A Glitch in Reality - Chapter 0030

Chapter 30

The Camaro knew the way better than its owner wanted to admit, and Kevin let it carry him through streets he had grown up calling his own and no longer recognized as anything but a wound.

He had stopped looking too long at any one thing weeks ago, because looking too long was how a person started counting, and once Kevin began counting the closed doors he could never make himself stop. A pawnshop he had walked past a thousand times, gone, its window boarded over with plywood already going soft at the corners from the salt in the air. A taquería his mother had liked, the sign still up and the grille cold behind glass somebody had cracked and nobody had bothered to fix. Every second storefront wore the same grey skin of spray paint now, the mark of one crew laid over the mark of another, a conversation conducted entirely in threat that the whole city was being made to read whether it wanted to or not.

On the corners they gathered the way they always had, the men and women the city had finished with, except there were more of them now and they were worse off, and among them moved the other kind. The ones the needle and the pipe had already emptied out, upright and walking and not in any sense alive, faces gone slack, eyes drifting toward some grey middle distance that held nothing, shuffling along the gutters with the loose, unhurried gait of things that no longer had anywhere to be. Kevin had been born six miles from this avenue. He knew the difference between a hard city and a dying one, and he could not have told anyone the hour the line had been crossed, only that it had been crossed, and recently, and fast.

That was the part that would not lie down in him. The speed of it.

The radio and the news desks all reached for the same name when they wanted a throat to hang it on, and the name was the mayor’s, and a year ago Kevin would have nodded along, because keeping a city from falling was supposed to be the job of the man at the desk and this city was falling. But Jack had turned the idea over one night the way Jack turned everything over, slowly and from underneath, and said aloud the thing Kevin had felt without finding the words for. Cities did not rot this fast. Not on their own. A bad mayor gave you potholes and a budget no one could read and a few more tents under the overpass each winter. A bad mayor did not give you this, did not gut a place inside a single season until the people left in it were either feeding on it or running from it. A thing rotted this fast only when something patient was rotting it on purpose. Jack had not offered a name. He had said he doubted the easy story very much, and left the doubt sitting between them like a live coal, and Kevin had been carrying it around ever since, warm and unwanted.

The pavement gave out and the dirt road began, and the tires found the old ruts that ran back through the dry brush to the fence. He slowed where he always slowed and reached up without thinking, thumbing the small remote clipped to the rearview, the one piece of the last few weeks that was entirely his own work. The motor he had bolted into the gatepost woke with a low industrial grind and dragged the gate back along its new track, smooth, no hitch in it, and Kevin allowed himself the small private satisfaction of a thing he had built doing exactly what he had built it to do. He drove through. At the far end of the lot the wide door of the warehouse already stood open, which meant Jack had been up for hours, which meant Jack had not slept much again.

He found him where the open door promised he would be, in the cleared space near the heavy bag, stripped to the waist, working.

Kevin still was not used to it. He doubted he would get used to it. The kid who had been all wrist and knuckle and visible rib a couple of months back now stood there filling out a frame the world had originally built for famine, the lines of him heavier, the shoulders carrying weight that had not been there at Easter and had no business arriving this quickly by any road an ordinary body knew. Each blow went into the bag with a sound like a door coming off its hinges, the chain snapping taut at the ceiling, the whole frame shuddering down through its bolts into the concrete. There was nothing wild in any of it. That was the thing about watching Jack do anything now. The power had arrived late, but the patience had been in him from the start, and the two of them together were harder to stand near than either would have been alone.

And he was not lost in it. Kevin saw that at once. Jack’s body did the work and his head was tilted a few degrees toward the workbench against the wall, where the old radio sat with its single speaker turned up, and he was listening.

“And by the time the last of it had burned itself out,” the voice from the radio was saying, level and unhurried, a man reading a butcher’s bill aloud and refusing to flinch at any line of it, “the department had every officer it owns standing somewhere in this city it would much rather not have been.”

The number the broadcaster gave was five. Five dead between midnight and the first grey of morning, and he walked through them without raising his voice, because a voice that rose would have had nowhere left to go before he reached the end.

