by George Foy
Swelling commotion on the floor below interrupted PC’s monologue. Cloaks fanned away from the swing seat as vampires rushed from every direction to gape at Claudine. The ex-rock-star was sitting in the swing seat, still as a fireplug, her eyes wide open, her fingers locked iron-tight around the stem of a champagne glass.
‘But I knew it was pregnant,’ a voice from the TV complained.
The face-suckers moved backward, each recoiling in a different direction from the horror that filled their vision.
Someone picked up an empty jis’ works off the floor. A fat Dracula checked Claudine’s throat, drawing caustic remarks from the multitude. ‘It’s okay, she’s got a pulse,’ he announced, and pulled a stethoscope from his pocket.
‘Then the merger’s off,’ the TVs replied.
The vampires drifted away, vaguely disappointed. A woman pulled out three cellphones and handed them around, rattling off the numbers of detox centers. The senator’s daughter talked brightly with the son of a top memory-broker. Death intrigued her, she said. It was the esthetic of vacuum, it was the opposite that defined creation. Where would art be without the counterweight of absence? The broker’s son fingered his watches. She drew her cloak around her mouth, hamming it up for a photographer from Shadow, a magazine that published articles exclusively about people who derived fame from their association with others.
‘Wondered when Claudine would freeze out,’ PC commented. ‘That jis’ is fresh as I’ve ever tasted.’
The pilot tilted his head back. Champagne coursed in his brain through channels the fever had cut. When he opened his eyes he noticed a painting on the far wall, over the banister.
It showed a nineteenth-century amusement pier, the old kind, a good mile long, filled with cockle stands, penny arcades, and merry-go-rounds. The signs, the flagpoles, the railings were painted in cheerful seaside candy-stripes of cream and light blue and red and yellow. It was the kind of place that was soaked in summer, the way popcorn was soaked in butter, a place where the sun always shone and little girls wore straw hats with ribbons; the type of place where you wanted nothing more of life than what came out of a pinball machine or a slushie stall and everything smelled of salt and warm, tarry wood and toffee apples, and the thought of the day ending was like a pain in the valves of your heart.
But something had happened. The sea had risen, or the land had sunk and this pier was fifty feet underwater. Schools of nacreous fish hovered over an ice-cream stand. Starfish clung to a jukebox. A hammerhead shark nosed through a movie house. Jellyfish floated in a pinball parlor. Above the pier, where soft breezes should have blown, the ocean depths hung, green, mysterious.
‘I’m sick of this joint,’ the pilot said. ‘I’m goin’ to the Weather Café. You wanna come?’
‘Are you kidding?’ PC looked at him in amazement. ‘There’s still women here I’ve never even met—’
‘You,’ someone said behind them, ‘let’s see your invitation.’
The pilot twisted around. Evangeline’s bodyguard stood in a position of challenge, lavender cloak dramatically swept over one accusing arm.
‘He’s my guest,’ PC said, and took another sip of champagne.
‘Evangeline’s the only one with guests here,’ the bodyguard said. He opened his cloak to reveal a .25 Raven strapped like a small pearl-handled tumor beneath his shoulder.
The pilot laughed. He’d had enough champagne to see everything in light pink, and the bodyguard’s gesture was pure spaghetti-Western, ‘Been-lookin’-fer-you-Cisco,’ all dark moustache, carefully aged leathers, nylon tumbleweeds, the ka-chink, ka-chink of Spanish spurs.
‘Get up,’ the bouncer said, nervously touching the pearl butt with his fingertips.
The pilot narrowed his eyes, still reacting to image. ‘I wouldn’t do that,’ he hissed, cowboy tough. ‘I’ll edit you, bo-woy, like I edited yer brother; left him all over the cutting room floor.’
‘Jesus,’ PC whispered to the bouncer, ‘don’t you know who you’re messing with here? That’s Crazy Skid Marak, man! I mean he’s blown away more Safe People moshes than you’ve even been invited to!’
The pilot stood up. The bouncer gulped. Only last month one of the homosexuals had been wasted by the son of a Neta capo who like many sons of capos was troubled about his own sexual identity as much as he was annoyed by the soaring price of jisi.
