Not exactly positive through which structure I am traveling and what the purpose of this journey is, numbers lighting up but not making sense, 1150, 1125 . . . furthermore an antique, why not something a stitch more modern . . .

  Vomit a little into my mouth. Don’t do elevators well and I am not ashamed to be that guy. The state my diet’s in, ain’t nothing but pill-dust and bile, burning my throat as I choke my gorge back.

  Try and fail to speak. Wanna be let the fuck off this Model-T cocksucker.

  Soldier peeps me askance, him saying, “You better not be throwing up in here. You sick?”

  He’s got a black scuba face mask on but I’m betting this is a yahoo white guy. Most of them are. Nodding, nodding, yes, very sick, so much things to say, gullet otherwise engaged.

  “Better not be puking. I’m serious. I’ll fuck you up, Special Deputy Agent Whatever, don’t care who you’re tight with. No puking, these are new boots. Break your fucking face, not a problem.”

  Air-tickle with my fake hand in an effort to hush this dude. I can dig it and can get behind concern for new threads and spunky shoes.

  But what brings a man here? What misfortune deposits me, in this moment, wedged in a vintage elevator with a rent-a-cop? Think, Decimal . . . there are the bells . . . and I throttle a white man . . . then I get in a car and go somewhere else. A conversation with a large man who might be my father—if I didn’t know my daddy to be a criminal deadbeat out of Trinidad, who for all I know has died a vagrant’s death in a San Fernando gutter. Hopefully he suffered.

  This tidbit, and the bells . . . whoosh, and the lift comes to a halt, emitting a weak old-timey ding, my only known friend dragging the gate back fast, I stumble-skate out onto wet-looking marble, a crowded atrium, my heels going click-clack, spin to the left, clock a huge bas-relief plate on the wall depicting that familiar phallus, the words: EMPIRE STATE.

  It all comes back, excruciatingly swift, a deluge of words and images, Allah only knows I hate this sick-making sensation—all too familiar to me now—like a deep suck of weaponized crack cocaine, the fear that my cerebral cortex just might become overwhelmed with this reintroduction of everything beyond the events of the last few minutes.

  In time, I will hemorrhage, my skull brimming with blood, with too much fucking information. That’s a bet.

  The Ark. Or so the Empire State Building has been rechristened. The Death Star, the Tower of Power, deco control center for the Coalition, new New York. And, if the powers-that-preside will have it, the cradle of the new New World.

  Bounce, Decimal.

  Lower my shoulder against the watery babble, the tangle of security types, a rainbow of uniforms, among them NYPD, baby-blue UN helmets, MPs, digital camo—a paramilitary melting pot, the concept of which is heartwarming, is it not, yo?

  “Fuck out my way.” Mumble just generally, nobody paying mind, otherwise engaged . . . sand on my tongue. I spit straight down, aiming discreetly for my own brogue. So many bodies, me thinking, hep B, hep C, TB . . .

  Through the full-body scanner on my exit, unsteady with my laminate high, the metal in my body enough to trip the alarm, pausing only to collect my weapons from Checkpoint Charlie and receive a pocket-watch-sized radio per the senator’s instructions.

  Hopscotch out onto the scarred 5th Avenue, angry with various construction and combat vehicles, luxury and cattle-car transport, civilian and official, idling or parked three deep. Uniformed chauffeurs bear plaques with Cyrillic and Arabic lettering.

  Sand in my craw. Awful sensation. Yet: hock one on the pavement, and barring the general unhealthy hue of my spit, I can see no trace of anything sandlike.

  Worrisome, as this spook-sand thing is a new development. Gonna wanna clear the dome.

  Best bet—fuck a ride. Opt to leg it home, direct myself uptown. Get to bopping, worrying at my PurellTM.

  Past a clutch of soldiers and building security are the civilians, their dwindling ranks, the amputees, the luckless, haunting the periphery, good as dead, hoping for . . . ? They call to me, snatch at my coat as I lean north. Gently now, I brush this debris aside, cause a man has problems of his fucking own and only so much love to give. Need some me-time behind doors. Can’t really get that clean-and-sparkly feeling down on the street, out in this bacterial chowder.

