by Chris Weitz
No sign of Chapel, Wakefield, or the football. There’s some sort of sales pitch going on. A kid wears a kind of parody of mid-level-salesguy clothes—collared shirt, khakis, lace-ups, all spattered with old grime and blood. At his side, a couple of Uptowner goons glower down on the crowd. The guy has a battery-powered loudspeaker that he’s using to deliver his pitch.
“Now you may be asking yourself, Self, how can we know that this is the real deal? The real, US Grade A Fancy, top-of-the-line, uncut Cure? Well, I can vouch for it myself!”
He pats a big glass jug propped on a barstool, and the dark liquid inside sloshes back and forth a little. Kids in the crowd, worried that it’ll tip over, gasp, and some of them try to make their way inside the ring. The guards in camouflage kick them off the ropes and wave guns around, promising death to the next person who climbs up uninvited.
“That’s right!” shouts the salesguy. “Want to know how old I am, kiddos? I’ll tell you. I’m twenty years old next week! And I’ve never felt better!”
Maybe he’s telling the truth. It’s hard to judge from his appearance, since the rigors of surviving in this place can make anybody look a little haggard. But what he’s selling sure doesn’t look like the stuff Brainbox and the Old Man cooked up.
The guy in the ring continues, “So you’re probably wondering what kind of price we put on this Cure. What kind of price can you put on life itself? How about twenty dollars? Is that a good enough deal for you? They used to say that life was cheap to the Uptowners—I guess it’s true!”
The salesguy basks in the rapture of the crowd. He’s suddenly the center of a sea anemone of hands holding bank-approved twenty-dollar bills. The guards start helping kids up one by one, and the salesguy takes their money, still working the crowd.
He starts going all Oprah. “You get a life! And you get a life! And YOU get a life!”
“Life” comes in the form of a swig of the “Cure,” administered from a dirty plastic Hello Kitty cup dipped into the jug. They drink, they faint in relief, they scream in exultation.
And the name Bugs Meany suddenly jumps into my head. You remember? In the Encyclopedia Brown books? Bugs Meany and his gang of older kids, the Tigers, were always ripping off the younger kids with bogus schemes. Then Encyclopedia would catch them in a lie and they’d have to confess.
This is kind of like that, except if you caught these boys in a lie, they’d just shoot you in the head.
All of a sudden, there’s a commotion from the far side of the hall. I can see a handmade banner mounted on a pole above a mosh-pit-like disturbance in the crowd. Pictured on the banner is what at first looks like some kind of mutated human with extra limbs, or maybe a Hindu deity. But when the jostling under the banner stops for a moment, I see that it’s a home-brew version of that Leonardo drawing, the one with the naked dude stretching his limbs out inside a circle. The banner jounces along as whoever is carrying it shoves their way through the crowd toward the boxing ring.
“Peter, what this is?” asks Guja, looking nervous.
“Hell if I know, G.”
The man on the banner, like the Leonardo drawing, reminds me of pictures of Jesus on the cross, at least because his arms are spread out, and as the banner drifts closer, I can make out the drawing of the face more clearly. It’s stylized, with almond-shaped eyes and black hair, and the man’s expression is remarkably calm. At the top of the banner, someone’s painted a big red J. Maybe the J does mean Jesus?
Turns out, it doesn’t.
Things get weird fast.
“Repent! Repent!” a voice calls from beneath the weird square banner.
The huckster selling the fake Cure turns to look, confused, and the Uptowner guards point their guns. But I notice a couple of kids in ragged robes slip under the bottom ropes of the ring and sneak up behind the guards, who I guess don’t hear them because of all the noise. Before the guards can fire, the robed kids pull knives out of their belts and, without warning, stab the guards and take their weapons.
Now others boil up over the edges, their faces wild, their heads stubbled and scabby. They carefully pass the banner hand over hand to the ring and set it up in the middle of the canvas floor. Then they smash the jug of “Cure” to the floor.
The suit-coated salesman, meanwhile, has melted into the crowd, making a run for it. The crowd turns ugly—they’re furious that the promise of life has been taken away from them. A dude jostles me as he heads toward the boxing ring, shouting for blood.
