“I need a hand,” Tietjen called, and she darted down the stairs again, to his side. “Grab there,” he said, pointing at one end of a segment of the apatosaurus’s neck. Barbara bent, and the two of them struggled to lift the thing.
“I can’t,” she sputtered. “I can’t.”
“We have to,” he said. “Come on.”
Tietjen closed his eyes and focused on drawing strength from the ground under him. A lifetime ago he had breathed in the air of the city, filtered through the breath and sweat and dreams of millions of other people, and believed that that air was his strength. Now he closed his eyes and felt the rock of the city, the concrete beneath him, felt himself rooted into bedrock, and drew on that strength until he felt it flood him. “Come on,” he said again, and heaved.
The stone came up in his hands, balanced against Barbara’s bracing arms. He turned and swung the long narrow stone, heaving it once, twice, a third time before he let it sail in an arc toward the stegosaurus. It landed on the dinosaur’s eye ridge, shattering the head.
“My God,” Barbara breathed. “What did you do?”
Tietjen shook his head. “I don’t know, exactly. I asked for help, and I got it.”
The stegosaurus stood, frozen. Behind it, the third dinosaur, the tyrannosaurus, watched, its head bobbing slightly. Farther back, the ranks of stone animals watched too, unmoving, waiting to see what would happen next.
Tietjen moved his feet, just to see if he could. The connection, the rootedness into stone had seemed so real. The sun overhead cast strange shadows—of the thorn vines, of the dinosaurs. Tietjen’s own shadow seemed too large and broad to be his.
“John?” Barbara stood beside him. “Is it over?”
“Wait,” he said. The last dinosaur still waited for him, and the animals, and he had to make them stop. For a few moments before he had been a part of the stone; maybe he could use that. His back hurt, and his legs, and he didn’t want to fight any more. “Wait for a second. I need to try something.”
Tietjen planted his feet firmly on the granite of the steps, imagining roots that shot down through the blocks of stone, through the sidewalk and subway tunnels and into the bedrock that underlay the city. As he made the connection he imagined flowing through it, not drawing from it this time but sending out a message, a command. Stop. Be what you are. Be stone, washed by rain, worn by sun and breeze, smoothed by human bands. Be what you are. Be stone, worn and broken, glittering in the hot sun. Be stone. Like me. When he opened his eyes there was stillness, and Tietjen knew that he had been heard.
“What did you do?” Barbara asked again.
“I asked them to stop,” he said quietly. “This isn’t their fight. I told them to be stone.”
Barbara blinked. “Is that all? You couldn’t have said so an hour ago?”
He shook his head. “An hour ago I didn’t know I was stone too.”
They sat down together, close but not touching each other, grimy with sweat and stone dust. Tietjen felt tired with the kind of pitiless melting exhaustion that felt eternal, as if he had always been this tired and would always be this tired. “So now what?”
Barbara shook her head. “I don’t know.” Her face was paper-white and there were deep gray patches under her eyes. “John, can’t we just go home? I don’t want to fight any more. If I have to, I will, but—” Her voice went high and much softer. “I don’t want him taking me again. I couldn’t bear that again, it’s like being trapped at the bottom of a well, doing things—” A quick sidelong look at Tietjen. “It’s like being crazy and knowing you’re crazy, not being able to help it. I couldn’t. I’m sorry, John.”
He wondered if she would let him put his arm around her and hold her. Tentatively he reached out and took her hand. She did not flinch or pull away. “I wouldn’t ask it of you, Barbara. It’s me he wants.”
“How do you know?”
“How do I know anything? How did I talk to the stone? I don’t think I can beat him, Barbara. But it’s me he wants, and I can give him that. Jesus, look what he did to the city, what he did to the monsters, what he tried to do to you. I wanted to lead a fucking crusade to make New York well again, and it looks like all I did was to get some people killed, almost get you killed. He didn’t want you, or Ketch, or Bobby, it was always me. I don’t know why, but I can stop it now. I’m going to. You go home.”
He turned his head and called out: “Okay. I’ll come. Just stop, after that. Just stop.” He tried to get to his feet but Barbara held him down, both arms around his shoulders.
