The Damned (30 page)

For love.

Love was the only skill that lay beyond Ash's reach. But when it came to our father, she yearned for his attention with an intensity that was something akin to it. She didn't care about acting or ballet or piano or glittering report cards or any of the other things she was effortlessly good at. It gave her no pleasure to excel, not in itself. Yet she did all those things. She did them for him. So that he could see her superiority and she, in turn, could mistake his admiration (something she could grasp) for affection (something she could not).

The more she performed for him, the greater the distance he removed himself from her. He knew what she was before anyone else did. From the first moments of her life, after she was miraculously returned from near death and the nurses handed his baby daughter to him and he looked into her blue eyes and saw nothing, felt nothing, recognized her as nothing, he saw how she would be a thing to be contained. Failing that, a thing to be denied.

I know all this because he told me. In those years when there were only the two of us in the house on Farnum Avenue, he confessed to having knowledge of his child that he didn't know what to do with.

“She would have killed, Danny. She had a life of taking life ahead of her,” he told me once at the kitchen table, dry-eyed. “I saw that while I changed her diapers or fed her stewed plums or held her on my knee. And I saw something else, too. How I would never be able to pretend I
hadn't
seen it.”

At the time, I assumed Ash was only a secondary reason that explained why my father pulled away from his family. There was work, I thought. The diminishing sales of Made in America cars adding pressure to the upper-floor guys like my dad, looking for costs that might be cut, aware that their own jobs might be among them. Not to mention his wife's drinking, his cowering son, the whole midlife
trap. But none of that pushed him to make a second home—his true home, however solitary—on the forty-second floor of GM's world headquarters in the Renaissance Center. That was Ash.

And Ash knew it.

That's where I have to go now. Up there behind the smoked glass of the tallest tower, the one that holds the blue letters for the whole underworld to see. It was where she longed to be more than anywhere else—not in our father's workplace, but with
him
, a partner to his secret thoughts, a daughter he would put his arm around and introduce as such instead of standing apart from her and letting his wife be the one to say her name aloud.

A
COUPLE BLOCKS ON,
W
OODWARD
opens up into the semicircle of Grand Circus Park. The windows of the buildings—the Broderick, the Kales—now close enough to see as a thousand opportunities for someone to look down at me. Me, the sole walker making his way past the patches of earth where trees once grew, the Edison Fountain now a rust-stained crater.

A light.

White and electric and strong, coming out from behind a parking facility on Broadway. Flying thirty feet above the ground.

A dragon.

This is the thought that comes first.

A beast of the air.

For a second the brightness falls directly on me and I'm blinded by it, held motionless like a forest animal crossing the road before it's struck.

When the light is thrown elsewhere I see it's followed by other, duller squares of illumination. Which makes it more snake than dragon. One that's ingested hundreds of humans, their faces looking out from along its length.

The People Mover monorail. Vacant in the living Detroit. Packed tight here.

The train glides into the Grand Circus station a couple stories over the sidewalk. The doors open.

Nobody gets off any of the cars. It is their place. Circling downtown, taking on new passengers from time to time—I watch one, a woman who drops her shopping bags on the platform and gets on—but none disembarking. With the passing of time there will only be more strangers to squeeze against, less air to breathe.

The doors close and the train starts away. Rounds southward again toward the river and is gone.

I'm expecting the appearance of the People Mover to lure others out from the shadows, but the plaza remains empty. But as I continue south, I'm more certain of being observed. The century-old office blocks of downtown, once the architectural pride of the nation and now little more than brick shells, leaning toward me as I walk. Trying to hear my thoughts.

And what would they hear if they could?

I'm coming for you. And when I find you, you're not going to like it.

It's only me trying to convince myself. Pushing the fear away with words.

It doesn't come close to working.

At the corner of Woodward and Grand River, I stop in front of the smashed-out window of Eastern Wig & Hair. I remember it from when I was a kid: the smooth plastic heads arranged on tiered displays, all wearing different curls and beehives and ponytails. On the rare occasions I walked this strip with my mother, I'd ask if I could “look at the heads,” and she would bring me here, never asking what interested me about them. If she had, I would have said they looked like Ash to me. Not individually, but collectively. Sculpted faces adorned with different looks, different moods, different appeals.

The heads are still here, though the wigs they wear are filthy and balding. Behind the tiered display stand four female mannequins. A couple missing arms. All white. Alabaster ghouls.

I start on again.

But not before one of them moves.

When I check back to confirm it, I see that they're all moving now. And that they're not mannequins.

They fix their eyes on me.

I spin around too fast. Nearly lose my balance, recovering by diving forward and hoping my feet can catch up. The four of them twenty feet behind.

Cut right a block on and find myself on the street beyond the outfield wall of the ballpark. The lights still on.

If there's a way in, there may be somewhere to hide.

I duck into the nearest gate. Dance sideways through the turnstile, past the overturned concessions to the closest archway and out onto the concrete deck at the top of the rows of seats. Some of them occupied, I see now. Maybe a few hundred dotted throughout the stadium designed to accommodate forty thousand. All of them watching the events on the field.

I have to step forward and take a seat in the back row to see.

The white baselines and foul boundaries mostly obscured by dust, the grass brown. Only the pitcher's mound recognizably remains. A circle of pocked earth like an anthill.

There's a game going on. But it's not a baseball game.

People running. A quick count puts them at six. Some injured, dragging broken legs or holding hands against open wounds. As they try to find a place to hide in the wide-open diamond, they step around the bodies of the already fallen. One man halved so that one part lies in the left outfield, the other in the right.

At first I can't see what they run from. Then I do.

