by Dale Bailey
“Abel—”
“Yeah?”
“It happened a long time ago, right?”
“Twenty-one years,” he said.
“And the watch … it still bothers you?”
It was the kind of question Lana might have asked: blunt and direct, because she wanted to know the answer, without consideration for the social niceties. Lara wasn’t sure what kind of response she intended to elicit by it, either—only that his feelings about the watch seemed to strike some answering chord within her.
Abel didn’t seem to take offense—maybe they had moved beyond that—but he took a long time answering. He slid the watch over his wrist and closed the catch, his expression faraway. Then he looked up and for a moment she was certain that he was going to fetch back news out of all that hazy distance. She could feel the certainty chime inside her, she could feel it humming in her bones.
But he only shook his head.
“It’s not the watch that bothers me,” he said. “It’s the death.”
He nodded and went out, and it was only afterward, bereft in the sparkling and silent kitchen, that Lara recognized what she had been hoping to hear—the same frail hope all of them must have brought to lay at his feet, the petitioners who waited in line for hours just for the privilege of sweating under the hot lights of Abel Williams’ studio. Not anything as simple as knowledge or understanding, not by a long shot. What they wanted—what she wanted—maybe what everyone wanted—was absolution from the dead. What they wanted was the assurance that someday the burden would be lifted—that someday the awful weight of guilt and terror and grief would pass away—that someday please. God it would be over.
But the truth was, it never would be.
The truth was you carried that freight of sorrow to the grave.
9
Night closed in.
The cold plummeted past zero, and the snow quickened, whipping in sheets through the shuttered downtown canyons. The lake turned its wind-frothed mirror to the sky, standing water crackled into glossy obsidian panes of ice, and the city, boisterous, broad-shouldered, subsided into stillness. In the broad tree-lined avenues of the Gold Coast—where luxury apartment towers with uniformed doormen reared up alongside the immaculate brownstones of millionares—brokers, bankers, and executives, snug in their security-monitored bedrooms, drifted off with Leno on their sleep-timed televisions. In the streets outside, patrol cars whispered past.
A dog barked, and somewhere in the darkness a bus slowed with a woosh of air brakes. And still the snow came, down, down, down, a silent ministry of frost, covering the streets and curbs, the gutters and alleys in the fine white fabric of a dream.
In the shadow of the El, huddled among his companions along that borderland where the Gold Coast turns to iron, a homeless man shivered under a threadbare blanket. He grumbled in his sleep as a train screamed overhead, showering sparks and cinders upon his shoulders. The lights flickered across his seamed and stubbled face, and amid the flying shadows, you could not say for sure whether he was black or white.
There was no such uncertainty in the dying streets across the elevated rails. There, where a single slat-ribbed rat nosed disconsolately through the spilled wreckage of an overturned Dumpster, and the smoke-grimed storefronts sagged wearily behind their steel security gates, made momentarily beautiful by weather, all the faces were black, or anyway what passed for black: a wild profusion, actually, of walnut and mahogany, chocolate, cocoa, tan, and a café au lait so pale and milky yellow brown that it was right next door to white. They too were sleeping, most of them, in crowded second-floor efficiencies and decaying row-houses, in the gang-infested hives of the projects, in basement apartments with miserly window-wells that hoarded coins of barred and jaundiced sky.
It fell beyond that, too, the snow, indiscriminately, in the dead lands.
The dead lands, where the streets gave way to shattered pavement and the chitinous husks of burned-out cars, like the shucked hulls of gigantic insects. Where fire-gutted houses presided over lots bereft of anything but broken stone.
Where Dreamland, blinded, lifted its shoulders like a crippled king.
Only now it was alight.
Fenced in, walled up and more than half-unmade, rising in ghostly stone from the snow-drift rubble of its seven tumbled sisters. But alight.
