JIT
flitted from voice to voice, from mind to mind, listening, tasting, playing with his new power, seeing through other eyes. He had always been kept down by the wave of feelings that pounded him, waking or asleep. Now he could separate the voices, savor them individually. Parts of the city he had never seen—which was most of the city—were now unfolded to him in a scattered collage. He saw the flooded south of Manhattan, the waters stopped by a wall of brick and stone washed from the offices of Wall Street. He saw the delicate outlines of midtown towers and understood, with someone else’s knowledge, that these skeletons had once been concrete honeycombs filled with activity and expectation. He heard the wind fluting between splintered skyscrapers and remembered the strains of a serene Mozart clarinet, winding together and almost interchangeable in the mind of his contact. Jit saw a street littered with carrion, thousands of dead rats like a plush carpet gone to seed, and felt the squeamish horror of his host. Sitting in his tunnel, back pressed against the chilly stone wall, Jit could travel all over the city.
There were things happening that Jit did not understand. He heard voices full of light, of hope and faith that made him briefly yearn for what they loved, even when he did not understand it. Others were black dark, filled with rage, madness, and strangeness, imagery that pleased Jit’s casually bloodthirsty soul even as it pleasurably frightened him. Until the strangeness grew too rich, Jit would tease those thoughts, playing with them. Watching through hosts he had seen people dancing wildly to a new god; Jit amused himself by making a big voice that he pushed through one dancer, and then another, so that the others thought it was magic, their master.
But after a while it wasn’t enough fun just to sit in the darkness, listening. He began to explore on his own, ranging outside the Park in daylight, wandering at noon through streets he had formerly seen only after dark, hidden in doorways, tossed by the inner thunder of voices. He walked with growing confidence. No one came to the Park except the squirrels, gaunt for lack of pickings from the street vendors’ scraps. Jit found no human being alive in the Park, little evidence of the old Park dwellers’ enclaves. There were strange things, though, strange to rival anything his voices told him. The carousel was gone—by the look of what was left it had been twisted out of the ground like a top—and the monument that old Nogai had called Bolivar was a puddle of frozen bronze. The bronze sled dog that Jit had often stroked and patted in the dark was gone too, without disturbance, leaving its footprints in the cracked pavement.
“I wan’,” he said once, loudly, waiting, but was not sure of what he wanted. The dog back, perhaps, something to touch and murmur to safely in the night. Nogai or the kid at the handball courts, even the old crazy woman of the park benches. The furtive community of street people which had populated the Park. “I wan’,” but nothing came to him, and he began to venture even farther from the Park.
He was searching for one voice in particular, a voice surrounded by others: one voice like a strong old tree bearing apples; another voice brown and strong like a fine-fleshed nut; voices that sought and voices that worried and voices that simply were, uninteresting except that they all relied on and yearned for that central voice. Jit was drawn to the voice that drew so many others to it. He reached for it, tasting fear and sorrow, hard determination and confusion, as if its owner was not sure of how to get what it had determined upon. A strong voice uncertain of its own strength.
Through this one’s eyes Jit saw the others, children, a dark woman with her face beaded with sweat, a kid Jit’s own age, a short blocky man with an unsmiling face, an old woman, a young woman with narrow dark eyes. Not one of them followed the Man for a reason that Jit understood. And the thing that Jit wanted in the Man was not something any of the others seemed to share. He had found it there at the first touch: the Man needed the city. And Jit did too.
Until the change Jit had never understood loneliness except as a bleak sharp note among the voices. But the day and night of silence had scared him, the reedy thinness of feeling where there had been a rich soup scared him. For the first time in his life, Jit
wanted
people; wanted the Man, whose need and love was so encompassing that Jit himself might be included in it. When Jit reached out and found the Man he sighed with satisfaction and for a little while he was not lonely. Now, when he left the Park, he walked with a half-hope that he would find the Man and be taken in.
