The Pure Cold Light (26 page)

He knew he should to make contact with Lyell but had no idea where to begin. The Overcity worked by tacit rules, and he was conspicuous however he went. No place offered him sanctuary. He had seen the looks in their eyes as he fled: they would all remember him.

Wearily, he got up and plashed across the broken concrete. His arm throbbed. The skin of his biceps was hot to the touch. All the energy that had attended him with Chikako had swirled away like this rain into the drains. He wished he had been able to sleep alongside her. He wished he possessed more medicine, one more shot to see him through his escape. Without it, he must go as far as he could. Mingo would come after him.

Ahead, past a row of huge pots rooting black dead trees, the plaza narrowed. He passed into a canyon beneath a crisscross of skywalks. Another plaza opened to him, this one encircling the Gothic City Hall building and lit by garish sodium lights. A security checkpoint was installed on the far side. He could see a few figures inside a conveyance tube beyond it, riding an escalator up to the skywalks. He hung back against the sealed ground floor walls of the buildings that circled City Hall plaza. He was a solitary figure in shadows cast by the walkways, cut by the lights. The rain helped, keeping the guards inside their gate. At that distance it erased identity: the guards nothing but faceless ciphers.

Edging along, he caught sight of his own lambent reflection in a polished buttress. Where the rain had spattered the mask, it appeared to have holes in it. Splotches covered the top of his head like some fungus or the exposed bones of his skull. Across the crown, the mesh of the mask emerged clearly. He glanced toward the checkpoint but no one was there. No one saw him.

Safely around City Hall, he set off more quickly down Market Street to the east. Not far along the broad and broken, debris-strewn avenue, the main cluster of towers fell away, until only a single strip of looming skyscrapers remained. They stretched east almost to the river. Nearby, much older buildings, many abandoned or inhabited on the ground floor only, filled the spaces between ancient streets. Dazzlingly lighted fast-food kiosks surrounded the tower exits off Market and Tenth Street, representative of every conceivable variety of meal. He stared at the twirling orange bun with the hideous grin on its cartoon face and recalled Chikako’s remark linking food and ScumberCorp.

He shied away from the kiosks. Many things he was, but hungry wasn’t one of them.

The number of people grew the farther he walked. Nocturnal nomads roamed the streets in search of nothing.

He passed graffiti-coated entrances to old underground rail lines, but did not understand what they were; otherwise he might have vanished right then into the sanctuary they offered. But no one else was approaching them, and he stayed away.

Thinking that Mingo might find him on so broad an avenue, he turned left at the next street. There, in the dark, he discovered ahead a wonderfully strange arch. It stood in the street, like the gate to a mythical realm. Brightly colored figures, monstrous heads and Chinese characters adorned the twin pillars and the crosspieces. It was all the more strange in that the buildings to each side of it were crumbling edifices. Who maintained this arch, and why? He could not imagine, but its very incongruity kept him from venturing further. Whatever dwelled in that darkened domain of shop fronts might have erected the arch as a warning rather than any kind of welcome to would-be trespassers. He must look elsewhere for sanctuary.

Turning, he noticed a rusted and graffiti-adorned green street sign: “Arch Street.” A joke?

A passerby stumbled blindly against him while he stood there looking, grumbled at him before shuffling on. Angel forgot about arches and headed away from the solitary figure.

He walked east upon a surface of flattened, dissolving trash made slick by the rain. Crushed atomizer bulbs skittered underfoot like tiny deformed crustaceans. No one passing seemed to mind the debris. People close by watched him, but most looked fearfully away if he turned his gaze on them and gave him a wide berth. Those few who stared longer did so with mad eyes, seeing something of their own making in his softly glowing visage.
 
He glanced past them, at store windows to either side. Against the darkness of the street, the mask was a bobbing will o’the wisp, a phantom light.

