Swimming Through the Flotsam in Which We Live and Move and Have Our Being

By George Stade

A plague was erupted. The victim suffers a two-month latent period during which he is infectious but shows no symptoms. The virus is spread by aerosol, so that millions of people are soon infected and infectious, but without knowing it. At the climax of he disease, there is what a character calls a rite of distribution. At the climax the victim does what he or she most wanted or feared doing, the idea being that this kind of fear is laced with fascination. As America (like the rest of the world) sinks into chaos, as the Red Deaths kills forty percent of the population, two fiercely antagonistic groups emerge. Theres the apocalyptic religious group called Swimmers, because their charismatic leader was first seen swimming out of the Hudson River. The other group jokingly calls itself Our Gang, a very mixed group that has become immune to the plague as a by-product of an experimental treatment of herpes. What they see and do as they hike north from New York City to a farm upstate forms the substance of the novel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781462804665

George Stade

For forty years George Stade was a professor of English and Comparative literature at Columbia University, where he earned the Great Teacher Award. During that time, he published three novels, a collection essays, and well over a hundred articles, reviews, and introductions for such journal as Partisan Review, Hudson Review, Paris Review, Harper’s Magazine, Nation, New Republic, and The New York Times Book Review. He is the Consulting Editor Director of Barnes and Noble Classics. He lives in New York City with his wife. His four grown-up children live north of the City, outside Washington D.C., and in Boulder.

Book preview

SWIMMING THROUGH

THE FLOTSAM IN WHICH

WE LIVE AND MOVE AND

HAVE OUR BEING

George Stade

Copyright © 2009 by George Stade.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER ONE

At twenty minutes to noon, Professor Daniel Sauvé began his peroration. He lit a cigarette (in reckless disregard of university regulations) and stepped aside from the lectern. He began to rock, up on his toes, down on his heels, his left hand shaking around the loose coins, or keys—or worry beads for all we knew—in a trouser pocket. So, he said from behind a puff of smoke, we end as we began.

His gaze swept the room; slowly it ascended, tier after tier, from Relly Florescu’s winking knees, front row center, to the hazy summit of the hall where the four of us sat and sprawled, a half dozen rows above anyone else. Professor Sauvé, we knew, could only see us in silhouette; for right behind us there were high, wide windows that let in the bright and cloudy sky. Lightning flickered. One or two of you may remember the Iliad, with which nine months ago we began, he said. He frowned at us, at all two hundred of us. He frowned at his cigarette, threw it down, rocked on it.

From our point of view, he said, the interesting conflict in that poem is not the war between Greeks and Trojans, nor even the celebrated duel between Achilles and that loser Hector, your favorite. He stopped rocking. He took his hand out of his pocket and looked at the coins. He put his hand back into his pocket. For some reason, he was breathing heavily. His face was flushed. The conflict that concerned us, let me remind you, is between Achilles and Agamemnon, between individual genius and institutional power. He rose high on his toes, lost his balance, took a step forward to recover, fell back on his heels, jiggled his coins furiously. Achilles is great in himself. His only allegiance is to the powers that define him. Agamemnon is powerful only because he is a king of kings. In himself he is a mediocrity.

His head sank. His shoulders hunched. He looked at us from under supraorbital ridges that made me think of caves. Agamemnon’s realm, the realm of institutional power, of politics, the polis, let us say, the whole world, dammit, so far as it is a social construct rather than natural or divine, and why does it take so many words to say the simplest thing, can neither contain Achilles nor do without him. Without Achilles, Agamemnon cannot win his war, but Achilles is as uncontrollable as Eros. He is Eros—but grown up. His mere existence loosens Agamemnon’s grip on his reign… or reins… . He paused, put his right hand on the lectern as though to support himself, and panted. His left hand was still busy in his pocket. Man, there was a crash of thunder and a shaking of the whole place as though a skyscraper had toppled over just across the street, and then a rumbumbumblebum diminuendoing away.

