Collected Short Fiction, page 971
39.
What a morning after! Not until night was beginning to fall, that first of January, was the full impact of the previous night’s wild events apparent, how many hundreds of citizens had perished in violence or in foolish misadventure or of mere exposure, how many shops had been looted, how many public monuments vandalized, how many wallets lifted, how many unwilling bodies violated. Had any city known a night like that since the sack of Byzantium? The populace had gone berserk, and no one had tried to restrain the fury, no one, not even the police. The first scattered reports had it that most of the officers of the law had joined the fun, and as detailed investigations proceeded throughout the day, it turned out that that had in fact been the case: in the contagion of the moment the men in blue had often led rather than contained the chaos. On the late news came word that Police Commissioner Sudakis, taking personal responsibility for the debacle, had resigned. I saw him on the screen, face rigid, eyes reddened, his fury barely under control; he spoke raggedly of the shame he felt, the disgrace, he talked of the breakdown of morality, even of the decline of urban civilization; he looked like a man who had had no sleep for a week, a pitiful shattered embarrassment of a man, mumbling and coughing, and I prayed silently for the television people to have done with him and go elsewhere. Sudakis’ resignation was my own vindication, but I could take little pleasure in it, not while that sad ravaged face looked out of the screen at me. At last the scene shifted; we saw the rubble of a five-block area in Brooklyn that had been allowed to burn by absent-minded firemen. Yes, yes.
Sudakis has resigned. Of course. Reality is conserved: Carvajal’s infallibility is once more confirmed.
I waited a few days, while the city slowly returned to normal; then I phoned Lombroso at his Wall Street office. He wasn’t there, of course. I told the answering-machine to program a return call at his earliest convenience. All high city officials were with the mayor at Gracie Mansion virtually on a round-the-clock basis. Fires in every borough had left thousands homeless; the hospitals were stacked three tiers deep with victims of violence and accident; damage claims against the city, mainly for failure to provide proper police protection, were already in the billions and mounting hourly. Then, too, there was the damage to the city’s public image to deal with. Since entering office Quinn had painstakingly tried to restore the reputation New York had had in the middle of the twentieth century, as the nation’s most exciting, vital, stimulating city, the true capital of the planet and the center of all that was interesting, a city that was thrilling but yet safe for visitors. All that had been ruined in one orgiastic night more in keeping with the nation’s familiar view of New York as a brutal, insane, ferocious, filthy zoo. So I heard nothing from Lombroso until the middle of January, when things were fairly quiet again, and by the time he called I had given up hearing from him at all.
He told me what was going on at City Hall: the mayor was preparing a sheaf of drastic, almost Gottfriedesque, measures to maintain public order. The police shake-up would be accelerated; drug traffic would be restricted almost as severely as it had been before the liberalizations of the 1980’s; an early-warning system would be put into effect to head off civic disturbances involving more than two dozen people, et cetera, et cetera. It sounded wrong-headed to me, a rash, panicky response to a unique event, but my advice was no longer welcome, and I kept my thoughts to myself.
“What about Sudakis?” I asked.
“He’s definitely out. Quinn refused his resignation and spent three full days trying to persuade him to stay, but Sudakis regards himself as permanently discredited here by the stuff his men did that night. He’s taken some small-town job in western Pennsylvania and he’s already gone.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean, has the accuracy of my prediction about Sudakis had any effect on Quinn’s attitude toward me?”
“Yes,” Lombroso said.
“Is he reconsidering?”
“He thinks you’re a sorcerer. He thinks you may have sold your soul to the devil. Literally. Literally. Underneath all the sophistication, he’s still an Irish Catholic, don’t forget. In times of stress it surfaces in him. Around City Hall you’ve become an Antichrist, Lew.”
“Has he gone so crazy that he can’t see it might be useful to have somebody around who can tip him to things like the Sudakis resignation?”
“No hope, Lew. Forget about working for Quinn. Put it absolutely out of your mind. Don’t think about him, don’t write letters to him, don’t try to call him, don’t have anything to do with him. You might look into the idea of leaving the city, in fact.”
“Jesus. Why?”
“For your own good.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Bob, are you trying to tell me I’m in danger from Quinn?”
“I’m not trying to tell you anything,” he said, sounding nervous.
“Whatever you are doing, I’m not having any. I won’t believe Quinn’s as afraid of me as you think, and I completely refuse to believe he might take some sort of action against me. It isn’t credible. I know the man. I was practically his alter ego for four years. I—”
“Listen, Lew,” Lombroso said, “I’ve got to get off the line. You can’t imagine how much work is stacking up here.”
“All right. Thanks for returning my call.”
“And—Lew—”
“Yes?”
“It might be a good idea for you not to call me. Not even at the Wall Street number. Except in case of some dire emergency, of course. My own position with Quinn has been a little delicate ever since we tried to work that proxy deal, and now—and now—well, you understand, don’t you? I’m sure you understand.”
40.
I understood. I have spared Lombroso the perils of further telephone calls from me. Eleven months, nearly, have passed since the day of that conversation, and in that time I haven’t spoken to him at all, not a word to the man who was my closest friend during my years in the Quinn administration. Nor have I had any contact, direct or otherwise, with Quinn himself.
