Silverfish

He yelled at 'em, man, must've been half an hour or more. Threatened
'em, said he'd sue, he'd get 'em, he'd firebomb the fuckin' joint.
Garbage, every fuckin' word. He knew he had it coming. Jumped right
into it, you want to know the truth.

He left straight after, took a right on 7th and walked for a while, mad
as hell. Didn't do no good. Wind was howling like the ghost train.
Crashed half-blind into some hotel, past the doorman, into the lift.
Barked at the bellhop: Bar. The bellhop whupped him up to the 90th
floor. Speeda light. Man. He woulda lost his stomach if he hadn't've
been so sick already.

Bottle of scotch, glass, rocks. No point messin'. He flung down
dollars, didn't count them, found a table, sat down. There was a woman
at the bar, young and rich and stupid-looking. He looked away, poured a
scotch, a second, a third. Another woman came through. She eyed him.
Jesus, not now. He moved off, looking for space, found a spot on the
terrace outside. Stared down and out over the city, thinking, this used
to be my town. He despised himself. He despised everybody. He poured
scotch. He sat in the wind, drank, tried to put all the pieces
together, but whichever way he tried to work them, he couldn't make
them fit.

The city's doing just fine without him. The lights are beautiful.
Sounds drift up; traffic hum, banging doors, sirens, shouting.
Seagulls, even. The soundtrack of New York. He catches one or two,
throws them back. The night gets deeper, blacker, later. The wind drops
a little. A star appears. Two stars, three, twenty. Al goes on sitting,
mulling, drinking scotch, trying to make it all work out.

---

Sarah gets stress headaches. They aren't so bad if she doesn't fight
them too hard. They like to sit on her shoulder and wind themselves
round her neck and they whisper things in her ear but she can never
quite hear them and she has to strain to understand. They don't hurt
her much but they cut her off from what's around and about and then she
gets anxious about how to talk to people and is her skirt still on and
can she cross the road OK on her own.

Other times, they go after her eyes. Sight distortion, it's called. It
looks like silverfish, falling to her left or her right, squirming,
shimmying, hissing and spitting and catching in the light. They come at
her, pick at her, pinch her and poke her, but if she tries to catch
them, they run away.

You'd think she'd be scared, so high up, but she's not. She feels safe,
or she would do, if she knew what it meant. The voices go quiet and the
fish, well, the fish can't cut it. They grow feeble and wispy in the
glow from the city.

The bar is called the Skyscraper, which is a very good name for it.
It's in the Campbell Hotel off Madison, where Sarah goes to work. Sarah
doesn't think the hotel can get very many guests because she hardly
ever sees any. The Skyscraper is solitary, a bit dusty and empty, like
the city put it away somewhere safe and forgot about it.

Tonight, they've shut the night out. There are pale, flimsy curtains
from ceiling to floor and the doors to the terrace look closed. It
doesn't matter; they never lock them. She'll take her wine, go outside,
gaze at the city and pretend she's alone.

---

Al has his back to the wall. The bottle is going down; he's making
inroads. Getting somewhere at last, maybe dreaming a little. He was a
night flyer once, whooping, swooping, circling round places he'd never
been, might never go. Come dawn, he'd turn homewards, a ten-year old
Cinderella, and head for the schoolyard. He'd hover there, taunting,
you can't catch me Ha Ha Ha, then help, shit, he'd be falling,
struggling to get back up, the bad boys grabbing his ankles, then his
shoulders, gotcha, pulling him down, ready to kill. Lost superpowers.
Every damn time.

It strikes Al that maybe he doesn't always learn from his experiences,
exactly.

The door, goddammit. His eyes slide leftwards. It's the woman from
earlier. He came out here to get away from her, ferchrissakes. But she
doesn't spot him, it seems. She wanders towards the other end of the
terrace, dawdling a little, peaceful-looking, then disappears. Briefly,
curiously, he wonders where she's gone. The thought fades. Maybe she
jumped. Whatever. Hey, it's one way out. He goes back to his staring,
and thinking, and drinking.

---

Sarah turns the terrace corner and walks on towards the river. She can
see everything, very clearly. The city, but that's behind her now. The
docks, the ferries, some other sorts of boats, New Jersey. Headlights
line up for the tunnel in neat grid diagrams, snapping out click click
click, like suicides. And on a very clear day, you can see
Philadelphia.

She stops at the next corner, leans against the wall, gazing but not
really seeing. Like Al, she is thinking backwards.

She was a kid when the headaches started, on a school trip. Notre Dame,
that day. They weren't that impressed, not till they climbed the tower.
You could see all of Paris and then even further. It was fantastic. She
scratched her name on the steeple with a french franc. You could find
it for yourself if you went up and looked. Sarah 72, it says, with a
wonky six-pointed star.

Twenty minutes or so after, a man jumped off the top. Or fell off,
maybe, she couldn't tell. They were looking up at where they'd been,
smaning and pointing at the little pin people, and then one of the
little pin people got detached from the others, came over the edge and
dropped down towards them.

The man fell lying flat, like he was asleep in bed. He swayed to the
left, to the right, to the left, as if he was tied to a pendulum. He
came down very, very slowly. When he reached the pavement, she felt a
long slow boom that swallowed up the square around her and then gently
dropped away. He lay still for a little while, then bounced up, a long
way, and slipped back down to the ground without a sound. After that,
he didn't move at all.

