The Stone War

by Madeleine E. Robins

  He did not see the fall begin. A blur of motion caught his eye; then he heard the screams. For a moment long enough to see that the window washers were still in their windows, looking down, horror-stricken, he did not realize who had fallen or from where.

  Near the roof, the scaffold dangled in two useless pieces, snapped in half. Gellis swung from one half, his leg tangled in one of the ropes, holding on with both hands, screaming for help. Jimmy Weeks stood dumbly at the roof’s edge for a moment before he began to pull on the rope, trying to raise Gellis up. Ketch had fallen.

  Tietjen ran with everyone else, the people in the garden, his own raiding party. He pushed his way through the crowd to where Li lay, broken and somehow still alive. She’d taken the impact feet first; her legs were shattered, bits of bone splintered through the skin. Maybe her back was broken too, he thought. Her eyes were open and she recognized him.

  “Ahh, shit,” she wept. “Ahh, shit, John.”

  He was afraid to gather her up in an embrace that might have comforted her, afraid of hurting her further. Instead he lay beside her, stroked her hair from her forehead, murmuring “Shhh, shhhh,” as he might have to a sick child.

  “Damn, I can’t even feel my feet,” she said. “I must be pretty fucked up.” She smiled and winced and smiled again, pure bravado.

  “Shhh, Li. Don’t talk. We’re going to bring you inside and get you all fixed up—” he began. But it was useless, she knew too much. The look Ketch gave him made it possible for him to go on. Internal injuries, dozens of fractures, probably. Even a hospital might not be able to fix her; what the hell could he and Barbara do?

  “Miz McGrath’s gonna be deeply pissed,” Li said, echoing his thoughts. “Damn, I kinda wish it hurt a little. This is sort of scary, you know?” Her voice was filled with liquid trills, as if she were drowning from the inside out. It took Tietjen a moment to realize that maybe she was.

  “Lie still,” he said, sick. As he said it he had a flash of Li in his bed, moving beneath him, her dark eyes looking up at him as they did now, asking for something from him. How simple had it been to give her pleasure? It was impossible to help her now.

  Her breathing became more liquid. The only other thing she said was “You know, John.” Then she worked at breathing for a little while longer. Someone had brought a blanket to cover her legs and fend off chill in the relentless afternoon heat; she smiled gratefully but said nothing.

  Powerless, horrified, Tietjen lay there stroking her hair and murmuring stupid, comforting noises, past the time when Ketch’s liquid breathing had stopped.

  “John.” It was Barbara, just behind him. “John, get up now and let us take care of her.”

  Numbly he stood up and let someone take him away. Gellis, rescued from the scaffolding, came forward to explain, but Tietjen waved him away; what the hell did it matter?

  “It just melted out from under us,” he heard Gellis saying. “Solid as a fucking rock, then gone.” Tietjen heard the horror in the other man’s voice, and remembered that perhaps he had loved Li too.

  “Not your fault,” he mumbled, then turned away and blindly made his way into the Store, upstairs to his own room where he could be alone. He did not think of leading, of the Store, of what anyone would think.

  He sat on the edge of the bed he and Ketch had shared and sent a thought, a prayer out, not really believing anything would answer. “What the hell do you want from me?”

  Of course there was no answer. The silence rang like laughter in his head.

  4

  TIETJEN went up to his room that night after dinner and the quick memorial service that Lo-yi and Barbara had staged. He lay on his bed for hours, staring at the ceiling. He was unable to stop the slow replay of Ketch’s fall from the scaffolding and the way she had slipped away from him, sliding into death. In memory he traced the tear that had rolled from the inside corner of her eye, down the side of her nose, moistening her lips, cutting through the powdering of grime. He could still feel her broken weight imprinted on the muscles of his arms.

  Even in the dark, sounds, voices mostly, filtered in from the hallway, up from the alleyway. Every now and then Tietjen heard footsteps near his doorway, voices speaking low. The second time it happened he realized that McGrath had stationed herself outside his door, turning the well-wishers away. Taking care of everything as usual. Taking care of him. Thank you, Barbara. Now and then Tietjen thought he should go out to the hallway and tell her he was all right, she could go to her own room and get some sleep. But it was comforting to have her there, so much so that he could not make himself send her away.

