Brood

by Chase Novak

  One of the squad cars drives right through the barricade of benches. Of the four mounted cops, two coax their horses to leap over the benches, and two pull their horses up short, causing them to rear up, paw at the air with their front hooves.

  A shot is fired. Rodolfo holds his breath, waiting for the pain. But maybe it was just a warning shot. Whatever it was, it missed.

  A dark geyser of dirt rises up where the bullet strikes the earth.

  The park has always been a place of safety, his refuge, all of the wild children’s. But now his only chance of remaining free, remaining alive, is to get out of there. He wills himself to go faster and faster. The ground moves beneath him as swift as water roaring out of a tap. He had no idea this kind of speed was in him. He runs left, and right, and left again. He does not dare look over his shoulder, but he can feel himself putting distance between them and him.

  He has reached Eighty-Fifth Street. The Metropolitan Museum of Art floats into sight. It is massive, heavy, definitive, a stone-and-marble crypt for everything from prehistoric tools to recent masterpieces. The extension on its west flank, a pyramidal glass enclosure for its tons of Egyptian bounty, looks milky white. He doesn’t know why (nor does he question it), but Rodolfo runs toward the glass pyramid, unsure what he will do once he reaches it. Sprinting, leaping, he makes it up the slope leading to the museum. By now, he has left most of his pursuers behind, but the two on horseback are still hunting him, still close.

  He allows himself a brief glance back. The mounted police are twenty feet away, maybe closer. One of the cops has his club drawn. The other, a woman, her trousers clinging to her powerful thighs, her blond hair streaming from beneath her uniform’s cap, has drawn her weapon. Both horses are winded. Their eyes are wild, showing a great deal of white. Their nostrils palpitate like beating black hearts.

  Rodolfo’s leaps become a kind of flying. In moments, he is at the base of the Egyptian wing. He looks up, surveys what he must do. Closer and closer the mounted police come. And…

  He’s up. He catches the lowest edge of the roof, lifts himself up easily, and scrambles across the steep glass slant to its apex.

  “Halt! Halt!” the man on horseback hollers.

  Yeah, me’s doin’ a lot of that, thinks Rodolfo, his first actual thought since the chase began. He stands atop the Egyptian wing, looks down at the police and their horses. How little they look. The man is telling the woman to put her gun away.

  Rodolfo raises his arms in triumph. He takes careful steps as he makes his way along the rooftop.

  Some of the other hunters are catching up. A string of flashing blue and red lights is closing in.

  Who knows what is on the other side of the museum? Fifth Avenue. More hunters?

  He has one thing to say to them: “Mother. Fuckers.”

  That said, he scrambles over the very top of the roof. He loses his footing for a moment and starts to slide down the roof’s eastern slope. Waving his arms and vocalizing little grunts of fear and distress, he manages to turn his feet in a way that brakes him. He sits for a moment.

  There is a breeze up here. But it feels warm, recycled, like breath.

  Next he scrambles up the museum itself, higher and higher, until he has scaled the slate roof and looks down at the city. A couple of buses idle in front of the Met. From this height, they look no bigger than a vial of Zoom. Taxis, limos, and the occasional private car stream southward on Fifth as the traffic lights turn green.

  There are no police, he sees, but moments later, eight squad cars arrive, their emergency lights dancing crazily around and around, their sirens silent.

  Rodolfo squats and looks down, hoping not to be seen. He thought that by now they would have been discouraged, would have given up. But no, it seems clear they will hunt him and hunt him until they can kill him or take him away.

  He hears something. A scuffling sound. He turns toward it—but too late. A hand clasps his ankle.

  Terrified, he looks down and sees a pair of large eyes staring up at him. He tries to pull his leg away, but he is gripped too strongly. Trapped! He pulls again but it throws his balance off and he starts to tip.

  “Whoa, Rodolfo, you’s slippin’,” a voice says.

  Whoever has caught him by the ankle has a flashlight, a small one, three inches long, but with a powerful glow. He shines it in his own face.

  “Globe!” Rodolfo cries, amazed and relieved.

