Manage to drag myself to my feet using my elbows, my knee nearly snaps straight away, and I can’t help it, I yelp like a dog and shove off at random … Beyond the billboard I see a broken storefront window, an upended Duane Reade drugstore, I make for the hole in the glass and am inside before the van is even completely turned around.
In the dark I crash headlong into some sort of shelving and hear the percussion of a ton of pill bottles hitting the floor. This and the pitter-patter of fleeing rats.
Must be the obscure/useless vitamin section. These spots got picked clean, and I mean bone-dry. Even I make the occasional run-through for some extra hand sanitizer (though I refer even to the generic brand as PurellTM, which is what it is). And some vitamin C, cause ever hear of scurvy?
Now I’m down and am pretty sure I cannot get up again. I think I broke my hip. Why the fuck not, y’all? Everything else is rattling around inside this brother, all splinters and fragments.
The van careens around the corner, onto Third Avenue. I lie there in the dark and listen to the noise of the vehicle fade. They’re gone, sounded like north.
Goddamnit, what did Rose think she was accomplishing? I had taken her for a clever young lady. This is now officially a disaster. If harm comes to that lovely gal, once again, it’s on me.
Gotta get on the good foot before the rats return to check me out. That thought forces me up to my hands and knees. This alone takes an eon. Thankful for the spacesuit.
Only thing to do is get some painkillers and carry on as planned. Bummed the plan calls for me to shuck the outfit soon enough. When I’m out of this jam I’m gonna get one of my very own to curl up in, tell folks to work their own bullshit out. Take a holiday.
With a sharp inhale and a grunt I’m on my feet again, unsteady … A trio of helicopters, flying low, come up out of nowhere … I consider scuttling for better shelter but they’re heading west and aren’t interested in insects like me.
Yeah, carry on. With Rose in play now, the other side has double the weight on yours truly. I’m holding a losing hand here, in more ways than one. Thing to do is to stay peace, get an edge, if not a leg up and over these motherfuckers, at least pull within stalemate range.
My internal clock reads about six in the evening, and when I’m on my game I’m usually within fifteen minutes of the correct time.
In a few moments I am speed-staggering north up Third Avenue, the one and only Chrysler Building soaring overhead as solid as ever … I could almost make like this was my city pre–2/14 were it not for the total absence of life, and the fundamental wrongness of the near absolute silence, with the occasional industrial rumble.
Third Avenue stretches before me, utterly blank, minus the rare abandoned vehicle, and that holds true as far as I can see.
Logos like FedEx and Starbucks and Cosi like hieroglyphics. I pass a pile of dead dogs, various breeds. I pass a shopping cart from Staples filled with printer cartridges. A Le Pain Quotidien, one of their country-style “communal” tables half in and half out of the busted window.
I’ll take a right at 49th Street, groove all the way east, and I’m pretty sure that’s where I’ll find the United Nations parking garage. From there it’s just a couple of elementary moves, and I’ll have the good senator’s wife trussed up like a pig waiting to get her belly cut.
See how the boys like that turn of events.
_______________
It’s an ugly ocher-tinged dusk as Kathleen Koch, in requisite patriot-navy Chanel pantsuit and heels, disembarks the chopper, that media-honed smirk affixed to her square-jawed, masculine face, hand on head in a attempt to keep her sculpted coif impeccable as she ducks under the slowing helicopter blades and makes a beeline for the limo. Her vicious mouth, her weird jaw. I don’t find her attractive in the slightest, but apparently I’m in the minority.
Me, in the driver’s seat, in an outsized MP outfit.
No problemo. Thus far this here op is automagic simplicity. Thus far nobody’s gotten seriously mauled. The owner of the pants I’m wearing is no doubt still sleeping off the chloroform, laid out on a bench on Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza, in my yellow biosuit.
From the UN it was a simple matter of gunning it all the way across town to the specified heliport off of West Street. My files, guns, and other supplies lie under a blanket in the passenger’s seat wheel well.
Let’s do this fucking thing. I’m chewing on an Aleve.
Now I clock Secret Service hustling ahead of the lady and jerking the rear door open, one eager beaver panting, “All right from here, Senat—?”
