Empire City by Matt Gallagher

Author:Matt Gallagher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2020-04-27T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

They walked alleys and unlit side streets, together in their steps, alone with their thoughts. Jean-Jacques didn’t ask where they were going and Emmanuel didn’t say. Jean-Jacques was glad for the quiet. He had a lot to mull over.

They reached a turtle shell of an overpass. Emmanuel walked up its small concrete slope. Jean-Jacques followed. They emerged onto an elevated train platform, long ago abandoned by the city. Moonlight revealed tracks covered in urban scrub, broken bottles and plastic bags and empty spray paint containers tangled up in patches of wild pale grass. In spots Jean-Jacques felt around with his boots to make sure track was still there. The summer night yo-yoed with indolence as they walked and it was strange to Jean-Jacques, being lost in his own nowhere instead of somewhere else’s.

Below them, outlines of sprawling warehouses and trucking depots dotted the nightscape. Many were retrofitted spaces, breweries a century before, the last vestiges from a far-gone wave of refugees fleeing the Ottoman Purges. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren had scattered to the winds, Jean-Jacques thought, because once money got made, people here never stopped immigrating, even if they called it something else. To nicer districts. To suburbia. To the far West or deep South. Back to the old homeland, even, once it was safe again, for a semester of fuzzy nostalgia and partying. Carrying a name with scars but none of the memories. Your progeny get soft and stupid: that was the real American dream.

Did Jean-Jacques want that for future Saint-Preuxs? Sure, he thought. Why not. As long as they still know what duty means.

Emmanuel cleared his throat. He wanted to talk. Jean-Jacques knew he needed to play dumb about the Mayday Front. His cousin needed to be the one to bring him there.

“Well. Those Sheepdogs seem nice.”

His cousin forced a laugh. Those old babylons had been hired by Wall Street, he said. By the Council of Victors. To protect their business interests. The colonies were a moneymaker. Sending broken-ass veterans to wilderness camps, isolated islands away from public scrutiny, to serve as lab rats. Did Jean-Jacques know the government paid the colonies by the head? They wanted more bodies. They needed more bodies. It was all connected, Emmanuel explained, for capitalism and profit and American comfort. It was wrong. It was immoral. Emmanuel hadn’t thought much about it growing up, because no one did. The colonies seemed normal, seemed humane. They were anything but. He’d been enlightened recently. He’d become informed.

“Think about it,” Emmanuel said. “That could be you someday. I mean, it won’t be. You got your shit together. But still.”

Jean-Jacques just nodded. Of course a kid who did strange things like baptize strangers on the street would grow up to find ideas like this. He should’ve known all along. Weird boys become weird men.

About a mile along the tracks, they rounded a long bend. Slivers of white light bladed the darkness. Little Haiti’s Market Street, the Mache, came into view. Hundreds of bodies packed its walkway, more crowded than usual because of the long holiday weekend.

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