“Yes, of course. Pass me the ice tray.”
The Ripple mansion shimmers at the end of this road, large and bone-colored and terrible, a dreamed thing, abuzz inside with nearly imperceptible tremors of doom. It is an enormous tooth being drilled. It is an enormous tooth in a mouth full of teeth, and that mouth is the city, and as they lurch forward, yard by yard, mile by jarring mile, the Dahlbergs are swallowed whole.
7
WHY WE STAY
A ruin becomes a ruin by degrees. Even a year ago, our decision to stay in the city did not seem like madness. Then, the Center for Global Capital still kept limos in our streets and HowLuxes in our skies. Content firms still sent unpaid interns on risky lunchtime errands to the hot-meat carts, since the majority of restaurants had closed. If we were renters, we dubiously renewed our leases; if we were owners, we fretted over the sharp decline in property values—though some doubled down and bought one apartment, two, an entire building, an entire block.
Entrepreneurs still proposed solutions: dragon-proof glass for windows, thick and tempered and threaded through with wires; dragon-repellant sound emitters, the size of kettle drums, that vibrated at frequencies none of us could hear. The products were sketchy but we bought them anyway. In our secret hearts, we continued to dream of a slayer, a scientist, a whisperer, who would understand what we never could. Even then, after all those years, we still longed for a hero who would cut the ties that bound disaster to this place we had loved too well for too long. We still hoped.
Many had evacuated, to be sure. The streets were quieter than they had ever been. But even on the loneliest night, we were never alone. Always there was someone half a block ahead of us, fedora illuminated under a streetlamp in the mist, walking an outlandish creature on a leash. Always there was another rider on the bus, reading a volume printed in a language of tildes and ampersands. In the city, we have always treasured secrets: the speakeasy entered through the coat-check booth, the unlisted number on the business card. The city itself had become secret, more precious than when it was cherished by many.
The dragons were not the end of us. Or so we made ourselves believe.
It was possible to think this way, a year ago, because back then, the Metropolitan Fire Department was still extinguishing the vast majority of fires. Our fire department had forever been a point of pride. Long before the dragons came, we named our firemen “Empire’s Bravest” and sacrificed a building to them each year, immolating it for their practice. We erected a temple in their honor, a Fire Museum, with daytime tours to indoctrinate schoolchildren and midnight sex galas to benefit elite philanthropic institutions. We bestowed crests and medals upon our firemen. We held them in genuine esteem.
Unlike the city’s police force, the Metropolitan Fire Department was holy, incorruptible. A fire offers no bribes. No force is excessive in putting it down. So we believed at the time. When the dragons came, it was only natural that we would turn to the fire department and say, “Tell us what you need and we will give it. Take our water. Take our taxes. Take our sons.” We did not want to believe they would take too much, that they would risk more than they saved. We told ourselves that conscripting youths into the fire department was worth the risk, that we were investing in the city’s future. But our nightmares told a different story. In these, we saw a figure, gas-masked like a fireman, tapping at our window, though we lived on the fourteenth floor. We saw him beckoning to us from the other side of the mirror.
Nightmares spread in a city like ours.
Then, six months ago, the Metropolitan Fire Department disbanded after a series of mutinies. Blood was shed. When the fires began to rage unchecked, many reconsidered the decision to linger in this place. Over the years, we had seen many waves of evacuation, but for those of us inextricably bound to the city, this was the worst. The hot-meat carts rolled away. The last of the fluorescent lights flickered off in the conference rooms. The buses, stolen by their drivers, rumbled over the bridges, never to return.
Other places beckoned: Upstate, the Sprawl, the Inhospitable West, even the East, all beset by their own calamities and pollutants, but nothing on the order of this. Some of us idly browsed faraway rental listings, halfheartedly filled out work visa applications, but we knew we didn’t intend to go anywhere, despite having lost our jobs, our property values, our illusion of safety, all of our excuses to stay. All excuses except the true one: we do not know how to live anywhere else.
Perhaps we do not know how to live at all.
* * *
Even in the best of times, a city does not love you back. We citydwellers are a strange breed, lodging in cramped rooms, filling our lungs with smog. Our buildings block the sun; our lights weaken the night. Humans make a city, but a city makes humans tolerate the intolerable. We have always known this in our minds. Now we know it in our broken hearts. Empire Island will kill us in the end. But what would it mean to leave?
We used to believe that the city made nobodies into somebodies. Staying here was an expression of fierce individuality—that stubbornness, that drive to carve out a name and own it. Yet one cannot own a city. It is a system we plug into…a system that we are. As that system fails, we fail too, by degrees. Abandoning it would mean abandoning ourselves.
So instead, we stay. We wait for buses that never come. We walk the streets at night, but we are never alone. The dragons fly above, unleashed.
8
THE WAY OUT
Sharkey is carving his name into a scrawny kid’s back. Three swillers hold the fucker down, wham his head into the table when he thrashes. Sharkey’s parlor is no place for heroics—more prayers. The walls are a mottled pattern of bullet holes and cursory attempts at spackling them. Rumor has it the carpet, an intricate pattern of brown and darkish red, used to be just brown.
Sharkey’s hand is steady, his eye typesetter-keen, even as each blocked letter oozes itself bloodily illegible.
“I’ll sans-serif this, seeing it’s a first offense.” He strips off his white undershirt to pat the trademark dry, admires his handiwork. The w in Eisenhower is a bit aslant, but he doesn’t pay that any mind. In his old age, he’s learning to ease up on the details. “Kid, you look so pretty, I should hang you up outside. A sorta shingle for the business. Swillers, what do ya say?”
The swillers eagerly hoist the kid back to his feet, make as though to drag him to the egress.
“Mr. S! Swear to shit”—the kid’s Mohawk is limp with sweat, his green plastic shutter shades cracked in three places—“next raid we go on, you’ll get pick of the litter and then some!”
“Isn’t gonna be a next raid unless I get whole haul. No fucking joke.”