City on Fire (122 page)

“Go look at a disco record some time when the lights come back on. Each side looks like a single song, only stretched out to fill twelve inches, because God forbid when there are wars on and kids starving in Eritrea anything should stop you from shake shake shaking your booty. This particular side is about halfway through, and there’s another record cued on the turntable beside it, so the switchover can be made seamlessly. The broadcast booth’s deserted, but there’s a cigarette burning in an ashtray. I figure Wolfman Jerry, our midnight-to-four guy, must be around somewhere. Me, I’m going to sit and wait for Nordlinger to come, tell me if I’m blacklisted for stirring up trouble or still clear to hit the air.

“To kill time, I pick through some of this mail that’s always piling up in the station. Promo platters, yes, but also publicity shots and autographs, the endless self-promotion. Maybe one of you nutjobs out there has sent in topless pics, I’m thinking, or at least a death threat—something. But every time I glance to see how much time’s left on the record, the swath of grooves between the needle and the spinning label has gotten smaller. Two inches, an inch. You’ll be shocked to learn, boys and girls, that it’s making ‘Dr.’ Zig tense up. This station’s been broadcasting without interruption since like 1923, but someone’s going to have to come switch the record soon or there will just be silence, that irksome pertussion of needle on groove. And we’re getting down to the nitty-gritty here, like a half-inch from the center, a quarter inch, someone’s scrawled ‘Fast Fades’ on the sleeve, any second now the pulse is going to stop, so at the very last possible instant I lean forward and switch the fader. Any idiot could do it, by the way, bloop, push a button, bleep, throw the switch, and you’ve meted out another seven minutes forty of life. Which doesn’t mean disco doesn’t still suck. Let me just wash these down.

“Ah. Better. What was I talking about? Accomplishment, is what I was talking about. My sense of it lasted about as long as the buzz of a smoke does after you stub it out. About as long as the afterglow of intercourse, before the voices start to froth again in the brainpan. Good for her? Good for me? Who leaves first? How soon’s too soon? Because my assumption of what’s been going on has just shifted: there’s no one in the station at all. No Wolfman Jerry, no Nordlinger. Which means no one but me at the controls. It’s a lot of pressure, I’m saying, and there are few places creepier than an empty radio station with the mic this hot and the monitors up loud, because you can’t hear a thing over your own voice. Like if the Kneesocks Killer or the Son of Sam were sneaking up behind me at this instant, I wouldn’t hear. You can talk yourself into being too scared to turn around …

“But wait. Who put this record on in the first place? Whose cigarette butt is this? I start to wonder—don’t laugh now, you city of palmistry and dashboard Jesuses—but to wonder if the place is haunted. I’ve mentioned my buddy who took a dive a few months back, right? And how he came to see me? Four years of silence, and there he was at the door, drunk, with a photograph and some questions about a leak. Maybe it even gave me a little pleasure to say: You’re over the line, pal, I got nothing for you. I can’t believe I never mentioned this. These pills must be eating away my mind. Anyway, I now get the strangest feeling he’s here in the studio with me. Or someone is. Any second now he’s going to swim up before me, or flicker, or however ghosts do, I don’t know, because I’ve always been certain they’re just a way of not having to face ourselves—only why, boys and girls, am I then so scared? Maybe because I’ve just walked six miles in the dark in a city that wants me dead?

“Or maybe because, when you get right down to brass, it’s ‘Dr.’ Zig who’s been the fraidy-cat all along. Yes, I hate to disabuse you aspiring jocks in the audience, but this broadcast booth is nothing but a hedge, a layer of glass protecting you from the horror show that is other people. Screwing around with which is what got this friend of mine in trouble. And I feel like he’s only inches away now, about to lay a hand on me, to start whispering in my ear, like, if things are verily as hopeless as you say they are, Zig, why not go ahead and have the courage of your convictions, pull the trigger—and you know what? I’m no longer ready to hear it. So I flee back out to the WLRC lounge, which is really just a closet with a couch in it. I’ve still got a few minutes before showtime to recollect myself, pull together whatever my message is going to be to you this morning, New York, when suddenly: a crash from the john. Oh, Zig, I’m thinking. You neurotic pardon my French fuck. This whole time you thought it was just you, there’s been a colleague here using the can. Or else some miscreant off the street.

