Jericho Iteration

3

(Wednesday, 9:36 P.M.)

Tell me about freedom. I’m willing to listen. Hell, I’ll listen to anything, so long as you’ll pardon me if I nod off in the middle of the lecture.

Wet, cold, muddy, and confused, I began the long hike out of the park, following the sidewalk down the hill toward the Forest Park Boulevard entrance. Although a couple of Piranhas and Hummers passed me on the road, their crews were too busy to stop and harass a lone individual on foot. Nonetheless, I crossed the golf course at the bottom of Art Hill to avoid a roadblock at the Lindell Boulevard entrance; two Hummers were parked in front of the gate, and I didn’t care to explain myself to the soldiers manning the barricade. Sure, I had my press card and I could point out that I was a working reporter on assignment, but these days that sort of argument would just as likely earn me a trip down to Busch Stadium, and not for a baseball game either. The ERA grunts didn’t spot me, though, and I managed to leave the park unmolested.

Grabbing a ride on the MetroLink was another problem. After I trudged the rest of the way through the park, I passed through the main gate at Forest Park Boulevard. The MetroLink platform was at the bottom of a narrow railway trench a block away; it was almost completely vacant, but an ERA trooper was standing guard at the top of the stairs leading down to the tracks, a riot baton cradled in his arms.

I glanced at my watch. It was already a quarter to ten. No choice but to tough it out; I was in no shape to slog all the way back to my digs. Trying not to look like I had just mud-wrestled a gorilla, I strode toward the turnstile, reaching into my pants pocket to fish out my fare card.

The trooper studied me as I walked under the light. I gave him a quick nod of my head and started to pass my card in front of the scanner when he took a step forward and barred my way with his stick.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said, “but do you know what time it is?”

In the old days, I might have just looked at my watch, said “Yes,” and walked on, but these guys were notorious for having no sense of humor. My mind flipped through a half-dozen preconcocted ploys, ranging from pretending to be drunk to simply acting stupid, and realized that none of them would adequately explain why I looked as disheveled as I did. Telling the truth was out of the question; the average ERA trooper had less respect for a reporter than he would for a suspected looter, and screw the First Amendment.

“Is it after nine already?” I feigned embarrassed surprise, then pulled back my sleeve and glanced at my watch. “Oh, shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it was so-”

“May I see some ID, please?” Below us, several people sitting on plastic benches beneath the platform awning watched with quiet curiosity. No doubt they had been forced to go through the same ordeal.

“Hmm? Sure, sure …” I pulled my wallet out of my back pocket, found my driver’s license, and passed it to him. The trooper’s nameplate read B. DOUGLAS; he passed my license under a handscanner, then flipped down a monocle from his helmet and waited for the computers at the city’s records department to download my file.

It gave me a chance to size him up as well. What I saw was scary: a kid young enough to be my little brother-twenty-one at most-wearing khaki combat fatigues, leather lace-up boots, and riot helmet, with the sword-and-tornado insignia of the Emergency Relief Agency sewn on the left shoulder of his flak jacket. An assault rifle hung from a strap over his right shoulder, a full brace of Mace and tear gas canisters suspended from his belt. He had the hard-eyed, all-too-serious look of a young man who had been given too much authority much too soon, who believed that the artillery he carried gave him the right to kick butt whenever he wished. In another age he might have been a member of Hitler Youth looking for Jews to beat up or a Young Republican wandering a college campus in search of a liberal professor to harass. Now he was an ERA trooper, and by God this was his light-rail station.

“Are you aware that you’re in a curfew zone, Mr. Rosen?” He pulled my driver’s license out from under his scanner but didn’t pass it back to me.

I pretended to be appalled. “I am? This is University City, isn’t it? There isn’t a curfew here.”

He stared back at me. “No, sir, you’re downtown now. Curfew starts here at nine o’clock sharp.”

I shrugged off-handedly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that was the situation.” I tried an apologetic smile. “I’ll keep that in mind next time I’m down here.”

“You look awful muddy, old-timer,” he said condescendingly. “Fall down someplace?”