“Repent!” says the leader of this strange new clique, which now definitely has the attention of the crowd.
In another place, at another time, two people being knifed to death would produce a panicked stampede, but here it’s nothing new. The guards’ blood flows toward the edge of the ring, where a little of the liquid dribbles down to the tile floor. Some kids open their mouths then lick up the Cure, or what they think is the Cure.
“Repent!” says the leader again, whose cray-looking face, with its mottled skin, stubble, and spiky eyebrows, looks weirdly familiar. “There is only one Cure!”
He holds up a yellow nylon rope, dark and discolored at the center of its length. “There is only one way out of the wilderness of the Sickness and into the paradise of New Life!” He says it like that, like some of the words are capitalized.
The kid parades around with his relic, holding it up for the crowd.
“You will not have New Life unless you touch the blood of Jefferson!”
And his companions shout, “Jefferson!”
There’s this part in this movie I saw called Jaws. When the cop guy has just opened the beach, and he suddenly realizes there’s a shark cruising around in the water selecting its next meal, and it looks like Roy Scheider is hurtling toward us, even though he’s in the same place. Anyhow, that is how I feel right now—like I’m rushing toward this realization.
The J on the banner is for Jefferson. Our Jefferson. And the guy on the drawing with his quadruple legs and arms stretched out like that Leonardo drawing? That’s him, too. Somebody has made a religion out of Jefferson. Or at least, they’ve taken facts—that we manufactured the Cure out of his blood, and that it works—and turned them into some kind of crazy-ass magical thinking.
That’s where the rope comes in. And where it gets even stranger.
Because I realize it’s the Ghosts. Or at least, they were the Ghosts, the insane cannibalistic cultists who we found living in the public library when we were searching for the Cure.
Back then, they were into a twisted version of the sacrament—wine turning to blood, bread turning to flesh. It was the way they justified eating people. They tried to convert us by forcing us to eat a meal with them. We wouldn’t. They insisted. People died.
And on our way out, some of Jefferson’s blood must have gotten onto the ropes they tied us with. Or maybe it’s not even his blood. It could have been anybody’s. Really, it doesn’t matter. Anyway, that’s what they’re displaying to the crowd, like it’s magic or something.
The Ghost continues, “I speak to you not as one of the elect but as a sinner, a sinner among sinners!” he shouts. “For he walked among us! But we did not understand! He came to bring us life! But we offered him death! We deserve nothing of him! But I have touched his holy blood—and so I live!”
He thrusts the nylon rope with the old blood on it into the air once again. I doubt the crowd knows what it all means, but something about the certitude of the gesture seems to convince them. They start to walk toward it, like metal filings drawn to a magnet.
Meanwhile, me? I’m backing away, with Gooj at my side. But—true confession? There’s a little, eensy bit of me that is envious of Jefferson. I mean, brother never seemed to care about being famous. Me? I always wanted to be. And now he’s the one with the profile.
But that doesn’t last long. As the people rush the stage, me and Guja resist the push, becoming a sort of boulder blocking the stream of the crowd. It draws the attention of the dude with
the rope. He turns to look at us—and sees me.
Now I guess if Jefferson is their new Big J, that makes me Saint Peter, which is to say, to them I’m Kind of a Big Deal, too.
I back away as the Ghost’s face starts to wear a look that is maybe religious ecstasy but also a lot like a thirteen-year-old girl who just found herself in the presence of a member of One Direction. For a moment, he looks too surprised to do or say anything. Then he rushes to the edge of the ring, strains his body over the ropes, and thrusts the nylon cord toward me.
“Peter!” he shouts. “Peter! We have kept the faith! Save us! Take us to Jefferson!” The other Ghosts around him are starting to get wind of what’s happening and floating toward the edge of the ring.
I don’t know, in normal circumstances—if “normal circumstances” could ever be said to be the case up in this mofo—how I would react to being proclaimed the apostle of a new religion. I’d like to think that I’d take it pretty well. I’d let them down gently, at least. But this is probably the worst imaginable time to be recognized, even if the context is kinda flattering.