“What—you were expecting an actual ghost story? I may be a coward, but I’m also an empiricist. I go knock on the door, hollow-core steel, I’m not sure why, though come to think of it, the can’s got one of only two windows in the entire studio, so maybe someone else is worried about breakins, too. Which would explain the padlockable latch on my side of the door. Remember, I’ve just walked through fifteen of my own riots and found myself too appalled to join. But I’m not going to be a coward anymore. The record’s going to have to be changed again in what my finely honed instincts are telling me is three point five minutes, and one way or another, this is going to have to be settled before I go back in that booth, i.e., the one you’re hearing me from now. So I take a deep breath.

“Take one with me now, New York, if you’re still out there. Shoulder to shoulder. Shoulder to the steel. Listen once more for that racket. Now push.

“I need a few seconds to grasp what’s on the other side. The window, the one I saw from outside, is open. Toilet paper everywhere, soaking up water. And there, thrashing around on the floor, is a frayed pigeon. It’s gotten stuck on one of those glue traps you use to catch rats. For years now, they’ve been scattered around the station, because we’ve been having a rat problem. Or what we assumed was a rat problem. And loyal listeners will be aware of the Zigler axiom that beneath the feathers, pigeons and rats are the same animal. Now there’s dirty down and fuzz flying off everywhere; all that remains is to give the thing a good stomp and be done with it. Barbaric, you say, to which I reply, no, this is the very essence of civilization. A willingness to do the stomping, before the vermin bite your children and contaminate your grain.

“But as I raise my shoe, the bird darts toward the toilet like it knows the end is near. It can’t quite fly because one wing’s still glued to the trap, and it’s making this cooing, this mourning dove sound, but with an undertone of absolute emergency. What am I supposed to do? There can’t be more than a couple minutes left on the record now, I’ve got to get back to the booth, and I don’t want to leave the thing like suffering.

“Have you ever tried to pick up a pigeon? This one basically panics and shits my hand, so I flip the glueboard upside down, remembering this as a falconry trick, only no dice. The bird is surprisingly lightweight, but those wings can generate a hell of a lot of force, and I’m pretty rattled, my instinct is to hold the board gingerly, but that would just lead to dropping it. So I’ve got it out and away from my body, trying to avoid getting pecked to death, and I climb up on the wobbly toilet seat and very slowly when the wingbeat subsides put bird and board and then my head out through the transom, where the sun is just coming up, praise be to the dashboard Jesi, red morning, streets beginning to articulate again, but there’s no time to commune with you, New York, I disengage the wing from the glue, and then I’ve got to do the legs, too, but soft, so as not to rip anything, which occasions another flurry, and all of a sudden I’m furious at the position I find myself in, I don’t know if I mean in the bathroom or in this city or as a human being or what, but I’m yelling, ‘Hold still, goddammit’—and everything I ever told you is a lie if the thing doesn’t go completely still, pluck pluck, the legs come unstuck, and without thinking I open my hand and it just … plummets. My shoe goes into the crapper, my sock is wet as I speak, but what do I care, because I’ve just cost a living thing its life. Only: four stories down, a few feet from the sidewalk, the damn thing remembers its wings, and with a few flaps it’s escaped into the sky. I’ve got no time to process, as they say, the record is dying, Slow Fades, this one, so I lollop with my one wet shoe back into the booth and lean toward the mic, breathless, which is where you came in, whoever you are, and why I’ve been here now for the better part of two hours, doing all this processing on air.

“Or okay, fine, you got me, maybe it didn’t all happen this way. Or is a fantasia on other stuff that did—doesn’t matter. What matters is the signal this story delivers as we near the top of the hour, which is this: ‘Dr.’ Zig has misdiagnosed you, Damen und Herren. I’ve had most of my facts right, mind you, but still somehow the picture I’ve been drawing is full of holes, because I never really believed you capable of change. And even now they’re writing over history, finding ways to tell you what you just saw doesn’t exist. The big, bad anarchic city, people looting, ooga-booga. Better to trust the developers and the cops. But let no one tell you you didn’t change into something else last night, New York, if only briefly. It’s been enough to make me think maybe I can change, too. So I want you to do me a favor. It’s 5:58 a.m. I want you to turn your radio off. I know I’m supposed to be here ’til seven, but if every last one of you would just turn me off, right now, I could shut the fuck up and no one would know it. Like Peter Pan, only upside-down: if you just stop clapping, I can walk out the door. Maybe we’ll even run into each other out there, you and I. We won’t have to recognize each other, so long as we don’t speak. It’ll be like starting from scratch. So get up off your collective ass now, New York, and please, just please—”

WEST SIDE—5:58 A.M.