As he progressed eastward, each row of decaying buildings that went by stripped another layer off time, each ushered him deeper into the city’s past, toward the Delaware River and the eldest stratum. He did not want to be trapped against the river

Many of the historical sites had been seized by squatters and converted into seedy shops that clung like barnacles to the city’s keel: grocers who grew food and herbs in scrubby backyard plots; cheap teahouses where locally grown opium was smoked and Balinese puppets cast their grotesquely flexing shadows across sex-stained sheets; verminous flophouses for those who had moved up from lower levels or fallen from grace. People lined one sidewalk, awaiting the next available room in a four-story flophouse. He kept to the far side of the street. The flophouse offered him nothing, either. Angel needed to descend to places where scouted shades could mask him far better than his dissolving electronic façade.

The buildings stopped abruptly. An open space lay dead ahead, caught in the sodium glare of lights atop a high wall to the north—that would be the wall enclosing the fabled Vine Street docks, he figured.

To his left, as far as he could see, stretched a conflux of boxes. A bizarre living fortress. It over-spilled a red-brick retaining wall, down a few steps and across the street. Rows of contiguous boxes covered the walks on both sides, the broad avenue ahead. A few scattered maple trees stuck out of the mass on his left, silhouetted, leafless, against the lights.
 

A layered murmur of conversation rolled like ocean waves upon the air, cresting with shouts and howls and peals of laughter. He could smell woodsmoke, and things less pleasing.

He crossed the street to where a crooked sign hanging off a Mile-a-Minute-devoured brick wall announced that he was entering “Judge Lewis Quadrangle.” Beneath it someone had scrawled“The Judge is Out.” He wandered in beside the wall.

There must have been hundreds of people milling about in the cramped lanes that separated the hovels. A cheesy background odor of unchecked bacteria, of bad meat, assailed him each time he squeezed past one of them. Others, squatting on the ground in their boxes, watched him silently with unreadable, feral eyes.

He discovered an opening in the brick wall to his right. Through it he could see a line of lamps, and he made his way toward them.

The lamps were short antique streetlights on black poles. They glowed wanly, hardly more spectacular than his LifeMask. Their light held a certain magic he could not explain—perhaps it was just that they worked. Moths fluttered obsessively around them. The steady rain glistened like gems, falling past. He took in the concourse around the lamps and noticed that some of the people were naked. They stood shamelessly on the bricks, their arms reaching for the sky as if in supplication; a few, armed with soap, lathered themselves furiously and then passed the soap to other eager hands. Others, possibly more timid, rubbed the soap over their clothes. They all gave him defiant once-overs when they caught him staring.
 

Behind them lay broad steps up to higher ground. At the top, enormous flagpoles pointed into the sky, flying ragged banners he could barely make out.
 
He started up the steps.

As he climbed, farther back to either side of the steps, two tall cloisters came into view. The greasy smells, combined with pockets of flickering light within the cloisters, suggested cooking fires shielded from the rain. More rain worshippers stood scattered along the steps as if in a shared trance. He had to navigate around them; they did not notice him. When he reached the last step, he stopped still, transfixed by the view.

Ahead of him, the quadrangle descended in five tiers to a center channel, wide open at the far end. There it dropped even farther to street level, where there was a large, disused fountain, and trees made shapeless by ravenous vines. And a second sea of box dwellings. He thought there must have been ten thousand. He had stumbled into the heart of Box City.

Like the tents of an army awaiting dawn’s early light, row upon row, their irregular lines ran all the way to Independence Hall. That edifice stood like an elaborate battlement or a simple church, its steeple ablaze in reflected sodium light.

People shoved past Angel, nudging him this way and that. They crossed the plaza and went down the steps. He drifted forward, and took the marble steps slowly. In the channel at the bottom, the crowd thickened but he was not watching them. The steeple had hold of him.

With his gaze fixed, he didn’t see a small woman in his path; she wore a miniumbrella fastened to her head and, as she tried to climbed the step beside him, the umbrella’s sharp ferrule poked his wound. He cried out and doubled up, clutching the arm. The woman tilted back her canopy headgear and said, “Sorry, Mac, didn’t see ya up there,” and started on. He reached out and stopped her.

When she turned again, he asked, “Can you help me?”

She sized him up from the shadows of her rain hat before replying cryptically, “Who’s to say.” She tilted her head back and stared some more, as if doubting he was real. She had a bristle of curly gray hair on her chin. He noticed that she was wearing red plastic gloves on both hands.

