Contraband Page 5

  ‘There’s a three-mile pile-up on the BQE,’ Obregon announced in a tone of satisfaction. ‘Truck bomb, again. Chihuahuan Adornista Faction, again.’

  Obregon was thirty-five. His features were sharp and handsome. His hair was spiky, like short feathers trained back over his head. He looked like a hawk as he squinted over Brooklyn.

  ‘Traffic’s backed up on the Battery Tunnel approach all the way to the Schermerhorn Street exit.’ He adjusted earphones that led to a pocket radio.

  Outside, the quick thunderheads of an ozone shower washed a single skyscraper in vertical fingers of rain.

  The shower was one of a million tiny pockets of precipitation that came into being around the time accumulated chemicals from aerosol deodorants started to eat at the earth’s protective layer of ozone.

  At the same time, industrial pollution was accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In a process not yet fully understood, this caused the plankton in the world’s oceans to store up nitrogen. When a lens of ozone depletion passed over a plankton-rich stretch of ocean, the tiny creatures released nitrogen, which formed clouds – short, round balls of precipitation, dispersed by the wind, that appeared out of nowhere, dropped a handful of raindrops, and scudded off quickly somewhere else.

  The pilot looked at the dragons and griffins outside his windows. They crouched absolutely motionless. Soot dulled their gleaming eyes. The pilot admired how well they concealed their capacity for flight.

  ‘What time is it?’ he asked Obregon.

  ‘Eight thirty-seven.’

  ‘What day is it?’

  ‘Thursday.’

  The pilot sat up. His muscles were weak. His brain felt like it had been sluiced down for days at a time in a great waterfall; very clean and pink and delicate.

  The room was filled with empty vodka bottles and lozenge-shaped boxes that once held Cubano-Chino food. Sharp darts of light bounced around the curved walls.

  ‘Your forwarding service beeped. I called ’em up,’ Obregon continued. ‘They said Chico Fong wants to talk to you.’

  Shit, the pilot thought. He did not want to talk to Chico Fong.

  ‘When did he call?’

  ‘Yesterday. Carmelita, too.’

  ‘You call back from here?’

  ‘Seguro, man. But I use a privacy service, like you tole me.’

  ‘Payphone’s better. Some of those local services—’

  ‘Fresco, babe.’ Obregon was standing on tiptoe to look down at the near streets. ‘Man, they double-park up and down 27th again. They gonna get towed, I give ’em eight minutes, you watch.’ He chuckled happily.

  Obregon was the only person the pilot knew who was truly obsessed with parking.

  The obsession made sense, because it was built on a worldview; for Obregon, who also loved New York, actually took pleasure in New York traffic, believing it to be the City’s truest vital sign, its very breath and systole.

  Obregon had driven to New York in 1996, on a three-day visit to see a girl he’d met on the beach in Seagirt, New Jersey.

  He got in on a Monday night, and found a whole metropolis sinking like the USS Hornet under wave after wave of Kamikaze automobiles without enough parking spaces for even the women and children.

  In panic, the Board of Estimate earlier had divided the streets into areas that were off-limits to parking half the time. The net result of this action had been to turn the average Manhattan driver into a psychopathic beast, a vehicular saurian equipped with airbags and five-hundred-cc pistons and aerodynamic armor, ready to claw and stab over the last square millimeter of curbside territory.

  In the midst of the carnage Obregon sailed in blithely to slot his ancient Mercury under the nose of a snarling local turbo job right in front of the girl’s building.

  A sign told him the space was good till Wednesday morning, when any car in it would have to be moved, between the hours of eight and eleven, so machines could clear out the gutters.

  ‘Wow,’ the girl commented admiringly. ‘Right in front of the building? That’s unheard of.’

  That Wednesday, after moving his car for the sweepers, Obregon found another space, on the same side of the street. The space was good for another two nights.

  When he gave her the news, the girl told Obregon he was the luckiest man she had ever met. She kissed his neck, and asked him if he could stay forever.

  On Friday, he found a space that was good till Monday. On Monday, the day he was supposed to go home, his old space in front of the building fell vacant just as he was finally getting ready to depart.

  Obregon was Cuban. He believed in luck, and the importance of playing out a winning streak. To break it flew in the face of chance and all associated saints. He put his car in the vacant slot, and stayed on in the City.