  The apartment was still and hot. He moved slightly to unstick the sheets from his back and legs. Tietjen did not want to sleep and dream of Ketch. Remembering was bad enough. When he closed his eyes he listened for sounds he had not heard in months; the rattle of cars and buses on the avenue, the faint sizzle of the streetlamp outside his window. All he heard was Barbara outside his door, murmuring that he shouldn’t be disturbed tonight.

  When he drifted to sleep at last, he did not dream of Ketch but of his sons. He knew at once it was not a true dream, as the ones about Irene, and his mother, and about the boys during the disaster had been. In this dream he was walking through the zoo in Central Park, the way he remembered it from his boyhood, bright, safe, well maintained. The zoo was empty of people. Tietjen wandered around, spent some time watching the polar bears and the penguins, before he moved on to the next exhibit. It was an old-fashioned iron cage; on the other side of the bars Chris and Davy stood, staring blankly past Tietjen. He called their names but they didn’t respond, just held on to the bars of their cage and ignored him. When he reached for them through the bars the boys shied away. Tietjen looked around him for someone to help, but there was no one. He climbed over the guardrail and reached again into the cage. The boys looked at him anxiously for a moment; it was only when they turned and ran that Tietjen realized the cage had no back wall and that his sons had run away into the Park, into the city, where he would never find them. He was left clutching the bars, watching the boys as they ran, watching long after they had vanished into the green of the Park, trapped behind the bars and unable to run himself.

  In the morning he rose and dressed and went downstairs for breakfast at the same time as always. He felt people watching him, but no one said anything. It irritated him, being watched that way. He felt as if they were waiting for him to go crazy. They should know by now, Tietjen thought. After everything they’d been through they should know he wouldn’t blow up.

  Barbara came and sat down beside him. She smiled matter-of-factly, but Tietjen suspected that she was watching him too. They ate in silence for a few minutes, as long as Tietjen could bear it. Finally he put down his fork and turned to her.

  “What?” he asked.

  A corner of Barbara’s mouth turned up. “Nothing particular. How are you doing?”

  “I’m not rabid. I wish people would stop looking at me as if I were a bomb about to go off.”

  Barbara kept her eyes on her plate, where she was tracing patterns in her grits with the tines of her fork. “I don’t think ‘bomb’ is what people are thinking, John. Give us some credit—we’re concerned about you.”

  Sullenly, Tietjen looked down at his own plate. “I’m okay, all right? You don’t have to watch me. I’m not going to start screaming or anything.”

  “Why not? Aside from the therapeutic benefits, it’d let people around you know that you’re human.”

  “Human!” He felt like his head would explode. “I’m just the same as always. I got some sleep, I’m eating something … like a normal person.”

  “John.” She put her hand on his forearm firmly. His mother used to hold him just that way, keeping him still until he could think things through. “It’s not like always. Ketch died yesterday, in your arms. Did you think no one knew that the two of you were involved? Do you think no one cares about your grief? Everyone is watching you—and Marty Gellis—
and no one expects you to act like everything’s all right. Lighten up, okay? People need to worry a little.”

  Tietjen looked at the hand on his arm, losing himself for a moment in tracing the veins on the back of it, noting Barbara’s long fingers, the dull jade of the ring she wore. In the green of the stone he remembered his dream, his sons running from him while he stood behind bars watching, always watching. Lighten up. “Okay,” he said at last.

  He wasn’t sure what he was promising when he said it, and he suspected that Barbara knew that. Still, she released his arm. After a moment they began to talk about the water tanks on the buildings across the street.

  Tietjen moved through the haze of sympathy that surrounded him for a few days, working hard to accept graciously the smiles and pats, the questions and murmured condolences. The first time he and Marty Gellis ate dinner at the same table there was an awkward hush; Tietjen thought the people watching them were waiting to see if their bereavements consumed each other or struck sparks. After a few minutes Tietjen asked Gellis a question, Gellis answered, they spoke for a few minutes between mouthsful. The electricity in the air dissipated quickly then: no sparks at all.

