I shake him and his eyes roll around to meet mine for a moment, then come unfocused again.
“Listen. Back when they had Rick Cerone pitching, he was pretty great, people don’t talk enough about Rick. They’re playing the Red Sox, a big game. Maybe it was the Series, I don’t know. So I’m watching the game … Listen to me.”
I slap his cheek. Again his head lolls back in my direction. The movement of his chest is growing harder to detect.
“I’m watching the game. It’s a good game. You know. And then I think I haven’t seen my dad in a while. I start wondering, hey, where’d he get to? Listen.”
I push his face again and this time he doesn’t respond at all. I keep talking.
“So I check the men’s room. I’m looking at all the lines at the concession stands. Can’t find him anywhere. Are you listening?”
Blood has soaked my left pant leg. I keep talking.
“So before I know it, the game’s over. Everybody’s leaving. Smells like beer and mustard and sweat, I remember that. It’s like a crush of people, just so many people, laughing and fighting and shouting, and I’m starting to get scared, right? I’m calling for my dad. Walking around and around the stadium. Just calling for him.”
I know this kid is dead. I keep talking.
“So eventually, what can I do, I leave. I walk home, it’s a long ways but I know where to go and I walk home. To my mom’s, that is. It’s dark when I get there and my mom, she’s furious, asks me why I ran away from Dad. Because it was a Sunday, and he had me on the weekends. She’s talking about how I should respect my dad more, and I keep trying to explain, Mom, Mom …”
The kid is very much dead. I release his gut and pull myself up.
I’m standing, wobbly, but upright.
Commence hopping south.
Feel like I need to allow the story to wrap itself up, I’m learning things, because this is not an active memory I have, and yet here I am describing it, so I continue speaking quietly. It’s like automatic writing.
I’m observing myself, listening, saying: “Mom. It wasn’t my fault. She’s not hearing me. Says I have to go over to his house, that’s where I sleep Sundays, she has company coming and it’s his night. I know there’s no arguing with her. I go. Walk to my dad’s project. I buzz him and buzz him and nobody answers. So I sleep in Claremont Park, on a bench. They gave us these crappy little beach towels with the Yankees logo at the game, I use that as a pillow. Turns out: Dad went to a bar and forgot about me. So …”
I stumble over a rut in the sidewalk. I’m in serious pain, but I press forward, the key in my fist.
“Needless to say, from that point on I was a Mets fan.”
My brain goes empty. Is that it? I wait for a postscript. Nope, c’est fini. Well, how’s that for a gun-tothe-soft-palette bummer of a story. I was hoping for a less heavy-handed wrap-up.
See, I’m suspicious of such yarns; could all be bullshit, false memory. It lists too far toward the weepy side. Overly pat somehow.
So I’m thinking: probably bullshit. But man, the detail. These elaborate lies I tell myself. To what fucking end?
Regardless. I attain the bottom of the park. To my left, what remains of the Plaza. On the right: the former Apple computer store, which appears structurally viable, despite the ordinance I know to have been detonated on the lower level.
Presently I limp by Bergdorf Goodman. It’s all winter shit in the windows, cream-colored Prada ski suits, wool capes, and whatnot. They had this up in mid-Feburary? It’s no wonder the displays are intact. Who wants to boost this kind of gear in the middle of a heat wave?
Even my sweat feels filthy. I pause to strip off my gloves and hit the PurellTM, which praise Yahweh is still to be found in my pocket.
Having done so, I slip on another pair. I love that initial powdery sensation of these gloves, it whispers “clean,” if you listen close. And I do.
Pass a night crew doing some kind of shit, a manhole open, yellow tape, floodlights, big red tent with a zipper, people moon-walking about in those creepy-ass space suits. Not the white suits, the orange ones with that biohazard logo on the back.
I stumble-slide forward, pulling my mask back on.
And as I pass St. Thomas it occurs to me: 2/14, they left the churches alone. They didn’t hit the churches. To my knowledge, only the mosque across from the Freedom Tower sustained damage, and best guess that was due to its proximity to a major target.
