“It is basic respect. If one has the means, one should dress properly,” she said. “The people living in shacks are one thing. Those white people have no excuse. They have money but no class.”
“Speaking of people with no class,” Topsy began. “Did you see your man Graham Douglas grandstanding in his expensive suit? Already making his political bid.”
“He’s not my man.”
“Don’t you belong to that hotel union?”
“In name,” Professor Cleave said. “Are you already starting in on this?”
“He’s ugly as mortal sin but not half as interesting. Eulogizing strangers to get a place in the papers. Someone should push him into the hole and cover him up,” Topsy said. “He’ll be prime minister or a hide-licked dog by the end of the week, depending on what Butts does.”
“This is no time for loud commentary,” Professor Cleave said.
“His father was a scabby bastard. He didn’t have a care for the labor movement, back when it was something to be proud of.”
“I see your leftist leanings have returned.”
“I used to box that fellow.” Topsy nodded to a man hunched within the folds of a baggy suit. “A champion banana weight, even if he doesn’t look it now. A real fighter in his day. An artist. Not one of these brawlers you see in the ring now. He showed me a few things back when we used to spar, and I shined the side of his face once or twice.”
“This is no time for your stories,” Professor Cleave said.
“His wife passed recently. I should join him for a drink after this is over.”
“This is no time for drinking in the street. The police don’t know who they’re working for.”
Professor Cleave trailed off. He looked at the backs of sagging banners and the road winding toward a cemetery that had once been a potter’s field, where the bones of debtors and slaves, prostitutes and paupers, and now Mary, would share a tiny patch of common ground. He wondered how much time would pass before weeds overran Mary’s grave, and how long Tremor’s name would remain on walls all over town. We gathered wherever litter provided cover, knowing that the longing for closure had already produced certain forms of forgetting. At the cemetery, politicians in linen suits would distill the most unlikely elements of Mary’s life into a cheap liquor to numb raw nerves. From a place of ignorance, they’d speak of love for a woman they would have shunned on the street. We shuddered, truly, at humans’ insatiable desire for soothing stories, and failing these, for scapegoats.
After the procession passed, Helen and Dave wandered back to the harbor and sat on the retaining wall. Dave looked out across the water, as if meditating on the Celeste.
“I did some math.” He pulled a joint from his shirt pocket. “We’ve been off the ship as long as we were on it. We’d be showing symptoms by now. We won’t be dying in this shithole.”
“People are still getting sick,” she said.
“But they say it’s slowing.” He took a drag off the joint and extended it to Helen.
“Some people started showing symptoms yesterday,” she said.
“I’m not going to worry anymore.”
She held the joint loosely between her fingers. “There’s something strange about smoking his weed.”
“Where it’s from doesn’t change what it does. And it’s paid for.”
She inhaled deeply and passed the joint back to Dave. Then she looked up at the cemetery, closed her eyes, and lost herself in the sound of breaking waves.
“I’m going back,” he said. “It’s hotter than hell.”
He dropped to the ground. By the time she opened her eyes and lowered herself from the wall, he was well down the sidewalk.
In the Ambassador’s lobby, they found a manager pacing behind the reservations desk. He glanced in their direction and started taping the flaps of a cardboard box. “Perhaps you didn’t take time to read the notice. In light of the disruption to services here, we’re accommodating all of our guests at the Plantations at St. Anne.”
“The strike—” Helen began.
“This hotel is closing. That was explained in the notice delivered to your room.”
“This thing’s slowing business,” Dave said. “Makes sense. Lump us together and turn off the lights here. Saves money.”
The manager fixed Dave in a hard stare. “I’ll arrange a shuttle for seven o’clock tomorrow morning. Please be in the lobby on time, this time.” Without another word, he started pulling file folders from a desk.
Dave found the notice and a brochure on the floor behind their door. “Saw these yesterday. Thought they were junk ads and kicked them aside.”
Helen sat down on her bed. “I don’t understand. The strike’s just one day.”