“I need a place,” he said, “to … to hide.” It slipped out as if from his grasp. “A place down there. Who do I ask about it? Do you know of any such place?”

“Somebody has to want to move or else has to have moved and nobody else is waiting ahead of you. There’s mostly a list, when you don’t know anybody. But nearly everybody can be bribed.” She reached out to rub his shirt between her fingers. “I could help you, I expect, for a finder’s fee. I know a box, got a blanket and only one owner lately. No lice. Well, not many. Plastic’s got a couple rips in the side but the water don’t get in bad. Unless it rains a lot like now, and then you take your bath with the rest of them.” She gestured back the way he had come, and chortled, revealing inflamed gums and no back teeth. “You don’t care about the view, do you? No Taj Mahal ’round here anyway. Although you can make out one of the blue towers of Franklin Bridge if you need something to stare at. Vine Street docks is noisy all the time, but you get used to that real quick. Especially as you usually can’t hear it over the assholes squawking on all sides a ya.”

“Sure,” he agreed, understanding little of her prattle.

She stepped closer, clutching his wrist. “Confidentially, I’d drop the disguise if I was you, unless you’re into frightening your neighbors to make ’em shut up. Them glowheads look like Orbiters’ ghosts. Liable to get you sliced for scaring somebody shitless. You twig me?”

“Take off the mask?”

“That.” She nodded.

One-handed, he undid the hasp and drew it off.

Her jaw hung open. “Hey,” she marveled, “you got disguises under your disguises.” She touched his jaw, turning it to display the readout panel on the side. “I know someone has one of those on his head, saying all the time he got ‘crabs.’” She guffawed. “Says it makes him walk sideways.”

“
Crab
, that’s right, it’s short for—”

“He got a speech problem that it
mostly
corrects. Does a lot better job on you. Now you come on, I’ll show you my box.” She grinned lewdly, as though she had made a rude joke.

With difficulty she walked back up the steps. Both hips seemed to bother her.

They returned to the street where he had entered, then across it to the raised park. The narrow lanes allowed little maneuvering room. Angel held his hand over his wounded shoulder to keep it from being bumped into.

Most of the boxes had curtained fronts of one kind or another, but many stood open, the people squatting in the entrance, or standing like prairie dogs in the dark doorways of their burrows. He saw no fires in them but a scattered flickering of TV screens.

Someone called out, “He here for the Bell, Lucy? He come awful late,” and his guide hollered back, “Could be.”

“You gon’ need a can opener to git anything outta him,” warned another. A lot of laughter followed that.

He watched the lights atop the Vine Street wall grow larger. The sounds from behind it ran across the ground and up his legs. Like the rumble of an earthquake. All at once the woman said, “Here ya go. As advertised.” She held back the curtain from a small box. The curtain, looped onto a dowel, had rows of leering President Odie faces on it.
 

Angel knelt and looked inside. He could just about sit up, and it was long enough for him to stretch out. Not wide, but the smallness, despite his earlier claustrophobia, appealed. It was an excellent place to hide. The aforementioned blanket was more like a large towel.

“’bout the size of a Jappo hotel berth,” she noted, as if this somehow increased its value.

“How much?” he asked.

“Depends. What you got worth pursuing?”

He dug into a jacket pocket, pulling out everything there. He had two program cubes from ICS-IV, and Gansevoort’s green biocard. He couldn’t recall how he had acquired it. It must have been in the jacket.

The woman swiped the card from his hand. “Oooh, you’s a regular jackpot.” She thumbed the edge, enjoying the snap. “Pristine, too. Think I’ll be sailing now. You enjoy your stay here.”

“For how long?”

“Honey, you
own
it, you stay as long as you like. Just don’t try lighting any fires in there or they’ll drop ya in Hell. Otherwise, you’ll be left alone, I expect. If anybody comes looking, you tell ’em Lucy moved up.” She squinted at the card. “Way up,” she added, tucked the card out of sight and limped away.

Angel watched her go. Disembodied voices out of the boxes again called to her, and she joked with them in passing.

Other observers got up and tried to hit on her as she passed, but she shook them off. Across the lane from him the curtains were drawn, either no one home or not welcoming interruption. That was all right by him.