“I don’t know. You’re the leader.”
They wandered downhill, away from the massive edifice of the Manhattan Bridge, past a fancy drugstore and a taqueria with a mural of a rooster. They looked in the windows of a specialty chocolate shop, closed today, and then wandered into a used bookstore where a live cat hissed at them from behind the register. “You can’t drink on transport, but you can keep a domestic animal in a place of business?” Hel said loudly before Vikram tugged her back out the door.
“Let’s get a drink.”
They settled into a booth in a very dark, very hip bar across the street from the bookstore. Exposed brickwork and ugly paintings. Vikram chose a dark draft of some adventive style. He wished he had sniff with him, or that smoking indoors were legal. Hel ordered an energy drink, which came already poured into a glass. When the server wasn’t looking, she topped it off with whiskey from their bottle. “That’s disgusting,” he said. “A disgusting combination.”
“What’s disgusting is to charge seven dollars for a beer during happy hour in Gairville, of all places.”
Vikram already had the browser open on his phone. “The neighborhood’s not called Gairville anymore. It’s DUMBO here.”
“Dumbo?” Hel scoffed. “Really? Who came up with that?”
“It’s an acronym.” He navigated to a related page. “It’s also a classic cartoon movie from 1941 about a small elephant.”
“Who cares?” She sipped at her drink, made a face.
She hated to see the gentrification of neighborhoods she’d known as poor. She also hated to discover formerly prosperous areas that had become run-down.
“Be honest,” Vikram said. “You just hate change.”
“At least the Manhattan Bridge is pretty much the same. I guess it must have been designed and built BS. That stands for Before Sleight,” she explained, before Vikram could ask. “I’m hoping it’ll catch on.”
She had to be kidding. “Instead of just saying Before, you expect people to say BS?”
“They’ll want to say it, when I’ve proved what I know about him. Let’s walk over the bridge.”
Vikram waited until she’d reached the door to leave a tip on the table. Hel never tipped. Outside, the sun had slipped in the direction of Manhattan, leaving behind desperate colors. There in the dusk stood the skyline, lit up and famous, right but wrong. They found the pedestrian access near Sands Street and began to walk uphill on the south side of the bridge. On the initial approach, over land, the highway passed below them and they stared directly into the windows of the buildings around them, people working in some and seas of empty desks in others. On their left, a sports club spread out its tennis courts below eye level. On the right, tracks carried trains from borough to borough.
The pedestrian walkway arched over the riverside park on the Brooklyn side and then they were crossing the East River itself, at last. Hel took his hand, but did not speak. A chain-link fence curled above them to preclude suicidal jumps. Through the grille, Vikram watched barges and boats far below, some carrying tourists. The watercraft parted the skin of the water in white-foamed cuts that closed seamlessly behind, scars that could heal perfectly.
One-third of the way across, they reached the first of the supporting towers and stopped to look out at the water. Vikram picked out the Statue of Liberty and the unfamiliar skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan. The space where the World Trade Center buildings had stood, built before his birth yet destroyed before his arrival. No trace of them now to see, their absence important to everyone but people like him and Hel.
“Remember, you’re the leader,” Hel whispered in his ear. “Turn around?”
“No. Let’s keep going.”
As they walked on, the suspension cables at their side dipped lower and lower. A jogger passed them right at the midpoint of the bridge, and a heavy MTA train rumbled past, its noise deafening. Vikram felt an unhelpful pang that he tried to suppress.
Every big city has its ghosts. A line from the climactic scene in The Pyronauts in which John Gund pursues a fleeing Asyl into the incinerated ruins of Philadelphia. Sleight’s words wafting over from another world.
It was just the density of population in urban centers that caused this feeling, the way that living chockablock with others encouraged anonymity, each member of a crowd consciously shutting out everyone else until one felt surrounded by ignored strangers. It was the tangible history; the new layered with the very old. “Every big city has its ghosts.” He spoke the words aloud. Someone in this world had probably said pretty much the same thing, only Vikram wasn’t sure what to read to find it. He thought again of the destroyed Trade Center buildings. Of the light from the window in the storage facility, flashing out like a beacon.
As they walked, the suspension cables on the river side rose to meet the second support tower. When they reached it, Hel said, “Stop here. Is anyone coming?”
Vikram looked in both directions. It was really getting dark, but the sight lines were good. The jogger, a tiny speck now on the Brooklyn end of the walkway. “No.”
“I was thinking,” Hel said. “The bike path is on the north side, right?” She pointed across the tracks. “So, anyone who approached us, they’d be on foot. No surprises—we’d see them coming a long way off.”
“I guess. What’s your point?”
She pushed him up against the support, the cold steel painted dull blue, then spray-painted in pink and silver bubble letters spelling something he didn’t know how to read—some other language, maybe—and tugged at his belt. “I wore a skirt,” she said, low and throaty. “Help me. Quick.”
She nipped gently at his neck and snaked her hand into his briefs, stroking him awkwardly from a cramped, restricted angle that somehow charged the movement with eroticism. The roundhead bolts pressed into his back like a sentence in Braille. Over her shoulder, he could see the water and, on the Manhattan side, cars on the FDR, the baseball diamond, the Chinatown projects where they once bought a huge bumpy-skinned jackfruit and didn’t know how to eat it. He shimmied his pants and briefs down his hips and lifted her up onto him.
The first card Hel found after the meeting with Ayanna Donaldson was a Queen of Spades, scuffed and bent. Fate dealt it out to her on the sidewalk outside the old Domino Sugar refinery complex, whose large brick edifice now housed the Museum of Modern Thought. The loading chutes Hel remembered had been demolished and newer buildings joined the smokestacks protected by the Landmarks Preservation Commission. She stood in the shadow of those stacks, still reeling from the meeting, and felt the sensation of being watched. But no one was here. No one lingering outside the museum, no one in the landscaped open space that joined the new buildings to the old. The card lay faceup, showing itself. Waiting.
She bent to retrieve it, wondering what it meant. The suit of Spades—analogous to the Swords of the Tarot they used here and the Truth deck she remembered. Swords signified ambition, power, conflict, courage. And queens, of course, symbolized female authority.
“It’s not going to work.” That was how Donaldson had said it, just ten minutes before. And the worst part was Hel’s lack of surprise. She had to admit that she’d expected all along.
The museum director met with her, not in her office but in one of the workrooms at the back of MoMT. A steel-topped table stood in the center of the room, its surface covered with what looked like half a dozen archaeological relics. Chalky white, each one the length of a thumb, they lined up in a neat row, waiting to be catalogued. Donaldson wore blue latex gloves; otherwise, she was dressed all in white. “Give me another chance,” Hel said, aware of the artificial sound of her own words. Had she dreamed of this? Had she said them already? “Give me another chance. I lost control in the artists’ space. I shouldn’t have expected the painting still to be there, but it exists. You can believe me. Whatever Klay said to you—I’ll do better. I’ll behave myself. We’ll find it.”