As it grew warmer Jit wandered the transverse roads south to the avenues and walked, no longer bothering to efface himself against the buildings. He passed bodies, some of them ripely foul-smelling, others gray and neat and without a scent; the smell didn’t bother Jit, but they seemed in the way to him, so he made them go away. That was a good new trick, but he was sure he would learn more as he walked; there was so much to learn: in honey-colored afternoon he peered through shattered glass and twisted steel mesh, trying to make sense of what he saw. Things. Tools for doing and making, things that had no use at all. Clothes, bright colored cloth and oddly shaped shoes; Jit took a long scarlet skirt from one window display and, tearing open a seam, had a cloak that swept from his shoulders to trail in the stone dust that was everywhere. One window was filled with bottles and jars and plastic packets, electric banners hanging unlit and illegible. Jit was curious enough to reach through the grating and take one of the jars displayed there, but was disappointed to find only small yellow and white pills. He tasted one, spat it out: it was dry as dust and tasteless.
Without thinking, Jit reached out with his new talent—the thing that brought the trees in the Park back to leaf—and made the bottles on the shelf explode, their contents spraying dust until the store was hazy. Satisfied with this small revenge, he turned to continue, tucking the jar he held into the pocket of his jeans. Every now and then he spilled out a pill, tossed it into the air and exploded it, enjoying the tiny puff of dust and sound.
As he walked, Jit sensed someone watching. He was being followed, but he could not see, could not hear, could find nothing when he turned his head. It took long moments for his body to let him know that he was scared; then his hair bristled and his heart sped in weighty thumps. Jit made a sudden sweeping turn, trying to surprise something. The scarlet cloak snapped around behind him as he moved. He found nothing and kept walking.
After a block or so he pulled a handful of the pills from his pocket and started tossing them into the air, exploding them, showing off for the unseen audience. He walked resolutely ahead, away from the safe containment of the Park, into a part of the city he did not know at all, rather than turn and face what was not there. Gradually, as he became accustomed to the sensation, the prickling at his neck and back of his hands subsided. He walked on, exploding the pills.
“Do it again!”
Jit swung around, but the voice did not come from behind. Swiveling back, he saw a girl, thin and knob-jointed, with the pale skin of a night person and a tousle of red hair, sitting in a doorway. Maybe she was a woman: when she stood up, hands in the pockets of denim overalls, and moved close, Jit saw deep lines around her mouth and eyes, one eyebrow drooping lower than the other. Her arms and shoulders and throat were bare, goosefleshed in the cool air. She grinned at Jit. “Do it again.”
Jit reached and found her voice in his head, flat and unpleasant; she was waiting for something. Harmless as the people in Lincoln Center, dancing to dead gods.
Jit poured a handful of pills into his palm, threw them in an arc over his head, and made each one erupt in a cloud of white powder. The woman’s grin widened, showing close white teeth and too much tongue as she laughed. Jit’s own laughter bubbled up briefly; he was hopelessly pleased that someone else liked his trick. “Know what Jit can do?” he asked her, thinking of the leafing trees in the Park.
She was not interested. “Again!” she commanded. Jit did it again. “More!” He exploded the pills again, but the trick was beginning to bore him. When she asked one more time, Jit shook his head and turned on his heel, walking back the way he had come.
She followed him.
Up Seventh Avenue, past the fallen marquees and shattered glass that had sifted through the gratings; past a miraculously unbroken window behind which holographic mannequins still gyrated. Once Jit turned around and waved his hands at her angrily. “Go ’way, you Ducks!” She still followed him, and drew her hands from her pockets and waved them in return, only she had no hands, just three long tentacles at the end of each arm, each with a claw at the end. Jit stopped in his tracks, curious. The woman should have tasted wrong, but when he let his mind lick out at her he found no sense of her own wrongness in her. What he found in her voice was dull, matter-of-fact rage; sly curiosity; and something else, a fearful hoping about Jit himself. He did not understand it.