“Jeez, I’m fine, Tom, God bless ya …” that too familiar Midwestern nasality dismissing the man. Koch slithers into the backseat, apparently already on a cellular phone or radio cause she carries on, “Hang on a moment, hon. Thank ya, Tom! See ya in a couple days for that … that thingamjigger.”
Tom is saying something as she slams the door.
“Jeez, freakin Mormons!” This into the phone. “No, my freakin new staff. Freakin buncha freakin flamin Mormons!” Kathleen cackles.
Me thinking, shit, a cell phone. Didn’t occur. On the plus side, no acknowledgment of yours truly. And why should there be?
Service guys backing up to get a look at my mug through the dash. Sure, they do look like a gaggle of Mormons, though this would be my first encounter with that particular subculture. Buncha duplicate white boys with nothing-colored hair anyhow, for which I praise Allah.
Cause to them, despite my varied ethnic background, a black dude is a black dude is a black dude. Especially as night approaches.
Salute ’em. Guy squinting through the window screen at my ID, all he sees is black male, whitey backing off, making the hand gesture move it. I hit the gas obligingly, not too fast now out the gates, and north onto the West Side Highway, marveling: those devils honestly do think we all look alike.
Not saying that’s always a bad thing, y’all.
“… oh gosh, just 120 percent,” Kathy’s saying. “Gay as a five-dollar bill. Part of the, ha, ha …” the woman just cracking up. “Part of the ol’ vettin over at, whozzit. Quantico. Sir, can ya demonstrate that yer a big ol’ freakin Mormon flamer?”
Koch is really knocking herself dead, takes no notice as I bust a screechy right onto West 33rd Street. Hit the power locks.
“… ohhh yah. All of those Jews too, whaddya call ’em … ones with the pigtails and outfits? Riiiight. Mormons and those Jews wear that secret lingerie. No, I’m telling ya, Pat!”
This goes on. I am thinking this may prove to be easier than I had anticipated, Kathy might not actually be the sharpest knife. I’d always taken her for crazy, but like her husband I reckoned it was of the crazy-like-a-fox variety … Perhaps not.
“… the one time I met that freakin robot Mitt, I promise ya, he had on lip gloss. And! Listen, Pat. I could see … ha, ha … I could see his bra strap. Would I kid ya?”
I hang a hard right onto Ninth Avenue, headed due south, annoyed that this woman is so profoundly wrapped up in her own sociopathology that she doesn’t even have the common courtesy to take fucking notice when being abducted. It’s rude.
Rise above, Decimal. That’s her MO: she’s a shit stirrer, riles up folks so that they get their panties in a twist whilst she leans back and observes.
“… telling ya, all their menfolk are queer. Jews, Mormons, and Arabs. Oh yeah.”
Kathleen is a fact machine. A factologist. A fact factory. A boundless fount of knowledge.
Only problem for Kathy is it’s all bullshit.
Bitch ran for president. It was a squeaker, y’all. She had this miserable “Just call me Kathy!” ad campaign that made me wanna gouge out my peepers with a spork. Lady’s scene got thrown cause it emerged that ol’ Kath was subject to debilitating migraines …
This I can empathize with. I get headaches something fucking awful. Like biblical headaches. Lays me up for days.
Yes. In fact, I plan to give her one tonight. A migraine, that is, player please. Woman is f
oul.
We blow the light at 23rd Street. Some neighborhoods, the lights continue to cycle around uselessly. Still feels satisfying to sail through a red light. Small pleasures. And I dig the feel of this fossil-fuel vehicle, perhaps the first I’ve driven in years. You can actually hear the damn thing, that’s what it is, there’s instant gratification when you step on that shit.
Well, I had something a little different in my mind’s eye, but between the cell phone wrinkle and her complete obliviousness I initiate my second Plan A: confirm the car stereo’s bass and volume are on max, make positive the fade is set all the way to the rear of the vehicle. Insert that audio CD I picked up out of the steamer trunk before all this madness got underway.
Gently press play. Even this gives me a hot shot of hurt up my arm.
Wu-Tang Clan’s “Shame on a Nigga,” with its clamorous kung-fu film combat intro, whallops me in the back of the head. And I’m not next to the speakers. Kathleen is, and she goes mouth to carpet, mitts to ears, one lacquerednail hand still clutching the phone. Which is my first concern.