For a time—an hour more, maybe two—a handful of yellow beacons glimmered almost halfway up the tower’s central facade. Then footsteps retreated down a hallway. A door slammed. A toilet flushed. And, as the night tipped imperceptibly toward dawn—one, two, three minutes past midnight, the toll of a distant church bell still shivering the air—the fifth-floor lights began to blink out.
In the kitchen, the counters gleaming—out. In the lounge, the pool cues at attention in their racks—out. In Ramsey Lomax’s room, and in those of Abel Williams and Lara McGovern, too—out, out, out.
The night deepened. Still, the snow fell.
Dreamland, dark, loomed against the sky: eighteen stories of formed and molded concrete, of empty hallways and abandoned apartments; eighteen stories of shattered doors and vacant eyelike windows. Outwardly unchanged, after all, the lights a mere illusion—or so it might have seemed, had anyone been out there to see, beyond the fence, in the devastated street, in all that dark and snow: Dreamland, unchanged. Dreamland: derelict, diminished, delimbed, its decaying arms outstretched.
But not dead.
Oh, no.
Behind a locked door, in a dark room off a renovated hall where light fell dim and orderly in overlapping parabolas, Benjamin Prather hunched closer to his computer, face slack, fingers flying, his skin sallow in the ghostly blue backwash from his monitor, the wire-rimmed glasses sliding down his nose dizzy with reflection.
That observer, looking closer, might have seen it—
Dreamland in darkness, shrouded in snow, an ethereal light guttering at one high window. Like the film of thin blue flame that hovers over dying embers, fluttering, fluttering, unless some chance draft should fan it once again to life. Like a ghostly pulse.
Or a faltered heartbeat, catching.
10
In the deepest trough of morning, when the snow had stopped and the clouds had drifted further east, disclosing a limpid shield of sky from which a crescent moon gilded the Gold Coast and the dead lands alike, Fletcher Keel came suddenly awake, his heart booming in his breast. He stared disoriented at the strange ceiling, memory coming back in shards: the smudged and crumpled promise of a barroom napkin, the long plane ride home, and that strange stir of presence in the south stairwell.
Everything but the dream that had startled him awake.
He lay very still, trying to recall it, until sleep carried him away at last.
11
In Dreamland, no one else dreamed, all the rest of that night.
A Tour of the Ruins
1
KATRINA SUKS COCKS, the words said, staggering in jagged foot-high letters across an otherwise unmarred wall of unpainted cinder block. As the others drifted down the hallway toward the twelfth-floor elevator, Lara paused in an empty doorway, staring in at those words and thinking not for the first time that maybe it had been a bad idea, this little tour. That was Ramsey Lomax’s word, not hers—the word he’d used when he had proposed the idea over lunch, in the same tone he might have used to suggest a stroll in the park or some other lark. And to Lara, that’s exactly how the whole thing had felt—like a tour, appallingly so, in fact: a lazy hike through floor after devastated floor, apartment after wrecked apartment, accompanied by Lomax’s incessant commentary—a fourteen-year-old girl raped and left for dead in a utility closet on seven, a thirty-seven-year-old grandmother—
“Thirty-seven and a grandmother!” Keel had marveled.
—gunned down in the hall on nine—horror after horror after horror, all of it narrated with the same blithe indifference to the incredible cost this place had exacted, the unbelievable human toll. No wonder Benjamin Prather’s
expression had begun to curdle half an hour into the excursion, she thought. No wonder she had found herself drifting farther and farther behind the other four, until at last Lomax’s voice faded to a distant quacking.
Anything for a moment of silence.
She looked up, watching the others as they neared the intersection with the central corridor. The red glow of a still-functioning exit sign, mounted over the door into the stairwell, momentarily illuminated them, and then they turned the corner, apparently unaware of her absence.
Which was fine with her.
She turned her attention back to the apartment. The words—
—Katrina suks cocks—
—were still there. Looking at them, she felt something turn over inside her. It wasn’t the sentiment itself that shocked her—God knows she’d heard worse in the trauma rooms at Mercy General. It was the location: here in a room that had once been someone’s home.
