The Burning Light Read online

  She had the itch, too.

  “Junkie girl, all burned up.” The Moby Jah boys corralled her. She regretted now coming at Stuy Town from the south. But Midtown was rife with thug cops hired by the Gov bitch whose sleek boat had prowled the city for months now, busting up halos. These cops, their sole focus was bagging junkies like Zola. She made to push through the Moby Jah boys, who’d cut her off now, their incisor smiles aimed her way. They toyed with her, steering their little boats at hers then veering away at the last instant—letting her know that if they wanted her, she was theirs. Zola reached into the chest pocket of her overalls, touched the tiny pearl-handled two-shot pistol she kept there. As she did, all the Moby Jah boys, every single one, snapped their heads to an electric barge up the way, crewed by three men and two women.

  Cops.

  Cops, with their little steel shields pinned to the chests of old Kevlar vests, pinned to the shoulders of torn T-shirts, pinned anywhere they couldn’t be missed, as though the law had come down and baptized them of their sins and justified their natures. They’d all been slavers and thugs before the Gov bitch had come and bestowed badges. Now they were slavers and thugs who believed themselves legit.

  Casually, the cops regarded the Moby Jah boys. They all held weapons—an old AK, pistols, a sawed-off. One old man held a simple fishing spear, a panting white bull terrier parked in his lap. The Moby Jah boys scattered, bobbing their heads twice to each stroke of the oar, and disappeared up an alley clogged with floating plastic.

  It was just Zola then. She stood there in her gondola. The cops zeroed on her, all five of them. One of the men, a muscled blond who wore his badge pinned to a frayed straw hat, looked her up and down as the cop barge drew close. Zola braced herself to fight.

  Zola, baby! Marco’s mind, touching hers. Need you here, girl. Soon, ya.

  Busy, baby. Hush.

  “Ma’am,” the blond cop said aloud, and touched the brim of his hat like some cowboy of yore as the two boats squeezed past each other in the narrow row between vendor barges. Zola forced herself to smile as gunwales nearly touched. She trembled, as much from fear now as from the itch. One of the cop women, big and scarred—she cocked her head back in contempt and said to the big blond:

  “You ain’t no super suave, Benji, you a lawman now. Act it, ya.”

  “Just being polite, Captain,” and the blond smiled broadly at Zola. The woman called Captain, who wore old surplus camouflage with brass on the epaulets, and whose shoulders carried the exaggerated swagger of street authority—she pegged Zola with a narrow look.

  “You look like someone maybe I know, girl. What’s your name?” The boats, almost past each other now. Zola, still smiling, working the oar, trying to slip away—

  The cop captain grabbed the gondola’s gunwale. The woman’s mind reached out, a probing flicker inside Zola’s skull. Zola tried to project her own mind like a shield, press her thoughts to the captain’s, the most natural of connections, a casual sharing of memory, the whispered merger of experience. She was Zola—once the star navigator at Latitude. She’d steered fleets of ships across the globe with her mind, easy as a smile, shared the simultaneous thoughts of ten thousand since her earliest memories. Connection had once been as natural as breathing. She pressed her thoughts forward, desperate now to connect with just one person.

  There was nothing. The Light had burned her clean, and the captain knew it. Predatory recognition lit the woman’s eyes.

  “Junkie.” She grinned horribly—brown wooden dentures, street-carved by some Rican whittler. “What’s your name, junkie? Your name Zola? Got a friend wants to meet you. You’re all she ever talks about.” Zola, leaning hard on the oar, going nowhere. The captain held the gondola fast. The other cops scrambled, reaching for Zola, reaching for her boat. “Benji, get her,” the captain ordered. Benji stepped across, ungainly, reaching.

  Zola reacted—pure muscle memory, a fighting fitness class, part of her Latitude girlhood. Her foot snapped out, a straight kick that caught the big blond cop in the chest. His arms flailed. His eyes went wide. He fell back against the captain, then slid cursing between the two boats and into the canal. Zola brought her heel down on the captain’s hand. The woman recoiled, hatred twisting her face. She lunged, but Zola was already on the gondola’s oar, sliding slo-mo down the canal, just beyond reach, the vendors quiet now, old Carib mamas and Rican ’crete hawkers staring at the junkie girl heaving at the oar and the cops cursing in her wake and trying to get their barge turned around. It was too wide. It wedged itself across the canal. In the water, the blond cop sputtered, holding his hat high where it wouldn’t get wet. The captain shook pain from her hand.

