Garth Hallberg - City on Fire

“Is it?” Her alertness now revealed itself as partly exhaustion. “Sure, I guess it is.”

When she declined his offer of a smoke, he returned matches to pack and pack to vest pocket. Had a long, melting drag. And evaluated her again. No, she seemed a promising guinea pig, if he could figure out what she might be made to do. “Business or pleasure?”

She seemed perplexed. “Beg pardon?”

“You’ll indulge me. A little diversion I invented to pass the time, with all the travel I have to do for work. I look at a fellow passenger, and I try to guess: is it business or pleasure that brings him here. Then I find out if I’m right.”

“Oh. I’m just out visiting family for a weekend. I’m not sure it counts as either anymore.”

“Family does tend to take it out of one.”

She looked a little embarrassed. “All of us here were scheduled to fly back to New York yesterday on a DC-10 that as far as I know is still refueling in Wichita. This is the second all-nighter I’ve pulled in a month.”

He puffed again. The tremor of a raw nerve. What could it be? Aside from encounters with maids and at breezeway ice machines, it had been a while since he’d spoken to a flesh-and-blood human. Possibly his reflexes had slowed. But this was why it was good to practice. Anyway, her regrets themselves didn’t matter; it was how they could be turned to account. “As it happens,” he said, “I’m coming from New York myself. Well, came some weeks ago now. Just after the blackout. You must have been in it, too.”

She looked at him.

“See, I knew there was something about you,” he continued. “But I do wonder that someone your age, your whole life ahead, would even bother to go back. In fact, it’s what convinced me to pull up stakes. A whole city, effectively irredeemable.”

“That’s funny, because there was a moment not too long ago when I had this idea the good guys might be returning to take the joint over. A little colony of light …” She caught herself. Though was that still wistfulness in her voice? “Anyway, I don’t have much choice but to go back. I start graduate school at the end of the month. But what about you? On to bigger and better things?”

“Hong Kong,” he said, which was true, if provisional. As this had been provisional, this long layover in a city he detested, holed up in his wretched airport hotel, waiting for the knock that would mean federal agents, and meanwhile working the phone. He’d assumed his new life would wend south, into the shade of the Subcomandante. But it had become widely known that Amory Gould had had a falling-out with his sponsors. The merchant bank to which an old associate had matched his hastily forged résumé was in Asia. Asia, about which he was trying to be optimistic. And perhaps this was more optimism, more striving, but he realized now what he might convince her of, and in so doing prove himself to himself. “I don’t suppose you’ve been?”

“I’ve never been west of Mendocino. Not since I was three.” Her expression had hardened a little. Perhaps he’d been wrong about women after all. She was obviously bright. And was that an announcement, sounding behind this ungovernable mob? He made his tone soft, confiding.

“You know, your bag is already packed, if you would prefer to spend your last weeks of freedom on a real adventure, rather than return so soon to that difficult city.” No turning back now; careful. “There are trans-Pacific flights boarding, even at present …”

“You ever tried to change a ticket on this short a notice?”

“Call it a whim, but perhaps I could help.”

“You’re right, that’s a hell of a whim.” There it was again, wistfulness. Hesitation. The pressure of the withheld.

“Let’s just say I’ve been fortunate in life,” he says. “Fortunate and driven. Nothing makes me happier than helping a young person of similar drive. You could return to school this fall with at least a bit more of the world under your belt. And we’ve lived through something together, you and I. There is a certain confraternity. In any case, it wouldn’t be a gift so much as a loan.”

“I wouldn’t know where to send the repayment. You haven’t even told me your name.”

“Or I’m sure an open return could be arranged. Isn’t an open ticket what people like us are looking for, really?” Beyond the immediate assurance that he was still the man he’d been, he was seeing already a future where in five or ten or fifteen years it would work its way back to him, this favor, through the grid of connections he would throw across the jungles and the plains. He was being forced to reinvent himself — unless of course one was only ever always inventing oneself — and he would need to seed favors in this new quadrant of the world, people who could help him translate his ambitions into actualities. Or what was this all for? Still he was mindful to hold on to his Exigente, the dizzy ember. The edge of the edge of the edge …

“It’s a generous offer, really, mister, for being so fucking impulsive,” she said. She worried a clasp on her carry-on. Then she shrugged. “But we’re just not the same. Even if it might take me a long hard time to know what they are, I’ve still got things to find out back there. So thanks again, but I should go buy a danish, and a magazine. It looks like I might have a while yet to wait.”

And she was gone from the bollard before he could respond, plunging herself into the mass of Manhattoes and tourists all jostling the beleaguered skycap who had no planes under his control. It was as if she’d never really been here. Amory concentrated. Tried to send himself into the skycap. Or past the crowd, into that girl. There may have been something wrong with him after all. Along his arm now he could feel the firm circles under the soft white cloth, the little map they made of his corrections, the freshest not a month old. He would not have thought he’d be adding to it so soon. But Amory Gould was nothing if not hard-nosed, and was already turning slightly away from the crowd, and without looking down beginning to remove the cufflink from his rumpled but still beautiful sleeve. You can get away with anything right out in the open, so long as you don’t look down.

HELL’S KITCHEN — FOREVER

BUT RIGHT NOWit’s still some time before dawn. William Hamilton-Sweeney sits on a futon he can barely see, fondling the Nikkormat the kid left in the kitchen back on Central Park West. It’s been years since he touched a camera, but he knows the button won’t work unless you first push this lever thing. It makes a ratcheting sound when he thumbs it. Snick, goes the shutter. Ratchet. Snick. He probably should have checked to see if he’s wasting actual film, but sometimes when he gets going like this, it’s almost impossible to stop. It’s mostly to distract himself from the fascination of the button, then, that he raises the viewfinder to his eye. The window of the loft has lightened enough since his return that he can pick out the cat perched on the sill, but when he calls her name, she won’t look at him. She’s not his anymore, if she ever was. He pans to the futon’s black cushion, where the letter from his father lies creased into thirds. He has half a mind to take a match to it, but what good would that do? Certain lines are already lodged too deeply in his brain to burn them out without also destroying part of himself. Which he’s discovering he’s loath to do. Snick.

One risks less … that entire world inside … Really, the problem these phrases point to is one of foreshortening. It isn’t that he’s been wrong about what was in his father’s heart, so much as that the universe of his own feelings keeps crowding everyone else’s out. It is a constant struggle to see other people as people, rather than as denizens of a dimension one level below the one in which he’s doomed to wander, imperially alone. That someone close to him might right now be awake in a different part of the city, feeling a pain every bit as real as his own … he can think it, but cannot seem to remember it. And is “remember” even the right word for something for which you have zero empirical evidence? Postulate, maybe. Imagine. He sweeps the lens back toward the window, where the cat hasn’t stirred. Her tail twitches. An idea threatens to form, but doesn’t.