“Tourist season ain’t happening now, and the folks at the Plantations sure as hell aren’t moving here.” Dave began reading. “‘The Plantations at St. Anne, where colonial elegance meets modern living. The restored estate house showcases period-piece furniture—’”
“That guy in the lobby wasn’t a creep. He was just making small talk.”
Dave dropped the brochure on Helen’s lap and turned on the television. “Don’t be sad. You’ll have your pick of creeps at the Plantations. Rich creeps.”
She tossed the brochure aside and stepped onto the balcony. The cemetery was empty and groups of people were filtering into the streets of Portsmouth. A second ship, a speck of battleship grey, was growing on the horizon and heading toward the harbor.
She turned to Dave, now propped against his headboard, drinking beer and watching television. “I can see the airlift. Aren’t there people actually starving somewhere?”
She waited for him to say something, knowing he just wanted to get away from the claustrophobic room, and from her. She gripped the railing and looked down at the pool, finding familiarity in the shadows lengthening beneath its surface.
Those drinking on Portsmouth’s streets saw the second ship through unfocused eyes, as an ill omen waxing on the horizon. Small crowds gathered along the harbor to better apprehend it—a dreaded apparition slowly assuming the appearance of a military transport. With its ill-timed arrival, the ship compounded the grief of Rocky Point. Bringing salvation to the sources of so much misery, it mocked the sanctity of Mary’s day and renewed thoughts of injustice at a moment of possible healing. As the sun set behind the Celeste, the groups of people standing at the water’s edge wandered into the center of town, observed by dwindling numbers of police.
Tremor watched them pass beneath the window of his spare refuge. Hours earlier, he’d parted the loose slats of a shutter and beheld a hearse covered in sprays of wilted lilies. He’d imagined Crazy Mary’s eyes, sealed shut but seeing everything. He’d seen his father in sagging pants, walking unsteadily with his bruised face lowered and his shoulders bowed. He’d curled his fingers over his own shoulders, touched his welts and cried, and then he’d slumped against the wall and raged in silence until his mind went blank.
Throughout, we’d kept our distance, shaken by his volatility and his unwitting role in Mary’s death. When he began seizing, though, we remembered all the times we’d huddled among weeds, stunned by unfathomable loss, and we edged toward him. Then something in the atmosphere shifted. We lifted our antennae and realized that Tremor, too, had sensed a violent movement in a symphony of voices. He lifted himself from the floor and parted the shutters. People were massing in intersections and standing on the hoods of parked cars. He discerned the guttural slang of Tindertown and the shouted names of friends. When he heard EZ’s voice, he abandoned all caution, leaned over the sill, and drew a breath of disturbed air. On the far side of the street, EZ was approaching a man wearing leather sandals, the same man Tremor had seen outside the Ambassador.
“Confused like a castrated goat,” Tremor whispered.
“Got the American disease,” EZ shouted, stepping into the man’s path. “No one wants your kind of business here.” EZ turned to two policemen standing at a distance and
spat on the ground. The police fingered their batons and then lowered their hands. Emboldened, EZ pushed the man into the gutter. “Beach boy washed up in the wrong place. Messing with white people and infecting everyone.”
The man began to rise from a bed of litter, and EZ kicked him in the ribs. Within seconds, glass bottles started raining down upon the intersection, and people began shattering windows in the wake of the retreating policemen.
In our terror, we crawled into wall cracks and the spaces between floorboards. Some of us scrambled onto rooftops, madly seeking higher ground, as if it all hadn’t begun to break apart. Tremor tore himself from the window and fled the apartment, leaping over stairs in his rapid descent. At the bottom of the stairwell, he stood in the doorway, captivated by the feverish faces of strangers racing past. With a pounding heart, he slipped into an undertow of sweaty bodies and latched, almost by chance, onto EZ’s shirt. EZ spun around, and in one fluid motion pulled Tremor onto the sidewalk. He picked up a loosened cobblestone, pressed it into Tremor’s hand, and nodded at a store window.
“You know the man who owns this,” EZ shouted. “Talking to the police about things he sees and giving them names.”