Three of them had been found on the west side, three men of a crew the man named carefully and without heat, a crew everyone in the county understood to be only the local hand of something far larger and far further south, a thread that ran down across the border and into rooms where the actual decisions were made. Two of the other dead had been nobody at all in the grammar of these things, a man and a woman who had done nothing that night except stand on the wrong side of a wall when the rounds came through it. Three officers were in the hospital. Four more bodies lay on the far column of the same page, and these had belonged to a younger crew out of the east blocks, a name that would have meant nothing a year ago and meant a great deal now, men who had spent the last several months growing bolder and better armed and harder to shove back onto their own streets. And then five more, hurt and not killed, tangled in folded metal on a freeway ramp, ordinary people caught when a chase that should have ended inside ninety seconds had instead run half an hour across three districts before it found something solid to stop against.

Jack hit the bag once more, hard, and then laid his glove flat against the leather and stilled it, and stood with his hand there and his head turned full toward the radio. Kevin came across the floor and stopped beside him, and for a while neither of them said anything, because the voice was still going and there was a kind of obscene completeness to the list that did not want interrupting.

“It’s worse than last week,” Jack said at last. Not to Kevin, exactly. To the room, to the number. “Every week it’s worse than last week, and the line isn’t bending. It’s climbing.”

Kevin found he had nothing to add to that, because the three men on the west side had died on a corner he could have walked to blindfolded, a block from a girl he had kissed for the first time at fifteen, in a part of the city that had been mean as long as he could remember but had at least, back then, still been alive. He had grown up in this place. It was a strange grief, to mourn a thing while you were still standing inside it.

Jack wiped the sweat from his jaw with the back of his wrist and shook his head slowly, and when he spoke again there was something far off in it, the tone he used only on the rare nights he measured the present against a yardstick he never explained the origin of. “I’ve watched a city come apart like this before. Not here. Not in this country.” He did not look at Kevin while he said it, and Kevin had long since learned not to ask, because the few times Jack let the edge of that other life show he closed back over it fast and clean, the way water closes over a dropped stone. “Another life. Places this country films from a helicopter and feels sorry for an hour before bed. You don’t see it here. You’re not supposed to see it here. America comes apart slower than this, and quieter, and it doesn’t lay the bodies out in the street where the morning radio can count them off one by one.” He turned his head finally. “Somebody’s in a hurry.”

The voice on the radio had paused, the small theatrical pause of a man who knows the next thing he says will not be believed and intends to say it anyway.

“That would have been the whole of it,” he went on, “on most nights, in the city we all used to live in. But last night was not most nights, and I’m told it was not only the guns. We’ve had calls coming in since the early hours that, I’ll be straight with you, folks, I don’t have a box to put them in. Sightings. I’m going to let one of them speak for itself. On the line is an officer who was there. He’s asked that we use only his first name. James, you’re with us.”

A second voice came up under the first, lower, worn thin at the edges, a man reading aloud from the inside of something he had not yet managed to sleep off.

They had taken a domestic call, he said. The ordinary kind, the kind that came in a dozen a night out of that part of the county, a disturbance at a house in a suburb that had gone bad years ago. They had rolled out heavy because in that district you went heavy to a shouting match the same as you went heavy to anything, vests on, the long guns up. Except by the time they pulled to the curb there was no shouting. There was a man going through the front window. Not a chair, not a bottle. A man, full grown, thrown from inside the house out through the glass and across the small dead yard and into the side of a parked car hard enough to fold the door inward like wet cardboard, and then lying there in the dent he had made and not moving at all.

The officer’s account changed when he got to the doorway. The front door of the house had come open and the one who had done the throwing walked out into the yard, and the word the man kept reaching for was tall, and Kevin could hear him reaching for it, hear it stop being enough somewhere around the third time and him having nothing to put in its place. They had put their lights on him and called him down, down on the ground, hands behind the head, the whole liturgy of it, and the man came on toward them without the slightest hurry and without any sign at all that he had heard a word.

The first round was the partner’s. Center of the chest, the way the training drills it into the meat of you, the shot that ends things. The man took it and did not so much as settle back on his heel. After that, the officer said, the two of them emptied everything they had into him, both weapons, the magazine and then the next one behind it, the rifle and the sidearm together, and the man simply stood in the middle of it and let them do it, and the only thing in him that changed was his face, which opened slowly into a smile. An easy, crooked, private smile. The smile, the officer said, of a man watching small children do a thing small children do.

