by Meg Medina
Maybe this is crazy. Who am I to need this information? The whole bus ride I fought with myself, wondering whether I should get off and head back home.
I am not Pablo’s girlfriend anymore.
I am not a girl whose life he will understand.
Get out of here, Nora, I tell myself. You’re stalking.
The mist in the air becomes a light drizzle. I can’t stay out here for much longer, but I don’t dare ring the doorbell. It’s too early, not even eight in the morning on a Sunday. I haven’t slept; I’m still wearing my disco clothes, and my makeup is surely smeared. His mother would take one look at me and think what?
So I reach into my purse and pull out the only things I have to write with: a Kleenex and my Cherry Bomb lipstick.
HAD TO KNOW YOU WERE OKAY. — N
I stick the note inside the driver’s window, which never quite rolls up, and hope he sees it.
Hobbling, I turn back for home.
The heat is already rising off the pavement on Monday morning as I roll open Sal’s awning and drag in the bound stack of newspapers from the sidewalk. The awful headline and photos are a reminder all over again.
.44 KILLER STRIKES AGAIN: WOUNDS 2
My eyes linger on the caption beneath Judy Placido’s picture on the front page. She had been celebrating her high-school graduation, it says. She’s barely alive at Flushing Hospital.
I crawl under my register counter to find the utility knife to cut the stack open. Everyone will want a paper today, hungry for every ghoulish detail. They will share theories that will make my skin prickle and make me look over my shoulder wherever I go.
The bells sound, even though the lights are still off.
“Just a minute.” I brace myself for customer number one and stand up.
But when I straighten, I find Pablo standing there, work apron in his hand. He’s got dark circles under his eyes as he regards me. I know that kind of tired, I want to tell him. It’s the deep kind from seeing what you don’t want to. It’s the one that makes you afraid to sleep.
“I got your note,” he says.
I put down the cutter and walk over to where he’s standing. The corners of his lips pull down as I put my hands gently on either side of his face. I kiss him as softly as I can on the cheek.
“She was trying to run back inside,” he whispers. “There was glass in her hair.”
He leans his forehead against mine and closes his eyes. It’s a hot morning, and still his hands feel icy when I take them.
I don’t say anything more. Why would I? I know there aren’t always words when we need them.
Sal’s footsteps sound along the aisle toward us, but we don’t move apart.
I feel Sal near us, but then he turns on his heels and his footsteps fade.
For once in his life, he just lets us be.
“The world is ending! Sinners, repent!”
That’s what the religious wingnut told Kathleen and me last year when we went to see the tall ships in the Harbor for the Fourth of July. We laughed at his tie and his crazy eyes. But now I think, holy shit, maybe he was right.
Kathleen and I are sitting in her yard, cooling our feet off in the baby pool. Her family didn’t go to Breezy Point this year for the holiday weekend. The sink leaked and flooded the place, so Mr. Mac is fixing it and is then stuck doing one of his workdays with no pay.
I close my eyes, trying to pretend I’m at a beach and not closed in on all sides by other houses. Unfortunately the train rumbles by every hour or so, and we can still hear the MacInerneys’ police scanner from here, too. It’s crackling inside the house, with all the normal garbage: a purse snatching near Bowne Park, a burglary, a loud altercation between two homeless guys, a car break-in. But it’s also been spilling the dirt on today’s big news. A Panamanian guy hijacked a bus at lunchtime. He’s still at JFK right now, shooting people and dumping bodies on the tarmac. He says he wants six million bucks plus a plane to Cuba, which Mima told me only proves he’s nuts.
But here’s what’s really weird. We’re all too hot and tired to even care. In fact, no one acts surprised because, face it, what disaster hasn’t happened this year? We’re burning. We’re broke. We’re laid off. We’re ripping each other off or being murdered or pulling the trigger.
Maybe it’s finally all too much to care about. It’s like the color wheel in art. You spin the colors fast enough and everything eventually looks blank and white all over again.
