The Swing Voter of Staten Island (7 page)

Oric was staring at some lady photographing a colorful mural on a large wall that looked like a little girl riding a dog. On a tray in front of the image was a coffee mug that said,
DONAT
, behind which was a row of unlit, half-melted votive candles. Off to the side of the dog-riding girl were sketches of three homeless men, and above them, a yellow starfish. When Uli stepped back, the tableau pieces all locked together.

“Oh, it’s the manger scene,” he declared. The little girl was actually a boy, and the dog was a donkey. “That’s God,” he explained to Oric.

“Huh?”

“That’s who your mom and dad are with,” he elaborated.

“In there?” Oric said, looking at the unevenly plastered wall.

“No, they’re
with
the kid in the painting—the baby Jesus.” Uli reached into his pocket and took out a sixteenth-stamp. He instructed Oric to light a candle for his murdered parents, then asked him to stay put. “I’ll be right back.”

“I wait for my brother.” Oric pointed to the wall.

Uli asked someone outside where Rock & Filler Center was. He was pointed to a traffic jam of cars and people squeezing around an empty mall between two large buildings. Instead of Saks Fifth Avenue, Uli noticed a six-column archway across the street. Approaching the plaque affixed to it, he found himself standing before a quarter-scale replica of the Brandenburg Gate.

He moved tentatively toward Rock & Filler Center, looking around for the blond stranger from the cemetery. At 50th Street, he spotted a familiar figure down by 49th, but it wasn’t the blond guy. His body clenched up as he realized it was the Flatlands pursuer, the one who resembled Oric. The man’s clothing was singed and wrinkled.

No sooner had Uli turned away, when he heard, “Hey! Wait a sec—”

A loud explosion knocked Uli and a dozen others backwards to the ground. As he rose to his feet several moments later, he saw a large plume of black smoke suspended in the air before him. It appeared that the goateed pursuer, along with a cluster of others, had been blown to smithereens.

“Fuck a duck!” one of the seniors behind him shouted.

Once the ringing in his ears had subsided, Uli limped through the smoke to the edge of a small crater. Smoldering body parts from at least a dozen victims were strewn about the twisted frame of a destroyed minitruck. Gasping for breath, he heard others screaming in shock, and realized that he must’ve seen a lot of this kind of thing, since his heart hadn’t so much as skipped a beat.

With the Flatlands pursuer dead, Uli resumed his search for the blond stranger. Rock & Filler Center had two paved walkways on either side of a raised stone garden that ended at a drop-off. Walking to the edge, still gasping for breath, Uli found himself standing on the precipice of a large empty ditch. It was roughly thirty feet deep by thirty feet wide, with a muddy puddle at the bottom. At the far side of the hole, a man was taking a piss on a pile of white stones.

“What the hell happened over there?” the urinator called out to him.

“A truck bomb.”

“Pigger faggots!”

“Yeah,” Uli replied tiredly. Behind the urinator was a narrow four-story office building that looked nothing like the surrounding structures.

“Do you know what that building is?” Uli asked.

“Yeah. Number 30.”

As Uli walked over, he saw that the front of the building looked like it had been chiseled down. Inside the lobby, two men in dark-blue blazers were checking people’s IDs and whatever bags they carried. A sign read,
Manhattan Municipal Government Offices
—hence the bomb blast?

Uli headed back to Fifth Avenue where arriving EMS workers triaged the injured as a growing crowd watched. Uli wondered if perhaps the goateed man had killed his nameless blond friend before being blown up.
How else would the Flatlander know I’m here?
he pondered.
I should’ve gotten off the bus after that cemetery in Brooklyn.
When the first gangcops finally arrived and started rounding up witnesses, Uli decided to leave before he could be detained.

He found Oric back at the church, rubbing the wall frantically, while other worshipers stared at him.

“What are you doing?” Uli asked, trying to pull him away.

“I saw him! He’s with them.”

“Who is?”