And at this point I’ve gotten better at walking, calibrating my step to favor my as-yet-undamaged leg. Making little adjustments.
Focus on the System, which has a way forward for everything.
Six months of physical therapy my caramel ass.
Get that prickly feeling around the backside of Rockefeller Center.
I’m on the east side of Fifth, and I sidestep into the northernmost doorway of bombed-out Saks & Company. Heart rate up a touch, even accounting for the physical exertion.
Take a look back up the avenue, casual like.
Yup. A black Lincoln Navigator idles a block down, between 49th and 50th, in front of St. Patrick’s. Blue parking lights on. Trying to make like they weren’t tailing me.
I tell myself I’m processing shit paranoid. But I rarely believe me. Consider possible moves. Decide to hang back a bit, stay put. Plus I don’t mind the breather. My leg smarts like a bastard. Feel for a cigarette, I have none. I keep forgetting …
My gun is holstered, but I’m a happier man for wearing it. I wanna scrub up but I got the gloves and wanna keep them on in case I need to bolt. Not like I’d make it a yard before my new knee snapped like a stale pretzel stick.
Another look. The Navigator loitering. I make out tinted windows, therefore can’t get a peep in.
Considering this. Lincoln Navis are strictly VIP rides. Engine conversion to battery way cost-prohibitive for just any Joe Schmoe. Celebrity, status whips. Not much changed in that respect since the bling-bling hip hop self-projections of the pre-Occurrence(s) world.
Guys I knew growing up would posture-pimp, renting a Navi or a Lexus or an Escalade for special occasions, along with the obligatory assortment of neighborhood chicas, some of whom were available for rent as well.
Drive the beast around town, bass in the back rattling folks’ windows. Shoot a video, YouTube it, smoke a blunt, and bullshit to your friends. Short-term large living.
Come morning, you’re back to your slog at Best Buy or Applebee’s.
Brothers would razz me because I favored that “think-y” Brooklyn/Queens stuff. Tribe Called Quest, Mos. Uppity fag shit. Despite the fact that I wore Skulls colors, which, honestly, never felt like me.
Except for the violence. Was always good at that part.
Imagine the ridicule, had they found me digging Stravinsky. Mahler. Ornette Coleman. King Tubby. Fela. Good stuff out of my dad’s record collection. Even now I can smell the vinyl and the faint mildew of the jacket covers.
Snap out of it. Back to the Lincoln. Thinking: the only other stratum of society who still rocked these tanks would be government. This sets off a whole new round of unbalanced speculation.
Can’t just stand here like a soft bitch. I use the brass doors to push off, direct myself south like a gentleman taking the air. In no hurry.
Don’t have to turn around to sense the Navi’s approach. My gun hand twitches, cowboy style. Ready for whatever.
The vehicle pulls parallel and paces me. Provocative … I can’t be hobbling more than three miles an hour.
Face front, keep on hiking. I don’t acknowledge the Lincoln. Again my hand spasms a bit. Amber alert.
Can’t help it, I glance sideways. Smoked-out glass, revealing nothing.
Me, primed for a tussle, a bracing, a shoot-out, what have you.
I guess they lose interest or opt out, cause the driver gases it and they pull away from me, kind of lazy like.
Smoked-out rear windows as well. Look though: the plates—red, white, and blue. Diplomatic p
lates.
I watch the SUV as it hangs a right onto East 47th Street.
Realize I’ve been holding my breath.
Maybe it’s the paranoia that’s keeping my ass alive.
Dig the two heavily muscled men sitting astride one of the marble lions that bookend the library steps, facing one another.
I’ve been watching them from the recessed entryway of the former Nat Sherman tobacco shop (later some useless chain clothing store) for about six minutes. Northwest corner of 42nd and Fifth Avenue.
I’m exhausted and just want to lie down. How much of my life, in hours and days, have I wasted watching other people from a concealed vantage point?
The brawny lads seem to be speaking quietly and sharing a cigarette, up there on the lion. Feels like I’m watching the beginning of a high-concept guy-on-guy porno, that part you’d fast-forward through to get to the action.
Fuck this, I decide to move in on them. No disguising the fact that I’m walking wounded. I have my gun at my side.