Kathleen flicks water in my direction with her toes. “What’s up with him?”
“Have a heart,” I say. “Who can think in this heat?”
Pablo is across the yard, waiting for Mrs. MacInerney to flip our burgers off the grill. I don’t tell Kathleen the rest. That he’s been quiet this week. That the slam of Sal’s back screen door made him jump yesterday, that we walk to the Dumpster at night together, each of us cautious for different reasons.
“You think he’s okay, though?” Kathleen asks.
“I think the world is ending — that’s what I think.” I open my eyes and imitate the wingnut. “Repent!”
“Repent for what?” Stiller grabs a folding chair near Kathleen. Her face is shiny with sweat.
“Nora thinks the world might be ending,” Kathleen says. “Thoughts?”
Stiller takes a swig of beer. “Nothing ends,” she says. “There is only transformation, ugly as it may be.”
She could be right. I just hope the end point isn’t this. What if a whole city can transform into a hot shithole and then stays that way?
Pablo comes back to us, his plate loaded with food to share. He hands us each a cold soda before he straddles the aluminum chaise and sits down. He puts the bottoms of his bare feet against me like a backrest. It could be a thousand degrees outside, and I would still love how it feels.
Just then firecrackers explode somewhere down the street. Pablo’s plate ends up in the grass.
“I’ll get us more,” I say, trying not to make a big deal.
“IIIIIIIIII love New Yooork!”
The Broadway stars sing and dance on the TV screen above Sal’s counter. Twirling their top hats, they urge us to get to the city, to our nightlife, to the shows.
Please.
Maybe they can still sing that la-di-da tune in Manhattan, but not out here in the boroughs.
In fact, I’m starting to hate New York.
First of all, Son of Sam’s one-year anniversary is just around the corner. Who wants to be in on that party? Nobody’s hanging out; every disco I know has become a ghost town.
But worse, the temperature has ticked up to the inferno range. It’ll be nearly one hundred degrees for a few days at least. Nobody in our building has air-conditioning.
Sal has the ceiling fans going full blast, but they just move the sawdust around. Each time someone walks in, a new wave of heat smacks me in the face at the register. I’ve been glaring at customers, trying to ward them off before they pull open the door and heave their stinking bodies in my direction.
Right now, the only relief is the refrigerator case. Pablo and I stand there, trying to let the cold air soothe us. His T-shirt is soaked at the neck and armpits.
“If we don’t find a way to cool off, I’m going to lose it,” he says.
“We could hose off the loading dock again,” I say. We’ve done that twice today already.
Pablo gives me a sidelong glance. “Or we could go to the movies tonight. There’s air-conditioning.”
I close my eyes and lean into the cold, thinking. We’ve been speaking again, but not about us. “As friends?” I ask.
“If that’s what you want.” He waits for me to say something in the long pause that follows. “Is it?” he asks.
I give him a careful look. “How about you?”
“No. But I’m not going to beg you,” he says. “You either want to date me or not.”
I take a deep breath of cold air. “It’s more complicated than that. Look, I really care about you, Pablo. Yo
u know that. But there’s a lot of sad crap in my life right now that I’m trying to figure out.”
He shrugs. “So what? There’s always crap to figure out, Nora. You can’t exactly wait for everything to be perfect before you date somebody.”
“This is really, really far from perfect,” I say. “But that’s not all. How about what I saw that night in you. Those accusations. Your jealous side is —”
“Not going to ever happen again. It was stupid of me, and I know that.”
I look at him a long time, trying not to focus on his mouth or how much I’d love to feel his arms around me again, even in this heat. He draws a heart for me in the steamy door.
“I miss you,” Pablo says, taking my hand. “And you miss me, too.”
“Shut that door already,” Sal barks at us from the back. “You’re melting the ice cream.”
The bells on the doors sound, and another wall of hot air hits my back again.
“What’s playing?” I ask.