Red Eyes steps out from where home plate used to be. Lopes after the closest prey, a barefoot woman in a sweat suit. Brings its teeth down on her head, snaps her neck, and drops her.

Some of the people in the stands clap, a sparse and echoing
pock-pock-pock
, but most remain still in their seats. Watching the monster start after the man with the broken leg who is now pathetically scratching at the outfield wall.

I bend as low as I can and make my way along the row.

A shriek from the field.

Pock-pock-pock . . .

At the next aisle, I start up.

But Red Eyes hears. Swings around. Spots me.

It bounds across the field and leaps into the stands. Jumping off the backs of seats. A few sections over and slowed by the uneven surface, but coming fast nevertheless.

I run down the ramp and out through the gates. At Madison, a half block on, I check over my shoulder. See the tiger come out of the gates and spot me right away. Digs in and comes hard.

The floating lights appear again. The People Mover, coming in toward the Broadway station. The stairs up to the platform another twenty yards on.

I take them at a run, propelled up the first flight without feeling the steps under my feet. The second flight is the opposite: the steps doubled in height, both hands grabbing at the railing, hauling me up.

Above, the train stops at the platform. The doors slide open.

Wait for me.

Red Eyes slams into the base of the stairs. Squeezes through the frame and starts up. Its claws scratching at the concrete steps like knives on slate.

I make the platform. The train's brakes hiss as they're released. The cars filled with the dead looking out at me. Witnessing my dash for the doors, now sliding closed.

I
t almost works.

I'm halfway in when the doors catch me at the shoulder, sandwiching me down the spine. A second later, they open automatically. It gives me time to jam myself in.

It also gives the tiger time to burst out of the stairwell.

The doors close again. The train eases away as the creature skids on the platform, bumping against the side of my car. It considers leaping on top, but decides against it. Watches the train travel south. Its tail flicking in irritation.

It takes a second to find me through the window in the door. When it does its whole body stiffens. The mouth opens and its tongue comes out, polishing the length of its lower teeth. Then it starts down the stairs.

Not in defeat. Coming after the train.

The cars roll slightly as they pick up to their sluggish maximum speed.

Go, you piece of shit. Go! GO!

Wishing doesn't make the shattered buildings and bombed-out parking lots pass any quicker. And I can't spot Red Eyes on the streets below, either.

For the first time since I boarded I turn away from the glass and meet eyes with my fellow passengers.
All
of their eyes. Because they're looking at nothing but me.

A big guy toward the rear of the car with a bandana wrapped around a head missing both its ears muscles toward me, squeezing through the crowd. Others who are closer—a young woman wearing broken glasses, a teenaged boy with half his body clothed, the other black from burns—pressing in as well. A hundred in this car alone. Strangers locked in their own looping regrets and with nothing in common aside from having this circling of Detroit's financial district be their place in the After. Until I joined them.

I turn my back to them. It doesn't stop them from crushing in. And instead of keeping my elbows out and trying to hold the ground I have, I slip back into them.

Because the train is stopping at the Greektown station. The doors about to open. If I'm next to them I'll spill out and they won't let me back on.

The passengers don't seem to be expecting my voluntary backstep into their arms. They hold me up without putting their hands on me, as if I'm a carrier of disease.

The doors open. None get on, none get off. The doors close.

That's when the big guy with the missing ears finally reaches me.

He starts by trying to dig the eyes out of my head. One hand grabbing my hair and the other planted on my face, the thumb working for the leverage required to gouge in.

My scream startles them. Even the bandana guy pauses a moment to shake his head. It doesn't seem he'd be able to hear anything with those ear holes of his, but my voice reaches him. Not that it inspires any pity. Seconds later, he's at me again. His callused thumb pumping at the air in front of me.

This time, I don't let him get my hair. He takes out his frustration by punching me in the face. It seems to lighten his mood. Something like a smile moves his lips around.

Then he punches me again.

A glance out the windows shows the train making the corner that leads into the Renaissance Center station. My stop.

The doors only four feet away. But three rows of passengers between me and them.

I time it so that I crouch down and start plowing through just as the train eases to a stop. When I hit the ones between me and the doors they fall back into the ones behind them, some giving way as a result.

None of them shout or snarl or speak. It occurs to me as I break free of them and the doors close behind me that, for the whole time I was on the train, none made a single sound.

Except for me. My shouts. My blood-spitting breaths.

Which is all there is to hear in this place, too.

A concrete hallway the width of Woodward Avenue that leads to the Ren Cen's main atrium. On the walls, forty-foot-long photos of GM cars and trucks from over the years. A Sierra overlooking the Grand Canyon, a Corvette zipping across salt flats, a Cadillac emptying its tanned, tartan-slacked passengers at the front doors of a golf clubhouse. Images that have all been stabbed and slashed and smeared as if attacked by monkeys armed with knitting needles.

I remember this place when it was the future.

My father introduced it this way whenever we drove by, whenever the towers were pointed out by a rare visitor to our home or if he spotted them during the intro to the suppertime news.

“That's the future, right there,” he'd say, with a hint of bitterness, as though with his pride came the anticlimax of knowing it wouldn't get any better than this, that his employer, his city, his driving-around-for-the-hell-of-it America had nowhere to go but into more and more acute realizations of how little time it had left.

To me, the Ren Cen looked like the future, too, though a cartoon version of it, the cylindrical, reflective structures like something a
champagne glass spaceship would putter toward on
The Jetsons
. That was from the exterior. On the inside, it left a similar impression to the one I have now: too wide, too hard, too easily aged. Something built to be ahead of its time, which doomed it to be a monument to obsolescence.