City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg Read Free Book Online Page A

the iron fence as you might a rose from a trellis. “You’re playing your trick on this fine gentleman, aren’t you?” The old man’s palsy, at this distance, resembled triumphant nodding. She turned to Keith. He could see that she was not young at all—she was probably his age—but was so thickly rouged and mascara’d that in the headlights of a passing car, say, she might look like an extra from a porno film. The roll of fat peeking between her waistband and her parka, like excess material left over from her manufacture, only made his feelings toward her more tender. “He does this to people. I don’t know why. He walks fine.” They watched the old man shuffle pigeon-toed toward the door of the building. A painted nail circled around an ear. “La locura.” And then, after sizing Keith up once more, she sashayed off toward the corner.
    Watching her go, Keith was struck by the supreme joke: he knew this block. There, on the corner, was the strip club called Lickety Splitz. And just next door was the by-the-hour hotel where he used to bring Samantha, outside of which off-duty go-go girls would mingle with cross-dressed hustlers from over on Third Avenue. He squinted against the snow. Something in him deflated. Downtown, uptown; what was the point of trying to decide anything? He dumped his bag of groceries inside one of the battered ashcans and set out after the stripper. It was as if, he told himself, the decision had been made for him. As if this were not his own brain telling him that every avenue away from his sins led him deeper into them. The sound of the white touching down all around him was like the sound of feet behind an arras, or like tiny, glottal laughter, if not of God the father, then perhaps of one of his angels, archangels, principalities, thrones, dominions, powers, seraphs, he’d known them all by heart as a choirboy in Stamford. What was the last one? A bird arced high above him, rooftop to rooftop. Oh, right, the cherub, the cupid, the little laughing boy.
     
    4
     
    BUT WHAT HAD HE BEEN DOING THERE to begin with? Why that day, at that particular hour? (And behind that, like a faint perpetual wind-chime: Why me, and not nothing at all?) Soon enough, William Hamilton-Sweeney would have cause to revisit these questions. At the time, though, he would have said he’d gone to Grand Central for exactly the reason he’d given Mercer: to be alone. For years, he’d been coming here when he needed to think, or not think, or to act or not act on the things he did or didn’t think about. Granted, there was also all the architectural whatnot that used to knock him out in his youth, the arches, the sconces, the vaulting blue zodiac at the center of everything where pigeons roosted among the stars. But grime had long since dulled the color and advertising ruined the lines. What abided was the sense of any one person’s life tapering amid the crowds to a meltingly thin slice. Proximity to the forty-story office tower bearing the family name had once raised the possibility of scandal, or pity, but any suburb-bound underling of Daddy’s he’d bumped into on his way up from the lower level likely wouldn’t even have lowered his eyes from the departure board before rushing on. And if anything, the years had rendered William’s anonymity here more vivid and complete. In the circles he now moved in (to the extent that he still moved in circles at all) to cross north of Fourteenth Street, at least east of Eighth Avenue, was to sail right off the edge of the earth.
    He stood now near a staircase, waiting to see just how badly the betrayal with the envelope had shaken him. Memories of Mercer’s plaintive look threatened to shade into memories of his mother, but then he did the thing a drawing teacher had once taught him of flowing out into the world, of letting his eyes forget what they were supposed to be seeing. You are what you perceive. He perceived pantlegs bearing the sooty imprints of escalators.