by D Keith Mano
Priest was on the viaduct. Hollow railings had been pushed out, bow chasers salvoing northward into the low jungle. Priest glanced down apprehensively; his heels were braced against the overgrown curbstone bumper. Below, in a playground, the concrete children’s wading pool had filled with rain water. A task force of pin-tailed ducks maneuvered on its surface. Priest heard raucous frogs. But for salmon apartment summits, one flagpole, the distant pencil of an old aqueduct tower, the city was featureless. Dogs scrimmaged between upended swings and slides, barking back over their shoulders. Priest had to eat; once off the railing, his fingertips fluttered. He made rigid fists. Where the viaduct was rooted in the primitive granite of Coogan’s Bluff, he saw a large public food trough. Priest walked toward it, one block west. Weakness hobbled his shins in creeper surf; he could not raise them. He opened his mask: the process of drawing breath through the mesh seemed expensive. For several moments he watched the six green/gold spouts. Around their splashing, sere creeper leaves cowered; there was no plant food in the E-diet. Priest jerked off his gloves, let them fall, cupped palms. Slight effervescence tickled there, but the liquid died in his hand. It faded as pebbles will, taken from a stream bed. Mary, he recalled, had made banquets of the E-diet. Soup plates, soup. Champagne glasses, champagne. Six courses, as many shaped containers. Priest lapped. He tried not to swallow deeply. The taste was sweet, cloying. He felt a gritty patina form over his teeth. Priest drank three handfuls.
155th Street was humped. Its blunt top rounded two blocks above, at St. Nicholas Avenue; from there it sloped down another two blocks to Riverside Drive. Here the asphalt had been removed with marvelous industry, its black hexagon mosaics repuzzled then into a crude decorative wall. Twenty years before, some neighborhood eco-committee had made an effort to grow flowers in the wide street bed. Priest’s feet encountered strip plantings of a rock garden beneath the creeper. He felt stronger now. He guffawed breath out; cheerfulness jiggled in his shoulders. It irritated him. His digestive tract was barren; the drug worked very suddenly in it. If he blinked, Priest’s eyes caught a weird, new focus, as though lenses of a different magnification, each slightly astigmatic, were inserted before his vision. He saw a tree. The tree entertained him: he remembered grinning at it. Yet the image left no memory. He had to see it again. Priest yawned, drawing air into his brain. The sun had almost setded behind the Palisades; it traced long building silhouettes across the street. Their shadows seemed enormously cold: he shivered. He thrummed in his nose—brrrrr. But he wasn’t cold at all.
Priest noticed a cubical building. Its tall windows were without glass, and around their frames the creeper was singed. Leaves made black fists. The fire had burned recently. Part of a west wall had collapsed outward; here and there an ember emitted smoke curls. Priest saw the building; his eyes, too, were windows. The building returned his glance. With no conscious motive, he walked toward it. Where sidewalk had been, the creeper growth was black, though still perfectly formed. It crumbled to paper ash when he stepped through. Priest saw aluminum letters on the wall: H SCH L. He peered over the windowsill. It had been a capacious gymnasium; the wooden floor was ripped up. Boards had been stacked; now the stacks smoldered, afire at their centers. An acrid stench opened his breathing; he knew the smell of seared human hair. Priest snapped his mask shut.
A tall sliver of window had imploded. It lay sideways against the frame, intact. Twilight entered at a freak angle, destroyed translucence, made a mirror of it. Priest watched his anonymous skull, black and sleek, wdth the abstract death mask of plastic across it. The head nodded. Priest saw the nodding and nodded. Impossibly there seemed to be a time lapse between nod and nod’s reflection. Priest wondered who it was. With inept fingers he broke open the snaps of his mask. He saw flat cheekbones, crushed nose. Mongoloid lids. It was not his face. Priest thrust backward, terrified. He fell prone on the cremated, fragile creeper leaves. Ash puffed up around him. Priest stood hurriedly in the spread-eagle imprint of his body. He could recall neither face nor reflected face; he could not recall the cause of his anxiety. He ran in a hampered, low scuttle westward, but the drug soon gentled him. His movements became disorganized. And he laughed.
