A Song Called Youth Read online

  The crow looked interested. “But still, Amsterdam is dead . . . New York is alive, Tokyo and Cairo are alive, very much alive. But this city . . . ”

  The crow made a caw that somehow sounded reproachful.

  “What is it?” Smoke asked. “Is it that I talk to myself? Because talking to a bird, or anything that can’t talk back, is really talking to myself? Is that it? I remember being twenty-five and feeling sorry for people who talked to themselves on the street. They were crazy. Or senile. And now I do it—I don’t say anything that would compromise Steinfeld, though. So I guess I’m not so far gone. Well I did just say his name. So maybe I’m losing it. And I’m only thirty-five now. I look older, crow, but I’m not. At least, I think I’m thirty-five. And something.”

  The crow cawed again, and Smoke thought it sounded sympathetic.

  “I talk to myself compulsively,” Smoke said; “I think I once wrote a paper about the phenomenon . . . I tried to make myself stop, for the sake of dignity. But dignity”—he gestured toward the flooded streets—“is underwater, with Rembrandt’s house. The water reaches into houses and floats the corpses out . . . ”

  Color caught his eye. A fantail of sunset red creeping across one of the southeast windows of the building across from him. Windows on the southeast side were often intact, because most of the tactical warheads had detonated in the northeastern part of the city. And the red glaze reminded him to check his radbadge. He fumbled in the folds of his shirts, the four shirts he wore one atop the next, and found the radiation indicator like a convention badge pinned to his rotting jogger’s sweatshirt. Only a faint corner of the badge had gone red, which was all right.

  “It’s all right,” he told the crow. “Voortoven says he wishes they’d dropped a Big One on Amsterdam. Instead of torturing us with this slow war. Reneging on their promise to get the third one over in a few minutes. You ever feel that way? Like you wish they’d just gone for it? You want some bread? I think it’s safe. I stuck a radbadge—I got a sack of them from Steinfeld—I stuck a badge, in the—here it is—” Rummaging in a greasy knapsack. “Left it in overnight, not a smidge of red. So the bread’s okay . . . Here.” He found the stale bread in its plastic bag, carefully unwrapped it, cursed when a few crumbs dropped. He licked a finger, touched the crumbs, sucked them into his mouth, watching the crow. The crow observed him fixedly, hopping nearer on the concrete rail.

  He broke off a corner of the bread and held it out to the crow.

  The crow’s utter lack of caution surprised him: it hopped up and plucked the bread from his fingers like a man accepting a stick of chewing gum. Casual, familiar.

  Smoke watched, fascinated, as the crow placed the crust on the ledge, then held it down with a claw to keep the breeze from stealing it, and meticulously chipped the bread apart, throwing its head back to down the crusty stuff, till only crumbs were left, and the wind got them.

  “I’m supposed to be recruiting,” Smoke confided to the crow. “Steinfeld says there are likelies here. In one of the rises. Not in this one, though.”

  He looked out over the city, saw it bruised in sunset. There was another high-rise a block north. It looked as lifeless as this one. He felt an alien touch on the index finger of his right hand and thought, A bombspider, and twitched his hand away, revolted—

  The crow flapped on his finger, clinging despite his sharp motion, looking at him crossly as it adjusted.

  He gaped for a moment and then laughed. “You’re trained! You belonged to someone!”

  The crow twitched its wings in a way that was eerily like shrugging.

  Experimentally, he put his hand to his right shoulder, and the crow fluttered onto a new perch there, settled down, perfectly at home, and all of a sudden Smoke felt just a little bit different. About everything.

  • 02 •

  Smoke walked into their trap, waited till they’d closed the trap around him, and all the time politely pretended not to know it was happening. He pretended to be watching the L-5 Colony.

  The artificial star glittered in the night sky like a fine timepiece, forty degrees from the horizon. He saw it for ten seconds through a break in the clouds, and then it was erased by mist. He wondered if the War had reached out to the Space Colony—halfway to the moon—and, if it had, if anyone was still alive there.

  And then the crow tensed and made a rasping sound Smoke was to learn meant Watch your ass! . . . and the three men closed in on him from three directions. The crow fluttered; he whispered to it, and it quieted down, pleasing him with its responsiveness.

