Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality (23 page)

Rolled into the corner of her pack of cigarettes are a one-hitter that looks like a cigarette and a plastic bag, the size that spare coat buttons come in. The one chunk of pot left in the bag looks like a tiny, freeze-dried Christmas tree. So out of revenge against her—and the way she hugged Conor Ricketts, or how she said Don't Ask Me Anything and fell asleep so now I'm stuck here and bitch-bored—I tap the one-hitter against the bathroom sink and crumble in a few pinches of weed. Then—just to have at least some Crazy Stories—I spark it, exhaling into the ceiling fan, coughing grains of solidified electricity until the plastic bag is empty, and my heart rate speeds up and floats, moth-like, out of my body.

When I leave the bathroom, my face glows with a calm, very discerning expression, like Harrison Ford. I assess the room. Curtains cover one wall. No sound anywhere, except my socks on the carpet. A cozy, echoless sound, like dialogue on late-night anime.

I lie down next to her and slip my hand under hers, which feels dry and slender, a Victorian hand. I place my palm on her right breast. I make a few rotations, scientifically. Her chest expands and contracts, like we've always been falling asleep in a bed that's too small for us.

When I sit up, I notice on the
Rochester Real Estate Journal
cover the phrase
SAVE TOUCH AND DIE
written in large, hip-looking type that's apparently supposed to resemble handwriting. Since that phrase seems like some life comment I don't understand, I open the magazine. Some listings are pre-circled, like an edgier way to highlight notable properties. Some of the articles display photos of homes, with messages
in the margins like “use this” next to a picture of a granite fireplace; and “!!!!” Which I realize, then, is all just Mindy Fale's handwriting, balloony in a murdery kind of way. But then I see this article about code enforcement, with pictures of rusted pipes.

I eye-stroke the article's first four words over and over, but a paragraph near the center of the page reads: “After a gas leak explosion at the Rochester Public Access Building that injured a St. Bonaventure student, the city condemned 21 properties in the two w—.”

I make a Bible-sized gulp. A picture, light harsh from the flash, shows a buffalo-sized gas tank—a cylinder on four legs, covered with rust and white and green infections. The caption says: “The gasoline tank had corroded due to excessive water at the …” I blink over a few sentences. “Tests had not been conducted since 1987.”

But then, Bible-Sized Gulp No. 2: “—a department research coordinator, said that outliers had created misleading statistics. This month, a juvenile, 14, pled guilty to arson charges in connection with fire incidents at two homeless shelters, the Monroe County Democ …”

I set the magazine down because my lips feel heavy. My head feels like it's about to fall off. Did I seriously not see this in the news? Did I miss all of this only because 11 p.m. runs directly into Rochester Drivearound hour? Was the Fires Gone Wild Runaway Cockdrama, this whole time, just some kid, a juvenile, who the magazine doesn't identify, along with a bunch of oven burners left on? For an answer, all I can hear is a low-pitched, synthesizery noise, tunneling in on me, low
like monks' blow horns. Then, in a wallpapery pattern, 8-bit images of Necro flash, in time with my heart rate, on the inner side of my cornea. My lungs close when I swallow. My mind free falls. My thoughts very quickly reason their way to hell.

I imagine I'm giving a toast in front of an audience, and Necro runs up to me and yells “You fraud!” I hear myself say that if Toby finds Necro, he'll kill him. He'll kill him and go to the police, and I need to show him this article, right now, need to watch him read it over to uproot the Runaway Cockdrama. I try to breathe deep—to get my brain to tread some water—but the best I can do is stand up. Then I think: You can never lie again. And I maybe, right here, get myself to fully form the thought of: if I can tell the truth about Sausage Academy, I can tell Toby the truth about Necro. But then I hear a girl yell in what is the opposite of a voice:
You are going to die this way
.

“Hey. Wake up,” I say to Mindy Fale, at conversation volume.

Some saliva at the back of her throat pops when she breathes.

I tap her shoulder. “We have to get out of here,” I say. Her hands, folded, rise and fall on her stomach. “My friend's in trouble. I have to apologize to him.”