The pilot bunched his own cloak over one shoulder. Slowly, deliberately, he reached in the inside pocket, and pulled out God.
‘Look out!’ PC shrieked hysterically, ‘he’s got a rat!’
The bodyguard jumped back, reaching for his piece. The pilot hopped down the stairs, knocking vampires like skittles. ‘That rat’s loaded,’ he heard PC yell, ‘he’s been drinking all night!’ People screamed, without being quite sure what they were screaming about. Men dragged women to the floor, throwing themselves on top of or under them depending on taste, courage, and inclination. Evangeline and the rest of her bodyguards were crawling like slime mold in black silk to block the front door; so, shifting direction, he crashed back through the kitchens, into a banquet room, and found himself in the middle of the waltz-mosh, complicated by a game of dwarf-throwing, which he had never seen before.
Two dozen vampires, paired off in couples, swung and dipped in graceful circles to a loud recording of the Emperor Waltz, then, whenever the music crescendoed, slammed as hard as they could into each other.
Loud shrieks and shouts of ‘O-lay!’ rang out when a couple was knocked to the stone floor.
Meanwhile, a man about three feet tall, dressed in a cheap blue size-four suit, with a beard covering his too-big chin, was being hurled, over the waltzers, from one side of the room to the other by two groups of men who were fully grown and well dressed.
‘Ouch,’ the dwarf shrieked, ‘catch my wrist, you idiot!’
‘Fore!’ cried one of the players, swinging the dwarf like a golf club.
‘O-lay!’ one of the waltzers howled.
‘Shiiiiit!’ the dwarf yelled.
The pilot stuck his head through the outer door, and the White Angel, lurking in ambush, slurped her fat arm around his neck and smushed him to her huge tits. ‘Gaar,’ he choked. She reeked of good brandy, and Lebensraum, by Lanvin. He felt like he was drowning in fascist cholesterol. ‘Ovah here,’ the woman yelled, ‘git him, y’all—’
The yell became a burp as the pilot stiff-armed her in the solar plexus. His fingers sank in at least four inches. She let him go. He ran around her, through the kitchens, the way he had come in.
When he got outside he put God in his pocket, straddled his bike, and kicked it into burbling life.
He roared off through the gate, right-angled west down Waverley, winter trees making Dutch hex signs between the bricks. The cloak billowed black behind him as he rode, like the angel of death come on wings of Plague to mark the streets of Greenwich Village; God cheeping anxiously inside his shirt.
Chapter Eight
‘History = Human Weather’
Meteorologists’ graffito
The Weather Café took up the higher level of the old control tower in Building 51 at Newark International Airport. It remained open twenty-four hours a day to serve the National Weather Service scientists who staffed the meteorological station in the building’s lower portions. It had a fine view of the eastern runways, 1-95, and the Jersey marshes.
Sitting inside the Weather Café at night felt like sitting inside a Christmas-tree decoration because its curved art deco windows looked out on a million colored lights; the distant glow of marsh fires, the blinking orange of airport vehicles, the long double strings of blue, yellow, red, and green lights that marked the runways, disappearing to mate with perspective in the distance; the winking red-white navigation lights of the jets, and the bright cones of their landing lights marking out diagonals in the sky.
The pilot nodded toward Lee, the waiter. He took his usual table in the corner. Lee brought him a coffee. The pilot asked if he’d seen
Roberto.
‘Not for a week, ten days,’ Lee said.
Lee was seventy-five or eighty years old. No one knew for sure. He had droopy eyes, a little old-man’s belly like a basketball, and yellow-white whiskers at which he pulled while thinking. ‘Well, anyway. You wanna special?’
‘OK,’ the pilot said, and put a twenty-mark note on Lee’s tray. The Weather Café was not licensed to sell liquor, but Lee took care of regulars.
The pilot looked around him. There were three tables full of meteorologists arguing quietly among themselves.
The other four customers looked like pilots. Two had chartcases. One wore an airline jacket. All had the squoze-eyed expression that comes from squinting through dark glasses for too long.
The pilot thought two of the pilots probably worked the Trade, at least part-time. They were the age, they had the wariness; most of all they were sitting in the Weather Café, which had a history of attracting the kind of lone long-distance flyers the Trade needed, and used, and threw away like soiled Kleenex when it had worn them out.
