Lyucius SHepard - Eternity and Other Stories

There are legends in the pit. Phantoms and apparitions. The men who work at Ground Zero joke about them, but their laughter is nervous and wired. Bobby doesnt believe the stories, yet hes prepared to believe something weird might happen. The place feels so empty. Like even the ghosts are gone. All that sudden vacancy, who knows what might have entered in? Two nights ago on the graveyard shift, some guy claimed he saw a faceless figure wearing a black spiky headdress standing near the pit wall. The job breaks everybody down. Marriages are falling apart. People keep losing it one way or another. Fights, freak-outs, fits of weeping. Its the smell of burning metal that seeps up from the earth, the ceremonial stillness of the workers after they uncover a body, the whispers that come when there is no wind. Its the things you find. The week before, scraping at the rubble with a hoe, like an archaeologist investigating a buried temple, Bobby spotted a womans shoe sticking up out of the ground. A perfect shoe, so pretty and sleek and lustrous. Covered in blue silk. Then he reached for it and realized that it wasnt stuckit was only half a shoe, with delicate scorching along the ripped edge. Now sometimes when he closes his eyes he sees the shoe. Hes glad he isnt married. He doesnt think he has much to bring to a relationship.

That evening Bobbys taking his dinner break, perched on a girder at the edge of the pit along with Mazurek and Pineo, when they switch on the lights. They all hate how the pit looks in the lights. Its an outtake from The X-Filesthe excavation of an alien ship under hot white lamps smoking from the cold; the shard left from the framework of the north tower glittering silver and strange, like the wreckage of a cosmic machine. The three men remain silent for a bit, then Mazurek goes back to bitching about Jason Giambi signing with the Yankees. You catch the interview he did with Werner Wolf? Hes a moron! First time the crowd gets on him, its gonna be like when you yell at a dog. The guys gonna fucking crumble. Pineo disagrees, and Mazurek asks Bobby what he thinks.

Bobby dont give a shit about baseball, says Pineo. My boys a Jets fan.

Mazurek, a thick-necked, fiftyish man whose face appears to be fashioned of interlocking squares of pale muscle, says, The Jets fuck!

Theyre playoff bound, says Bobby cheerfully.

Mazurek crumples the wax paper his sandwich was folded in. They gonna drop dead in the first round like always.

Its more interesting than being a Yankee fan, says Bobby. The Yankees are too corporate to be interesting.

Too corporate to be interesting? Mazurek stares. You really are a geek, yknow that?

Thats me. The geek.

Whynt you go the fuck back to school, boy? Fuck you doing here, anyway?

Take it easy, Carl! Chill! Pineonervous, thin, lively, curly black hair spilling from beneath his hard hatputs a hand on Mazureks arm, and Mazurek knocks it aside. Anger tightens his leathery skin; the creases in his neck show white. Whats it with you? You taking notes for your fucking thesis? he asks Bobby. Playing tourist?

Bobby looks down at the apple in his handit seems too shiny to be edible. Just cleaning up is all. You know.

Mazureks eyes dart to the side, then he lowers his head and gives it a savage shake. Okay, he says in a subdued voice. Yeah fuck. Okay.

Midnight, after the shift ends, they walk over to the Blue Lady. Bobby doesnt altogether understand why the three of them continue to hang out there. Maybe because they once went to the bar after work and it felt pretty good, so they return every night in hopes of having it feel that good again. You cant head straight home; you have to decompress. Mazureks wife gives him constant shit about the practiceshe calls the bar and screams over the phone. Pineo just split with his girlfriend. The guy with whom Bobby shares an apartment grins when he sees him, but the grin is anxiouslike hes afraid Bobby is bringing back some contagion from the pit. Which maybe he is. The first time he went to Ground Zero, he came home with a cough and a touch of fever, and he recalls thinking that the place was responsible. Now, though, either hes immune or else hes sick all the time and doesnt notice.

Two hookers at a table by the door check them out as they enter, then go back to reading the Post. Roman the barman, gray-haired and thick-waisted, orders his face into respectful lines, says, Hey, guys! and sets them up with beers and shots. When they started coming in he treated them with almost religious deference, until Mazurek yelled at him, saying he didnt want to hear that hero crap while he was trying to unwindhe got enough of it from the fuckass jocks and movie stars who visit Ground Zero to have their pictures taken. Though angry, he was far more articulate than usual in his demand for normal treatment, and this caused Bobby to speculate that if Mazurek were transported thousands of miles from the pit and not just a few blocks, his IQ would increase exponentially.

The slim brunette in the business suit is down at the end of the bar again, sitting beneath the blue neon silhouette of a dancing woman. Shes been coming in every night for about a week. Late twenties. Hair styled short, an expensive kind of punky look. Fashion model hair. Eyebrows thick and slanted, like accents grve. Sharp-featured, on the brittle side of pretty, or maybe shes not that pretty, maybe she is so well-dressed, her makeup done so skillfully, that the effect is of a businesslike prettiness, of prettiness reined in by the magic of brush and multiple applicators, and beneath this artwork she is, in actuality, rather plain. Nice body, though. Trim and well tended. She wears the same expression of stony neutrality that Bobby sees every morning on the faces of the women who charge up from under the earth, disgorged from the D train, prepared to resist Manhattan for another day. Guys will approach her, assuming shes a hooker doing a kind of Hitler office bitch thing in order to attract men searching for a woman they can use and abuse as a surrogate for one who makes their life hell every day from nine to five, and she will say something to them and they will immediately walk away. Bobby and Pineo always try to guess what she says. That night, after a couple of shots, Bobby goes over and sits beside her. She smells expensive. Her perfume like the essence of some exotic flower or fruit hes only seen in magazine pictures.

Ive just been to a funeral, she says wearily, staring into her drink. So, please Okay?

That what you tell everybody? he asks. All the guys who hit on you?

A fretful line cuts her brow. Please!

No, really. Ill go. All I want to know that what you always say?

She makes no response.

It is, he says. Isnt it?

Its not entirely a lie. Her eyes are spooky, the dark rims of the pale irises extraordinarily well-defined. Its intended as a lie, but its true in a way.

But thats what you say, right? To everybody?

This is why you came over? Youre not hitting on me?

No, I I mean, maybe I thought

So what youre saying, you werent intending to hit on me. You wanted to know what I say to men when they come over. But now youre not certain of your intent? Maybe you were deceiving yourself as to your motives? Or maybe now you sense I might be receptive, youll take the opportunity to hit on me, though that wasnt your initial intent. Does that about sum it up?

I suppose, he says.

She gives him a cautious look. Could you be brilliant? Could your clumsy delivery be designed to engage me?