The street crested, leveled. Priest was sitting: the Chapel of the Intercession awed and surprised him. It was tremendous. At first he could not believe it was man-built. Only the roof peak had surfaced, a bald tonsure in the tousling creeper. He supposed it a natural granite outcropping, but rectangular eye sockets in a tower above the apse had been poked through. He saw flushed sky behind. Priest lay full length in the creeper, one knee up, admiring it, imitating its shape. Priest guessed that this was a church, though he knew only propaganda tales of the Christian faith. Christians ate flesh, drank blood. He sat up, alert. He had sensed figures moving. At the tower base, nosed into by apse and cloister arcade, he saw a deep graveyard. Dusk, exacerbated by festoons of creeper in the crowded, dead tree boughs, had advanced half an hour there. Priest wanted to see people. He walked to the fence. His head ached—a cost of resisting the drug. Mosquitoes drizzled, draped veil-like, billovdng in the gloom. He counted perhaps two dozen figures. They were naked.
Some knelt, pushing forward, drawing back, as his mother had rasped clothes over her washboard. They were clustered, four or five together. Priest stepped through a gap in the railing. Mosquitoes sang, angry electric wires, around his ear-hole mesh. Several men glanced at him, but they were apathetic. Here and there wide turfs of creeper had been uprooted carefully, then folded back on themselves, carpets. To the left he saw four figures on four sides of a shallow excavation. They pushed handfuls of soil in, sifting it patiently for life. Mosquitoes caped their shoulders. Priest walked near. One of the men looked up; his beard around the mouth was caked brown, as though he had been eating dirt. He raised his hands; he offered Priest soil. Priest looked down, then started. He punched at his face, cracking plastic cheekbones. A woman and an infant were sprawled, embraced, in the grave. From groin to feet the mother was shrouded with dirt. Still alive, she shifted her legs slighdy, setding covers of a bed. Priest staggered back.
His agitation astonished them. On the slow lens speed of their drugged vision, his running form left a hundred still images. Priest clamped his plastic mouthpiece. He vocalized as he inhaled, screamed into his own throat. He saw the Hudson. By an optical trick it appeared upright, lit from behind, a cyclorama wall beyond two green/black creeper wings at the foot of 155th Street. He musjudged the downslant and his own momentum. He fell, ripped a foot-long divot from the creeper sward. Priest stood. He panted; his mask fogged. He was half a block from the parapets of Riverside Drive. Priest ignored his ankle. His armpits opened as he ran, fingers flat and separated, palms flapping. He stopped in a broad plaza of intersecting avenues. It was brighter there.
Slowly now, afraid, Priest crossed to the parapet wall. He unsnapped his mask, gazed north; river wind prised in and blew the mask wide. Priest gasped. His hands tore creeper growth from the wall. He had no hope.
The bridge was down.
Chapter 4
He dreamed that spasms were in the earth. A dry field buckled; combers of soil and rock attacked his balance. Forms were in process, unstable. Priest awoke; he lay on his back. It was dawn. Kneecaps had folded against his rib cage. Intestines churned in a busy, false peristalsis. He was nauseated. Priest turned his face sideways, into the parapet wall; he lay now where he had collapsed the night before. He whimpered. The spasms evolved in three stages. Paraplegia below the hips: an irresistible nerve reaction that drew knees up, set shivery, hot cramps in thigh and calf muscles. A rough pair of hands palpated his abdomen; the belly surface undulated toward ribs, cresting, troughing, cresting. Then his knees spread. He panted, straining foolishly against the contractions; he had never learned the Natural Digestive Exercises. Hands clapped quickly over his groin. He had almost herniated there; it was a common effect of spasms. He sensed slight moistness between the buttocks. Priest counted to three hundred; at three hund
red the convulsions would begin again.
He rested when the spasms were over. Sensitive temporary swellings formed under his armpits, in his groin. The day was clear, but to the southwest cumulus clouds, tall as battleships, advanced grandly. Mist wadded the air over Trinity Cemetery. Priest waited, thinking. He had noticed something the night before. It gave him hope; it terrified him. Priest found his stone in the pouch and sucked on it. He sat up. The skin on his palms had begun to jaundice. He stood, supporting torso’s weight on the parapet wall. There were corroded lamps at intervals along its rim, two nude sockets suspended in a single axis, a set of scales. Priest looked at the river, postponing certainty. The Hudson was lovely. It was immense: Priest had known the Hudson in its late adolescence, fifty miles upstream near the old Storm King Highway. It was twice as broad here. A travertine path of blue/green reflective plates led across from the just risen sun. Fish simmered near the shore, attracted there by teeming insect life. Priest gobbled breath. He was apprehensive. He had no other option. He turned to look north.
