Black Tie says nothing. Black Tie stares at the side of Julie’s face, and she leans away from him as far as she can, almost ending up in my lap.
“You smell like shit,” she growls at him, then turns to the front seat to include the other two. “You smell like stale old-man shit covered up with air freshener. Where are you taking us?”
“432 Park Avenue is currently the tallest building in the western hemisphere,” Yellow Tie says with silky assurance. “With ninety floors of spacious condo units and every amenity you can imagine, it is truly the new standard of luxury living.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Julie shouts. “Do you even hear yourself?”
I am watching the river of people flowing by on each side of the street. Gaunt, exhausted faces, bodies either scrawny or obese, wrapped in tattered remnants of expensive clothes, logos obscured by rips and stains, all colors faded. Crude plywood patches cover the war-torn, quake-rattled buildings, repaired but not restored, storefronts fenced off and filled with obscure machines. The city buzzes like a factory, but where is the product? I see no abundance. No glow of hard-earned contentment on any of these faces. The factory’s product is more factories.
How did this happen? Not even the wretch in my basement wanted to live in a world like this. He wanted to feed on the fruits of society, not pave over the orchard. What was the moment that broke Axiom’s mind? I pry at my memories, but they refuse to open.
“Are you really going to take Park all the way there?” Julie says.
“It’s the most direct route,” Blue Tie says.
“The traffic is hell. Third is faster.”
Blue Tie glances at her in the mirror, then continues on Park. Julie sighs.
It gives me some small pleasure to remember that we’re both New Yorkers, for whatever that title is worth now. One bit of common ground in the vast gulf between her past and mine. I imagine her riding along to her father’s gigs downtown, sucking in the sights with her hungry young eyes, oh so eager to grow up. And later, visiting him at Fort Hamilton as the Borough Conflicts began to boil, a little less eager now. I see her at twelve years old, an image that comes to me with surprising detail: shorter, skinnier, with fewer scars on her soft cheeks, her tiny frame disappearing into baggy work clothes, walking alone over the Brooklyn Bridge while distant bomb smoke adds texture to the sunrise. The thought makes me smile until I remember that I was there too, perhaps looking down at her from some grim tower window, seeing just another pixel in the porn of my ambitions.
I want to cough up my past and spit it far away from me, but it catches in my throat. The only way to make it gone is to digest it.
“Here we are!” Yellow Tie announces as the SUV pulls to the curb.
“Three days later,” Julie says with a roll of her eyes.
“We appreciate your enthusiasm for today’s interview,” Yellow Tie says, opening our door. “We hope this means you’ve decided to collaborate.”
“Fuck you. You smell like cherry condoms full of rancid come.”
I snort. Yellow Tie frowns. However colorful Julie’s insults get, they remain disgustingly accurate.
I step out into a stiff wind that blows the pitchmen’s stench out of my nose—only to replace it with the city’s blanket aroma of trash and human waste. Black Tie ejects Julie with a shove and she stumbles; I catch her as best I can with my wrists bound in front of me. Both of us are cuffed but otherwise unrestrained. If we made a sudden sprint, we could probably get away, but the pitchmen’s clear lack of concern reveals the futility of this idea. Where would we go? How far would we get? The city itself is the prison.
My neck pops a few times before I find the top of 432 Park Avenue. The building is a perfectly symmetrical rectangle, its square windows rising in an unbroken sequence until they’re too small to see. But what makes my head spin is not the height; it’s the familiarity. The excited gibbering behind my basement door.
I lived here.
It was glorious, the wretch sighs. But more importantly, it was necessary. The people needed to see that someone was still in charge, still looking down on them from some unfathomable perch. It’s the mystery that maintains power, the weary assumption that it’s all beyond them. God is wise to hide in Heaven.
But something isn’t right. The lobby is oddly unkempt for a seat of divine power. Its white marble floors are smudged with boot tracks, furniture overturned, everything covered in dust. No doorman, no concierge, no sign of life whatsoever. I remember this building as a luxury fortress for the world’s few surviving power brokers, but now it’s as cold and quiet as any other ruin.
“This isn’t the tallest building,” Julie says as the pitchmen lead us into the elevator. “How are you going to run this country if you don’t even know New York’s skyline?”
“Its height was exceeded by Sinopec Tower,” Yellow Tie admits.