Empire City

by Matt Gallagher

  Jean-Jacques strolled through the courtyard to the metal tables, head low and hands deep in his pockets. He tried not to betray any hurry. The scent of marinated chicken and sauce piquant drifted through the night air from an open window. His stomach grumbled. It’d been a long time since he’d eaten a proper Caribbean meal. Wog food relied too much on earth flavors, he thought. It needed some fire in it. And army food, forget about it—that paste was for white people. One of the girls jumping rope turned and squared him up.

  “Why you walk like a babylon?” she asked. The other girls laughed.

  Jean-Jacques considered the question. He’d never been called police before. He was glad to see them jumping rope with one bought from a store, made of nylon. The girls from his youth had made do with lines of telephone cable.

  He shrugged. “Just how I walk,” he said in kreyol. The girls widened their eyes. They hadn’t thought he was one of theirs.

  He sat at one of the tables. His knees cracked for the effort while his lower back ached from an old slipped disc. Twenty-five going on fifty, he thought. Jean-Jacques was beginning to feel his own mortality.

  He looked around, eyes adjusting to the lamplight. A sterile conformity rustled through the courtyard, strips of neat yellow grass and power-washed walkways glinting with forced order. There was one exception: a circle with three arrows spray-painted in blood orange raced across the face of a nearby building. The arrows pointed to the lower-left inside of the circle. Underneath, written in wavy kreyol, was a message:

  “DEFY THE GUARDS. GUARD THOSE WHO DEFY.”

  Ooh, Jean-Jacques thought. So cryptic. He had nothing but disdain for political statements and the type of people who made them. He’d found that the minds he wanted to emulate grounded their thought exercises in the world as it was, not in a world of ifs and perhapses. Practical: he’d loved that word since he’d first heard it as a cherry private, and had tried to steel himself to it ever since.

  A man emerged from under an overhang across the courtyard. He wore faded jeans and a baggy white tee much too large for him. A flat-brimmed baseball cap tilted to the side bore a big green C on it.

  “Yo,” the man said. It wasn’t until he got closer to the tables and smiled that Jean-Jacques recognized him. “It’s true. My big cousin is the black superman from the news. Where did all the fat go?”

  Jean-Jacques returned the smile and slapped hands with the man. “Mon ami!” he said. The kreyol felt like an old sweater on his tongue, stretched and itchy, so he kept his words tight. “Emmanuel. Surprised you ain’t a priest.”

  When they were children, Emmanuel would spend his post-mass Sundays baptizing anyone who’d let him, from little girls coloring the sidewalks with chalk to old men in wheelchairs sipping on forties. It upset some of the adult women, who thought it was sacrilege to either Jesus or Bondye or maybe both, but it’d been Jean-Jacques’s mother who intervened on her nephew’s behalf. “Let the boy be a boy,” she would say. “Why rush a child to grow in this world?”

  Emmanuel had grown, though, and the smile dropped from his face in the courtyard. “No, homie,” he said to Jean-Jacques. “Gave up that foolishness a long time ago.”

  Jean-Jacques sat back down. Emmanuel remained standing. The younger man held a pine box the size of a firecracker and Jean-Jacques tried not to stare at it. It was why he was here but Emmanuel already knew that. No need to remind him.

  “How’s the family?” he asked.

  “We okay.” Emmanuel paused for a moment, chewing over what to say next. “Sorry my mom won’t let you come to the apartment.” He paused again. “Superstitious shit. Thinks your powers will mess with the kids’ brains. Give them radiation or something.”

  Jean-Jacques didn’t know what to say to that so he didn’t say anything. He considered his aunt stupid and ignorant, but maybe she’s right, he thought. Maybe I would frighten children. Maybe I should, too.

  “We’re all proud of you. For real. Getting all those medals, saving wog babies and stuff. You’ve done good, cousin.”

  Jean-Jacques hoped the darkness of the courtyard hid the contours of his face. He knew it must’ve been revealing something. He’d saved people overseas, and some of them had been wogs, and some of them had been babies. But they weren’t the ones he thought about since coming home.

