Dark City Lights

by Lawrence Block

  “You believe in God?”

  “Yeah, there are even a few of us who live in town.”

  She shook her head. “Well, I haven’t had much proof lately.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, I just stopped you from becoming subway mulch. That would seem to indicate something.”

  “Yeah. It indicates that you’re a Jesus freak who can’t mind your own fucking business.” She was probably right, but she smiled when she said it, and her hands had relaxed out of their fists. We both knew she wouldn’t jump now.

  I asked her why she had wanted to do it. It was about like I had figured. The job hadn’t come through, which meant the rent wasn’t gonna make, which meant that she’d have to hitch back to Antelope Springs or Sioux Falls or some other city named after animals or Indians. Another big city success story, except that I hadn’t let her write that last chapter. But I knew, even if she didn’t, that she hadn’t wanted to die with that last decision on her soul.

  Another train rolled in, headed for Queens. A couple of guys got off and made their way up the stairs, and to the streets above, I guess. The girl and I just stood there and the train rumbled away.

  “So I guess this is where we’re supposed to fall in love and I get my happily ever after, right?” she said. Her voice seemed to trail off, but it was just the beginning of the roar of the oncoming train.

  I smiled, but shook my head.

  “So what happens next?” she asked.

  I saw the headlight. “This,” I said, as I hooked my left foot around her right ankle and shoved her off the platform.

  The train hit her with the sound of a meat-filled Hefty Bag smacking the pavement, and the effect was much the same, I guess. Not that I stayed to watch. I was already running up the stairs, my feet light, the screaming of the brakes still in my ears. I had helped her leave without sin, and I knew I had done God’s work. Why else would He have put me there?

  I felt cash in my pocket as I went up the steps opposite the ones I had gone down a few minutes earlier. I could get dumplings. Life was good. Amen.

  CHLOE

  BY JERROLD MUNDIS

  I HEAVED INTO BEING, CAME out of the stone, the bricks, and other elements, and took form. Because I was lonely. More, wanting. The two are confusing sometimes. Less as I age, but still, sometimes. It was both then: an emptiness, a whimper, a longing, coiled round and merging into a focused tremble in my loins, a swelling of my breasts. I wanted. I needed.

  People drink themselves stuporous over that, or cry into their pillows, or take and hurt. Sometimes they love, and find and offer solace.

  Nothing was different from when last I was, when I had walked through the dark pipes and channels for months musing with small companions and reading the debris: the lost, the discarded—in a way, the entrails—of the city above to learn what, if anything, had changed. It is not often anything truly does. Mostly it is just the trivia, the distractions of the moment, the colors in which the verities are currently painted.

  To me the air here is neither fetid nor dank, the gloom is not gloom, nor the little rivulets, swirling eddies, and coursing streams of corruption corrupt. They are as sweet to me as a spring-fed meadow is to you, and the scurry of little clawed feet and dragging hairless tails as welcome as the flit and song of birds among the grasses and trees to you. I have seen those things of yours, and while they mean nothing to me and are even a little unpleasant, I can understand through my own my own causes of charm and delight what they are to you.

  I am happier and more content than you. Happy just in being, when I am.

  You were never that. You were more so once, in the days before the fierce mono-gods rose—I and no other!—and more content, too, when we were all about you, and you saw us. Few of you do that now, and mostly we do not come where we are not loved, or at least seen.

  Not that I was ever loved or supplicated much, but I was known. And appreciated. Which was enough for the small needs I had of you. We all have need of you, the greater and lesser among us. We are not complete without you. Deprived of you, we languish. Sometimes we have simply taken you. In the past when we did so, it was often crude or violent or both. Leda was not welcoming, Europa did not consent, nor did Ganymede desire.

  Rubens knew. Yeats knew.

  I want, too, sometimes. But I do not raven.

  I wanted that night, and was lonely, and so I came out of the stone, the archways, beds and joints, where somehow I am when I am not, and heaved into being.