  Globe is one of the original wild children. He was on the scene when there were no more than ten of them eking out an existence in Central Park, skateboarding eighteen hours a day, chasing and eating squirrels, bathing in the reservoir. As the population of cast-off and runaway kids grew, relations between Rodolfo and Globe deteriorated. As Rodolfo took more control of the lives of the castoffs, Globe resented his growing power—though, in fact, he had no desire to be leader of the brood. What he wanted was to be left alone and to have no authority to answer to, especially when it came to his all-important, all-consuming sex life. He and Lily-Lou mated three years ago; their child was wingless, but strange in other ways. After that, he mated with Casino; their child was winged but died shortly after birth.

  “Why you’s up here?” Rodolfo asks.

  “We’s living high, my brother,” Globe says.

  He sweeps the shining arc of his flashlight, illuminating his pack, nine in all, crouched prehistorically, with hungry, wild faces, unkempt, grinning. Two small children, naked, hover a couple of feet above the roof, their rapidly beating wings like the shuffle of cards.

  Globe jabs his thumb down toward Fifth Avenue. More police have come. They are dragging sawhorses onto the street, detouring traffic east.

  “Troubles?” he asks.

  “Me’s carrying a million woes,” answers Rodolfo.

  One of Globe’s crew, a girl with braids pinned to the top of her head, catches one of the hovering babies by the foot. She lifts her T-shirt and brings the child to her breast. The baby’s wings continue to flap, but more slowly as he latches onto his mother.

  “Ow!” she says. “Take it easy, Icona, you’s got teeths.”

  “Me’s need to go,” Rodolfo says.

  “You’s welcome twenty-four-seven,” Globe says. He points his flashlight at the others, letting the light linger on a girl dressed in a white T-shirt and black shorts, with short blond hair, several tattoos on her face. She smiles at Rodolfo.

  “How me’s go?”

  “No problemo, my brother. You’s hundred percent?”

  “Me’s gotta go.”

  “No problemo.”

  “We’s not say problemo, Globe. We’s say worries.”

  “Life goes different up high,” Globe says. He winks at Rodolfo. “Us’s knowing all the things about this picture house no other bodies know. We’s having you long gone in no time.”

  “All right. Go now?”

  “Sure. Where?”

  “Me’s got a visit,” Rodolfo says.

  Globe grins a grin far too knowing for a boy his age—but there it is. “Sure now?” he says. “Soft company here.” He shines his light back toward the blond girl. She raises a hand to shield her eyes, but she does not stop smiling.

  “Sure now,” Rodolfo says.

  “Okay, then.” Globe claps Rodolfo on the shoulder. “We’s here, you’s gone. No problemo.”

  No problemo turns out to be a bit of an overstatement. There are problemos, and worries too. But in the broad stroke of the promise, Globe is as good as his word. Using rope ladders, treetops, ledges, and their own dexterity and guile, Globe and his trusted sidekick Stash have Rodolfo on the ground and on his way in about ten minutes. His final descent is at the south end of the Met’s parking garage, and from there, unmolested, he makes his way south and east.

  To Sixty-Ninth Street. Out of nowhere, a summer rain. The drunken roll of thunder. Couples running for cover. A homeless man rising groggily from his tormented sleep. Rodolfo walks with his head down. Hands in pockets. Looking at no one and
hoping no one looks at him.

  The rain awakens Alice in her bed. She has been sleeping with her window open and now she sits up, presses the heels of her hands into her eyes, shakes her head. Rain is blowing in and she gets out of bed to shut the window.

  When she reaches the window, she sees a face. She lets out a yelp of shock and covers her mouth.

  It’s him. Her pulse races. She can hardly breathe.

  “Rodolfo!” she whispers.

  He is standing on the fire escape. He doesn’t wait to be asked in. He climbs through the window. He is drenched. His long hair is shiny and dark. His shirt is soaked, transparent. She forces herself not to look at his muscles, the dark scribble in the hollow of his chest. A zigzag of blood runs along the skin from his wrist to his elbow, but he seems unaware of it. He stands now in her girlish room, rain dripping off him, wetting the carpet as if he were a cloud.

  “What happened?” She points to his arm.

