likely despised about the city was gone: the people. The Quiet Storm told him she still had work to do, in her weird affect, which he didn’t pay attention to at the time. He finally saw it from above, what she had carved into the interstate. While the other wreckers, indeed all the other survivors, could only perceive the wasteland on its edge, the Quiet Storm was in the sky, inventing her alphabet and making declarations in a row of five green hatchbacks parked perpendicular to the median, in a sequence of black-and-white luxury sedans arranged nose to nose two miles down the road, in a burst of ten minivans in glinting enamel tilted at an acute angle half a mile farther north. The grammar lurked in the numbers and colors, the meaning encoded in the spaces between the vehicular syllables, half a mile, quarter mile. Five jeeps lined up south by southwest on a north—south stretch of highway: This was one volley of energy, uncontained by the routes carved out by settlers two hundred years before, or reified by urban planners steering the populace toward the developers’ shopping centers. Ten sport-utility vehicles arranged one-eighth of a mile apart east—west were the fins of an eel slipping through silty depths, or the fletching on an arrow aimed at—what? Tomorrow? What readers? Then his chopper was over a midsize city in botched Connecticut, beyond the margins of her manuscript, and he was halfway to Zone One.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“We don’t know how to read it yet. All we can do right now is pay witness.”
She wrote her way into the future. Buffalo huffed over its machinations and narratives of replenishment, and the wretched pheenies stabbed their bloody knees and elbows into the sand as they slunk toward their mirages. And then there were people like the Quiet Storm, who carved their own pawns and rooks out of the weak clay and deployed them across their board, engaged in their own strategic reconstructions. Mark Spitz saw her mosaic, in its immense tonnage, outlasting all of Buffalo’s schemes, the operations under way and the ones yet to be articulated. What readership did she address? Gods and aliens, anyone who looks down at the right time, from the right perspective. To Anyone Who Can Read This: Stay Away. Please Help. Remember Me.
“Maybe it says: It’s safe now, we’re gone. Maybe it says: I’m still here.” She had told him when she declined to leave the corridor that she wasn’t finished yet.
“Sounds like PASD to me,” Gary said. “In Rainbow Village this one guy wrote Bible verses in his own shit.” He tapped his vest after his sponsor cigarettes, drowsy. “Who’s going to go up and get me more penicillin?”
“I’ll go,” Mark Spitz said.
“Try not to fuck around, going on about how the ash is falling,” Gary said. “You’re not going to mention the ash, right?”
“Yes.”
“I see you looking out the window,” he said. “It’s best to keep it to yourself, I think.” Like a parent telling a kid to lay off the nostril-mining, just for an hour. People might talk.
“You’re not on your deathbed. Death-futon.”
“How am I supposed to light a cigarette with this?”
Mark Spitz waited for Kaitlyn to join him outside. Up the street, Disposal had tossed the bodies of the suicides into the back of their cart. The overcast sky ushered in premature evening and he wondered if it was going to rain, even though the thunder he heard wasn’t meteorological but martial. Kaitlyn emerged from the shop, wiping her fingers with antibacterial wipes. “He says he wants to stay here,” she said. “He doesn’t want to see anyone.”
“I’ll check in with Fabio, hit up the medic for something to make him more comfortable.” The euphemism came easily. “What if he turns quick?”
“I’m ready. I won’t leave him alone. I only came out here in case he wanted a minute to off himself.”
“Okay.”
“Run.”
He beat it uptown. Two blocks uptown he realized he’d forgotten his pack; he decided not to go back for it. The thunder of the artillery intensified, cleaved from the lightning that might have, for an instant, lit his passage through the worsening gloom, livened his ash into brief fireflies. The thunder has lost his brother, he thought. When was the last time they enjoyed a proper dinner as a family? Done it right, without griping about the brass at Wonton, complaining about blisters, had a dinner devoid of one person’s brooding or sullen reverie about the time before