by Matt Ruff
Fiber-optic lines carried this eidolon to the foothills of the Rockies, an angry shout in a glass thread; like a call to arms, it rang telephone bells up and down Colorado and New Mexico. Then, gathering momentum, it leapt the Continental Divide and dashed across the deserts of Utah and Nevada. The cities of the East were still shaking as it passed through the central exchange of the 714 area code, seeking a hidden back door.
From the high ground of space, the Electric Eye of a C.I.A. Spy Hole satellite noticed a small thermal bloom on the landscape. The satellite’s microprocessors went to work cataloging the event, first framing it in an increasingly precise series of location-boxes: Western Hemisphere. North America. United States of America. State of California. Orange County. City of Anaheim. Disneyland theme park. New Orleans Square. Southeast corner.
Burning.
Gas
The restaurant was called Gilead. Located across the street from heaven’s velodrome, it was popular with new arrivals, a good place to unwind, sip Mai Tais, and start adjusting to the afterlife.
Joan, Kite, and Sister Ellen Fine sat together at the bar, drinking beer and smoking. Smoking two-fisted, in Joan’s case: for along with their wisdom teeth, Joan’s and Kite’s arms had been returned to them at the pearly gates, Saint Peter digging through the severed-limbs drawer of his Roman filing cabinet. Unlike Joan, Kite had elected not to reattach hers just yet, but simply carried it with her, like a questionable gift she would probably keep but needed to get used to.
“So even if the bomb had gone off,” Joan said, “it wouldn’t have mattered. The nanovirus had already been dealt with . . . by Maxwell, of all people.”
“With a little help from the press and the Shin Bet,” Joan’s mother said. “And a good thing, too, because if they hadn’t dealt with it, the earthquake would have caused the virus canister to drop, explosion or no explosion . . .”
“So nothing I did made any difference.”
“Not to black people. But by preventing the explosion, you did save Harry Gant millions of dollars in skyscraper repairs.”
“And you finally killed Meisterbrau,” Kite added. “Don’t forget that.”
The bar overlooked a garden with a pool in which a gray shark’s fin circled contentedly. A man and a woman sat at a table beside the pool. The woman had a pageboy haircut and a flowing black cape; a gold dollar-sign pendant was pinned above her heart. The man had long curly hair, an impish grin, and a shirt sewn from pieces of an American flag; the top three buttons of the shirt were undone, revealing a furry chest and a peace symbol on a silver chain.
“Why is Abbie Hoffman sitting with Ayn?” Joan asked.
“Community service,” her mother said.
“Community service?”
“He was a suicide. Suicides get a billion hours of community service.”
“What service?”
“Psychological counseling. He’s been assigned to help her develop a sense of humor.”
“Lyndon Johnson and a rattlesnake are sitting on a fence,” Abbie Hoffman was saying. “And the rattlesnake turns to Lyndon, and says—”
“No,” Ayn Rand said.
“What?”
“Snakes cannot speak.”
“Well yeah, I know they can’t, but—”
“Also, it’s unlikely that a president of the United States would be allowed to endanger himself by sitting next to a poisonous reptile. Nor would a rational man choose to do such a thing—which is not to say that architects of the welfare state should be regarded as rational. But—”
“Yeah,” said Abbie, “but it’s a joke, see? It doesn’t have to make perfect sense, or at least the setup doesn’t. The fact that it’s a little absurd actually makes it funnier.” Ayn looked skeptical. “So OK,” Abbie continued. “Lyndon Johnson and a rattlesnake are sitting on a fence . . .”
“What kind of fence?”
Kite shook her head. “I’m glad my mortal wound wasn’t self-inflicted,” she said.
“Kite,” Joan wondered aloud, “how bad were you hit?”
“I’m here, and you have to ask?”
“Where were you hit, though? What exactly was the wound?”
“The bullet smashed a rib on my left side, put a groove in my lung, and chewed up my spleen. I bled a lot.”
“There was no spinal cord damage, though? Your heart wasn’t touched?”
“Unfortunately. That would have hurt less and been over quicker.”
Joan looked at her. “You can live without a spleen, you know. People have done it.”
