first shot. She gutted the dead rabbit there, leaving the entrails for the wild dogs and cats.