Dark City Lights

by Lawrence Block

  I served the city as it grew, and it propitiated and appreciated me and built for me a great arched tiled home beneath itself, running the length of the valley so I could continue to drain down the marshy parts that once were there and keep it dry and habitable, and also to carry away their wastes as the greater houses multiplied over the years and connected to me, and the public facilities, too. As the city grew, an ever carefully planned and multiplying number of subsidiary ducts were connected to flow into me. I also carried away the waters from great storms for them, feeding it all out into the Tiber, just as much later I would do for London into the Thames, Hamburg into the Elbe, and for other places into other rivers and lakes.

  I served them in that, my first city, and they reverenced me and even erected for me a small shrine in the center of their dry valley which they now called a forum, along its main thoroughfare which they called the Via Sacra, in front of a building they called the Basilica Aemilia. It was a modest shrine, but sincere. They understood the importance of what I did for them and wished to honor me, and I regarded them well for that and pledged to serve them tirelessly. They built my little shrine over the central drain of my home, the Cloaca Maxima. It was a round, raised platform with a low railing and two statues of me (though some have claimed one was of a greater being like me, and not me, but it was not) and in the center a covered opening that gave ingress into my great tunnel, as if into me.

  That was long ago, as you count time. Long before any fancy I might have had about Dovid and me.

  MIDWAY THROUGH MY PREGNANCY FROM Dovid, a great, terrible storm struck the long island to the east and north of Manhattan, and even Queens and Brooklyn and some of the eastern edge of Manhattan itself. The East River, which is not truly a river but a tidal strait open to the ocean on both ends, surged up from the south against Governor’s Island and Roosevelt Island and Randall’s Island in the strait which separates Manhattan from Queens, and surged again, and then yet again, frenzied and wild.

  Raging, the crazed waters flowed backwards into my systems, pounded into them, carried debris and things from the sea swirling into them, and among those things a pod of little sea nymphs who became trapped beneath a grate that secured a passage between the tunnel in which I stood witnessing the rape of my home and the tunnel below, and they were hurled up against the grate by the thrusting backflow, the salty water erupting up past them into the larger tunnel where I was, streaming their golden hair up over their heads in wavering filaments through the small square openings in the grate. They raised their faces and pushed their slender fingers up through the grate toward me in panicked supplication and shrilled in terror with their high-pitched voices. And I could not help these lovely fragile creatures who in common days rode the crests of waves in the bright sunlight under a blue sky in delight, known long ago for who and what they were, but no longer now, not by you who cannot see the stars in the sky but rather who see these creatures only as glinting little puffs of spray as the wind whips against the curling tops of those waves. All I could do was stretch out my hands toward them in pity and hold their eyes with my own so they could see that they were not alone, for though I am greatly strong I cannot wrench heavy iron from its embedment deep in concrete. And I watched the little pod of these frightened creatures drown, which is all I could do, and then watched them sink back down lifeless into the roiling waters and be carried away.

  The storm killed Dovid, too.

  He had gone out to a marina on City Island in the Long Island Sound to help his friend Michael Shannon re-moor the small sailboat Shannon kept there. A boom broke free in the driving wind, swung wildly, struck Dovid, knocked him overboard, and he drowned.

  It was that simple, and that sudden.

  Beneath the city streets, I felt a wrench within my belly when it happened. I cried out and lowered myself to sit on a ledge from which the rats, who normally find me congenial and I them, had gone scurrying away at my cry. I held my rounded belly, surprised. I do not much feel pain, if this had actually been pain. I was uncertain. If it had not been pain, it had at least been unfamiliar: a sudden twisting, a turn, a breaking of some kind.

  And in truth I did not know if it was I who had experienced it or my forming child, whom I would later learn was a boy; if I had not instead felt a rippling outward from him, of what he felt at that moment. I do know that as I sat with my hands cradling my belly, my forming child was thrashing about within me and that it took time for him to become quiet again. But I do not know which of us had actually felt this loss, sensed Dovid in his death, and in our agitation had disturbed the other. I think perhaps it was the child, connected to his father through the agency of the small part of him that was me. As later, through that same agency he would—dimly—know me.

  I loved my child. That had never happened to me before. With my first two, I felt some regard—or at least that I ought to—and I saw that they were not destroyed, that they could exist without suffering the more violent pains of their times and live out their natural lives that way.

  The girl, whom I had by Albus, I was able to place into the house of one of the lesser noble families, a house more kind than most at that time, as a household slave. The boy, from John, I got situated as an infant with a servant couple who had lost a child of their own, and later apprenticed to a cobbler so he could have a decent trade.

  Had Dovid lived, I would have brought Ben—for that is what I named my son, and he was my son, not just a child I had borne—to him, and I believe Dovid would have loved him, would have wanted him. And I would have found ways to help, make it not only possible but even easy for him to raise our son, even though I would not, I think I have to admit, have been able to be with them.