Fear made him nod. Twin-deck roadways of the George Washington Bridge had disappeared. On the New York side, steel and concrete had sheared off exactly: there was no sign of debris in the water. On the Jersey side, breaks were more jagged; falling, the roadway end had bounced once, then caught in the caisson’s top. Now it ramped two hundred yards into the water, a ribbon twisted over once. This peninsula was somewhat buoyant; currents eddied briskly around it. But the roadway did not concern Priest. His memory had been accurate. Far above, anchored in top windows of each huge tower, a single cable remained, spanning the Hudson. It slacked down gradually to a nadir at the river’s midpoint. Priest didn’t know if he could approach the cable base, but he supposed that access had been provided for maintenance. From twenty-five blocks south, the cable seemed as delicate against the sky as pencil strokes on cloth. Priest turned away, down. He stared at the shattered parallel lanes of the West Side Highway. One stanchion was still upright, supporting a few square yards of elevated highway, and on this pedestal a car had been islanded. Priest cursed: he doubted his courage. He began to walk north.
The asphalt of Riverside Drive had been pulverized. Black powder coned up between the creeper roots—anthills. Priest watched the bridge as he walked. At certain angles past 165th Street, a second strand of cable became visible behind the first. If he could cross to New Jersey before night. Priest would have six days to walk the forty-five miles north. Six days unless Mary was given the pill sooner. Priest feared that: his wife had never resisted the Guard. Two years before, Ogilvy had raped her; Mary had not told Priest. She knew the act was a trap for her husband’s anger. There had been no risk of conception; vasectomy was routine, an initiation rite, in the Guard. Throughout, Ogilvy and his two lieutenants had sucked Mary’s body, drawing blood up, blotching her with superficial bruises. Though it was mid-August Mary had not gone naked for a week. She made love in the dark. Ogilvy waited expectantly, appearing each day outside Mary’s house with his bodyguard. Nothing had happened. Ogilvy hesitated; then he sent Priest a letter. But when Ogilvy arrived the next day, Mary said merely that her husband had gone into the forest. She had been bruised again: the dark blue of Priest’s blows contrasted almost handsomely with the stippled red/purple of the guardsmen’s sucking. Mary could hardly stand upright, but she had smiled.
He was gone three weeks, hunting without a kill. For his size Priest could move lithely, silently, and he was indefatigable. Once, during twelve hours he had pursued a female deer, following its trail relentlessly, starting it up again and again, demoralizing the animal despite its superior speed. Before dusk it waited for him, flank against an impenetrable grove of hawthorn. It quivered with anxiety, defeated. Priest shut his fingers around the doe’s throat. His pressure extruded the long tongue; its eyes bugged. Priest laughed, then he spanked the deer across one buttock. It galloped, staggering, glancing off tree trunks, into the marshland north of Bull’s Hump.
A week later, at dawn, the bear attacked him. It was female: he had noted its five-toed spoor for several days, claw marks like incurving candle flames on candles. Fortuitously Priest had intervened between mother and four cubs at a bend called the Elbow of Little Rope River. As he walked north now. Priest remembered the magnificent impetus that had breasted him. It was to this, at last, that he had owed temporary freedom: the kill had assuaged his bitter fury. Big rump upraised, the bear rushed headlong at him, as though overbalanced by an anatomical gravity. Drawn teats ran under it, a centipede’s treadmill legs. Her claws had met behind him, had punctured, then had thoughtfully peeled down long shreds of his insect suit over the spine. Priest had been winded, but instinctively he did not pull back, pressing instead toward the bear’s chest, face to muzzle, cheek against slaver. They tumbled over and over along an abbreviated incline to the stream bank, both panting with shock at the sudden encounter. The bear urinated in its excitement. Priest’s breath gushed up when its weight emptied his lungs. He clung to its pelt, cheating the claws of free play.
