You did not. “I told you there was going to be a war,” you say, standing over me, your feet at either shoulder, arms crossed, bearing of statue. “Just listen.”
From the sound of it, your lions have come alive outside. You haul me up in the faulty non-light. I’ve got sea-legs, as in they don’t work at all. The top half of my body slumps into yours.
“You’ve dribbled down your front, bless you. Let’s get you home.”
With that innocuous final word, I feel a shiver in your chest—transmitted through us both—indicating that every time we say it now, no matter how often, it will be an accident.
The good thing is: I smell like flowers, and they no longer seem that fake.
Together, we shoulder through the blacked-out doors and into the street, now lit by a false, electric daylight, the tone of a parking garage. My eyes are stinging, tearing up from the perfume and polish and sudden light, one of them stuck fast. Close at hand, I make out the shape of something burning beneath a glaze, hear a pattern of thunderous crashes, human yelling.
Beside me, you whisper, “I told you.”
I want to tell you that I suspect it’s not as big as you think it is, or that it’s much bigger than you think it is, that violence creeps up in the oddest, most convenient places—but it sounds too much like a truism, especially from someone who can’t effectively see anything. Still, I consider the heightened sense of smell particular to the big cats. And all at once, my legs are working just fine.
*
We move eastward, away from the fires, toward the northbound subway—not running, exactly, but walking quickly, as fast as you can walk away from a situation without looking suspicious. Beyond the immediate perimeter of the store, the burning and mounting whatever, the streets are empty—no traffic, no human bodies, no cops. The concrete-bordered avenue is bathed in a glow of red light that seems to come from beyond above, or to occlude the above, as if someone’s put the entire bubble of existence here into lockdown. As if, all at one time, the city has finally decided to address itself. The air is close, busy with the sense of mass movement somewhere just out of view, but a distinct, concentrated chill pipes through the streets and directly into our faces, giving the impression that we’re still indoors, that some controlled substance is being filtered in to appear natural, that the streets themselves are part of a greater structure. I look up—the persistent flow of air now pushing on my throat—and am not surprised: the sky, or whatever is beyond the glow, is matte black, no stars, so uniform as to seem artificial—again, this feeling of shuttering on an immense scale, a dome sliding over.
As we walk against this wind—which feels in its benign constancy like the static gust of an air conditioner—I notice that to either side of us several of the gated storefronts glow orange from within, as if someone had set fires inside them. The light reflects through the gates in pixelated patterns on the sidewalk. The color is inviting, like hearth.
Your commentary is constant, endlessly speculative about the nature of these changes, yet strangely offhand, as if the consequences lacked real effect, could only be interpreted symbolically: a class war, a changing of colors. I’m not listening specifically. I peel my eyelids apart into a clouded right field as a flaming figure hurtles around the corner, running toward us in rapidly increasing resolution. It takes a moment to put it fully together, build it up from an animal: it’s a man on fire.
We tighten our grip on each other and jolt to the side, stepping toward the fires that aren’t burning in the open. His path doesn’t divert, continues to move in a line parallel to ours. The vent of cool air billows the smoke ahead of him and into our eyes. He makes no sound himself: the only noise we hear comes either from the background—the pulsing sirens from everywhere, the hum of the vent—or the physical act of his running and burning. His shoes hitting the street at a constant, unnerving rhythm, the melting rubber sticking and then breaking free; and, as he nears, the crackling of the fire, the flickering bursts of skin separating under so much heat. He pumps his arms, he doesn’t scream—like something mechanical, wound up and then released, repeating the same motion until it winds all the way down, and comes finally to rest.
He passes dangerously close—just a few feet from my left side—and the heat feels like enough to break the skin inside my clothes, as if to draw it prickling outward from my body and consume it in the blaze. There’s a sensation like light rain on my sleeve, sparks of him erupting onto me. Something runs down my leg. I can’t remember if it’s blood or piss that comes out cool. He leaves us in his wake.
“This is us,” you say, turning abruptly to a subway entrance on the right, which, miraculously, hasn’t been closed off.
We descend and enter another, deeper chamber. The station is still lit and not completely empty, which surprises me, as if I’d assumed we were the only ones to have sense to go elsewhere, to hide underground. There are people milling around the empty guard booth, down on the platform below; their movement doesn’t indicate disaster or panic. We vault over the turnstiles, not because we have to, not because they don’t work.
We wait on the uptown platform, where the mildly ironlike smell of tuna fills the air, like someone’s broken open the rations early: undercutting this smell, perversely, that of fresh water. The idea of waiting for a train seems ludicrous—if there was any delicate piece of the city’s infrastructure that would collapse first, it was the trains. At this point, though, I can’t tell if what we’re experiencing—the conditioned air, the planned and random fires, the winnowing of all our paths down into one, this feeling of controlled synesthesia—is the work of such an infrastructure crumbling or boning up; falling apart, or testing its limits. On the other side of the tracks, a woman sits hunched over on the platform, her top half hidden in a heavy fur coat, her leggings in a pattern of hundred-dollar bills, legs dangling over the tracks.
“That man,” you say, rocking back on your heels against a tiled column.
There’s still some resistance, some stick every time I open my right eye. I bat my eyelashes to ease away the sting. “What about him?”
“He was a cop.”
I can’t make out what this means—the implications of each action, already, are starting to lose their individual meaning in the collective well of paranoia. “How could you tell?”
You shift and put your hands behind your back, flattened against the column. “It smelled like bacon.”
You mime turning a badge upside down and pinning it to your chest. The train drowns out my lack of response.
We step inside, along with several of the others standing on the platform. They move to empty seats as if prescribed, but we remain standing. It doesn’t occur to me until we’re aboard that the train, too, could be a hostile mechanism, an operative part of the defenses that I intuit around us. As it crawls out of the station, I see through the window, across the way, a drenched figure haul himself up from the tracks onto the platform, water splattering everywhere. The woman in the money-printed leggings struggles to her feet, screams silently, and falls.
The train fills further at each stop, but never reaches capacity. I watch the passengers, but whatever their disguises are, they keep them. A man drums his knee impatiently whenever the doors open; a woman consults the map once, then again two stops later, using the same series of gestures each time. No one exits the train. At