City on Fire (75 page)

Unfortunately, snorting smack didn’t yield the same high. It was fine for like watching TV, but he missed the visions, the religion of it. He’d graduated to smoking, with similar results, and then to skin-popping, and finally to shooting between his toes, as one of his dealers did. Ah. At last. He could be on the most astonishing nod and still look down at arms as smooth and white as elephant tusks, arms that should have been in a fucking museum, telling the world he was still in control. Lately he’d started carrying works and a little auxiliary stash around with him in his great-grandfather’s shaving kit, just in case. And where once he’d resolved to get high only alone—he never had liked to share—by February he would be squatting with Nastanovich in the weird little yard behind the practice space.

It was strange, he’d always thought: this pocket of untenanted land walled in by buildings, as if it predated the rest of the city. You reached it by squeezing past a warped swatch of chainlink between two brownstones that for some reason had not been built flush. The side of each house was chalky, limestoney, and they got closer together the farther back you went, so that if you were schlepping, say, a kick drum, you began to wonder if you were going to make it. Then you were through, in the yard, looking at a squat brick building like a janitorial kiosk in a city-run park. It was unclear which of the surrounding buildings it belonged to. Back in the fall, the ground around it, under the never-quite-dark sky, had been a weedy mess glinting with pop-bottle fragments and crushed vials, but all that had vanished now under a layer of snow. Clotheslines crisscrossed crazily above. No one ever complained about the noise. Nastanovich scooped a lemon-sized ball of snow with the spoon he’d taken from his pocket and used a finger to level off the excess. Through the brick wall they hunkered against, William felt the tremor of notes he couldn’t name: Venus, bored or impatient, exploring the lower registers of her organ. “Seriously, Nastanovich,” he said. “That’s filthy. You’re going to get us sick.”

“What do socialites shoot with, Billy? Holy water? Besides, I don’t see no tap.” Nastanovich nodded vaguely toward their sordid environs, but his attention was all on the lighter-flame tonguing the bottom of the spoon. You had to hand it to him: he was smarter than people took him for. Smarter even, apparently, than William, who could have insisted on sterility, but who had never gotten high with Nastanovich before, and didn’t want to bollix the chance of there being a next time.

He rubbed his hands together for warmth and squatted down himself and concentrated on the lick, lick of the flame. He felt, in a sense, beheld; anyone who cared to look out a back window right now might have seen them, two degenerates hunched in a circle of light. More likely, of course, they would have just seen the lighter (someone had shot out the yard’s lone streetlight long ago) and what could they have done anyway? People were cooking up all over the East Village. Probably even in some of these rooms. As long as you were safe in your apartment, why rock the boat? Snowmelt and dope bubbled and hissed in the concavity of the spoon and let off oily steam. Nastanovich’s hands stayed solid. In William’s experience, etiquette dictated that the guest boot up first, but when he reached down to undo the knotted lace of his sneaker, Nastanovich asked what the hell he was doing. “Fuck that,” he said, when William tried to explain. “Give me your arm, homeboy.” He took the syringe in his teeth and tied William off.

“Jesus,” William heard himself say as the plunger dropped. It was the first time he’d mainlined since that day above Señor Wax, and he was unprepared for the pinch in his arm, the flush and shiver carrying him away across the bounded infinity of snow. He didn’t realize that Nastanovich had already fixed himself up until the bassist rose again, sniffling, and wobbled around the corner toward a parallelogram of light that had opened. William brushed snow off the butt of his jeans and teetered after his bandmate.

Inside, the bare bulb, which before had seemed cold and insufficient, still did, except now there was something utterly specific about the light, like a memory already lived through. These were not William’s feet moving over the stained concrete. They belonged to some previous person whose choices were already behind him. As did the grin floating free of his head, like a daisy on a stalk. As did the hands strapping on his guitar, dragging through the barre chords of “E. Vill Zombies” and a cover of the Nightmares’ “Horrors of the Black Museum” and a new bit of pith called “Make Me Sick.” Now, when Nicky Chaos, unsatisfied, wanted to run through the intro to “Brass Tactics” for the twentieth time—“but faster … and can you guys make it swing less? It should sound like jackboots”—William could just swim down into the loops and whorls of those cables heaped on the floor, like a minnow tucking itself away in kelp beds, or like an appraiser inspecting at close distance the fractal curves of what may or may not have been a Pollock.