  I made my way through the darkness which is not darkness to me, through the tunnels, to a place where I knew there would not likely be anyone above. I waited, casting about for any of you, and then when I sensed nothing, lifted the manhole cover in the small private street in Kips Bay a little past the Riverpark Restaurant, toward the river, and came up into the city, into Manhattan and the night.

  THE SKY WAS EMPTY BUT for a half moon and a single planet, Venus. It is always astonishing to me to see nothing in the night sky now but the moon and a planet or two, and sometimes a point of light that is a satellite and perhaps dimly another one or two in an otherwise empty vaulting field of dark blue. The sky at night was once black as pitch, black as a cave with a sealed entrance: deep, infinite, voluptuous, shot through with stars—so many!—like shattered crystals or scattered diamonds. It summoned awe. It engendered peace, gave solace. It was wondrous.

  But it is gone from the cities of the earth now, at least to you who live in them, and you are poorer for it and made more mad.

  There were cities before, of course, even great ones, and I have lived in many of them, but it is only recently that they have eaten the nighttime sky. Not that I ever saw that sky much myself. I didn’t, only on the infrequent nights I rose and came up onto the streets of whatever city beneath which I was living, but it did please me to see it then, even if I did not miss it otherwise.

  I have seen how its loss has ravaged you, taken some of your very heart from you.

  Some of your cities devoured it earlier than others, with their thickened air and lights. London was one, the place where I last emerged before that night in New York and where I took as my lover a poet and dramatist, and a good a lover he was, for the night. I took him because he was often about on the streets nights as well as days and because he was one of the few in his time who had ever shown interest in me and my works. (I grant he showed interest in many other things as well. His fascination was broad. As was his waggishness, which was also of appeal.) I had read most of his works, which had found their way from the streets as pamphlets, broadsheets, and dailies, along with other debris, and lost or partly ruined and discarded editions into my channels and byways, on their way, eventually, more deteriorated and transformed, and only partly recognizable as what they once were, and sometimes not at all, out to the Thames with the other effluents and discharges. I knew him, even if he had only dimly sensed me, and I felt a certain draw to him. So I emerged in a place and at a time as to encounter him. Which I did.

  Only once before had I done that, sought out a man in particular rather than at random, and him for encounters over several months (something I have never done since), until he died one day in the sands of the arena. I missed him when that happened, while it could not be said that I mourned him. I didn’t know then what it was, to mourn, except through what I had read or heard. One needs to love before one can mourn. I imagine it was as close as I had ever come or thought I could to either loving or mourning, until the night in New York. At least as I understand those things now. I was young then, when I was with Albus.

  I was older that night in London (and other nights in other cities, too). On some, I took a lover. Others, I simply walked along the streets among you, out of loneliness. And I was older still—but unchanged to the eye and even mostly in how I experienced myself on that night, which is now just a little gone, at least as I reckon things—when I lifted and set aside the manhole cover and emerged into the semidarkness of the starless night over Man
hattan. I paused. I looked about, cast outward, and when I sensed and found nothing, picked up the iron cover and lowered it back into its seat, careful not to make a sound.

  While there was no sky, at least as I have known it, and most of your ancestors, too, only the half moon and below it and off to the side Venus—at least the planet (might that be a joke or an approximate of one?)—against the empty gray-blue field, there were still lights, a myriad of them from the cars on the FDR Drive and the buildings across the river in Queens and even from some of the windows of the buildings along the street on which I was, and the street lamps, and blooming up into the thickened air from First Avenue and the rest of the city behind me.

  I went to the rail at the end of the street to look out over the river and the expanse of empty sky beyond, where it was not carved into narrow strips as it was by the tall buildings that rose above the canyon streets of Manhattan. Only a handful of weak scattered little points of light blinked in and out of view in the dead sky as companions to the moon and planet. Still, it was vast, a universe to me, who lives in and melds with such small tunnels and byways. Its immensity quickened me.