THIS TIME OF MORNING, trucks from Manhattan’s last remaining factories should be stacked at the Battery Tunnel, diverting traffic onto surface streets, but the backup is paltry; anyone looking to get out of the city is already gone. What diverts Pulaski instead is the thought of having to descend into darkness again, with the sun finally having started to rise. Instead, after killing the radio, he cuts across Chambers to the bridge, and is soon soaring up over the harbor, and thence onto an expressway that for once merits the name. Pedestrian overpasses fly by. Signs for the Verrazano are grimed but legible. In the car there’s only the hum of asphalt punctuated by expansion joints. Everywhere else, on the water, on the windows, on the rusted chainlink, is light, is light, is light.

Then, just as he reaches Port Richmond, the cobra-lamps over the highway snap on. The sky behind them is the color of a gum eraser—it tends to get that way in summer, something to do with landfill gases—so the brightness is nothing to write home about. Still, it puts a lump in the throat. The neon ninepin out front of BowlRight Lanes flicks through its angles of collapse. Bulbs flash on one of those wheeled letterboards, NOW OPEN WEE DAYS AT 10, referring either to Shenanigans Irish pub or the Greek Orthodox church next door. In the bays of the carwash just before the subdivision entrance, two sponges whirl like dingy sheepdogs, their dreadlocks reaching out for a car that is not there.

Some kind of circuit must have blown on his garage-door opener, too, for as he pulls into the drive the door is going up, then down, then up again. He can see Sherri’s Thunderbird inside, which is odd, unless Patty came last night from Philadelphia to pick her up? He parks in the driveway. The slam of his door sounds overloud, even to him, and startles a few wrens from the neighbors’ privacy hedge. It’s possible he himself is a little frightened. You remember that saying, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life”? There’s something awful about that saying. “Stay here,” he mouths through the window, to the still-silent form in the passenger’s seat. He stands and watches the garage door go up and down, up and down, a few more times before heading inside.

“Sherri?” He makes, by habit, to put his service revolver in the lockable drawer of the table by the front door, but then reconsiders and checks the safety. In the kitchen, the heating element on the coffeemaker has come on with the power, coaxing a curdled deli smell out of yesterday’s coffee, but no one’s there. Their bedroom, too, is empty, the bed with its motel corners. He heads upstairs, leaning heavily on the railing, hardly noticing another door-slam outside. Their bedroom used to be up here until about five years ago, when Sherri complained it was too big—a way of sparing his feelings—and they had movers come in and take everything downstairs to the smaller room where a son or daughter would have slept. Now she calls the old bedroom “a room of Sherri’s own.” She likes to sit on her papasan chair with an afghan in the winter months when the pool is covered over and have her tea and read her book. The curtains that are never drawn are drawn, and the room smells of candlewax, and it is here on the round chair that Pulaski finds his wife, curled up asleep with the earpiece of her little transistor radio in her ear.

He limps toward her, the shag of the carpet swallowing all sound, and when he’s close enough takes out the earpiece. There is no noise. Either the battery died or she turned it off. “Sherr?” He pulls back one of the curtains. Light from the pool redoubles itself on the ceiling, building in wavery white lines, waves of light buffeting this little room. He wants to get closer to her, but to kneel now is basically impossible. He’s stuck looking down, though it feels like she’s the one above.

She opens her eyes. Their blue still startles. “Have you been up all night?” she says. It’s not an angry question, but maybe she’s beyond anger.

“I called. I thought maybe you went to Patricia’s.”

“Why don’t you go to bed, Larry? We’ll talk things over in the morning.”

But he can’t just go to bed. She’s been right here the whole time, not ten miles from the Hamilton-Sweeney Building. “It is the morning,” he says. “What things?”

“You know what things.”

“Look at me, sweetheart.” He grasps after the words. “They’re going to be different from here on out. I’m going to be different.”