  “Need to see the Saint-Preux name getting some shine, though. Those two blans you roll with, they always in the lights. What’s this Dash thing all about?” Emmanuel’s voice flexed with the question, and Jean-Jacques knew why. Dash was both his nickname and his code name; the latter since the cythrax bomb, the former since day zero at basic, when the drill sergeant couldn’t or wouldn’t say “Jean-Jacques Saint-Preux” so he said “Dash” instead, and then the moniker stuck, so Jean-Jacques became Dash, too. It made things easier, and truth be told, Jean-Jacques hadn’t minded. Much of why he’d joined the army was to be shaped and molded into someone new, someone different. A new name for a new identity. Jean-Jacques Saint-Preux of Little Haiti had been fat and dopey. Through combat, through the application of armed violence, through blood and sand and kills and death, Dash of the Legion and Dash of the Rangers became hard and discerning. That mattered to Jean-Jacques more than anything else. People could call him whatever the hell they wanted. He’d been reborn.

  “Just a name,” he told his cousin in kreyol. “Same as any other.”

  “Same as any other.” Emmanuel repeated the phrase, slow and dry. Jean-Jacques heard something like spite in his cousin’s words. “Wasn’t going to tell you this—but. Your mom was dying, she kept praying about you. Said you’d left home, you’d left your people, but she wanted you to remember where you come from. Kept calling you her little miracle. Might’ve been the last thing she said that made sense.”

  Jean-Jacques closed the gap between them in a blur. When he turned rapid for long distances he could taste water in the air but this was child’s play. He grasped the top of his cousin’s shirt with his fists, crossing them at the wrists into a chokehold, and hooked a leg behind the man to lean him over. Emmanuel’s face, only inches from Jean-Jacques’s, betrayed pure, howling fear. Loose spit gathered at the corners of his mouth and mucus dripped from his nose. Jean-Jacques had seen this before in virgin eyes confronting the mystical. Speed like his could not be rationalized by human minds, nor could it be reasoned with. It could only be experienced.

  “Speaking of,” Jean-Jacques said. “Give that over.”

  Emmanuel pressed the box into Jean-Jacques’s stomach. Jean-Jacques looked into his cousin’s mouth—twisted teeth crashed into one another like tiny yellow crags. He tongued the back of his own. They felt smooth as ever, straightened out and aligned by the army years before. He let go of his chokehold and took the box. He unhooked his leg from his cousin’s body and took a step back.

  “Suuu-perrr,” Emmanuel said, sounding out both syllables in English, and only then did Jean-Jacques realize he’d been trying to goad him all along.

  Neither man apologized, preferring to let silence fill the void. Jean-Jacques knew he’d gained an anger abroad but he didn’t know what to make of it. From floors above, he listened to a woman sing along off-key to a hip-hop song he didn’t recognize.

  He looked over at Emmanuel, who was panting and trying not to show it. “Who’s this?” he asked, pointing up at the woman singing.

  Emmanuel loosed a short laugh and shook his head. “That’s Big Daddy Pouchon, homie. You have been gone.”

  Jean-Jacques snorted. “That I have. I like it. Good…” He searched his mind for the right word in kreyol. “Pouvwa.” Power.

  “I’ll burn you a mix,” Emmanuel said. Jean-Jacques thought he was joking until he asked for the number to his cell. Jean-Jacques gave it, more out of a sense of control than embarrassment. They weren’t supposed to use their supers stateside. The handlers had been quite clear about that.

  With a nod, Jean-Jacques bumped fists with Emmanuel and began walking out of the courtyard. He smelled hot
trash and wildflower in the night again.

  “Let’s chill,” Emmanuel called after him. “Got a proposition to throw your way.”

  Jean-Jacques smirked at that. A proposition. The child priest had become a hustler. “Let the boy be a boy,” his mother had said. And then what? Little Haiti was like the rest of the world that way. No one knew.

  * * *

  Jean-Jacques walked through a group of pigeons gathered on the sidewalk. They were pulling apart a fast-food wrapper covered in hamburger grease. Most looked dirty and overstuffed to Jean-Jacques, but a young female with an emerald-green neck and long gray wings stood off by itself, watching over it all. It looked up at him and tilted its head as if it were sizing him up, in case Jean-Jacques had come for the wrapper.