  I know Dovid would have loved Benjamin. Though we had had but a single night together, he had loved me. His touch had become too gentle, his eyes too open to me, his body figured to mine too easily as we slept, and his arms around me too cherishing and protective, his breath too soft on my shoulder, for him not to—even with the swell of his hormones, which is what had first impelled him to me at the side of the river. After that swell, beneath it, Dovid was a man capable of love. He would not have been able to resist loving his child. I think that was part of why I loved Ben myself, however much I can love, which is at least some, I have learned. Because his father had loved me.

  And I think Dovid would have liked the name Benjamin. I don’t know why. I just do. Which is mostly why I chose it.

  The sea god might have killed Dovid. Out of anger, or jealously, or both. He was once a suitor to me, some say. Others that he was my father, who carelessly tossed me aside. I don’t think either is true. If so, it was somehow before I was, and I cannot see how that could be. Still others say he might simply hold me in contempt, I being so much less than he, a corrupt little mimicry in a corrupt domain, or because in his eyes I foul his own. Again, I do not know. Perhaps it was just that he goes into rages sometimes, needing no reason, and it was only by sad coincidence that Dovid was killed along with the little nymphs and other creatures of the sea that day, and even some of the air and land, too, and the borders between sea and land so badly ravaged.

  Whichever, Dovid was dead; and months later Ben was in my arms and suckling at my breast.

  I HAD LAIN WITH DOVID in the summer. It was late in a night the following spring when I rose up into the streets again, with Ben in my arms. He was but seven days old, swaddled in a light wool blanket, with a little cap on his head, and sleeping contentedly, having suckled his fill. When there was no one to see, I emerged onto Seventeenth Street, walked east a little, crossed to the other side of Sixth Avenue and turned south. Within a few steps I was at the closed glass doors of the New York Foundling Hospital. I lifted Benjamin, kissed him on his forehead, then quickly bent and set him gently to the pavement. I stood and rapped on the glass. Within, the guard looked up. I pointed down to Benjamin, and then I left, moving rapidly, and turned east onto Sixteenth Street before the guard could open the doors.
r />   A taxi was pulled to the side there, the driver talking on a cell phone, gesticulating as he spoke. I could not return to my home with a witness. I walked past the taxi to Fifth Avenue, where cars were moving down toward Washington Square, as they always are—the city never wholly sleeps—went to Fifteenth Street, and saw there would soon be a lull in the scant traffic there. I turned onto it, waited, and when the lull did come stepped off the sidewalk into the street, lifted the manhole cover there, slipped down, replaced the cover behind myself, and was home again . . . and alone.

  More alone than ever.

  I did not want form anymore, in which there is more feeling, so I merged back into the brick and concrete, melded into the stuff of the tunnels and passageways, and became without form—still being in a way, but in a way where not much was poignant.

  Time passed.

  I sensed the boy now and then. He was content, he was happy, he was lonely. He was frightened, he was angry, he was amused. He felt terribly, terribly alone: friendless, unloved. I stirred in the tunnels, in the brick, the concrete, the cast-iron. His loneliness touched me, even in my attenuation. I nearly took form, but in the end did not. There was nothing, really, I could do for him.

  I could do only what I had always done. I drained the city, and kept it from sickening itself.

  BUT ONE NIGHT, SUDDENLY, WITHOUT intent, I heaved again into being. Just did.

  I was afraid, something I had never been before. Terrified, I think—if I understand what people mean by that word.

  (If it is, I can only pity them. I cannot imagine how they can bear to live with something like that in their life.)

  I took form below a manhole on East Fourth Street, off Avenue D, rose up, threw aside the iron cover, which clanged atop the pavement when it fell, and surged onto the sidewalk and up the stairs of one of a pair of abandoned buildings there. I plunged through the splintery gap in the broken plywood that ineffectually sealed a glassless window to the side of the landing, which was half a level up from the street.

  “Please, please! Don’t!” cried Benjamin.

  “I’m going to cut your dick off, you little shit.”

  I saw them in what was the near darkness to them but was not to me, two boys, young men really, greasy, dirty, both with knives advancing on Benjamin, who was equally unkempt but younger, much younger, and smaller, and who had already been cut on his arm, from which blood was dripping down onto the dirty floor, his shirt wet with it around the wound.

  I said nothing. I just moved.

  I ripped the head from one of his attackers and seized the other as blood sprayed from the neck of the corpse that was still standing beside him. I lifted him above my head and hurled him against the scarred, stained, hard plaster wall a dozen feet away in what had once been the sitting room of this old, tired building. Many of his bones broke when he struck it. He dropped heavily to the floor.

  “Please!” Benjamin wailed.

  He was pressed against the far wall in front of me, away from the street, half crouched, his head down, trying to protect it with his arms.

  The decapitated corpse collapsed.

  There was blood on the ceiling from it, and on the near wall, and blood now began to pool slowly out of the torn neck, no longer pulsing with the heart no longer beating, just trickling some now.

  “I don’t have any more money,” Ben cried.

  “Ben,” I said.

  “Please!”

  “Ben. Benjamin. It’s alright. You’re safe now. No one is going to hurt you.”

  He raised his head a little, peered fearfully over his forearm, trying to see in the gloom.

  “It’s alright, Ben.”