  A block beyond the clamor, past the sparse shanty, the lean-tos . . . sure, it gets quiet in a jiffy, once you get outside the orbit of the Ark. Lay a gloved hand on the back of my neck. Touch the thing, bas-relief. Pop a pill, choke it back, replace that mask. Thinking System.

  Contemplate my new assignment. Which was . . .

  Gimme a fucking minute. I take a broad psychic swipe at the cobwebs in my cranium. And come away with: Unsanctioned congregations of unknowns in the park. The gig—a simple walk-through, an easy look-see, give the trespassers a stern once-over finger-wag.

  But before I am forced to tackle this one, there remains plenty of time to get some work done back home. Back at the library. My true work. So much to be done.

  Twitch, tilt my mug back toward the mother ship, toward the heavens, obscured as they are by drifts of methane and cancer and Christ knows what else, snorting burnt plastic and garbage, above me a battered crane, the structure swaying subtly, no, no, no, and beyond that the helicopters. Always with the helicopters.

  Gimping up 5th Avenue, the first fat droplets of poison rain smack the pavement. Gathering my coat around my frame, me and my shadow, headlights on the burgundy metallic Escalade flipping on, the car a discreet half-block to my back.

  Truth is, I don’t know who I work for. In theory I am on the State Department “payroll,” though “money” has been usurped by goods, daily necessities, and guaranteed safe passage.

  I engage in cleanup for the Christ-crazy blowhard Senator Clarence Howard. But behind his considerable girth I dig the movement of a far larger creature—massive, complex, and by no means godly—and it is this entity that I serve.

  It has a name: the Coalition.

  And precisely why a brother like myself finds himself in the theoretical employ of the likes of snaky Senator Clarence Howard, and by extension the Coalition . . . well.

  Stop on by. There you are, striding between that famous pair of lions, up the steps and through the revolving doors, avoiding the pools of water that collect on the indented, unlit marble stairwell that carries you to the third floor, at points having to feel your way past the murk. A couple of lefts through huge, silent halls, lit sporadically by helicopter spotlights.

  And yonder, you’ll find me, killer of men, happily ensconced in the middle of the cavernous Rose Reading Room here in the Main Branch NYPL, my home, my castle, my charge.

  I shuck my jacket, roll up the sleeves, and hit the books. Working on a realignment. Having scrubbed my flesh raw, I set about the work, surrounded by hedgerows of books, all sensible, short stacks. No more five-meter towers leaning hither and thither. No more chaos and mess. A new order prevails.

  How a lost child of the South Bronx, a damaged veteran of ops black and white, finds himself the custodian of a national landmark like the Main Branch is a lengthy story indeed. The books. That’s how they keep me.

  See: a significant segment of the New York Public Library’s priceless collection was (shall we say) compromised beyond repair. Up in smoke. An act of God. Force majeure.

  Okay, not exactly. Specifics: some nutjob took a flamethrower to the stacks. Best forgotten. Above all else, we move forward around this bitch, and don’t get weepy about what’s done.

  So, Senator Howard re-upped the book supply, supplementing the damaged or destroyed volumes with irreplaceable material siphoned off from the Library of Congress. And the material keeps on coming. And I keep taking it. Like the blue pills, the pistachio nuts, and PurellTM. The stuff of Life. Senator Howard provides. So you might say I am in his thrall.

  There are . . . episodes, occurring with greater and greater frequency. Events I want to keep to myself. The Semi-Freddos. The Full Freeze. The minor fugue state. Time grows vague, insubstantial, slippery. Wake up in various places, with little clue as to how I got there or what may have been my errand.

  Come to on the damp marble stairs. Under a table in a vast hall of dead computer monitors. In the Map Room, my dome on a book about mollusks, or Dutch colonialism. In the tiled bathroom, choked sink overflowing with rusty river water. In nothing but my briefs, upon a pile of microfiche. I might be losing minutes, or days. It doesn’t particularly matter, in the sense that I set my own hours, but it makes System protocol difficult to stick to. And it makes me look bad. Touchable.

  I ain’t never lied. I know what it all means. I’m sloughing this life. On the slow fade. A partially asymptomatic carrier of, perhaps, everything.

