by K. Chess
An officer returned her to the bench to wait some more; no doubt additional paperwork would need to be filled out before they sent her to wherever they were going to hold her until trial. Her friend the whole shebang was gone by now, but the young cherry was still there. Hel looked at the girl’s thin legs, clad in sheer tights. She felt in her pocket, searching for something to give her, but all that was in there was her carbon of her property voucher. “Are you all right?” she asked.
The cherry sniffled. “What you fuckin’ think, bitch. Fuck off.” But there was no hostility in her voice. Their shoulders were an inch apart. Hel felt that inch like a touch. It was a comfort to her and a scourge, just as the hand-holding in Calvary had been. She resented the proximity but wouldn’t have moved over if she could.
After a minute, the sound of heels signaled that someone else approached them, a woman dressed in a nice skirt and a silk blouse. Surely another lawyer—the cherry’s. “Good luck,” Hel told her sincerely.
“Are you Helen Nash?” the lawyer asked.
The prostitute rolled her eyes. “No.”
“I am,” Hel said.
“Come with me.”
No one looked twice at them as they walked down the hallway. The lawyer woman held the stairwell door open.
“What’s happening? Did someone pay my bail?” Vikram, she thought, hopeful despite herself.
The woman shrugged. “Dr. Oliveira says to pull yourself together.”
Vikram thumped down the stairs to the basement and sprinted to the end of the hallway, out of breath. He was only twenty minutes late for Reintegration Education and he’d never missed a session before. He peeked into the room through the wire-embedded window set in the door. There was the group, sitting in a circle. Wes picked at his cuticles. Agnew, the new addition, worked out some kind of equation on the back of an envelope. Catalina Calderón appeared to be sound asleep.
Vikram opened the door. “Mr. Bhatnagar! We were worried you were sick, or that you’d gotten into an accident.” Sato reached behind her for the tablet she used to take attendance, tapping on its screen. Would he be written up, or was she letting him off the hook? He’d find out later, he supposed.
The metal chair squealed as he dragged it into position. “No. I’m not sick. The train was stopped.” Old Catalina scoffed at him under her breath. “I guess somebody was on the tracks killing himself,” Vikram said. “Trying to touch the third rail.” He hoped this was plausible. He’d never been sure exactly how that worked.
“I have days like that,” Catalina said.
The comment was loud enough that Sato had to address it. “Mrs. Calderón, it’s not your turn to talk. Mr. Pikarski was about to check in. Please continue, Mr. Pikarski.”
“Yeah, so this was a really good week,” Pikarski said. “I had no idea that my cousin’s son made it out. He’s been living here—in Kansas City, Missouri—since he passed through. I never would have known, but I was searching for names on the internet the other night. You know.”
Yes, they knew. They’d done it themselves, fishing blindly in the ether.
“He was in his local paper. He came in third in a 5K, can you believe it? And I’m like, there can’t be that many Andre Pikarskis out there. And there was a picture. I knew in a minute—would have known him anywhere.”
“This kind of thing wouldn’t happen,” Poornima Anthikkad said, “if they’d just publish the damn directory.” Certain members of the group groaned or shifted position restlessly; this was an old topic of debate and most of them were tired of hearing it hashed and rehashed.
“Are you crazy?” Agnew asked. “Sure, a directory might be convenient, but can you imagine what it would be like if anyone and everyone could find out who we are? If they put all our names in one place, publicly accessible? Thank God someone filed a cease and desist on that.”
“They put the mark already on our IDs,” Catalina said. “If the government wants names, look, they already have! Look at us all, here, under their thumb. They can round us up anytime they want.”
“I’m not even talking about that,” Agnew said. “I’m just talking about all the sad shitfoots out there who resent us. Who call us aliens and say we’re taking their jobs and whatnot. You want to find trash burning on your doorstep?”
“But think of the human cost,” Anthikkad said. “Think of poor Ed, the years he could have been spending with his cousin. What if that was you? Wouldn’t you want to know?”