In the seat to my left, Pit Armstrong was doodling in his notebook. Pit’s given name is Leonard. We began to call him Armpit when one day he returned from his job behind the steam table in the school’s cafeteria and took off his tee shirt, thus exposing armpits that were goatish for both their beards and their smell. Armpit soon became Pit. The doodle was of Professor Sauvé, naked and on all fours, straining against a harness from which reins stretched rearward to end abruptly in empty air. Pit is handy enough with a pencil when it comes to drawing, but not when it comes to forming sentences. I have had to write or at least rewrite his term papers, as I wrote his term paper for this course, a piece of Utopiana entitled Rabelais’ Ordered Disorder Restored.

It is fated that Achilles will fight Agamemnon’s war, said Professor Sauvé. And that he will die in the process, killed by the Amazon he loves… . There are worse fates. He cast a sharp glance at Relly Florescu. The individual dies, his energies spilled like the blood of Achilles, the polis survives… for a time… sometimes… . He took four steps forward, removed his hand from his pocket, and spilled his change into Relly Florescu’s lap. He did a neat about-face, tripped, caught himself, and began to walk back to his station beside the lectern, already talking, his arms waving. Beowulf and Hrothgar, Siegfried and Gunther, Roland and Charlemagne, Tristan and Mark, Dirty Harry and his Station Chief, Nietzsche and Western Civilization—the repetition compulsion of the heroic ethos, Eros embracing Thanatos on a bed of state. I trust I make myself clear, but enough of that, enough of that. He turned to face us, one hand on the lectern, the other rummaging around in his pocket. Tragical pessimism has been blown away by the winds of social change. He panted, his upper lip baring his teeth with each intake of breath.

Then there is the countertradition, now ascendant, he said. Let’s say it is the other strand of DNA in the double helix of Western politico-religious history… A pregnant phrase if I say so myself… Outside, serious rain began to fall. Big drops slapped the window. The light became lurid. I am talking about that dreary collectivist-utopian daymare from which we have given up trying to awake, an effluvium off the hydraulic societies of the Neolithic Near East, become virulent in Christianity, ressentiment on the warpath, what Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Fascism, and Communism have in common, the last two being heresies, more or less, of the first two, its first propagandist that mincing fag Plato, and I don’t want to talk about him anymore, ever. Lone Wolf Larson, from where he sat on the left of Pit Armstrong, leaned forward to look at me, one eyebrow cocked. Professor Sauvé, after all, was not normally a man given to the public venting of his prejudices. He was well-known, in fact, for his aloof impartiality as though in his eyes nothing that anyone had ever said was nearly right or entirely wrong. Lone Wolf’s given name is Harold. As much for his disposition as for how he played football and with a glance at Jack London’s character, a teammate began to call him Lone Wolf, and others began to call him Wolf, and still others began to call him Lone. I could not help noticing that Pit Armstrong’s doodle, nearly finished, depicted a chariot in which Relly Florescu stood, wearing a breastplate decorated with hearts, a miniskirt of leather straps, and high heels. In one hand she held a bow and arrows, and in the other she held the reins that led to Professor Sauvé’s withers.

That tradition, he said, philosophically speaking, culminated in Marx, nothing more dreary than his worldview being imaginable. Since Marx, all political philosophy has been a matter of footnotes and marginalia. Trunk DuShane, sitting on my right, let me have an elbow in the ribs (Uf, I said); for Professor Sauvé, one hand on the lectern, panting lightly, slightly hunched forward, no longer rocking, his left hand in his pocket, was unmistakably playing with himself. Trunk’s given name is Schuyler, why I couldn’t say. He is six-foot-five-inches tall, weighs two hundred and sixty-something pounds, could bench-press Lone Wolf’s Volvo, and has been called the best offensive lineman in college football, winner of the Vince Lombardy Award; but his legs are short relative to the rest of his body. Except for Freud, said Professor Sauvé, who provides us with our epitaph. The rain was drizzling out.

He straightened himself up with an air of resolution. He lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and coughed. The contention of Civilization and its Discontents—and here I quote from memory—is ‘that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions.’ His voice sounded squeezed, higher in pitch, but lower in volume. He inhaled and coughed out smoke. Freud contends, to nut it in a putshell [cough, cough] that you give up want you what [cough] to get what you need, until [cough, cough] what you want becomes a need [cough, cough, cough] for self-destructionuminum. And now Professor Sauvé began to move the zipper on his trousers up and down, opening and closing his fly, revealing and concealing the tail of his white shirt as though it was a signal.