  He looks, noticing it for the first time. He makes certain it’s nothing serious. He wipes the blood clean with his hand and then attempts to dry his hand against his jeans, but his jeans are soaked.

  “Me’s okay.”

  “Look at you!”

  “Look at you,” Rodolfo says, and the tone of it, and her perception of its meaning, silences Alice; the tone carves a trapdoor in the moment, and Alice falls through it as if through the opening in a hangman’s scaffold.

  But rather than being afraid, she chooses to be brave. She takes Rodolfo’s hand and leads him into her bathroom. She runs the water until it’s hot—it’s a long journey from the water heater in the rat-infested cellar to her bathroom on the house’s third floor—and soaks one of her fluffy taupe towels. Gently, she cleans the blood off his arm. Now she can see the extent of the gash.

  “Oh, Rodolfo,” she says.

  “Me’s okay.”

  “What happened?”

  He doesn’t answer right away. He looks deeply into her eyes. She is still holding his arm with one hand, and the towel—now bloody—with the other.

  “You left without saying good-bye,” he whispers.

  He hears them. Adam turns over in his bed, checks the clock. It’s 2:14 a.m. He hears his sister’s sweet alto, as familiar to Adam as his own breath. He hears another voice. It’s Rodolfo.

  He hears the occasional car going down Sixty-Ninth Street, the sibilance of deep treads over wet pavement.

  He hears the hot water thudding in the pipes.

  He hears the rats in the walls.

  From one floor below, he hears his mother getting out of bed, opening the door to her room, stepping out into the hallway.

  He wraps his pillow so that it covers his ears. His squeezes his eyes shut. The world recedes but now he hears his own blood going around and around on its innocent errands. Nervously, he puts his hand down his pajamas, feels himself. Oh God: a hair. He yanks it out.

  Slowly, reluctantly, Cynthia makes her way up the stairs to the third floor of the house. She knows she is embarking on a lose-lose proposition. Either nothing is going on, in which case she will be trumpeting her mistrust, or something is going on, in which case she will have to face it and do something about it. She pauses, listens.

  The gnawing of rodents in the walls. Ceaseless.

  Fucking exterminators, she thinks. What do you have to do in this town to get someone to come over and kill a rat?

  She gathers her resolve. She is the parent. She needs to do her job. If she suspects something is wrong upstairs, she needs to go and investigate it. End of story.

  She corrects her posture. She straightens her robe. Rubs and gently slaps her face so she won’t look like death warmed over.

  She hears Alice. A high-pitched, wordless…what? Is she crying? Laughing?

  It occurs to Cynthia that she has heard neither laughing nor crying from the tightly wound little girl.

  She raps on the door, rather vigorously. She doesn’t want to make a tentative little knock, a little timid tap-tap that basically says It’s up to you whether or not you open the door. Those days are gone, maybe forever.

  The knock stops the laughter, or the crying, cold. A brief silence. Then Alice says, “What?”

  Cynthia chooses to take this as an invitation to enter, and she quickly opens the door.

  Alice is there with…a boy. A boy half a head taller. With long wild hair, the eyes of a panther…and he is naked.

  No. He’s not. Her optic nerves jumped to conclusions. He is almost naked. His chest is bare, his legs and feet. However, he has had the decency to wrap a bath towel around his middle.

  He turns slowly to look at Cynthia. In her day, if a mother caught a boy in a girl’s room, the boy would be all over himself trying to escape, he’d be frantic. He’d be hopping up and down, or the blood would be draining from his face. But this boy looks relaxed, amused.

  “You can’t come in here!” Alice shouts. Her pajamas are wet. The bone of her sternum is visible through the fabric. There is blood on the cuffs of her shirt.

  “I’m already in, Alley-Oop,” Cynthia says.

  “Stop calling me that! You have no right!”

  “Of course I do. I’m your mother and you’re still a little girl.”

  “Best if you’s taking another looks, Moms,” the boy intruder says.

  “Who is this?” Cynthia asks, directing her question to Alice.

  “He’s my friend.”

  “He’s your friend. And what is your ‘friend’ doing in your room at two in the morning?”