  Zola, oaring away, faster now, the cop boat receding. She aimed her middle finger at the cop boat. “Chinga tu madre!”

  The captain bared brown wooden teeth. She pulled a big pistol from a holster and brought it level.

  “No!” The old man in the back of the cop barge stood, holding his fishing spear in one hand and the little white terrier in the other. “She’s worth more alive.”

  “Still worth something dead.”

  “We know her now. We’ll find her again.”

  Zola felt that pistol aiming for her head, but the shot never came. The captain didn’t pull the trigger. Zola angled the gondola around a corner, a narrow alley, looked back, a last glimpse. The captain, sucking those teeth, her gun dangling at her side. The old man and the dog both looking Zola’s way—the old man smiled at her.

  * * *

  Zola, baby! Marco, insistent now, full of possession and love and heat and fear. His thoughts reaching out like fingertips to touch Zola. For an instant they connected, a fluid rush of union, the way Zola used to do before the Light had burned the ability out of her. Now it only ever happened with Marco, a few days each time after they’d touched the Light together. You good? Are you good?

  Ya. She wasn’t caught, but maybe good was saying too much. There had been a time, before the Light, before Marco, when her life had been easy. Those memories, days in Latitude when she’d done what she’d been born to do—navigator, lover, collector of far-flung artifacts—it was as though that life had belonged to someone else. Now, with cops not far behind and Zola winding the gondola through random streets, trying to lose herself down alleys and blend into the press of boat traffic, she couldn’t remember what it felt like to be something other than hunted. She worked the oar back and forth, let the air breathe against her sweat. I’m good, she told Marco, and then: Baby, they know my name.

  Just a matter of time. But you’re safe?

  Safe.

  Marco’s relief flooded Zola. His mind braided through hers. Zola peered through his eyes—down the face of the Stuy tower from whose ruin he leaned, dangling from the dark cavity of an empty window, a vine clenched in one fist. Sunlight blazed off the East River far below, searing white light around which the city seemed insubstantial, a bardo of gray Stuy Town monoliths rising out of the spiraling foam of tidal vortices. Concrete and brine, a world of physical truths from which Zola felt Marco’s mind recoil, the confines of what Jacirai called the mortal cage. Marco’s thoughts bent wildly away from the moment, wrapped themselves instead around Zola’s mind, zeroing playfully on the things he wanted to do to her—half fantasy, half memory. His lips on her neck, the gentle tug of his teeth on her nipples, the places his tongue would tease. But beneath those urges was a different, more desperate desire, a wish to be back among the folds of the Light, enveloped in a sea of thoughts so deep they’d never find the limits.

  Into the Light . . . The whisper of a thought, unbidden, and Marco leaned far out the window, into blinding sun. Zola felt his fear, his urge to let go. Don’t make me wait, girl.

  He had the itch, bad.

  Be easy, baby. Cops filling the day thick as mosquitoes. But I’m coming, ya. Soon now. Zola’s shoulders flexed against the oar; she fought the shake in her hands. Real soon, baby.

  She worked the gondola through the boa
t traffic—the scavenger barges loaded down with rebar, ’crete dust, and steel girders stripped from uptown scrapers and towed by Rican men in longboats, oars like centipede legs sculling the canal; the schools of rainbow junks, men shirtless in the heat, on the prowl for a hustle, their shaved heads dark and nodding in unison to the beats of Moby Jah; black market banker types who rode in the posh leather seats of gleaming polymer-hulled boats, their collars buttoned priest-high and bound by silk cravats, faces vacant, meditative: their minds riding the ebb and flow of currency from one black account to another.

  Through the traffic, back onto East 17th now, a wide deep pool at the intersection of First Ave. Old Rican mommas had set up shop there, rafting square garden barges together in the afternoon sun. They sat, wrapped in the personal shade of thin shawls, behind tables stacked with jars of herbs and spice seeds. From behind giant aviator shades, they watched as East Siders browsed their garden rows.

