Foley found me at the station’s glass doors and ushered me in. The show was to consist of me and a female cancer doctor, an oncologist who’d been consulting with Mission Control on Janice’s case, and who greeted me a little coldly, I thought. We’d been seated at our microphones and prepped a little, supplied with drinking water and shown the Cough button, when Lehrer came in, trailing more of his staff, and Foley too, and made an apology: we weren’t going to go on the air after all, had been bumped. Those sirens weren’t irrelevant, something had happened, close by, and the station was shifting to live coverage, on the street. A man, one of the money people, instead of showing up at the offices of the brokerage house where he worked, had thrown himself and his briefcase into the giant excavation for Noteless’s memorial. It was all unfortunately too easy to do, creep close to that site, under cover of the gray fog. Lehrer explained all this in a wryly consoling voice I now realized I’d heard a hundred times before. “I suspect we’ll be seeing more of this as winter comes in,” he told us. “I think it’s that much harder to report for work down under that cloud every day when it’s so cold.” The doctor and I stood, rendered dumb. Everything about this confused me, but I didn’t want to take up anyone’s time. I felt I should be the apologetic one, sorry for my own dispensability, as though I’d let down Lehrer and Foley, Oona too. Yet confirmed in my own suspicion that I was generally a filler item, useful only on slow news days.
Foley led me downstairs to share a cab back uptown, shaking her head. I felt affectionately toward the small, intent publicist, making such effort always to keep her needless professional distance, forever on my side in any misunderstanding or disappointment, as though my cause was righteous or just, or was a cause at all. This absurdity, that Foley cared more than I did, kept me from ever knowing how to make conversation with her, despite all fondness. So I committed the discourtesy of opening the creamy envelope in front of her there, in the cab’s backseat. Jules Arnheim / Requests the Presence of You and Your Guest / At His Residence / For a Champagne Dinner / In Celebration of the Holidays. A separate tiny envelope, stamped, for RSVP, slipped out into my lap. The party was two days before Christmas, eight days from now. Despite the engraved elegance of the paperwork, the whole thing smacked of imperial impulsiveness. Arnheim was known for commanding celebrities to his table at whim.
This was a surprise. I recalled some prediction from Rossmoor Danzig, a mention of the mayor’s gratitude. But that whole episode was like a cameo in fever. So it was as if my own illness had arranged to introduce me to Mayor Arnheim. Anyway, I must have concealed my amazement well enough from Foley. Her face fell. She thought I’d been shunning her calls because I’d wandered into fabulousness. Realms a mere PR girl daren’t imagine. I had no way to explain how wrong she was, that I’d in fact stumbled into squalor and marginal romance. I shouldn’t mention Oona and I couldn’t describe Perkus. Foley dropped me off at my door, so we could both forget the errand’s conundrum, my near miss with publicity. I was only relieved. That part of my life could go on without me for all I cared, was as distant as the space station.
I had to kill a few hours before I could descend into my well of squalor and romance again. What I failed to note was how those sirens in the fog had sounded a note of disaster that cold morning. I was diverted from contemplation of harbingers by Christmas decorations on Second Avenue and the mayor’s invitation burning a hole in my pocket all through the day’s empty hours. I’ll confess I did feel a little fabulous about it. I became fixated on taking Oona to the mayor’s, flaunting our secret affiliation in a semipublic place from which I could be positive the media would be banished. Nobody was as guarded as Jules Arnheim, never more so than in his private domain. I wanted to present this fun to Oona in person, like a Valentine. Yet I knew she was hammering at her chapters and wouldn’t reward interruption. I also expected she’d find me at Perkus’s later if I was patient.
The phone rang an hour or so after I’d appeared at Eighty-fourth Street myself, but it wasn’t Oona. “It’s Abneg,” Perkus reported to me, holding the receiver aside. “They’re in a cab a few blocks away. He says Georgina’s having a craving for burgers, he wonders do we want to meet them at Jackson Hole?”
There was only one possible reply. I wasn’t worried, Oona could find us there easily enough, at that restaurant which was like an annex to Perkus’s kitchen. We grabbed our coats-even Perkus had at last admitted winter’s irreversibility, and dug out of his closet a moth-eaten maroon stadium coat, half its wooden-peg fasteners missing, and a black captain’s cap, which made him resemble an Irish folksinger or terrorist. We were just downstairs and in the building’s doorway when we felt the crack and shudder beneath our feet, a wrenching seizure in the earth below the tile of the corridor, the foundations of the building, the pavement of the street. I don’t know if there was truly a roaring sound or if it was merely the disconcerting roar of silence that followed, an instant afterward.
Whatever had snapped beneath the world, beam or bone, wasn’t in our imagination. The cars crawling up the street each braked, and the piano inside Brandy’s halted too, the sing-along stilled. Then, as we stood trying to fathom it, a bubble of laughter and mock-shrieks erupted within the bar, the uncurious singers only relieved to be alive, and the piano resumed its strolling tune, and a ragged harmony of voices resumed, too. The cars picked up their crawl. Perkus and I rounded the corner of Second, hungry and habitual (and yes, freshly stoned).
Neither of us spoke, and in that heartbeat’s moment of bogus imperturbability, like the interval before blood wells in a deep-sliced fingertip, it seemed not impossible we’d take our booth at Jackson Hole and never mention it. Except the gaudy burger joint had just an instant before been demolished, the building wholly wrecked from underneath, the recognizable shards of exterior window frame and signage and also the chrome-and-vinyl booths and bar and stools of the interior sagging together, under the crushing weight of the roof and the yellow-painted brick of the upper stories, into a groaning trench, a ragged black smile in the concrete that was meant never to betray us, with tiny waterfalls of pulverized drywall like chalk trickling into the corners of that new mouth. Stepping up entranced with others on the sidewalk, Perkus and I found ourselves transformed into first members of a mob of rubberneckers, gathered at the outskirts of a crime or disaster, the nearest layer of the concentric amazed staring from windows and out of stopped vehicles. Then the sirens came, as if replying to those in the morning’s fog, and converged on us where we swayed stupefied in the blossoming dust.
Richard Abneg and Georgina Hawkmanaji joined us there, milling in that human amoeba of gawkers as it was brushed back from the scene by policemen and emergency medical workers, though at its outer edge the collective creature grew grotesquely huge, and throbbed, livid and possibly dangerous, faces lit from underneath by sparking red-and-yellow flares that had been laid like sticks of dynamite at the feet of barricades. I’d read of this, an unintended consequence of the city’s Tiger Watch Web site, that hundreds with vicarious investment in the activities of the predator, citizens superstitious or worshipful, others disbelieving, seeking to confirm conspiracy explanations for the shutdowns and ruin, others armed with cameras or concealed weaponry, others hoping to pillage wrecked stores, all had been flocking in increasing numbers to the coordinates of reported sightings, their numbers growing, their response times unnervingly sharp. Then again, by any outward measure Perkus and I were part and parcel, members of the Tiger Stalkers’ Union.