That was the thing you had to remember, the thing Lomax—and Keel, too, and maybe even Abel Williams—apparently found so easy to forget—if they’d ever really understood it in the first place. People—real, live human beings—had lived here, here, in this …
Lara sought for the word, but everything that came to mind—slum, ghetto, whatever—seemed somehow inadequate.
Hell might do it justice.
In the depleted gray light admitted by the sole window—a tall, narrow aperture more like an arrow slot than a proper window, an arrow slot sporting shards of broken glass like teeth—the word seemed close enough. Good enough for government work, as her father used to say—which, come to think of it, Dreamland had been. Your tax dollars at work.
Ha, ha.
Lara scanned the room once again: narrow and airless, with flat cinder block walls, a floor of peeling linoleum, and a swaybacked sleeper sofa the color of phlegm, its cushions canted back to reveal the thin mattress underneath.
Maybe right there, Lana said inside her head.
Right there what?
Katrina. You know … Maybe Katrina suc—
Right, Lara thought.
But from the look of the mattress, yellowing and mysteriously stained, it seemed like more than a remote possibility. It seemed like a probability, actually. Standing there in the empty doorway (which raised another question: what had happened to all the damn doors in this place?), the scene was all too easy to imagine. And as much as it bothered her—the idea of some strung-out black kid named Katrina working a stranger to joyless spasm on that sagging, piss-stained mattress—as much as it bothered her, it didn’t bother her quite enough, did it?
Not as much as Lomax’s story about Theresa Matheson had bothered her. Not as much as that story still bothered her. Which said what, exactly, about her character? Something she didn’t want to think about, that much was certain.
Just then, the wind kicked up, drawing a mournful keening harmonic across the saw-edged teeth in the window. Lara shivered and crossed her arms over her breasts, mindful suddenly of the forsaken arcade at her back, the echoing emptiness of the floors below. Turning, she gazed once again down the hallway, so unlike the renovated hallway seven stories below that they might have been in entirely different buildings—or entirely different worlds, for that matter. She stood at the far end of the southern wing, at the door to the next-to-last apartment in line. The corridor stretched away before her, uncarpeted concrete cluttered with still more cast-off furniture—a broken bar stool, another battered sofa. Two or three doorways at the other end of the hall radiated that same wan exterior light—more arrow slots, she supposed—and the exit sign continued to shed its faint cherry glow, but otherwise the gloom was unrelieved. And it stank. Even in subzero weather, with the wind pouring through half a dozen or more broken windows, the place stank. Come August it must have been intolerable. Lara took a long breath and let it whistle between her pursed lips, clouding the air before her.
Not a good place to be alone, sis, Lana said. Remember what the man said.
“Shut up,” Lara said softly.
Something had started banging down the hall, a rhythmic clapping. The wind, she told herself. Another broken window, maybe a shutter or something. Except people didn’t exactly install shutters in places like this, did they? They had more pressing concerns. Like not getting shot.
In the next moment, the wind died away. The clapping died, too, along with that awful keening. Thank God for small favors. But that left the silence, which seemed deeper now, more pervasive. It welled up around her, spilling out of empty apartments, through doorways, in windows, and suddenly she found herself longing for the sound of human voices, even Ramsey Lomax’s endless quacking.
She took a first hesitant step, and then another, and then, without intending it, she found herself hurrying down the crepuscular hallway at a quick walk, snatching glances into open apartments on either side.
“Guys?” she said. And then, louder, hating the way it sounded, the weakness: “Hey, guys, wait up!”
She barked her shin on a discarded chair, cursed under her breath, and kept moving—faster now, pumping her legs in something just short of a jog as she took the corner.
There.
Lara checked her progress mid-stride. She’d caught a glimpse of something—movement, a flash of yellowish white—through a half-open door.
“Very funny,” she started to say as she swung toward the apartment, brushing back the door—this one actually had a door—with one hand.
The words died in her throat.
