The City of Mirrors (The Passage 3)

In this manner I hunt-and-pecked my way across the great featureless slab of the American Middle West. As the nights and miles slithered by, road hypnosis cast my mind into the past. I thought of my parents, long dead, and the town where I was raised—a doppelgänger to the many anonymous hamlets that I, King of Destruction, passed through unremarkably, just a pair of headlights drifting downstream in the dark. I thought of people I’d known, friends I’d made, women I’d bedded. I thought of a table with flowers and crystal and a view of the sea, and a night—a sad and beautiful night—when in falling snow I had carried my beloved home. I thought of all these things, and many more besides, but most of all, I thought of Liz.

The lights of New York rose from wretched New Jersey on the evening of the sixth day. Eight million souls: my senses were singing like a soprano. I entered Manhattan via the Lincoln Tunnel, abandoned the car on Eighth Avenue, and set out on foot. I stopped in the first tavern I came to, an Irish pub with a heavily lacquered bar and sawdust on the floor. Among the patrons, nothing seemed out of the ordinary; such is the insularity of New Yorkers that what was happening in the middle of the country had yet to coalesce into a feeling of general crisis. Seated alone at the bar, I ordered a Scotch, not intending to drink it, but discovered that I wanted to and, more interestingly, that it caused no ill effects. It was delicious, its most subtle flavors dancing upon my palate. I was on my third when I realized two other things: I was not the least drunk, and I badly needed to piss. In the men’s room my body released a stream so powerfully percussive it made the porcelain chime. This, too, was immensely satisfying; it seemed there was no bodily pleasure that had not been amplified a hundred-fold.

But the real object of my attention was the television above the bar. A Yankees game was on. I waited until the last pitch was thrown and asked the bartender if he would switch to CNN.

I did not have to wait long: “Colorado Killing Spree,” read the chyron at the bottom of the screen. The madness was spreading. Reports were coming in from locales throughout the state: whole families obliterated in their beds, towns without a man or woman left alive, a roadside restaurant of patrons gutted like trout. But there were also survivors—bitten, but alive. It just looked at me. It wasn’t human. It gave off this kind of glow. The ravings of the traumatized or something more? No one had done the math yet, but I did. Per my instructions, for every nine killed, one had been called into the fold. The hospitals were filling with the sick and injured. Nausea, fever, spasms, then…

“That’s some creepy shit.”

I turned to the man sitting next to me. When had the adjacent stool become occupied? A certain urban type, manufactured by the thousands: balding and lawyerish, with an intelligent, slightly pugnacious face, a speckling of day-old beard, and a little paunch he kept meaning to do something about. Wingtips and a blue suit and starched white shirt, necktie loose around his throat. Somebody was waiting for him at home, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to face them yet, not after the day he’d just had.

“Don’t I know it.”

On the bar before him sat a glass of wine. Our eyes met for what seemed an unusually long time. I noted the overwhelming odor of nervous perspiration he’d attempted to cloak with cologne. His eyes traveled the length of my torso, pausing at my mouth on the upswing. “Haven’t I seen you in here before?”

Ah, I thought. I darted my eyes around the room. There were no women at all. “I don’t think so. I’m new.”

“Are you meeting anyone?”

“Not until now.”

He smiled and put out his hand—the one without the wedding ring. “I’m Scott. Let me buy you a drink.”

Thirty minutes later, wearing his suit, I left him in an alleyway, twitching and frothing.

—

I thought of visiting my old apartment but discarded the idea; it was not, had never been, home. What is home to a monster? To anyone? There exists for each of us a geographical fulcrum, a place so saturated with memory that within its precinct the past is always present. It was late, after two A.M., when I entered the main hall at Grand Central Terminal. The restaurants and shops had long since closed, sealed behind their grates; the board above the ticket windows listed only morning trains. Just a few souls lingered: the ubiquitous transit police in their Kevlar vests and creaking leather accoutrements, a couple in evening wear racing for a train that had long since departed, an old black man pushing a dust mop, earphones stuffed in his head. At the center of the marbled hall stood the information booth with its legendary timepiece. Meet me at the kiosk, the one with the four-faced clock…It was New York’s most celebrated rendezvous point, perhaps the most famous in the world. How many fateful encounters had occurred in this place? How many assignations had commenced, what nights of love? How many generations walked the earth because a man and a woman had arranged to meet here, beneath this storied timepiece of gleaming brass and opalescent glass? I tilted my face toward the barrel-vaulted ceiling, 125 feet overhead. In my young adulthood, its beauty had been muted by layers of coal soot and nicotine, but that was the old New York; a thorough cleaning in the late nineties had restored its gold-leaf astrological images to their original luster. Taurus, the bull; Gemini, the twins; Aquarius, bearing his water; a milky smear of galactic arm, as one sees only on the clearest of nights. A little-known fact, though not unacknowledged by my scientist’s eye, is that the ceiling of Grand Central is actually backward. It is a mirror image of the night sky; lore holds that the artist was working from a medieval manuscript that showed the heavens not from within but from without—not mankind’s view but God’s.