Star Wars is at the Prospect. For two blessed hours, we shiver happily in the air-conditioning, our eyes filling with the wonder of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia kicking intergalactic ass. For the first time in two weeks, I’m not thinking of the shootings or my brother or Mima or how to get away from them. Instead, I’m holding hands with Pablo in the cool darkness, transported to a time and place where good guys band together and there is still hope.
Fantasy, but who cares?
The credits roll and the house lights come up, but neither one of us moves, even as people have to climb over us to get out. Finally the only ones left in the theater with us are the ushers sweeping up popcorn kernels and candy boxes.
“Let’s watch it again,” he says. “Or at least, let’s sit here in the dark again.” He reaches for my face and pulls me into a deep kiss that sends a jolt right to the very center of me. “You don’t want to go out in the heat, do you?” I answer with a deep kiss of my own.
“Sorry, pal, you gotta buy another ticket,” the head usher warns from a couple of rows behind us. “We’re selling out.”
Pablo pulls away from me and gives the guy a sharp look. “Wait here,” he says, and heads out to the ticket booth.
We’re settling in for the opening scene again — spaceships engaged in battle and, more important, Pablo’s hand on my thigh — when the projector suddenly goes black and stutters to a stop.
I twist in my seat and look upstairs, thinking that the projectionist has had a brain warp or something. It happened when I saw The Blob a couple of years ago. The guy burned a hole right through what we saw on the screen.
But this is different. The cyclops eye of the projector is dark, too, and the air conditioner has stopped humming. There’s expectant stillness that feels strange.
“Hang on, everyone!” the projectionist calls out. Footsteps sound, but when he opens the door, there are no lights shining in the outside hall, either.
I reach for Pablo’s hand. “It’s just the power,” I say, not adding to the crazy thought tapping at the back of his mind, too. Did someone cut it on purpose?
The theater door opens a few minutes later, and someone shines a flashlight on us. “The whole block is out. Good old Con Ed, huh?” the voice says about our power company. “Management says to wait.”
We all sit in silence for a while, but with the sold-out crowd and the heat wave, the theater grows stifling in no time. In this heat, it doesn’t take long for people to lose it. The muttering becomes soft cursing, and finally a guy gets so fed up, he tosses his bucket of popcorn right at the screen. Another guy kicks a chair near me so hard, it dislodges from the bolts.
“Hey, pal,” Pablo says, getting up. “Watch it.”
People around us start climbing out of their seats, pushing one another as they head out.
“Let’s go,” Pablo says, but it’s not so easy in the pitch-black. Strangers’ bodies press on us from all around, just like at rush hour on the train, which I despise. We’re holding hands, but somebody behind me actually cops a feel on my ass until I give a hard jab with my elbow.
We finally make it to the lobby and step outside, but the heat is a thick blanket here, too. It doesn’t take long to see that something really serious has gone wrong.
It’s not just the Prospect that’s out of power, or even just this block that’s dark.
All of downtown Flushing has disappeared. In fact, the blackness stretches as far as we can see in every direction. Not a single streetlight or traffic signal is working. There are no neon signs anywhere. No marquees. No tower clocks. The only lights we have are headlights, crisscrossed in confusion as traffic starts to snarl.
The air feels charged in a way that reminds me of a Mima and Hector showdown. It’s that same sense of something about to shatter. Does Pablo feel it, too? He squeezes my hand tighter than he probably realizes as we hurry to his car. I know he’s thinking the same thing I am as we jog along: what’s to stop Son of Sam from being out here with us, too?
We’re almost to the Camaro when a crash of glass sounds behind us. Pablo grabs me instinctively and pulls me close, his head tucked down. But it’s not gunfire. Two guys have tossed a loaded garbage can through the storefront window of a men’s clothing shop. We stand there, watching in shock as they pull off their T-shirts and knock the shards of glass still hanging. All you can hear is the crunch of glass under their sneakers as they step inside.
No power means there are no store alarms to sound. There’s nothing to stop them.
Or anybody else.