The vodka was clean and cold. Lee got only the best, from scammers in the cargo area, square bottles of one-hundred proof with labels printed in Cyrillic. The pilot sipped at his glass, letting the party crank bleed off slowly. It was not only the champagne, the social buzz. He still did not feel quite right. Part of it was the sludge of fever. Some of it was a tinge of disconnection, a hint of being apart, that had started – he was sure of it – in that green-silver fog in the depths of a storm system, and had never completely gone away.
Maybe it was the storm-electricity that had done this, he thought fancifully. Like one of those antique sci-fi flicks where the hero went through a mysterious cloud, of radiation or strange magnetism, and was never the same thereafter.
Or perhaps this was what happened when you came a little too close to death. It certainly set you apart from those who spent their lives diligently avoiding the idea, let alone the reality of final extinction.
All of a sudden the pilot found himself mourning the Citation. He told himself it was a heap, but that only made him feel disloyal on top of everything else.
Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. A Hawker 550 whined away from the STOL terminal next door. A couple of weathermen came in, got coffee to go, went out again. The pilots sat as still as if they were stuck in the cockpit of a C-119, low on power; flying their drinks carefully around the tables’ brasswork edge.
No sign of Roberto.
‘None of that pumps in enough variables.’ One of the meteorologists suddenly raised his voice. ‘Look at that.’ He threw his left hand in a loose gesture at a dozen VDTs lined up over the counter. The sets were all tuned to various B-Net weather channels. They featured colorful graphics, mockups of every weather pattern in North America; the sharp-tooth lines of cold fronts, the worn molars of warm fronts, the organic spreading ripples of isobars, the fractal digits of weather radar, with red marking the lowest pressures and chill blues the rain.
‘Look at these.’ The meteorologist got up and ripped about fifty feet of paper data from one of the NWS printers humming and zipping to themselves in laser talk in one dusty linoleum corner of the café.
‘You tell me,’ the weatherman said, ‘how even Lorenzian equations gonna crunch all of this, just these numbers we got here, and make sense day to day. Well, they won’t.’
The weatherman was tall, and graying, with a big black Groucho moustache. He wiped his hair back with one hand.
‘Even Lorenz said so. “Program in every beat of a butterfly’s wings, every fart from a bullfinch, every door slammed in anger in every suburban ranch house, and I’ll give you an equation that will predict the weather,” that’s what he said more or less, words to that effect.’
‘Take it easy, Dave,’ another weatherman muttered.
‘But what he really meant,’ the gray-haired man said, ‘is, This is where the bottom drops out. Fractal progression, my Aunt Fanny. This is the hole, guys, this is the quantum hole, which we don’t fuck with. This is where things like ozone showers come from. A trillion-trillion jellyfish reacting to Reddi-Whip cans. And now they tell us they want us to control it. Control the weather!’
The pilot got a feeling of invading someone else’s most intimate madness. He looked down at his table. ‘The Bridge is the Other Side,’ someone had carved on the tabletop. It was a Hawkley-ism, a slogan attributed to the mythical author of the Smuggler’s Bible. The carver probably took seriously the so-called rites of navigation woven into the text like Day-Glo thread through a figurative painting. It was not just smugglers, or node rebels; a lot of weathermen seemed to be Hawkley-ites, or at least read the Bible, or subscribed to the monthly Gazette and CD-ROM updates.
There was another graffito under the Hawkley-ism. ‘Sea Beasts Suckled,’ this one read, over an e-mail address. Not for the first time, the pilot wondered why meteorologists were so strange.
A man walked in, dragging a heavy chartcase. The light from the stairwell was behind him and his face was in shadow.
The weatherman walked over to a big glass case in one corner. It looked like a jukebox but instead of CDs contained dust, three powerful fans arranged in an exact pattern, an electric heater, and a scale model of a Missouri farm. The motors whirred, the glass dome filled with blown dust, which began to concentrate toward the base, move in a circle like an exotic dancer, very slow at first, then faster and faster, the circle growing tighter and longer till it became a cone, then a spiral, then a funnel, and finally a recognizable tornado about two feet high, bellydancing to itself over the minuscule cows, trees, and cornfields on the floor of the device.
