“I dreamt about my wife. What happened to her. It was … rough.”
McGrath nodded.
“We hurt each other.”
“It’s hard not to.” She did not move, did not even uncross her arms to reach a hand to him, but Tietjen felt an unmade gesture reaching out nonetheless. “When Gordon died I spent a long time regretting, feeling sorry for him; I wasn’t exactly the model wife by local standards. Then I decided that that was a kind of presumption—he was a grown-up, who was I to feel sorry for him? I swing back and forth between those two poles. Grief doesn’t just go away.”
“I wish it would,” he snapped. Aware of how stupid that sounded, he added, “There were things I never understood about—I was probably the single worst person in the world for her to have married. She hated this city, hated people. The way she died—”
“You can’t know how she died,” McGrath objected.
“I
know,
” Tietjen said.
For a little while both were quiet. When he looked up, McGrath had dropped her head. All he could see was the nimbus of her hair. “What color was your hair?”
She raised her head and tilted it again, surprised, smiling. “Reddish brown. Dull auburn, you could say. But it’s been white since before my fortieth birthday.”
Irene’s hair had been black. “Just curious,” Tietjen said.
The silence again. It was the friendly, companionably awkward quiet that waited for someone to say something.
At last McGrath uncrossed her arms and pushed off the chest. “You should get some sleep. You sure you’re going to be all right, John?”
He rose from the bed. “I’ll be fine.” The sheet slipped off one shoulder, the air was cool on the skin of his chest and back. A little awkwardly Tietjen hiked the blanket back into place as a shawl, and tugged at the waistband of the sweatpants he wore. “I’ll be fine,” he repeated.
“Right.” McGrath smiled, walked over, and touched two fingers briefly to the side of his neck. “If you need anyone, you know where to find me.”
He thanked her. She looked as if there was something else to say, then shrugged and turned and left the room.
For a few minutes he sat at the window, staring out at the moonlit street. Finally he went back to bed, piling the covers up to ward off his chill.
Ketch was asleep beside him when he woke in the morning, the covers thrown off, the dark red T-shirt she wore rucked up to her waist. Back arched, legs bent, arms stretched above head. It looked like the most uncomfortable way to sleep that Tietjen had ever seen. Gingerly he got out of bed, pulled on pants and a singlet, went into the other room to make coffee on the tiny campstove in his kitchen and sit in the window to drink it.
“Hey.” Ketch, dark hair rumpled, her eyes slitted against the sunlight, stood in the bedroom door, scratching her hip dozily. Relaxed, without the tough-girl tension in her face, her mouth was soft and sensual. “What time is it?”
Tietjen looked at his watch. “Seven. What time’d you get in?”
She shrugged. “Four-something. Wanna come back to bed?” The smile and the smoky lift of her eyebrow made the casual question less casual.
Tietjen looked out the window. “I ought to get to work,” he said. “You go back, though.”
Ketch’s back stiffened. “Figures,” she said quietly. She turned away, heading back to bed.
What did I do?
Tietjen wondered. Aloud he said, “Li? What?”
She didn’t turn to look at him, just shook her head. “You wouldn’t get it. G’wan, now.” She dropped back onto the bed with her face turned toward the wall, ostentatiously settling herself for sleep.
“Goddammit, what’s going on? What wouldn’t I get?” Irene had fought just the same way, by accusing and refusing to explain, hanging him on his own incomprehension. He hated it. “What is it?”
Ketch rolled over, up to sitting. “I get a little tired of being the last resort, okay? It would be nice to be someone you
wanted
to play hooky with, even if you knew you couldn’t. I’m, like, what you do when it’s too dark out to work and no one else wants to sit and plan with you. Christ, you could take up whittling and not miss me.”
He stood there with his mouth open, unable to think of a thing to say. “That’s not true,” he said at last.
She sighed. “Not exactly true, but true. John, why’d you get involved with me in the first place?”
Because you asked
was the first thought he had, but he knew how damning that would be. “I liked you. And you seemed to like me.”
“I did. I do. God knows why, though. I’ve never been involved with anyone as—Christ, I don’t know what to call it. Even gang boys let you in closer than you do, John.”
Stung, Tietjen tried to throw the accusation back at her. “Li, I never thought you wanted to be that involved with
me.