Old-timer, indeed. I was thirty-three and Lord of the Turnstiles knew it. If there were the first few gray streaks in my hair, it was because of what I had seen in the past eleven months. I wanted to tell him that I was old enough to remember when the Bill of Rights still meant something, but I kept my sarcasm in check. Li’l Himmler here was just looking for an excuse to place me under arrest for curfew violation. My police record was clean, and he didn’t have anything on me, but my occupation was listed as “journalist.” I could see it in his face: reporters for the Big Muddy Inquirer didn’t get cut much slack on his beat.

“Sort of,” I said noncommittally, careful to keep my voice even. B. Douglas didn’t reply; he was waiting for elaboration. “I tried to jump over a storm drain a few blocks away,” I added. “Didn’t quite make it.” I shrugged and managed to assay a dopey gee-shucks grin. “Accidents happen, y’know.”

“Uh-huh.” He continued to study me, his monocle glinting in the streetlight. “Where did you say you were?”

“U-City,” I said. “Visiting some friends. We were having a little get-together and … y’know, kinda got sidetracked.”

It was a good alibi. The U-City neighborhood was only a few blocks west of the station; that’s where all us liberal types hung out, listening to old Pearl Jam CDs while smoking pot and fondly reminiscing about Bill Clinton. It fit. Maybe he’d pass me off as a stoned rock critic who had fallen in a ditch after going into conniptions upon seeing an American flag.

Off in the distance I could hear the first rumble of the approaching train, the last Red Liner to stop tonight at Forest Park Station. If Oberleutnant Douglas was going to find a good reason for busting me, it was now or never. After all, he would have to file a report later.

The kid knew it, too. He flipped my license between his fingertips, once, twice, then slowly extended to me as if he was granting a great favor. “Have a good evening, Mr. Rosen,” he said stiffly. “Stay out of trouble.”

I resisted the mighty impulse to salute and click my heels. “Thank you,” I murmured. He nodded his helmeted head and stood aside. The train’s headlights were flashing across the rails as I swept my fare card in front of the scanner, then pushed through the turnstile and trotted down the cement stairs to the platform.

The train braked in front of the station, bright sparks of electricity zapping from its overhead powerlines. A couple of my fellow riders looked askance at me as they stood up. One of them was an old black lady, wearing a soaked cloth coat, carrying a frayed plastic Dillards shopping bag stuffed with her belongings.

“What did he stop you for?” she asked as the train doors slid apart and we moved to step aboard.

I thought about it for a moment. “Because of the way I look,” I replied.

It was an honest answer. She slowly nodded her head. “Same here,” she murmured. “Now you know what it’s like.”

And then we found our seats and waited for the train to leave the station.

I rode the Red Line as it headed east into the city. Quite a few people got on or off the train at Central West End, most of them patients or visitors at Barnes Hospital, but my car only remained half-full. Most of the passengers were soaking wet. The train was filled with the sound of sneezing and coughing fits, making the train’s computerized voice hard to hear as it announced each stop. The Red Line sounded like a rolling flu ward; despite the fact we had just stopped at a hospital, somehow all those free vaccinations we were supposed to receive courtesy of ERA seemed to have missed everyone on this train. On the other hand, this wasn’t unusual; most of the people in the city had somehow missed receiving a lot of the federal aid that had been promised to us.

Through the windows, I could see dark vacant lots filled with dense rubble where buildings made of unreinforced brick and mortar had once stood; streets blocked by sawhorses because ancient sewer tunnels and long-extinct clay mines beneath them had caved in; shanties made of scraps of corrugated steel and broken plywood. Armored cars were the only vehicles on the streets, but here and there I spotted figures lurking in the doorways of condemned buildings. Night brought out the scavengers, the teenagers with tire-irons who prowled through destroyed warehouses and demolished storefronts in search of anything to be sold on the black market.

The train left the midtown combat zone and rumbled toward the downtown area. It stopped briefly beneath Union Station, but it passed Auditorium because the platform there no longer existed. Kiel Auditorium itself had survived, but where the old City Hall building and the city jail once stood were now vast lots filled with crumbled masonry, broken cinderblock, bent copper pipes, and shattered glass. Giant piles which had once been buildings, waiting to be hauled away.

By now the downtown skyscrapers were clearly visible, their windows shining with light; the Gateway Arch, seen above the spired dome of the old state courthouse, reflected the city lights like a nocturnal rainbow. For a minute or two there was no wreckage to be seen. It seemed as if the city had never suffered a quake, that all was sane and safe.

