Jit looked through the Man’s eyes; he was watching the city, looking out over the Park toward the Hudson and the cold distant sparkle of New Jersey. What the Man felt was a patchwork of longings and regrets and triumph: too rich a combination for Jit to understand. The boy stood spread-eagled against the mesh fence staring up at Tietjen’s building, wondering when he would see the Man again.
The word came to him: father. Gable was wrong, Tee-jin was the father. The word made Jit feel warm, as if he’d wrapped himself in blankets. It made him feel like smiling, and he had a shadowy memory of father that was warm and embracing, although he wasn’t sure the memory was really his own.
Jit wondered what he could bring to the Man, what gifts. To make him understand how they were connected, tell him the fight was their battle together. I was there with you, even when you did not know it. How to make the Man love him. How to keep for himself a small corner of the warmth the Man felt for the city, for the old woman and the young one and the people in the house.
Father, he thought again, but, overcome by shyness, he did not send the word into the night.
Jit slid down to sit at the bottom of the mesh fence, staring upward.
Now it begins, Jit heard the thoughts as clearly as if Tietjen had spoken them. Sweep the city clean, make it thrive. When they come, the outside, when they finally come back, they’ll find us rebuilding, keeping the city going. Now we can build. We can make it better, we’ve got good people here. And maybe, when they come—for a moment Tietjen’s eyes reflected the starlight with a kind of clean, holy anger. Maybe then we’ll find out what struck the city down and created Gable and those things. That’s what we need to purge from the city. When we find it we can make it pay. Destroy it.
The Man’s rage was a fine, clean thing. It burnt in him as bright and uncivilized as the fires Gable’s people had let burn through the night. It rooted him in the stone and glass and brick of the city. Destroy the thing that had broken the city. Someday …
Jit felt the Man relax against the sill again, relax into the fullness of his exhaustion, his victory, his triumph, and let the rainwashed cool of the city air fan around him and smiled. And Jit, hidden in the darkness inside the Park wall, pulled away from the man, had taken the Man’s rage with him, stung with it, filled with its poison. Jit spat a single word into the night. Father. Sour as spoilt milk.
Jit helped you! he railed. Jit helped you, you don’t know, Jit sent the angel, Jit save you. You hate? he asked. You hate me? You don’t know!
The boy pushed backward from the fence, away from Tietjen and his people, shrinking into the darkness as if the dark could swallow hurt. Hate me! He began to grizzle: Hate me!
The words sang in Jit’s head, echoed, rattled against the pain. He could see nothing of a man above him in an unlighted window. The air was black with hatred. You hate me!
Hate you.
In the night air, two thoughts, the same and wholly different, met and twined together: Now it begins.
PART THREE
1
IT was a hot day without any breeze at all. Jit sat under a broad-branched tree, feeling the coarse bark prickling through his shirt, and listened, watching the sun move in and out of the clouds, listening to the Man and his people. They were happy. The happiness made Jit sick. He wanted to slap and pummel and kick until he’d beaten the Man’s face out of his own mind. Happy. You happy now? he asked the Man. Jit spat at the squirrel that sat nearby, transfixed and silent. The sun moved out from behind the clouds again, and its hot silvery light gleamed on the edges of the squirrel’s fur; Jit could see its heart beating. He reached with his mind, not very far at all, and squeezed that furiously beating heart until it burst and stopped and the squirrel lay like a rag in the dust.
Nothing okay, Tee-jin.
But what was he going to do? How was he going to let the Man know how badly he had failed him?
Tell him a story. Tell him stories and dreams, steal away his sleep … Jit had lots of stories, lots of dreams, all the stories in the world had come rushing through him when the bad thing happened. Let him hear what happened till he can’t go away from it and it put him in a little little box, and then he know what Jit can do. Let him hear the stories no one was telling, the ones no one was alive to hear. Make him hurt. Like Jit.