41.
In February the visions began. There had been one harbinger on the cliff at Big Sur and another in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, but now they became a routine part of my daily life. None can pierce the vast black veil uncertain, the poet said, Because there is no light behind the curtain. Oh, but the light, the light, the light, the light is there! And it lit my winter days. At first the visions came over me no more often than once every twenty-four hours, and they came unasked, like epileptic fits, usually in the late afternoon or just before midnight, signaling themselves with a glow at the back of my skull, a warmth, a tickling that would not go away. But soon I understood the techniques for invoking them, and I could summon them at will. Even then, I was able to see at most once a day, with a prolonged period of recuperation required afterward. Within a few weeks, though, I became capable of entering the seeing state more readily—two or even three times a day—as if the power were a muscle that thrived with use. Eventually the interval of recuperation became minimal. Now I can turn the gift on every fifteen minutes, if I feel like it. Once, experimentally, toward the early part of March, I tried it, on-off on-off constantly for several hours, tiring myself but not diminishing the intensity of what I saw.
If I don’t evoke the visions at least once a day, they come to me anyway, breaking through of their own accord, pouring unbidden into my mind.
42.
I see a small red-shingled house on a country lane. The trees are in full leaf, dark green; it must be late summer. I stand by the front gate. My hair is still short and stubbly but growing in; this scene must lie not very far in the future, probably this very year. Two young men are with me, one dark-haired and slight, the other a burly red-haired one. I have no idea who they are, but the self I see is relaxed and easy with them, as if they are intimate companions. So they are close friends that I am yet to meet. I see myself taking a key from my pocket. “Let me show you the place,” I say. “I think it’s about what we need as the headquarters for the Center.”
Snow is falling. The automobiles in the streets are bullet-shaped, snub-nosed, very small, very strange to me. Overhead a kind of helicopter soars. Three paddlelike projections dangle from it, and there are loudspeakers, apparently, at the tip of each paddle. From the three speakers in unison comes a wistful bleating sound, high-pitched and gentle, emitted for a period of perhaps two seconds spaced by five-second spans of silence. The rhythm is perfectly steady, each mild bleep arriving on schedule and cutting effortlessly through the dense swirls of descending flakes. The helicopter flies slowly up Fifth Avenue at an altitude of less than 500 meters, and as it makes its bleating way northward, the snow melts below its path, clearing a zone exactly as wide as the avenue.
Sundara and I meet for cocktails at a glittering lounge hanging like the gardens of Nebuchadnezzar from the summit of some gigantic tower looming over Los Angeles. I assume it’s Los Angeles because I can make out the feathery shapes of palm trees lining the streets far beneath the window, and the architecture of the surrounding buildings is distinctively southern Californian, and through the twilight haze there is a hint of a vast ocean not far to the west and mountains to the north. I have no idea what I’m doing in California nor how I come to be seeing Sundara there; it’s plausible that she has returned to her native city to live, and I, visiting on business, have promoted a reunion. We have both changed. Her hair is streaked now with white, and her face seems leaner, less voluptuous; her eye sparkle as before, but the gleam in them is the glint of hard-won knowledge, and not just playfulness. I am long-haired, graying, dressed with chaste ferocity in an unadorned black tunic; I look about 45, and I strike myself as crisp, taut, impressive, a commanding executive type, so self-possessed that I awe myself. Are there signs about my eyes of that tragic exhaustion, that burned-out devastation, that had marked Carvajal after so many years of seeing? I don’t think so, but perhaps my second sight is not yet intense enough to register such subjective details. Sundara wears no wedding ring, nor are there any of the insignia of Transit visible about her. My watching self longs to ask a thousand questions. I want to know whether there has been a reconciliation, whether we see each other often, whether we are lovers, even whether perhaps we are living together again. But I have no voice; I am unable to speak through the lips of my future self; it is altogether impossible for me to direct or modify his actions; I can merely observe. He and Sundara order drinks; they clink glasses; they smile; they exchange trivial chatter about the sunset, the weather, the decor of the cocktail lounge. Then the scene slips away and I have learned nothing.
Soldiers move through the canyons of New York, five abreast, looking warily to all sides. I watch them from an upper-story window. They wear bizarre uniforms, green with red piping, gaudy yellow-and-red berets, ruffles at their shoulders. They are armed with weapons that look a little like crossbows—sturdy metal tubes about a meter in length, widening to a fan at the outer end and bristling with lateral whiskers of bright wire coil—which they carry with the wide ends balanced across their left forearms. The self who watches them is a man of at least 60, white-haired, gaunt, with deep vertical lines scored in his cheeks; he is recognizably myself, and yet he is almost wholly strange to me. In the street a figure erupts from a building and rushes wildly toward the soldiers, shouting slogans, waving his arms. One very young soldier jerks his right arm up, and a cone of green light emerges quietly from his weapon; the onrushing figure halts, incandescent, and disappears. Disappears.
The self I see is still youthful, but older than I am now. Say, 40: then this would be about the year 2006. He lies on a rumpled bed next to an attractive young woman with long black hair; they are both naked, sweaty, disheveled; obviously they have been making love. He asks, “Did you hear the President’s speech last night?”
