Hazardous Materials

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To those who will never settle

If you want to play soldiers, you'd better expect a war.

—King Swamp, “Man Behind the Gun”

AP Top News at 9:19 p.m. EST

AP EXCLUSIVE: POLICE IN STANDOFF WITH TIMES SQUARE GUNMAN

NEW YORK (AP)—An unidentified gunman has invaded a Times Square arcade. According to reports from citizen journalists trapped inside the building, the gunman is armed with two semiautomatic pistols. Police have set up barricades outside the popular gaming establishment and are awaiting further information from FBI negotiators who were sent in earlier.

“As of this time, we believe there have been no casualties,” said NYPD spokeswoman Lisa Wells. “The situation is tense, but we hope to end it as peacefully as possible.” Wells went on to state that the police would not rule out the use of lethal force if necessary and that SWAT officers were standing by. “The safety of all New Yorkers is our top priority.”

ONE

J
arrod Foster stared through the mud-splattered windshield of his boss's pickup truck. He wanted a cigarette. That was nothing new. He'd wanted a cigarette at least once a day since he'd quit smoking. And like every other day, in every other way, Jarrod settled for wanting.

The November weather had swung from snow to sleet to rain and back to sleet again. He downed the dregs of the cart coffee Ludwig had bought him. At seventy-five cents, it might not have been the most extravagant display of largesse. But too often, seventy-five cents was exactly seventy-five cents
more
than Jarrod had in his pocket. And although he never came out and admitted as much, his boss seemed to have picked up on that fact.

“How'd we land this gig, anyway?” Jarrod asked, staring at the bombed-out Greenpoint strip mall they'd strip to bare brick over the next two weeks.

“My motto is this . . .” Ludwig pulled a pack of Newport Lights from his shirt pocket. “You want a job done well, you gotta pay. You want it done cheap, call Ben Ludwig.” His boss had said similar things to Jarrod in the two months he'd worked for him. It was the reason his under-the-radar removal service was so popular with property owners dodging the expense and paperwork of a licensed hazmat crew.

Jarrod tried not to stare as his boss peeled the cellophane off the pack and let it flutter to the floor. Ludwig pinched out a cigarette and started tapping the filter against the side of the steering wheel.
Tap-tappity-tap-tap.
This was a ritual for Jarrod's boss, and he performed it with the casual precision of a priest celebrating mass. Like any longtime congregant, Jarrod knew what came next: another ten hours of soul-breaking monotony.

Ludwig stuck the cigarette into his mouth, the filter lost under his rusty walrus mustache. He shook the pack in Jarrod's direction. One single cigarette stuck out, practically begging Jarrod to take it.

“I told you. I don't smoke.” He'd wanted to add
anymore. I don't smoke anymore.
That's what he'd wanted to say. He'd learned, however, that that phrase was an open door to folks still in the habit. Eventually, they'd push their way in, and they'd bring their cigarettes with them. He'd been good. He hadn't taken so much as a puff in more than a year, not even when he could still afford them. And sticking it out might have been the only thing he'd done in the twenty-eight years he'd spent on Planet Earth that he was truly proud of.

“Don't smoke, huh?” Ludwig grinned, pack still extended. “You will. All that stuff we end up breathing on this gig . . . makes cigarette smoke taste like fresh mountain air.”

“I'm cool,” Jarrod lied, and looked away from the pack. His eyes returned to the strip mall, a one-story expanse of urban blight so heavily boarded up by warped plywood it looked like a wet cardboard box.

“Okay, bucko.” Ludwig produced a lighter and sparked up. “Sooner we get in there, sooner we get cancer,” he added, hopping from the truck.

Jarrod followed, crowbar in hand, kicking wet, gray snow from his still-stiff work boots. As they crossed the small lot, the rain hit his skin like a shower of needles. Ludwig hefted his bolt cutters and clipped through the padlock. The doubled chain fell against the brick with a scraping
clack
.

“Great,” Jarrod said, noticing that the seam between the doors was rimed with rust. He yanked hard on the handle. Nothing shifted, except perhaps his shoulder from its socket.

“Didn't expect that to work, didja?”

Jarrod said nothing. He eyed a spot where the seam appeared weakest and took aim with the flat of his crowbar. Together, they wrenched open a
V
-shaped gap just wide enough to slip through. A blast of chalky air hit them. Jarrod covered his mouth with the back of his hand, again remembering Ludwig's words about what they'd breathe in on this job. Fiberglass? Asbestos? Black mold? Who knew?