  He was standing at a window, looking out at the gray stalagmite outline of the high-rise where he’d met the crow. “I was over in that ’rise,” he told the men, “and I looked at this one and couldn’t see a fire or anything moving.”

  He heard one of them cock a gun.

  And then again, Smoke was not so different, even after feeling that things had shifted: he still found himself hoping that the man would use the gun.

  But behind Smoke, a man with a leader’s voice said, “Turn around.”

  Smoke turned slowly around and saw a compact young man in his early thirties—but, no. Wrong. Subtract the etchings of wartime stress and fatigue and hunger, and the man was perhaps mid-twenties. He was gaunt from hunger; his chin was just a shade too prominent, like the old drawings of the man-in-the-moon at quarter-phase, and his forehead was high; he had a straight nose; a wry, red-lipped mouth; and small, dark-lashed green eyes rimmed with sleeplessness. His hair was thatchy, oily because it was something he ignored. When it was clean, it was probably blond. He was not more than five-seven, and lean in a weathered brown flight jacket that looked like it had done its flying in bad weather; ancient, faded Levi’s; motorcycle boots held together with duct tape.

  He was carrying a . . . Smoke stared. “Where’d you get the old Weatherby?” he asked, interested. The boy was carrying a Weatherby Mark V hunting rifle. Gun must be thirty, forty years old, Smoke thought. Bolt action, .460 Magnum. Long, long rifle. Developed for big-game hunting. Anomalous thing to find here, Smoke thought.

  The man with the green eyes chuckled and shook his head. His eyes didn’t change expression when he laughed. They remained flat, hard, candid. “You’re supposed to be scared,” he said, “not asking where I got my gun.”

  “So he knows all about guns,” one of the other men said. Moved to Smoke’s right. He was a big-framed man who had the look of someone who’d been overweight, starved down to sagging folds. He wore a long black coat, open at the front. And to Smoke’s left there was a twitch-eyed vulture of a man breathing noisily through his open mouth. He wore a raincoat and beneath that something so ragged it was unidentifiable. The starved bear carried a .22 rifle, and the vulture carried a sort of mace made from nails soldered to a long pipe. “If he knows about guns,” the bear went on, “he ain’t some wanderin’ tramp.”

  “That logic is questionable,” Smoke said. “A wandering tramp is someone who used to be someone else—and when he was the someone else he might have made guns his hobby. I am, in fact, a wandering tramp. That doesn’t mean I don’t have business. I have business. But I’m not an eye for the Armies. And I’m here unarmed.”

  “What’s your ‘business’?” the green-eyed one asked, jeering the word business.

  Smoke was thinking that the starved bear should have the big Weatherby, and the green-eyed one should have the .22, because he was smaller, and because he was the leader, so he should have known better. But maybe the gun was the totem of power here. And the king should carry the scepter.

  “Here’s where I take a chance,” Smoke said. “I’m going to refuse to tell you my business. Except to say it’s no threat to you.”

  The starved bear took a step toward him, and Smoke closed his eyes and said, “I hope they don’t hurt my crow.”

  Not sure if he’d said it out loud.

  “Jenkins,” the green-eyed one said, not very sharply. But that’s all it took. The big guy stopped, and Smoke, even with his eyes shut, knew the starved bear was looking at the green-eyed one for his cue.

  “Lez go through his stuff,” the vulture said. “Might be food.”

  “Animals,” Smoke said, opening his eyes. “One’s a starved bear and one’s a vulture, and you make me think of a coyote or a wolf.” He looked at the leader. Again the guy made the smile that didn’t travel to his eyes.

  “You’re just a roost for a crow,” he said. “You got a name?”

  “Smoke.”

  “I heard about you, something. Like you barter, black market or . . . ” He shrugged. “What’s to be so mysterious about?” Smoke didn’t answer, so the guy went on, “What’s your crow’s name?”

  “I haven’t decided. We’re of recent acquaintance. I’m wavering between naming him Edgar Allan Crow or Richard Pryor.”

  The green-eyed one lowered his rifle, maybe only because it was heavy. “Edgar Allan Crow is corny. What’s ‘Richard Pryor’ mean?”

  “He was my father’s favorite comedian, and he was black. That’s all I know about him.”

