Garth Hallberg - City on Fire

Now he is either lost to the chatter of talk radio — needing it to tell him something — or asleep. Little ridges of vertebrae push against his tee-shirt along his back. It is warm and damp, but not feverish. Her hand, resting there, looks like another person’s. Like the memory of a hand.

And then it is twenty years later, and all of this is irrelevant. She is waking from a nap, in the mid-to-late afternoon, in the spring, bits and pieces of her flitting down from the corners of a sunny room and assembling themselves into the person she is now. That cramp in her left hand is arthritis. The drone she’s dreamed was a plane is actually the maid’s vacuum in the hall. Beyond an open window birds twitter and buses sigh, but even after she can tell herself these things with some authority, she remains recumbent, a sweaty pillow over her head. Not that there will be anyone trying to get her up. Cate works long hours at a firm downtown, and Regan experiences her these days mostly as a visitor for Sunday brunch. Keith is up in Rye for the afternoon; retired, he’s taken up golf and Republican politics (which amount to the same thing). And Will … Will is an answering machine on another coast — and every once in a while, when she can catch him at an odd enough hour that he has to pick up, a voice, reticent, pixellated by satellites. Still, Regan wouldn’t trade the life she’s made. She’s got her brother back, and it seems like he might be around for a while yet. And Act 2 of her marriage has been much better than Act 1. The company’s eventual implosion has not only put her and Keith on more equal footing, but also freed her to figure out what to do with herself. At his urging, she sent out résumés, and the next year was hired as head of community relations at St. Mary’s Hospital for Children in Bayside, Queens. The creation of money from money wasn’t ever something that fulfilled her; this is. More importantly, she’s learned to live with herself, which she now knows is a precursor to learning to live with other people. Sometimes in the early evening, she will look up from a magazine to find Keith in the chair cattycorner to her, just looking. “What?” she’ll ask, and he will say, “Nothing,” but with a kind of wonder. You can build a life on this: two people who know each other’s failings electing nonetheless to sit together, in socks, in lamplight, reading magazines, trying not to look too far beyond the day just passed, or the one coming up. Only at the borders of sleep, really, will she ever find herself rooting back along overgrown passageways for a place where her current life split off. And what she comes to, more often than not, is this fantasy she’d once had of having recovered the son or daughter she’d lost, as if that whole night had been a vast Rube Goldberg contraption for showing her that what she wants is not what she’s thought.

Under her hand, the boy doesn’t move. For a few seconds, things could go either way. As long as her eyes stay closed, it’s not impossible she does say something, and whatever happens after that will have become her future, and her current one the dream. But she has come to believe or remembers believing that she has to choose: either the path not taken seventeen years earlier, or the path that leads to her actual children, as opposed to imaginary ones. And this boy has his own life, as does she. It was a mistake to think she ever didn’t.

Still, she keeps her hand on his back a few seconds longer. Tries to memorize the pale lines of scalp branching through his hair. She holds on to the feeling until it is exactly the size of her body, and then she lets go. She’s been awake for twenty-three hours. Her eyes are dry. The sky outside brightens, or doesn’t. The daytime maids will be arriving soon. Under one of the boy’s inert hands she places a note. Make yourself at home. William (brother) upstairs, can help with food. I’m at this number if you need anything . But already she knows he won’t call. She is never going to see him again. And after a last look, she prepares to return to reality, pursued by the babble of the madman on the radio, like a voice out of a dream.

LAST TRANSMISSION

“—ANYWAY, THERE WE ALL WERE,hands on shoulders. Yours truly ends up in line between a woman in an Arab hair thing and a Hasid who seems nervous I’m going to cop a feel. The tunnel? Hotter than I ever thought a tunnel could be. Flames barely reaching the graffiti and that weird brown residue the trains leave, like inside the barrel of a gun. Turns out to have its own smell, by the way, mushroomy and sweaty and metallic all at once. You’ve smelled it before and thought it was something else. I’m just starting to ask myself are we being led into an ambush when the wall on the left becomes an echoey black vacuum. The platform. The guy behind takes his hand off my shoulder. All these little lights drifting apart. We’re just folks coming home from work again. Then I’m up and through an open exit, screwing on the old face. Because there above, everything is in limbo. Whole apartment blocks as dark as the train. And at ground level, obviously, shades of the Last Judgment. I’ll spare you my man-on-the-street; you just lived through a version of this yourselves. But suffice it to say, many hours and blocks later, when I spot a light in the WLRC windows — don’t let anyone tell you Zig doesn’t put your needs first, New York — I’m instantly thinking, burglary. Then it comes to me that the station has a generator. And at quarter to five a.m., the blocks below Canal are such a ghost town I can already hear music through the window: thump thump thump. And again at the top of the stairs.

“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— some thing. 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 …