“They have,” Kite agreed, “but I don’t seem to be one of those people.”
“But what I’m saying is, you could still stage a miraculous recovery. It’s not like your head was chopped off. . .”
“Hold on,” Sister Ellen Fine said. “What’s this about recovery?”
“We could go back,” Joan said. “Both of us, me and Kite. This doesn’t have to be the end. We could go back.”
“Joan. . . .” Her mother sighed. “You’re dead, Joan.”
“I could recover!”
“Your arm was bitten off. . .”
“People can survive losing an arm. Kite did.”
“Not without help,” Kite pointed out. “And I wasn’t trapped in a sub-basement.”
“Don’t worry about the sub-basement,” Joan said. “I’ll get out of the sub-basement.”
“How?” her mother asked.
“Well the earthquake probably shook the gates open. I didn’t notice it at the time, because I was so frantic, but—”
“What if it didn’t shake the gates open? What if it jammed them shut even tighter than before?”
“Then I’ll get out through the hole Meisterbrau made in the floor.”
“The shark’s carcass is still in the hole.”
“So I’ll move it.”
“With one arm?”
“Its insides have just been vaporized by a thermite charge. How much could it weigh?”
“Uh-huh. And if you do get out through the hole, then what? You’ll be back in the sewers. If you couldn’t climb up to a manhole before, how are you going to do it now?”
“I won’t bother with the manhole. I’ll circle around, come back into the sub-basement the same way I did the first time, and take the stairs.”
“No good,” Sister Ellen said. “You know that machinery they ripped out to make room for the dynamite? They used it to barricade the stairs. You’re blocked in.”
“Then I’ll use some of the dynamite to blast through the barricade. That should bring the cops down, too, so even if I can’t make it all the way to the lobby on my own, I’ll be rescued . . .”
“It’ll never work.”
“You don’t know that.”
“You’re in heaven, Joan. You’re dead.”
“Mom,” Joan said, “this is not heaven. Heaven, if it exists at all, is nothing like this . . .”
“Oh?”
“For one thing, if this is heaven, where are all the people who died in the Pandemic? Look around. Do you see a single African or African-American? Where are they?”
“Well it’s their paradise too, Joan. What makes you think they want to spend eternity in your presence?”
“This is not heaven, Mom. And since it isn’t, I must be hallucinating, and if I’m hallucinating, I’m still alive, probably tying on a tourniquet and babbling to myself.”
“But how do you know the dead can’t hallucinate?” Kite asked. “That’s a pretty bold assumption, isn’t it?”
“Don’t start,” Joan warned.
“All right,” Abbie Hoffman said. “Let’s try something a little simpler. ‘Knock, knock.’”
“I beg your pardon?” Ayn Rand said.
“Not ‘I beg your pardon.’ I say ‘Knock, knock,’ and you say, ‘Who’s there?’”
“But I already know who’s there. I can see you.”
“Yeah, but pretend you can’t see me. Just—”
“You want me to deny the eviden
ce of my senses?”
“No, see, the idea is—”
“Are you a communist?” Ayn asked suddenly. “Is that why you desecrate the American flag?”
“Joan!” Sister Ellen called. “Joan, sit down!”
“No!” Joan said. “Fuck it, Mom, I’ve got things I want to do yet. And I won’t have my last act be a screw up. I’m going back!”
“Joan—” But she was already storming for the exit, shoving aside a carpenter’s son who had just stepped out of the men’s room.
“Oh dear,” said Kite. And leaving her arm at the bar but remembering to take her cigarettes, she got up to follow.
Sewer
The lights of Manhattan were back on by Monday.
Harry Gant had described his city as having “the best engineering anchored in some of the toughest bedrock in the world,” and he was right, particularly about the bedrock; though some parts of the Tri-State Area had been devastated by the earthquake, Manhattan Island came through relatively unscathed. True, the eighty-two seconds of sustained vibration did reveal some engineering deficiencies. Many older buildings suffered structural damage, and a few especially poorly maintained structures failed entirely; a minute into the ’quake, the Brooklyn Bridge fell down. The temblor also pointed up some problems with the Island’s four-hundred-year-old infrastructure. Ruptured gas and water mains unleashed a plague of fire and flood in select neighborhoods; in one of the most horrifying incidents, exploding mains set all three towers of Trump’s Riverside Arcadia ablaze, and those residents who escaped the flames were attacked at street level by a wave of mutant Rattus norvegicus, driven up from underground by a rising tide of sewage.