Vikram tried to make eye contact with Wes as the UDP registry argument, now predictably reignited, raged around them in the basement, but Wes’s eyes were shut, as if he were in pain. Vikram, too, stopped listening.
Pikarski’s cousin.
Any of them could know someone who had made it out. One hundred fifty-six thousand was around 2 percent of the population of Greater New York. A small fraction, yet significant. Every UDP had heard anecdotal evidence of someone who’d said good-bye forever to a sister, a husband, or a mother and stepped through the Gate alone, only to be reunited hours or days later when the loved one’s number was chosen. That was how the authorities kept the system going during those desperate days. Don’t despair; maybe you’ll meet again on the other side. That kind of platitude. Didn’t mean it couldn’t happen.
If Vikram widened the reckoning of his acquaintance to everyone he’d ever known, every coffee vendor and loan officer, every fencing instructor and fellow Emergency Clinic patient, well. It was hard not to see connections everywhere. Proper names—the list Agnew talked about—wouldn’t have helped here; ferreting out connections so tenuous required a conversation. It became a game they all played, one less serious and intimate than What Did You Take Through, but just as common: Yes, we used to live on that block, but not since the ’90s—was the Youth Home still on the corner when you moved in? I was at that very baseball game, and I remember the score. Yes, that was my favorite place to get my eyebrows threaded! I used to ride the same trolley route to work every day; surely we hung on the same strap, did we ever sit next to each other?
Vikram grabbed Wes’s arm when the session ended. “Have you talked to Dwayne?” He remembered Dwayne had said he had to do something today but, in his excitement about the painting, couldn’t remember what it was.
Wes shrugged. “He texted me earlier that he might not be around, but said that I could get some hours in finishing up, if I wanted. I’m about to head over there to get started on that big bedroom. Want to come?”
He didn’t know about The Shipwreck yet. “I’ve actually got an errand to run. I need to get to Williamsburg, fast. Do you think you can take me?”
He held two fistfuls of Wes’s jacket as they zigzagged up to Eastern Parkway, where they cruised in the far right lane. The top speed Wes’s scooter could muster, according to the dial, was forty-five miles per hour. Vikram struggled to convert that to kilometers per hour and gave up. Compared to subway travel, it seemed fast. He felt he was riding on the wind’s back.
No way to talk over the roar of speed and traffic, and no face shield on the spare helmet. Vikram kept his eyes closed, aware only of the movement of traffic around them. Big cars and big trucks, but no vacuum trailers or rigs—in this world, the cross-borough highways all ran north and west of here. Instead, over Vikram’s shoulder, morning foot traffic and the parade of Crown Heights businesses—hair braiding, Caribbean bread, MoneyGram, fresh fruit, furniture on installment plans—all the innumerable things of this world. Vikram knew where he was. He knew. Still, he was filled with the nonsensical conviction that if he opened his eyes, he would be riding on a blazer in another New Jersey.
He peeked. There, inches from his eyes on the flesh of Wes’s neck: the horrible scar. A world erased.
Just before they hit Prospect Park, Wes steered them onto Bedford Avenue. They coasted past alternating one-ways, a poor neighborhood on their right and a gentrifying one on the left. Why? It was unknowable. At the red light at Wallabout Street, Wes flicked on his turn signal and they z
oomed under the BQE toward the water.
When they got to the Domino Sugar complex, Vikram climbed off the scooter and headed straight for the museum entrance without looking back. He’d head over to Brownsville to meet Wes later. As he approached the front door, he felt his phone buzz in his pocket. The display read DWAYNE S. Vikram reversed course, walking over to one of the granite seats between the buildings as he picked up the call.
“What’s up,” Dwayne asked, his voice uncharacteristically hoarse. “I saw you been trying to reach me. Something important?”
“I’m about to talk to someone Hel’s been working with—she’s an art history person, works at a museum, has a lot of connections.” He lit a cigarette. “I’ve never met her, but she seems like a good bet for figuring out the provenance of the painting.”
“Oh.”