I thought you liked this because it was—loose.”
“Loose is okay. But it’s like there’s this plate-glass thing runs all around you; I can see in, I can touch you, but I can’t get hold of you. I don’t even know if I really want to grab hold of you, you know? But I’d just have liked to have the option.”
Again he felt angry. What did she want from him? “There’s nothing around me; I’m right here, but I’m just me, right? If that isn’t enough for you—I’m sorry,” he finished lamely.
Ketch stood up, dropped the sheet, pulled the T-shirt over her head in one easy motion. Her stomach was flat, breasts small; her thighs were thick and muscular; she looked powerful, even tossing through a pile of clothes for the shorts and tank suit she had worn the night before.
“Not enough. Fuck this, I don’t need it. Look, any time you want to get real, John, you know where to find me.”
“Is this because I wasn’t going to stay? Li, if it’s important to you—”
She shook her head. “It’s not about getting laid. It’s about being important to you, and I’m not. I can’t compete with the Store; I don’t
feel
like competing with the Store. I’ll come around later and pick up the rest of my stuff.” She bent and picked up the ankle-high hiking boots she’d worn last night, slung them over her shoulder by the laces, and walked out.
Tietjen watched her go. She was wrong. He knew it, but he couldn’t think of what to say to her. He went to the window and stared out unseeingly, trying to figure it out. Maybe he kept thinking of Irene because of the dream he’d had—his hands clenched when he recalled it—but it felt like Ketch had been using her words, her arguments. They didn’t make any more sense to him now then they had years ago. He heard a voice, one of the men calling something below, and remembered that he wanted to start a survey of water tanks in the neighborhood. Tietjen left his apartment and went downstairs.
Jit lay under the ground, in his tunnel, listening. The Man was still angry and scared and confused by the dream Jit had sent, and that was good. Jit had made the dream out of found images, true rememberings that had slowly washed back into him like a lazy tide. He had matched the woman to memories in the Man’s own dreams and known that this would be a dream that would hurt. There were other memories and stories Jit could use later. And the Man had fought with the dark woman and she’d left. Jit didn’t understand the emotions or the words, but the result—that the man was alone again—was what mattered.
Wait you see what else Jit can do,
he thought, and grinned.
Tietjen didn’t avoid Ketch; she didn’t avoid him. He had never declared her his consort, and she had never demanded to be treated that way, although her occasional public intimacy had always left him feeling rattled. They behaved now as if nothing had happened, still conferred together, ate together sometimes and apart sometimes. Li was still one of the people with whom he took walks, like in the old days, miles-long hikes south and west, to investigate the damage around town, to bring in new people, find resources. On the walks she was a little quieter than formerly, but seemed determined that nothing would be any different. He was relieved about that.
If anyone wondered about them, Tietjen was not aware of it. Even now, as the leader of the Store, he found it difficult to believe that anyone would care who he slept with, who he loved.
Barbara seemed to have noticed something, but she said nothing, and he couldn’t find a way to open the subject. Tact itself, Barbara was. Whenever he left on one of his walks she’d see him off, joking about packing him a box lunch, her fine features lit with a smile that was the last thing he saw of the Store when he left. Sometimes he thought he saw a shadow on her face—Barbara, the least shadowy, least hidden person he knew—and that was when he wondered if she’d noticed about his split with Ketch. She would probably have something comforting to say, but Tietjen wasn’t in the mood for comforting.
At the end of each scouting trip when he returned, Barbara would be waiting to hear about it, nodding, asking good questions, reporting on what had happened in the hours since he had left. He teased her once about being the Mother to the Store, “like we’re all playing House, and I’m the Daddy and you’re Mother”—but when she frowned at him and changed the subject, Tietjen realized he’d presumed too much on their friendship. Still, sometimes he thought of her that way, to himself: the gracious, thoughtful, clever den mother to all of them. When he thought about it, she really did not resemble Irene at all.
DREAMS
were not enough. It was time to hurt someone.
Jit had tasted Tee-jin’s fear and his sorrow with each dream and story he had sent, and he knew they were working. But the Man didn’t stop, didn’t run away, didn’t face his fear. Did not acknowledge Jit’s power. He didn’t bleed the way Jit wanted, rich and fast-flowing: the Man bled slowly, little hurts that didn’t satisfy.