As if on cue, half a dozen people seem to swarm out of nowhere. They push past Pablo and me and step inside the store, too, grabbing shirts off the mannequins and emptying shoeboxes and racks. In seconds, they run back into the darkness.
Soon there’s a second sound of breaking glass and then another farther off.
“Let’s get out of here,” Pablo says. “It’s going to get ugly.” We duck into his car and lock the doors just as an appliance repair shop and an electronics store get their windows smashed in, too. In the glare of a bus’s headlights, I see a woman about Mima’s age run off with a vacuum cleaner. A girl takes off with a boxed turntable balanced on her head.
“What the hell is happening?” I twist the radio tuner, trying to find anything that can tell us what’s going on. All I get is static.
Pablo drives north along Main Street only to find when we get there that all six lanes of Northern Boulevard are dark, too. He drives slightly crouched in his seat, especially as we pass people on the streets. It’s a night made for Son of Sam, isn’t it? The cops will be overwhelmed in no time. It’s the perfect night for anybody to commit any crime at all.
Maybe it’s the movie still fresh in my mind, but the world suddenly looks like a moonscape to me. We go by instinct and memory, our giddy nerves finally making us laugh as we drive. With the windows rolled down and no signals to stop us, we speed along faster and faster.
“Whatever happened, it’s big,” Pablo says, sailing through another intersection.
I finally hear a voice on the AM dial. It’s DJ George Michael on WABC. He’s broadcasting, he says, with a generator.
A lightning strike in Westchester has just knocked out a power station, and like a set of dominoes, every borough — including Manhattan — is completely without power. TV stations gone. The airports all closed. Bridges, the World Trade Center, the needle on the Empire State Building, the glare of Times Square, all of it plunged into total blackness. There’s even a bunch of kids stuck mid-ride on the roller coaster at Rye Playland.
“Citizens who may be trapped in subway cars or elevators are urged to remain calm, please. By order of Police Commissioner Michael J. Codd, all off-duty police officers and firemen are requested to report to their stations immediately. I repeat . . .”
Soon sirens begin to wail somewhere up ahead. And then, with a sinking feeling, I think of Hector.
Where is he? I wonder as the sirens grow louder. And what’s he doing in t
he dark?
I turn to Pablo. My mind is starting to race. “Sal’s at the Cubs game tonight at Shea,” I say quietly. “You think the deli’s okay?”
Pablo glances at me. He knows what I do: no one would dare start trouble with Sal and his golf iron around.
But what will happen now that he’s not there?
It’s completely black when we turn the corner onto 162nd Street, and for a moment, I relax. The grates are still pulled down on the deli, exactly as we left them, and the street looks quiet.
But then, as our headlights brighten the road ahead, I see where the real trouble is.
The glass doors and windows of Mr. Farina’s pharmacy have been smashed. Half a dozen guys are inside, clearing the shelves into bags and pockets.
Pablo shines his high beams into the mess, and for a moment, I’m reminded of that year we were overrun by roaches. As soon as you’d turn on the bathroom light, hundreds of insects would scatter back to their corners.
The same happens here. The store empties as the figures take off down the street, but not before I see my brother. Hector is at Mr. Farina’s counter. He leans down and, with a whoosh, a flame lights. Then he takes off. I recognize his familiar lope and Sergio right alongside him. Moments later, a car engine guns and the screech of tires fills the street as they speed away in the Monte Carlo.
Pablo and I jump out of the car and race toward the drugstore. I recognize the smell of lighter fluid right away as we step inside. Pretty yellow-blue flames rise from Mr. Farina’s dispensing counter, following a trail of what’s been doused.
“Where does he keep the extinguisher?” Pablo shouts, but everything inside the shop has been overturned, and it’s almost impossible to see as we grope around in the dark. I’m afraid, too, of stepping in fluid that will set my clothes aflame.
It doesn’t take long for the smell of melting plastic to fill the air. The flames gain intensity and lick all the way to the ceiling. Thick black smoke billows. We have no choice but to turn back. In seconds it feels as though it goes from a small fire to an entire room in blazes.