“The reason I was really calling was to ask if you’d try reaching Hel from your phone. She’s not picking up for my number and I’m getting a little concerned. I’ll text you her number.”
“Mmm. Yeah, I guess.” He sounded extremely unenthusiastic at the prospect.
“Hey, am I interrupting something? Are you at the bowling alley?”
“No. Just taking a day off from everything today.”
That was when it came back to him—Dwayne’s brother’s grave. “Look, man. I’m sorry to have bothered you. Forget about what I asked.” He dragged on his smoke, fighting an intense feeling of foolishness.
Dwayne had lost one person. Vikram had lost everyone. Almost certainly.
The year he left Boston for New York, he went to Union Square with coworkers to see the Halloween bonfires lit. They’d all taken pictures of themselves—him with his now-dead coworkers—the thronging crowd behind, and yes, many of those out-of-focus faces would have been tourists, dead now too, back home in another Nashville or another San Jose. And yes, many of them would have been New Yorkers who didn’t make it through, dead now too in another Morningside Heights or Battery Park. But surely at least one of those strangers had been displaced, too.
What if that was you? Anthikkad had asked. Wouldn’t you want to know?
Cristaudo in the storage unit with her machine, signaling and signaling and never a response.
Knowing for sure would be unbearable.
“I’m really sorry,” he said again.
“It’s OK,” Dwayne said and ended the call.
His phone was still out. To cheer himself, Vikram called up the pictures he’d taken of the painting. Ill lit and blurry but unmistakable.
He crushed the butt under his shoe. Time to go.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Oliveira’s lawyer furnished Hel with cab fare sufficient to get her back to the precinct station house. There, she could recover her vouchered property: her phone and her wallet. The gravity knife, the lawyer warned her, she would never see again. As soon as the courthouse building was out of sight, Hel told the cabdriver to bring her to Old Calvary instead.
They traveled via the Long Island Expressway, the pavement slick and wet, though no rain was in evidence now. Traffic moved fluidly. She shut off the TV screen mounted on the back of the seat in front of her, watching for the approach through the smeared windshield as the driver bobbed his head to the music playing on the radio. A song Hel recognized came on; she hummed the chorus as she tried to place it. Was it one of those awful Dop Peters covers? No, it was just an ordinary top 40 song that had become popular recently, within the time she’d lived here. She’d heard it a million times, no fewer than anyone else.
Now, the newer part of the cemetery spread out below them, extending in every direction, the grave markers indistinct in the mist. Today seemed to her very unlike the day of the evac when she and the others in her entry group walked from one world to another, an intangible seam somewhere in the space between one snowflake and the next. But the grayness was the same, the shrouded sun. Down below, the grass spread like a duvet and the squares of white were Truth cards, the engraved letters and motifs on the face of each one showing the fate of the person lying beneath.
The taxi took the Laurel Hill Boulevard exit. The driver stopped right by the tall wrought-iron gate and Hel handed over all of her money without looking at the meter. She intended to come as a supplicant, pockets and hands empty.
She chose a winding path, always turning toward the place she remembered, though she hadn’t been here since that night. The anniversary—the third anniversary—approached, just a few months away. Would any UDPs come here then? Bouquets lay scattered across the walkways, blown like tumbleweeds by the strong autumn wind. She picked one up. Plastic poinsettias. A winter flower.
The mist played tricks with distance, making the Manhattan skyscrapers look no bigger than the skylines of memorial stones presenting themselves on every side. The breach created by the Gate setup had been somewhere in this section of the cemetery. With no map, she had only fallible memory by which to steer, and all of her recollections of this place originated from the frenzied journey to the evac site in her world. She retained nothing but vague impressions from the hour following her crossing: the blinding lights, the crackle of the emergency blanket someone had put around her shoulders. Still, as Hel walked deeper into the cemetery, the occasional marker looked familiar, the ones old enough to have persisted unchanged. She tried not to read the names of the dead.