In the wake of the victory things began to return to what Tietjen called normal. One afternoon, as he helped shift furniture in one of the large third-floor apartments that they planned to make into a dormitory, Tietjen began to laugh. The man carrying the other end of the breakfront gingerly lowered it to the ground and looked at him.
“You okay? he asked. The man had come to the Store in the weeks just before the final battle with the monsters; Tietjen had been told his name but couldn’t remember it, and didn’t know how to ask without seeming rude. He did have a memory of seeing the guy with Ketch’s team at Grand Central, swinging at one of the monsters with an aluminum baseball bat. Now the man swiped a trickle of sweat from between his sandy eyebrows and cocked his head, waiting.
“Back to normal,” Tietjen gasped between laughs.
“Yuh,” the guy prodded. “So?”
Tietjen sat down, still laughing weakly. “What’s so normal about this?”
After a moment the man sat down too. “I see your point.” He did not laugh, but managed a lopsided grin.
Summer heat had arrived; most days the skies were clearer than Tietjen could ever remember them being, faultlessly blue, without clouds to break the glare of sunlight, without city exhaust and smoke, without rain. Barbara sent a few of the teens scavenging for sun-stop, and no one went out unless they were liberally daubed with the stuff and carrying safe water. On one particularly brutal day Tietjen declared a holiday, told everyone to stay inside in the shade. Bobby Fratelone had rigged a hose from one of the water tanks atop a neighboring building, and had flooded the basement next door, creating a wading pool where adults and kids alike sat. Tietjen had protested at the waste of potable water, but Barbara convinced him the morale boost was worth it.
The aching heat of that day finally settled, and in the early evening a light breeze began to play through the Store. Tietjen took a plate from Elena’s kitchen, piled stew and a lump of bread on it, and took it with him to sit in one of the back windows, thinking of work he could accomplish in the evening cool. Downstairs in the alley kids were playing: Greg and the three other boys at one end ricocheting a ball from sidewall to sidewall, the little girls sitting in a circle at the other end. Kathy Calvino sat, as always, on a box, with her sisters on either side. DeeDee sat in front of Missy Hochman, who was braiding the littler girl’s hair.
“Tell a story,” Tietjen heard DeeDee say. He remembered the tone: “Tell that one.” “What’s the boy saying to the monster?” “Daddy, read it again.”
“What story?” Missy asked patiently. From where he sat Tietjen could see her fingers gently working tangles out of DeeDee’s fine red hair.
“A DeeDee story.”
The Calvino girls nodded and made a chattering of indecipherable speech, apparent assent.
“Okay. Then listen.” Missy did not look up from her work, but gathered them in, even Tietjen, with the slow, rhythmic tones of a true storyteller. “Once upon a time there was before, when everyone lived with their Moms and Dads—”
“And their brothers,” DeeDee interrupted.
When Missy repeated, “And their brothers,” Tietjen realized how many times she had told this tale before.
“And their brothers and sisters, and no one got hurt and no one got sick, and all the houses looked like houses—”
“And there wasn’t any bad people that tried to hurt you.”
“DeeDee.” Missy sounded exasperated. “I’m telling the story, okay?” The littler girl nodded, then leaned her head on her fist to listen. Tietjen found himself listening too.
Missy continued. “And everything was just the way—” DeeDee murmured something. Missy cocked her head to l
isten, then nodded. “Everything was just the way it was supposed to be,” Missy continued, “even when kids didn’t live in houses or apartments. It was okay before, right?” She looked at her audience and one by one Karen and Colleen and Kathy Calvino nodded; DeeDee dropped her head back to look at Missy, and nodded too.
Listening as Missy built the tale, Tietjen realized that it was DeeDee’s story, literally, that this was her story. She had lived with her mother and her father and her brother Mickey, in a lean-to outside of one of the huge old apartment blocks on the west side, one with a courtyard, heavily guarded so that little girls could not play there. “They never let you inside,” she repeated twice at that part of the story, the grief still hot in her voice. “And there was trees in there.”