“I can do a trick,” she called to him. She took a step toward a doorway, reached down, and the tentacles on her left arm snaked out to grab something and pull it toward her. It was a body, one of the bad ones, gray and patchy with decay; a man in a suit. Something had been chewing at its face. “Watch me!” the woman said. The tentacles on her left arm held the body by the neck with the head up; one tentacle slid across the cheek until it caught on the upper lip. She began to work the mouth as if the man were a puppet: “Hello, how are you?” she faked a deep, pompous voice. “Are you having a good walk?”
Jit laughed once. But the woman kept on going, didn’t make the body say anything funny, just “Hello, how are you?” over and over. He shrugged and turned away.
“Don’t go!” she called to him. “Wasn’t it a good trick?”
Jit turned, shrugged again. “Whyfor you after me?” he called at her.
She blinked at him. “Do me your trick again!” she said. And, “Gable told me.”
Jit shook his head in disgust; he understood none of it. “You go ’way,” he said again.
She stared at him with an empty smile. Jit read something beyond the smile, something beyond the woman herself, and it made his stomach turn. “Lea‘me alone. Go ’way.”
Her smile broadened. “Gable told me; you’re the one.” She stepped forward again, reaching out to him with one arm, each of the tentacles reaching out as well with a little life of its own. “Gable told me so. Come on, come with me. Gable’s waiting.” The voice Jit tasted in her warmed at Gable’s thought.
Jit shook his head, annoyed.
He
was the master of voices, the master of Central Park and the city. Whoever this Gable was, Jit did not like him. “Go away!” he called again, waving his hand at her. He turned his back and started off toward the Park.
She kept following. The sky faded to dull lavender edged with pink as the sun went down, and her pale skin glowed pink and mauve. “Gable said—” she began. In her mind Jit read an uncomprehending confusion: Jit was not acting the way she believed he would.
“Don’t
know
no Gibble-gabble. You go!” Jit yelled.
When she kept walking Jit reached with his mind and pushed her, knocked her to the ground hard enough to take the breath out of her, and held her there while he walked away. Enough of
that
game.
He made it back to the safe enclosure of the Park without the sense of watching, but the encounter with the woman still bothered him. She was harmless enough, the bad strangeness of her arms was nothing, even the anger that Jit had found in her was vague and dreamy. But the taste of the man Gable on her, and the idea that someone knew of Jit, that was frightening. The boy shinnied down the side of the ladder to his home cave, started the fire and the stove and opened a can of soup for his dinner.
When it was hot he leaned back against the wall, stared into the fire and, between bites, reached out with his mind, searching the city, trying to learn about Gable and the woman from the safety of his cave. He found others. Somewhere an old woman was kneeling, lighting a candle, muttering
Blessed art thou Eternal our God, King of the world, who has sanctified us by thy commandments and ordered us to light the Sabbath candles,
her head lowered and tears running down her face. Somewhere a man was laughing, hoarse and panicky. Jit touched the Man briefly and was tempted to stay with him. But now he was safe, and now he was curious.
Jit reached around the city, touching and discarding voices, searching for the individual flavor of Gable’s woman. At last he found it: dull and angry except when she looked at the one she called Gable. Then her hunger rose and a warm fusion of wanting and fear lit her. Jit let the woman be his eyes, saw the crowd of people, each twisted by wrongness and sculpted into something strange. In the center of a crowded circle was a fire, and just to the side of it was Gable. He was tall and very pale, as if he had never seen the sun, and his eyes—the burning darkness where his eyes should have been—glowed like a torch in the firelight, sparked and beckoned to the others. He was speaking; Jit listened.
“They are ours,” Gable was saying. His voice was hoarse. “I’ve
told
you they are ours. The city is ours, we just have to take it from them! When we take the city, the
maker
will come to us and we’ll rule forever.” The blind man looked over the crowd and stopped, looking at the woman in overalls. “Carol Ann found him today,” he announced. “Carol Ann was the first to find him.”