“My brother, but he said … he said they ain’t mine, so …” Oric looked confused and then distressed.

“I think maybe you had a bad dream.”

“No dreams. My brother, he just came here, see, and … he said you take me to him.”

Uli gently led Oric outside the church and across the street. As Oric continued with his nonsense, more emergency vehicles came to take care of the wounded. Uli led him to the bus stop at the corner of 51st. Glancing eastward, he could see a row of towers across the slim waterway separating Manhattan from Queens. There was something odd about them. It was as though a Hollywood producer had shot a big-budget film there and left this elaborate set behind.

“What exactly are those?” Uli asked a tall man wearing a pointy bamboo hat who was also waiting for the bus.

“Just backdrops,” the guy replied. “They’re nicer than the ones across from Wall Street.”

A southbound bus eventually pulled up. With his mission to meet the blond man a failure, Uli’s next move was to drop Oric off at the Crapper headquarters.

Uli paid their fares and watched as a balding gangcop waved all traffic past the explosion site. Oric started whimpering again, and then murmurred, “See you soon.”

The buildings down Fifth Avenue, though occasionally singed and almost all run down, looked occupied. Small-business owners had loaded piles of merchandise onto the cramped sidewalks, forcing pedestrians into the street.

Growing impatient, the driver angled the bus along the far right side of the street. Straddling one tire on the edge of the curb and the other in the gutter, she drove down a new lane of her own creation.

At 42nd Street, Uli saw a big sandy mound where he had expected the stately New York Public Library. It seemed that not all of the city’s landmarks, or their German-inspired replicas, had made it into the final imitative plans.

Passing 34th Street, Uli spotted a strange building soaring up six majestic flights with a sign that read,
Vampire Stake Building
. It didn’t have swastikas emblazoned on it like some of the other midtown buildings, but was instead covered with leering gargoyles and hieroglyphics that suggested powers of the occult. A string of sightseers cued up at the front door.

At 23rd Street, when a group of people finally got off, Oric and Uli grabbed a pair of seats across from a cute girl with curly hair and glasses. She smiled, revealing a mouthful of black teeth.

Uli greeted her with a smile of his own. “Hi, I just arrived yesterday from old New York and I’m totally lost.”

“I’m jealous,” the woman replied with a chuckle. “Unlike everyone else here, I never really lived in New York. My name’s Kennesy. You guys go to the rally earlier today?”

“Yeah,” Uli said. “How bout you?”

“Yeah. Now I’m heading down to CoBs&GoBs for a benefit show.” She spoke with a slight Southern twang.

“What’s that?”

“A musical palace. I’m a deejay for a rock show on the local radio station.”

“Where exactly are you from?” Uli asked.

“Mississippi.”

“How’d you wind up here?”

“When I was a kid, we lost our place to Hurricane Camille and were offered temporary asylum in New York. No sooner did we arrive than the attack happened and we were offered refuge out here.”

“So which gang are you with?”

“That’s a rather indiscreet question,” Kennesy replied coyly, “but I’m still a Crapper. At least until they fragment into a half a dozen other parties.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Go to the next Crapper convention and see for yourself.”

“What would I see?”

“Well, recently they broadcasted the Pigger convention in Queens. It was like watching a high mass. Everyone talks softly, one at a time, and they all applaud politely. But the Crapper convention, wow! They held it at the Coliseum on Columbus Circle last year. I did a radio show from there, and I swear, I couldn’t hear myself think. Five thousand screaming voices. Fistfights in the aisles.”

“Amazing that they’ve been able to hold two boroughs together.”

“Yeah, but in the last month they’ve lost three Brooklyn neighborhoods and one in Manhattan,” she said. “Inwood just elected its first Pigger Councilperson, Julie Rudian. And it was done by internal dissent. All the Crappers just voted for her.”

“Sounds pretty messed up.”