WHEN NASTANOVICH DIED, in June, William wasn’t around for it, and didn’t find out until he showed up at the garage for practice one day, still a little loaded, with his leather kit stashed in his guitar case. Everyone was sitting around on amplifiers, staring at the floor. Even Sol Grungy, Nicky’s personal sound guy, looked chastened. “What’s up?”

Nastanovich OD’d, someone said.

“Oh. Is he all right? He’s all right, right?”

“His mother found him when he didn’t come down for breakfast,” Venus said, looking straight at William. The whites of her eyes were pink, as from swimming-pool chlorine. “He still had the belt around his arm.”

William didn’t know what to do. The top half of his body weighed a ton. He sank down right on the cool concrete, all those redundant cables. “Fuck.”

“I say we still play today,” Nicky said, after a while. “It’s what he would have wanted. If there were a life besides this one, he’d be looking down on us from that great rent-controlled apartment in the sky, egging us on. So I say we play.”

“I say fuck you,” Venus said. William seconded that emotion, but didn’t know how to say so, so he stood and walked out.

IT HAD BEEN A LONG TIME since he’d prepared a canvas, and his toolbox was on the bottom of a shelf blocked by a shopping cart he’d found somewhere, which was filled now with old issues of Cosmopolitan and Wrecking Ball and anatomy books shoplifted from the Strand. He couldn’t move it—wasn’t as strong as he used to be—so he had to unload the cart and find new places for the books, which took half the morning. Eventually, though, he had the tools to nail together a four-by-four frame (a vestigial reflex, blame New York: he still had the conviction that American art should be Big). He stretched the canvas, stapled it to form a blank surface, a tight white drum. And maybe the contest between painting and dope was not as lopsided as it seemed, because over the next two days, while he waited for the layers of gesso to dry, William got by on only ten dollars’ worth of drugs.

He decided to turn inward, paint whatever he found there, and when the canvas was ready, he covered it in black gouache. What came next was an off-center polygon, low and to the right, eight-sided, slashing. He wasn’t happy with its color, a brown like dried blood, so he mixed up a translucent blue and went back over the edges. He built up an interior with yellow, then fire-engine red. The instant the red hit the canvas, though, he felt physically ill. Not so much nausea as a whole-body itch. Because the octagon was death, it seemed to William. A rust-colored figure the size of a bowler hat, rimmed with blue voltage. A snuffer like he’d used as an altar boy, back before his mom died and he stopped believing in God—only viewed from below as it came to put out your flame. He thought of Nastanovich intently scooping up snow, of the narcotized monotone of his basslines, of colorless fish slop squirted into assembly-line cans and the plaster-walled room in Middle Village where he’d lived with his mother. It was a life that hadn’t been worth much, from the outside. Things weren’t looking so hot for William’s either, just at present. What he wanted more than anything was to escape, go blow some guy in a bathroom, go get so high the top of his head would blow off, but he owed it to his dead friend to stay here and force himself to wait to be told what to do. At which point he would reach once more for the brush.

IN THIS WAY, the first time around, William managed to kick cold turkey. He stayed in the loft with the phone disconnected. He threw up a lot and for a week could eat only Neapolitan ice cream, first the chocolate stripe, then the strawberry, and finally the freezer-burned vanilla. When his hands weren’t steady, he listened to the radio. When they were, he painted. By the end of that month, when he started to feel like himself again, he was deep into the work. The black background had gained weight and texture, like the swimmy darkness you see right before you lose consciousness, and the foreground sported a brighter border. He felt he was painting now from memory, filling in shadows and light. There was a light source somewhere, a particular source of a particular summer light that distilled itself into a glare near the center of the octagon, like a flash seen in a mirror. And as he painted up the edges, adding blue and green traces of that flash, he could make out letters. S T O P. But this wasn’t that flat, affectless Pop thing, the Brillo box, the soup can. If anything, it was the opposite: a stop-sign whose unique scumble of urban grit—whose peeling green pole, textured upon the canvas, whose reflection of morning light near a river in summer—made William want to cry. It was the stop-sign at the end of Sutton Place, which he’d last seen sliding past the window of a stolen car on the morning he’d left home for good. A piece of evidence, though of what, he didn’t know.