The streets receded from Tremor’s vision until all that remained of the world was the stone resting in his palm and EZ’s expectant expression. His hand trembled, and before his mind could revolt, he squeezed his eyes shut and forgot about dirty towels and dumpsters and the shame festering in the welts upon his shoulders. When he opened his eyes, triangles of glass were dropping from the window’s wooden frame. EZ slipped through the frame and reappeared in the shop’s doorway, shouting about cash registers and cans of kerosene.
When Tremor and EZ left the store, they found the street aglow in orange light. All around, fires were spreading, taking on a life and logic of their own. They leapt from one roof to another, lapped at weathered shutters and wooden shingles. They blackened walls and gutted cars and devoured bags of garbage in glutted alleyways. They scaled telephone poles and left power lines writhing on the ground in showers of yellow sparks. They cast shadows across the face of a woman picking scattered bars of soap off the street. Tremor watched the woman and recalled so many maids bending over bathtubs, picking sticky residue from drains, and with the same sickening efficiency, kneeling before him and wrapping their callused hands around his hips. He turned away from the woman, looked into EZ’s glistening eyes, and then ran toward the harbor. He didn’t stop until he came upon six friends burning a couch.
“We’re burning something bigger,” he shouted above a deafening roar.
He started running again, thinking of Professor Cleave’s brittle books and thousands of dirty glasses rimmed with saliva. Halfway up the hill, he turned to watch columns of smoke bending in the disturbed atmosphere, drifting over the harbor and obliterating the Celeste. He lifted his phone to take a picture, saw that it had no signal, and realized almost everything beyond Portsmouth lay in darkness.
“It’s dead,” he said.
“Electricity’s out,” EZ said. “The only lights are in the south.”
Tremor turned around and gazed at the reflected light of Portsmouth flickering upon the Ambassador’s face. Unsteadied by a familiar sense of vertigo, he continued up the hill and down a sidewalk, past a gated enclosure reeking of garbage, and to the Ambassador’s front doors. He tried a locked door and pounded on the glass. Behind him, his friends unearthed rocks from a flowerbed.
He left EZ in the lobby and made his way to the lounge. Alone, he marveled at luminous mirrored walls alive with the light of Portsmouth’s burning. He stepped behind the bar and stared at his reflection above a row of bottles, admired the cast of his features and the play of shadows beneath his eyes. He dug his heels into a rubber mat and imagined Professor Cleave brooding over third-hand books.
“When you steal, you lose yourself,” he said. “You’re deformed.”
He drew a bottle from the shelf and held it up to the light coming through the patio doors, enchanted by the glow of amber liquid. The bottle seemed a magical lantern illuminating the only path open to him, now that circumstances had closed every other. He was dousing the bar when EZ found him.
“What you doing? This place is going up. We’re leaving.”
Tremor narrowed his eyes, unable to grasp the urgency of EZ’s words.
“What the fuck’s wrong with you?” EZ said.
Tremor pulled out his lighter and conjured a river of blue flame that snaked along the counter, sweeping over stacks of matchbooks, napkins, and cardboard coasters. He stepped away from the bar and held the lighter to the drapes framing the patio doors. A sheet of fire rose to the ceiling, and bits of blackened fabric drifted through the air. EZ shouted when the first ceiling tile crashed to the floor. Tremor registered his name, and for once at one with himself, he followed EZ through the lobby, over broken furniture and shattered glass and pieces of cracked ceramic. Outside, he gripped the bottle in his hands and waited for the Ambassador to burn.
Most of us, by then, had fled the Ambassador. Some of us lingered in Room 504, transfixed by the sight of Portsmouth consuming itself, and like the Americans, stunned when the hotel went dark. In too many cases, we retreated too late, scaling down blistered walls, crawling into smoking elevator shafts, and in utter desperation attempting flight from the rooftop.