Quick-witted Relly Florescu began to applaud, not, of course, for what Professor Sauvé was doing, but as though for what over the whole two semesters he had done. Relly has a low tolerance for the pain of other people, even when they bring it on themselves. The one ear and the portion of her peachy cheek within my view were dark red. The rest of us joined in. We then filed out, depositing term papers on the table upon which sat Professor Sauvé’s lectern. We were careful not to brush against him or to look at him as he stood there—one hand on the lectern, head forward, cigarette hanging from his lips, smoke drifting into his eyes, which blinked regularly but otherwise gazed out into the emptying classroom, his other hand on the zipper tab, up and down, up and down. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see tears begin to trickle down his cheeks. As a mere auditor, a graduate student (in the writing division, School of the Arts), I had no term paper of my own to hand in.

Outside, in the bright, clear air, Relly was waiting for us; the concrete walkway steaming up around her. She walked up to Trunk DuShane. Somebody ought to call a doctor, she said.

Who’s got a quarter? said Trunk.

Relly’s got a lapful of change, said Pit.

A pretty example of displacement activity, that was, said Lone Wolf.

I left it by the lectern, said Relly.

One crazy professor, more or less, who’s going to notice? said Wolf Larson. As a graduate student on his way to becoming an evolutionary biologist, Wolf was on his way to becoming a professor himself.

Harold Larson, you ought to be ashamed, said Relly. Trunk Dushane and Wolf Larson, I believe, are undeclared rivals for Relly Florescu’s favors. Pit Armstrong certainly lusts after Relly, but her character is not the kind that attracts him. On the evidence, I would say that Pit’s preference is for women without any character at all. Relly, so it seems, is finding it hard to choose between Lone Wolf and Trunk. To simplify a bit, she is attracted to Wolf because he is dangerous, and she is attracted to Trunk because he is safe. I could go for Relly myself, but she is not likely to go for me. For one thing, I am neither dangerous nor safe.

Three white-coated Emergency Service types hustled by us on their way to Philosophy Hall where professor Sauvé was no doubt still exposing himself to the empty classroom. Someone clipped me across the back of the legs, and I felt that invigorating surge of readiness to do another human harm. At the same time, a yapping growling row erupted from right under me. A pair of the many stray dogs that had begun to infest the campus was getting down to some foreplay or forefight; the moves are similar. They were both big, both black; the one a Labrador mix, the other pretty much a shepherd except for its longish hair and legs.

The Labrador sniffed under the shepherd’s tail. The shepherd whipped its hinderparts around and stiff-stepped muzzle to muzzle with the Labrador. Bodies rigid, heads high, spinal brushes raised, they sniffed the corners of each other’s mouths. The Labrador draped a paw over the shepherd’s neck. The shepherd wheeled around to a position behind and to one side of the Labrador. The Labrador looked back and growled. The shepherd mounted the Labrador, although as I now could see, they were both males. They dissolved into a yapping, growling, yowling blur of black fur and white fang.

Lone Wolf Larson grabbed the shepherd by the scruff of its neck and by what would have been the seat of its pants, had it been wearing any. I grabbed the Labrador by its tail. Lone Wolf leaned back, swung the dog in a half circle, and let go, as a man might heave a sack of grain into a truck. The Labrador curled back to bite my hand. The shepherd landed, sprawled, yipped, bunched, leaped for the Labrador, which was snarling and clacking its teeth at my hand. Lone Wolf caught the shepherd in midair with one hand and by the scruff of the neck and, leaning back, he swung the dog in a full circle. The shepherd moved through the air at the end of Wolf’s arm like a swing boat on a strut; its legs pointing to the horizon, relaxed, not struggling, a thoughtful look on its face, until Wolf let go, as a man might hurl a satchel bomb through a plate glass window. Trunk DuShane clamped one hand around the Labrador’s muzzle. The shepherd landed, yelped, sprawled, scrabbled itself together, charged, leaped for the Labrador. Now you be good, said Trunk Dushane, lightly cuffing the Labrador with his free hand.