He had gotten on the radio. He remembered that part clearly, calling it in, calling for everything the night had to give. And then the man was no longer where he had been standing. The officer could not give the in-between of it. One instant a wall of a body in the ruined yard, and the next his partner was leaving the ground, lifted clean off it by a blow nobody had seen travel, thrown the better part of thirty feet and put down, and after that not getting up again. He said his partner was alive. He said it the way a man says a thing he is working very hard to keep believing.

The reason he was on a telephone that morning instead of folded into the side of that car was that the man had turned to come for him, taken a single step, and then stopped. Down the street the first of the backup units had swung around the corner with the lights going, and the man had stood looking at them a moment, and then, the officer said, he had smiled again and turned and walked away. Not run. Walked. Back across the yard and around the side of the house and gone, in no hurry whatever, a guest taking his leave of a party that had started to bore him.

The broadcaster let a few seconds of dead air sit before he came back, and when he did some of the polish had gone out of him. He thanked the officer. He said it had not been the only call of its kind through the night, that there had been others, in other districts, wearing other shapes, none of which he was prepared to put on the air until he understood them better than he did at that hour. He said he wished he could tell the people listening that it was the heat, or the lateness, or men seeing whatever their own fear chose to paint for them in the dark. He said he was not going to insult anyone by trying. Watch the streets you walk, he said. Watch the doorways. Watch the alley you cut through to save five minutes on the way home, because five minutes was no longer worth what a few of them had started to hold. San Diego, he said, was not the city it had been. He signed off on that, and let a song rise underneath it, and nobody in the warehouse heard a note of it.

The bag had stopped swinging a long while back. Jack stood with his hand still flat against it, not seeing it, his eyes fixed on the middle of the empty air the way they went when the part of him that never rested was doing the only thing it knew how to do, taking a pile of facts that did not want to lie down together and making them lie down anyway.

“Bulletproof,” he said, half to himself. “Strong enough to throw a grown man through a window. Fast enough that a trained cop couldn’t follow him across a yard.” He set each phrase down and looked at it, and Kevin understood that none of it frightened Jack the way it would have frightened a normal man, because Jack kept two such impossibilities under this very roof and one of them was standing next to him. What had hold of Jack was not that a man like that could exist. It was that one had strolled out of an unremarkable house in an unremarkable suburb, last night, in the same fortnight the whole city had finally gone over the edge it had spent the season sliding toward.

He laid it out low and even, the way he did when he was building something and wanted Kevin to go looking for the crack in it. A city did not come apart this fast on its own. They had settled that between them weeks ago. The blame the radio passed around was too small for the size of the thing. A man at a desk could not do this. No run of plain bad luck could do this. The speed of it had a hand in it, whether or not anyone could yet put a face to the hand. And now, inside that same narrow window, men were surfacing across this city who could not be shot. Not one of them. Several, in a single night, scattered through separate districts, as though a handful of seeds set down at some earlier date had all chosen the same hour to come up.

He did not have the shape of it. He said so plainly, because faking a shape he did not have was a fine way to get them both killed. He could not say who, or toward what end, or by what means a thing like that was even done to a man. But he could feel the edges of it now, the way a person feels a wall in a dark room a moment before the hand arrives at it, and what the edges told him was that none of this was weather. The city was not falling. The city was being pushed, and the unkillable men were not a symptom of the fall. They were the reason for it, or close to the reason, the cargo the whole long collapse had been arranged to deliver.

And that moved the arithmetic out from under everything they had decided.

You could not outlast this. You could not bank a future inside a city being fed into a furnace, and you could not stay unseen in a place filling up week by week with men who walked through gunfire and tore the door off a car with someone still strapped behind it. A fence and a gate and a locking door made a fortress only against the kind of trouble they had been raised to stop. Against the thing that had come out of that suburban house, they were a box with two friends inside it, sitting in the open, waiting to be noticed.

Jack took his hand off the bag at last and let it swing free, a slow shallow arc, dying down toward stillness. He looked at Kevin, and Kevin looked back, and the thing passed between them without either of them having to dress it in anything, the way the things that mattered always had, going back to the first cold night on this floor when they had owned nothing in the world but a borrowed promise and each other.

“We don’t get to sit this one out,” Jack said.

“No.” Kevin found he had known it since the west side, since the corner six blocks from a fifteen-year-old kiss. “We don’t.”

“Then we stop waiting around to learn what it is.” Jack reached down and lifted his shirt off the bench, and there was no more training left in him for that day. The day had quietly become some other kind of day while they stood there listening. “We go and find out. Before it comes up that road looking for us first.”