Garth Hallberg - City on Fire

“Excuse me?”

“Writing, my boy. Oh! You didn’t think I meant … How embarrassing.”

Proclivities. The innuendo here had little or nothing to do with him personally; he knew it was meant to wound his presumed date. And yet the lightness of Uncle Amory’s regard was, in itself, humiliating. Nor did Regan make any effort to defend him. How had he ever kidded himself into thinking he could be part of this world?

Mumbling something about the lateness of the hour, he took his leave. Amory didn’t deign to shake hands, or say that it had been nice to meet him; he’d already turned to Regan and was telling her that, if she had a minute, they had important matters to cover; and whatever had she done to her finger? When Mercer glanced back, on the off-chance that she, at least, was ruefully watching, the two of them had already been sucked through one of the balcony doors. He wished he could disappear that easily, but the only way out was down the twisting staircase and across the full breadth of the room. His mask was suddenly meaningless. He was distinctly aware of the darkness of his skin against the white dinner jacket, the dryness of his eyes and mouth, the nap of his hair. The women, in their variegated little dominos, looked like savannah birds turning to watch a wounded rhino blunder by. Even the coat-check girl in the foyer seemed to smell weakness on Mercer. She took her time retrieving the Coat of Several Colors, and still he had to leave her a tip, so as not to confirm her worst intuitions. The elevator was obnoxiously slow.

By the time he hit night air, he’d begun to sober up somewhat, his shame cooling to a sort of melancholy. Here he was, expelled from Eden, back down on the street, where a lamppost was once again a lamppost, a parked car exactly the size of a parked car. The spires of Midtown were lost to the snow, and even the balcony from which (however briefly) he’d possessed the glittering life he longed for seemed smudged and blurry, like the memory of a dream. For a minute, the only evidence that he was in a functioning city and not in the ruins of the future was the bench across the street, where a human-sized patch of green amid the snow attested to recent occupancy. Someone waiting, no doubt, for a bus.

Then miraculously, way up Central Park West, at the very edge of what the slackening snowfall permitted him to see, one glimmered into view: two bulbs surmounted by a headband of light. It was always a mug’s game, trying to calculate whether surface streets or the subway would get you home faster, but he’d learned by trial and error not to overlook the transportational bird in the hand, especially not after midnight, and there would be something fitting, would there not, about ending this night and this year on a poky and prosaic city bus, amid the alcoholic, the epileptic, and the otherwise damned, in mortuary fluorescence, on a sticky floor, in the seat nearest the driver?

In the time it took these stoned apprehensions to shamble across the stage of his attention and do their little twirl, the traffic signals had gone from yellow to red, pinning the bus into place a dozen blocks off. He leaned against the pole of the bus-stop sign, trying to recover the earlier image of himself as a romantic figure, the loner in the long, brown coat. He whistled a few bars from La Traviata. He thought poignantly about himself thinking. He was appreciating the soulful billow of his own breath before him when from behind the stone wall across the street, the darkened Park, came the most upsetting sound he’d ever heard. It was a sob: high, breathless, gurgly, like a dying seal. And then it stopped. It must have been another fantasy, or at the very least none of his business, but even before it came a second time, some animal matrix beneath the skin of his consciousness had been activated. The bus was now only ten blocks away, or fewer, kneeling to discharge a passenger. He willed it to hurry up. He would hop aboard, and the sound, assuming it even was a sound, would be the problem of the person now climbing off. Except the traffic signals had gone red again. Shit, he thought. Shit. What was he supposed to do?

The noise did not recur. He thought of all the harmless things it could be. A dying fox; there were foxes in Central Park, weren’t there? The wind moaning over a plastic bag caught in a tree. One of those sad, compulsive men who cruised public spaces in search of anonymous rough sex. Whatever it was, it was not his responsibility, and this timely ride home, his reward for all he’d endured tonight, was—

The driver laid on the horn as Mercer darted in front of the oncoming bus, toward the far side of the street and the park entrance. As he plunged under the snow-crazed tangle of limbs and into the bosk, he had to rely on his memory, on an impression of something he hadn’t been listening for. It had seemed close to the wall, hadn’t it? He cursed his dress shoes, which threatened to slip out from under him on the icy downhill path. A pile of black boulders rose to the left, a screen of bushes to the right. You’re a fool, Mercer Goodman, he thought — a clown on the heath, with no Lear. Still, what if it had been a human being? Well, what if? In that case, there was probably more than one human being, an attacker and a victim, and Mercer, with his bow tie and his soft dilettante’s hands, would just be fresh meat.

He stepped over the knee-high iron piping that edged the path and forced his way between two bushes. At first the earth running up to the wall was an illegible sheet of snow and shadow. But he must, with that same animal attunement that had marched him here, have sensed breathing, or warmth, because as he stared at the base of the wall, a crumpled mess resolved out of it. He approached. Some birds perching atop the masonry nestled down in their feathers, vigilant. It was just a kid, he saw. A boy. No, a girl, short-haired. Her face was turned upward, toward the plane of light spreading over the wall, her head twisted back uncomfortably on her neck. She was unconscious, maybe dead. Blood from her shoulder had spilled out to color the snow. Mercer was appalled to remember that blood had a smell, a coppery kind of smell. He thought for a second he might vomit.

“Help!” he yelled. His voice boomed off the wall and dissipated in the void behind him. He yelled again. “Help!” The birds resettled themselves. The girl did not stir. You weren’t supposed to move a body, and he didn’t want to touch it, so he stood for a minute, looking down at the black form he would now forever be involved with. Then he took off, between the bushes, up the path, a ghost burst out of the jaws of hell, shouting as if anyone might save him.

REGAN HAD FELT THE EYESbefore she’d seen them, moving over her like a pawnbroker’s fingers. And if she’d imagined having William’s gay black boyfriend on her arm might protect her, those eyes made her feel that even this had been choreographed, like the divorce, the storm out in Chicago, the knife with which she’d cut herself. Which was of course somewhere near the heart of Uncle Amory’s power: to be in his presence was to come into propinquity with designs far larger and older than oneself, great star-maps wheeling across an empty planetarium dome. As far as she could tell, these designs were the sole basis for his interest in other people. Not curiosity, not sympathy, not even amusement, but underlying the canny simulation of normal personhood, the simple question of what might be in it for him. Whatever it was, in this case, must have been significant, because the last time he’d appraised her so openly had been that long-ago weekend on Block Island, when she’d mistaken it for attraction. And then there was how swiftly he’d dispatched poor Mercer, alighting on his secret in a single swoop. She felt bad about this, but compared to her own, decades-old injury, it was a flesh wound; Mercer would heal. She hurried into the room off the balcony not to abandon him, but to deprive Amory of the chance to steer her.