  Zola scanned the avenue for cops, and saw none. She felt exposed: this was a place where normal people shopped—as normal as people in this city got. These new cops, they gave rewards for junkies. But junkies had needs too. Marco had needs.

  Zola steeled herself, thrust her chin defiantly forward, and threw a line. She stepped out into a bed of root vegetables. This she wandered slowly, probing bare toes into black topsoil disturbed by a thousand shoppers before her—skinny carrots, onions whose impressive stalks belied bulbs no bigger than her thumb. The tomatoes, however, were real beauties. They hung pendulous, oxhearts nearly too heavy for their vines, on the yellow side, not quite ripe. Perfect. Bending low, Zola reached out to touch one. In the corner of her mind, she felt the pressure of Marco’s need, his itch. It made her hand shake.

  “¿Puedo ayudarte, hija?” A Rican woman stepped toward her. In her insectoid shades, the distorted reflection of Zola’s gaunt face. Zola picked two tomatoes and held them up.

  “This. Saw palmetto, too. And mullein. I need it dry, madre. Dry enough to burn, ya.”

  The Rican woman said nothing. With a finger she pushed the shades up over her brow—her black eyes fixed on the tomatoes, clocked the tremor in Zola’s hand. A stillness came over her and she stood like that, poised, hand raised in mid-gesture, occupied by the sort of silence that meant her mind had merged with others from her collective. For a beat, it was like time stopping, then the madre’s eyes refocused on Zola. Her expression was hard.

  “East Side Growers don’t want no junkies in our gardens. You got to go, honey.” She glanced pointedly down the row, where a young, East Side mother leaned over, inspecting a patch of leeks. A clean skirt and hair pulled back and rings on her fingers, the moneyed ease of someone who had never seen bad shit—or, Zola figured, the Burning Light of Truth. Beside the woman sat a toddler in denim overalls, the miniature, clean version of what Zola wore. Desirable customers. The Rican woman waved a hand as though Zola were a fly to be shooed. “You got to go!”

  “Junkies got to eat, too, madre.” Zola held up the tomatoes. “Already picked them, ya. Got to buy them now.”

  The madre eyed Zola for another hard beat. Then, sucking her lip, she jerked her head forward, dropping the shades to her nose. She aimed a finger at the ground, as though some immutable principle lay etched there in the garden’s topsoil.

  “Chavos,” she stated.

  “Si, si.” Zola clutched the front of her overalls and shook them. Coins jingled in the bib pocket.

  “No. Chavos real.” The madre raised an index finger to her temple. She went still again, and this time Zola felt the whisper of the woman’s mind reaching out, to Zola this time, trying to connect, the way the cop woman’s had—but in Zola’s lobes, atrophied by the breadths and depths to which the Light had taken her, it was almost intangible, as impossible to touch as smoke. When she’d come to the old city from Latitude, Zola had still been able to connect. She could’ve reached out and joined the madre, traded real currency. The Light, though, took its tithe. After three trips with Marco and the others, it was hard to connect. After ten, Zola could only connect in the calm days that followed each trip. After twenty, her hands had begun to shake and her dreams had turned to white fire, and now she couldn’t join anyone anymore, except for Marco. Jacirai said it might come back if she stopped, but Zola doubted it. It was a sacrifice they all made, those who wanted to touch the Light. Sometimes it seemed too much.

  “Real is real, ya.” Zola shook the coins again. “I pay, madre, you sell.”

  The shakes set in again, deep in Zola’s chest, emanating out to her limbs. The itch, the need to connect.

  Out on the canal, the cop boat appeared, sailing east now. Under her breath, Zola cursed. She turned away from the cops, held a hand to her brow to obscure her face. The Rican woman watched, her gaze switching from Zola to the cops and back, clocking the whole thing. She pursed her lips, considering.

  “Please, madre,” Zola pleaded. “I see it in your face you think I got no life worth living, ya. But I got love, and someone to live for, someone who loves me. Those puto slave cops take me,” a glance toward the cop boat, “and that’s all gone. I’ll be gone. Please.” The madre frowned, not without sympathy.

  “You take them.” Indicating the tomatoes. “You take them and you go.”

  Heat worked its way up Zola’s spine. Marco’s mind, itching bad.

