Empire City

by Matt Gallagher

  Jesse laughed again, less sincere this time. He asked if Sebastian still worked in media.

  “Homeland Authority,” Sebastian said. “Became a PR flack.”

  The two men parted ways with promises to hang out soon, the kind that only sound hollow afterward. Sebastian got another drink. He moved through the next hour in a trance, going from social circle to social circle with the stupid grin of a man overmatched. Sebastian knew little of Connecticut, and even less of Wall Street, but the Tucker family transcended even his ignorance. Mia’s great-great-grandfather had made a fortune in steel, later founding the nation’s seventh-largest investment bank. Though the company had long ago gone public, Mia’s father still served as its asset management CEO. Despite the crash of the global economy, life for the Tuckers hadn’t changed as far as Sebastian could tell. That bothered him when he bothered to think about it. He couldn’t help but think about it in the restaurant.

  “Eight hundred thousand just doesn’t get what it used to,” someone said. “Don’t those people understand they’re voting against their self-interest?” another asked. “Who summers in the Antilles anymore?” still another said. Class resentment raged within Sebastian, but he kept it hidden and sheathed, remembering that such a weapon never struck clean. He nodded and smiled. He also ate a lot of bacon-wrapped dates.

  While Sebastian listened in on an obligatory “Where were you during the Palm Sunday attacks?” conversation, Mia’s stepmom patted his arm. Sebastian had thought that Mrs. Tucker—who insisted he call her Linda—disliked him, but she pulled him away with friendliness in her grip.

  “Hello, Mrs. Tucker,” Sebastian said.

  “Take off those sunglasses,” Linda said. “You’re indoors.”

  You know damn well why I wear these, Sebastian thought, though she probably didn’t. He kept them on.

  “You’ve been requested,” Linda continued. “A new friend of Mia’s. Don’t…” Linda trailed off. “Just be normal.”

  Before Sebastian could ask what that meant, Linda led him to a woman in a long green chemise leaning against the back wall. A tattoo sleeve of black-and-red flames breathed down her right shoulder to the elbow. She wore no jewelry except for a dull labret piercing above her chin and little makeup, and her arms were crossed. Sebastian thought she looked bored. She had curly brown hair and big, green eyes he labeled “sad,” then “defiant.” Sebastian grinned wide.

  “Here he is,” Linda said. “Meet Britt, Sebastian. We were just talking about your, umm. Experiences.”

  Sebastian’s grin slid away. Anything but that, he thought. Can we talk about anything else? He began chewing on his bottom lip. Linda said, “If you’ll excuse me,” and disappeared into the crowd. Sebastian whistled low to himself. He was about to lead with another “So” when she spoke.

  “My brother,” Britt said. She uncrossed her arms, a faint omega symbol on the underside of a wrist turning out against the wall. “He was one of the guys who saved you.”

  “Oh.” Sebastian had to jam some goodwill into his voice. He knew what his rescuers’ families held against him. “I’m. Well. So sorry for your loss. And grateful. Very, very grateful.” He was genuinely both of those things, and did his best to convey it in his words, all the while knowing she’d find the words empty and worn. They always did. “I’d love to hear about him. Whatever you’re willing to share.”

  “He didn’t die.” Britt lifted an eyebrow in amusement as Sebastian raised his in surprise. Three Rangers of forty had survived. “I’m Pete Swenson’s sister.”

  She finally smiled, and Sebastian noticed the smallest of gaps between her front teeth.

  “Oh. Wow.” Sebastian stuck out his hand. “Your brother’s a hero.” She didn’t return the gesture, so he returned his hand and kept talking. “I mean, all the Volunteers are. But especially him.” She still didn’t do anything, so he still kept talking. “Didn’t they just finish filming a movie? They’re playing themselves? It was on the news.”

  “Yeah.” Britt couldn’t hide her disdain. “Something like that.”

  Pete Swenson’s sister doesn’t regard him the same way everyone else does, Sebastian thought. That’s interesting. He wanted to ask about it. But her voice suggested wariness. So did her posture. She must get questions about him all the time, he realized. So instead he asked how she knew Mia.

