and upright, had been hopping train cars. “Just don’t look down!” Johnny called helpfully, and it was suddenly so ridiculous, this fear of the subway—he’d huffed freon!—“You wimp!” said his father, “you wimp!”—that Jude opened his eyes and, laser gun cradled across his chest, crossed the platform in one dexterous leap—Mario sailing from cliff to floating bridge, Pitfall Harry traversing tar pit—and when the train screeched to a halt (“Fourteenth Street, Union Square”), Jude kept going for one slow-mo second, hooking an arm around a pole to catch himself, laser gun ch-ch-ch-ing to a stop.
Here he was. The noise was gone and he was inside again, in another, identical, freezing cold car.
“C’mon,” Johnny said, unfazed. He dragged Jude out through the doors just before they slid closed again. They raced down the platform, their laughter echoing against the Lego-yellow tiles, the aroma of wet garbage and hot exhaust and the cool iron earth, a man pissing in a corner, a woman shaking a can of change, Johnny winning by a good ten yards, until, halfway up a flight of stairs, he was shot. Jude heard the sound—keo, keo, keo, the fighter planes of Space Invaders—and saw the red light exploding from Johnny’s chest. Staggering backward two steps, Johnny clutched the target over his heart with one hand, grabbed the railing with the other, and groaned, “Go, man! Go on without me!” Jude did, but not before firing up at the top of the steps, illuminating the target of Johnny’s dark-shirted killer, who fell quickly, without ado, out of sight.
Jude turned around and ran in the other direction, up another set of stairs. He ran past a homeless mariachi band, a troupe of break-dancers, endless stretches of graffiti. He ran past a white-shirt and returned his salute as they crossed paths. He ran past a black-shirt and fired at him from the waist, but it was just a regular guy smoking a cigarette, his eyes filled with confusion and fright. At the end of the corridor, Jude followed the signs to the downtown platform and the sound of the arriving train, and slipped into the last car just as the doors sighed closed. He kept running, car to car, his legs throbbing, his breath inflating his smile. People looked at him, people looked away, some gasped or screamed, he could be arrested or chased or shot at for real, but he was too fast. Jude had not yet been told about Bernie Goetz, the Subway Vigilante, had not heard the Agnostic Front song “Shoot His Load”; he did not comprehend fully the fear of the woman he sent shrinking into her husband’s overcoat. In one car, he shot and killed an unsuspecting black-shirt who’d made the mistake of putting down his gun to tie a shoe. In another, he shot poor Elliot, whose gun, apparently broken, fired soundlessly back at Jude. At Astor Place, he ran off the train, outside, down the uptown stairs again, under the turnstile, and back on the 6. And back and forth, uptown, downtown, until he couldn’t find anyone anymore, until it seemed he was the only man left alive.
When he finally surfaced, it was dark. Aboveground, the air smelled as clean as New England, and the sky was like a deep blue sheet unfurled above him, like the sheet his mother would put on his bed, letting it hang in the air for a moment before it dropped. The stars were coming out above the newsstand on the corner, the magazines and candy bars lit up like prizes. For the first time in many weeks, he felt awake. He thought about lighting a cigarette but instead inhaled the evening tonic of the street as he walked up and down his block for a while, then home.
Eight
Johnny gave him a key, said “Mi casa es su casa.” Played him No for an Answer, Straight Ahead, Wide Awake, Project X. Took him to his friend’s half-pipe on Houston, to the Cyclone at Coney Island, the elm tree in Tompkins where the first Hare Krishna ceremony had taken place, with Swami Prabhupada and Allen Ginsberg, to all the places he would have taken Teddy if he’d been the one alive and living in New York. He showed him how to empty the coins from a pay phone, where to find lead slugs for video games, how to suck subway tokens. (First you slipped a matchbook into the slot. Then you waited for someone to get his token jammed.