Keeper of the Streets

"That's the sign. The killer. Another one's going to die. That's always his sign."

"A bag of frozen peas? What are you talking about?"

Bosun walked cautiously towards the bag and stared at it. It was just a bag of frozen peas, but something hot had smashed a perfectly round hole in the center and smeared the crushed and charred contents all over the street. It was somehow pitiful and faintly nauseating.

Bosun's eyes went over the rest of the pile of garbage, then he stepped back. He took her arm and began to lead her away.

"There are signs, Lia. Everywhere there are signs if you know how to look for them. That's what we do. We study signs. We put our hands against the street and feel the life of the city and we study the signs. The garbage, the discards, a pair of shoes hanging from a street lamp, a child's toy purse in the middle of the street, even the power lines over your head. Do you ever look up and study the power lines, Lia? Do you know they change from day to day?"

She looked at him incredulously as he hustled her back to her car.

"Do you remember what was in the street last night when I saved you from that salt truck? A bag of frozen potatoes with a hole punched out of the center. That's how I knew someone was going to die."

"But why me? I don't know anything about all this." Lia stopped in the middle of the street and looked at the absurdity of the busy office in the street. Transparent workers rushed around in a ghostly parody of business, some walking right through her as if she weren't even there.

She suddenly realized that to them, she was the ghost, she was the one who wasn't real, and she was seized by a rising panic, a certain knowledge that she didn't know what was real anymore, only that something might be trying to kill her.

"I've never seen this place before in my life!" She was frantic now, trying to explain to him. "Block seventeen: that's just a project we're doing PR for! That's all, just another project! I don't know anything about all this."

She was bewildered and frightened, and she felt tears gathering in her eyes. She hated crying: she detested it. She looked at the bill of lading in her hand it as if it might have some explanation, but it was as meaningless as everything else, and she furiously crumpled it up and threw it away.

She approached Bosun beseechingly. "What the hell are you doing to me? Why me? Why are you doing this to me?"

He looked at her sympathetically, then opened the car door. "Come on. Lia. It's time you went home. You obviously don't know anything, and I've got work to do. Maybe it was a mistake to even got you involved."

"No!" she shouted, grabbing his arm. "No! You're not leaving me! Not now. Not until I know what's going on."

Bosun looked at her for a moment, then opened the car door. "Okay. Then let's go. You can drive me. I can get there faster myself, but you can drive me."

Lia got behind the wheel and started the car and they took off, driving right through the crowds of ghost workers who dissolved like so much smoke as they passed. Lia tried not to look. She reminded herself that in this world, she was the ghost.

As if reading her mind, Bosun said, "It's so hard to tell what's going on sometimes. We all think we understand how we're connected, our relationship to other people and things, but all we see is what's in our own little world, just that little slice. We don't see all the connections in the other worlds, and in the other worlds connections are thick as knots. Things are bound together in ways you can't even begin to imagine."

Bosun directed her to an up-ramp that left lower Wacker and brought them up to street level again, but it wasn't the same street they'd left before, and as the car emerged onto street level, Lia cried out as if she'd been struck in the face, her eyes wide with horror and disbelief. She slammed on the brakes and the car screeched to a halt.

She was still seeing Bosun's world, and what she saw when they emerged onto the street was a bewildering, overpowering riot of color and activity. The buildings on either side of the street seemed to vibrate and hum and the street itself took on the gleaming, living character of a vein or artery, undulating with life. The night sky above was filled with squares and rectangles of color sliding along invisible lines like thoughts in a brain, and the windows of the building throbbed with changing colors and flashes of light. There were figures in the street and she knew they were people, but they appeared as bobbing smudges of light in the frenzied landscape, some brilliantly lit up, some barely glowing, and everywhere were the skittering shapes that Lia remembered from her first trip underground with Bosun, the things she had thought were rats, but were not rats, she saw now. They scurried along the streets and sidewalks, ran up and down the sides of the buildings like ants on legs that were too fast to follow. It was a cartoon world: a world gone mad.

Everything was alive. Everywhere was the frenzied activity of overflowing life, as if every thought of every mind had a life and a shape all its own, and all waving and radiating into the night air in a cacophony of color and movement that simply took her breath away.

