He tries to think of something to say, but before he can speak, Mrs. Bloch opens her mouth and, in that deep, clipped, guttural, Eastern European accent, she asks, “Ahr du der reeda?”
He’s so taken aback, both by the question and the sound of her voice, somehow both ghostly and deeply authoritarian, that he says nothing.
She asks in a louder voice.
“Ahr du der reeda?” the noise of her harsh, croaking words booming through the cavern of the train station as if amplified in far-off corners by some hidden web of microphones and speakers.
Unsure of what to say, but feeling prodded to say something, as if his silence could be an irreversible mistake, Gilrein mutters, “Yes.”
Mrs. Bloch turns her head into a shaft of moonlight that cuts across her left ear. And taking this as a sign to repeat himself and speak up, Gilrein says, “Yes, I’m the reader.”
Mrs. Bloch doesn’t seem to recognize his voice, or if she does she allows no indication of recognition. She steps in close, reaches up, and starts to run her fingers over his face. Then she abruptly stops and nods, reaching into the folds of her ragged trench coat and pulling out a crumpled brown paper bag.
“Dis,” she says, “ist fur du.”
She places the bag on the ground at his feet, then turns and starts to walk back to the track 7 tunnel, finding the rail with her cane, which, Gilrein sees now, is just a length of lead pipe, and starting a new run of methodically paced clanging.
He waits until she completely dissolves into the shadows, pockets his gun, squats down, and lifts up the bag. He begins to open it and instantly stops himself. This, he knows, is the package. This is the item that Leo Tani died over. This is the book that has caused his beatings, caused his lips to be sewn together. Caused Wylie to betray him. Gilrein has spent the last twenty-four hours trying to convince everyone he’s come in contact with that he has no knowledge of this volume. And now, the only thing he can think of is the fastest way out of the station.
He tucks the bag under his arm and runs for the crevice that exits into the rear yard. He tries to ignore what he thinks is the sound of hushed speech from every shadowed notch that he passes. When he reaches the Checker, he pops the trunk and reaches inside, shoves his father’s wooden tool chest to the side, finds a pile of oil rags, and selects the largest. He wraps the paper bag inside the rag, then hides it in the hollow beneath the spare tire.
He climbs behind the wheel of the cab, loads the key into the ignition, cranks over the engine, and looks out the windshield to notice, near the roof of Gompers, positioned against one of the half-toppled Ionic columns that rims a section of balcony, what looks to be a child, staring back down at him, hunched over itself, looking feral and skittish even from this distance. Gilrein leans over to the passenger seat to get a better view, but the child vanishes back into the interior of the train station. One more ephemeral tenant of the city’s expansive black holes.
22
Wylie climbs out of the red cab, hands money through the front window, ridiculously overtipping the driver. And this after the initial bribe that convinced the fleet-boy to ignore the company regs and take her into Bangkok Park. But he went all the way to the edge of the Vacuum, and for a corporate weasel that’s as close to bravery as you’re going to get.
Heronvolk Road is deserted, as usual, but tonight the street has somehow managed to outdo itself and evoke an even more desolate atmosphere than is the norm. It’s as if the Vacuum in general and Heronvolk in particular were a setting from one of the pirated comic books that Kroger markets, one of those ultra noir bandes dessinées in which doomed schlemiels wander through urban wastelands attempting to impose concepts of logic and ethicality in a hostile place where those ideas no longer have any meaning. And maybe never did.
It’s not just the decay, the adamantly worn-out and brokendown milieu that permeates every surface here. Not just the tangible evidence of violence and poverty and isolation, the fire-destroyed buildings or the gutters filled with putrefaction. It’s the ethereal sense of omnipresent absurdity, a feeling that there is something in the air itself, some single, guiding impulse that makes the organic want to recede and die, something chronically seeping into one’s pores that makes every living organism genetically incapable of hope. This is an environment that radiates its dwellers with the purest nihilism, mutates its inhabitants until they are infertile in the crucial area of faith, barren of any trace, of any type, of belief. The Vacuum is where one comes not to dread annihilation but rather to embrace it like a redeeming lover. And this kind of world will always make people despise themselves just as much as, if not more than, the landscape that perpetually defiles them.
Wylie Brown knows, as she approaches her place of recent employment, that she might always hate herself just a little for coming to work here, for being August Kroger’s flunky. For succumbing to the cheap and relentless addiction to the text. The unfortunate are born screwed in this kind of cesspool, but Wylie willed herself into a toxic resident. Made a conscious choice to move here. So how do you forgive a betrayal that turns you into the most cynical monster of all, the breed that can always successfully lie to itself and then take pleasure in the deception?
She stands across the street from the Bardo and looks up at the building, trying to get a fix on how it stays upright, how it prevents itself from cascading earthward into a pile of broken masonry, what ugly architectural magic keeps the mill ensconced on the block while looking every second as if it were about to dissolve into fallen chaos.
As she studies the structure for a clue to its logic, she becomes aware of someone approaching from the opposite end of Heronvolk, a child or a dwarf hobbling slowly forward with a limp, swinging a cane or walking stick as if parting a crowd.
At first, the figure gives no indication that it sees her. Then it begins to move toward Wylie, speed and cadence never changing. And halfway across the street, Wylie realizes it’s Kroger’s foreperson, the manager of the labor force, the woman August refers to only as the hag, but whose name is actually Mrs. Bloch.
Mrs. Bloch comes to a stop directly in front of Wylie, leans forward until their faces are uncomfortably close, the patties of tough skin sealing in Mrs. B’s eyes almost grazing Wylie’s cheek. They have never spoken before, though Wylie has seen the old woman several times in the corridors. And there was one awkward occasion when they shared the freight elevator, rode up to the penthouse together, both silent through the trip, Wylie pretending to study the cartoon forgeries on the cage walls, Mrs. Bloch imitating the sighted and staring at Wylie the whole time. When they reached Kroger’s lair, Wylie got off and Mrs. B rode back down to the sweatshop without explanation.
Now Mrs. Bloch comes up on the sidewalk, stands next to Wylie and asks, “Ahr du der vitnis?”
“I’m the librarian,” Wylie says.
Mrs. B’s head pivots up and down slowly on the neck, mechanically, as if she can see through her tumors and was appraising Wylie’s face for evidence of a lie.
“Teik der ahrm,” the hag commands, sounding like an emphysematous prison guard from the Balkans.
Wylie chokes off an impulse to resist and cups the woman’s elbow with her hand. And though the request would seem to indicate that Mrs. B wanted assistance crossing the empty street, it is the old woman who takes the lead, pulling Wylie along.