“That’s the wave of the future, and the Crappers don’t get it,” she said. “It won’t be gang warfare that’ll decide the future of this place, it’ll be the
sentiment
of the people. Folks in Manhattan are growing more and more Piggish.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“Pure-ile Plurality—they’re this quasi-evangelical outreach organization.” Uli thought he remembered seeing their headquarters in southern Queens. “A lot of Piggers work for them. They’re always hiring people. You know that expression,
If you win their hearts and minds
… Well, P.P.’s food trucks won the stomachs of Inwood, then they went down to Harlem. Now they’re going all the way to the East Village. They start with food, then it’s clothes and basic medical treatment. Soon it’ll be free movies in the park.”

“So is P.P. an arm of the Piggers?”

“Technically no. If any evidence is found showing they are swayed by any one gang, they could lose their government funding—”

“Would you mind keeping your brilliant insights to yourself?” interrupted an older woman a few seats away.

Kennesy rolled her eyes, and without lowering her voice she resumed: “The only thing I respect about the Piggers is their pro-life stand. They’ve accepted this as the life they are fated to, instead of always waiting for the day they get to leave—that’s the pro-choice position.”

“How can someone actually want to live in this hellhole?” Uli said quietly.

“Just ask anyone here what it was like being homeless. After being evacuated when Camille struck, we were given housing in Queens shelters. Then when the bombs went off, we were moved out into a hangar at LaGuardia Airport. Try living there on cots with thousands of people and tell me this isn’t better.” She took a deep sigh. “Besides, if you don’t like it here, you can always file an appeal.”

“Why couldn’t they just give us subsidies and let us stay in Flushing or Prospect Park?” burst the older woman who had just tried silencing them. “That’s what they did during the San Francisco earthquake! Why the hell did they ship us out to a radioactive desert in the middle of nowhere?”

“You didn’t have to come here,” Kennesy replied, and explained to Uli, “I don’t know about you, but everyone here
applied
to get in. There’s still a lot of poor people living in old New York.”

“What do you mean a radioactive desert?” Uli asked the older woman.

“There’s no scientific proof of radioactivity,” Kennesy shot back.

“This is where they set off all the A-bombs back in the ’50s,” the lady explained to Uli.

“And in case you don’t remember,” Kennesy countered, “they did try subsidies. They handed out supplies in the streets of New York. Everyone got in line. Do you remember who eventually wound up with the bulk of stock?”

The older woman made a sour face.

“The Mafia, that’s who. No one has ever starved or frozen here. Hell, we even got cars and other basic luxuries.”

“We can’t travel or have children!” the lady barked.

“People were
homeless
. They couldn’t afford to travel anyway. And why the hell would someone who doesn’t even have a home want to have a homeless baby?”

“So only the rich should reproduce, is that it?”

“Look, you want to blame someone for sticking us out here? How about the terrorists who hit the city!”

Before Uli could intervene, the driver called out, “Eighth Street, Crapper HQ. Last stop.”

Uli and Oric got off with the cute hurricane evacuee, who bid them farewell and headed south down Lafayette Street.

Uli and Oric moved eastward to Astor Place. Suddenly, two hands grabbed Uli’s elbows from behind. A thick arm looped over his head and across his neck. Back-kicking his assailant’s kneecap, Uli grabbed the arm and flung a fat bespectacled kid up over his back and onto the pavement. Just as quickly, a third and fourth pair of beefy hands grabbed at his arms. The fat kid pressed a wet rag against Uli’s face. Another pair of hands grabbed his knees and lifted him. As Uli struggled, he smelled the chloroform compound and held his breath. Twisting his head around, he realized that the person holding the rag to his face was the guy from midtown with the pointy bamboo hat. Uli struggled to free one hand, but he felt his consciousness thinning out.

“Ma! Da! Ma-Da! I miss you!” he heard Oric yell.

Dazed, Uli was now being lifted into a van. The geeky fat boy kept the rag pressed tightly over his mouth. Uli found himself fading to Oric’s screams.

10/29/80

W
ake up now! Wake up! GET THE HELL UP! GO!