Lone Wolf Larson again caught the shepherd in midair and quickly shifted his grip until he held the dog by the mane, one hand on either side, right under the ears. The shepherd braced itself by placing its right forepaw on Wolf’s left forearm and its left forepaw on Wolf’s right forearm. Will you simmer down? said Trunk to the Labrador, which was blinking at Trunk’s admonitory finger, in no position to answer back. Wolf Larson raised the shepherd, which was not struggling, until their noses nearly touched. The dog held Lone Wolf’s gaze for a while, then blinked and turned its head. Wolf opened his hands so that the shepherd dropped and sprawled; it rolled over on its back, exposed its neck, waved its forepaws in unison, and let out a few drops of urine. Just so we understand each other, said Wolf. Behave yourself, said Trunk Dushane to the Labrador. And do it somewhere else, he said, releasing his grip on the dog’s muzzle. The Labrador trotted off in a dignified manner. Once it stopped, lifted its leg by an imaginary post, and then trotted off, moving faster now, looking back at us over its shoulder.

What is it with dogs, anyway? said Relly.

Oh, they can get on with each other well enough, once they’ve sorted out who’s boss, said Lone Wolf.

Like humans, said Pit.

Except that the alpha dog has to prove himself in combat, perro a perro, said Lone Wolf.

Even with dogs, I said. A good bluff will sometimes do the trick.

Only for a while, said Trunk.

Everything’s only for a while, said Relly.

That dumb shepherd, or whatever it was, began to make a nuisance of itself again, galumphing around to one or the other of us, wagging not just its tail but its whole rear end, pawing our legs and nuzzling our hands. Relly, who always carries food in her pocketbook (just in case), things like protein bars, dried fruit, salt peanuts, anchovy paste, gave the dog one of those spicy dried beef sticks. She also carries a multibladed Leatherman knife, a first aid kit, a plastic whistle with a compass on the back end and a compartment for wooden matches in the middle, safety pins, a miniflashlight, needle and thread, a plastic poncho that folds down to about the size of a deck of cards, and penicillin pills, that I know of and I don’t know half. As long as you don’t rip my stockings, she said to the shepherd, which followed us, chewing on the beef as we headed toward the main campus gate on Broadway. In spite of the longish hair, you could see that there wasn’t much meat on its ribs.

Why did you want to break it up? said Pit Armstrong, elbowing his way between Wolf and me. Dogs got as much right to kill each other as anybody else.

Something to do, said Wolf. I’m itchy.

Long as you ain’t becoming one of these do-gooders, Pit said.

The two of them, like me, had migrated south to college from the same economically defunct area of upper New York State where they and Trunk DuShane had played high school football on rival teams and from where they had been recruited by head coach Darnell Oates (soon to be the university’s first black director of Athletics) and by me. (Pit and Trunk, like Relly, are seniors; Lone Wolf and I are graduate students; Professor Sauvé’s course is a 4000, open to both.) For among other things, I am an assistant football coach, a specialist in the defensive secondary—that’s how I pay for my tuition. I think it would be fair to say that I was better at doing it than I am at coaching it. I don’t much like telling people what to do. It’s a little easier, however, to tell people to do what Coach Oates tells me to tell them to do.

Let me see your hand, Relly said to me, but when she saw that the Labrador had only dented the skin, she broke the connection. Relly has small, shapely hands. I like them. She also has small, shapely feet, which I have studied at the university pool. Between her pretty feet and her intricate knees, her calves swell out in a line that could break your heart.

At the foot of the steps leading to College Walk, an ambulance was waiting, but not for us. The driver got out to meet the other Medical Emergency types, who were rushing Professor Sauvé along on a kind of stretcher with wheels. He was looking at the sky and blinking. His lips were moving, but he wasn’t saying anything. That nosey shepherd nearly got its head caught in the rear doors of the ambulance when they were slammed shut from inside.

And there he was, the great Elroy Toom, standing just outside and downtown of the high black iron gates to the campus, our own mini-Hyde Park, holding an open Bible (at which he never looked), delivering a practice sermon. His sponsor was beside him, writing left-handed on a pad clipped to a clipboard, grading Elroy’s performance. Four years ago, Elroy had been the meanest cornerback at large, which is saying something. Toom, Toom, Toom, the crowd would intone, drawing it out when Elroy separated some poor receiver from the ball or his senses. From the sound alone, you might think they were booing him, but they were not; or maybe they were, not quite consciously. Now he is a student in the Union Theological Seminary, as Wolf Larson is a graduate student in the Biology Department, and as I am a graduate student in the School of the Arts. He finished up by saying, So there is no safety, not from war, pestilence, or the demons within us, save in Jesus Christ, our Lord, Amen.

