Another hour of this noise creeps by. My bad knee giving me deep grief, lower back barking, yeah, I’m more or less convinced there’s no paper trail with respect to yours truly.
It’s entirely possible. Rosenblatt never paid me in cash as such. Not like I ever got any W2s. I was taken care of in other ways, like the pills. It was a unique arrangement, very much in groove with our brave new environment.
Empty the file cabinets, deposit their contents on the floor with everything else. I can never be positive I’m not mentioned anywhere given this impossible fucking mess. This is a serious concern.
Fact in mind, I withdraw a bottle of Grey Goose vodka from the lower left-hand desk drawer, and a couple of loose Cohiba Coronos Especiales. Look around, yeah, here’s that cigar clipper. With the man’s engraved initials. Jackass.
I’ve been organizing the papers a bit as I go along. Can’t help it, really. Force of habit.
Almost as an afterthought I nudge a box of aforementioned files, the tabloid-y shit on the big operators, toward the exit. Remember tabloids? Remember newspapers? A quaint thought.
Yeah, I know what I said about the blackmail racket not being what it once was. But hey now: you never know when spicy intel like this might serve some future purpose. Make a good bartering tool—but would never want to deal in this firsthand, are you crazy?
Place the set of folders out in the hall, empty and silent this late Sunday afternoon. Not that one would notice, and not that Monday will look much different. Wonder if anyone works up in this building, period. Anymore.
Douse the place in spirits, around in a circle twice.
Take a final look about. Out the window, the great Woolworth Building visible due northeast, about to be outdone (again) once they wrap up that new Freedom Tower piece of shit.
Frisk myself, locate a book of matches, reading: Millennium Hotel. Gives me a little zing. Obviously I haven’t been smoking much lately.
There in the doorway, I take a moment to scrub those paws good with the PurellTM, and kit-up with a fresh mask and set of gloves.
Lower my face mask, clip the tip off a Cohiba. Jam it between my split lips and spark a match. With the flame applied I rotate the cigar, getting a nice even cherry going.
Flick the match back into the office, it hits a stack of documents, whoosh, manila and paper go up in hot blue, the flame charges right, chasing its tail.
The room blossoms fire.
I kick the door shut, pick up the box, and head toward the elevators, huff-puffing on the expensive cigar. Trying not to inhale.
Waiting for the alarm, the sprinklers, cops, movement, something, anything. Doesn’t happen.
Because like most of everything and everybody in this ghost town, like my knee, like my head, like my heart: everything is broken, and barely there.
_______________
Cause I’m afraid of what I might have done.
Memory, it’s said, is either cruel or kind depending on who you’re talking to.
In my case I can’t say it’s not cruel, as I’m only allowed a peek at a pile of fragmented snapshots. It’s rerun material, rotating past my mind’s eye with agonizing sameness, over and over ad infinitum.
And on the other hand, I can’t say memory is not kind, because if the images I am shown mean what I think they mean, I’m better off never knowing the whole story.
Yeah, I am afraid of what I might have done, and what might have been done to me. And I am forever stuck between gears, with the clutch grinding uselessly. Grinding itself down.
So with nowhere to land, and to get myself through the goddamn day, I’ve adopted a System of behavior. Adherence to it is the last shred of structure I have available in an otherwise chaotic maze.
Yeah, I’m afraid of what I might’ve done.
_______________
Limping up the marble stairs that lead to the Main Branch, I shift the box of files to one arm and tap the southern-most lion’s stone ass.
That’s System protocol: a tap on my way out, and a tap on the way in. Balance, people.
Twin monster cats, keeping vigil over my home here at 42nd and Fifth Avenue. Again: balance.
I take a moment to groove on it all, applying PurellTM as I do so. Clean of hand is clear of mind.
Just made that shit up. I mouth the words, repeat it to myself.
By some miracle, the beaux arts façade of the library remains as magnificent as ever, pretty much unblemished. In the darker hours, such as this Sunday evening in mid-September, automated floodlights illuminate the building. Even now. One or two have burned out, and I wonder how long the surviving lights have yet to live. I will mourn them, believe me.
