Antenna Syndrome (13 page)

I nodded at the ball game. “Who’s winning?”

“Houston three, Miami zip.”

I peered over his desk. “Where’s Werewolf?”

“Out killing cats, I reckon.”

Major shook a multi-vitamin from a bottle and popped
it. He offered me one and I took it. I was feeling woozy today and
didn’t know what to blame it on.

“Hope he doesn’t get sick.”

“It’s just fun. He knows better than to eat them.”
No sooner had he spoken, a high-pitched shriek came over one of the
wall speakers. Major believed in maintaining a secure perimeter so,
aside from cameras, he’d planted microphones outside as well. We
listened. Moments later, a low-pitched howl raised the hackles of
my neck. Major clucked his tongue. “Got another one. That’s his
victory howl.”

I looked up at one of the screens and saw a wolfish
creature slinking through the shadows of the service lane.

Major opened the back door. Werewolf entered with a
tattered grey cat in his jaws. He dropped it and laid a forepaw on
its head like a white hunter posing with a dead lion. Werewolf was
Major’s dog, part Irish wolfhound and part mastiff, a big speckled
bastard with the personality of a hyena. He was a sly old bugger,
but fairly good-natured with those few who’d made friends with him.
I put a hand out slowly and rubbed my knuckles atop his bony skull.
He half-closed his eyes and muttered like a worn-out chainsaw.

Major put on gloves to take the cat away from
Werewolf, sealed it in a plastic bag and pitched it into the
dumpster out back. He shucked his gloves off and washed his hands
at the sink of an adjoining bathroom.

Werewolf was still breathing throatily as I rubbed
his back.

“He likes you, Savage,” Major said. “He won’t let
anybody else lay a hand on him. Of course, not many people do, what
with the mange.”

“Right.” I pushed Werewolf away and washed my
hands.

“Working late tonight?”

“Just dropped by to pick up something. See you
later.”

I went up to my office. After Dachshund’s account of
plainclothes in Chelsea Park, I half-expected to find my office
disturbed by a police visit, but there was no evidence of it. I
pushed the fridge aside and opened my floor safe to take out
another thousand bucks. After losing a grand at the police station,
I was leery of carrying a wad but what could you do? I had to talk
to people but they often didn’t talk back unless I paid them by the
word. It was a cash-and-carry trade.

Just as I pushed the fridge back into place, the
lights went out. I looked out the window and saw darkness
everywhere. Another power outage. With inadequate maintenance of
public utilities on one hand, and relentless copper scavenging by
day-strippers on the other, New York was an accident victim who’d
also become an unwilling organ donor.

Time to go home. I shouldered my tote bag and locked
up. I went down the dark stairs with flashlight in one hand, spray
can in the other. By the time I reached ground floor, the score was
Savage 8, Roaches 0.

Chapter 21

Still avoiding the police, I left the building by
the rear and retrieved my car from Mr. Kim’s. Back home in Clinton
Hill, the power was on in my condo building. In the elevator I
prayed it would hold until I reached the 15th floor. In the
bathroom I saw myself in the mirror. After a night in jail, it
wasn’t pretty. I showered and put on clean clothes.

I checked the fridge and saw some hamburger that had
turned black, some cheese gone green, and a brown bag of lettuce. A
visual feast unfit to eat. I had a glass of wine with a few
crackers and brushed my teeth. My support group met Tuesday nights.
It was a sad comment on my social life that I looked forward to
it.

I walked to the high school on 56th where we met.
Being so close, it left me with no excuse to miss a meeting. Not
that I wanted to take a pass, but when the mood was on me, I could
find reasons not to go. Sometimes I preferred hanging out with my
friends, Johnnie Walker or Jim Beam, trying to forget.

The first two years after the Brooklyn Blast had
been a blur. I’d scratched together a living doing search and
recovery work, clean-up, construction – mostly manual day labor
because for awhile that’s all there was. I spent most of my
paychecks on booze and pot. I lived in different places, usually
close to where I worked at the time, trying to avoid transit costs
because I didn’t have a car.

I’d been an open wound of rage and sorrow. There
were many like me who should have left town but couldn’t pull
ourselves away. We’d died but couldn’t move on, like ghosts
haunting the places we used to call home. Thirsty ghosts gathered
in bars, back alleys and parks, drinking and smoking to numb our
memories of what we’d lost.