Pit Armstrong pulled me by the elbow, pulled me toward the uptown side of the gate, and the others followed; for we had all heard this sermon. Lone Wolf and I in fact had helped with the wording, although neither of us believed a word of it. Pit’s goal was a table manned—so to speak—by WAWO, or Women Against War and Oppression, on which table were some dirty pictures.

Their operating assumption, to simplify a bit, is that if there were more women in positions of power, there would be less war and oppression. Pit Armstrong used to get under their leader’s skin by intoning Margaret Thatcher, Indira Ghandi, Golda Meir, Jean Kirkpatrick…

If it isn’t Trunk Dushane and his three little twigs, said Veronica Malone, who assumed that football players are even more piggy than other males. Veronica is black Irish: lots of black hair tumbling loose to her shoulders, one of the seven familiar Irish faces, the one with a long chin and thin nose and tombstone teeth, no makeup, a sharp tongue, a trim body—she jogged and practiced one of those Oriental arts of self-defense—an ironic smile. Her father is an IRA-fellow traveler and a mean drunk; her mother had wanted her to be a nun. I know all this because we had gone out three dates a few years ago, and let me tell you she is the best dancer who ever made this football player feel that by comparison his cleats were over their tops in mud. Not only that, I think it is probably true that if there were more women in positions of power, there would be less war and oppression. Most women aren’t always trying to prove (mostly to themselves) how tough they are. Veronica’s politics come out of her own experience: Father would come home drunk and beat up Mother, and Mother would get between father and the kids when he started to slap them around. You know, it may be more pertinent to get your politics from personal experience than from books.

The shepherd started to sniff under her skirt until she stepped on its paw. Hovering by her side, at the edge of the table, there and not there, head bowed as though she had just been justly reprimanded was shy Emma Slotkin, the current object of my undeclared affections. In spite of Veronica, our relation to Trunk DuShane is not that of followers to their leader. It is just that any group he joins seems instinctively to organize itself around him. He is a pillar of strength, old Trunk is; people look up to him.

Coach Byrne, said Veronica, the ironic smile broader.

Vera, I said.

How’re they hanging? she said.

Low, I said.

Pit held up a photo for all to see. It was of a handsome Asian woman, naked, on her knees, hands tied behind her. Crouched over her was a man, his face all twisted in rage, one hand tangled in her hair, yanking her head back, the big knife in his other hand a blur as it swung up toward her neck. On her face was a look of exalted suffering.

She burnt the rice for his sushi, Pit said.

Got your little wee wee standing on end? said Veronica.

Men, said Relly. Well, it’s not exactly my idea of fun either.

Get thee hence, Satan, before I put a curse on you, make you choke on your own tail, said Elroy, his sermon delivered, side-stepping the rambunctious shepherd. Who belongs to this?

Let’s go, said Trunk; so we started across Broadway, jaywalking toward the bookstore where Emma’s brother works, leaving behind Elroy’s sponsor—and I’ve forgotten his name—and Veronica Malone.

Well, I stepped out with a spring to my legs, even if the left one is permanently on the stiff side, and not only because this was the last day of classes. It makes me feel good just to be in the company of these people, just to be visibly one of them; and there is no way you can tell by looking at us that we are, or maybe only were, diseased and in the most intimate places. The five males (including me) are all tall and brawny; although Pit gets some pudge on during the off-season; and although Elroy, who never had any body fat to begin with, has gotten skinnier, but not less muscular, since he graduated. So what if being tall is a gift of nature rather than a personal achievement. Your gifts are also you.