  “I reached out a couple years ago,” Britt said. “We got coffee. She was there with you all. With the cythrax bomb and everything. I wanted to know more and my brother wasn’t here. We became friends.”

  Sebastian didn’t know what Mia had told Britt, over coffee and after, but he knew what she shouldn’t have told Britt, because it was the same things none of them were supposed to tell anyone. The cythrax bomb was definitely one of those things. He’d only told his mom because he figured all nondisclosure agreements had mom clauses, even federal government ones. He took a long drink from his whiskey and coke and pretended like Britt had said something normal instead.

  A waiter passed with a tray. Britt snapped at him while looking the other way. It worked. The waiter stopped and lowered his tray of vegan jalapeno poppers.

  There it is, Sebastian thought. A moneyed bohemian. Most bohos were, these days. The culture and the counterculture grew from the same seed of privilege. Who could afford to be genuine anymore? No one Sebastian knew, not since the new recession. He’d sold out to Homeland Authority and wasn’t afraid to admit it. That’s the difference between me and the boho sorts, he thought. Honesty. Britt ate the vegan jalapeno popper with a neatness that could only be taught, rigid fingers and tiny, minute chews and a paper napkin folded in half like origami, not one crumb escaping. He pushed away a joke about it and asked where home was.

  “Been in Gypsy Town awhile,” Britt said. “We’re originally from the Federal City area, though. Little suburb called Troy.”

  “Right. Of course.” Every war journalist on the planet had christened her brother the American Hector. Wasn’t it stranger than fiction, they all asked? Something to be considered, certainly! No art in propaganda anymore, Sebastian thought. Just blunt force. He asked if the Volunteers were still in Hollywood.

  “You don’t know?” Britt asked. She sniffed in confusion, crossing her arms again. The omega tattoo disappeared into her body. “They’re here.”

  “Here where?”

  “Here here.”

  “Here here where?”

  “Here. Empire City. The movie’s over. They’re on leave until they deploy back to the Mediterranean. Finally convinced the War Department to let them be soldiers again.”

  Something between wonder and panic dropped through Sebastian. The Volunteers were here, in the city here? And going back over there? Nothing about that made sense to him. They were supposed to be in Hollywood or touring the country, raising money for the government. That was the deal. He was figuring out how to ask particulars when a digital jingle sprang from within Britt. She pulled a phone from an unseen pocket and looked at it. “Boyfriend,” she said.

  Sebastian nodded and pantomimed smoking a cigarette. He headed outside for the patio, focusing on the ground as he walked. He needed to think, and wanted air and smoke for that.

  A dozen or so partygoers had pushed out to the patio as well, but they all seemed the same to Sebastian. Faceless and prim, fatheaded and fake. He grabbed a seat in a corner where no stranger could sneak up, and took out a thin pipe shaped like a cigarette and packed with weed. A gray sun, masked by a grayer sky, hung on the horizon like a dreary disco ball. The sidewalks swelled with noise and angst. Where they all found the energy to do it, to do any of it anymore, Sebastian didn’t know. He watched and smoked, content to be detached, detached to be content. The Volunteers were here, somewhere. Sebastian knew he should find them. He hadn’t seen any of them since the hospital in Germany. They’d gone on to do brave things, incredible things. They were using their powers for good. He wanted that, too. Not just the brave or incredible parts, but the going-on. That m
atters, he thought. It matters a lot.

  On his phone, Sebastian skimmed through fan theories on a Utopia message board. He hated giving any time or attention to state TV. But the show challenged the old rules. The cinematography, especially. If Bobby Kennedy had lived to become president—a genius conceit. River Phoenix mostly pulled it off, the accent notwithstanding. Sebastian never missed an episode.

  Sebastian was trying to figure out how to repack his one-hitter unnoticed when Mia found him.

  She sat next to him and pointed to his pipe. “Really? Here?”

  Sebastian held his fingers to his throat. “It is medicinal,” he said like a robotic voice box. “Please don’t tell my boss. My pension isn’t vested yet.”

  Mia laughed, a bit too easily to Sebastian’s mind, which put him on alert. “How are you, See-Bee? I’ve missed you.”