  As noted, I have the sense these episodes might compromise my standing with my benefactor—and with those who would wish to take me out. Therefore, I do my utmost to prolong the inevitable and make like I’m operating at 150 percent. You’d think the cameras would pick these anomalies up, but so far, nobody has commented—so I just keep it tight-grill—they must reckon I’m a napper. Or a narcoleptic. That is if anybody’s out there, and that’s a big if.

  All this work. I shake my dome at the stacks. The books. My loves. Touch a blue leather spine.

  I should be thinking about a successor. Mind, my conditions for coming into my jobby-job for the senator were extensive. Nothing extravagant, and nothing they couldn’t accommodate, but they were for sure deal-breakers from my perspective. Conditions include:

  Under no circumstances will I be subordinate to any individual or group, specifically my former employers Cyna-corp and the United States government or any of its various tendrils, particularly the Senate, the legislative branch in general, or any branch of US military. Okay, we might run jobs in tandem, and sure, there will be some interaction, some overlap. But my contract is directly with the senator himself, the very man, having no intermediaries, and absolutely no bullshit.

  As for my duties, they remain largely unarticulated. Think this is for the sake of deniability as much as anything else, and I’m comfortable rolling like that.

  This was how we kicked it back in ops: you got thrown a mission, and you went and did the motherfucker. Full stop. Some entity catches you ass-out? That was your problem and your problem alone. So the way to glide was this: give ’em exactly nil and not an ounce more. Blank those silly bitches, sit tight, savvy a soft spot, kick, cut, or eat your way out. Long as it takes. Baby, I like it like that.

  Did it in Pakistan. Did it in Somalia, Damascus, Tripoli. Did it in Frankfurt, did it in Fallujah. So too did the shit in Bethesda, Maryland. Did it in ghost towns, no-name twilight locales not on any GPS.

  Wasn’t nobody coming to spring you either. Nobody to holler for. Strictly off-grid. A fellow’s gotta be highly motivated. Self-starter. Saying how we did this fucking thing. That’s the job.

  So. Isn’t outside of my paradigm, this valley of the shadow. Comfortable here. Good place for a brother who hates the sun, hates its cruelty, hates exposure.

  Clarence Howard. US senator, man of God, sociopath, realist. If the single remaining source of power left in the city lay in the control of its reconstruction, then Howard and his cronies and the larger Coalition were there first—looking to consolidate and take full possession of the whole motherfucking shebang. You had to concede points for balls, for grand thinking, for epic visualization.

  This meant a gradual annexation of the various construction firms, generally defined as they were along racial and cultural lines. Dominant were the Chinese, Russian, and domestic criminals. And then there were those outfits defined not by the composition of their crew, but by the money behind them: the Saudis, the Israelis. Former eurozone members in there too, but these were so intermixed with the aforementioned groups they hardly counted.

  Until recently, this was all a hell of a mess. So the bosses figured: why not pool their resources . . . and lo, the Coalition.

  So what’s my day look like? Well, float it my way, senator: The contractor who gets uppity. Expansionist. Looking to strike out on his own, or get with the competition. Or one of our own contractors gets to misbehaving, making sloppy with the kickback math. Toss it here. Lippy, itchy folk wanna buck the status quo. Would-be soloists, prospectors, and high fliers.

  The senator voices a name. Just the name is all I need. Sometimes this name is guttural and spiky, sometimes it’s a sing-songy tongue-twister, and sometimes it’s monosyllabic plain-Jane homegrown as a side of high-sodium grits. The name I’m given is immaterial. Me take a stroll, have a word, set a shitbird back on the path of the good and the mild. And should they wanna try and play me, should they not want to step back in line . . . Well.

  I tsk. See this? Bit of gunk on the book here, some shit like fish sauce in the whorls on the leather. Extract a disinfectant wipe and carefully dab at the offending particle. Cause people, I run a clean library.

  My original purpose here in this spot, that of reorganizing the entire catalog according to the Dewey decimal system of my youth, has been expanded to actually and thoroughly cleaning each and every volume, freeing the texts of (in some cases) more than a century’s worth of accumulated grime, not just what can be detected by the eye, but the settlements of microorganisms, the infestation of weevils and worms and wood mites.

  To release the Word from such squalor, and to return order and dignity to this wounded house; this is my single goal. I do it with the mindfulness and respect one would bring to restoring the world’s greatest works of art, and with the patience, care, and discipline the paleontologist applies to the excavation of a prehistoric chicken bone.