“No. Even if he could hear you—what good would it do? He gets you and he … does whatever he does with you. Then you’re gone and what’s left? Who else is going to motivate people at the Store? When he decides to come after the rest of us, we won’t even have you there. Allan’s dead, Bobby’s no damned use, and don’t gloss over that, Bobby’s out of it and you know it. You can’t leave us.”
“It’s me he wants. He won’t fight the rest of you. It’ll be the end of it. If we keep fighting there’ll never be an end. I know it.” He put his own arms around her shoulders and drew her close so that her head rested on his shoulder. He let himself feel the pressure and shape of her body against his own, her breasts, the muscles in her shoulders and arms, the sweat that rimed her skin and mingled with his. He felt a stab of desire and familiarity, as if they had been lovers for years and her body was territory known and beloved. She held him tightly, trying to keep him with her. After a few minutes the desire passed, and there was only the need to comfort and say good-bye. Tietjen began to talk to her as to a child, as he would have spoken to one of his sons. “It’s up to me, Barbara. It’s my job. You keep things running, keep rebuilding. You don’t need me. You’d like to have me,” he teased gently. “But you don’t have to have me there. You were the one who knew how to get things done.”
She would not be teased or soothed. “Please, John. Let’s just go, maybe he’ll forget it. He’s only a kid.”
“He’s a kid who steals minds and destroys cities. I’m not going to sit around talking when I know what will work.” He reached up and took Barbara’s hand from his neck, rocked back onto his heels and stood up.
She looked away, turned back to him, rose less steadily to her feet, and fingered her bruised chin. “The only way to stop you would be to sock you in the jaw, I guess.”
Tietjen nodded sadly. “Barbara.” For a moment he looked down at her, memorizing her: white hair curling wildly, blue eyes fearful and desperate, her mouth pressed thin with fatigue and too many emotions, closed to keep crying shut away. “Barbara.” He said her name as if it were a charm. “You’ve been my friend and companion and advisor, I don’t even know how to say what you’ve been. I will always love you.”
She looked down, embarrassed “I love you too. But that’s not the point right now. John, don’t do this,” she added, dry hopelessness in her voice.
He didn’t answer, only leaned forward and kissed McGrath very gently on the mouth. Then he stood up and helped her to her feet. “Go home now.”
McGrath shook her head. “I’ll wait, thanks.” She settled back down on the steps, arms crossed as if she were holding something in, or together.
Tietjen turned and started down the stairs. He felt tired and a little giddy, light. He stepped through the stone rubble of the dinosaurs, heading for the lions and unicorns and gargoyles at the end of the block. He expected to be afraid but he just felt tired and empty, as if he had cried so much he had washed all feeling away.
The stone creatures were densely crowded together; it was hard to move through them. Sandstone, granite, brownstone forms bristled around him. He almost missed the boy’s narrow, hawk-boned face among them. The kid sat astride a lion, leaning forward to watch Tietjen come. The long, unpleasantly pale face was tipped to one side, and the boy smiled, a satisfied, savage, weirdly innocent smile.
Go ahead, you monster. Take me and then stop it. Take me and have done with it.
&n
bsp; Tietjen took a step forward, spread his hands and said, “Well? I’m here.”
The boy smiled wider and said something, the words so garbled that Tietjen had no hope of understanding them. He only wished the kid would do it, kill him or hurt him or whatever he needed to do. Do it, before his own courage failed him. Come on, kid, he thought.
The boy smiled. The world was swallowed whole.
8
IT was not death, then. Not what he had expected. It was not nothingness, exactly: he still thought, still remembered. He knew that his favorite color was green, that he liked the smell of coffee wafting on cold winter air, could imagine the jounce and balance of riding the subway late at night. I’m still here, he thought.