  Sebastian readjusted his sunglasses and stuck the pipe into his pocket. “You’re asking if I’m seeing anyone.”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s your engagement party, Mia. Not the place to confess an undying love.”

  She sighed the sigh of someone playing a part. “You know what I mean.”

  “I met Britt Swenson earlier,” Sebastian said. He wasn’t quite ready to ask the question he’d come here for, so he asked the question he’d found here instead. “You know the Volunteers are in the city now? And going back to the war?”

  Mia tilted her head. “My handler told me last week. Yours didn’t?”

  That made Sebastian grunt. “Mine’s been busy.”

  “You look skinny.”

  Sebastian considered telling her about what had happened at the subway the previous night. Instead, he said, “I’ve always been skinny.”

  “Jesse likes you, you know. Despite my trying to convince him otherwise.”

  “He’s cool. Good choice, senorita.” Sebastian scratched his head and leaned close to Mia. “Curious,” he said. “You fly anymore?”

  “Of course not.” Mia paused for a beat, then another. It’d been three years since Tripoli. She raised her eyes to meet his and narrowed them to splinters. “You disappear anymore?”

  Sebastian laughed, quick and short. “Just teasing,” he said.

  “I’m not. Don’t play around with what you can do, Sebastian. They’ll crush you.”

  Sebastian clenched his jaw and felt his chest seize up. He looked back out into the maze. Mia was right, of course. But he didn’t like the way she’d suggested he didn’t understand the stakes. Was he being sensitive? Perhaps, he allowed. We all have our vices.

  Mia patted his knee and said she needed to get back inside. He apologized for forgetting a gift and said he’d see her in there. A minute later, he decided to ghost. He walked off, concentrating on his feet moving along the sidewalk, counting each step silently until he got to twelve. Then he started back at one.

  Anytime someone came up too close behind him, he stopped and let them pass before continuing. He knew he was a cliché, maybe a couple different ones, but he didn’t care. All he wanted was to be by himself. A block from the restaurant, he hailed a cab by stepping into the street.

  “The Village,” he told the driver. “Take the expressway.”

  This proved the wrong choice. Traffic piled up a half mile north of the Jubilee Bridge. Cars crept along in sleepy monster fury, and Sebastian’s legs began cramping, then twitching.

  The driver pointed to the radio. “Crazy shit,” he said.

  “What now?” Sebastian asked. He hadn’t noticed the radio was on.

  “The consul who collapsed in Federal City yesterday. He’s a deader.”

  “Damn.” Sebastian had seen some scroll somewhere about it. “Steps of the Nixon Memorial?”

  The driver nodded. “Someone hacked his pacemaker. Zap! Just like that.” The driver spoke with the abrupt, flexing voice of an Empire City native, like his words had been rolled through gravel. “Technical error, they’re saying. Please.”

  “Terrorism?” Sebastian asked.

  “Not the separatists’ style. They go for the big bombs, the big blood. The wogs? Had a price on his head, true enough. But the jihad don’t have the tech. This was an inside job.”

  Conspiracies were the last vestige of the vacant-eyed, Sebastian believed, of the mediocre-minded, the not-quite-read-enough, the too-stupid-to-realize-it. Inquisitiveness was not a substitute for critical thinking, nor paranoia for reason. The American government made mistakes, sure. Because it was a government. It didn’t always tell the truth but it was always true. It’d saved him, and he was a nobody, a citizen like any other. They still came for him in Tripoli. He tried to remember that any time his skeptical bone was tapped.

  Still, though. An inside job made some sense. The consul had been scheduled to brief Congress on the progress of the Sinai occupation. Or lack thereof.

  “Maybe it was his wife.” Sebastian smiled to make sure the driver knew he was joking. “Love and war.”

  “Maybe.” The driver snorted. “Treacherous times.”

  The radio trundled on. Police robots in Indiana had blown up a Sears. The body count was forthcoming. Some would always believe only radical wogs could commit such acts. Others seemed almost relieved when the far west (and very white) separatists made news for the same. Both groups of militants were largely made up of vets of the Mediterranean Wars, something Sebastian liked to sneak into conversations. A verbal pipe bomb, of sorts, meant to disrupt any pretense. The veterans came from opposing sides, sure, but that was the joke.