  “We could eat that bird,” the vulture suggested. He looked at the green-eyed leader. “Let’s eat the bird, Hard-Eyes. Fuck it, huh?”

  Hard-Eyes. Quite a monicker.

  Hard-Eyes said, “No. Crows are good luck where I come from.”

  The clouds had congealed into rain and the rain had wormed and nosed and nudged its way into the high-rise’s ten thousand hairline cracks, and it was seeping out of the cracks in the ceiling and dripping with a smell of dissolved minerals into a large bathtub—which someone had dragged from its original mooring just to catch the rain—and into a wooden box which itself was beginning to discolor and leak.

  The crow was asleep on Smoke’s shoulder.
br />   “I wisht we could have a goddamn fire,” Pelter was saying. Pelter was the vulture.

  They were sitting on red plastic crates around a dead TV set. The TV screen had been painted with a symbol:

  . . . in red paint. They weren’t looking at the screen. But it was a kind of chilled hearth for them. They’d eaten a tin of sardines and a pound of cheese Steinfeld had given Smoke “to soften them up.” Smoke had brought it out as soon as they’d arrived at the squat. “This’s our squat,” Hard-Eyes had said, just as if he’d wanted to displace the word bivouac in Smoke’s mind, in case Smoke was working for the Armies after all.

  There was a jumble of old furniture in the room, mysterious geometries in the half-darkness. They’d blacked out the window with three thicknesses of taped-on black plastic; the plastic’s wrinkles made glowworms of the anemic yellow light from the two chemlanterns. Smoke said, “You’re gonna need a new lump for your lanterns. That solid fuel seems like it’s going to last forever, then all of a sudden you’re in the dark.”

  “I don’t like the way this guy talks,” Pelter said. “He’s gonna bring us bad luck.”

  Hard-Eyes ignored Pelter. He looked across the cone of lampglow at Smoke and said, “You’re not talking just about lamp fuel.”

  Smoke shrugged. “It’s all in the lanterns. Energy and attrition and entropy.”

  Hard-Eyes blinked, looking skeptical. Then his face cleared and he nodded. “And glass going black.”

  Jenkins and Pelter looked at one another, then at Hard-Eyes and Smoke and then at the floor.

  “What’s the TV fetish-sign about?” Smoke asked.

  He nodded toward the red symbol on the screen. He’d seen it the first time in Martinique, ten years before. He’d seen it on pendants and on screensavers. No one had explained it, except to say, “It’s good luck.” Later, in Harlem, seeing dead TVs turned into household iconography, he’d figured it was big-city cargo cultism, in a way, and something more: an invocatory variation on the Gridfriend sign.

  “You believe in Gridfriend?” Smoke asked.

  Gridfriend, god of the global electronic Grid. The Grid gives TV, and news—and credit, which translates into food and shelter. Pray to Gridfriend and maybe the power company’s computers lose your bill, and you go an extra month before they turn off your lights; pray to Gridfriend and maybe Interbank makes an error in your favor, computes you five hundred dollars you shouldn’t have. And then forgets about it. Pray to Gridfriend and the police computer loses your records. Or so you hope.

  “That’s not the Gridfriend totem,” Hard-Eyes said. “It’s Jenkins’ thing. It’s Jenkins’ invocation to the Big Organizer, the god who manufactures patterns—and luck. Jenkins used to do a lot of meth.”

  “Big Organizer? Just another Gridfriend. You a believer in luck?”

  “I make my own.”

  Smoke smiled at the movie-melodrama sound of “I make my own.” It went with the monicker.

  “That’s why you’re here, Hard-Eyes? In this fucking icebox?”

  Jenkins snapped Smoke a look. “Hey, you got nothing better goin’, Rags. You ain’t even got lanterns. You shouldn’t be talkin’ about our lanterns, man.”

  The crow stirred on Smoke’s shoulder, disturbed by Jenkins’ tone. Smoke crooned to it. It tucked its head back under its wing.

  He smiled. “Look at that. That’s completion . . . This crow and I met today and we’re fast friends already. Just like that. Makes me almost believe in reincarnation.”