She could see the signs too now. She could see what was healthy and what was diseased, as if she could feel it with her eyes. She could feel the currents of the people's thoughts and see the inexorable flow of the traffic like blood through a vein. The city was alive. It was humming with life. She was in the bloodstream of a living organism, and she was part of it too.

"Damn!" Bosun snapped. "I forgot. It's too much, isn't it? Too much for you? Where's your purse? Get some money! Give me some money!"

Lia sat there unable to move, transfixed by the riot of activity before her as Bosun grabbed her pure off the floor and scrabbled inside it looking for her wallet. He pulled out some bills and pressed them against the back of her neck.

Lia felt that that same electric jolt at the top of her spine she'd felt before, and then she was suddenly looking at the city she knew again, just west of the Loop, the steady traffic and the flow of pedestrians under the streetlights, but the memory of what she'd seen left her speechless and unable to even think.

"What did you do to me? What did you do? Where'd everything go?"

"Hold this money," he said, pressing the bills into her hand. "That's what does it. It's one of the best ways to keep you grounded in your world. Take it and hold it tight."

Lia grabbed the money in her gloved hand, closing her fist on it, afraid to let it go.

Bosun stared at her to make sure the crisis was over, then he sat back in his seat. "The one thing everyone you see out there has in common is that they all carry money with them, all the time. The more money they have, the less they can see the other worlds. The only time they put their money away from them, that's when the dreams start."

This time she didn't even bother to ask for an explanation. She only looked at him to see if he were joking, but he was serious.

"There's a reason that rich people live so high above the street and the poor people live below it," he said, and smiled.

Everything was serious, and everything was a joke, and it bothered her that the wonders he was showing her all seemed on some level ludicrous. She almost wanted to laugh, but she knew it would sound hysterical, and that once she started laughing she might never stop.

She looked stupidly at the bills she held tightly in her hand. Bosun reached over and gently pushed her hand down. She hadn't realized she'd been holding the money in front of her face.

As if reading her mind he said, "Yes. It's a joke isn't it? It's all a joke. That's the way things are. Frozen vegetables. Thoughts as rats. It's just too funny to believe."

"Drive," he said. "Take a right here and a left in the middle of the block."

Automatically she stepped on the gas and spun the wheel, steering through the traffic, no longer even paying attention to what she saw, not trusting anything now, no longer even questioning what she saw.

"Listen," he said, turning to face her. "I'm sorry for all this, what I put you through. I thought you were involved somehow. Now I see I was wrong, but it's not easy. Just because I see more than you doesn't mean I always know what to make of it, and I'm not sure of anything with this. I have to talk to my people."

She pulled into the alley as he'd directed and looked at him. She wasn't surprised to see he had turned back into the bum again, the very same one she'd seen last night: the filthy gray coat, the bulbous nose with enlarged pores.

But there was something else too: his eyes had gone dead now, a very convincing hollowness in his bloodshot eyes, as if he really were just some homeless derelict she had picked up and driven around for the last hour or so.

She felt dizzy and had the curious feeling things suddenly snapping into focus, as if her ears had suddenly popped and she could hear again, but all over her body. She looked at the bills she held tightly in her hand, as if seeing them for the first time.

"Do you know where we are?" he asked her. His voice was rough and ragged, full of whiskey and bad wine. "Block seventeen is right over there. Right through those two buildings near the end of the alley. We're very close.

"I'm going now, Lia. I've got to go. You'll just have to do the best you can from now on. I'm really fucking sorry about that, about all this."

He opened the door and put his foot out onto the alley, then stopped. He looked back at her with his rheumy eyes. "Probably this never even happened. Know what I mean? Probably I'm just a bum and you've been dreaming. Or maybe you died in that cab last night and this is heaven or something. Or hell. Like in those old Twilight Zone shows. You know them? I used to like them shows. Yeah"

He heaved himself out of the car and hawked and spit. She heard it hit the bricks. He turned around one last time. "Thanks for the ride, lady."

Lia was beyond words now. She watched him walk down the alley, and as she watched she seemed to see other gray shapes emerge from the very bricks of the surrounding buildings, stepping slowly out of the shadows. She seemed to see them, but she couldn't be sure. She wasn't sure of anything anymore, and she didn't seem to be able to make herself care.

He stood together with the other shapeless shadows, unmoving, black against the gray snow, then the darkness seemed to swallow them up and Lia lost sight of them. She sat in the car, her hands still poised on the wheel, and forced herself to be calm.