“What?” The sun was bright in the doorway, so it had to be the next morning. Uli was hanging upside down with his hands bound together.

She’s going to torture you! You’re going to have one chance and that’s it!

“Help me!” Uli shouted back.

Where are you?
It was the blond man. Yet the voice was female. How could this be?

“I don’t know,” he said aloud. Looking around, he saw that he was alone and dismissed the interaction as the afterwash of a bizarre dream.

An awful sulfuric stench pulled him to full consciousness. He appeared to be in a barnyard. His lower section was numb with pain. He could still hear Oric’s shrieks nearby.

“How do you know about the blast?” Uli heard a woman’s voice shouting.

During an interlude of silence, Uli figured something sinister was underway. Sure enough, Oric started screaming terribly.

“Talk, you fat fucking retard!”

“Great Neck,” Oric groaned. “Little Neck. Great Neck, Little Neck!”

“What are you talking about? What’s this neck shit?”

“Dark, dark,” Oric heaved. “Then light!”

“You are going to tell me what that
Great Neck, Little Neck
shit means or you’re going to …”

He recognized the voice. It was Dianne Colder, the Feedmore lobbyist. Uli could hear her engaging in some kind of strenuous activity. Maybe she was punching Oric. It didn’t last long. To the frenzied squeal of pigs across the barn, Oric was shouting, “No, please! Don’t hurt Oric no more!”

Uli mustered all his strength, flexing his waist to catch a glimpse of the knot around his knees. Then he heard a loud thud.

“Shit! You fat fuck!”

“Brother, brother!” Oric was continuously screaming now.

“Scat! Get out of there!” he heard Dianne shouting over the shrieks. “Serves you right! You should have told me!”

In a moment, her footsteps were marching toward Uli. He dropped his arms back down and laid limp, pretending to be unconscious. The lobbyist paused before him, then poked him hard in the stomach—he didn’t budge. As she crouched low to inspect his lifelessness, Uli sprung his body outward and wrapped his bound wrists over her blown-out, highlighted hair.

“Wait a sec!” she screamed, immediately trying to negotiate. “Ninety-two percent of all Crappers—”

He yanked her head sharply forward, dislocating her vertebral column. With a crunch, she fell into a perfect seated position and just stared straight ahead.

“Oh my god,” she slowly said. “I can’t move—I—”

He had paralyzed her. Only her mouth still worked. Like a broken robot, she manically recited statistics underscoring how Piggers were morally, intellectually, and economically superior to Crappers. She was a true partyist.

Uli twisted on his rope like a large marlin on a hook. Behind him, hanging from a nail, he saw a rusty scythe veiled under years of dusty cobwebs.

“I didn’t mean to hurt him.”

Uli swung backward and caught the wheat cutter in his bound hands. He squeezed the wooden handle up between his knees. Oric’s shrieks were unbearable now.

“I was only trying to scare him.”

“What’d you do?” Uli asked as he frantically rubbed his knotted wrists over the rusty tool.

“He was yelling strange shit! He kept saying,
Great Neck, Little Neck
.” She paused. “I guess he was talking about
my
neck!”

“He’s psychic,” Uli explained candidly, since the woman was clearly headed nowhere.

“Well, if he wasn’t so fat, I wouldn’t’ve dropped him in the pig pen,” said the talking blond head. As Uli continued sawing away at his ropes, she added, “The average Pigger is 12.8 pounds lighter than the average Crapper. Did you know that?”

“That’s a lie, so you’ve probably been lying all along,” he replied, cutting through the final strands.

Once free, he began sawing through the cords holding his ankles together. The dried-out rope snapped and Uli fell to the ground, collapsing on top of the paralyzed body of Dianne Colder.

“You are a truly despicable human being!” she shouted painfully.

“Even if that were true,” he countered, “I’d still be a hundred percent better than you.”

A car screeched to a halt outside. Uli grabbed the rusty scythe, hid against the side of the barn, and waited.