Her Daddy worked in an office building somewhere, doing something. Mama didn’t work because Mama was sick, or sort of sick, all the time. DeeDee took care of Mama: that was her special job. After school she went home, no stopping to play, to make sure Mama was okay, to rub her feet or brush her long dark hair because Mama said that made her feel better. Mickey did the shopping because DeeDee was too little, although DeeDee knew she could do a better job than Mickey because she remembered more about what Mama liked than he did. DeeDee was learning to cook, Mama was telling her how, because it made Mama feel dizzy to cook these days, and DeeDee was so smart; Mama said so.
When DeeDee’s father came home, Mama would be brave, and would finish the cooking and give them their dinner and ask brightly about Daddy’s day at the office, and Mickey’s school and DeeDee’s school, and Daddy would ask what Mama had done that day and Mama would look very sad and say that she would really try tomorrow, but she’d felt so weak today … .
“Daddy din’t understand Mama,” DeeDee said, twice, coaching Missy. “DeeDee’s daddy didn’t understand her mommy,” Missy repeated, then went on.
The Day It Happened—Missy put the words in italics—DeeDee had been on her way home from school. She stopped for a few minutes to look in at the trees through the security grating and the ornamental fence of the Bessborough—that was the apartment block’s name. Then she went on home, although Kai Chanadar was playing jacks and wanted her to play too. Mama was sleeping; she had that sweet, powerful smell she sometimes had in the afternoon, a smoky sweet smell that clung to her fingers and hair, and she slept deeply. DeeDee sat down beside her on the mat, waiting for Mama to wake up.
The first thing was earthquakes,” Missy Hochman said.
“No! The first thing was the angry monkey-man running up and down the street yelling at everyone.”
“DeeDee, there wasn’t a monkey yelling at people,” Missy said.
“There was. I saw him. It was a monkey-man, and he ran up and down the street and called people names, really bad words, and he bit Kai, too, but he didn’t get me because I stayed in with Mama. And he was the first thing. Tell about the monkey-man.”
With a sigh, Missy told about a monkey-man which had run down the street terrorizing the children, teeth bared, snapping and chattering. Tietjen wondered what that had been: a chimp escaped from the zoo or a pet store? Or some real, awful, thing made by the disaster the same way Gable’s people had been. He didn’t know.
Missy went on to the earthquakes. “The ground shook up and down and Mama and me got shaked around in the lean-to, but Mama was so asleep she din’t wake up even when a piece of the lean-to fell down.”
“DeeDee was scared,” Missy said.
“I was very scared,” DeeDee corrected.
“But she stayed with her mommy because her mommy was sleeping, and that was her job.”
Listening, Tietjen pictured the child and her mother—drugged senseless, probably—thrown around their shack, buried in their own possessions, their cookstove upsetting and catching fire, the fire extinguished when part of the roof fell in on them. Through it all, DeeDee pulling on her mother’s arm and crying “Mama, get up, Mama, please—” What was odd was that those weren’t the words Missy Hochman was saying, although her bare-bones telling matched his inward vision. More of the strange in-tunedness which had struck the night they plotted the attack on Grand Central, he thought gratefully. More of the city becoming interpreter, intercessory.
“DeeDee cried, and pulled on her mommy’s hands and tried to wake her up, but her mommy wouldn’t wake up. Then there was water—”
“She woun’t wake up, and there was water that come in the lean-to and got higher and higher and higher, and—”
“Then the water went away again, only there was a lot of mud that got all over DeeDee and her mommy, and—”
The flood that followed the fire and the earthquakes—Jesus, the poor kid had been hit by everything—had receded quickly, but had left a deep pocket of foul-smelling black silt around and in the lean-to, so that DeeDee’s mother, still unconscious, had been mostly buried, and DeeDee herself had been coated in the stuff. Still she sat beside her mother (What had the woman been smoking, Tietjen wondered. What would have knocked her so profoundly out for so long?), pulling on her hands, saying, “Mama, you got to wake up now.” Hours after the disasters began, DeeDee had heard a noise that scared her. In Missy’s telling, that was the whole of it, but for DeeDee, Tietjen knew, it had been more than frightening. She had heard something so terrifying that, exhausted as she was, frightened as she was, she found a new kind of strength and got to her feet, crouched in the ruin of the lean-to, and pulled on her mother’s arm, trying to pull her out of the lean-to, to get somewhere safe.