Then the train hurtled toward Busch Stadium, and the illusion was destroyed. Silence descended as everyone turned to gaze out the left-side windows at the stadium. Busch Stadium still stood erect; bright spotlights gleamed from within its bowl, and one could almost have sworn that a baseball game was in progress, but as the train slowed to pull into Stadium Station, the barbed-wire fences and rows of concrete barriers blocking the ground-level entrances told a different story.

A group of ERA soldiers were sitting on benches at the subsurface train platform; a couple of them glanced up as the train came to a halt, and everyone in the train quickly looked away. The doors opened, but no one got on, and nobody dared to get off. There was dead quiet within the train until the doors automatically closed once again. The train moved on, and not until it went into a tunnel and the station vanished from sight did everyone relax.

Busch Stadium wasn’t a nice place to visit anymore. Oh, people still did at times, but seldom voluntarily. There were whispered rumors that people who went to the stadium often didn’t come out again.

But, of course, that was only hearsay.

A few minutes later the train rolled into 8th and Pine, the underground hub station for the MetroLink. I got off here and took an escalator from the Red Line platform down to the Yellow Line platform. The station was cold, with a breeze that seeped through the plastic tarps covering a gaping hole in the ceiling where the roof had partially collapsed during the quake. A couple of ERA troopers lounged against a construction scaffold, smoking cigarettes as they watched everyone who passed by. I was careful to avoid making eye contact with them, but they were bored tonight, contenting themselves with ousting the occasional vagrant who tried to grab a few winks in one of the cement benches.

I managed to grab the Yellow Line train just before it left the station. It was the last southbound train to run tonight, and if I had missed it, I would have had to dodge downtown curfew patrols while I trudged home through the rain. At times like this I wished I still had my own car, but Marianne had taken the family wheels when we had separated. Along with the house, the savings account, and not an inconsiderable part of my dignity.

Not surprisingly, the train was almost vacant. Most of the South-side neighborhoods were under nine-to-six curfew, so anyone with any sense was already at home … if they still had a home, that is. Across the aisle, a teenage girl in a worn-out Screamin’ Magpies tour jacket was slumped over in her seat, clutching her knees between her arms; she seemed to be talking to herself, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. At the front of the car a skinny black guy with a woolen rasta cap pulled down over his ears was dozing, his head against the front window, rocking back and forth in time with the movement of the train; every so often his eyes slitted open, scanned the train, then closed again. A bearded redneck sat reading a battered paperback thriller, his lips moving slightly as he studied the sentences. An emaciated old codger stared at me constantly until I looked away. A fat lady with a cheap silver crucifix around her neck and an eerie smile. Pretty much your standard bunch of late-night riders.

I had the seat to myself. The train came out of the tunnel; once again I could see the city. For an instant, though, as I stared out the rain-slicked windows at the lights passing by, I felt a presence next to me.

I didn’t dare to look around, afraid to see what could not be reflected in the glass: a small boy, wearing a red nylon Cardinals jacket, dutifully marking up his scorecard while mustering the courage to ask me if he could enter a Little League season he would never live to see …

Can I play Little League next year?

Goddamn this train.

“Not now, Jamie,” I whispered to the window. “Please, not right now. Daddy’s tired.”

The ghost vanished as if he had never been there in the first place, leaving me only with memories of the happy days before May 17, 2012.

Let’s talk about Jericho again.

There had been plenty of advance warning that a major earthquake might one day rock the Midwest. Geologists had been warning everyone for years that the New Madrid fault was not a myth, that it was a loaded gun with its hammer cocked back, and their grim predictions were supported by history. In 1811, a superquake estimated at 8.2 on the then-nonexistent Richter scale had devastated the Mississippi River Valley, destroying pioneer settlements from Illinois to Kansas; legend told of the Mississippi River itself flowing backward during the quake, and simultaneous tremors were reported as far away as New York and Philadelphia while church bells rang in Charleston, South Carolina.

And there were other historical harbingers of disaster, major and minor quakes ranging between 5.0 and 6.2 on the Richter scale during the years between 1838 and 1976, all caused by a 130-mile seismic rift between Arkansas and Missouri, centered near the little Missouri town of New Madrid. Sometimes the quakes occurred away from the Missouri bootheel, such as the 1909 quake on the Wabash River between Illinois and Indiana, but most of the temblors happened in the region near the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, and during even the most minor quakes chimneys crumbled, roofs collapsed, and people occasionally died.