It didn’t work. My memories were still intact. I
still couldn’t see a tricycle without getting a lump in my throat.
I couldn’t listen to Alison Goldfrapp. I couldn’t play hopscotch or
go out dancing. The things I associated with Gwen and Lily were too
painful. But I could drink and get high. No one could take that
away from me. No one cared enough to try.

I arrived at the High School for Environmental
Studies. Ironically, it’d been around since well before the blast.
At its inception, their concerns had probably been urban pollution
and garbage disposal. What was their curriculum now? Radioactive
landfill, contaminated ground water, mutant vermin...?

I entered the classroom. Our moderator was a
chemistry teacher named Bill. Someone had nicknamed him Walter in
reference to an old HBO series everyone said I should watch. But I
didn’t do drama. I’d had enough for a lifetime. I preferred
documentaries, preferably about pre-atomic ancient civilizations –
the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans.
Veni, vidi, didici
. I
came, I saw, I learned.

Bill greeted me with a nod. I took my seat with half
a dozen other people in desks arranged in an open circle. I looked
at my watch, thinking I was early, because usually there were twice
as many attendees, but I was on time.

“I don’t know where everyone is tonight,” Bill said,
“but we start on the hour. Discipline is the foundation of a
responsible life, and one of those disciplines is punctuality.”

We took turns checking in. Our group, like thousands
of others that sprang up in the wake of the blast, had no specific
focus. Gone were the days of groups dedicated to alcoholism, drug
use or sex addiction. Nowadays, we all had lots of baggage, and our
aberrant behaviors were part of the post-traumatic stress disorder
from which an entire society was trying to recover.

“Since there’re so few of us here, let’s do
something different tonight,” Bill said. “I know many of you suffer
recurring nightmares. But if you think about it, we’ve all been
living a nightmare. The challenge is to acknowledge it. Since we
can’t run away from it, we might as well embrace it. Anyone want to
share?”

Colin, a former investment banker now working as a
store clerk, described being chased by a giant rat through
maze-like city streets. Every night Colin set traps in his
ground-floor apartment and drank a pint of bourbon in hopes of
dream-less sleep.

Next was Trish, a former model who now worked as a
seamstress. She had a recurring nightmare of a black snake coming
out of her toilet. Fearful of using the bathroom at night, she
drank no fluids after dark. She’d installed a bolt outside her
bathroom door and spent more on anxiety patches than food.

Many recurring nightmares involved vermin of one
kind or another – bed bugs, rabid bats, giant worms, feral cats,
flea-infested raccoons. New York residents were no longer in
control of their environment; the lesser species were out to get
us. It made my nightmare seem almost trivial.

Bill gave me the nod to speak if I wanted.

“As some of you know, I moonlight as an
exterminator,” I began, “so I’ve seen everything you’re afraid of.
Giant rodents, snakes, alligators – I’ve hunted and killed them.
But for the past year I’ve had a recurrent nightmare involving
cockroaches. This is it:

“A Village brownstone sits abandoned because it’s
infested. In desperation the owner hires me to clean it out. Other
exterminators have tried, but the roaches in this house are immune
to DDT. So I do a little recon with night-vision goggles.

“As soon as it’s dark, the roaches emerge. They’re
organized like ants, forming platoons, leaving the house to forage
in the neighborhood for food. Within hours they’re back in the
woodwork, partying like it’s 1999.

“I put an optical fiber under the floorboards to get
a closer look. To my horror, the roaches have human faces. Even
worse, they’re scientific geniuses – DaVinci, Einstein, Newton,
Pavlov …

“Suddenly I’m blinded by a burst of light through
the optical fiber. Like being hit by lightning. When I wake up, I’m
strapped to a gurney with an IV drip in my arm, my brain wired to a
computer. They’re reprogramming me to be one of them.”

“Man, what have you been smoking?” someone said.

Bill laughed along with the rest. Then someone else
volunteered a nightmare and we continued around the circle until
everyone had coughed up their hairball.