Naturally, I like to be around Relly and Emma too, not that I expect anything to come of it. Why Patrick, said Relly once after I had made drunken overtures. I think of you as a kid brother. She had forgotten, I suppose, that I’ve got a good seven years on her. Relly’s hair, to start from the top in the manner of medieval poets, is short, blonde, curly, and always just so; Emma’s hair is long, brown, straight, glossy, and parted in the middle. Relly is on the short side, her flesh fair, firm, and dramatically curved, as though a taller person had been compacted; Emma is on the tall side, her flesh pale, olive, soft, and sparsely freckled. Relly always wears makeup, heels, stockings (panty hose?), and a skirt or dress; Emma usually wears expensive sneakers, classy jeans, and New York black. Relly is forthright and decisive; Emma is hesitant and oblique. Relly stands straight as a diver (which she used to be), poised at the end of a board; Emma slouches as though to diminish her generous bosom. Relly dislikes all politics and politicians, maybe because her father’s parents had to flee Romania one step ahead of political enforcers, whether of the right or the left I never asked. Emma is always attaching herself to this or that ad hoc raggle-taggle protest group, maybe because her father is an ex-Weatherman, now a big-shot activist lawyer (and a vicious poker player as Trunk and his three twigs discovered one night when he invited us over for a game; Emma’s mother offered us pot). Neither set of traits adds up to beauty, although the beauty is there all right and certainly so far as Relly is concerned, not just in the eyes of this beholder. But whether the beauty is a gift of nature or a personal achievement is a tough one. Relly’s makeup and all that, for example, her deliberate respectability of dress and attitude, are parts of a defense system, a bulkhead against the ground swells of disorder within her and all around us. Emma is trying to efface herself, to disappear in a cause. Relly arouses the old Adam in me; Emma arouses… something else, some disabling emotion. It is, of course, fatuous of me to dream that were I to put my arms around her, she would feel safe. Physical beauty, then, is a mystery. A darker mystery surrounds people with beautiful persons and evil personalities. It is not just in art that the beautiful and the good are no longer one, if they ever were.

I was sort of daydreaming as we approached the other side of Broadway, wondering which of the women I would rather have choose me for her own, if not first one then the other, or both at once; for in daydreams, anything is possible. Relly would organize me, shape me up, get me going. Emma would depend on me, force me to organize myself, to take on responsibility. I would teach her exercises to improve her posture. Relly reached the sidewalk first, and a lifetime spent studying the curve of hip and thigh as she stepped up would not be wasted, when, THUMP, man, what a noise and SCREECH right behind me, made me whirl.

An orange beetle skidded sideways CA-CUMP into a double-parked milk truck, the right rear fender hitting first then the front. It bounced off at an angle and began to meander slantwise across the downtown flow of traffic, the driver leaning into her seat belt and holding her eyes behind her hands until a Brinks armored truck drove smartly, PACT, into the left rear fender of the Beetle, skidded, EEECH, stopped, and slowly fell over its side, CHANK, while the Beetle revolved once, 360 degrees, before continuing on its way to hump bump halfway onto the divider mall where it was abruptly halted, KANCH; the driver whipping forward and then back by the end of a concrete bench on which sat a bum who went flying in one direction, his brown-bagged bottle in the other. A Pepsi-Cola van braked, swerved to avoid the back half of the Beetle, and came to rest just touching the underside of the overturned Brinks truck. A mile-long silver limousine drove at full speed into the half of the Beetle still on the roadway, whipping the Beetle’s driver from side to side. A taxi drove at full speed into the back of the Pepsi-Cola van, PASH… TINKLE, the front of which crumpled against the underside of the overturned armored truck, the side of the van spilling cases of Pepsi, and a side door cutting short the forward progress of the taxi driver who had flown head first through his windshield. The driver of the armored truck, who had been climbing up and out of his side window as from a hole, revolver in hand, dropped back out of sight, like a jack-in-the-box; the gun going off as he fell. A sporty little red convertible turned acrobatically just before the pileup, swivel-hipped through a break in the pipe railing around the divider, cut on a diagonal uptown across the mall, flattening the magnolia in a blizzard of petals, and juking like a halfback, ran to daylight through another break in the railing, right into the uptown lane where a dirty old pickup hooked fenders with it, as you might gaff a pike. The two of them proceeded uptown in the shape of a V, the pickup spilling scrap iron. A mealmobile or roach coach (Bobs Kebob’s) drove into them at their juncture as you might drive a shaft into the base of an arrowhead, tumbling the driver of the convertible back onto the mall. He got up running with a limp then hit the ground again when his car exploded into flame tick-WHOMF-lickalick.