I look south. You could roll a skull down Fifth Avenue. Absolutely zero traffic. Dead quiet, with the exception of a distant industrial hubbub, a construction site to the east, the night-crew going at it.
Get itchy around crowds. That’s where true believers go to blow themselves up, right to the dead center of a nice crowd.
This is why today’s New York City couldn’t be a better spot for a cat like me.
In this sense the town is much improved. I should know, I’m the original native son.
The air? The air is getting steadily worse, if that’s possible. Or at least that’s my perception. The Stench, which has been brutal since February 14, is now actively visible: a jaundiced haze of burnt plastic, burning oil, and smoldering trash. Hard to go more than five blocks without feeling a tightening in the chest, shortness of breath. Comes off the water, out of the ground. It rains from the rancid sky. Gets in the eyes and nostrils as well, glassy little particles and fat snowflakes of ash.
I can see it in the floodlights, a slow-moving yellow fog. Shiny bits wink at me like glitter.
You can learn to live with anything. That’s the real.
Upstairs in the grand hall known as the Reading Room, I shove the box of documents beneath the bench nearest the corner where I keep my shit.
Make positive nobody else is around. Funny. Ever since that drama with the Ukrainians went down nearly two months back, I haven’t seen a soul up in here. Usually there would be at least one or two ghosts looking to flop. Maybe it’s cause the weather’s holding steady, a touch chilly but not particularly cold yet. Maybe word spread that folks got themselves killed in these rooms. No matter. Happy to be on my lonesome.
Strip down to my boxers, shrugging off my shoulder holster, which stinks of sweat. Stow the guns. Carefully hang up my suit on a plastic Century 21 hanger.
Consider doing a little work.
Man, just when I reckon I’m getting somewhere, I discover a whole new cache of books in the twisty underground cathedral that houses the library’s collection. Sets me back freaking weeks.
As much sense as the decimal system resonates with me, as much as I dig its logic, there are difficult days; I will not lie.
Coming up on seven months, and I am at classification number 004: “Data Processing and Computer Science.” This can be found within subheading 000, known as “Computer Science, Information, and General Works.”
Now Melvil Dewey, the father of this ingenious methodology, and its subsequent editors could not have possibly known how many volumes would come to fall under the heading “Computer Science.” It’s seemingly infinite. Might just take the rest of my natural life to log everything in this sub-subheading.
Check it: a good analogy is the U.S. Constitution. Essentially suspended, per Amendment 30. The one after the close-the-borders amendment, number 29. Championed, I should add, by husband-and-wife Senators Clarence Howard and Kathleen Koch.
Look at the Second Amendment. Think about all these frothing delusionals, running around hopped-up on meth and/or religion, armed to the freaking gills—I’m talking before 2/14. All bets are off now.
As a kid in the Bronx, I saw close to a hundred situations in which shit went south just cause some stupid fuck had a heater and an inferiority/Napoleon complex.
The founding slaveholders
couldn’t have foreseen how our culture, our diseased urban centers, would devolve.
My proposal? Gun ownership should only be awarded to citizens like me, who will generally keep the peace, and will only ever bust a cap in a motherfucker if said motherfucker really deserves it. It’s about wisdom and character. Knowing when to stay thy hand.
Sure, there are no more licenses—for anything. But there’s just as many guns, if not more so. And all this mental jawing on my part is for naught now, being as we are all so much closer to the end of history. Assuming we haven’t staggered over that line already.
But let’s accentuate the positive.
Strip off the shrink-wrap and pull on a brand-new hospital gown. Consider my larger task.
Naw, fuck it. It’s been a busy Sunday. I’ll bunk down early so I might get the jump on the morning.
Unfurl my bedroll. As I do this, my eyes are drawn to the box I pulled out of Rosenblatt’s office. A couple outstanding issues nibble at my chest.
One: Did I miss anything? Could Rosenblatt have been holding a document stash somewhere in his apartment, aside from the material I know I destroyed weeks ago when I offed the man? What could I have passed over, unawares? Did the DA keep duplicates—perhaps at yet a third location, unknown to me?
