How different can it be? he asked himself. It’s still Empire City. Sort of.
At the station, Sebastian approached a fare card machine. He missed being able to buy subway tokens from bored transit employees, but times had changed. The machine answered him in Japanese. He’d pressed the wrong button. The machine kept answering in Japanese. Through trial and error, he eventually replenished his card. The line for the body scanners was longer than he’d have preferred, but he only waited for ten minutes. No tourists to foul things up, Sebastian thought. Praise the Trinity.
The subway car was crowded and smelled of human stink and Sebastian kept his back against the door but kept getting in the way of people getting on and off and it annoyed them, and him, too. He felt his senses flaring up again, so he concentrated on breathing and focused, as much as he could, on being normal. This is democracy in motion, he told himself. Savor it. He thought of the subway bombing from the year before that’d killed eleven people and would’ve killed more if not for the off-duty cop, but that wasn’t helping anything so he stopped. His ears popped as the subway passed under the river and a girl with bug eyes and popsicle lips bumped into him and looked up at him like it wasn’t her fault, even though she’d been the one moving. Sebastian gripped his sunglasses and aimed them at the girl, making a hushed laser-beam sound. The bug eyes got buggier and the girl smiled wide. Despite himself, Sebastian smiled, too.
He got off at the fourth stop in Gypsy Town; deep enough into the district, but not that deep. The station seemed grungy to his eyes, and not in a quaint way. The walls were cracking, the concrete platforms dirty, the bums more deadbeat Beat than artful dodger. The scent of sour piss filled his nostrils and he thought whomever it belonged to needed to drink more water. The subway clattered down the tunnel like a horse on the trail, pushing farther into the city’s outlands. Sebastian stood alone on the platform and fingered the pills in his pocket, considering turning back. Dorsett only drank at a couple of places. He’d be easy enough to track down.
Sebastian was nervous, and embarrassed because of it. You drove into a fucking war zone in a fucking Audi, he reminded himself. You’re no pussy. He found stairs and climbed them.
Stoplights and muddy stars exposed a more volatile sort of energy than across the river, as if the streets themselves had drank too much caffeine. Bars and delis and sidewalk vendors snapped with aggressive gladness. People yelled and people moved, but with an aimlessness Sebastian couldn’t reason with. He hurried past them, knowing no other way to walk. He found himself not swallowed up in a sea of fringed vests and black jeans and wallet chains, as expected, but just part of another noisy crowd, as common and loud as any other. He walked half a block, then turned around after realizing he’d been going the wrong way.
“Me Want Wonder.” He passed over a philosophizing Cookie Monster stenciled into the sidewalk. “Om nom nom nom.”
In front of a grocery store, a young man around high school age was trying to hand out pamphlets. People parted around him like shadows under a flashlight. He wore the uniform of a suburban prep—lightweight collared shirt with rolled-up sleeves and madras-pattern shorts—and a powder-blue baseball cap.
An ultra, Sebastian thought. They’re even here now!
“Hello, sir. Have you helped the homeland today?” the high schooler said to Sebastian, holding out a pamphlet. The cap carried the standard ultra slogan FREEDOM BEAST, though there were variations.
“Last name is Rios.” Sebastian drew out the last syllable and pushed past the young ultra and his pamphlet, reminding himself that even a quick punch to the gut would qualify as assaulting a minor. “You wouldn’t want me.”
Sebastian then blew a kiss to the kid, who recoiled. He knew he should be above messing with a teenager. And yet.
The ultras had made a lot of noise about cleaving its white supremacist wing over the past few years, but Sebastian figured that didn’t matter to the disciples with the pamphlets. He knew it didn’t matter to him. Whatever they were claiming to be at the moment—a service organization, a political action committee, just a good ol’ fashioned group of nationalist expression—Sebastian doubted it would ever appeal to him. “Freedom Beast.” That meant supporting the state no matter what (for its rule-of-law members) but also defying the state as often as possible (for its libertarian members). It was all rather mystifying.
Their loudest position centered on a return to military conscription and eliminating the International Legion. They believed that would result in two things: less foreign intervention and stricter immigration. Sebastian agreed vaguely with the first, though it was hard for him to imagine that world. Only the oldest of the old radicals talked of an America like that. He found the second racist, and not in any playful, ironic way. Say what you would about the Legion’s methods, but it granted citizenship to its fighters. That was important, Sebastian thought. Kept fresh the American dream.
A block from the grocery store, Sebastian checked the map on his phone to make sure he didn’t get lost again, and turned left at the next cross street. It led him to an isolated building surrounded by empty cement lots. A flickering streetlight at the corner revealed a four-story structure made of brick and sandstone trim. A pointed roof shot from the top in a rush, matched by a chimney on the side. Broken stained-glass windows covered much of the front, parallel to a slab of gray stone with the year “1876” carved into it. A decaying wood sign hung underneath the windows, bearing words written in Hebrew or Yiddish or something. Sebastian wasn’t sure.
“A real temple,” he said to himself. “Funny.”
Dance music rumbled from somewhere beneath the building. Sebastian walked around to the far side of the temple and spotted a staircase. Following the noise of the music and lights intermittently flashing blue and yellow, he came to an open steel door. A thin woman with a long neck and scarf met him there, handing over two drink tickets without a word or eye contact.
The basement was dim, the air in it dank. Sebastian waded into the throng, some of whom were indeed wearing fringed vests and black jeans and wallet chains. It was standing room only, fifty or so people jammed into darkness under dueling strobe lights. Onstage, a lanky bearded man wrapped in a camo poncho read slam poetry, his words attempting to match the beat and rhythm of the music. Sebastian found a pillar in the back to lean against.
“Splish splash, a fascist was taking a bath,” the man whispered into the microphone. “All alone on a knock knocking night.” Then he began chanting. “Who’s there? Life! Liberty! The pursuit of diggity! Like life without the F. Or country without the cunt.” His voice lowered in timbre and pace. “The fever dream… indulges. The gobblers… wargasm and… the… chickenhawks… crow. So… we… they… I… fought. The rest is. Is? Is!” Now he raised his voice. “Who will survive America? Another man’s morning, another son’s gun!” And, again, a whisper. “My supper is maroon. My star is spoon. Forever fleeting, looms.”
Sebastian was beside himself. If a sense of shame didn’t keep a person from free association like this, some sort of social contract needed to. The man dropped the microphone and walked offstage, out of view. A voice in the crowd yelled “Golf clap!” and a small round of polite applause followed.