  Game knows game, he thought.

  His phone buzzed from a front pocket. It was a text from Flowers, asking where he was. Something about another Gypsy Town party and how Pete hadn’t showed either and how they’d said they were going to be there and how the Volunteers were supposed to stick together, even back here.

  Jean-Jacques put his phone back into his pocket without replying. Flowers meant well. But.

  The stoplight had remained stale yellow. The basketballers across the street called out to one another in thick shouts and grunts, the ball an anvil of lead in the still. A third player had joined the teens, blocking their shots and taunting at their objections, looming over them like a shadow giant. Straightaway, Jean-Jacques knew who it was. There was only one Justice.

  Jean-Jacques had served with Pete Swenson for four years, yet the man’s physical presence had never normalized. Tall as an orange tree with outsize shoulders and legs long as roots, Pete wore khaki cargo pants and a short-sleeve rugby shirt. Every time he posted up one of the teens or bent over to reach for the ball, it appeared like he might fold in on himself, until he burst back up with raw muscular force. Other than a five-o’clock shadow, he still looked the part of a special operator—a low fade haircut and sideburns that barely met regs, wraparound ballistic shades propped up on his head. An old Ranger cadence entered Jean-Jacques’s mind: “I ain’t the killer, I’m the killer man’s son. So I’ll do the killing—until the killer man comes.”

  “There he is.” Pete punched the basketball into the air with a fist and walked over to the chain-link fence. “Get what you needed?”

  Jean-Jacques answered with his own question. “How’d you get out here?”

  Pete half-smiled, half-grimaced. His dark eye blended with the night, but the other one, coral green and throbbing, pierced through it. If my family thinks I’ll radiate them, Jean-Jacques thought, they should meet this freak.

  “Car service,” he said. Dabs of sweat had gathered on his forehead and under his ears and armpits. “Yellow cabs won’t come out this way, you know that?”

  “Mmm-hmm.” Jean-Jacques shook his head and walked toward the car, still holding tight the box he’d secured from his cousin. Car service to Little Haiti? After hundreds of missions together and thousands of orders, he liked seeing Pete out of his element.

  “Dash.” Pete called after him. “What’s a guy have to do around here to get a brew?”

  Jean-Jacques shook his head again but turned around.

  “How thirsty are you?”

  “Very,” Pete said.

  “Okay,” Jean-Jacques said. “You’ve been warned.”

  Jean-Jacques got into the car and started the engine. As he reached over to open the passenger door for Pete, one of the kids playing basketball called after them.

  “Superhero,” he said. Pete looked over. “Why you leave Abu Abdallah breathing?”

  Pete leaned over the door frame of the car and stroked his chin. He loved answering this question for citizens more than any other. Jean-Jacques understood why. It hadn’t only been a good mission. It’d been a clean one.

  “Didn’t have a gun in his hands,” Pete said. “Just a bag of his own piss.”

  * * *

  They drove through Little Haiti. The passenger seat belt was broken and Pete couldn’t figure it out. He knotted the strap around the buckle until it held and pumped his fist in triumph. Then he asked what it was like being home.

  They were passing a bus depot Jean-Jacques remembered as a construction pit.

  “Got nicer.”

  “That’s good, right?” Pete looked out the window, nodding to himself. “Home should get nicer.”

  “Sure.” Jean-Jacques again tongued the back of his teeth. He’d liked that pit. It’d been normal. It’d been consistent. It’d been a pit. “If you say so.”

  Pete nodded again.

  Jean-Jacques took them to the Basic Lounge. It was nearby enough, and he felt like fucking with Pete. The lounge had been founded with the first exodus of Haitians, the ones who’d fled the second dictator. The ones who’d arrived when Empire City still had its old name, before it became an American city-state over taxes. Jean-Jacques hadn’t spent much time there growing up, but he had made a few of its famous karaoke nights. At one, he’d received the first blow job of his life in the bathroom from an angry Cuban wife who’d caught her husband cheating. At another, he’d given the only blow job of his life to an investment banker for three hundred dollars.