  And my earlier trembling became a pulsing.

  His name was Dovid.

  I sensed him before he actually approached, while he was still preparing to make himself known to me.

  He was back a little down the street, considering me. He was young, hormonal. He wanted, too. Powerfully. His life was powerful. I shuddered with the beat of his heart, the surge of oxygen-rich blood through his arteries, the vitality of him. There was heat in him, his loins. Strength. But he was not dangerous. No man is to me, actually. Still, I avoid those who are dangerous to others: they are not pleasant to consort with.

  (But what about my first lover, you might ask. Was he not dangerous? No. He killed as a professional; died as one.)

  “Hi,” he said.

  I turned my head. He had taken up a position on the rail near enough to speak easily but enough apart from me as to be reassuring. Young, driven by the wants of his youth, but wise, too.

  “Hi,” I said, and smiled.

  He was tall, with dark curly hair. He had strong, attractive features, the lean build of a basketball player. I know about such things as basketball, and most else that is important to the time and city in which I happen to live. I always have, in the same way I did the works of my London poet and dramatist.

  “Nice moon,” he said. “It’s peaceful down here, with the water and the open sky.”

  I nodded.

  “I usually stop by for a little after work.”

  “You work near here?” I asked. “And nights?”

  He motioned with his head back down the street. “At the Riverpark, the restaurant. You?”

  “I’m just out for a walk,” I said.

  I loosened my posture, opened it.

  He noticed.

  “I’m Dovid,” he said.

  His voice was deep and friendly and had a guilelessness that, while almost certainly not genuine at the moment, was still convincing.

  He reminded me of Josephus, that priestly, aristocratic, defeated Jewish warrior-turned-historian whom I met once on the streets of Rome while walking about with my lover, Albus, he whom I missed but did not mourn after he died. (I do not think I can rightly call any of the others, with whom I spent no more than a night—and there were not many of those, either—a lover.) I would not have been surprised if Dovid descended from that line, from Josephus. It is a smaller world than one might suppose, and always has been.

  “Chloe,” I said.

  “Nice to meet you, Chloe.”

  “Are you a chef there, at the Riverpark?” I asked.

  “Nothing so exalted,” he said “A waiter.”

  “And an . . .”

  He laughed. “Actor.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “You?

  “I am a helper,” I said. “I serve.”

  “Well, that’s evasive,” he said.

  “Yes. It is.”

  “And a little intriguing. Intentionally?”

  He had moved just a little closer.

  “Perhaps,” I said. “Maybe even a bit more than perhaps.”

  We talked for a while, then walked a while more, and then we went back to his apartment in Yorkville. It was a freshly painted one-bedroom with inexpensive but pleasant drapes, and carpets, books, and a nice reading chair. There were a handful of framed playbills with Dovid’s name in them, a couple of framed photos of him on stage and two more with friends, one taken on a small sailboat. He had worked in his craft a lot for someone so young.

  Twenty-six, he had said when I’d asked.

  He hadn’t asked me. If he had, I would have said twenty-seven, and it would have been believable—though I would have been that age, by his reckoning, far, far back in the distant past, if I had ever been an age at all. I don’t remember. I just remember being, where a moment before I had not.

  I have been as I am now always. It is simply how I am, though I think those of you who see me when I am abroad each do so a little differently, according to your own predilections.

  “You have beautiful eyes,” he told me.

  I do. Green, with flecks of gold that pick up the color of my hair. I am fair and lovely despite who I am and what you might think at first. I serve, and lovingly. “Goddess of the Tide,” my London lover for the night wrote of me, “Whose sable Streams beneath the City glide.” And still they do, as they did then, in every city, though I live only in the great ones (except for an occasional holiday in a country hamlet) and only one at a time. But John, which was my London lover’s name, dissembled after that line, and wrote:

  “A mortal Scavenger she saw, she lov’d;

  The muddy Spots that dry’d upon his Face”

  It was he, John, and not some scavenger I saw and lov’d (though lov’d was not the proper word), and not mud upon his clean-shaven face but a bit of powder.