The Americans, remarkably, escaped the flames. Tremor rose from the curb when they staggered from the Ambassador, coughing and rubbing their eyes. Every thought fled his mind. Before he realized he’d raised his hand, he felt the sickening resistance of splitting flesh. He stumbled backward, away from the man collapsed on the pavement and trying to stanch the flow of blood with splayed fingers. He looked at the ghostly woman, a pale incarnation of Crazy Mary, moving her lips without speaking and clutching the folds of her ragged clothing. Then he dropped the bottle and raced down the street, driven by the sensation of Crazy Mary’s hands clawing at his neck. Soon, he was lost to us, leaving terror in his wake.
Dave looked up at Helen and the burning hotel, recognizing neither. He tried to make sense of disjointed perceptions—auras of purple light around bits of garbage, twisting metal shrieking, and warm asphalt seething beneath his knees. He felt his eyes liquefy and slide down his cheeks and grew bewildered by his capacity to see. The only mercy was his inability to retain a thought beyond the instant of its inception. He flinched at Helen’s touch and just as quickly forgot his fear, rose on unsteady legs and followed her around the hotel. At the top of the bluff, he looked down at a narrow beach, a desolate isthmus dividing two regions of Hell. Above, palm fronds hissed in a sulfurous firework burn. Below, Portsmouth formed a crescent of fire beneath a charcoal sky. With a dim sense of Helen’s hand beneath his arm, he stumbled forward, terrified by the sensation of sand swallowing his feet as they staggered down the bluff. He collapsed beneath a copse of trees at the end of the beach.
Helen pulled off her sweater, pressed it against Dave’s head, and prodded him into wakefulness each time he slumped. When she peeled her sweater from his face, he shuddered violently, wracked by chills and an awareness of something evil passing through his broken skin and nesting within his skull. He backed against a tree, only to recoil from the skeletal fingers of its exposed roots. He retched and seized for hours and finally grew quiet when the fires in Portsmouth began to burn out.
Helen looked across the water, at the smoke dissipating above the harbor and the Celeste floating upon its inverted reflection. She considered its illuminated decks and the indecorous lights strung between its bow and dead funnels, and further south, an isolated glow at the tip of a peninsula. She walked to the water’s edge, crouched down, and urinated on the wet sand. Pinpoints of electric light glimmered and vanished on the waves. In her delirium, she imagined constellations of dying stars extinguished by the sea, lost souls cast by indifferent angels into a watery abyss.
Were religion our compass, we might have imagined as much. Some of us had fallen that night,
and in a last glimpse of the world seen little more than a steel air duct beneath a water line, paint vaporizing on the Ambassador’s face, or the collapsing timbers of a tinderbox slum. Those of us who’d escaped the Ambassador huddled beneath singed wings and cursed the Celeste. The bravest among us finally drew our antennae from the sand, extended them toward Portsmouth, and wondered what life there remained.
Professor Cleave, too, had spent the night in torment, obsessed with the orange glow in the sky. He sat at his kitchen table and stared at his hands, stunned by how quickly a peaceful march had devolved into violence. He returned again and again to the fact that he’d felt uneasy leaving Portsmouth with Cora beside him, fussing over a blister, and Topsy in the backseat, searching for cigarettes. He’d thought to stop by the terminal, but he’d been too disappointed in Desmond. He’d been too angry. Now he was trying to remain calm while Cora recounted half-spent batteries and searched the radio for news.
“Our stations are dead,” she said. “If we walked up the hill, we could see something.”
“My father’s been up there. He said there’s nothing to see through the smoke.”
“We might see something from the church.”
“Perhaps there’s nothing left to see.”
Professor Cleave met Cora’s eyes and regretted his words. She straightened the wick of a guttering candle and fell silent. By the slight movement of her lips, Professor Cleave knew she was either praying or conducting mental inventories of canned goods. At midnight, he rose from his chair.
“Desmond is by himself,” he said.
Cora rose from her chair. “You’re a fool to go out there now.”
“They’ll leave me alone. We marched this morning.”
“So did everyone else lighting fires.”
“They’ve spent themselves by now.”
She slammed her palm on the table, and a stream of tallow spilled from the candle. “You’ve been putting your neck out for years.”
The Wonder That Was Ours Page 17