So Public Works emergency response crews did have their hands full for a while. But by Monday morning, a sense of normalcy had begun to reassert itself. New York City had always been something of a disaster area, after all, and as the mayor reminded his surviving constituents during a rush-hour radio broadcast, hey, it could have been a hell of a lot worse: 7.1 on the Richter scale was nothing compared to the 8.5-magnitude Apocalypse predicted by certain pessimists. What’s more, it was shaping up to be a beautiful week, unseasonably warm and sunny, and all citizens were encouraged to enjoy the new vistas being created by the dynamiting of unstable buildings.
Around nine A.M., shortly after power was restored to the business district, Harry Gant decided to go for a walk, Like the Public Works Department, he’d been busy since the ’quake, working out of a temporary command post set up on the ground floor of the Phoenix. Over the weekend his sales force had fielded hundreds of calls from city and state agencies requesting Servants for use in the recovery effort; extra shifts had been ordered at Gant’s manufacturing plants to meet the demand. In what little spare time he had, Harry kept in touch with his parents, who—short of breath, but otherwise none the worse for their ordeal—were recuperating at the Times Square Hilton; he also spoke regularly with Vanna, who despite whiplash and a severe concussion insisted on managing all media coverage from her hospital bed. By Monday he was ready for a break, and after his mother called to remind him that it was his birthday, he decided to give himself the morning off. He told his staff he’d be gone for a few hours and stepped out onto 34th Street to greet the day.
It was nice out; a warm, gentle breeze was blowing, fresh off the East River but virtually odor free. And midtown was in fine shape, only a little more rubble strewn than usual. Granted, a huge sinkhole had opened on Fifth Avenue and swallowed two lanes of traffic, but that was hardly unprecedented, and Harry’s fellow New Yorkers—those who had not been crushed, burned, drowned, or eaten by rats—looked lively and purposeful as they hurried along to their various destinations.
Avoiding the sinkhole, Gant walked west towards the Hudson, following the same route Eddie Wilder had taken only a week previously. Just like Eddie, he paused at the corner of Broadway to rubberneck at the sights, one in particular: looking over his shoulder at the Phoenix, he was pleased to see that the Electric Billboards were back in action. But the featured advertisements had changed during the blackout; the giant’s day-calendar page that had so puzzled Eddie had been succeeded by an equally mysterious Eye, a solitary green Eye that gazed out watchfully over the city.
“Hmm,” said Harry Gant, not recognizing the logo, “I wonder what that means. . . .” But just then the quarter-hour struck, and the Billboard ads shifted clockwise around the skyscraper; the Eye was displaced by the Coca-Cola trademark. “Yeah,” Harry Gant said. “Good idea.”
He bought soda and a sandwich from a street vendor and stopped to browse at a newsstand. The Times contained mostly sober accounts of the ’quake aftermath, with the latest damage and casualty estimates; on the editorial page Lockheed Martin, makers of quality combat aircraft, offered their condolences to the suffering.
The New York Post was less restrained in its coverage. The early edition carried a banner headline:
STILL STANDING!
Below this were two photos of New Babel, one a long shot showing the whole Tower, the other a detail of the ziggurat’s highest construction platform, with a solitary figure silhouetted against the clouds, a man in a high place alone, undaunted. Harry recognized Vanna Domingo’s handiwork: the closeup shot was a stock publicity photo, taken over a year ago; Gant hadn’t had a chance to get up to Babel since the earthquake, though he’d heard reports of the goings-on there. So had the Post. A caption beneath the photos read:
Erratic android behavior linked to pre-quake magnetic fluctuations; Servants could be used as predictive devices, Gant spokeswoman speculates. [story, pg. 3]
“Nice save, Vanna,” Harry Gant said. “Now if we can just figure out what really happened . . .”
A sidebar promised other stories:
Mona Lisa recovered; looter fleeing National Guard
unit finds stolen masterpiece in former Harlem landmark.
