Against the Day (29 page)

In a metropolis where Location was
often the beginning, end, and entire story in between, the presence of an
underground spring beneath the Cathedral of the Prefiguration, feeding its
three baptismal fonts, had until this unaccountable advent been thought a
sufficient, if not to everyone miraculous, defense. But now, in arclight, at
the church’s highest point, authorities had begun to project a threedimensional
image in full color, not exactly of Christ but with the same beard, robes,
ability to emit light—as if, should the worst happen, they could deny
allout Christian allegiance and so make that much easier whatever turnings of
heart might become necessary in striking a deal with the invader. Each night at
dusk, the luminous declaration was tested for electrical continuity, power
level, accuracy of colors, and so on. Spare lamps were kept ready, for the
possibility haunted everyone that the projection device might fail at a
critical moment. “No one would venture at night into a neighborhood of known
vampires without carrying along a cross,” as the Archbishop had declared,
“would they now? no, and so with this Our Protector,” who remained, guardedly,
unnamed.

Despite the recent incorporation, the
outer boroughs would be allowed a few more honorable years of wilderness and
pastoral calm, having escaped at least for a while the stultified scrawling of
builders and developers that was passing in those days for dream. Though what
future could there’ve been for the “territory across the bridge” but sooner or
later a suburban history and culture to be undergone?

So the city became the material
expression of a particular loss of innocence—not sexual or political
innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to
be—its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac
race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of the injury,
unable to summon the face of their violator.

Out of that night and day of unconditional
wrath, folks would’ve expected to see any city, if it survived, all newly
reborn, purified by flame, taken clear beyond greed, realestate speculating,
local politics—instead of which, here was this weeping widow, some
onewoman grievance committee in black, who would go on to save up and lovingly
record and mercilessly begrudge every goddamn single tear she ever had to cry,
and over the years to come

would make up for them all by
developing into the meanest, crudest bitch of a city, even among cities not
notable for their kindness.

To all appearance resolute,
adventurous, manly, the city could not shake that terrible allnight rape, when
“he” was forced to submit, surrendering, inadmissably, blindly feminine, into
the Hellfire embrace of “her” beloved. He spent the years afterward forgetting
and fabulating and trying to get back some selfrespect. But inwardly, deep
inside, “he” remained the catamite of Hell, the punk at the disposal of all the
denizens thereof, the bitch in men’s clothing.

So, in hopes of being spared further
suffering, as demonstrations of loyalty to the Destroyer, in the spirit of the
votive shrine, the city had put up a number of propitiatory structures. Many of
these were deliberately burned, attempts being made to blacken the stylized
wreckage in aesthetic and interesting ways. Attention was directed Downtown,
kept wrapped in a plasma of protective ignorance, extending at last to the
enormous rampart of silence along its edge, one limit of the known world,
beyond which lay a realm the rest of the city could not speak of, as if having
surrendered, as part of some Plutonian bargain, even the language to do so. It
being the grand era of archbuilding in the City, usually of the triumphal sort,
it was decided to put up, at some transition point into the forbidden realm,
another great Portal, inscribed
I am the
way into the doleful city—Dante
, above which, on each anniversary
of that awful event, spanning the sky over the harbor, would appear a night
panorama—not quite a commemorative reenactment—more an abstract
array of moving multicolored lights against a blue, somehow maritime, darkness,
into which the viewer might read what he chose.

On the night in question, Hunter
Penhallow had been on his way out of town but, feeling something at his back,
had turned to witness the tragedy unfolding along the horizon, stricken into
remembering a nightmare too ancient to be his alone, eyeballs ashine with
mercilessly sharp images in flame tones, so overbright that his orbits and
cheekbones gathered some of the fiery excess.

He was abruptly lost in an unfamiliar
part of town—the grid of numbered streets Hunter thought he’d understood
made no sense anymore. The grid in fact had been distorted into an expression
of some other history of civic need, streets no longer sequentially numbered,
intersecting now at unexpected angles, narrowing into long, featureless
alleyways to nowhere, running steeply up and down hills which had not been
noticed before. He pushed on, assuming that far enough along he would come out
at an intersection he could recognize, but everything only got less familiar.
At some

point he must have come indoors,
entering a sort of open courtyard, a ruined shell of rustred and yellowish
debris towering ten or twelve stories over0head. A sort of monumental gateway,
unaccountably more ancient and foreign than anything in the known city. The
streets had by now grown intimate, more like corridors. Without intending to,
he soon was walking through inhabited rooms. At one end of a mostly empty hallway,
he found a meeting in progress. People were sitting clustered about a
fireplace, with cups and glasses, ashtrays and spittoons, but the occasion was
more than social. Both the men and women had kept their coats and hats on.
Hunter approached tentatively.

“I think we’re agreed we all have to
get out of the city.”

“Everyone’s packed up? The children
are ready?”

People were getting to their feet,
preparing to leave. Someone noticed Hunter. “There’s room, if you’d like to
come.”