  He could not make me out clearly, but he could see that I was not them.

  “Ben,” I said, letting him hear my voice, my woman’s voice.

  I took a step toward him, held my hands out to him.

  “I . . . my name is Tom,” he said. “Tom.”

  “It’s Ben,” I said. “That’s what it first was. But you can be Tom if you wish. Either way, you’re safe now.” I extended my hands further. “Come, let’s leave this place.”

  He pushed himself erect, took a tentative step toward me, then another, looking about for the two young men who had hurt him, who had intended to kill him. In the blackness, he didn’t see the body at the foot of the wall against which I had thrown the one. I moved a little away from the other, crumpled at my feet, which I did not think Ben would recognize as a body in the gloom and amid the boxes and other debris on the floor. He was looking for standing figures, dangerous figures.

  “Come.”

  I reached for his hand, touched his fingertips. He flinched, but did not draw his hand back. I took it and began to lead him toward the broken plywood and the street. I could feel the years through his hand, could feel his heart, could know him. I ached for him. Too many foster homes, too many indifferent or bad people, and finally the awful one, who had hurt him and caused him to run away, to be living on the streets as he was. I have never wept. If I could, I think I would have then.

  Ben was turning his head, trying to see into the darkness around us.

  “Where are they?” he asked. “What happened to them?”

  “They’re gone,” I said.

  I helped him out through the broken plywood onto the landing at the top of the steps.

  “Stay here a moment,” I said, touching his shoulder. “I need to go back and get something I dropped.”

  He tensed.

  I touched his cheek. “No, no. Don’t worry. There’s nothing to be afraid of. I’ll be back in just a moment. Truly. A moment.”

  I was quick. I went through their pockets and took the money that was there, which wasn’t much but was enough for what I needed. The one at the foot of the wall moaned once, a little moan. I broke his neck.

  Outside, I took Ben’s hand again and led him down to the sidewalk. He was, I think, somewhat in shock. But I could see him struggling against that, working to take control of himself. I walked him to beneath one of the sodium street lamps, which cast a light that had an orange tint but was brighter than one might have thought. He needed to see me. To feel comforted, to feel safe, and he needed to see me examine his wound in the light, which I could have done in what was the dark to him, but which would not have been a good thing to do.

  “It will need cleaning and stitches,” I said.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  He was trying to toughen himself, to stand straighter.

  “Just a friend,” I said. “Someone who cares about people. At least sometimes. I heard you cry out. I went to see what was wrong,” I said.

  “There were two of them,” he said. “They were going to kill me. They could have killed you.”

  “No. They couldn’t—they . . . wouldn’t have. I think they were cowards.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  I took the moment to look at him more completely. He was gangly, but I could see that he would grow up to be tall and lean like his father. His dark hair was the same, curly and thick, even if in need of a washing now. And his eyes.

  That was a mistake, looking into his eyes.

  They were not Dovid’s eyes.

  They were my mine: green with flecks of gold that picked up the color of my hair.

  In the light of the street lamp, even with its orange tint, he saw that, too: his eyes in mine. He saw me, even if he did not understand what he was seeing. He made a sound that seemed torn from his heart and threw himself into my arms and clasped me.

  I held him, and rocked him, and kissed his head.

  “There,” I murmured. “There. It’s alright now. It will be alright. No one will hurt you again. There,” I said, holding him.

  I took him in a cab to the Downtown Hospital on William Street at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, to the emergency room. There were only two other patients waiting at this late hour. The bleeding from Ben’s wound had slowed, and we were given a compress to keep pressed
to it. It was not long before the nurse called us over to take our information.

  “Name?” she asked.

  Ben looked at me. Into my eyes. “Ben,” he said.

  “Last name?”

  He waited, looking at me.

  “Davidson,” I said, after only a moment. “Benjamin Davidson.”

  “Davidson,” Ben said.

  That had not been Dovid’s last name. But it was a true name for Ben.

  “And you are?” the nurse asked me.

  Ben was waiting, intently.

  “His sister,” I said. I could not have been his mother, did not look old enough.

  “Your name?”

  “Chloe.”

  “Davidson?”

  “No. Purificare. Chloe Purificare,” I said, using one of the old words.

  The nurse wrote it down. “Your date of birth, Benjamin?”

  I did not answer for him. When he saw that I was not going to, he gave her a date. It was not the true date, but close enough, probably assigned to him by the Foundling Home.

  “Address?”

  He gave her one in the West Village that was not his, that had never been his. He gave it to her easily, naturally. I could see some of the charm of his father in him, as his father had begun to speak to me by the East River that night fifteen years ago.

  “How did this happen?” the nurse asked, lifting the compress and looking at the wound.

  “I was trying to fix a broken window pane. I slipped. I got cut.”

  The nurse wrote that down. She may have believed it. It was clear that she had noted his clothes, which looked like the clothes of a boy who was living on the streets, and his grime. My robe, which some see as a kind of gown when they see me, or as a simple dress, was not blemished. It never is, by anything, as I myself am not. I have been called a purifier.

  “Parents?” she asked.