HE’D SORT OF ASSUMED the bassist’s death and the guitarist’s disappearance would mean the end of Ex Post Facto; his phone didn’t ring even after he plugged it back in, and he didn’t bother to tell anyone. It pleased him, secretly, to be free of the band. For one thing, it meant that Nicky Chaos would never get his most ardent wish: to play a live show as the frontman. He found himself surprisingly bitter toward Nicky, blaming him somehow for Nastanovich, though of course if he’d really been looking for someone to blame, he might have started with himself. Then, leaving his building one day, he found Nicky on the front step. He must have been waiting, though how he knew when William was going to leave was anybody’s guess. Maybe he’d been there all night. “Hey, Billy, hold up—can we talk?” William kept moving toward the corner; Nicky followed. “You look good.”

“Thanks.”

“Listen,” Nicky said. “It’s been a couple months now, I’ve been thinking it’s time we got the band back together.”

“There is no ‘we’ anymore, Nicky. You have to know this. There is no band.”

“Okay, I get that, I respect that, but this thing is bigger than one person. All those kids out there with nowhere to go, just waiting for someone they can follow …”

“It’ll have to be someone other than me.” They were at the subway steps now. “I’m out.”

“Sol thinks he can wire Tompkins Square for sound, run it off a lamppost. I’m saying we play one last show for free, take up a collection, set up a kind of charity, like the Concert for Bangladesh. Only, the Concert for Nastanovich. Maybe record it live.”

“ ‘Concert for Bangladesh’? I can’t think of anything less punk.”

“And then give the dough to his mom. She’s real emotional, you know. Or maybe you don’t. I guess you weren’t at the funeral, were you?”

William hated him for a minute. A year ago, Nicky had barely known Nastanovich’s name. “I’ve got to go, Nick. Why don’t I think about it and get back to you?”

“I won’t take no for an answer, you know.”

“I know you won’t,” William said. “I’m just not quite ready to give you the satisfaction of yes.” And without another word, he went down into the ground.

63

THE THING ABOUT NGUYENS,” said her father, from the passenger’s seat, “is we always have to learn everything the hard way.” They were somewhere east of the Rockies, in a rental truck with a shaky transmission. For the last half-hour, he’d been reading speed-limit signs aloud, and Jenny assumed that this was just another way of telling her to slow down. When she turned up the radio instead, he fell silent again, staring out at his adopted country, its flat confusing billboards and harvest-green heart.

In retrospect, though, a couple things would strike her. One was that he’d been talking about himself as much as about her. The other was that maybe he’d been right.

A few weeks after being allowed to graduate, she’d returned home to the Valley, flattering herself that her presence would help Dad through the divorce, but for all the good it did him, she might as well have joined the Peace Corps, or journeyed to the moon. Meanwhile, the world she’d been so eager to change—the world out there—was passing her by. All she could do, coming back at night from dinner at Mom and Sandy’s, was sit with her father in the aquarium of the living room to watch a recap of the travails of his beloved Dick Nixon. It had taken her over a year to break the news to him that she wanted to move to New York.

They reached it now on day four of the drive, thanks largely to her lead foot. Still, they had only a few hours to unload her furniture (such as it was) before he had to go turn in the truck and catch his flight home. One of these hours they wasted navigating a warren of one-way streets before she found the address on Rivington where she’d arranged to rent a flat. The building was dun-colored, jumbled with fire escapes like orthodonture over bad teeth. The windows had bars all the way up to the fourth floor, and it had been eons, probably, since the glass had been washed. But Jenny was no stranger to squalor; she’d done four years at Berserkeley, after all. Inside, the door to 3F had been left ajar. It was less the junior one-bedroom she’d been promised on the phone than a glorified closet. The bathtub adjoined the refrigerator. Her dad glanced out the window at the hoodlums sizing up the moving van below. How could a landlord charge the equivalent of a mortgage payment, he asked, and not even provide a living room? She’d known it was a mistake to tell him what she was paying. She pointed out that the whole city would be her living room, which made the apartment a bargain, if you thought about it. The logic of this cliché impressed her at the time. What she’d failed to take into account was the fact that most people’s living rooms didn’t have weather, whereas in hers, it could rain for days. Not to mention all the other ways the blurring of indoor and outdoor would work against her, as when six-legged forest creatures came lumbering out of the broiler grate the first time she turned on the oven.