“Why should I waste my time listening to that murderous fascist bastard?” she replies.
A party is going on. Shrill unfamiliar music, strange golden wine poured freely from double-spouted bottles. The air is dense with blue fumes. I hold court at one corner of the crowded room, talking urgently with a plump, freckle-faced young woman and one of the young men who had been with me at that red-shingled house. But my voice is covered by the raucous music, and I perceive only shreds and scraps of what I am saying; I pick up words like “miscalculation” and “overload” and “demonstration” and “alternative distribution,” but they are embedded in gibberish, and it is all ultimately unintelligible. The clothing styles are odd, loose irregular garments decked with patches and strips of mismatched fabrics. In the middle of the room about twenty of the guests are dancing with weird intensity, milling in a ragged circle, slashing the air fiercely with elbows and knees. They are nude; they have coated their bodies entirely with a glassy purple dye; they are altogether hairless, both men and women totally depilated from head to foot, so that but for their jiggling genitals and bobbing breasts they might easily pass for plastic mannequins jolted into a twitching, spasmodic counterfeit of life.
A humid summer night. A dull booming sound, another, another. Fireworks explode against the blackness of the sky over the Hudson’s Jersey shore. Skyrockets litter the heavens with Chinese fire, red, yellow, green, blue, dazzling streaks and starbursts, cycle upon cycle of flaming beauty accompanied by terrifying hisses and pops and roars and bangs, climax after climax; and then, just as one assumes the splendor now will die away into silence and darkness, there comes an amazing final pyrotechnical frenzy, culminating in a grand double set-piece: an American flag, spectacularly quivering above us with every star discernible, and, exploding out of the center of Old Glory’s field, the image of a man’s face, limned in startlingly realistic flesh tones. The face is the face of Paul Quinn.
I am aboard a great airplane, a plane whose wings seem to stretch from China to Peru, and through the porthole beside me I see a vast gray-blue sea on whose bosom the reflected sun shines in a furious glaring brightness. I am strapped down, awaiting landing, and now I can make out our destination: an enormous hexagonal platform rising steeply from the sea, an artificial island, as symmetrical in its angles as a snowflake, a concrete island encrusted with squat red-brick buildings and split down its middle by the long white arrow of an airstrip, an island that is entirely alone in this immense sea with thousands of kilometers of emptiness bordering each of its six sides.
Manhattan. Autumn, chilly, the sky dark, the windows overhead glowing. Before me a colossal tower, rising just east of the venerable Fifth Avenue library. “The tallest in the world,” someone says behind me, one tourist to another, twanging western accent. Indeed it must be. The tower fills the sky. “It’s all government offices,” the westerner goes on. “Can you catch it? Two hundred floors high, and all government offices. With a palace for Quinn right at the top, so they say. For whenever he comes to town. A goddamned palace, like for a king.”
What I particularly fear, as these visions crowd upon me, is my first confrontation with the scene of my own death. Will I be destroyed by it, I wonder, as Carvajal was destroyed—all drive and purpose sucked from me by one glimpse of my last moments? I wait, wondering when it will come, dreading it and eager for it, wanting to absorb the terrifying knowledge and be done with it; and when it does come, it’s an anticlimax, a comic letdown. What I see is a faded, weary old man in a hospital bed, gaunt and worn, perhaps 75 years old, maybe 80, even 90. He is surrounded by a bright cocoon of life-support apparatus; needled arms arch and weave about him like the tails of scorpions, filling him with enzymes, hormones, decongestants, stimulants, whatever. I’ve seen him before, briefly, that drunken night in Times Square, when I crouched, dazzled and astounded, tripping out on a torrent of voices and images, but now the vision continues a little further than that other time, so that I perceive this future me not merely as a sick old man but as a dying old man, on his way out, sliding away, sliding away, the whole vast wonderful lattice of medical equipment unable any longer to sustain the feeble beat of life. I can feel the pulse ebbing in him. Quietly, quietly, he is going. Into the darkness. Into the peace. He is very still. Not yet dead, else my perceptions of him would cease. But almost. Almost. And now. No more data. Peace and silence. A good death, yes.
Is that all? Is he truly dead, out there fifty or sixty years from now, or has the vision merely been interrupted? I can’t be sure. If only I could see beyond that moment of quietus, just a glimpse past the curtain, to watch the routines of death, the expressionless orderlies placidly disconnecting the life-support system, the sheet pulled up over the face, the cadaver wheeled off to the morgue. But there is no way to pursue the image. The picture-show ends with the last flicker of light. Yet I am certain that this is it. I am relieved and almost a bit disappointed. So little? Just to fade away at a great old age? Nothing to dread in that. I think of Carvajal, crazy-eyed from having seen himself die too often. But I’m not Carvajal. How can such knowledge harm me? I admit the inevitability of my death; the details are mere footnotes. The scene recurs, a few weeks later, and then again, and again. Always the same. The hospital, the spidery maze of life-support stuff, the sliding, the darkness, the peace. So there is nothing to fear from seeing. I’ve seen the worst, and it hasn’t harmed me.