It was quieter than any quiet you've ever heard. The cars stopped
moving, the buses stopped clanking, there was no talking or shouting.
Even the birds were still. Sarah couldn't move or speak or breathe. She
could only stand and look, thinking, help, quick, someone should do
something, someone should come, someone should phone an ambulance, but
no-one moved and no-one came, and then the sounds rushed back in louder
than you can believe and there were sirens and someone was screaming in
her head, on and on and on, and she didn't ever remember the
rest.

---

A few yards away, it comes to Al that his thinking is done. All figured
out. Man. First time in his life, if you think about it. He should have
taken it up years ago. Shame, but what the hell. Now he knows what to
do.
---

Sarah shakes herself a little. Time to pick up her coat, go home,
perhaps she'll hail a cab. She walks back the way she came, towards the
city.

---
Al decides it's time to leave.

---

As Sarah turns the corner, she sees him go.

---

Some of the boys from downstairs are here to give Louis a hand closing
up. They're cheerful young guys and they like to make sure Lou gets
away on the nail because Lou is kind of an old guy and the streets can
be a little mean at this hour. Lou appreciates the help and the chat
and he pours them a beer and so they get down to it, collecting up
coasters, wiping down tables, loading the dishwasher, emptying
ashtrays, polishing glasses, pulling the curtains closed, vacuuming the
floor, rapping and laughing and talking big. They're loud and they're
quick and they're busy and none of them sees when the guy on the
terrace stands, steps up on to the railing, flips a finger at the city
below and disappears. And nobody hears the glass fall to the ground and
smash because c'mon, a broken wineglass don't make so much noise. So
Lou and his boys flick the lights out, triple-lock the door to the bar
and go, the boys back to work and Lou, into the night.

---

There's not a sound anywhere. You could hear a pin drop, in
Philadelphia. Sarah stands perfectly still and waits for the
grown-ups.

A bit later, the screaming starts. She remembers what to do, staggers
inside, thinking mixed-up sliced-up thoughts of sirens, crime tape,
policemen, blue lights flashing, ambulances. The lights are all out.
Christ. There's no-one here. She lurches for the exit, banging into
stools and tables, knocking things over, and she reaches the main door,
but although she pulls it and pushes and beats it with her hands, she
can't make it open. Too weak. She stumbles. And she feels herself
floating downwards, a very long way, swaying to the left, to the right.
She tries to shout for help but no sound comes out and she falls to the
ground, the shock ramming through every cell, and she is still.

Outside, the night wears on. It is colder. The stars start to cover the
sky as the lights of the city begin to go out, first here and there,
after a while in their hundreds and thousands. Sarah hears none of it.
They are back sitting on her shoulder, winding themselves around her
neck, whispering, poking, shouting, you did it, Sarah, you did it
again. Then come the fish but now they are hard, glittering, blinding
and she can see them, they're not fish, they're real, they're lumps,
diamond sharp, twisting and flashing, pinching and scratching to start
with then biting into her, thumping, bruising, cutting. They fall
faster and faster, huge flashing boulders. She flails, screams, tries
to protect herself, her face, her body, her arms, but there are so many
and they are falling on her so fast and so hard that they cover her
body and after a while, she is buried underneath them, and after that,
she can't hear or see or feel anything. Nothing at all.

---

Somewhere outside, Al is flying.

---

Hours pass. A snake of pale light appears in the night sky over Jersey.
You could see it for yourself, if you were out on the terrace. The
stars are thinning out and new lights are clicking on here and there in
the city below. A few cars appear on the streets. The early bird ferry
docks at the Hoboken gate. The wind picks up and nudges into the bar
through the open terrace door, picking up the curtains and letting in
little puffs of grey dawn light. Sarah lies on the ground under the
boulders. A man steps into the bar through the terrace doors.

Sarah is dead so there's no need for her to speak, but she can feel
something, a touch maybe, a little scrape. Something is picking away at
the blackness in front of her eyes. Each piece falls to the ground with
a little clink. She feels herself being pulled up and the stones fall
away, bouncing, clattering, rolling off under sofas and chairs and
tables. Standing in front of her is a man, dusting off his hands,
smiling at her, a nice, crooked smile, a
well-come-on-then-what-are-we-all-waiting-for kind of smile. Maybe she
recognises him, but it doesn't really matter.

I was planning to go home in a cab, she explains, but I killed two
people by mistake, and I have a headache.

The man is still smiling. No, he says, no headaches, not any more. You
didn't kill anyone. Come and see what I can see.

She says no, listen, I died, I was buried in diamonds. Yes, he says, I
can see them, they're all over the place. Sarah looks, and the floor of
the bar is covered with diamonds.

He leans down, picks one of them up and puts it in his pocket. Come
along, he says. He takes her hand and leads her back to the terrace
doors. Come outside, Sarah, he says, come and look, but Sarah shrinks
back. No thank you, she says, I think I'll just stay in here.

He puts his hand in his pocket and pulls out the diamond. Sarah, he
says, you can see all of Paris and then even further. And on a clear
day, you can see Philadelphia.

He holds out the diamond for Sarah to see. It is star-shaped, wonky and
six-pointed.

He says, do you understand now? She says yes, she understands, and she
is smiling. She steps outside and takes his hand. Al pulls her up
carefully onto the railing. They look at each other, look at the sky,
look at the city, smile again, and then, they disappear.