Two: Was this the wise move, grabbing these files? Realize having this stuff around makes me twitchy. Blame my pack-rat instinct. Perhaps I don’t need the headache this kind of stanky material could generate.
These concerns bounce around my brain like pissy wasps, and I’m at a loss as to how to silence them for good. I take a temporary measure.
Making a promise to deep-six this gear at the first opportunity, I fetch the box, carry it over to the dumbwaiter, stick it in, and send it downstairs. Press the button to open the bottom of the lift, dump the box, recall the dumbwaiter, and jam the thing by removing the control faceplate, and the buttons with it. This I stash with the rest of my gear. Close the door to the cubby, a wood contraption with fake book spines. I’ve gotten a lot more careful of late, used to just leave my things out in the open.
Kill the power to the building and grab my flashlight next to the fuse box. PurellTM up, pull on a fresh pair of gloves, and raise my mask. Settle in with a copy of Experiencing Totalitarianism, in the original Latvian. Happy with how my Latvian is coming together. I must have absorbed some along the way during this recent period of action.
See, I can read and speak an unknown number of languages. Not cause I’m some kind of linguistic genius. It’s cause the government stuck something in my head that allows me to do this. Sound batshit crazy? Indeed it might be.
But dig it, as this is a solid fact: I am constantly surprising myself with a total command of new and unexpected languages. Languages I’ve never heard of. I don’t know the extent of it, this “gift,” this unearned ability.
But apparently Latvian wasn’t written into the master code, cause I’m struggling with it a tad.
Get hung up on the sentence, “As the Fourth Panzer division crossed the border …” Not sure of the Latvian word for “division,” perhaps they mean “battalion” or “regiment,” trying to recall the difference in terminology, this thought-stutter like a skip in an old LP record, and gradually sleep takes me.
_______________
A loud crack jerks me out of the only goddamn dream I ever have. The one where somebody who looks and feels a lot like me murders my wife and child.
I roll sideways, pop open my camouflaged cubbyhole, and root around in there for a couple seconds. Withdraw my guns and come to a squatting position. Wide awake now. Listening to my blood. Listening to the dark.
Another snap, down the hall. And a third.
My pistachio shells. Laid out on the stairwell. Somebody tramping on ’em. Means visiting hours start now, like it or not.
I raise the Beretta and the Sig.
Can’t see shit. I hear my flashlight, which fell off my chest as I popped up, rolling toward the back of the room. Somewhere amongst my gear I have those night-vision goggles, but I can’t go foraging for them now.
I have that CZ-99 as well, it occurs to me, but I’ve never fired it, so best to stick to the known.
There, in the hallway, thin shafts of light. Getting steadily brighter, less diffuse.
The lights round the corner into my room, four slivers dancing vertically, making jerky sweeps. Just under these, moving in tandem with the light, red lasers cast pinpricks on bookshelves, tabletops.
Tactical weaponry. Customized, expensive. I experience something like envy, but just for a sec. Mostly cause for all my lone-wolf posturing, I do miss being part of a posse. Pack animals, after all.
I grin, nasty. No problem. Aim just north of the beams, take two of them out, one of the remaining two will panic and do something stupid. Positively no sweat.
Cock both guns.
And a metal object is pressed into the back of my head.
“Drop ’em, shitbird.” Scratchy-voiced male behind my right ear.
Hell, I do it. If these people were skilled enough to get in here, get behind me, me sleeping like a baby lamb? Strictly pro shit, and I do not want to play cute.
“On your stomach, go.”
A boot in my back and the floor meets my face. Thinking: goddamn. Mental flab. Going soft. Events should not be rolling out in this manner.
“Subject is disarmed. Repeat, subject is disarmed and secured, over.” Calm and cool, like, all biz.
Heavy boot on my neck now. I’ll be goddamned.
There’s a crackling of radios, somebody talking about “fuse box, breaker,” and with a clunk the lights come on. With my ear to the ground I hear an ascending hum as the building wakes up. Maybe I imagine it cause these floors must be four feet thick.
