Garth Hallberg - City on Fire

“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 break-ins, 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.