  “We should eat ’im,” Pelter said, wiping a trail of snot from his bony nose with a crusted sleeve. His eyes were red, swollen, and he coughed sometimes, and now and then his head dipped as if he might fall asleep sitting up. Smoke thought Pelter was sick and would die soon.

  “The bird will more likely be pecking your dead eyes out,” Smoke said, and then regretted it. He hadn’t intended to say it aloud. But Pelter didn’t hear. His head had drooped and he was breathing with a bubbling sound.

  Jenkins was scowling. “You hear that, Hard-Eyes? His bird pecking Pelter’s eyes?”

  Hard-Eyes shrugged. “Smoke resents people talking about roasting his designer squab. Makes a man say bitter things.”

  Smoke laughed. Hard-Eyes made the short, snorting sound that passed for machismo laughter. But his eyes stayed hard.

  As the rain made hollow plips in the tub of water.

  Jenkins and Pelter were asleep, stretched out on pallets of cardboard. Jenkins slept with his face in his curled arm—like the crow with its beak under a wing—his hands now and then clutching, closing on something he dreamt about; Pelter slept with his mouth open, his breath coming raggedly.

  There was only one lantern still lit. As if Smoke had spoken an omen, the other one had used up its fuel and gone out, just like that.

  “Not going to make it,” Smoke muttered.

  “The other lantern?” Hard-Eyes asked.

  “Pelter. Maybe the lantern too.”

  “Pelter’s been sick,” Hard-Eyes said, nodding.

  “Been with you long?”

  Hard-Eyes shook his head. “Six, seven weeks. Jenkins has been with me longer. Jenkins, he’s not dumb. Just a different focus. He’s handy with chip-splicing, accessing, like that.”

  “Not much use for computer skills in Amsterdam just now.” They both smiled wearily at that; it had been too obvious a thing to say and they both knew it.

  “You still worried about me?” Smoke asked.

  Hard-Eyes shook his head. He smiled flickeringly. “The crow vouched for you.”

  “I’m a little worried about you. You could almost be one of their background men. Looking for the underground. Or for anybody that smells like they wish the Armies would snuff each other and fuck off.”

  Hard-Eyes shrugged. “You want the story?”

  Smoke nodded.

  So Hard-Eyes told his story.

  I was in London, (Hard-Eyes said), and I was at a club called The Retro G. They were into cultural retrogressing. That month they had a ska motif, ska music. Two months before they’d had thrash. And before that it was hard core and before that worldbeat and before that angst rock, and before that it was dub and before that it was core-dub and before that, melt-pop, which is what was hot when the club opened. If the club were still there I guess they’d have worked back through the nineteen-nineties, eighties, seventies, sixties, back to rockabilly and bebop and blues. But it’s not there now because that part of the town is rubble. Me, I’m from San Francisco, California. I was in Britain for a seminar on Social Democracy. Watered-down socialism. I was a grad student. Yeah, a student with a fucking satchel for carrying his books. Political science major. And deep into applying structuralism to problems of diplomacy. Jesus. And then politics got real for me. The truth behind politics. Aggression and acquisition . . . We were at the Retro G, dancing, and the DJ sliced in that meltpop tune, “Dancing with the Russian Brothers,” not part of the ongoing retro motif, so it made you wonder, and then the DJ said it was dedicated to the Russian Brothers who’d just driven their tanks across the frontier into Poland. It shouldn’t have been all that surprising; the Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan—it’d all been reunited into Greater Russia not that long before, and did we really think they were going to quit there? But still, we thought he was kidding, until we heard someone else talking about a radio broadcast and we went outside to Dody’s car. Dody—man, what an airhead. But she was worried about her business because she marketed designs from some Polish designer. And on Dody’s car radio they said the Greater Russian army appeared out of nowhere, no one could understand how they got so many troops to the border without alerting NATO. It was a long time before word filtered back about the maxishuttle drops out of orbit. NATO saw the drops, but the Russians told them it was emergency medical supplies because of some outbreak, and then the fucking troops were in place . . . Okay, that’s the version I heard. You hear different versions . . . Anyway, they took Warsaw, moved the Greater Russian Liberation Army’s western front HQ in. And this girl Dody, all she could think about was her business going down the drain. I wanted to stuff her up the exhaust pipe of her Jaguar Gasless.