“I think we should go,” I say to Guja.
“Copy that,” he says. We turn and start to leave, but the cultists are not done with me.
“Peter!” they cry. “Stay! Stop him! Stop him!”
Now the faces of people in the crowd are turning toward us; I’m breathing fame on them like an airborne virus. Hands reach out to grab me.
It is at that moment that the Uptowner soldiers appear, rushing down from the ramps of the upper level, rifles up.
But they haven’t come for me; they’ve come for the Ghosts who interfered in their sale of the fake Cure. The salesman points out the offenders, and the guards fire into the ring. A cultist to the right of the leader falls, and then the crowd finally recoils as bullets fly. It’s like a shaken snow globe, a stampede, a gyrating mosh, and the distinction of being a saint is wiped away in the panic. When kids look at me now, it’s only as another animal in their way as everyone tries to escape from the cross fire.
A figure falls to the ground in front of me. I make to step over it, but then I realize it’s Guja. As he looks at me, wild-eyed, I pull him up and start dragging him toward the side ramp that leads up to the station’s main concourse, away from the riptides of fleeing kids. He gets his feet under him, and we make it to the ramp heading up.
Gunfire and bloodshed are everyday here, and the crowd’s panic simmers down the higher we go. The shouts and screams get hushed by the twists and turns of the granite corridors.
“What do those people want?” says Guja, once it feels safe enough to talk again.
“Who, them?” I say, kind of playing it off.
“They see you, and they go crazy.”
“Oh, you know, it’s just my personal magnetism. Ain’t no thing.”
I remind myself to stay Down to Earth.
Back before What Happened, when there was such a thing as celebrity, we used to joke about the phrase down to earth. People who met celebrities always called them that. They’re so down to earth. I felt like this was due entirely to efforts on the part of the famous person to seem like it. And if you knew them in real life, you’d realize how fame had totally warped their personalities. You know. Your Kardashians. Your Trumps.
At least, that’s how it felt back at the UN, when we were dispensing the Cure. Everyone was aware that, on some level, they couldn’t live without Jefferson. After all, their lives were saved by a vaccine made from his blood. So they treated him with exaggerated respect and attention. Everything he said seemed to be in a larger font than everybody else’s words, and everyplace he went seemed to be more interesting to them than it had been a moment before. It was messed up, and so is being idolized by a bunch of recovering cannibals, but still.
I’ll admit it: There’s a kind of skip in my step.
As we hit the main floor of the terminal, with its high, latticed windows and star-dappled ceiling, we dissolve into a new crowd, unaware of the shitstorm below. Up here, there’s more businesses selling the Cure in every form—from pills to powders to injections. It’s all got to be fake. The only real Cure I know is a batch they whipped up on the Ronald Reagan according to Brainbox’s recipe and put in little sealed plastic packets that looked like doses of fast-food ketchup.
There was enough to treat the attendees of the Gathering at the UN, but that was it. For the rest, the plan was to fire up a lab—something that couldn’t be done without a whole heap of resources and logistics and whatnot. Brainbox said he’d need a location, a staff, and, like, resources to make the stuff, and New York had been stripped clean of anything useful. I’m guessing that when everything went south at the Gathering, somebody made off with the remaining doses of the Cure—that, or it was lying scattered on the floor of the Security Council chamber.
Anyway, it’s pretty unlikely that somebody has taken up the plan to manufacture more. Brainbox was probably the singularly most qualified kid to do it, and he’s dead. And Chapel seems pretty uninterested in anything other than the biscuit.
He certainly doesn’t seem interested in me.
“Hey, Guja,” I say.
“Yes, Peter.”
“When they were gearing you guys up for this mission, did they mention bringing any medicine? For the kids?”
Guja looks confused. Then he just smiles and shrugs, sort of like he’s saying Above my pay grade or whatever. But I figure he’d know if they were gonna help us out, right? It’s not exactly like they’re distributing infected blankets, but this is no mercy mission, either.