The track is deafening and I’m mildly impressed that the glass on this car, bulletproof as it undoubtedly is, doesn’t atomize.
Speed up. We bounce over West 14th Street and I swerve to avoid a work crew, an open manhole spewing thick smoke.
Turn on the interior lights and in the rearview I observe an ashen Kathleen Koch coming to her knees, making her way forward. Begins sliding the “executive privacy” window that separates us. Her cell is in hand, to my relief, her mouth working. Can’t hear a word. Keep an eyeball on the phone. On the stereo ODB roars forth. R.I.P. Big Baby Jesus.
To the young youth, you wanna get gun? Shoot!
Blaow! How ya like me now? Don’t fuck the style, ruthless wild …
When she gets close enough and commences wailing, I reach back with my good hand and snatch her cell, a pink BlackBerry, gives me a retro zing, she’s doing her level best to lunge across the seats, flailing left arm knocks off my MP helmet, but I’m depressing the button that controls that hard plastic divider, Kathleen quickly and wisely withdraws her hands, not before tearing off half my shirt collar.
Shame on a nigga who tries to run game on a nigga …
I ease the car to a stop near Horatio Street and Hudson. Swivel in my seat. Smile wide at Kathleen, our faces mere inches apart.
All this expensive material sitting between Wu-Tang, the controversial far-right-wing politician, and myself creates an oddly noiseless experience. I feel the bass, observe her spittle and bared teeth, eyes boiling.
So much to despise in this woman and the interests she represents. Time was, she could’ve been the most powerful female on the planet.
Time was, plenty of folks in my current position wouldn’t’ve hesitated a microsecond to simply off the terrifying bitch, by any means available.
I swear to Xenu my wrecked trigger finger twitches.
But people. Really. Dewey Decimal doesn’t play that. I did tell you, now, my word is I don’t harm the females. Unless extreme circumstances warrant such action, and even then …
So, this: I jerk the car forward a good ten feet. Turn and watch the fallen Kathleen “Call me Kathy!” Koch gamely endeavor to get herself upright again. Slowly start to accelerate … gain a block, then another, moving at a good clip now, glance in the rearview to check that the woman is unsteadily maintaining a hunched standing position. Slam on the brakes.
Wham-o as she hits the glass. We skid to rest at Bethune Street, just in front of the old nursing home.
Take a moment to really be in the moment. Something we so rarely do, ain’t it?
In the periphery of my headlights, I note leaves red and gold on the untended trees. An abandoned, doorless DOT car. Pigeons crowding something or other, several seagulls in there too, nipping at the smaller birds. Clock a pair of orthopedic shoes just visible amidst the avian throng, still attached to … My gut shucks and jives. Let’s leave that mess alone.
I sigh. So much unnecessary silliness in this motherfucking life. Look over my shoulder … a blot of lipstick, a touch of blood, and a little spit slowly sliding down the opposite side of the glass. Peep deeper, and there lies Kathy, flat on her back. She’s lost a purple pump. Watch her chest. She’s breathing.
And just like that I’m back in the honorable business of wife-snatching.
Butter. I kill the stereo. Do that PurellTM. Reach for the duct tape with my good gripper.
_______________
I’m kneeling on a beige leather couch, facing a blank wall. Extremely thin, light-colored wood. I’m aware that there is a peephole about three feet above my head, and I stand so I might look through it.
I am observing a stunning young woman, seated on a similar couch. She wears a tight black or dark-colored (the footage is in black-and-white) reflective dress, looks like silk. She wears her hair in a single long braid thrown over her left shoulder, which hangs down below her left breast. On the table are two martini glasses, two smaller bowls, a pack of cigarettes, an ashtray, and a black cordless microphone.
She sits quite still, in silence, though very faint laughter and music is audible, probably coming from surrounding rooms. She seems occupied with her nails. At one point she looks at her watch, sighs, glances around the room. She returns to her nails.
My foot slips, banging against the wall. And with supernatural speed, the woman, whom I know to be Song Ji-Wong, looks up at me, flips upside down, and lands like a spider on the ceiling.