She smacks her lips and rolls over. Since I'm relieved to at least be annoyed by this, I rip open the curtains, and behind them the entire time was a sliding door, which opens to a balcony, which overlooks the Horseshoe Falls.

The falls are so loud, curving like a broad, raging fingernail, that I'm amazed the balcony's concrete floor is still there when
I step out. The mist is thick enough to comb your face. I kick some cobwebs off the chair and tip it forward to dump the puddle from the cushions.

After two or three pairs of headlights slide by—however long that is—Mindy Fale comes out to the balcony. The timing of which, for obvious reasons, is total Colonel Shortchange Moonteeth Hellstache.

“These new pills must have reacted—” she yells, before the loudness of the falls makes her impossible to hear, “—of my stalkers there.”

“Yeah!” I say, because I can't get my head around asking her to repeat herself.

And I would think to tell her we need to leave, but I'm in Weird Politeness Recoil now that she's out here with me. She hugs herself against the balcony railing and mouths something I can't hear. So I stand up next to her.

“Sometimes, the falls freeze all the way across!” she yells. “Tourists used to go out and party on the ice! There were liquor stores!”

“Yeah!” I yell. Mindy Fale's been destined for temp jobs. But in class once, the teacher was talking about Einstein's brain being preserved in a tank. Her hand darted up: “You mean like Napoleon's penis?!”

A strand of her hair is stuck to my shirt sleeve. I can't tell if her arm is touching mine. And, how sad is it that, right now, I'm thinking about Frankenstein, eating a hamburger, and how me and Necro, long ago, could have totally joked about a horror-themed restaurant with intentionally-poorly-named menu items like the Horror Burger, or the Chicken Salad
with Werewolf Fingers, or the Really-Scary, Awful-Tasting Spaghetti with Vampire Meatballs. How sad that I have to go to Niagara Falls to figure out that I've chosen Toby's Cockdramas and women over Necro? Because what do you say, with some girl who is kind of a Level 3 Frumptruck, some woman you'll only use to think of someone else, and in my head, Necro is yelling to me “That was my life!” and another voice yells “Take him to court, Necro!” before something in my body tells my brain That's Enough. And only now am I able to punch a hand, mentally, through my brain's cemetery dirt and tell myself: I Am Absolutely Blazing.

“Well, there they are!” she yells over the falls.

“There they are,” I say.

The Genesee Falls downtown, however, are green. When me and Toby cross the bridge, the air from the water feels me up through my shirt in that way where you can't tell whether you smell the deodorant of every person living here, or every person being murdered here, or whether it's just back-to-school season. But you saw me—even though I went to bed first, and when I woke up the next day the Brain-Chafing Fraud High was done and I only felt urgentless—you saw me show Toby that article today. You saw his eyes moving over the words. So I tell him one more time, just to make sure: “Turned out, after all this, it wasn't Necro. It was a gas leak. It was some kid, a juvenile.” I force a laugh out. “We're retards!”

“Retards. Huh.”

“I already called Necro to apologize,” I say. “I left a message from us.”

Toby's facial expression doesn't change, still stuck on Will Put Body Parts in Suitcases.

But, have you seen what Toby does all day? I've been
with him since before noon just to keep him from generating Havoc Rays over Going Off the Top Ropes on Necro. I got in his car and we dumped some trash bags behind the post office. I stood in line with him while he talked to the girl at MotoPhoto (“Make extra duplicates; you know the ones I like,” he told her).

“So, find a place? Watch preseason?” I say, because Necro would never end up at a Bills bar.

But Toby's brow suddenly crumples. His pupils harden, like there's an apocalypse of fear only he can see on the horizon. I wonder if he's heard a police siren, which is what we came into the city for, because Toby loves to listen for sirens.

“He's right up there,” he mumbles into his shirt collar.

“Up there who?”

“I was downtown yesterday and I knew it was him.”

