Salvation City - By Sigrid Nunez Page 0,50

him too badly.

They had names like Pharocious II and Grime-Boy and Niggahrootz and Da Phist. The black kids.

The white kids called themselves Methastofeles and Skull Mother and Kid Hammer and Dude Snake.

The grown-ups did whatever they could to keep them apart, and when they failed there was mayhem.

He knew this was what he was supposed to be talking about, what he had already talked about with PW, who in turn had told all to Boots. But in the sound booth, Cole had gone all but mute. He knew what he was supposed to say, but the words wouldn’t come, and Boots was being forced to do most of the talking.

“We’ve all heard people call these places Dickensian. Would you say that’s a fair and accurate description?”

“Yes.”

At first, before he’d heard it so many times, he hadn’t been completely sure what “Dickensian” meant. He’d always assumed it had something to do with Christmas. He thought of the dreadlocked giantess who told everyone to call her Mama Jo, but whom everyone called by another name instead, forever fuming about the “Dickensian” or “barbaric” state of things, and how funny it was the way she shook her fist at God at the same time she was begging him to help her.

Mama Ho. In a quiet moment alone with her (haircut, delousing), Cole once heard her say the pandemic had set life back a hundred years. She was crying then, and he’d worried she would nick him, the way her shoulders were jerking. But those were the days when, rather than stop whatever they were doing, people would just go about their business in tears. Everyone was used to the sight. His mother—

“Why don’t you share more about it with us? You know, just—in your own words.” Boots was smiling and his voice was calm, but Cole knew Boots couldn’t be very happy with him at this moment.

Come on, Cole. Words. Remember? But now was not a good time to be thinking about his mother.

“It was like life was set back a hundred years?”

“Ah. Well said. Can you elaborate?”

“Like, we didn’t have any computers or cells, and that was weird. There were a couple TVs, but they all got smashed or stolen. We didn’t have lots of books. We had some paper and some pens and pencils. But we didn’t have real school.” These few lines had exhausted him, but he labored on. “We had classes. Sometimes. Only not real classes. I mean, they’d put us in groups and make us talk about something, and maybe they’d give us homework. But it wasn’t like, you know—it wasn’t like school school.”

None of the kids could get over it. Days and weeks passing without any school, and no one able to say for sure when they’d be going back again. The rumors that, in fact, there were schools reopening out there. Just none ready to take orphans.

“What about religion?”

“I didn’t go to church.”

“You don’t have to ‘go’ to church, son. Church happens wherever and whenever folks come together to pray and ask forgiveness for sins and worship the one true God. No special edifice required. Did that ever happen? Did people ever read the Bible together? Did anyone lead you boys and girls in prayer?”

Cole shook his head. Boots frowned, but without losing his smile, and pointed to Cole’s microphone.

The great thing about radio, PW had told him, is that people can’t see you and you can’t see them, so you don’t have to be all that nervous.

But from the moment he entered the sound booth Cole had seen them: sitting in their kitchens or in their cars or offices or shops, listening to him the way he and Tracy listened when PW was on the air, listening to every word.

He had also seen himself, through their eyes, larger than life, the world’s biggest retard.

And besides, what about the people—Mason, for one—who Cole happened to know were tuned in right now, and who knew exactly who this retard talking (or not talking) was? How was he ever going to show his face to those people again?

Through the window he could see Tracy and PW, sitting outside the booth but able to hear everything through the speakers. Whenever he glanced their way, PW would bob his head enthusiastically while Tracy flashed her widest smile, probably without realizing she was wringing her hands at the same time. Cole was aware of Beanie Gill, a young man he knew from church, sitting in a smaller booth built into the