I wasn’t —
Violence. Bah.
Debbie and Pop cut through a final thicket of shrubs onto the sidewalk. Ahead loomed the monorail station, up on stilts and halogenically lit, tracks extending north and south, and into which an escalator rose, whirring.
With his hands on his knees Pop rested, candy bag hanging. Sweat dripped from the end of his nose and splattered the sidewalk. Across the street, the Cinecity marquee read: JUBILEE LIVE FRIDAY/ALL IN TOGETHER NOW STARTS SATURDAY! Beyond it, the Podesta Tower lofted high above everything, twirling twin searchlights into the night sky.
Debbie never came downtown at this hour, the abandoned streets reminded her of afterhours at the Bebrog bar where she’d worked before signing on to In the Know. At the end of each night, with everything hosed down and the stools stacked and the place vaultlike and the morning lurking outside, it never seemed that the night’s revelry, or anything resembling life, could ever happen there again. And now, with the streets empty and the office towers vacant and the escalator winding up and down, untrafficked, the absence of people in this world they’d built filled her with that same melancholy.
Something moved under the Cinecity marquee. A strange shape jerked through the shadows with a scraping, rattling sound. At first Debbie thought it might be a person in a wheelchair, but the figure seemed too tall — a homeless person piloting a shopping cart maybe. But there were no homeless people downtown, not anymore.
Pop toed the escalator, retreated. How does one make an ascension?
What do you mean? said Debbie.
You think, with all I do, that I have time to gallivate around the city? Pollycock!
Wait — you’ve never taken the train?
Across the street the figure had heard them: it melted inside the entryway to the theatre. There’s someone there, Debbie whispered, but Pop was edging onto the escalator.
No problem, he said, swept upward, here I go.
With a glance over her shoulder — the person across the street cowered, motionless — Debbie followed Pop, the escalator lifted them to the turnstiles. Up the tracks a train eased south from Guardian Bridge Station. Good timing, said Debbie, and Pop nodded, eyes fixed upon it in terror, as if what approached were a shuttle to his own grave.
THE MAYOR WAITED until the train pulled out before moving. With a dust shovel scavenged from the banquet hall fireplace she land-paddled out from under the marquee and wheeled right onto Paper Street. From atop the dessert cart she punted along, legs heaped on the lower tier. One foot had lost its pump and dragged on the pavement, the tights split, big toe flaking skin like sparks.
At Municipal Works’ executive entrance the Mayor keyed in her code. The doors opened, she paddled down a long, empty hallway, out into a marble-pillared rotunda, surveillance cameras blinked red lights, past the security guard, Betty, to the elevator at the base of the Podesta Tower. And then she was lifted into the sky: the island swelled glittering to its edges, where it ceded abruptly to the lake.
Released one hundred storeys up, the Mayor flicked on the lights and rolled out onto the viewing deck, a bubble enclosed by glass on all sides that turned, languidly, clockwise. And though the viewing deck boasted the best and most comprehensive panoramas of the city, at this hour, with the lights on inside, the Mayor saw none of it: not the sleeping city, not the night sky, not the polished coin of the moon, not, as the viewing deck rotated south, the vast emptiness of the water, a second sky hollowed out beneath the sky. Everything was lost in the room’s reflection.
And at the heart of this reflection the Mayor saw herself, spectral and translucent, floating out there in space, a thousand feet above downtown. The dark shapes of her eyes hovered in a gaunt face, every wrinkle a gulley, her hair a tussled silver nest. She stared into the eyes out there, on the other side of the glass, her eyes, but couldn’t see her own eyes: they were just absence, two holes punched into the night.
Had she left the lights off, as the deck swivelled north, then east, she would have been treated to a straight shot over People Park, and across it, the tower of the Grand Saloon Hotel, the clockface a sort of second moon, the hands at right angles where the illustrationist had frozen them that morning. On the roof’s edge sat his helicopter, nosing out over the brightly lit penthouse suite. The balcony doors had been cast open, the curtains billowed in the A/C’s steady draft. And with each ruffle they revealed the illustrationist atop the sheets in his tracksuit, fast asleep.
He needed cold air to sleep and light, lots of light. The penthouse was all marble and polished dark wood and brass, everything gleamed in the brilliance sprinkled down from a row of crystal chandeliers. Atop the nightstand was the CityGuide that lived in every guest’s bedside drawer, bookmarked with a feather four pages from the end.
Raven’s position atop the bed’s black silk sheets was perfect symmetry: on his back, arms at his sides, legs a fist apart, face to the ceiling. His baldhead gleamed. His tracksuit was velvety. His eyes were open, yet he was sleeping, this was how he slept, and his eyes seemed to have no irises but just pupils swollen into pits, and his body produced no movement or sound, his chest did not rise and fall, there was not even a hiss of breath, and anyone happening upon this person would have assumed him dead.
The illustrationist seemed to stare upward, but his brain registered nothing of the outside world, only his dreams — if he had dreams. But Raven did not dream.
Friday
And when he had called them together, he spake as follows —
I
HEY WOULD ALWAYS remember the day their mama stopped believing in God, a hot August Sunday when Sam and Adine were seven. With the tower bells ringing the entire congregation was set free into the Cathedral parking lot, Sam and Adine held their mama’s hands, her grip went tight when they reached their parking spot: no car, just a sprinkling of what appeared to be beach glass. In her nice blue dress their mama sank down onto the curb, face in her hands. All around the bells chimed joy and past them flowed people in their Sunday best, smiling and saved. No one stopped to say anything or help.
Once everyone disappeared and the bells went quiet their mama stood and without a word started walking west, into the ruins of Lakeview Homes. Sam and Adine trailed behind her exchanging looks: What was happening, where was their car? They followed their mama in silence through the wreckage of buildings half-destroyed by diggers abandoned for the weekend, sitting there like the shells of larval bugs, and the spindly stalks of apple-tree saplings lined up along the fence that penned in the wrecking site.
The sun burned above and the asphalt of South Throughline burned below and the churned-up earth burned from somewhere deeper. The heat was brackish, stifling, they could taste the tarry smoke of it in their mouths. Their mama stopped at the fence: beyond it was the dug-out pit where A-Block 100 had once stood. All the A-Block residents had already been packed up and bussed across town, trucks had taken their things. As the demolition swept north into B- and C-Blocks, more and more people would be shifted to what people were calling the Zone, the westend neighbourhoods north of Lower Olde Towne. And when the bulldozers reached H-Block Sam and Adine and their mama would have to move too.