  Alice is silent. Her face hardens, and she folds her arms across her chest. “You never trust me, do you?”

  “That’s not an answer, Alice. I was about to call the police.”

  “I’m like a prisoner here.”

  “A prisoner? A prisoner? I don’t even know where you are half the time.”

  “He’s my friend. He came to visit. What is the big deal?”

  Rodolfo, perhaps wanting to drive home the point, pats Alice’s arm. But she shakes him off.

  Encouraged by this, Cynthia calms herself. “All right, let’s just be reasonable here. Shall we? Let’s start with you,” she says, pointing to Rodolfo. “What’s your name?”

  “His name is Rodolfo,” Alice says in a crudely sarcastic voice, as if reminding someone that two plus two is four. She even rolls her eyes after saying his name.

  “Why don’t you let your friend answer for himself, Allie. Okay? Okay, Rodolfo. And where do you live?”

  But rather than answer her questions, he leaps upon her. He springs eight feet through the air. His towel unknots itself and he is naked. Cynthia, taken by surprise, cast into terror, falls backward, and Rodolfo is on top of her. His body odor is very, very strong. His penis is long and tawny, his testicles small and black. She is quite sure he is going to kill her—the only question is how. He places his hand on her neck and squeezes. It doesn’t hurt. She feels something between a kind of inner thud and a dull electric shock. And a moment later, she is plunged into darkness, a deep unanimous blackness without a dissenting quiver of light.

  When she awakens, she is alone. She is woozy, but basically all right. She gets up, looks at the clock. Only seven minutes have passed. Adam!

  She races to his room. Adam is gone too. They’re both out there—somewhere. She has no idea where, and cannot bring herself to fully and explicitly ask herself this, but in some wordless, inchoate way she wonders if this is it, the final disappearance, and now they are gone forever.

  Chapter 19

  Well, to be honest with you, Dennis, you couldn’t have chosen a worse day to come asking for a raise.” Cal Rogers folds his large, meaty hands and thuds them onto the desk. His steely hair has just had a fresh crew cut, but that’s the only thing that looks fresh about him. He looks, in fact, haggard. Back in the day, when he was a grad student at UC Berkeley, Cal could work seventy-two hours straight and hardly be fazed by it. But now, just one all-nighter leaves him feeling like his eyelids are mad
e of Velcro, his tongue is a scarf, and inside his small intestine lives a swarm of hornets. Things are not going well at the lab. Another subject has perished, and, even more distressing, the results of all the tests have been rubbish. The Borman and Davis researchers are no closer today than they were two months ago to isolating just what it is that makes the wild children so supernaturally vigorous and their blood able to restore potency, desire, and, to an extent, even youth itself. Taken in small doses, of course.

  “Well, Cal, I must say that is not good news, not good news at all.” Keswick looks around Rogers’s office—the framed picture of his family (standard-issue wife, overachieving son, grumpy daughter), the good-natured trophy engraved Cal Rogers, Thirty-Ninth Place, New Hampshire Goofy Golf Tournament, the framed degrees—and he thinks that this could have been his life, his office, his, his, if only a few things had gone differently. If someone had believed in him, set a fire under him, so to speak, made sure he worked hard and didn’t give up, kicked his heinie a bit, if that’s what was necessary, which it was…now look at him! A glorified dogcatcher.

  Rogers looks Dennis over and thinks with some small satisfaction, This guy looks in worse shape than me. Might be time to flush him.

  “I’m a scientist, Dennis. I don’t make salary decisions.”

  “I’m in trouble, Cal.”

  You can say that again, you lunatic.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Dennis.”

  “I’ve had to move out of Brooklyn. I’m living in a hotel and I’m having a heck of a hard time finding a new place. I’m priced out of the market.”

  “New York can be very expensive, Dennis.”

  “I need money, Cal. A substantial amount. Not this bullcrap I get at the end of the week. Money. Real money. We’re friends, you and I. Aren’t we? We understand each other. Am I right?”

  “Dennis, this really isn’t a good time for a heart-to-heart. Corporate’s down my throat like a tongue depressor. If we don’t start getting results, my bosses are going to shut us down.”