“Help! Quick!” Dianne squealed, now lying flat on her back. “He’s in here!”

A large man rushed inside. Uli swung the scythe deep into the front of the guy’s neck, severing his jugular. It was the man in the goofy hat who had been with the fat boy when they kidnapped him at Astor Place. He grabbed his neck wound, dropped to his knees, flipped over, and gurgled slowly to death. Uli removed the scythe and dashed out to the pen.

Four large wild hogs were chewing on the tied-up limbs and torso of Oric’s bloody body. Uli could see their teeth tearing through the poor man’s flesh as though it were raspberry pudding. When he kicked one of the animals away, it tried to bite him. He slashed and stabbed at their fat hairy backs with the rusty weapon. When the biggest one charged him, Uli jabbed it right in the eye. The hog squealed insanely with blood shooting forth, causing the others to dash off. Uli used the opportunity to heave Oric out over the rails of the bloody pen. Among his many wounds, Oric’s right shoulder was eaten clean to the bone. The hogs had chewed into his belly and bit into his scalp, inadvertently pulling the long t-shaped device out of his skull.

Oric was still slightly conscious. Placing him gently on his back, Uli tried to tie a tourniquet around his gnawed arm, but two of the worst bites on his torso had severed major veins and arteries. The poor man was bleeding to death and there was nothing Uli could do.

“I’m so sorry, Oric,” Uli said sadly.

“It’s okay, friend,” the dying man muttered. “The Carnivals abducted me and had some goddamn scientist shove that thought-cuff into my skull.”

“What … ? Why?”

“They knew I had some basic psychic gifts. And by retarding me they could enhance those abilities.”

“Oh my god.”

“You’re the only one who figured it out. He was using my predictions to change the outcomes of—” Oric was losing it. “That was my twin brother in Flatlands trying to rescue me … I’ll be joining him now.”

“I didn’t know.”

Oric was gasping for breath and consciousness. “You … you have … too!”

“Have what?”

Oric moved his mouth, but nothing came out.

“DO I HAVE A CROSS IN MY HEAD?”

Oric stared at him.

“A TWIN, DO I HAVE TWIN?”

Oric just kept staring. It took Uli a moment to realize he was dead. He heaved the man over his shoulder and walked out to the front yard. There he saw an old sports car with only two seats. The keys were still in the ignition.

“No, wait, please don’t leave me here!” Dianne cried out faintly as Uli checked Oric’s pulse for the last time. He was about to drive off and just abandon the paralyzed lobbyist, but then remembered that she was the only person he had met here who mentioned routinely leaving the place. She had to know some way off the reservation. Racing back inside the barn, he scooped up Colder’s limp body and carried her out.

“Thank you. Bless your soul.”

“We have to get you to a hospital right away,” he said, hauling her up on the roof of the old car so that she was lying belly-down with her head facing forward.

“There aren’t any good hospitals here,” she blurted. “These animals can barely handle basic bruises.”

“We have to get you and Oric out of here. He’s going to die.”

“The retard’s already dead. Help me and I’ll get you a million dollars!”

Uli glanced around and spotted an old burlap sack slung over a laundry line running from a wooden post to the end of the barn. He pulled the cord down and grabbed the sack, which he slid under the corporate shill’s skinny body. He tied the line tightly around Dianne’s left wrist, strung it through the windows, and knotted it to her other wrist so that she was pressed flat against the roof of the car.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Underwood sent you to kill us,” he answered while securing her legs.

Letting out a deep sigh, she said, “You got it all wrong—
he
works for
me
. The only reason I’m here is to protect the company’s interest—” She cut herself off, realizing that in her muted agony she had imparted too much information.

“How are you protecting its interest?”

“Just making sure that everything is running smoothly,” she said simply.

“I’ll give you one chance,” he reasoned. “If I think you’re lying, I’m feeding you to the pigs. Now tell me what’s really going on.”

“Oh, what the hell. I was sent in to sway the election.”