  The lucky streak outlasted his vacation, so Obregon got a job. It outlasted the girl, who got sick of him hanging out her windows, checking on traffic; so he rented his own apartment. It even outlasted the Mercury, which was stolen from a parking space (good for another thirty hours) by a person from Brownsville, Brooklyn. But by that time eight months had passed, and Obregon had become part of the City’s rhythms, and had no need of a car in any case.

  ‘You gonna marry her?’ Obregon turned toward the pilot, carefully patting his oiled hair.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Carmelita. Who you think?’

  ‘No.’ The pilot waved wearily. ‘It fucked up. Last month. Just friends, now.’

  Obregon’s face dropped. His hands fell limply, in a caricature of distress. ‘Man, I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘She said I was too hungry, for her taste,’ the pilot went on, watching four 777s and an Airbus chase each other slowly down the spiral over La Guardia. ‘I wonder what she meant by that?’ But Obregon was staring at traffic again.

  ‘Look at that,’ he burst out, ‘look at that!’ He whipped out a pair of Spetsnaz binoculars from under his uniform jacket, and focused it to the east. ‘Breakdown on the FDR. Cars backing up to the UN.’ He cruised channels on his pocket radio. ‘None of the eye-in-the-skies got it yet.’

  The pilot switched the ECM to cellphone, punched in the privacy service, ran his fake UCC-card through the scanner.

  When the tone came, he punched in Carmelita’s number.

  Her machine answered. It said she could not come to the phone right now. It offered to trade information on the caller for a return call, later in the day, from the girl herself.

  God peeked out of his box under the window. God was the lounge’s longest-serving tenant, a small, brown, long-haired Norway rat with dark, wise eyes and a look to him that said he was surveying the world he’d created, and finding it acceptable, with a few minor corrections to be made later. He skittered over to investigate the remains of the pork chow mein.

  The pilot punched PC’s number. PC should know where Carmelita was, but the machine there said he was out for a few minutes.

  Carmelita’s mother’s phone was disconnected. He called the forwarding service used by her brother Roberto and got a recording that said the line was ‘temporarily out of service.’ Finally he phoned the Go-Go Emporium in East Orange, where Carmelita worked weeknights.

  ‘Bitch din’ show up for her set,’ the manager there said. ‘You see that bitch, you tell her get her ass ovah here fast, she wan’ her job.’

  ‘Go fuck yerself,’ the pilot told him.

  Vaguely worried now, he took a shower and got dressed. He made a cup of coffee, with lots of sugar added for energy, and drank it. He put God in an inside pocket of his City overcoat, slipped through the airco ducts, and took the elevator to the outside world.

  *

  The minute he stepped out the glass doors of the TransCom Building and felt the cold smoke on his skin he knew it was too soon.

  It was not the fever, he thought. It was more the overdraft of stories that had galloped through on hot midnight horses. He had an idea dreams were the brain’s way of breaking down, digesting, balanci
ng the too-strong forces of perception, and as such they usually were a good thing, but this time he’d had too much. His mind was reamed hollow from their passage. Any input now was like eating cold pizza on an empty stomach. He went to the garage nonetheless, got out his Yamaha, roared the bike slowly up the ramp, and turned west on 27th.

  Men staggered from the steaming asphalt. They wore two or three golden watches on each wrist. Cellphones occupied their ears, cellphone throat-mikes their jaws, notebook computers their fists. They talked without pause, surfing from link to link, drunk on schedules.

  Their wives, lovely and fit, learned Hausa to communicate with the baby-sitter, discussed personal Websites over diet lunches in Tibetan restaurants, newly fashionable in the City.

  Kiowa helicopters stuttered over the rooftops, sniffing for Chihuahuan terrorists.

  A trio of young derivatives analysts, wearing the Maine hunting boots and button-down oxfords of the Manhattan Safety Volunteers, pulled a Tele-DysFunction victim to the pavement. The tee-dee, festooned with dead radios, screamed ‘Gilligan! The Skipper! Gingerrr!’ repeatedly – for TDF, a serotonin imbalance apparently triggered by excessive exposure to electronic media, had as primary symptom an obsession with schlock television.

  The volunteers, vowels cracking angrily, loaded him into a brown Swedish station wagon.