Guys running in my direction, light on their feet for the amount of gear they must be carrying. Radios, numbered codes being called out, call letters and verbal shorthand I don’t recognize.
That’s troublesome. I’m a military creature. Got a good recall when it comes to codes and such. Should be on my radar.
“Let’s get those hands, top of your head. Lock fingers, let’s go.”
I do it, feel plastic being threaded around my wrists and pulled tight.
“Let’s get some ID on this mook, now, now.”
Attempt to shift my head but the boot is still pinning my neck to the floor, say: “Suit jacket pocket, right side. My laminate.” Comes out constricted.
Trying to get a look at somebody. I hope they don’t fuck up my suit. Every time I score a new suit …
Note the footwear, a couple pairs of hi-tech plastic and nylon in black, looking for a brand, something to indicate—
“Sending scan, over.”
Déjà vu. I’m having mad déjà vu.
“That’s a roger. Let’s move, move …”
My hands are pulled back and a hood comes down over my head. It’s cinched at the neck.
Think Abu Ghraib, that photo, crucifixion pose, it comes to me, and I gotta say I am ever so slightly fucking terrified. There’s not even a pretense of civility, which would come with most law enforcement agencies. Wouldn’t it?
I know better than to say anything further unless addressed directly.
These guys are vibing contractors, private army stuff, beholden to nobody. Better equipped than our own military, I saw that myself over there. In the later days, there were more of these motherfuckers than there were straight military. Always swanning around. Better guns, better body armor, better food, better whores, better digs … Got me to thinking I was on the wrong team. Hell, that’s why I—
Up and away. I’m lifted like a sack of rice, dudes have their hustle on, jogging me forth, swing right, down the stairs, slam through the door and out in the sickly night air.
As we’re bumping down the exterior stairs, I’m hearing, “Subject in custody, awaiting go-to points,” the guy sounding winded, makes me think this operation is an improv, a last-minute clambake. Not th
at this observation matters.
I’m unceremoniously deposited on carpeting, reckoning the interior of a vehicle, two metallic bangs, must be in the rear, most likely a van, “Go, go, go,” they’re calling, and the van lurches forward, I tumble with gravity, hit the rear doors with my forehead. Hoping they’re locked.
Feel fucking naked. I got boxers and a hospital gown. And a goddamn Gitmo Klan Kap.
Messing with my head. Driver going in circles, right on 39th Street, left on Sixth Avenue, right on maybe 42nd, and repeat. Trying to get a man disoriented … and worse, violating the edicts of the System (details when I get a chance), not that I expect these thug-o’s to be aware of such an elegant paradigm.
Radio squawk. Driver or somebody saying something, and next time we hit Sixth Avenue we accelerate, northbound.
_______________
Trying to count blocks based on our approximate speed. Reference my mental map, dig the interlocking grid. It’s all there, laid out in my head, in 3-D, in full color.
North on Sixth, sharp right on what I figure is Central Park South. Fucking hell. Zoom zoom, I’m counting, hard left, I’m guesstimating onto Madison or Park Avenue.
This is making me physically sick, this … gross affront to the System. What kind of animal …
Flat-out northbound, gaining speed. Wracking my brain over this fine how-do-you-do. Could this be FBI? Likely not. FBI don’t have no sexy boots, they just throw shit together, especially these days. More fallout from the Branco/Iveta cock-up, the Balkan imposed upon me of late? The only loose end would be one Brian Petrovic, and somehow when that man gave me his word, despite his shadiness, I fully bought it as good. Plus, old Brian was on a military flight to Paris last time I checked, and I did confirm that.
Didn’t I? Not remembering key shit. Slipping up.
The girl. Iveta, the very thought of her, it hurts my chest, so I kill that line, kill it good and hard and throw a padlock on it.
The woman in the middle. Pushing the buttons. Yeah, I get it, people. Lady played everybody. Doesn’t change a damn thing. The human heart is a strange, lawless planet.
The Nervous System Page 2