  The money had gone to the hospital during his mother’s initial chemo treatments. He’d told her he’d earned the money carrying groceries for white people.

  Jean-Jacques didn’t tell any of that to Pete, instead choosing to wait and see how long it took the other man to realize where they were. The lounge, a quarter-full and languid on a late Sunday night, smelled of air freshener and old leather. Black-and-white photographs of poets and dancers from the Harlem Renaissance and curtains of red satin hung from the walls. Soft funk played through unseen speakers. Jean-Jacques and Pete found a booth in the corner and a middle-aged waitress with pink dreadlocks and eyelash extensions asked what their poison was.

  “Two beers and two well whiskeys,” Pete said.

  “I don’t want whiskey,” Jean-Jacques said. “Just a beer.”

  “Wasn’t ordering for you. Super liver.” Pete turned to grin at the waitress but she was already headed toward the bar for their drinks.

  “You know,” Pete continued, “I expected a bit more—well, not acknowledgment, exactly. But notice?”

  “Cali’s cued to celebrity,” Jean-Jacques said. They’d spent a lot of late nights at Hollywood clubs basking in that recognition. “It’s different here.” He paused until the waitress dropped off the beers and shots and left. “Even for us.”

  Pete laughed, then downed his first whiskey like it was tap water. Jean-Jacques’s stomach ached just watching it. “Maybe that’ll change when the movie comes out.”

  Jean-Jacques sipped from the neck of his beer and narrowed his eyes. “Why’d you come here, man?” he asked. “I told you. I was handling family.”

  “Got antsy. All the bohos were watching some peacemonger fantasy about Vietnam and a dead Kennedy.” Indoors, it was his black eye that emerged, smoldering like hot coal. The cythrax had left Pete with the most extreme case of heterochromia any doctor had ever seen. Not that he minded. It was always the second thing strangers commented on, after his height. Young women, in particular.

  Pete continued. “Gypsy Town’s got some perks, but it’s not authentic. It’s not the real city.” He shrugged. “Also, got some intel for you.”

  Jean-Jacques rubbed at his bald head. They’d survived the same experimental bomb, but instead of irises that exuded primal sex magic, he’d been left naked as an earthworm. No eyebrows, no nothing. He ignored the question coming up from his chest about “the real city” and instead took the bait he was supposed to, from the squad leader he’d followed into battle too many times to remember. “Intel?”

  Pete leaned his long frame forward and pushed his elbows out, slipping into his command voice, terse and jumpy. It was a flaw, a goofy one. Jean-Jacques appreciated it. Kept Justice as one of them. He’d spoken with a War
Department contact. Jean-Jacques’s request for a platoon in the International Legion would be denied. They wanted to keep the Volunteers united. At least for another tour. It would be important to the war effort, them fighting terror together when the movie was released. For recruitment, in particular. Which had been flagging.

  “I’m sorry, dude. Know you wanted it. Don’t think it’s dead for good. Just for now.”

  Jean-Jacques didn’t react. Anger would come later. He hadn’t wanted to participate in the movie. He’d done it to make going back to the Legion possible, to make becoming a Legion platoon commander possible. This wasn’t the first time the camo machine had lied to him, though. He’d deal.

  “Can’t say I’m surprised,” was all he said.

  Pete had other news, as well. Once their leave in Empire City ended, they weren’t bound for the Mediterranean. They’d be joining a spec ops team in Sudan. The war had spread there, like a virus. Rumor had it Chinese commandos were in the region. China was making a play all over Africa. A brave new world awaited the Volunteers. A brave new front, too.

  “Agency folks think it was them who zapped that consul’s pacemaker,” Pete said, knocking back his second whiskey. “Vacation’s almost over. Duty, my dude. She beckons.”

  “Sergeant Swenson.” Jean-Jacques sighed, hoping the official rank might help break Pete from his plotting. “We got months until all that. Leave. Then train up. Then we get our assignment. A million things will change between now and then.”

  Jean-Jacques held deep misgivings about the Volunteers’ combat readiness. It was part of the reason he’d tried to rejoin the Legion. Hollywood had made them soft. America had made them soft. More than anything, their powers had made them soft.