  Tietjen worked until he could only stagger upstairs to sleep. When he was working and around other people, he didn’t think too much or too long about Ketch’s death, or Irene’s or Chris’s and Davy’s, or about Bobby’s fractured arm and leg. Once he opened a door to such thoughts, every passing notion or memory led back to death or disaster. When he was overwhelmed this way the only thing Tietjen could do was blink and breathe hard and hope the thoughts would go away. If he looked into the tarry blackness too long, he was afraid he would never escape.

  Despite his exhaustion there were still some nights he could not sleep. It was not just missing Ketch; she’d been gone from his room and his bed for a while before her death. But Tietjen was lonely. It seemed to him that the more established the community he had founded became, the further away from it he grew. What was it that was drawing him away? The darkness he knew was still out there, that no one wanted to hear about. Was he the only one who saw the blackness? Was he the only one there who knew that the city was not done with them? When the loneliness got bad Tietjen would climb upstairs to look out at the city, but more and more that was not a hiding place either.

  One evening McGrath found him sitting on the stair between the sixth and seventh floors, slumped back so the risers cut into his shoulder blades. The stairwell was bathed in moonlight, which threw Art Deco shadows against the walls; Barbara’s hair and skin took on the silvery blue of the light and made her look carved out of marble or silver. She sat down on a lower stair and for a little while they were quiet and the loneliness in Tietjen subsided a bit.

  Finally, Barbara murmured, “Why is moonlight supposed to be romantic? It always looks creepy to me.”

  Tietjen smiled. “Me too. Makes you look like the ice lady.”

  “I’m not,” Barbara said, too quickly and too coldly. Then she leaned back again and said more easily, “You look wrung out.”

  “In the moonlight?”

  She shook her head. “For a while now you’ve been looking bad, John. It’s not just Ketch’s death; you’ve been in trouble for weeks now. What’s going on?”

  He wanted to say, and believe, that it was nothing. “I don’t know. It’s nerves, my imagination, something like that. Only a feeling …” It sounded so insubstantial Tietjen did not want to go on.

  “Feelings count,” Barbara prodded dryly. “I’ll trade you a feeling. Sometimes I get a sense that I’m being watched.” She threw the words out with an elaborate casualness which was not at all casual. “No, not watched. Like someone was eavesdropping.” She laughed. “It’s a little weird.”

  It was Tietjen’s turn to shake his head. “Not that weird, Barbara. I feel that way sometimes, too. And worse.”

  “Worse?” She leaned back farther and tilted her head toward him so that her hair drooped over one eye. There was some old film actress, Tietjen remembered; from the black-and-white era, someone famous for the hair that fell in her eyes. Barbara looked unaccountably seductive in that pose; it made him uncomfortable. He shook his head and concentrated on trying to make his thoughts clear.

  “I’ve been having dreams for weeks—since right after we fought the monsters at Grand Central. Dreams about Irene and the kids and my mother, about how each of them died. What’s weird is that I know they’re true.”

  Barbara turned. “How horrible.” Her face was right side up now, the hair out of her eye. She looked herself, and worried. “But how can you know they’re real, John?”

  “The same way we knew that Grand Central was where we’d find Gable and his people. That kind of knowing. Irene was trampled to death in a stairwell at Macy’s. The boys were in the babysitting room in their building and a fire broke out, and they hid in the bathroom and—just passed out, waiting for Mommy and Daddy to come save them.” Tietjen couldn’t control his voice, which was shaking and wet. “My mother—how the hell would it know about my mother, she died six years ago. Cancer. She was so brave, we all thought she was so brave … and in the end she died hating us. God, the way she hated everyone who was living, the nurses, the doctors. Me. Especially me. And she kept smiling and smiling until there was nothing left of her but the drugs, and the drugs told us everything she’d hidden from us.”