  “Want to know what I think needs to be done?” the driver asked.

  Only now did Sebastian notice the blue infantry cord dangling from the cab’s rearview mirror. The driver wore a mesh cap with the words VIETNAM WARFIGHTER in bright yellow on it. Sebastian wasn’t sure he wanted to be in the cab anymore. Between Mia and the silver-haired man at the restaurant, he’d had enough vet-splaining for the day.

  “How’s traffic?” he asked.

  The driver pointed to the bridge, then to his ears. Distant sirens filled the space between.

  “Could be another jumper,” the driver said.

  Sebastian slid a twenty-dollar bill into the driver’s tray and exited, slamming the door behind him before the driver could reply. He didn’t care that he’d overpaid, or that the summer heat felt like steam. He began walking home.

  “Stop being emo!” Sebastian yelled at the bridge. Maybe there was a jumper up there, maybe there wasn’t. Either way, he felt something loosen inside him. “Either do it or climb down! Twelve-year-old girls draw it out like this!”

  The horns of angry, delayed motorists served as the sole response, twirling flashes of emergency vehicles soaking the moment in pomp. How selfish can someone be? Sebastian wondered.

  Then he thought, the jumper’s probably thinking the same.

  He yelled at the bridge, again, this time in solidarity. “Defy!”

  Again, only car horns replied.

  Sebastian walked slow and south. A messy dusk loomed, black and slate wrapping together like an ice cream swirl. He found it calming and the anxiety from earlier embered out. He thought about things long out of his control and things still in it. He thought about the dead hostages at the Indiana mall, and the terrorists, too. He thought about prayer. He thought about Tripoli, and his home, and his MIA cousin. He thought about the Volunteers, and the cythrax bomb. An hour passed. Smelling liquor in his sweat and with his throat dry, he stopped at a corner market. He bought a bottle of red wine, though he hated wine. In this America, Sebastian thought, emotion can only be expressed in regurgitation. Cultural regurgitation. Drinking wine from a brown bag is that. So drinking wine from a brown bag is the thing I will do.

  He walked across a footbridge over the expressway and found a bench near the river. The dirty water flowed by with hurry. The Prince Bridge imposed itself to his left, all cables and pillars and might. In the twilight, Sebastian couldn’t figure out if it was blue-gray or gray-blue. He decided it didn’t r
eally matter. Across the river in Gypsy Town, defunct smokestacks and the sugar plant sign stood proud. Shiny high-rise condos surrounded the stacks on all sides, reminding Sebastian of the man and the elephant in the watercolor for some reason.

  There’s nothing gypsy about Gypsy Town, Sebastian thought. He smirked, finding that clever. It should be called Trying-Too-Hard Ville.

  He texted some friends to see if they wanted to join him on the bench. No one responded. Then he tried his handler. He didn’t respond, either. Typical, Sebastian thought. Passing joggers rustled a scrawny wild turkey from nearby foliage. Sebastian finally had company.

  “Simon the Zealot!” he said, as the turkey emerged. “A past from the blast.”

  When Sebastian had first moved to Empire City, Simon had been a favorite find on walks along the river. Named after a long-dead painter who’d lived in the district, Simon had landed from parts unknown years prior and become a local legend. Empire City did not house many wild turkeys.

  Sebastian poured a splash of wine on the ground. He’d decided he and the zealot were kindred spirits. This resulted in an annoyed cluck from Simon, who was scrounging the shrubs for food. After a day of drinking on an empty stomach, the wine was hitting Sebastian harder than expected. “Stupid turkey,” he muttered. His eyes began to ache, which gave him the motivation necessary to tip back the wine bottle and finish it.

  “I need to get my shit together,” Sebastian told the turkey, which was true.

  He lingered with Simon and the inanity of personal tragedy a bit longer, then returned to the city for a slice of pizza. Sebastian felt invisible for much of the walk, but when he woke the next morning, hungover and alone, he didn’t know if it’d been his imagination or his power.

  Hello, young citizens, I’m Justice of the Volunteers. Protecting the homeland is a sacred duty, and it’s one we’re all in—together.