“Runaroundandscreamalot!” says Sasha.
“Yeah,” says Angus, that glaze in his eye, one Pete can remember seeing, but not for a lot of years. It was when he was going to do something bold and fiendish, like in Rooftop Apocalypse, right before he doused Pete’s shoes with gasoline and set the match alight. He starts to wander away, and Pete watches him break into a jog, weaving between the clumps of people. He’s headed for the crawlbyrinth — but no, he’s stopping at the castle, sizing it up. He misses the moment when Angus is in midair, but next thing you know, his brother is hanging off the side by one arm like some kid. At first this is amusing, and Pete taps Sasha. “Look at Uncle Angus. What is he doing?”
Sasha starts laughing, and others are beginning to take notice.
“Attention, attention!” Angus is shouting. “People of Runaroundandscreamalot!”
“Wait here,” says Pete to Sasha and Hanh. “I’ll be right back. Wait together?” They nod solemnly.
“Patrons, regular and under today’s inclement conditions, of Run-around-and-s-cream-alot!”
Jesus, thinks Pete, in a headlong race toward the castle now, the crowd parting for him. Everything has begun to happen in slow motion. He sees Tru Renfro coming from behind the counter, sees her bafflement at this latest disturbance, somehow sees in her eyes in that single instant that she feels that she’s opened up her establishment to the public under these extreme circumstances, that this storm could be the thing that keeps her in business, keeps her alive, keeps her from the fate of an adult-video store and of the storefronts on Main Street, stores that had been there for fifty years, stores that still sold penny candy, stores that had opened with the bluster of youth in benigner times, selling fashionable things when fashionable things seemed like necessities, seemed important, when everything that didn’t seem to matter anymore nowadays had, but all that matters, as Pete can now see on Tru’s face, is that she keep them all warm today, and that’s what matters to Pete, too — that he keep them warm. And here’s this lunatic, flying from the battlements, cupping his hands and yelling “Runaroundandscreamalot!” The people are restless and cold and confused, plus there are too many of them, and on an ordinary day it would be a fire hazard, a dozen codes violated, and people get trampled under conditions like these, do they not, the smaller ones can die, and there are a lot of small ones here. Next thing he knows, Pete himself is leaping onto the castle, tackling his brother, grabbing at him like he grabbed that stinger, with that same urgency, knowing that he has to silence him just this once, has to seize the upper hand. Down they tumble into the guts of the castle, the inner sanctum where he’s watched Sasha play plenty of times but never had occasion to go. They clutch at each other, grunting, and he feels the spittle fly hot at him from Angus’s mouth as his brother curses, sees the bulge of his flaring eyes, their wild longing, and he pulls Angus at last into the embrace he’s always wanted to throw around him but never has.
Urban Planning: Case Study Number Six
The city that was in denial that it was a city had a weekly farmers’ market that ran through late fall. It drew farmers from miles away. They had to drag their wares on the subway or through gridlock. The central plaza went from its pigeonmolt weekday self to a Saturday-morning bounty of fruit so bright and burnished it seemed to exhaust the light around it. They talked of the harvest, traded tips about fire blight, and muttered obscene things about those who took free samples with no intention to buy. One man made puppets of his potatoes and was at once a big hit. At the end of the day, they all packed up except the pigeons, who strutted and churred amid the fallen toothpicks and cheeses and relish.
The city that was in denial that it was a city called the skyscrapers “mountains,” its giant central train station “the Butte,” its industrial waterfront “the marshlands,” its spindly bridges “land bridges,” its vacant lots “the ocotillo patches,” its sewers “the arroyos,” its sidewalks “eskers,” its elevated trains “cutbanks,” its skyline “the tree line,” its brownstones “brown stones,” its city hall “the Glacial Erratic,” and its mayor “the Fungus Gatherer from Between the Hills.” Commuters, craning their necks in search of any sign that their train’s lights were coming closer, sighed and reminded themselves that they were, after all, dealing with a terminal moraine. They glanced occasionally at their watches, which they stopped short of calling “the sun.”
The city that was in denial that it was a city went to a support group for other cities with similar problems. Only they weren’t the same problems at all. One city was dealing with overcrowding, another with a crime wave, bodies bloating harborside. Another was shutting down factories like crazy, its ’stacks no longer spewing. The city that was in denial listened patiently to the other problems, eloquently delivered, but when it was its turn, it stood up. “Look,” it said soberly, “there’s been some mistake. I simply don’t belong here. Y’all are great. . fabulous. You”—it pointed to the nonspewer in particular—“haven’t danced your last two-step. Any of you — we could grab a drink, catch a late flick. But at the end of the day, we must part ways, we going back to our endless starry sky, and you. . well, we are glad to send you a postcard of our starry sky.” The starry sky was the two, three, and four o’clock shows at the planetarium, which they’d dubbed “Old Hoag’s Field.”
In the city that was in denial that it was a city, they used the expression “sweet hickory borne on the wind” often, but most of all on days when the wind was carrying southeast from the waste-treatment plant.
Under a weird sky in which silvery pollution had congealed into a solid concavity, the city that was in denial that it was a city caught a glimpse of itself one day. For the first time ever in its existence, it was confronted with its gridlines, its fuming drivers, its onslaught of suits and ties, the dirt-encrusted blankets of its transients, its grayness, its dearth of smiles, heard its Ornette Coleman horn bleats and medley of languages and saw its garish mannequins and spattered canvases and its sleek triple jogging strollers and acres of paper. There was a silence as a citizenry entire gaped. The stock market, aka “the livestock market,” ground to a halt, and even the taxi meters knew to freeze. After a while, a fog started to creep, then roll in off the ocean, shrouding everything. The collective exhalation (which took several minutes) was powerful enough to sate ten thousand hickories, carrying enough of their scent to make cities hundreds of miles away weep.
My father is semiporous. Even now that he’s been fully disassembled and the schematics rendered in a dizzying cross section, he remains largely unknowable to us. Once we spun tops in the shadow of his rocking chair, which turned out to be an optical illusion triggered by the elaborate arrangement of pieces of wood that did not resemble a chair whatsoever when gazed at directly, and why why would he do such a thing the same question we asked every time we gauged his charged breath for negative ions not excluding alcoholic ones or caught him slipping sawdust from his pocket into the meringue. Oh, his pocket. Pluraclass="underline" Pocket. Not pockets. Pocket—like deer, like moose. His coinage. I can hear him rage still at those times when, still young, we threw an s onto the end; I can see his flaring hair and contorted features dappled with benday dots like a comic-book villain as he came after us. Other than that, an unstinting pacifist mostly occupied with his many pocket. The fatal gift of the multipocketed vest one year started it; we could only watch wide-eyed as his obsession mounted, first with the stashing away of wrapper detritus clip coin oil subsidy paperwork in existing pocket, then the construction of new pocket, pocket stitched lovingly and then stapled hastily and then merely outlined in Sharpie, “Home of Future Pocket,” unceremonious groundbreaking followed by new pocket springing up like housing, whole subdivisions eventually, Pockettown, the continual fractionation of slottable space, eat your heart out Zeno. Infinite places where things could be lost and found, places where things could stay hidden and accrue scruff, fuzz, and legend, places where things could fester, mold, and potentially molt, places a person could go lost for years, the only trace a rivulet of sardine juice spilling down the smooth side of a shirt they wore but a single time, unless, that is, you count memory.