_______________
Wednesday
Come to with a big jolt, in the driver’s seat of a Chinese BYD e6, sporting a brand-spanking-new suit. I look at the tag dangling from my cuff … black little pouch with a couple extra buttons. Paul Smith. Okay, right. A peek outside … groan, as the general filth and the presence of a mangy flock of chickens tells me straight off I’m ass-deep in Chinatown.
Chinatown is not what it once was. Which is to say: there’s a hell of a lot more of it today. You could safely say that today’s Chinatown stretches north to approximately East 6th Street, east as far as one can go, south to the Seaport, and west to Greenwich Street … but these borders are constantly shifting.
Shit. I spin and check for Kathleen … There she is, across the passenger’s seat, sealed in a black plastic cocoon, securely wrapped in duct tape. For a moment I’m thinking I killed her, which would have been a bad move, but I can see her breathing, see that I cut a slit in the plastic near her mouth … I suppose this is a relief. Another moment of panic as I pat myself down for pills … blessed are the poor. The reassuring contours of pill bottle, PurellTM, etc…. wince at my sorry digits.
Last night? Details hazy. Trying to piece this scenario back together …
Well hell, on our merry way down here to 154 Hester Street near Elizabeth, found myself with an acute desire to shuck those miserable poly MP duds and get back into something proper. I cut across Houston to Greene Street and (not for the first time) tossed the Paul Smith store for some flossy new gear. Kathleen was out cold and pretty well immobilized, so I took my time, wandering around the stockroom till I found something temperature-appropriate (one of the pluses of the timing of 2/14, with fall being upon us now, slightly heavier duds that’d been bypassed over the summer become suddenly useful). Nearly everything hung tragically off my emaciated frame, but I ultimately landed on a dope wool flannel gray-check double-breasted suit, with which I married an off-white shirt and a gray-and-black-striped tie. Completed the outfit with a pair of oxford brogues, a touch big but manageable, and with great relief dug up a black trilby-style hat with a blue band that fits my skull to perfection.
This Paul Smith dude, he brought it strong when it came to threads. Before, I couldn’t have come near this level of elegance, but now, what with all things being equal and money being no object, literally, I’m free to enhance my carriage with an extra dash of panache.
As an afterthought I grabbed a black wool-and-mohair overcoat with a
velvet-top collar; it’s not that cold yet but it’ll get there … or will it? I suppose we shall see, as each year brings new surprises on the atmospheric front. None of them happy surprises. Ill breezes blowing hardcore. Old-testament stuff.
Two extra dress shirts, some multicolored underwear that I don’t love, and four pairs of stripy socks. A pair of calfskin gloves. That’s me set for the next several months.
Also grabbed a green-handled box cutter out of the storeroom. I dig box cutters, they take me back.
Time to ditch the limo and acquire a new whip. Easy enough; I hot-wired a BYD e6 just nearby. Transfered the unconscious Kathleen. Tossed my new wardrobe in the front seat with the rest of my shiz, took a break to disinfect, swap gloves, and I biz-ounced.
That’s as much as I recall, I don’t rule out a freeze but the facts are it’s about six twelve a.m., according to the dashboard clock, and I have come to the one place I could possibly pop up and be welcome with a hostage in tow.
It’s the old Overseas Chinese Mission building, which has been occupied and heavily renovated by my man Dos Mac, with whom I enjoy a fragile connection.
Before the Valentine’s Occurrence, Dos was the chief computer tech guy for the NYC government, having been hired on straight out of the Navy. Dos had written the code that controlled the weapon systems on all U.S. submarines, later adopted by most military forces worldwide, the British, the Russians, NATO, etc. This code was based on something he sketched up during freshman year lunch breaks at Brooklyn Tech, so it is claimed, on a napkin from Junior’s (of cheesecake fame). And yes, Dos is a homeboy, raised hard in Brownsville, a brainy kid with very few options by dint of his economic status and skin color. In this sense alone I am proud to call him my friend and spiritual brother.
Dude owes me, in a large way. But I won’t need to remind him that.
And Dos, who refuses to reveal his real name to me, just as I can’t return the courtesy, is a … complicated man. Again, not unlike your narrator. He is to be approached with great caution, eyes and ears wide open.
The Nervous System Page 14