There was nothing to see, not blackness or grayness—as if seeing didn’t apply here. Yet he remembered seeing. He conjured up the image of his old block at sunset. Sitting on the stoop with Maia, drinking coffee from china cups—the cups were hers, she said they were easier to hold with her damaged hands—and watching children play on the sidewalk. The gold and pink of the fading sun lit the bare branches of a ginkgo tree and cast patches of light on the white brick of the upper stories of the school building across the street. There had been the smell of cooking from shanties along the block, and he and Maia had watched parents trying to gather in their children for supper. Maia, her wiry gray hair moving in the breeze, had laughed at the children, her dark, seamed face alight with amusement as she told him all the ways those children had of outwitting their parents. When he asked how she knew kids so well, Maia laughed again and said, “That’d be tellin’, now, wouldn’t it?”
And she had wings.
Tietjen tried to rearrange the memory to fit the truth: Maia had got her wings in the disaster; on the fall day he was remembering, she had been as normal as himself. Knowing that did not change the image: he remembered Maia with her delicate leathery wings, as if they had become too much a part of her to be left behind by memory.
Tietjen loved the memory. It warmed him and he wanted to stay there—certainly it was better than the nothing. If this was what surrender to Jit was like—forever sitting with Maia, drinking coffee in autumn sunset—he was all for it. For a brief moment he remembered something else: the sight of Maia’s body, broken and crumpled on the marble floor at Grand Central, her delicate wings torn, her face a bloody mask.
“Now, John, you don’t want to be thinking like that,” her voice remonstrated. “Come back into the sunlight.” And he did, smiling at Maia, relaxing against the stone of the stairway he sat on.
A flock of kids ran past them down the street, the last of them a tall, skinny kid with milk-white skin who stopped, reeled around, pointed at Tietjen and said “No!” As he watched, the kid grew, like something out of a nightmare, until he was as tall as the brownstones, his long-fingered white hand reaching out for Maia, gathering her up. She kept smiling, kept talking as she was lifted away, waving her teacup and sloshing coffee onto her clawed hands. The boy’s hand held her as delicately as a butterfly at first. Then he closed his fingers, mangling her wings. Maia screamed. The hand closed on her legs; Tietjen could hear bones snapping.
“John!” she screamed.
Tietjen was on his feet, grabbing at the boy’s monstrous arm, screaming himself: “Stop it! Stop it.” The boy smiled his weird savage smile and closed his hand completely. Maia’s arms and head dangled limply; a trickle of blood ran darkly down the kid’s arm.
“Gone,” the boy said. Tietjen wanted to close his eyes but after a long, horrible moment, the memory faded into grayness again.
He was in Irene’s head, with her on the day the city fell. His hands—her hands—sorted through boys’ socks, searching for a certain feel that meant softness as well as long wear. She—he—frowned at the elderly woman who pushed past her to get to the girls’ dresses, hating the old woman for pushing her, daring to touch her. Hating her for wearing an old, too-worn coat in a color Irene liked. Hating her for being old, which frightened Irene. He felt how tired Irene was, how much energy it took to be angry all the time, how much she needed the anger to keep herself safe. As she chose socks and looked through the piles of sweaters, Tietjen felt how much she loved and hated their sons, who reminded her with every breath how dangerous living was. She loved them with every breath she took—and knew that if anything happened to them it would destroy her. She could keep them in, away from danger—except when they were with their father—
The thought wasn’t finished; the flood of anger at Tietjen stalled abruptly when the floor rippled under Irene’s feet. Her stomach lurched with terror. She would die. No one would help her, no one would take care of her. Rage broke through again: no one would take care of her.
Irene used the rage to push herself through the crowd, hating all of them—not one of them cared about her, none of them would take care of her—pushing her way to the stairs and into the crowd that was making its way down, slowly. Tietjen, remembering it all, understood at last how he had failed Irene; the fact that no one, probably, could have taken care of her enough, didn’t matter. I should have taken care of you, he thought now. I will take care of you now. It was his memory, after all. He could change it.
He imagined himself as the old woman to Irene’s left. “You go first, dear.” She waved Irene ahead of her. Irene looked at the woman with distrust, but moved ahead in the line. “Here, watch your step, miss,” he said, speaking for a big maintenance man who took Irene’s arm to steady her, then took his hand away at once. He smiled at her, and Irene twitched her lip at him in a sketch of a smile. “You just stick with us, we’ll get you down safe,” another man said, a thin man with a weedy mustache. The knot in Irene’s stomach loosed slightly.