  “Swift the Goddess rose,” he wrote,

  “And through the Streets pursu’d the distant Noise,

  Her Bosom panting with expected Joys.

  With the Night-wandring Harlot’s Airs she past,

  Brush’d near his side, and wanton Glances cast;”

  Yes, I did that.

  “In the black Form of Cinder-Wench she came,

  When Love, the Hour, the Place had banish’d Shame;

  To the dark Alley, Arm in Arm they move:

  O may no Link-Boy interrupt their Love!”

  No, it was not as a cinder-wench but rather as my comely self I came, even if in the guise perhaps and manner perhaps of a gentleman’s daughter; and not to a dark alley, but rather back to his quarters we went. By night’s end, he knew me, as I was, as I am—the only one of my lovers (if they were that) ever truly to do so, even if he dissembled some when he later wrote of it. I do not know how he knew, or why, but he did, classicist, poet, dramatist, and man of many curiosities that he was, and maybe that was all there was to it, that he was those.

  “Thank you,” I said to Dovid.

  He had to imagine that many before him must have said that to me, or at least known that it is a tired thing to say to any woman whose eyes are not forcefully unpleasant, and yet he did not hesitate to say it to me himself, was unafraid of sounding trite. Because it was true and how indeed he found them.

  We made love in his small bed, and again, and then yet again.

  He had greater appetite than Albus, less guile and calculation than John.

  He fell asleep holding me, with his breath gentle upon my shoulder. I lingered in it, and in his arms.

  Thank you, Dovid, I wrote to him on a notepad on an end table in his living room when finally I rose and made ready to leave. At the door, I stopped and returned to it, and wrote, O, thank you!

  I felt what I think you must feel when you are ready to cry.

  I WAS PREGNANT. I HAD been so before. From Albus with a daughter, John with a son. To both of whom I gave
birth.

  I prepared a nursery in the drains, from which I had not emerged again since my night with Dovid. (I rarely do, often for decades, sometimes even centuries. I am not usually lonely; nor do my loins tremble much.) Though my babies have been like you and not like me, still they can live without harm here in the few days I keep them, which I know I should before I bring them up to you, which I also know I should and which I do not mind, never having felt before anything more than faint connection with them, and only fleeting interest once they were no longer within me; as I might with anything new and novel that entered my realm, stayed briefly, then left, as it should, along with everything else. They can live here without harm during their brief tenancy because of the suckling of my breasts, which protects them.

  I did remember Dovid’s hands, though. And his breath upon my shoulder. And how he had held me, as if he would have done so forever, as if he had thought it was all he had ever wanted.

  I would have gone back to him again, I believe. No, I am certain.

  And somehow we would have . . .

  But no, that is just fancy. (Even though I am not given much to fancy.)

  We wouldn’t have. We couldn’t have.

  But while I think that, it cannot be proved. Partway through my pregnancy, it was made impossible.

  I WAS NOT BEFORE I was. And then I was, where I had not been before.

  I was the moment Lucius Tarquinius Priscus touched me, or rather the marble form he perceived to be me. That is the moment I came into being, brought forth, so far as I can determine, by Priscus’s very act of perception.

  I was not; and then I was.

  They had found me, or what they perceived to be me—they knew as well as I that it was a statue they saw—but whence and how it had come to be in that broad ditch, that stream, that open drain that cut along the floor of the valley between the seven hills and which would become the center of the city as it grew, they did not know any more than I. They wondered at it, especially Tarquinius Priscus, who was the king, there still being kings then, long before the Republic that supplanted them and the Empire that followed, who had been summoned to look, to witness, and who in some wonder touched me, as he perceived me, named me, and I was.