  Zola, baby . . . Leaning far out into the light, yearning to let go. Zola stepped closer to the Rican woman.

  “And saw palmetto,” she insisted. “Mullein, too. I need it real dry, ya. Dry enough to burn.” Her whole body afire with the itch, her reflection twisting in the woman’s shades. “Thank you, madre.”

  * * *

  “You got to be careful, baby.” Marco, framed in pale light at the open edge of the thirty-fifth floor, where once had been floor-to-ceiling windows and now hung a thick screen of vines. He sat naked, arms wrapped around his knees, the immediacy of his voice a source of grounding warmth in the building’s gutted solitude. “That defiance of yours get you killed, ya.” He meant the cops. He’d been there with Zola, watching through her eyes, listening through her ears. He’d seen the woman cop raise her pistol.

  “It’s okay,” Zola told him. She’d built a small driftwood fire on bare concrete near the edge where its smoke would leak out into the day, and now cut tomatoes into palm-thick slices with the same folding knife she used for cleaning fish. It was an old residential building. Rican and Carib scavs had stripped it long ago, like most of the old city core, mined it for raw materials for the new cities up north along the Hudson. Nothing remained now but concrete struts, spines of rebar—Stuy Town a Venetian ruin rising from the river far below.

  Marco had tried to make good on his promises, had come on determined and rough, kissing, groping. But he had the itch bad and couldn’t get it up. After, they had lain there in cavernous isolation, wrapped in the coarse folds of an ancient army surplus blanket. Zola had tried to hold him.

  “Lo siento, baby,” he’d said, and turned away.

  She’d run her fingertips over the tattoos on his shoulders and along his arms, images he’d designed himself, a narrative tapestry of his short life, all the places he’d ever been, inked into his skin. A painted kabuki mask on his shoulder, emblemizing his time in a Tokyo farming arcology. A spiraling, fanged snake he’d had done in a Sao Paolo art collective. An AK over his heart, from Mexico City. The two of them had connected in the Light, gone deep into each other’s memories. He was rough and uneducated, at least in the ways Zola was educated, but the breadth of his experience made her feel small, and she liked that. He’d been everywhere. He’d sought vivid experiences, his true north the ardent belief in a life wholly lived, equating meaning to the most raw sensations. He hungered to find the limits of his being. It was only natural he would come to the Burning Light.

  During the cool nights between the ritual halos when the itch kept them from sleeping, Zola would lay an index finger against his skin, and in the low firelight whatever image she
touched, Marco would tell that story—not like people did now, but with words, spinning a tale like people used to do. Zola would recall his memory, a memory now her own. She loved these stories, these memories he’d given her—always exotic, far-flung, full of fighting and broken, drunken hearts. With each one a piece of Marco would fall into place, some historical marker helping to map him; his smile, his dark moods, each shared memory a stepping stone, bringing him closer to Zola.

  There in the cavernous twilight of the empty Stuy tower, they lay together in strained silence. His failure frightened them. It marked his decline.

  “We should go somewhere,” Zola’d said into the growing darkness. “Make a new tattoo.”

  For a long while, they both simply breathed, relishing that sweet lie.

  “All times are now, ya,” Marco said finally, maybe to Zola or maybe only to himself, and then he’d slipped from under the blanket and away from her. All times are now. It was a meaningless phrase to Zola, the sort of thing Jacirai would declare in one of his mad sermons between rituals, the Burning Lighters stationed in a sphere around him in whatever vacant tower they squatted. His eyes would roll back so only the whites were visible and he would growl and spit and give utterance like some feral demon—from on high, ya, the echoes of things they’d all touched in the Light. His sermons, sometimes they spoke straight to the heart of truth—that in the Light they all became something more, godlike in the depth of their union—and sometimes it seemed all nonsense, just noise to keep everyone going, feeling connected until the next ritual, the next sweet burn.

  As Zola covered the tomato slices in an herb mixture—thyme, basil, sea salt, and white pepper, which she took in pinches from a small leather pouch—she watched Marco. He looked small, boyish. Ribs etched his back, and he trembled. It was as though the Light had hollowed him, as though he were receding in stages from his own flesh so that others might touch the truth. Thus was his lot, a medium for the Light. Zola strained to touch her mind to his, and for a moment they reveled in closeness.