Then there was a tremendous clang and the stairs shook, rippled like the floor, almost tossing Irene over the banister. Tietjen’s many hands reached out to steady her. The noise came again, the word NO said so loud it was almost unintelligible. Tee-jin can’t help! The stairs shook again, and Irene lost her footing, started to slip down under the feet of the crowd.
The hell you say, Tietjen thought. First as one person, then another, he reached for Irene and tugged, pulling her back to her feet. It worked again. But we’re five stories up—if the kid doesn’t keep adding stories on. We could keep this battle up forever. Already he was tired. Tietjen settled in the body of the maintenance worker again, one hand on Irene’s shoulder to steady her. Then he thought down again, as he had done with the dinosaurs and the stone lions; felt himself draw strength from the concrete, the steel, the foundation and bedrock beneath it, and give that strength to the stairs, holding them still while Irene and the people around her made it down to the street. He held them that way until he saw her out on the street, surrounded by the people who had helped her get down, smiling at them bewilderedly. Then Tietjen released the power, and the building began to buck and waver. Abruptly the memory ceased.
Tietjen was sightless again, with words ringing in his mind: No good! She dead! They all dead!
And Tietjen saw again: Ketch dying on the pavement before the Store; Allan Hochman’s bloody body carried back from Grand Central; Mack, fur matted with blood, dying before he could reach the Store. And Chris and Davy, pressed against a door in the after-school room, crying, waiting for Daddy to come. They had died of smoke and suffocation, their cheeks pink with carbon-monoxide poisoning. Chris had taken Davy in his lap and told him stories of how Daddy would come, because Daddy wasn’t afraid of anything, Daddy walked in Central Park where the knives were. But Daddy hadn’t come, maybe because they were bad boys, because they weren’t brave enough, because they didn’t want to walk in the Park or play with the street children that lived near his house. Daddy hadn’t come.
They all dead, Jit said again, with relish. Man can’t fix it.
Tietjen was sick. The kid was right: he could not fix it, could not be where he had not been. It was all very well to imagine saving Irene, but he hadn’t saved her. He couldn’t save his son
s. Or Ketch, or Allan or Mack or Maia.
But I saved Barbara, he remembered. Like a tonic, he imagined her tart voice: “You couldn’t help them, but you can help other people—if you don’t roll up in a ball and die. Snap out of it, John.”
Tietjen imagined his sons curled by the door, and he opened the door and gathered them up and carried them out to the fresh air, away from fire and terror and loneliness, all the while telling them, “You’re the best boys, you’re brave and wonderful, and nothing terrible will happen to you because I love you and nothing you could ever do could change that—”
And the kid’s voice, Jit’s voice, broke up Tietjen’s words and shattered the memory of his sons, and Tietjen was back in the nothing again, alone, unable to stop his mind spinning. “You lie! Tee-jin lie! Man lie!” The high voice echoed over itself like half-a-dozen voices all at once, garbled and furious, until they felt like physical blows. Had he had a body, Tietjen would have been crouched down, arms around his head, trying to ward off the beating: “You lie! You lie! You lie!”
How do I lie? What did I do to you? Tietjen wondered, through the cacophony. “Why are you so angry?” he thought at the boy. “What did I do?”
The boy’s voice boomed out, “Tee-jin lie!” His voice was huge, as if he had again grown enormous. “Tee-jin lie!” Lied how, Tietjen wondered wildly. In the middle of his bewilderment something felt familiar, a tone or something, as if he had played this scene before. Then he realized what it was, and felt stupid that he hadn’t known before: Jit sounded like one of his own kids, furious over some huge betrayal which had been the result of a moment’s thoughtlessness, the different points of view of child and adult. Is that what this is about? Tietjen wondered. Have I hurt his feelings?
“I’m sorry that I made you angry,” he said at last. He kept the boy’s image in mind, but pretended he was talking to Davy, whose feelings had been as easily bruised as a ripe peach. “I didn’t mean to, and so I don’t exactly know what it is I did.”
The Stone War Page 35