How stupefied he must have looked. He
followed the group dumbly down a flight of winding metal steps to an
electriclit platform where others, quite a few others in fact, were boarding a
curious mass conveyance, of smooth iron painted a dark shade of industrial
gray, swept and sleek, with the pipework of its exhaust manifold led outside
the body, running lights all up and down its length. He got on, found a seat.
The vehicle began to move, passing among factory spaces, power generators,
massive installations of machinery whose purpose was less
certain—sometimes wheels spun, vapors burst from relief valves, while
other plants stood inert, in unlighted mystery—entering at length a
system of tunnels and, once deep inside, beginning to accelerate. The sound of
passage, hum and windrush, grew louder, somehow more comforting, as if
confident in its speed and direction. There seemed no plan to stop, only to
continue at increasing velocity. Occasionally, through the windows,
inexplicably, there were glimpses of the city above them, though how deep
beneath it they were supposed to be traveling was impossible to tell. Either
the track was rising here and there to break above the surface or the surface
was making deep, even heroic, excursions downward to meet them. The longer they
traveled, the more “futuristic” would the scenery grow. Hunter was on his way
to refuge, whatever that might have come to mean anymore, in this world brought
low.

it didn’t get to meet his benefactor until the weekend of the
YaleHarvard game, on a clouded and windless lateNovember day, in a side room of
the Taft Hotel. They were introduced officially by Foley Walker, who was
wearing a sporting suit in some horseblanket plaid of vibrant orange and
indigo, and a top hat
that matched,
while the magnate was dressed more
like a feedcompany clerk from parts considerably south of here, and likely west
as well. He also had on smoked “specs” and a straw hat whose brim width
unavoidably suggested disguise, with Irish pennants flying head to toe. “You’ll
do,” he greeted Kit.

Load off
my
mind, Kit supposed
to himself.

It was a less than intimate
têteàtête. Alumni of both persuasions were milling everywhere in and out of the
lobby, gesturing carelessly with foaming beer steins, sporting hats, spats, and
ulsterettes vividly dyed in varying densities of the rival school hues. Every
five minutes a page came briskly through, calling, “Mr. Rinehart! Call for Mr.
Rinehart! Oh, Mr. Rinehart!”

“Popular fellow, this Rinehart,” Kit
remarked.

“A Harvard pleasantry from a few
years back,” explained Scarsdale Vibe, “which shows no sign of abating. Uttered
in repetition, like this, it’s exhausting enough, but chorused by a hundred
male voices on a summer’s evening, with Harvard Yard for an echo chamber? well
. . .
on the Tibetan prayerwheel
principle, repeat it enough and at some point something unspecified but
miraculous will come to pass. Harvard in a nutshell, if you really want to
know.”

“They teach Quaternions there instead
of Vector Analysis,” Kit helpfully put in.

Pregame passions were running high.
Venerable professors of Linguistics who had never so much as picked up a
football had been earnestly reminding

their classes that, by way of the
ancient Sanskrit
krimi
and the later Arabic
qirmiz,
both names
for the insect from which the color was once derived, “crimson” is cognate with
“worm.” Young men in striped mufflers knitted by sweethearts who had dutifully
included rows of flasksize pockets ran clanking to and fro, getting a head
start on the alcoholic merriment sure to prevail in the stands.

“I was hoping my son would deign to
stop in for a moment, but I fear it is not to be. Detained by an orgy, no
doubt. It is surely among the more compelling forms of human sadness to watch
one’s alma mater decline into this Saturnalian swamp of iniquity.”

“I think he’s playing in some
intramural freshman game this morning,” Kit said. “He really should be on the
varsity.”

“Yes and a shame there’s no
professional football, for his career would be assured. Colfax is the last of a
litter that, love ’em all as I must, promise despite me to redefine
fecklessness for generations to come. It is the old capitalist’s
curse—the aptitudes that matter most, such as a head for business, can’t
be passed on.”

“Oh, but on the field, sir, he’s as
goahead a fellow as any captain of industry could wish.”

“Let me tell you. Colfax used to work
for me down at the Pearl Street offices, summer vacations, fifty cents an hour,
far more than he deserved. I would send him out on grease
runs—’Here—bring this to Councilman Soandso. Don’t look inside.’
The young idiot, literal as well as obedient,
never looked inside.
Hopeful,
though increasingly desperate, I kept sending him out, again and again, making
it more obvious each time, even to leaving corners of greenbacks sticking out
of the satchel and so forth, but the pup’s naïveté withstood that, too. At
last, God help me, I brought in the police, hoping to shock my imbecile son
back into some relation with the World of Reality. He would still be
languishing in the Tombs today had I not given up the struggle and begun, in
the matter of an heir, to search outside the immediate bloodlines. You
following this?”

“All respect, sir, think I read it in
a dime novel once, wait, what am I saying, more than once, and you know how
that stuff pickles your brain for you
. . . .
”

“Less so, I pray, than the crockful
of cucumbers I have sired. What I’m working up to here is a fairly grand
offer.”

“What I was afraid of, sir.” Kit
found himself steady on his feet and able to gaze back calmly into Scarsdale’s
increasingly perplexed stare.

“Drawing against a hefty trust fund,
inheriting uncounted millions when I’m dead, not up your alley, young man?”

“Apologies, but with no idea how
you’ve gone about earning it, I couldn’t

add much to it—more likely be
spending the rest of my life in courtrooms fighting off the turkey buzzards,
not how I was fixing to occupy my adult years, exactly.”

“Oh? You have an alternative plan.
Admirable, Mr. Traverse. Tell me, I’m really interested.”

Kit ran silently through the list of
topics better not gone into with Scarsdale, beginning with Tesla and his
project of free universal power for everybody, proceeding through the
enchantments of Vectorism, the kindness and genius of Willard Gibbs
. . . .
Didn’t leave much they could talk
about. And there was something
. . . .
The
man had been looking at him strangely. Not a fatherly or even fosterfatherly
expression. No, it was—Kit almost blushed at the thought—it was
desire. He was desired, for reasons that went beyond what little he could make
of this decadent East Coast swamp of lust in idleness to begin with.