At last, a stone angel she might know. She stopped, staring up at the statue, formed to resemble a young woman standing with one hand hidden in the folds of her robe. The angel’s hair waved, motion frozen in stone. Wings extended above her shoulders, folded in, and she held her chin up, head unbowed. Sightless eyes pointed out at the world, dark streaks of sediment staining the stone cheeks like tears, the scars of decades of acid rain.
Hel had always been good with faces. If this wasn’t the place, she would never find it.
This is it, she thought. This is where the tide will reverse. Where time can flow backward.
Teresa Klay suggested that she and Vikram talk at the cafe that occupied part of the ground floor of one of the old Domino Sugar buildings. Over a plate of delicate cookies, he showed her the picture on his phone. “There.” He’d framed the image so as to cut out everything but the magnificent painting itself, but a tennis racket and the spines of some Harlequin romances were visible near the bottom of the image, and in the corner, part of the London subway map poster overlapped the gilt frame. “It’s just sitting in someone’s house. Don’t you think this should be part of the exhibit?”
“The exhibit,” she repeated. “Right. About Ezra Sleight and the lost treasures of the UDPs.” There was something tentative about the way she spoke that gave him pause, until he realized that it was possible that she didn’t grasp the connection.
“It’s the one mentioned in the introduction to The Pyronauts. Did you get a chance to look at it?”
Across the little table, Klay nodded. “Iceberg. Ship. Hand. Yeah, got all that.” Her features were delicate, her pale face overpowered by the frames of her glasses and a halo of fuzzy dark hair. If Vikram had to guess, he would put her at twenty-eight or twenty-nine, but she had the calm self-possession of an old woman.
“Did you know the painting’s been missing for more than a century? The artist, George Lowery, exhibited it in Paris in 1828 after he finished it, and a private collector bid for it and brought it to America. After the collector died, ownership of his house and most of its furnishings, including his art collection, passed to his niece, who was what they called an old maid back then. She started a private school, the one that Ezra Sleight later attended. All this is Before, you understand, so it applies to my history and yours as well. Then the divergences started. In my world, the school folded in the ’30s and The Shipwreck ended up in a museum in Vancouver. But here, sometime right around 1910, it disappeared.”
A bearded server brought the green tea Klay had ordered in heavy ceramic cups. Klay stirred in a packet of sugar, then turned her attention back to Vikram. �
��Just out of curiosity, how do you know what happened to it in this world?”
“Wikipedia.”
“Excellent.” Her tone reminded him of the one Officer Sato always used when congratulating them for attempting some basic skill that two-year-olds born at the same time the Hundred Fifty-Six Thousand entered this world had long since mastered. “I checked out Lowery’s page too, actually,” Klay said. “Back when Dr. Nash first showed me the book. I hadn’t heard of him, so I looked him up. Moderately famous guy in his day. Painted mostly allegorical scenes, right? The Christ child in the jungle, stuff like that? But he’s pretty much unknown here now.”
Vikram felt affronted. “I understand why the man’s work might not be to your taste, but this is a famous painting in its own right, and its documented connection to Sleight seems to me to be of interest—”
“No, absolutely. I agree.” Klay leaned forward. Her eyes were a changeable hazel, subtly lovely. “You’ve made an important discovery, Dr. Bhatnagar.”
“Vikram, please. Anyway, I never finished my PhD.” He slid his own cup around on the table’s surface, mollified despite himself.
“Sure. Vikram. No matter Lowery’s current reputation, The Shipwreck is obviously a fascinating painting, and it will be essential to the UDP exhibit. Where did you say you found it?” He saw she’d taken out her phone. “I think it would be a good idea for a professional to take a look first. Being stored haphazardly with no temperature control really isn’t good for an oil. And we should consider the possibility—forgive me—that it’s not even genuine.”
“I’ve seen it in person. I’m pretty sure it is.”
“And I’m sure you’re right. But what could it hurt to have it authenticated? We can arrange a time for you and I to meet with a conservationist. Just to look it over, before we go any further.”
That sounded reasonable. “All right. It’s at the old Sleight house.”