Now: if I’d started with a full magazine, I should have fourteen rounds to go. The Down syndrome kid, his guileless smile, pop up at me, I knock them back and bury them.
The boys are watching me, as I do my funky limp their way. Aware that I’m podcasting Halloween-scary, a bloody black apparition in half a suit.
The fellows dismount, not particularly graceful in their movements. My goon radar is spiking. Goon city. And I make them for Baltic/Slavic twenty yards away. Hope that doesn’t sound racist, you can just see it. Tell me I’m wrong.
These people are the new goombahs, nouveau-Guido, used to be the Italians. And they dress accordingly.
The boys fall into bouncer positions, seemingly a natural bearing for this body type. Legs a touch wide, arms folded.
“Good evening!” calls one of them. Yeah, I hear Eastern Europe.
I hobble up and stop, about ten feet shy of the heavies, scope them. One has a shiny black T-shirt with a massive Armani logo, the other is rocking one of those miserable Ed Hardy pieces favored by this class of character, an off-white number with crisscrossing stitching up the sides, and a pair of yakuza-style “sleeves,” renderings of a koi pond, colorful fish, and shit. Both are wearing linen trousers and man-sandals.
I get the douche-chills.
“Gentlemen,” I greet them, hoping they don’t register the quotation marks.
“Beautiful place to come home,” says the talker, the one in the Armani tee. Like overfriendly. He tilts his head in the direction of the library. “To live in such a place is to feel like a king. What do they call this place?”
“It’s a library.”
Armani pouts his lips and nods, admiring the Beaux-Arts façade, which still looks pretty clean. “Very good. If they are making a condo inside, I buy one. I come talk to you, huh?” He grins at me.
“Don’t hold your breath on the condo. And I don’t own the place, I’m just the custodian.”
Armani is nodding. Custodian is a big-boy word so I doubt if he got me, but he’s nodding all the same. “It is Mr. Decimal?”
“Indeed it is.”
“Perhaps you are hurt? Wishing to sit?” He glances at my leg, the bandages, my filthy pissed-in slacks, of which one leg has been cut off at the thigh. I see him note the gun, by which he is unfazed.
“I’m good here,” I say. “Your manners are impeccable, and I appreciate that. Now what can I do for you cowpokes?”
Ed Hardy is looking me up and down, slowly. His eyes have that unoccupied look of heavies the world over. They alight on my gun and stay there. He’s got a jailhouse tattoo on his neck, some gang scrawl, the Jack of Spades.
“Some discussion, some talk. More comfortable inside?” Armani half bows in a lead-the-way gesture.
“It’s a public building. You gents might be more comfortable inside, but I’m fine just where I am. What say we talk here?” In truth I’m aching to sit, but I want these thugs on their way. I cross my arms casually, Beretta in hand.
“Okay. No problems. Guns, no need for guns,” says Armani.
“What can I do for you?” I repeat. I’m too tired, really. I need to wrap this up.
Armani’s ingratiating veneer slides a bit. “Our boss, he likes to speak to you.”
“And who is your boss?”
“Mr. Yakiv Shapsko.”
“Uh-huh. And he wants to discuss …”
Armani lifts his shoulders and drops them. “Business. What else?”
I nod. “Okay, I’m open to that. Tomorrow morning would work best for me.”
The men exchange looks.
“Mr. Shapsko makes suggestion, meeting right away. We take you to him now. Okay?”
I absorb both of them. Honestly, I don’t want to be a snob, I certainly do similar errands on occasion, but there’s this subspecies that’s just so specific. These guys fall into that category.
From past experience I can guesstimate that I don’t exactly have a choice about how this plays out. I’m not up to further static. Say, “Look, boys. At least let me change my pants. As you can see, I’m not presentable and I don’t want to disturb you or your boss’s finely honed aesthetic sensibilities. If I may.”
Again the boys share a glance. It’s a hair tense. Armani is working his jaw. “Stepan, he is going with you.”
“Guys, I’m not a flight risk. Neither you two nor your boss does much in the way of scaring me. I’ll go wherever, I don’t have anything better to do.”