Ludwig clicked on his flashlight as they padded inside. The beam hit a shattered mirror ball and splintered into countless fading spokes. Wilted acoustic tiles hung above them like dead petals, and the floor felt soft, rotted. Ludwig coughed and lit a fresh smoke. “She's a beaut, eh?”

Jarrod's eyes were fixed on the glowing end of Ludwig's cigarette and nothing else. “What?”

But his boss had already moved on, creeping toward a sagging Formica counter. He leaned over it, inspecting a gaping hole in the Sheetrock. “Can always count on the bums to take anything obviously valuable. Copper pipe and wire'll keep you set for a while with hooch or crack or whatever poison you like. Keep you set for a
good
long while.”

“I'll keep that in mind.”

“You don't do no drugs, do ya?”

“Only Advil. And only after you make us work too long.”

“Oh, hardy-har-har.” Ludwig extended two fingers in the direction of Jarrod's feet, a warning. “Careful—lotta rusty nails stickin' up in here. Can't have you getting lockjaw on the job. Advil ain't gonna cut it there. You got that Obamacare, by the way?”

Jarrod bit his lip. His boss paid him as fair a wage as he could; he knew that. But while it was enough to pull him out of the Medicaid safety net, it wouldn't cover even the Bronze level of the exchanges. Not in New York, and not after he splurged on luxuries like rent and heat. For Jarrod, health insurance was as much a fantasy as Russian caviar or Fabergé eggs.

“You hear me? I asked if you got that Obama—”

“No.”

“You should.” Ludwig grunted. “It ain't great, but it's better than nothing.”

Jarrod nodded, wondering if that would be the chorus that resounded through the rest of his life. He wanted to scream, to kick a trash can. Would that be what they'd read at his eulogy?
Jarrod Foster, he wasn't great . . . but he was better than nothing.

“You all right, bucko?”

“Yeah . . . coffee's just sitting a little hard in my gut right now.”

“Let me know if you need to pop out to drop a deuce, okay?” Ludwig turned his flashlight beam toward the back wall. “Look at that, will ya?”

A mural was painted across it. The flashlight beam illuminated it in patches. In one spot, Jarrod saw half-naked nymphs frolicking with mermaids in a rocky pool, their bodies wreathed in steam. In another, he saw a woman being chased by a satyr in a meadow—her eyes wide with fear, his red with lust. Yet another patch revealed a line of children blindly following a juggler down a twisting path.

The images stuck in his mind like cockleburs. There was something off about the whole thing. The details were all there but incomplete and wrong. The angles of the limbs, the symmetry of the faces, the colors of the landscape, all of it was askew—not a lot, but enough for the painting to step past parody and embrace the grotesque.

“What was this place, anyway? A disco?”

“Disco? Nah.” Ludwig tossed something at him from across the counter. What landed at Jarrod's feet looked like a shoe. A boot, really, one that might have been white a million years ago but was now the gray of wastewater. Its tongue sprouted cankers of green mold, and a rusting metal spar ran the length of its sole. “Roller rink.”

Jarrod swept the interior with his flashlight, imagining a stampede of skaters caroming around its planked oval while multicolored lights danced and KC and the Sunshine Band commanded all within earshot to
shake shake shake, shake shake shake, shake their booties.
And all of it under the watchful gaze of that nightmare mural. “Roller rink,” he said, not caring if his words echoed. Not caring if they were hollow.

“Guess you're too young to remember 'em, the roller rinks. Big thing when I was a kid. Used to be everywhere.” Ludwig tilted his flashlight beam up above the sagging remains of what might have once been a DJ booth. “Look at that.”

He pointed at some silvery jigsawed letters hanging on the wall. They must have spelled out
God Bless America
at one time, but the
B
had dropped off, leaving nothing but a dusty ghost.

“God
less
America,” Ludwig read out loud. “Ain't that the truth? All right, why don't you pull the halogens outta the truck?”

“The genny, too?” Jarrod asked, unable to take his eyes off the pack of Newports still in Ludwig's hand.

“Only if you want them to turn on.” Ludwig caught Jarrod's stare. “Sure you don't smoke?”

“I told you I don't. Smoking's slow suicide.”