They were gone now. There was no sign of them. Lia turned off the engine and the warning buzzer sounded in her car, telling her the key was still in the ignition. She pulled the key out and the interior lights went on, and Lia sat there in the light of her car until she began to feel vulnerable and exposed. She flicked off the interior lights and sat in the darkness. The feel of her car, the smell of the leather interior, were reassuring to her. She felt safe and isolated.

The alley was narrow, hemmed in by two tall buildings on either side. The passageway that led to Block Seventeen was down towards the end, just before the alley dead-ended against a blank brick wall with a big dumpster against it. There was yellow light spilling through the passageway, and Lia stared at the light, looking for Bosun's shadow, which would tell her he was headed to Block Seventeen, but she saw nothing. Wind gusted across the roofs of the buildings above and sent a shower of sparkling snowflakes drifting down into the sheltered stillness of the alley. She sat and waited and listened to the tick of her cooling engine.

After a time she opened her door. She remembered what Bosun had said about feeling the streets, and so cautiously, she reached out a gloved hand, leaned out of her car and pressed her palm against the bare, icy cobblestones.

Yes, she felt it. The street was humming with some kind of life, as if a current of electricity were going through it. She couldn't believe she'd never noticed it before, but then, how many times had she ever bent down and put her hand against the surface of a street?

She got out of the car and the cold struck her immediately. Now that the sun had gone down the air was frigid and a stiff wind had sprung up, making her eyes tear. She leaned against the car and wrapped her arms around herself.

He wouldn't be coming back. Something in the way he'd dissolved into the shadows told her that she wouldn't see him again. He'd been mistaken about her. He'd saved her life and given her a warning, opened her eyes briefly to another world and now he was through.

Lia looked down at her feet and listened. She heard the wind, the grinding squeal of the El train reflecting off the bricks of the buildings, the muffled honk and roar of the traffic out in the street behind her. The image she'd seen of the city as a living organism was burned into her eyes, and when she looked into the shadows she still saw things moving, dim squares and rectangles of light sweeping over the bricks, as if she'd been staring into a bright light. The telephone wires over her head seemed to sizzle.

She began to walk down the alley, watching her step on the ice and keeping a wary eye out now for garbage or anything out of place, for any telltale signs or bags of frozen food, feeling her way along with her heart as well as her eyes and ears. Several times she saw skittering in the shadows, but she wasn't afraid of rats anymore, and she found the motion strangely reassuring. She stepped into the shaft of yellow light that marked the passageway to Block Seventeen.

Even though her company handled the PR for the project, Lia had never so much as visited the site or even seen what it looked like. Now, as she emerged from the shadows of a neighboring building, she found herself looking at a great, empty space, something dead in the heart of the city. There were banks of huge, bright, construction lights set around the perimeter, powered by rumbling diesel engines, and the whole site, almost half a city block, was covered with polyethylene tarp several layers thick, weighted down with boards and bricks and pieces of junk. There were a few construction workers at the far side milling about the trailer office, but other than that she was alone.

The polyethylene sheets blew and flapped in the wind, the generators hummed. Lia couldn't be sure, but she thought there was some strange movement at the center of the site, something moving beneath the tarp that didn't look like wind. She blinked back her tears from the cold and stared again, but her eyes were caught by a rustle of movement on the periphery, and she turned and looked at the edge of the tarp to her right.

There, beyond the glare of the lights, a mass of cable and wires were being slowly, almost imperceptibly dragged under the plastic sheeting: phone lines, electric power cable, armored BX, all slowly slithering under the tarp at barely a snail's pace. It reminded her of nature films she had seen, of a wasp dragging a paralyzed caterpillar into its den, or one snake being swallowed by another. There was something nauseating about it, but she ignored the feeling and forced herself to watch until she was sure she was seeing what she thought and that it wasn't just some trick of the light or the wind. The cables and wires really were being drawn beneath the plastic sheeting.

She looked back at the center of the site, then back at the workers, who seemed oblivious to anything beyond the circle of light around their trailer-office. There was no doubt now. There was something moving under the plastic, something small, the size of an infant, rolling around in a most unnatural and almost obscene way, rocking back and forth and shuddering, like something being born.

She had a terrible premonition of blood and hunger, of something that smashes and burns and crushes, and then the wind took the corners of the tarp and set them to flapping like whips.