The apartment was empty: dank cinder block walls strewn with graffiti, that same scarred linoleum, a faint lingering reek of urine, the smell of it reminding her suddenly of the ER, its complex melange of odors: urine, sweat, the omnipresent ammonia burn of disinfectant.
How much she missed it.
In the same moment, she once again sensed movement, an ivory blur hurtling toward her from the absolute limit of her peripheral vision. Lara gasped, a sharp little blurt of surprise—more like a squawk than a real scream—slipping out before she could choke it back. As she turned, a cold draft lifted her hair—
And then a bottomless wave of relief buoyed her.
Laughter, bright and glassy, burbled in her throat. A window shade—a ragged age-yellowed remnant of a window shade, actually, the plastic roll-up type—that’s all it was, all it had ever been. And as she stood there, listening to that odd, disturbing little laugh die away, the wind picked up again, hurling itself in a chill blast through the shattered hole of the window. The shade bellied outward, its weighted bottom smacking the wall—a hollow thwacking sound, like an irregular drumbeat—with every fresh gust.
Lara laughed again, real laughter this time.
And you call yourself a scientist, Lana said inside her head, and that only made her laugh harder. She was still laughing when Abel Williams appeared in the doorway.
“You all right?” he said, and for some reason that set her off again.
“What?” he said. “What’s so funny?”
“The window shade,” she managed to gasp. “It scared the shit out of me.”
“The window shade?” Abel said incredulously. He snorted, and she couldn’t help herself, she snickered in response—then they were both laughing, a wild, rising gale of hilarity that kept renewing itself every time one of them tried to speak, until finally, abruptly, it burst, leaving them wrung out, breathless.
Still gasping, Lara shook her head. “Where the hell were you guys? That window shade could have killed me.”
Abel laughed once again—a single sharp bark, like an explosion—and then he drew himself upright. “At the elevator,” he said, with an air of injured dignity. “Waiting for you.”
2
By the time Lara and Abel swung back through the doors of the waiting elevator, their pale faces highlighted by rosy patches of color, the nature of Lomax’s little “tour”—not to mention the climax he clearly had in mind for it—had become all too evident. Just thinking about it, Ben felt the knot
of tension in his chest grow tighter.
It had been there all morning, that knot, from the moment he woke unrested just after nine o’clock, his eyes burning with weariness. Lomax’s leisurely pilgrimage through the blasted warren of Dreamland hadn’t helped any. By the time they had reached the tenth floor, it had begun hardening into resentment. “By the mid-eighties, gangbangers, the Conservative Vice Lords, were pretty much running this place,” Lomax had said, staring into a vacant bedroom where a gaping hole had been punched through one wall, providing access to the neighboring apartment.
An enormous black-and-gold graffito had been painted on the cinder block wall opposite—a top hat, a glove, and a cane, all of them superimposed atop a gigantic pentagram, like a coat of arms, faded now, but far more proficiently executed than anything Ben had seen elsewhere in the building. Sheets of rain-warped plywood covered both windows, but the smoky faraway light of the winter sun bled around the edges and streamed in glittering spokes through splintering holes in the panels—bullet holes, Ben suspected—suffusing the room with an ethereal undersea glow.
Lomax turned, his hawklike profile momentarily illuminated. “This was one of their safe houses,” he said. “They’d set them up in vacant apartments and tunnel through the interior walls to set up escape routes.”
“Jesus Christ,” Keel had muttered.
And the other men in the room—the white men, Ben couldn’t help thinking, one of whom had never been short so much as a single dime in the last thirty years—stood there sober as deacons, shaking their heads in agreement: unbelievable, these people. Ben, watching from the doorway, felt the knot tighten another notch.
The doctor, at least, had dissented.
“It’s not like they had a lot of choices,” she’d said.
“People always have choices, Doctor,” Lomax replied crisply, and that had been that, the final word, delivered with a steely edge: the chairman quelling an insurrection in the boardroom. Or—more appropriate, given the context—the master delivering a stern warning to some uppity darky. That cultured voice, that whiplash smile.