Jit had sent him more stories after the Irene-woman dream. The best was the story of his babies, little boys crying for their Mommy and Daddy, locked in a tiny room where they had hidden when the bad things started happening. At first Jit had savored the taste of their panic as fingers of smoke combed their hair and tickled them into coughing. He felt Tee-jin’s sleeping face crumple up in pain, listening to their baby voices as they got softer and softer, drowsing off to death. He rolled the taste of the Man’s guilt and anger and despair when he heard what his babies were waiting for: for him to come and get them, for him to be their Daddy, who was big and could do anything. For him to make them safe … . At the end he sent the Man a picture of his babies, tousled and rosy, curled in each other’s arms, dead and reproachful, and let the man watch as the skin slowly puckered and sizzled in the flames that finally found them.
It was a good dream for the Man, Jit thought, but he didn’t listen too closely to it himself—something about those feelings made Jit uncomfortable. It was not fear he disliked; he knew fear too well, it was familiar and tasted safe to him. But the
wanting,
the waiting for someone to make them safe, the believing made Jit mad. Those babies never lived long enough to know that no one was coming, not the Irene-woman, not Tee-jin, not nobody. Jit had known that for years, forever. No one came, no one stayed.
No one,
he thought at the Man.
The Man cried some nights, in the dark. Jit heard him, listened to the crying until it filled him up warmly like a good stew, tasted Tee-jin’s grief on his own tongue. The Man cried, but it wasn’t enough. Every morning he went back outside and started talking with the other people, making things, giving orders, living. Crying wasn’t enough. Jit wanted the Man to know who hated him.
It was time to hurt someone.
The more things went on track at the Store, the more it seemed to Tietjen that he was falling apart. He dreamed of Irene, and Davy and Chris. He dreamed of his mother dying years before in a cancer hospice, her skin pocked with IV sticks and gummy with adhesive from monitor leads, the unyielding fluorescent glare of the hospice room gradually driving her toward the light that everyone swore would welcome her … . In the dream, as in his memories, she railed against him and the doctors and the disease, all of them conspiring to kill her, spitting with rage as the cancer ate away at her: “You never loved me. You never loved me. If you’d loved me you’d have saved me.”
He had wakened from that dream in tears, staggered out of bed, and vomited, the tears still running down his face.
All his dreams seemed haunted by death: one night he dreamed of a deer he’d hit while driving down a dark country road at night, felt the meaty impact in his own body, saw the blood that fanned across the windshield, felt the animal’s deep wordless terror in the approach of headlights, the sudden blinking out of fear and light and life … . He dreamed of death and pain, until he dreaded sleep.
He was always tired. In his waking moments, as he watched the Store deepen its roots, grow and strengthen and reach out to gather in survivors and insure its own survival, Tietjen would drift off into reveries on failure: daydreams of his own bumbling, times when his stupidity, his inability to understand the people around him had let him hurt people, disappoint them. In the middle of a reverie someone would come to him with a question, Beth Voe or Ketch or Bobby Fratelone, and Tietjen would stare at them blankly for a moment, unable to understand why they wanted an answer from him.
What could he possibly say that would help them?
Then after a moment he remembered, pulled his thoughts together, solved the problem or posed a new question, absorbed the data, gave directions. It bothered him that no one seemed to see that he was falling apart. Ketch was cordial but never came close enough to see what was happening. Barbara maybe saw something, but stayed distant, as if she was afraid to ask if he was all right. Bobby and Lo-yi and Beth and all the others saw only the guy who gave them answers and directions. He was passing for whole, passing for able. But he didn’t know how long he could do it.
When he could, when there was time, he did what he had always done and went back to the city for help. Waking from nightmares, he climbed up to the twelfth floor each night and sat himself in a window, looking out over the dark shadows of the city, his mind supplying details his eye couldn’t see. When the sun came up he was often still there. And he walked, sometimes with the scavenging parties, but more often alone; it was hard for him to keep his eyes to the ground as he should, read signs, look for drugstores and grocers and hardware and book and electronics and clothes stores. He wanted to look up, examining the stonework, drawing strength from the solidity of the city around him, closing his eyes in prayer to the spirit that still, for him, kept New York alive.