Despite geologic and historical evidence that the city was living on borrowed time, though, most people in St. Louis managed to forget that they lived just north of a bull’s-eye.

In August 1990 a New Mexico pseudoscientist named Iben Browning caused a panic by predicting that there was a fifty-fifty chance that a major earthquake would occur between the first and fifth days of December of that year. His prediction, based upon flimsy conjecture involving sunspots and lunar motion, was made during a speech to a group of St. Louis businessmen, and the sensation-hungry local media blared it to the public. By coincidence, Browning’s prediction was followed in late September by a minor 4.6 quake epicentered near Cape Giradeau. The quake did little damage, but the general public, already unnerved by war in the Middle East and a shaky national economy, went apeshit.

During a three-month silly season, St. Louis prepared itself for imminent disaster, climaxing on a Wednesday when the city’s public schools were shut down, its fire departments mobilized, and scores of citizens left town for vacation. When the prediction proved to be false-as was bound to happen, since earthquake prediction ranks with Rhine card ESP tests for unreliability-St. Louis ruefully laughed at itself and promptly began to forget everything it had learned about earthquake preparedness.

Iben Browning died a short time afterward without ever having made public comment about his apocalyptic predictions. In doing so, he gave the, city renewed overconfidence. Earthquake drills were canceled as the 1990 scare settled into the back of everyone’s mind, and the people of St. Louis once more settled into the safe, conservative mind-set that Nothing Ever Changes In Our Town. Even the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake did little to shake the city’s complacent sense of false security.

And so it went for the next two decades. Our local pundits have often observed, sometimes with barely concealed pride, that St. Louis consistently remains about five years behind the times. Nonetheless, the city was dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. New buildings were erected, old ones were torn down, and the downtown skyline began to rival Chicago for brightness. The city’s building codes were revised to imitate the earthquake-preparedness standards institutionalized in California, but they didn’t affect thousands of older buildings or private residences. Electric cars replaced the old gashogs on the highways as new federal laws phased out the use of internal combustion engines in automobiles. A new light-rail system was erected, effectively replacing the old bus lines. The local aerospace industry gradually regeared itself from making warplanes to building spacecraft components. Hemlines rose, fell, and briefly became nonexistent with the short-lived barebuns look of 2000, which contributed to yet another moral revival that lasted until most women decided they really didn’t want to wear neck-to-toe chastity gowns in 100-degree summer weather. Extrophy, smart drugs, isometrics, minimalistic education, and at least a half-dozen sociopolitical theories came and went as fads. Two economic recessions were suffered and were survived, the last one finally forcing the county and city governments to merge after more than a century of squabbling; their uneasy shotgun-marriage formed Metro St. Louis, the seventh largest city in the United States.

And there were two or three minor quakes, the largest one being a 5.2 temblor in 2006 that enabled the city to save a few dollars from having to tear down some condemned buildings in the central west end. Nothing serious. But the gun was still cocked and one day in early summer, when no one was paying attention, the hammer finally came down.

That was the day my son was taken from me.

My reverie ended as the train lurched to a halt at another station. The doors slid open and the skinny black guy, the strange fat lady, and a few others stood up to shuffle off the train. No one got on; except for the old dude who continued to stare at me with doleful contempt, the strung-out teenager, and the guy who was reading, I was alone in the car.

As the train got moving again, the old codger rose from his seat and walked unsteadily down the aisle. “The train is now in motion,” a pleasant female voice said to him from the ceiling speakers, its metronomic cadence following him as he staggered from seatback to seatback. “Please return to your seat immediately. Thank you.”

He ignored the admonition until he found the seat next to mine and lowered himself into it. He watched me for another moment, then leaned across the aisle, bracing his chapped hands on the edge of my seat.

“Repent your sins,” he hissed at me. “Jesus is coming.”

I stared back at him. “I know,” I said very softly, “because I am Jesus.”