We get to the end of the bridge and pass some club with a chrome façade and black windows. A tall kid with a Euro soccer jacket zipped up to the collar says to a group of kids with side bags: “You gays like techno?” in this California-therapist voice. “House? Deep house? Chicago? Oakenfold? Berlin? I'm spinning at Freakazoids: Tuesdays and Fridays. The Aurorist. Come check it out—”

Then, the kid, who's handing out laminated, postcard-sized fliers—right when he sees us, he takes off!

And Toby follows him! Chain wallet swinging with his fat, his sprint-form somehow really professional looking.

Except, right then—I put back together what I just saw: That kid—despite the dyed-gray jeans and short white hair—had a swollen face and triangle Draculabrows. That
kid was Necro! Necro, but dressed totally different and with a personality-changing haircut!

Toby chases him over the fence behind Dinosaur BBQ, down a short hill into a grassed-over trench the width of two car lanes. At the entrance of Rochester's abandoned subway system—an entrance the size of a garage door, black as an eye socket of a large skull—they disappear. I swallow hard, and go in after them.

The Rochester subway. I've heard there's still paperwork on the desk inside the dispatch office, dispatching Ghost Trains, or Trains of the Dead, or the C.H.U.D.way—jokes I tried out once on Necro years ago but were forgotten after ten minutes.

Faint light reflects off the puddles, and what looks vaguely like chubby graffiti floats over the walls. I pass a raised platform, maybe where passengers waited, where a stairwell leads straight into a concrete ceiling. Just past that, I walk into an area with long rows of pillars to my left and right, black like underwater chess pieces on a board that won't end.

“Toby?” I say. “Necro?”

Echoing burbles from somewhere.

I press my thumb into the button that turns on my watch light—one of the bright blue kinds. I point my wrist forward. My shoe-echoes shriek when I jog through the large pillary area, and I arrive at a series of narrow metal walkways right-angling in labyrinth-type directions. Way off at one end, some archways overlooking the Genesee let in some half-moons of city light, the color of candle flame. Water pours out of a pipe somewhere.

I hear some footsteps, then some clanging metal, and then a splash.

“Toby?” I say.

Palms and legs slap in the water. “Brhghghhggg!” the body in the water says.

There's enough light that I can see a long, straight path on one of the walkways. Far off, under one archway, where the light is at its whitest, I see a silhouette turn, delicately, ninja-like, and run. I run, too—on my toes, like I've got winged sneakers, wind slicking my hair back, metal of the walkway bending a little under me, until I end up at the portion of the subway tracks that run underneath the Aqueduct.

I've actually heard about the Aqueduct, which I think the Erie Canal passed through a million years ago. The curves of its brick archways recede like skipping rocks. The graffiti on the pillars overlaps, brightly colored as stuffed animals inside a drop-claw prize machine.

The shadow stands at the opposite end of the Aqueduct, collar turned up, one shoulder turned toward me, like it should be holding a katana, like it's waiting for me. I make another ass-bolt toward the shadow, the soles of my shoes soft, like there should be a ledge up ahead and, after it, deep space and the broad blue curve of the Earth below.

The shadow stands there and, as I get closer, the shadow becomes a person. Necro. With a face. “What!” Necro screams.

That Necro knows his way around an abandoned subway in the dark? A little hurtful.

“The Aurorist, Necro?”

“That's what they call me now, as of current. That's what
I'm trying to do, something positive with my life. Trance, deep house. Got a new URL, got some photography on there and shit. Stuff of the future: ‘Curio Goldwing dirges: It'll be an integument of clean destitude.' Or at least that's how, I imagine, sarcasm will sound like, two hundred years from now, in music reviews,” he says, somehow, still with anger.

I pucker my lips, to suck on a pretend pacifier, and hold out my arm: “Touch my arm, Necro! Touch it! Please!”

Instead, Necro reaches into his pants pocket and wings his keys at my face. Some of the teeth of one key nick my left eye. The feeling is more annoying than it is painful, the kind of annoyance you can only get rid of by one way.

“You threw your keys at me,” I say.