Under the circumstances, I guess it’s not surprising that there’s a huge demand. Or that the market is meeting that demand with snake oil.
They’re still selling other stuff, too, still issuing authorized money at the old ornately grilled ticket windows. But I can tell the camo-wearing Uptowner soldiers are spread thin. Here and there, you can see an item exchanged for another without the intervention of cash, which never would’ve been allowed before. Now handshakes and private understandings get around the rules of the Uptowners.
Up the staircase under the cracked Apple Store altar, a boy with a hoarse voice shouts a speech about the treachery of barter and credit. And below, in the horseshoe-shaped whirlpool of stalls, Uptowner soldiers pull violators away and summarily execute them, staining the marble walls with blood.
“Crazy,” says Guja. “Crazy people.” His hand reaches to touch his knife for reassurance.
“Yeah,” I say. “They’re slippin’.”
In theory, I ought to be happy, since it looks like Evan and his thugs are losing their hold. But all it means for now is that things are more dangerous than they ever were. Like, if there’s one thing worse than a police state, it’s a failing police state, with the rulers grabbing desperately at their power and strivers rushing in to pick up the pieces. That dude Evan must be trippin’. I mean, more than usual.
The Gathering was supposed to stop all this from happening. The Bazaar was going to be peaceful, a neutral territory, maintained by a multitribe security force. At least, that’s what Chapel and Jefferson said.
“Look,” says Guja. He points with his chin toward the opposite end of the Grand Concourse, where a squad of camo’ed Uptowners is forcing its way through the crowd.
They have Wakefield and one of the other Gurkhas on rope leads, urging them forward with blows. Wakefield looks around, dazed, too battered to orient himself. The Gurkha keeps his head down, absorbing the punches and slaps stoically.
“Kulbir,” says Guja to himself, or something that sounds like it anyway.
“Chill,” I say to Guja, who looks like he’s fixing to take some heads. “We follow.”
THEY’RE BACK AGAIN. Those white kids.
Now, before you get all offended, let me explain. I’m not a racist. See, racism is a matter of a system. To be a racist, you have to be the party in control, and we are not. Yes, we have control over our own little dominion from 110th up
to 135th, Saint Nicholas East to the FDR. But we are an island in a sea of the Other. And though the structures of power have been toppled, the ruins are still clogging shit up.
When I say I am not happy to see these kids walk into my office in the old brownstone on MLK, understand then that it is because they in general and they in particular have never had our best interests in mind and have done nothing on our behalf.
Spider? Dead. Captain? Gone. Theo says it was by his own choosing, and may Allah, the compassionate, the merciful, watch over him. As for Theo, those fools kept him chained up so he couldn’t reveal the truth—that we weren’t alone in the world.
You’re gonna say that blond bitch saved Theo’s life. Yes, but that was a side effect, not her intention. And I know Theo has a soft spot for her. But brothers have been falling for milky-skinned, yellow-haired hos for four hundred years now, on account of the poison that has been poured into their brains by the media. Doesn’t mean she’s worth the DNA she’s encoded in.
But here she is, with two other little blond kids, straight-up little Aryan crackers, and that boy Jefferson, who last time I saw him was debating me at the Apollo, right before he broke his word to us and spread the Cure around to anybody who asked, like it was Halloween candy. Well, I was here in this very room when he told Solon that only Harlem and their tribe would get the Cure, if we would help him get to Plum Island. Solon was sitting where I am now. Me, I was in the corner, doing my Dick Cheney shit.
So we sent Spider and Captain and Theo in the ship, all the way to the end of Strong Island, and two of them didn’t come back. And at his “Gathering,” our enemies—otherwise known as everybody else—got rewarded just the same as us.
Well, Solon is gone, and I’m in charge of Harlem now. And Jefferson doesn’t look so high-and-mighty, not like when he was selling his line about peace and love and life, bullshitting the brothers and sisters, telling them we all, in the words of the old secular hymn, could get along. We have heard this again and again. It is our nature to fall for this because we are a loving people, because we are a generous people.