Okay, so maybe it was a little blasphemous. I was worn out and pissed off. But I’m Jewish and Jesus was Jewish, and that made us closer kin than with some crazy old dink with a grudge against anyone who didn’t share his hateful beliefs. At any rate, it worked; his eyes widened and his chin trembled with inchoate rage, then he glared at me and, without another word, got up and made his way to the front of the train, putting as much distance between us as possible.

Good riddance. “Go forth, be fruitful and multiply,” I added, but I don’t think he got that old Woody Allen joke. Alone again, I recalled my conversation with the nameless black woman at the Muny.

I was supposed to tell John to meet her at eight o’clock tomorrow night at Clancy’s; that would be Clancy’s Bar and Grill, a bar just down the street from the paper’s offices. Since she didn’t bother to tell me her name, she must already be known to John … but certainly not by sight, considering how she had mistaken me for my colleague.

Therefore, how was John to recognize her? Not only that, but why didn’t she simply call him herself, instead of relying on a near-total stranger to pass the word?

Tell him not to trust any other messages he gets, she had said. I had to assume she meant IMs or e-mail through his PT.

I recalled the terrified look in her eyes when she discovered that the message she had received had been bogus, and what she had said.

Oh my God, it’s started …

What had started?

There was only one clue, those two words she had whispered to me before she fled from the ERA troopers. “Ruby fulcrum,” I repeated aloud. It sounded like a code phrase, although for all I knew it could be the name of a laundry detergent or a cocktail-hour drink. New, improved Ruby Fulcrum, with hexachloride. Yeah, bartender, I’ll take a ruby fulcrum with a twist of lemon. Make it a double, it’s been a bitch of a night …

I pulled Joker out of my inside pocket and opened it on my knee, exposing its card-size screen and miniature keypad. After switching to video mode, I typed, Logon data search, please.

Certainly, Gerry, Joker responded. What are you looking for?

314 search mode: ruby fulcrum, I typed.

An hourglass appeared briefly on the screen; after a few moments it was replaced by a tiny pixelized image of the Joker from the Batman comic books cavorting across the screen, maniacally hurling gas bombs in either direction. I smiled when I saw that. Bailey’s son, Craig-who was now going through a Rastafarian phase and insisted that we call him Jah instead-had recently swiped my PT while I was out to lunch and had reprogrammed it to display this Screensaver during downtime. For a while, the gag had gone even further; Joker had spoken to me in a voice resembling Jack Nicholson’s until I had forced Jah to ditch the audio gimmick, although I allowed him to leave Batman’s arch-nemesis intact. It could have been worse; Jah had done the same to Tiernan’s PT, and Dingbat had spoken like Lucille Ball until John had threatened to wring his neck.

After a while the Joker began turning cartwheels for my amusement. Behind the scenes, though, I knew that there was some serious business going on. “314 search mode” meant just that; Joker was accessing every public database available within the 314 area code, searching for any references to the phrase “ruby fulcrum.” The job was enormous; I was mildly surprised when the timer passed the thirty second mark.

I was just glad that Joker hadn’t been damaged during the events of the evening. If I had broken the little Toshiba, Pearl would have eviscerated my liver and deep-fried it, with onion rings on the side. Joker was far more than a semiretarded palmtop word processor; its neural-net architecture enabled it to answer questions posed to it in plain English, and its cellular modem potentially allowed it to access global nets if I cared to pay some hefty long-distance bills.

The train began to slow down again as it prepared to come into my station. The Clown Prince of Crime abruptly vanished from the screen and Joker came back on-line.

No reference to the phrase “ruby fulcrum” has been located. Do you wish me to continue the search?

Rats. It had been a long shot, but I had been hopeful that Joker could turn up something. The train’s brakes were beginning to squeal; glancing through the windows, I could see the streetlights of I-55 coming into view. My stop was approaching.

No thanks, I typed. Discontinue search. Logging off now.

Logoff. Good night, Gerry.

I switched off the PT, folded its cover, and slipped it back into my jacket as Busch Station rolled into sight. It had been a long night, and I was ready to go back to what now amounted to home. I stood up and made my way toward the front of the car, ignoring the train’s admonitions to take my seat until it had come to a full stop.

“Repent, sinner,” the old man hissed at me as I walked past him toward the open door. I was too exhausted to make another smart-ass reply.

Besides, if I had any sins to repent, it would be those against the ghost of a small boy who still rode these narrow-gauge rails.