  Next to the Plaza, police were setting up tollbooths at the entrance to Central Park.

  Two years before, the mayor had hired a Minneapolis think tank called The Omega Corporation (once known for its Cold War disaster assessments) to exploit New York’s advantages in name recognition and communications access.

  The Omega Plan, as it became known, had been activated three months ago. It called for turning Manhattan south of 110th Street into sixteen ‘theme development sites.’ Towers full of expensive offices would be designed around motifs from Europe, Russia, and East Asia, as well as the Liteworld enclaves of South America and Africa. More specific themes from popular B-Net dramas also would be featured. Cafés, restaurants, VR arcades, communication centers, all would favor the theme in vogue in that sector.

  The sectors, of course, would turn a profit. New co-op complexes in the general shape of Schonbrunn Palace, the Taj Mahal, or Tara were sold out the day they went on the market. Already Bambi-42nd Street, Zabar’s-Old Vienna, and Hampstead-TriBeCa were charging steep admission to their daycare, parks, and playgrounds.

  Because of the tax breaks involved, the City did not make enough from the plan to fix the streets, or hire sufficient teachers, or pay the ones it did hire.

  Outside the moats of Manhattan, the Projects smoked with arson.

  On Central Park South, in the middle of the crowds and cold wind, a smell of life and fields. God, smelling horseshit, poked his thin nose around the pilot’s collar and twitched his whiskers. The pilot cruised his motorbike slowly down the line of horse-drawn tourist carriages, looking for the Appaloosa with the black-rimmed eye, and the brown-and-white brougham Carmelita drove for a living. Neither was present.

  He headed west to Tenth Avenue, steering carefully around potholes. Some of the holes were the size of small cars. A few even contained small cars, trapped like mastodons in a pit on some callous rush hour, abandoned an hour or a month ago by despairing owners.

  The abandoned cars now served as shelters for men and women who could not afford theme-area rents, humans trapped like the cars down a hole in the infrastructure that was simple to fall into but near-impossible to climb out of. Thus it was not uncommon to see smoke from cooking fires, and makeshift cardboard tents sticking up like the sign of underground armies from a half-covered pit in the middle of the street.

  The pilot stopped to buy a bag of carrots from a Korean, then motored slowly to the hack stables over the Lincoln Tunnel.

  An ancient Jamaican groom pulled him over by the gate.

  ‘What you got there, mahn. A rat?’

  ‘You see Carmelita Chavez?’ the pilot asked the old man, stuffing God’s inquisitive nose back down his pocket.

  ‘You can’t breeng anyting in here, ’specially not rats. We got too many already.’ The Jamaican wore a wool cap. His hands were twisted like mangrove roots.

  ‘Okay, you keep him.’ The pilot put God on the guard’s desk. The Jamaican leaped back, yanking a .38-caliber revolver from his jeans.

  ‘Tekk heem out,’ the old man threatened. ‘I keel the rasclout.’

  ‘Look,’ the pilot said, ‘he’s a good rat. He even does tricks.’ He tickled God’s belly and the rat rolled over on a hard-copy of the Daily News, grinning like an idiot.

  This was, in fact, his only trick.

  The pilot went through the doors and walked in a maze tunneled through ancient wood by the hooves of ten thousand long-dead horses. Lights were few, bare, and feeble. The beams apparently were held up by a century’s worth of caked manure. He found the Appaloosa in a stall full of Titian shadows and old hay. He rubbed her felt-tipped nose, patted her black eye, fed her the smuggled carrots.

  When he came out, the Jamaican was sitting back in a corner of his cubicle, his .38 still aimed at God.

  God sniffed without much enthusiasm at the remains of a tuna sandwich in a drawer of the cubicle’s file cabinet.

  ‘Heem lookin’ at me funny,’ the old Jamaican said.

  ‘How would you look at him,’ the pilot answered, ‘if he was holdin’ a .38 on you?’

  *

  The pilot had a theory about God, and how people reacted to him.

  He had noticed how, near the turn of the second millennium, humans were romanticizing creatures that lived in wide-open spaces, even as the corporations they worked for destroyed those open spaces forever, sending the romantic species into extinction, or zoos, thereby.