Ludwig took a long drag. “So who's in a hurry?”

Jarrod's jaw clamped so tight he could almost hear a molar crack.
Play it cool
, he commanded himself. This was Jarrod's own doing. Ludwig didn't know about Simon. It wasn't Ludwig who'd used the
S
word. All Ludwig did was make a stupid joke—
another
stupid joke. “I don't smoke, okay?”

“Okay,” Ludwig said, both hands up. “Just the way you keep lookin' at the pack, startin' to think you wanna ask it out for a drink.”

Jarrod said nothing as he went to get the work lamps and the generator from the pickup, determined not to let Ludwig or his parade of idiot comments be the things that broke him.

The rest of the day was measured in rusty splinters, torn fingernails, and sore muscles as they methodically ate away at the inside of the roller rink like a pair of carrion beetles, determined to leave nothing behind but bones.

JARROD WENT BACK
to his basement apartment that night and collapsed into his twin bed. He took in the single room, spying the
U
-shaped water stain on the cinder-block wall. That stain had always looked like a smirk to Jarrod. A smirk with no eyes. “How did I get here?” he asked, but the smirk had no answers.

He lay back in the dark. His body screamed for sleep. Normally, after a punishing day at work, Jarrod slept like a man sunk in tar, his dreams dim and unremembered. But not this night. His mind kept whispering the same refrain to him again and again. This was
not
the life he'd left Vermont for eleven years ago. This was not what a BFA in graphic design was supposed to get you.
Eleven years
, the echo went. Eleven years and nothing to show for it but a pile of credit-card debt and ninety-three more student-loan payments. And now the gig with Ludwig, the sort of job he could have gotten if he'd stayed home—if he'd dropped out of high school, for that matter.

Dawn was still an hour away when his alarm finally went off, but Jarrod had been awake. He'd been awake all night. He skipped the shower and waited on his stoop for Ludwig to pick him up, praying that his boss would bring coffee.

THE SECOND DAY
was identical to the first, only more exhausting. It seemed that at every break, Ludwig was there to offer him another cigarette. Jarrod began to wonder if it was some mindfuck on his boss's part, some sick way to motivate him. And conscious or not, it worked. Each time Jarrod refused a smoke, he took his aggression out on the nearest rotting support timber.

He spent his lunch break eating a peanut-butter-and-nothing-else sandwich, sitting on an empty milk crate and staring at the mural. He could see the whole of it now. Or at least, what remained. Some sections had been blacked out by creeping mold. Others were just gone, nothing left but gaping holes in the plaster.

Maybe it was the light, but it was as if details had changed overnight. Jarrod could have sworn that the juggler had been juggling colored balls, but now he saw they were clubs. At the pool with the nymphs and mermaids knelt a young man that he hadn't noticed yesterday. And the woman fleeing the satyr was glancing back at him, when Jarrod was sure she had been eyeing an escape to the forest before. And then there was the forest itself. A forest straight out of a fairy tale. The type of forest that ate travelers whole. Each tree cast a shadow that seemed to hide something. No, it was more than that. It was as if the shadows themselves were hiding.

“Should pull that down next,” Ludwig said, suddenly behind him.

“Can't we leave it? Just for a bit longer?”

“What the heck for?”

“I don't know,” Jarrod answered, never once taking his eyes off the mural. Never once turning back to Ludwig. Someone had taken the time to put this up here. As strange and unworldly as it was, someone had loved it once. “I like looking at it.”

“You
like
that thing?”

“I don't like it, exactly . . . I just like looking at it.”

“That makes . . .” Ludwig said, stepping into Jarrod's view. “No sense. Not a lick of it.” Ludwig pulled off his Mets cap and scratched his scruffy neck. “Nah, pulling it down today. Gives me the willies.”

Jarrod nodded, choking down the dry crust of his sandwich. Together, he and Ludwig attacked the mural. Jarrod felt it crumble in his hands as he pulled it away by the fistful. Soon it was little more than a pile of confetti. One eye, maybe the juggler's, winked at them from a chip resting on top. Jarrod reached for the final corner and saw the artist's signature there in neat, flowing lines:
Shaw.

He ripped it out just the same. Whoever this Shaw was, his work had been forgotten, left to rot, and now destroyed. What did it matter if his name remained? Jarrod threw the last of it onto the pile and moved on.