Then silence… . Then I began to hear again, shouts, mutters, a wail, a moan, Lone Wolf cursing, honks, hissing, the shepherd howling, the flick of flames, Relly shouting, Stop it, that’s enough! The bum and the driver of the Beetle, her hair and skirt suit twisted around her, one foot shoeless, were holding on to each other, foreheads touching. People were staggering out of their vehicles. Others were running toward the wrecks, still other running away from them. Something whizzed vertically before my eyes POCK on the street, not five feet away, shrapnel hitting my shins, a potted plant. I looked skyward.

A dozen or so stories up, a window washer, secured to the window frame on either side by his safety belt, was bending over to pick up another plant off the ledge. So that is what I had seen flying off the hood of the Beetle as it bounced around: dirt, pot shards, greenery. Scatter, said Lone Wolf. I picked up Relly, a melodramatic thing to do I admit (she was surprisingly heavy), and ran across the sidewalk, up against the bookstore window, Emma following, one of her hands on my back. Only Trunk DuShane hadn’t moved. He was pointing a finger at the window washer. Hey, you, he said. Cut that out. He put out his hands as though to catch the plant pot. Changed his mind, took one step back, and hopped up neatly to avoid the fragments, his timing perfect as the pot exploded right in front of him. A siren whoop-whooped in the distance then another close by.

Elroy Toom has an interesting face: long, bony, the color of semisweet chocolate, and always in motion as though a dozen currents of feeling were moving against each other under his skin, no one of them able to surface. But now his face was slack and blank. You all right? Relly said to him as Lone Wolf and I stepped away from the building, twisting our necks to see what the window washer was up to next. He was unbuckling his safety belt. Lone Wolf sprinted for the corner, around which is the entrance to the building. I ran for Trunk and tried to pull him back, first by the arm then by an ear. Don’t, he shouted up, but the window washer put his arms to his side, flexed his knees, and pushed off, extending his arms as though in a swan dive. Trunk and I were facing away, thank God, running toward the others, when the window washer hit with a hollow, wet sound, SPLAT, I don’t want to think about.

I was, however, in a good position to see Elroy jump backward, his shoulders hitting the glass first, his eyes rolling up as he crashed through the bookstore window. He crashed into a house of books, a tower of babble, you might say, a display of Multinational Affairs, which I had vaguely heard of as a best seller; but whether it was fiction or factual, about politics or sex, I still don’t know. The display toppled onto Leon Slotkin, Emma’s brother, who was peering out from behind it. As he went down, he clutched a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, thus loosening it on its moorings. Another clerk, whom the others called Big Red and who always put on a satirical smile, as distinct from Veronica’s ironic smile when I talked to her, tried to break his fall and went down with him. The bookcase spilled its shelves onto Leon, onto Big Red, and onto a tweedy lady with short gray hair whom you often saw around the campus smoking a cigarillo. A large piece from the top of the window dropped like a guillotine, just missing Elroy’s feet.

Emma sat down suddenly, her back to the building, put her face on her knees and her hand over her ears. Daddy, she said. Pit, his hands on his hips, was looking around with a kind of scornful grin. Very pretty, he said. Nice work, you dummies. Trunk was swaying restlessly. There was nothing I could do, he said, and who expected him to do anything anyway? There was something about him as he stood there, something noble and monumental and lost, say, his big head and curly brown hair maybe, his formidable upper body and narrow hips and short legs, that made me think of a bison. Relly turned her back on us and stepped through the now-paneless bookstore window to see about Elroy, her high heels crunching or sliding on pieces of glass. The shepherd stalked up to the heap of rubble that had been a window washer, stopped, and pointed. My gaze followed the black smoke from the burning convertible to the heavens, but they did not seem to be falling. Lone Wolf was leaning out of the famous window and looking down; he was braced on his arms like a gargoyle. Then he lifted his head and spit out a good one over the smoke, the fire, the wreckage, the din. It was the size of a poached egg, by gob.

CHAPTER TWO

Low clouds spread out from New Jersey to cover the visible world. Their mottled undersides, tufted like mattresses, scraped over the palisades, reached downstream to where the leaden Hudson and the nacreous sky fused without a seam and reached upstream to where the towers of the George Washington Bridge were dissolving from the top downward.

The light dimmed. The day became brain-colored. It pulsed with flickers of distant lightning. Sounds touched the ear as