“DeeDee pulled really hard, but she couldn’t do it, and her Mama was asleep and couldn’t help her, and finally DeeDee got tired and she fell asleep.” Missy added quickly, “But she didn’t mean to.”
“I didn’t mean to,” DeeDee repeated softly.
Jesus, didn’t mean to: a five-year-old child punishing herself because she’d fainted, hungry and exhausted and scared out of her wits. And when she came to again her mother was dead.
“And DeeDee’s hands had got funny, like they are now.” Looking down, Tietjen watched DeeDee raise her hands and look at them, as if for the first time: black pincers, hard-shelled, like lobster claws, suited for grabbing and holding, so that DeeDee would never fail to grab what she needed again. What a sick fucking joke, he thought.
When DeeDee’s father and brother finally found her the change had already happened, and her mother was already dead. The father had tried for more than a day to get back to his home; Tietjen shied away from imagining the familiar despair and rage the man must have felt. Mickey had run, just run, away from the block and his school and his sister, and only returned a day later to find his father waiting for him, his baby sister asleep, covered in dried mud like a cocoon, his mother dead, the mud filling her mouth. He never told DeeDee or their father where he had been.
“Then her daddy said he’d take care of her and Mickey—” Missy began. Again DeeDee interrupted, muttering low. Missy said, “No, her daddy said it wasn’t her fault. So they found a real house to live in, and DeeDee’s daddy went hunting and took Mickey with him so he could learn how to hunt for food, and DeeDee stayed home to watch things.”
How small a change this was for the girl from her old life: stay home and watch Mama, stay home and watch the things that her father managed to pull out of stores and the rubble of other people’s lives. Probably the father hadn’t even meant it when he told DeeDee she was in charge of watching things. Probably it never occurred to him that she would take him seriously, that if anyone had come to take their stuff, DeeDee would have died defending it. Just null sounds, the sort of meaningless noises people make at children.
He had brought them down to Midtown, to one of the fancy old brownstones in the East Fifties, so that his kids should have somewhere nice to live. For DeeDee’s father the disaster was a chance to prove himself, a chance to even the score with all the people who had more than he did, a chance (Tietjen thought) to lose the suffocating burden of an addict wife. He and Mickey hunted and forag
ed, practiced fighting; it was like Adventureland for them. But DeeDee had always been her mother’s child; he really didn’t know what to do with her, except encourage her offers of help, let her feel she was helping.
For a few weeks, they managed. Sometimes one of the family heard a voice, saw a figure vanish around a corner, a skirl of dust in the street outside their window. DeeDee stayed in the big house all day, wandering from dim room to dim room, barefoot, afraid to walk on the white carpets in her shoes, reluctant to sit on the stiff, uncomfortable chairs in the downstairs rooms. She liked the littler rooms on the upper floors; it was from one of those windows that she saw monsters in the street one day, pointing to the house. She was afraid they would come and try to take the things Daddy had left in her care, but they never did. Daddy, when she told him about the monsters, shook his head and told her there were no such things.
Daddy decided to take DeeDee with him one morning. They were going to find a drugstore, and Daddy wanted her to help carry. That made her feel good: DeeDee didn’t like the new house, though she never told Daddy so.
They had gone a few blocks, Daddy walking briskly, Mickey keeping up with him, DeeDee falling behind, her slender legs too short to match their strides, when the first of the monsters came out from behind a crashed car. Then another, and another.
Daddy had raised the gun he carried and waved it at them.
The Stone War Page 26