And he could hardly tell anyone about that. Barbara might understand. Might. No one else would, even Ketch. No one else in the Store saw what they were building as anything but a lifeboat for an indefinite stay. Over the months he had seen each person in the Store realize that help, if it ever came, was not coming soon, that they had to make the Store work. Elena and Sandy had a school for the children; Barbara’s infirmary was stocked and equipped with the best they could steal; the garden Beth and Elena had planted was already showing life. It was all about survival.
Only Tietjen felt he was dying, bit by bit.
Bobby’s arm had been pronounced sound again. At least McGrath had examined it, made him bend the arm every which way, consulted two books, and admitted that since they had kept the arm immobilized for four weeks and he showed no discomfort, that was the only way she had to gauge his fitness.
Bobby grunted that he was fine, what was the fuss? But he grinned when Ketch and a few of the others threw a “coming out” party for his arm after Barbara removed the zipcast, and sat drinking beer and listening to the others gossip about the past. Greg Feinberg showed up with a battery-powered boomer and a pile of disks, and Ketch sorted through them, taking half a dozen from the pile and tossing the rest to one side, uncaring of Greg’s chagrin.
Tietjen and McGrath watched from a table against the wall as Ketch put music on and began to dance with Gellis. It was gaido, street music with a heavy thudding bass line and high, wailing vocals; Tietjen had never cared much for it. Ketch and Gellis moved together hip to hip, hands upraised and eyes closed, swaying.
He realized Barbara was watching him. “She’s good,” he said at last. He could not think of what else to say.
Barbara nodded.
Fratelone came over to join them, draped his healed arm across Barbara’s shoulders. “Dance?” There was something boyish about him when he asked, shy and daring at the same time; it sat oddly on blockish, undemonstrative Bobby.
Barbara smiled at him. “Sure. John?” she turned back to Tietjen, excusing herself.
“What? Oh, sure.” He was a little surprised to hear Barbara say yes; thought it was rather like a teenager asking the chaperone at a prom to dance, and anyway, Bobby would have to teach her the steps.
Only he didn’t; she taught
him,
moving with a loose, easy authority that startled Tietjen. Among the other couples moving in the center of the room to the percussive beat, Barbara looked at home, arms raised in a graceful, sensual curve above her head, rib cage swaying in opposition to hips, back and forth. Meanwhile Bobby ducked and hopped, hopelessly separate from the rhythm despite Barbara’s best efforts to guide him. Finally, laughing, she steered him off the floor.
Tietjen didn’t see what happened, only that one moment Bobby Fratelone was coming toward him, chagrined at his failure, head turned to listen to Barbara’s laughing reassurance. The next minute Bobby was on the floor screaming, his left leg bent at a sickening angle. As he moved forward to help, Tietjen could see nothing that Bobby could have tripped over, nothing that would have hit him, no one except Barbara near enough to have been able to strike or push or pull him down.
“What happened?” he muttered to McGrath as he knelt next to her.
She shook her head. “He just—dropped. Like that. I don’t know. Bobby? Bobby, we’ve got to straighten that leg, sweetheart.” Her voice gentle and steely at the same time, McGrath put one hand on Fratelone’s thigh, the other on his shin. She motioned to Tietjen to help her and he reached down to grasp the man’s shin, feeling the rough, uneven scar tissue on the back of the leg, where he had been flayed by Gable’s people. McGrath shook her head. “Hold his shoulders,” she murmured. “Okay, sweetheart, this is going to hurt like Holy Fuck-me,” she said, deadpan.
The shock of profanity worked. Fratelone gave a ghostly, painful smile. When Barbara grasped the shin and turned the leg to face its proper direction he jerked under Tietjen’s hands, but did not cry out, did not pull away. “Holy Fuck-me,” he agreed weakly, and fainted.
“Let’s take advantage of the faint and get him upstairs,” Barbara said to the crowd around them. “Four people—bring him up to the infirmary. I want to get some of the cast on while he’s still unconscious.”
The party broke up. Ketch and Gellis, holding hands unself-consciously, paused by Tietjen to ask what happened, but he shook his head, shrugged his shoulders.