  He knew that, because the big corporations required a dense and dependent labor pool, the humans themselves spent their lives in tight unhappy spaces near their workplace. The humans did not know for sure why this had to be so. All they could do was protest, by purchasing things they did not need, or withholding touch from their kids, or smoking jisi yomo, or demonstrating in support of romantic, extinct animals.

  But the romanticization did not extend to all animals. Far from it. In fact, it seemed to go hand in hand with a growing hatred for the creatures that had managed to adjust to man’s ravages; the coyotes who were infiltrating the suburbs; the raccoons who raided the stacked garbage; the congeries of crows living in City buildings; the peregrine falcons who built nests on tall towers and filled the ledges with sun-dried pigeon guts; the rats who dominated the City’s dead spaces and forgotten tunnels; the varieties of cockroaches that dwelled in the cracks everywhere and between.

  The humans said they hated these animals because they posed a health hazard, but in fact the animals were no dirtier, or cleaner, than they. The pilot believed the real reason was jealousy. Because the big corporations could not control the rats and roaches as they did the humans; because the crows in the water-tanks and the raccoons in the disposal areas and the coyotes haunting the City parks managed to live better in this metropolis, and with more freedom, than the humans around them.

  When war came; when the third- and fourth-level pressures finally crushed the eggshell structure of the communications economy; when the tanks finally rolled and the missiles finally flew – then the rats and crows, the coyotes and raccoons and roaches, would inherit the poisoned cities. They would take over the humans’ apartments, they would play among their femurs. They would uncover the relationship between the computer and the microwave. They would program the VCRs to nature shows and cooking channels, they would switch the trash compactor on and off for fun. It was this prospect, the pilot felt, that fueled the humans’ hatred, and kept the sales of pesticides high and climbing.

  *

  The pilot got hold of PC in the late afternoon.

  PC’s real name was Fred Rosenbaum. The nickname ‘PC’ stood for ‘Party Connection.’ He acquired this name by functioning as a living
network, an organic hotline relaying news of every bash, waltz-mosh, and Shift-shin rave going on in the New York metropolitan area, getting the word to his friends via e-mail and B-Net cables.

  PC had started in his avocation when he decided that the odds against meeting the woman of his dreams in chance social encounters were pathetically long. The logical way to shorten the odds was to find out about, and attend, every party likely to attract women. PC had made this calculation two and a half years before. He had dedicated his free time to the pursuit ever since.

  ‘I wish the fuck I did know where Carmelita was,’ PC said. ‘I got her a job at the White Angel’s waltz-mosh tonight. If she doesn’t show up, I’m gonna look like an asshole.’

  ‘Too late,’ the pilot said.

  ‘I don’t need this. I don’t need comments like this.’

  ‘She blew off the Go-Go Emporium last night,’ the pilot said. ‘I talked to the manager. And she always keeps fresh hay in the Appaloosa’s stall . . . but today the hay was old.’

  ‘Come to the party,’ PC said. ‘Maybe she’ll show up. You know the scene,’ he continued. ‘It’s costume, which means black cloak, long teeth, with that crowd. You should fit right in,’ he added. This was his way of paying the pilot back for the ‘asshole’ comment.

  After the pilot hung up he played with the payphone for a few seconds, putting off the call to Fat Chico Fong. The tai-lo was going to be upset, because of his lost cargo. Also, the Cayman had threatened to contact Chico, claiming the pilot turned down extra cargo; and if he’d done as threatened it would not improve the tai-lo’s mood.

  When Fat Chico got upset he always got heavy.

  Normally the pilot did not pay much attention to the bluster of people like Fat Chico but today he lacked the energy to deal with it. He swiped his card through, got a machine at the tai-lo’s number.

  He left a message.

  On his way home he stopped by the forwarding service to pick up his mail.

  There was the usual backlog of Aviation Weeks and Smuggler’s Gazettes. The Gazette was the update to the Smuggler’s Bible, published in both hard-copy and CD-ROM. The pilot noticed the Gazette CD with the harmonics program had finally come in. There was also a small, unmarked cardboard box with a Texas postmark containing a half-sucker the pilot had ordered two months ago, along with a batch of floppies. When the pilot got home and opened the box he found, embedded in the styrofoam peanuts, what looked like a big pair of graphite sunglasses, shaded indigo on top. A jack protruded from one earpiece.