The Waste Lands (Page 45)

Then he saw what was at the corner of Second and Forty-sixth and stopped after all—skidded to a halt, in fact, on the heels of his loafers. He stood there in the middle of the sidewalk, hands clenched, his breath rasping harshly in and out of his lungs, his hair falling back onto his forehead in sweaty clumps.

“No,” he almost whimpered. “No!” But his near-frantic negation did not change what he saw, which was nothing at all. There was nothing to see but a short board fence and a littered, weedy lot beyond it. The building which had stood there had been demolished.

JAKE STOOD OUTSIDE THE fence without moving for almost two minutes, surveying the vacant lot with dull eyes. One comer of his mouth twitched randomly. He could feel his hope, his absolute certainty, draining out of him. The feeling which was replacing it was the deepest, bitterest despair he had ever known. Just another false alarm, he thought when the shock had abated enough so he could think anything at all. Another false alarm, blind alley, dry well. Now the voices will start up again, and when they do, I think I’m going to start screaming. And that’s okay. Because I’m tired of tough-ing this thing out. I’m tired of going crazy. If this is what going crazy is like, then I just want to hurry up and get there so somebody will take me to the hospital and give me something that’ll knock me out. I give up. This is the end of the line—I’m through.

But the voices did not come back—at least, not yet. And as he began to think about what he was seeing, he realized that the lot wasn’t com-pletely empty, after all. Standing in the middle of the trash-littered, weedy waste ground was a sign.

MILLS CONSTRUCTION AND SOMBRA REAL ESTATE ASSOCIATES ARE CONTINUING TO REMAKE THE FACE OF MANHATTAN!

COMING SOON TO THIS LOCATION:

TURTLE BAY LUXURY CONDOMINIUMS!

CALL 555-6712 FOR INFORMATION!

YOU WILL BE SO GLAD YOU DID!

Coming soon? Maybe . . . but Jake had his doubts. The letters on the sign were faded and it was sagging a little. At least one graffiti artist, BANCO SKANK by name, had left his mark across the artist’s drawing of the Turtle Bay Luxury Condominiums in bright blue spray-paint. Jake wondered if the project had been postponed or if it had maybe just gone belly-up. He remembered hearing his father talking on the telephone to his business advisor not two weeks ago, yelling at the man to stay away from any more condo investments. “I don’t care how good the tax-picture looks!” he’d nearly screamed (this was, so far as Jake could tell, his father’s normal tone of voice when dis-cussing business matters—the coke in the desk drawer might have had something to do with that). “When they’re offering a goddamn TV set just so you’ll come down and look at a blueprint, something’s wrong!”

The board fence surrounding the lot was chin-high to Jake. It had been plastered with handbills—Olivia Newton-John at Radio City, a group called G. Gordon Liddy and the Grots at a club in the East Village, a film called War of the Zombies which had come and gone earlier that spring. NO TRESPASSING signs had also been nailed up at intervals along the fence, but most of them had been papered over by ambitious bill-posters. A little way farther along, another graffito had been spray-painted on the fence—this one in what had once undoubtedly been a bright red but which had now faded to the dusky pink of late-summer roses. Jake whispered the words aloud, his eyes wide and fascinated: “See the TURTLE of enormous girth!

On his shell he holds the earth

If you want to run and play,

Come along the BEAM today.”

Jake supposed the source of this strange little poem (if not its meaning) was clear enough. This part of Manhattan’s East Side was known, after all, as Turtle Bay. But that didn’t explain the gooseflesh which was now running up the center of his back in a rough stripe, or his clear sense that he had found another road-sign along some fabulous hidden highway. Jake unbuttoned his shirt and stuck his two newly purchased books inside. Then he looked around, saw no one paying attention to him, and grabbed the top of the fence. He boosted himself up, swung a leg over, and dropped down on the other side. His left foot landed on a loose pile of bricks that promptly slid out from under him. His ankle buckled under his weight and bright pain lanced up his leg. He fell with a thud and cried out in mingled hurt and surprise as more bricks dug into his ribcage like thick, rude fists. He simply lay where he was for a moment, waiting to get his breath back. He didn’t think he was badly hurt, but he’d twisted his ankle and it would probably swell. He’d be walking with a limp by the time he got home. He’d just have to grin and bear it, though; he sure didn’t have cab-fare. You don’t really plan to go home, do you? They’ll eat you alive. Well, maybe they would and maybe they wouldn’t. So far as he could see, he didn’t have much choice in the matter. And that was for later. Right now he was going to explore this lot which had drawn him as surely as a magnet draws steel shavings. That feeling of power was still all around him, he realized, and stronger than ever. He didn’t think this was just a vacant lot. Something was going on here, some-tiling big. He could feel it thrumming in the air, like loose volts escaping from the biggest power-plant in the world. As he got up, Jake saw that he had actually fallen lucky. Close by was a nasty jumble of broken glass. If he’d fallen into that, he might have cut himself very badly.

That used to be the show window, Jake thought. When the deli was still here, you could stand on the sidewalk and look in at all the meats and cheeses. They used to hang them on strings. He didn’t know how he knew this, but he did-knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt.