They glide like attendants toward the room of a waker from civic nightmare who will not be comforted. Open-top tour buses cruise by carrying visitors in matching plastic ponchos with the tour-company logo. At Church and Fulton, there’s a viewing platform, allowing civilians to look in past the chain-link and barricades to where dump trucks and cranes and loaders are busy reducing a pile of wreckage that still reaches ten or twelve stories high, to gaze into what should be the aura surrounding a holy place but isn’t. Cops with bullhorns are managing the foot traffic. Buildings nearby, damaged but standing, some draped like mourners in black façade netting, one with a huge American flag attached across the top stories, gather in silent witness, glassless window-sockets dark and staring. There are vendors selling T-shirts, paperweights, key chains, mouse pads, coffee mugs.
Maxine and Xiomara stand for a while looking in. “It was never the Statue of Liberty,” sez Maxine, “never a Beloved American Landmark, but it was pure geometry. Points for that. And then they blew it to pixels.”
And I know of a place, she’s careful not to add, where you dowse across an empty screen, clicking on tiny invisible links, and there’s something waiting out there, latent, maybe it’s geometric, maybe begging like geometry to be contradicted in some equally terrible way, maybe a sacred city all in pixels waiting to be reassembled, as if disasters could be run in reverse, the towers rise out of black ruin, the bits and pieces and lives, no matter how finely vaporized, become whole again…
“Hell doesn’t have to be underground,” Xiomara looking up at the vanished memory of what had stood there, “Hell can be in the sky.”
“And Windust—”
“Dotty said he came here more than once after 11 September, haunting the site. Unfinished business, he told her. But I don’t think his spirit is here. I think he’s down in Xibalba, reunited with his evil twin.”
The condemned ghost structures around them seem to draw together, as if conferring. Some patrolman from the karmic police is saying move along folks, it’s over, nothing to see here. Xiomara takes Maxine’s arm, and they glide off into a premonitory spritzing of rain, a metropolis swept by twilight.
Later, back in the apartment, in a widowlike observance, Maxine finds a moment alone and switches off the lights, takes the envelope of cash, and snorts the last vestiges of his punk-rock cologne, trying to summon back something as invisible and weightless and inaccountable as his spirit…
Which is down in the Mayan underworld now, wandering a deathscape of hungry, infected, shape-shifting, lethally insane Mayan basketball fans. Like Boston Garden, only different.
And later, next to snoring Horst, beneath the pale ceiling, city light diffusing through the blinds, just before drifting downward into REM, good night. Good night, Nick.
40
There is a particular weirdness to be found on weekends in the evening in NYC health and fitness clubs, especially when economic times are sluggish. Unable anymore to bring herself to swim in The Deseret pool, which she believes to be cursed, Maxine has joined her sister Brooke’s state-of-the-art health club Megareps around the corner but isn’t quite used yet to this nightly spectacle of yups on treadmills, plodding to nowhere while watching CNN or the sports channels, laid-off dotcommers who aren’t at strip clubs or absorbed into massively multiplayer online games, all running, rowing, lifting weights, mingling with body-image obsessives, folks recuperating from dating disasters, others desperate enough tonight actually to be looking for company here instead of in bars. Worse, hanging around the snack section, which is where Maxine, coming in out of the strange kind of late-winter rain that you can hear rattling lightly off your umbrella or raincoat but when you look, nothing is getting wet, finds March Kelleher, busy on her laptop, surrounded by muffin debris and a number of paper coffee cups she’s using, much to the annoyance of the rest of the room, for ashtrays.
“Didn’t know you were a member here, March.”
“Walk-in, just using the free Internet, hot spots all over town, haven’t been in this one for a while.”
“Been following your Weblog.”
“I had an interesting tip about your friend Windust. Like he’s dead, for example. Should I post it? Should I be offering condolences?”
“Not to me.”
March puts the screen to sleep and regards Maxine with a level gaze. “You know I never asked.”
“Thanks. You wouldn’t have found it entertaining.”
“Did you?”
“Not sure.”
“Long sad career as a mother-in-law, only thing I ever learned is don’t advise. Anybody needs advice these days, it’s me.”
“Hey, more than happy to, what’s up?”
A sour face. “Worried sick about Tallis.”
“This is news?”
“It’s all getting worse, I can’t just stand by anymore, I have to be the one to take the step, try to get to see her somehow. Fuck the consequences. Tell me it’s a bad idea.”
“It’s a bad idea.”
“If you mean life is too short, OK, but around Gabriel Ice, as you must know, it can get even shorter.”
“What, he’s threatening her?”
“They’ve split. He’s kicked her out.”
Well. “So good riddance.”
“He won’t leave it at that. Something I can feel. She’s my baby.”
All right. The Code of the Mom stipulates you don’t argue back at this kind of talk. “So,” nodding, “can I help?”
“Lend me your handgun.” Beat. “Just kidding.”
“Yet another license pulled, would be the thing…”
“Only a metaphor.”
OK, but if March, already on the fly, living with her own danger levels, sees Tallis in this much trouble… “Can I do some recon first, March?”
“She’s innocent, Maxine. Ah. She’s so fuckin innocent.”
Running with Gulf Coast gangsters, party to international money laundering, any number of Title 18 violations, innocent, well… “How’s that?”
“Everybody thinks they know more than her. The old sad delusion of every insect-free know-it-all in this miserable town. Everybody thinks they live in ‘the real world’ and she doesn’t.”
“So?”
“So that’s what it is, to be an ‘innocent person.’” In the tone of voice you use when you think somebody needs to have it explained.
TALLIS, booted out of the East Side stately home she and Ice were sharing, has found a utility closet converted to residential use in one of the newer high rises on the far Upper West Side. Looks like a machine more than a building. Pale, metallic, highly reflective, someplace up in the mid–two figures with respect to floors high, wraparound balconies that look like cooling fins, no name, only a number hidden so discreetly not one in a hundred locals you ask can even tell you it. Keeping Tallis company this evening are enough bottles to stock an average Chinese-restaurant bar, from one of which she is drinking directly something turquoise called Hypnotiq. Neglecting to offer any to Maxine.
Out here at the far ancient edge of the island, this all used to be trainyard. Deep below, trains still move through tunnels in and out of Penn Station, horns chiming in B-major sixths, deep as dreams, while ghosts of tunnel-wall artists and squatters the civil authorities have no clue what to do about—evict, ignore, re-evict—go drifting past the train-car windows in the semidark, whispering messages of transience, and overhead in this cheaply built apartment complex tenants come and go, relentlessly ephemeral as travelers in a nineteenth-century railroad hotel.
“First thing I noticed,” not complaining to Maxine so much as to anybody who’ll listen, “is I was getting systematically cut off from the Web sites I usually visit. Couldn’t shop online, or chat in chat rooms, or after a while even do normal company business. Finally, wherever I tried to go, I ran into some kind of wall. Dialogue boxes, pop-up messages, mostly threatening, some apologizing. Click by click, forcing me away into exile.”