Though it was a criminal offense. Priest had not given up his father’s hunting knife. He kept the knife in a tree hollow twenty feet above ground. He seldom, dared carry it, but now the hilt was against his chest, sheathed by an inside suit pocket. The hilt bruised him when his ribs spread for breath. Priest guessed that the bear was amusing itself: perhaps she had learned that men, upright black animals, no longer cared to defend themselves. The bear snuffled moistly, as if Priest’s scent were more alarming than his arms and legs. Priest recalled a first reaction when the bear’s shoulders closed on him, when his shoulders met and thwarted that closing. He felt exuberant. It was competition; he craved it. Movement in his right wrist was circumscribed, yet Priest managed to work his zipper open. The bear had not utilized its jaws; they could not vise Priest’s cranium. When jaws nuzzled, he butted at the hard canine teeth, hurting them. He was in pain but not hampered by it. The bear, frustrated, began jostling him side to side pointlessly. Priest would not relinquish his grip on its fur; he protected his vulnerable belly against the bear’s belly. He did not shout pain when a claw lodged between ribs. Priest brought the knife out, hilt downward. He was in jeopardy then, for he could have only one chance. He had to aim, to incline his face toward the bear’s jaws. The animal sensed this and was ready. Its teeth clamped over his face, crunching the insect mask. The bear’s head arched back, masticating, tossing plastic toward its throat, certain that it had flayed the enemy’s face of skin. Priest thrust upward, close to his own cheek, both hands on the knife hilt. Its blade skewered through the lower jaw, pinned it to palate above. Claws came free. Unstoppered, blood ran from punctures over Priest’s kidneys. He felt its flow. The bear rolled aside, tried to disengage. It wallowed in panic, helpless without powerful jaws. Priest rode the animal’s body, sawing downward toward windpipe, until his face and chest were enameled with the hardening blood.
He camouflaged the carcass. For years Priest had not been hungry in the old way. Then he was ravenous: instinct shouted that he compound triumph by eating his victim, but he did not dare—Ogilvy tested his blood once a month for Organic Food Content. Eerily placid. Priest returned to New Loch. The bear’s clawing had infected him: he was feverish for a month. Mary knew from delirious yells that he had killed, but the killing had exorcised Priest’s anger, and during more than a year he had ignored Ogilvy’s taunts. Yet, after all, the least of provocations had brought him to Yankee Prison: two fingers goosing between his buttocks. Priest had hauled Ogilvy into the air by a green scruff of his insect hood. He could still feel Ogilvy’s Adam’s apple, a big, elusive knuckle under his thumb. When Priest roused from the stunning, his hands were so fiercely locked that finger joints cracked again and again as he flexed them open.
***
The bridge tower was splendid, immense. Priest stood on a ruined access ramp: explosions had broken it into a staircase, the tiers of a shallow amphitheater. He was scared. Unconsciously Priest imitated the tower�
�s great straddle, palms flat on spread thighs. Lobed, active cumulus clouds flecked with olive, rose on short strings above New Jersey. Rain, Priest thought. It was eight o’clock: he had lost a full hour severing the creeper vine with his teeth. Twice guardsmen had nearly apprehended him in the act. The vine was coiled six times around his chest, under the insect-suit shirt. Priest climbed onto the highest tier level. Thirty years before, a long skirmish had been fought at the Manhattan bridgehead. There was a plaque; battle equipment had been left as a memorial. Tank cannons fired creeper growth. One jet plane’s tail section levered under an apartment house at 178th Street and Pinehurst. Artillery bombardments had weakened the span then, though neither faction had wanted to destroy the bridge. After sixteen days the combined Realist and Christian Nihilist guerrilla forces had run out of fuel.
He walked under the tower arch, toward the precipice. As he approached it, Priest’s body became afflicted. He aged; he seemed shorter. His knees broke. Shoulders huddled and his chin inched toward their huddling. The seat of his body jutted backward, ballast. His fingertips felt over the pavement. Then he was on all fours. As he gazed down/over the brink. Priest lay fully prone, arms and legs and fingers spread, a dead man’s float. Even prone, vertigo had confused his senses; a burbling voice talked inside his left earhole. He was two hundred feet above the water. Priest could see portions of the bridge roadway, green-yellow, bobbing a yard under the river’s surface. He could not watch longer. Priest rolled over onto his back.