Afterwards, Bill locked up and we all went out into
the schoolyard to sit on benches under a three-quarter moon.
Someone had brought a bottle of red wine and a dozen plastic cups,
someone else a pack of contraband cigarettes. We shared the bottle
and lit up and savored the moment like the survivors we were. For
an hour and a half, we’d been a family, and there was something
hopeful about that.

Then we all said goodnight and went back home, each
to his own nightmare.

Chapter 22

When I got back home, I had another glass of wine
and sat out on the balcony. Up here at night the air wasn’t bad.
The lights were still on in my neighborhood, but south of 42nd were
huge swaths of darkness on the west side. I sat there drinking,
watching planes on their descent into LaGuardia.

My stomach growled. I should eat before I drank
more. Rather than go grocery shopping at this hour, I decided to
kill two birds with one stone and clock some more time in search of
Marielle Jordan. See what was cooking at Crabner’s favorite
deli.

I drove the Charger down Broadway. The traffic
lights were working and there were people on the streets. Most of
them were probably looking for sex, dope, money and excitement, but
some were certainly in search of lost family members, lost lovers
and lost dreams. I wished them better luck than I was having
finding Marielle.

In Times Square I saw lots of people going in and
out of movie theaters, bars and sex clubs. Mostly white folks. Even
though the race war was three years ago, most Afro-Americans didn’t
venture south of 110th Street any more, unless it was broad
daylight and they were packing, like the guys I’d rented parking
space from in Chelsea.

After the Brooklyn Blast, the Russkies had invaded
Manhattan, tried to take Harlem, but settled for pockets on the
Upper West Side. We’d always known the Russian mob was ruthless but
nobody knew the extent of it until the Kalashnikovs came to
Morningside Park. For a while in 2023, the body counts from
bombings and shootings were as bad as the sectarian violence in
Iraq. But after the NYPD and National Guard joined forces,
demarcation lines were drawn, and a new segregation took hold.

The Afro-American community had come out of it okay.
Harlem was secure at its end of Central Park, outside the 15-mile
limit decreed by FEMA to be a safe distance from Brighton Beach.
Property values had remained stable or improved.

I rode Broadway down to Houston and turned east. I’d
just passed Essex when I saw the big neon crescent moon and
Luna
Deli
in blinking blue letters. Houston was full of parked cars,
like a herd of cattle bunched for the night under the watch of
armed auto wranglers parked nearby. It was like this all over the
city – if you couldn’t afford off-street parking, there were zones
to rent protection by the hour, day or week.

I circled the block and parked halfway down Norfolk.
It was just past midnight. I locked the car and walked back to
Houston. A guy with a pump shotgun across his knees sat on a chair
outside Luna Deli. Deterrent for anyone who thought robbing the
till was the road to solvency. More like, a ride in an
ambulance.

Inside, the deli was doing a ripping business. Two
white-bibbed guys worked the counter, slapping sandwiches together,
scooping sauerkraut and pickled eggs into take-out cartons, while a
girl at the cash took the
gelt
from a steady flow of
customers.

A few patrons sat in a row of booths, enjoying their
deli fare. I went to the coolers in back, fetched a Heineken,
ordered a chicken salad with mozzarella on rye, and had it in my
hand within a minute. I paid and sat in the last booth at the
rear.

I’d had about two bites of sandwich and a sip of
beer when a tall guy in a black coat entered the deli. Although it
was pitch dark outside, he was wearing wrap-around shades. He
passed me without a glance, fetched a six-pack of beer from the
cooler and stopped at the service counter. He had high cheekbones
and a strange mouth, which fit Jack’s description of the AC
repairman who’d spirited Marielle out of the house. Even more
disturbing, he looked like the bodyguard who’d overpowered the
gunman at the media center this afternoon. Buzz, Dr. Globik had
called him, the same name Jack Randall had seen stitched on the AC
repairman’s coveralls.

“Oyster, onion and Swiss on pumpernickel, right?”
said one of the countermen. “Three pickled eggs on the side?”

The tall guy nodded and went to the cashier.

By then I was out of my booth and through the door.
I looked up and down the street but saw no cars with engine running
nearby. I crossed the street and stood in a shadowed doorway. I
bagged the unfinished sandwich and put it in my jacket pocket. I
finished the beer and put my hand in my other pocket with my
pistol.