  The shaking in his voice got too bad for him to continue. Tietjen hung his head and waited for it to stop. Without words, Barbara moved from the step she had been sitting on and sat next to him, gathering him into her arms as unself-consciously as if he had been five years old. “Shhh,” she murmured. “How horrible, shhh. It’s okay, it’s okay.” Sweet, meaningless sounds that gave him time to recover. She rocked him, with his head against her shoulder, stroking the hair away from his forehead. Tietjen listened to the strong beat of her heart under his cheek.

  “It’s not just the dreams,” he said at last. “Whatever is watching us hates. I don’t know if it’s me or the Store or—I can’t help feeling that all the shit that’s been happening, Bobby’s leg breaking and Sandy’s hand, and Ketch—”

  Barbara pushed him away from her. “Don’t say they’re your fault, John. The Store doesn’t need that kind of self-aggrandizing guilt crapping up the works, do you hear?” She looked stern, not angry, but there had been real force in her hands as she held him away from her.

  Tietjen sighed. “It’s just, they all feel related. Like whatever killed Ketch sent my dreams.”

  “Look.” Barbara settled next to him again, her hand loose around his arm. “Maybe what happened to Ketch was bad luck. Maybe what happened to Bobby and Sandy was back luck or some freak of nature we don’t know anything about. Maybe all the shit we’ve been through in the last six, seven months has loosened up a lot of repressed guilt in you, and that’s why the bad dreams. Maybe we only think we’re being listened to because this is a big city and we’re not used to it being so quiet. Maybe, huh?”

  For a few moments her words hung in the air of the stairwell, shimmering in the moonlight. At last Tietjen sighed and put his arm around Barbara, leaning his head against the top of her head. Her curling white hair tickled at his chin and nose, but he didn’t move. “Yeah, maybe,” he said. “Barbara, of all the things that have happened in the city since I got back, finding you was definitely the best.” He kissed the top of her head quickly, then released her and stood up. “It’s going to be another hot day tomorrow. We should try to sleep.”

  Barbara nodded, but did not rise. “You go ahead down. I’ll follow in a couple. I want to enjoy the moonlight.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. You afraid I’m going to run into trouble between here and the second floor?”

  Tietjen smiled. “You’re too tough for trouble. I’ll see you in the morning.” He turned and went down the stairs, feeling her eyes on him as he went, a comfortable sense of being watched.

  Through the Old Woma
n’s eyes, Jit watched the Man go downstairs. The woman was filled with an excitement Jit did not understand, something about the cuddling and the words that had been spoken. What Jit understood from the words was that the Man had begun to acknowledge Jit’s power. The Old Woman had tried to turn Tee-jin away from it, but the Man knew.

  Jit lay under a tree near the old zoo on the east side of the Park. He was curled up on a pile of blankets, a circle of candles burning around him. He liked the Man’s pain, he wanted more of it. When he left the Old Woman he began to surf the currents of the night, collecting dreams, searching out hopes and fears, looking for new ways to hurt the Man. There was a dark rainbow of feeling in the night air, but in the end he came back to the Old Woman. Tee-jin liked her. If he hurt her that would hurt the Man. But she had given Jit the coat; he did not want to kill her. And there was something about her dreams—she dreamt often of the Man, and when she woke she was always uneasy. Afraid the Man would find out.

  Jit reached out to her again. She had left the stairs and gone to her own room to go to bed. In the dark she took off her clothes and wiped a wet cloth across her back and neck, down around her breasts, the length of her thighs; Jit could feel the relief of breeze against her damp skin. Then she lay down on her bed and closed her eyes, remembering over and over the embrace in the stairwell, the Man’s words, his kiss on her head where she still felt it. As if she had been hit, Jit thought. But there was no pain. He stayed with her into sleep and when she was quiet he whispered a name to her sleeping mind: Tee-jin.

  Her breathing sped up. He said again, “Tee-jin.” Then, remembering the name she used for the Man: “John. John.” She took a sharp inward breath and Jit felt a spread of warmth across her chest that had nothing to do with the sultry weather. Her nipples tightened—Jit’s own contracted and he stirred uncomfortably on his pile of blankets—and she crossed one arm over her chest.