“The mayoral election?”

“Fuck no, the presidential election. It’s tightly split along party lines. I’m here to tilt it right.”

“Just how do you hope to do that?” She didn’t respond. “Your only chance of survival is by talking quickly.”

“The five boroughs work almost like the electoral college. Each borough gets a single vote. Three out of five boroughs throw a single electoral college vote from Rescue City, Nevada to the presidential election.”

“Are the boroughs divided?”

“Queens and the Bronx are Pigger. They customarily vote for the Democratic Party. Brooklyn and Manhattan are Crapper. They go with the Republicans. Staten Island is the wild card. They went Democratic in the last election, but the Staten Island borough president has the power to ratify or veto the vote of his constituents at his own whim.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, and the only reason I was sent here was to make sure Staten Island swings the vote to the Democrats.”

“So you’re a Democrat?”

“I’m whatever they tell me to be!”

“How exactly did you hope to alter the vote?”

“I already did it—with a large quantity of bullets. Look, if this really matters to you—”

“It doesn’t. These people can all kill each other for all I care. I just want out.”

“Then undo my ropes and within thirty minutes I’ll have you sitting in a Jacuzzi in a Vegas hotel with two underage girls.”

That was the best offer he’d had since he found himself sleepwalking near the airport two days ago.

“Where do we go?”

“Take me to the corner of 4th Street and First Avenue in Manhattan,” she commanded. “Let’s get the fuck out of Staten Island!”

Before untying the cord, he propped up Oric’s dead body in the passenger seat. He had rescued Uli yesterday from the geriatric mob at the funeral in Sunset Park, and now this blond bitch had brutally killed him.

Uli jumped into the sports car, turned the key, and hit the gas. In his rearview as he left the compound, he saw a sign that read,
CALYPSO PIG FARM
. Dianne Colder began screaming from the roof of the car like a human siren: “Treason! Treason!”

After twenty minutes of bouncing over the dunes of Staten Island, following rusty signs directing him to Manhattan, crisscrossing streams of waste water along Hyman Boulevard, he had to clamp his nose due to the stench. Driving past the rows of gorgeously designed buildings he had heard about, situated along the banks of the borough, he saw that they were indeed uninhabitable. Some were still submerged up to their roofs, just as Mallory had said. These flooded structures were evidence of how high the sewage water had risen.

He soon reached a two-lane ramp marked
Staten Island Ferry Bridge
. The wooden bridge swayed as he drove from submerged foundation to submerged foundation. The guard rail was a string of rotten two-by-fours. Fearing he would skid right off the aging planks into the toxic waters, Uli slowed to a crawl. To the southeast, he spotted a short, arching red bridge connecting Staten Island to Brooklyn. Nearer to his right, a dark angle of land narrowed to a point, then turned into a tall, reinforced concrete wall. The liquid sewage reached almost to the top of it. Below him, the black muck oozed south from the western side of Manhattan. At the other side of the dam were cleaner waters streaming northward up around Brooklyn.

As he approached Manhattan, Uli saw up close what he had spotted from the Brooklyn Bridge the day before. A tight wall of sandbags around four feet high and ten feet wide had been constructed next to the concrete dam wall running along the southeastern edge of Manhattan. The bags moved westerly around the Battery and up the west side of the borough. Conical orange sentry booths, like giant traffic cones, lined the bagged wall.

Uli sped through lower Manhattan, ignoring the passing motorists who gawked at the screaming blonde roped like a deer to his rooftop. He made his way onto Houston, turned left on First Avenue, and screeched to a halt at the corner of 4th Street, in front of a building with a shingle that read,
CLASS-A LADY HOTEL
.

“Is this where you live?” he asked, getting out of the sports car with Oric’s motionless body still slumped forward in the passenger seat.

“You’ve performed … high crimes … and misdemeanors … against the Feedmore … Corporation.” Dianne attempted to spit bugs out of her mouth as she spoke.