The Range Rover breasted through an intersection swollen with rain. To one side the road had collapsed and was blockaded by sandbags and sawhorses. A man in an orange kayak hove into view, his paddle cutting smoothly through blazing water as he propelled himself toward the river.
Jack shook his head, fear chased away by the sheer strangeness and perverse beauty of it all. He cracked his window, letting in a blast of cold salt air heavily laced with exhaust. Water seeped through the floor. He drew his feet up to sit cross-legged on the damp seat and wondered if the Range Rover would be swept like the kayak to the Hudson.
“Look at that,” marveled Jule. It was the first time either of them had spoken for nearly an hour. “Over there—”
A huge tree had smashed upside down against a building. Twenty feet above the washed-out sidewalk its immense root mass hung like a black cloud.
“Wow. I didn’t know there were still trees that big here.”
“Probably it came uprooted somewhere upstate and just floated down. But look behind it—”
Jack pressed his face to the window, straining to see through the filthy glass and barbed wire. He made out something caught in the limbs, ten feet from the ground. “What the hell ?”
Above the tree trunk bobbed four skeletal faces. The water’s reflected gold touched hollows where cheeks, eyes, nose had been; sent strands of light rippling across the surface like fine hair. Antlers branched from each skull like lightning. It was a full minute before Jack realized that the ghastly faces were masks, and that the stags’ horns were not bloodied but wrapped with red ribbons.
He half gasped, half laughed as the Range Rover sloshed past the macabre vision. “Jesus! That scared me.”
Impulsively he turned to Jule.
“I had a dream like that,” he said. “That’s why it scared me. About these people—men, with horns like that.”
Jule nodded. He slowed the car to take a corner, sending a jeweled arc of water against the barricaded facade of the Empire Hotel. “Yeah. Rachel comes to talk to me.”
“They were—” Jack stopped. “Rachel?”
“It started about a year ago,” Jule continued. “When I had to go to court up in Poughkeepsie. I was just coming back, getting onto 684, and she was there”—he pointed at Jack’s seat—“sitting right there. She told me I forgot to put on my turn signal.”
“Oh.” Jack tried to keep his tone even. “So!—was it on? The turn signal?”
“Sure it was on. A little kid, what does she know from cars? But I just about had a heart attack, I can tell you. That’s why I drive around so much. She rides with me, Jackie. She talks to me.”
“Oh.”
“She doesn’t forgive me. I mean, she doesn’t blame me, I wasn’t driving the car that killed her. But all this shit now, my drinking, all that—she doesn’t forgive me, Jackie. She doesn’t forgive me.”
Jack glanced up. He saw Jule’s face, not slack with alcohol but hardened by it, calcified; his eyes dry and glittering as quartz. “Does—have you told Emma about this?”
“Sure.”
“What does she think?”
Jule shrugged. “She doesn’t believe me. She thinks it’s the DTs or something. Actually, what she thinks is that I haven’t processed through my grief. She thinks I’m still in denial.” He stared at Jack measuringly. “I mean, you think I’m nuts, don’t you?”
Jack took in his friend’s haggard unshaven face, the carpet of bottles and empty Thermoses covering the floor. What would be nuts right now would be to get into an argument with Jule.
“I don’t think you’re nuts. I think Emma’s probably right—you’re still grieving, or—”
A delivery van pulled in front of them. Jule beat on the silent horn. “Of course I’m still grieving. You’re still grieving for that guy Eric you were in love with, aren’t you?”
Jack stiffened. “Yes.”
“And Peter and all those other guys?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it doesn’t ever really end, does it?” Jule’s voice dropped. “It’s like you wake up one day and they chopped off your hand. Maybe sometime it stops bleeding and scars over, but you don’t grow a new one.” He added matter-of-factly, “I know Rachel’s dead. I never said she wasn’t dead, I’m not denying that she’s dead. I just said I see her sometimes. She comes…”
Jack’s heart welled as he watched his friend tighten his hold on the steering wheel.
“She comes. Right there, where you’re sitting. The first couple of times it was at night—I just looked over and there she was. She’d say, ‘Hi, Daddy.’ I almost went off the road.
“And now she’s here all the time. I mean, no matter what I do, if I drink, if I don’t drink: she’s still there. Afterward, it always seems like maybe I was dreaming; but then she always comes back.”
Unexpectedly he grabbed Jack’s shoulder. “And she doesn’t forgive me. I thought maybe if I explained things, maybe she’d understand. But it doesn’t work that way. I guess they have their own itinerary. Their own way of doing things.”
“Who?”
“The dead. Like people always think they can be summoned, with a Ouija board or a séance or whatever; but really they just do what they want to. Just like us. It’s not even like they have some message. Sometimes they just want to be with us, I think.”
Jack recalled the sound of his grandfather’s tread upon the stairs at Lazyland, the smell of cigarette smoke and Irish whiskey and his touch upon Jack’s cheek, cold and feathery as snow. Before he could stop himself he blurted, “I know—I know what you mean. A few months ago I had this dream, about my grandfather. Only it wasn’t really a dream. He was really there, and he—he gave me something.”
Jule nodded. “What did he give you?”
Jack hesitated. For one moment he considered telling Jule about the Fusax.
“It was just something I’d lost,” he said at last.
“Like your mind? ”
Jack forced a grin. “Something like that.”
Around them vehicles slowed as though stuck in quicksand. They were in midtown. A few blocks to the south glittered a vast triangular complex of buildings, glass-and-steel walls shining gold and green and red like some monstrous Christmas ornament. From one side bulged a huge glass-domed arena, ovoid, still fluttering with orange construction tape and DANGER: KEEP OUT signs: the site of the millennial ball two days hence. High overhead, an array of solar shields blinked from black to silver, turning this way and that in an urgent search for light. There were bristling antennae like the spines of some huge undersea animal. Satellite dishes and windmills vied for space with hotel and television logos, a neon sign for a restaurant named Pynchon. Across the central pyramid’s surface, rippling letters splashed bright as water.
Jack gazed awestruck. Jule laughed.
“Don’t get out much, huh?”
“It’s been a while.” Jack smiled sheepishly. “I mean, they built that thing so fast… I remember when this was all live sex shows.”
“Oh yeah. The good old days.” He stared up at the monolith with its swags of Christmas lights. “Fucking Christmas. I hate fucking Christmas. And this place,” he said. “I really hate this place. Because they think it makes up for all that other shit, you know? They think you can walk inside and forget about everything here—”