  That I not die is a necessary aspect of this single goal. I go, and so goes all of this. Y’all could consider keeping myself alive a kind of secondary goal, cause I take the shit as seriously as I do my primary goal.

  Where am I at with the books? Hit a very productive period with 030, as reference texts are pretty easy to log, and taking liberties with the original system, perhaps a little display of artistic license or rebellion on my part, I cruised right on over the periodicals with speed, blazed religious texts of all kinds, gave parapsychology the bum-rush, mowed down general statistics, made quick work of ethics and Eastern philosophy . . . and after nigh on two years gone, still moving at a steady clip—behold, I run up on section 330, behind me the recently reorganized residents of political science.

  Progress, y’all. Scraped and bruised, this is still America, after all, and we do nothing if not shred ass. Theoretically.

  Dig that the appointed hour is drawing near. I place Modern Trends in Labor Economics tenderly and with ceremony on the appropriate stack, the first entry in 330. As I apply the PurellTM, my peepers flip up to the cameras . . . old habits . . . and there they are, discreet in the corners and (I have learned) the massive custom hanging lights. There are a minimum of eighteen throughout the length of the Reading Room alone, that I am aware of.

  Old habits. Used to dog a man that his every twitch is duly recorded for posterity. Now I could give a frozen fuck. Most of the shit is gotta be me sleeping. Rest of it is me sifting books. Whose gonna wanna scope that? Plus, yo, what am I gonna do that I haven’t already done? And anyway—what are they gonna do about it? Ten to one, half these cameras are fritzing anyways.

  Wind and water lash at the huge multipaned windows, running the length of the building—a bass hit of thunder jerking me out my stupor. With suddenness I retch on the sand blocking my windpipe, and with equal speed the sensation is gone.

  Check the watch. Time. Suit up for the money gig, Decimal. On some monitor somewhere, my scene looks a little something like this:

  Colored man swaps out his dusty shirt for a clean one, and a fresh suit. Tight: British cut, hemmed just at the ankles, no fold. Coming correct in the details. Spends a moment shaking everything out. Selects a hat, carefully, from an eye-level built-in bookshelf on the northeast side of the room. A choice of six hats, exactly, each a very slight variation on the same tune. Places said hat on a nearby table as this is the last element to slot into place. Colored man swallows blue pill. Knocks it back with a dram of warm spring water.

  Popping the fake panel that covers my cubbyhole, I withdraw today’s guns: the HK I stashed earlier, and a new-ish Beretta 8000, chambered for a .357 cartridge. Grab an extra clip for each cause you’d be a fool not to smoke ’em if you got ’em.

  In addition: handcuffs, switch watches, slapping on something cheap and digital with a precision timer.

  What else? Penlight. A big knife. Nasty diver’s blade gets strapped into place near my ankle. Oh yeah: the senator’s walkie.

  I think of the subbasement beneath me, the unknowable catacombs, moldering paper, packed-dirt walls.

  The twin Louis Vuitton steamers overflowing with high-grade explosives, from which I earlier grabbed a morsel of C-4, mounted in a shockproof Silly Putty egg.

  Upstairs, dressed proper now, nice suit and tie, coming out of my crouch, my robot knee emits a explosive pop. But pop is not the word. Hold up a sec, make sure it’s all still connected. Gingerly move my toes. Check. Proceed.

  Coming apart as I am. Despite the fancy weaponry and my skills in the ring, I’m a hastily scribbled fusion of Scarecrow and Tin Man, exhibiting both characters’ physiological shortcomings. No amount of dope threads can alter this fact. In short order, everything’s gonna crack, collapse, and I will expire here, of thirst perhaps, throatful of ghost sand, as the digital cameras roll. Simply not wake up. That moment is hurtling toward me. The lump at the base of my brain tells me this is so, and I have no cause to doubt it.

  But in the meantime, what’s a man to do but keep popping?

  Yeah. Brainless, heartless, hollow metal and straw. And I already dig the wizard is just a trembling white man behind a green sateen drape.

  My Emerald City, fragile cubic zirconia, looking tough from a distance, but so easily broken. Easily broken. Not easily killed.