Armani, who I’m sure would love to have at me, is marshalling his cool. “Stepan, he is going with you,” says the big man again.
I shrug, put my gun in my waistband, and start up the stairs. It’s not easy. “Fine, Stepan, please do follow me.”
Armani, in Ukrainian, says to Stepan: “Hurry this up, help the nigger walk.”
“Yeah, Stepan,” I echo in their native tongue, “help this nigger walk.” Throw them off a little.
They don’t seem particularly impressed by my lingual skills.
Stepan offers his forearm, the koi warped by his ridiculous musculature. A lesser man would have gagged on his cologne, but I keep it together and take his arm like Scarlett O’Hara.
“You’re too kind,” I continue in Ukrainian. “Hey, I dig Hardy’s gear. It’s got that edge.” Stepan won’t look at me, so I keep talking. “Cousin, in general I just gotta say, I like what you’re working with. The big guns here. Since David Barton went under, I imagine you have a fantastically well-appointed home gym.”
These guys must be under strict orders and/or truly fear their master. Because their intense desire to beat me into carpaccio is thicker in the air than my man Stepan’s cologne.
Which is saying something.
Superflu descended like the motherfucking wrath of God, Old Testament style.
H1N1? That stepchild had been the viral equivalent of Ishtar. A big raspberry of a bomb, the failed punch line, all talk and no walk.
Put folks off guard.
But Big Bad Mother Nature learns from her mistakes, makes adjustments, and comes roaring back with an improved model. Those who knew said if you dug the Superflu virus under a microscope, you could watch the bastard mutate, right there before you eyes.
It was perfect, in every respect. And like a snowflake, each and every individual virus had its very own unique design and symmetry. Constantly shifting.
In North America, it’s thought that about two million people lost their lives to this pandemic. Even with all our modern medicine, inoculations, etc.
That slightly beats out the Spanish Flu of 1918, given the current world population. No joke.
Course, me, I’d had the secret shot. The one that never went into production. So as the bodies stacked higher and higher, all I had to contend with was a mild case of the sniffles.
Gliding now down Ninth Avenue.
This far west? You can smell the Hudson, even above the Stench. The tainted water level is high, about a meter below the edge of the road. And rising. I
t’s just a matter of time.
As we arrive, I gather the Maritime Hotel on Ninth Avenue and 16th Street is not what it once was, which is to say that it is apparently no longer a hotel. More like a private entertainment facility.
The first indicator my brain didn’t identify right away. I’m folded into the cramped backseat of a latemodel Ford Volt as the distinctive building comes into view, and I’m thinking something’s funky.
As we pull into the former bike lane and come to stop at the curb, it hits me: all the lights are on. They must have a serious generator, industrial kind of gear.
Dude in some sort of fancy burgundy Mao jacket opens the door for Armani (never got his name), who turns and flips down the seat.
“Mr. Decimal. Let’s go.”
I’m climbing out, obviously not fast enough what with the knee, because Armani grabs my upper arm and gives me a jerk … I almost do a face-plant, which would have been embarrassing because we have a potential audience; the mezzanine-level terrace, formerly a nightclub or a sushi place or some shit, is hopping.
Thick with white men drinking cocktails and uniformly slender white or Asian women doling them out. Rice paper lanterns adorn the balcony, and I hear the muted throb of that kind of crappy electronic music to be found only in settings such as these. I spy a waterfall.
The vibe is strictly late–twentieth century designer hotel, and my inner douche-o-meter is pinned hard right.
Mao jacket slides into the car and is off, taking the corner at 16th with a slight screech of the tires. Valet parking?
I have a few questions but Stepan grips the back of my neck, and together with Armani they’re hustling our party toward the entrance. This is the largest grouping of people I’ve seen in the city since the Occurrence(s), outside of a construction site. Clearly I’m out of the loop.
Back at the library, I had been allowed to change, then I was stripped of my gun, my PurellTM. They studied my laminate for ages. They took issue with my key, I kept telling them it was just a goddamn key, and eventually they let me hang on to it. I slipped it into my new pants pocket, front right of course.
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