(pg. 7)
•
Fed agent who escaped downed chopper is improving, docs say;
boss says hero Vogelsang will receive commendation, promotion.
(pg. 15)
•
Beached whale sicks up eyeless man in Rockaway;
irate Jonah taken to Bellevue after assaulting paramedic.
(pg. 19)
•
Philo Dufresne: Nazi lover?
Former Wiesenthal Center director weighs the evidence.
(editorial, pg. 24)
•
Disaster chronicler Peller feared slain by L.A. serial killer.
Corpse I.D. stymied by missing parts; cops need your help.
(color pics w/phone-in contest details, centerpage B)
Harry paid for the Post and continued his walk crosstown. Near Eleventh Avenue he caught sight of a woman in a green and white Department of Sewers uniform, which reminded him that he still hadn’t heard from Joan. He supposed, given the events of the past week, that he ought to be concerned for her safety, but something told him not to bother: Joan just wasn’t the type to die in an earthquake, and having seen her knock the stuffing out of a purse snatcher once, Harry could only pity the man—or the machine—that thought to get the better of her in a fight.
Besides which, the omens were all pointing in the other direction. On Thursday night, Joan’s friend Kite had succumbed to her wounds, slipping away while Gant and a semi-conscious Vanna tried to figure out how to transport her down two hundred flights of stairs. Eventually they found a way to lower the window washer’s platform without power—an open-air thrill ride Harry hoped never to repeat—but by the time they reached the sidewalk and flagged down an ambulance, it was much too late; Kite was pronounced dead at the scene. But then on Friday word had come from the city morgue that her body had disappeared. They must’ve just misplaced it, Harry thought at first. Place must be a zoo with all the ’quake casualties. But when Vanna sent an assistant to check on the matter personally, it turned out Kite hadn’t been misplaced: she’d gotten up and walked out. The medical examin
er had returned from a doughnut run to find an empty slab and a discarded toe tag; bloody footprints tracked from the cold storage room across the hall to the forensics lab (where matches were kept), and from there to an exit stairwell.
So if that sort of thing was going on, Harry wasn’t going to waste his time worrying about Joan; he just wished she’d call.
He was at the extreme west end of 34th Street now, at the docks. Like the East River, the Hudson smelled pretty good today; a lot of upstate mills and factories had been shut down for repairs, and even the city’s sewer outflows had slacked off now that the water mains were being fixed. Looking around for a place to have his breakfast, Gant spotted a quaint wooden pier jutting out from the shoreline. He walked out to the end of it and sat down, dangling his legs over the river; he spread out his paper, opened up his Coke, and took a bite of his sandwich.
He was about to take a second bite when he noticed the alligator. Packing crates and other shipping debris had been abandoned along the pier; a couple of arm-lengths from where Harry was sitting, a steel drum lay on its side, its open end facing him. He’d assumed it was empty, but now the sound of raspy breathing drew his attention, and he saw that there was a little albino reptile curled up inside, looking out at him.
“Huh,” Harry Gant said. “Huh.” The alligator shifted position slightly; morning sunlight fell across the tip of its snout, highlighting its pale skin. Alligator manhattoe, Harry thought, hearing his father’s voice in his head. Alligator manhattoe, the legendary Manhattan sewer gator, believed by many scholars to be extinct, or to never have existed at all. But Jerry Gant knew better—and now, so did Harry.
“You like tunafish?” he asked uncertainly. The alligator’s head came up, and a sixth sense warned Harry to get the sandwich out of his hand. He tossed it underhand, like a softball. The gator scooted forward with amazing speed; Gant had a brief glimpse of jaw muscles and teeth, and then the sandwich was gone. It had never touched the ground.
“Huh,” Harry said. The alligator was right beside him now, sniffing at his thigh and at the edges of the paper in his lap; he was suddenly glad he hadn’t bought a copy of the edible Long Distance Call. “Easy now,” he said, as the alligator nuzzled his trousers. “Easy, little guy. . . .” The gator’s head came up again, and Gant froze, arms in the air. But the gator didn’t bite him; it just shuffled forward a couple more feet and rested its long chin across his knees.