‘We can make toys,’ the weatherman said. ‘But now they want us to play with the fucking continent. Aerial bursts! Silver nitrate! Ozone machines! Jetstream punches! I mean come on,’ the gray-haired man addressed one of the flyers, ‘would you trust us?’ The flyer shrugged.
The ‘twister’ subsided, dry of credit. Uprooted ‘silos’ the size of dimes dropped back to earth. The newcomer sat at a table near the back. In the light of the massed TVs, the pilot saw his face. The pattern of expression lit up circuits in his brain. The man’s name was Adam Coffin, and they had run a cargo together in a DC-3 a couple years before, automatic pistols to Cap Haitien, illegals back.
The pilot was pretty sure Adam knew Roberto. They both used Newark a lot, often for straight cargo.
Coffin did not look in his direction. The pilot did not look at Coffin. He looked around the walls of the Weather Café. Half of one wall was covered by a cracked and faded fresco painted, two years before he killed himself, by a Russian surrealist named Arshile Gorky. It had been plastered over in the fifties; Lee had found what was left and painstakingly chipped away the plaster with a dentist’s pick and a toothbrush. The artwork featured shapes that looked halfway between birds and pieces of sirloin, flapping slowly in a sky that was stripped and banded like geological layers in colors of rose, lavender, sapphire, midnight blue. The pilot had never seen planes like these, but that sky looked familiar as hell.
He drained his vodka and ordered another. Vodka put a nice transparent lid on the buzz of Doyen-Kruyff. When he had finished he put on his City coat, made sure God was comfortable, and wandered over to Coffin’s table.
‘You got a chart for Jérémie?’ he asked Coffin.
‘In my truck.’
‘Mind if I look at it?’
‘Sure thing.’ Coffin’s eyes were neutral. They avoided the pilot’s.
They went down the spiral staircase together, into Coffin’s pickup. He turned the engine on for warmth.
Coffin had a small version of the pilot’s ECM-pak in a hidden compartment behind the seat. He switched on a white noise generator to block any eavesdropping devices, any parabolic mikes. He turned on a frequency scanner and listened carefully to the chopped bits of transmission on state police, BON, FAA channels, but it was all caretaking traffic; ten-nineteens, stolen cars, route changes. He asked the pilot to op
en his coat and checked him for wires. ‘Still got that rat,’ he commented, without smiling. Finally he put on RayBans to stare at the nighttime airport.
‘Ain’t too cool,’ he said at length. He talked in short, punched sentences, the kind flyers used to communicate with air traffic control. ‘Split soon.’
‘We’ll keep it short.’
‘Been bad traffic, last few weeks. Too many trips busted. All of a sudden. Everybody lyin’ low.’
‘I heard something,’ the pilot said carefully, trying to remember the Cayman’s words, two continents, three rivers, four borders, five days ago.
‘Careful time.’ Coffin still would not meet his eyes.
‘Bokon.’ The pilot leaned over to check the dark glasses. ‘A lot of trips busted, like you said, because of something, someone called Bokon Taylay.’
Coffin shook his head. ‘All I know is, lot of people been nailed. The ones that got out, they say no sign, no warning, no radar sometimes – just all of a sudden, BON Vikings on yer tail. Just like that. It’s what we heard. What do you want, anyway?’
‘Roberto,’ the pilot said. ‘I’m lookin’ for him.’
‘Roberto Chavez?’ Coffin looked up. The sunglasses reflected sodium lights from the airline parking lots.
‘You seen him?’
‘Why?’
‘We share a mutual interest in Neo-Platonic metaphysics, is why.’
Coffin nodded. ‘I guess you din’t hear then.’
The pilot waited. Coffin gripped the wheel as if he wanted to drive off.
‘One of the guys I was talkin’ about. Wasted. That’s what I heard. Overdue on the milk run, Abaco to St Pete four days ago. It’s what I been tellin’ you.’
The pilot felt his chest expand, then sag. Numbness, pressure; too much empathy for the fate of tendon and fluids and quick jags of brain electricity all flying at speeds and heights they were not really designed for.
No sadness yet. That would come later, with the guilt. All he felt now was a clicking into place, because he knew what had happened to Carmelita.