Jesus, what a hell of a thing.
What could make a man’s leg just break like that, no fall, no blow, nothing.
“Delayed stress, I guess. Maybe the dancing set it off,” Barbara told him later that night when he stopped in the infirmary to see how Fratelone was doing. His leg was cased in zipcast and plaster from thigh to heel and he was sleeping. “He insists someone hit him—with a baseball bat, I think he said. I will say, it
looked
like someone had hit him with a baseball bat: lots of surface bruising, abrasion, that kind of stuff. But I think you can have spontaneous bone fractures if there’s been earlier damage. I
think.”
Barbara’s face settled into an expression Tietjen recognized from the night Kathy Calvino was so sick: a hard cold hatred of her own helplessness. “I set it the best I could, but God knows what that leg is going to come out looking like, working like. I may have crippled Bobby for life. Dammit, there has to be some way to get out of New York and get help.”
There was no use arguing about it; every couple of weeks a scouting party would attempt to cross the river to the Bronx, or to leave the city in some other way: by raft to Brooklyn or New Jersey. Something always stopped them; they were as sealed
in
as the rest of the world, apparently, was sealed out.
In the morning Fratelone insisted again that someone had hit him. “With a bat, Boss. Something like. I don’t fall for nothin’ less,” he maintained.
Tietjen, remembering the scene, Bobby, head turned, walking away from the dancers—no baseball bats, no attackers, no one behind him at all—nodded and agreed that something weird must have happened.
“Damn bet,” Fratelone said.
Then the room was filled with the Store’s children, the Calvino girls in the lead, who had come to sign Bobby’s cast. The tough-guy mask settled more securely over Bobby’s ashy features; he was gruff with the kids, pretending irritation. Tietjen was startled to realize that all the kids, not just the Calvinos, but the others as well, loved Bobby.
“No purple on my cast,” he was saying. “Purple’s some kind of sissy color. No purple, you kids,” he was saying loudly, as one of the boys wielded a purple marker over his knee.
Tietjen edged toward the door, feeling as though he had somehow invaded Bobby’s life and found something he wasn’t supposed to know.
Bobby Fratelone is a sucker for kids.
As Tietjen went out the door he passed Barbara, shook his head, and muttered, “It’s a zoo in there.” She grinned and answered, “I know. Great, isn’t it?”
Bobby’s accident was the first of the small accidents and catastrophes that beset the Store in the next few weeks. Small things, nearly explainable: a ball bearing rolled under a plank which slipped out from under one of the carpentry crew and sent him flying across the room; Elena’s arm scalded by boiling water from a cooking pot (“But I’d only started heating it,” she wept as Barbara took her upstairs to the infirmary. “It was just getting warm!”); a plague of battered thumbs and splinters and cuts among the work crews; a salvage crew that brought back nothing more than poison ivy.
“It’s like we broke a mirror or something,” Tietjen heard Greg Feinberg saying to Sandy Hochman one afternoon. “Everybody’s got bad luck.”
Sandy shook her head and said she didn’t believe in luck. Not since her husband’s death, Tietjen thought. She had changed, a rosy-faced, plump woman with an easy laugh, become gray and spare, tender with her daughter Missy, evenhanded and dutiful with everyone else. Like Barbara without the grace notes, Tietjen thought, and then felt ashamed of the thought. Sandy had been through enough.
They had spent weeks clearing a vacant lot three buildings to the east of the Store of rubble, trash, and bodies—there had been an apartment building there before the disaster, not a beautiful building, Tietjen remembered: a solid square hulk of limestone with its one beauty, a pair of iron and glass doors, hidden by the security grille. Now they were building a fence to keep out scavengers from their garden. Lo-yi and some of the gardening crew were turning the earth over, breaking it up, preparing the soil. Sandy and Greg knelt to one side, making improvised grapestake fencing, nailing slats and pickets to one-by-fours. Tietjen was working in Lo-yi’s crew, hoeing up earth until his shoulders ached unmercifully, enjoying the freedom of being just another member of the crew, taking Lo-yi’s terse orders with pleasure. The sun had been brutally hot in the middle of the day, but now the air was gentled with a light breeze, and the worst of the day’s heat had faded. It was nearly quitting time.