Spider Robinson - Night Of Power

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Night Of Power

reproduced in whole or in part by any means without permission from the

This is a work of fiction, newly revised for this 1994 edition by the

author. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional,

and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

CHAPTER ONE

"The infant mortality rate in Central Harlem and the Fort Greene section

of Brooklyn is almost double the city rate, and twice as high as the national

rate, according to a recent report.

"The report...showed that of every 1,000 babies born in 1980, 27.8 in

Central Harlem died and 26.6 in Fort Greene died. The citywide infant

mortality rate was 16.1 per 1,000 births compared with 12.5 per 1,000 births

nationwide....

"The infant mortality rate for minorities here in 1979 was 68% greater

than the rate among white New Yorkers, the report indicated.

"The infant mortality rate is an indicator used to measure the quality

of life..."

-Esther Ross, New York Amsterdam News, August 21, 1982

"In the first years after the [First World] War, 70 black Americans were

lynched, many of them still in uniform. Fourteen were burned publicly by white

citizens; 11 of them were burned alive.

During the 'Red Summer' of 1919, there were no fewer than 25 race riots

across the country. A riot in the nation's capitol lasted 3 days; in Chicago,

38 people were killed and 537 injured during 13 days of mob rule."

-C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Muslims in America

"The white man need expect no more Negro blood to be shed on his

behalf...the dying to be done by the black man in the future will be done to

make himself free."

-Marcus Garvey, 1920

"There's a shitstorm coming."

-Norman Mailer, The White Negro

It was, of course, just after they had passed the last exit from the New

England Thruway that the car cleared its throat apologetically.

"Ahem. Excuse me," it said with its usual irritating diffidence. "I will

be needing fuel within the next fifty klicks."

Russell Grant groaned silently; had traffic permitted, he would have

rolled his eyes skyward.

"Oh, good," fourteen-year-old Jennifer said from her niche in the back

seat, confirming his worst fear. "I've been needing a bathroom for simply

klicks."

"Me too," Dena agreed before he could speak, and Russell's dismay

increased.

"Sorry, ladies," he said to both of his passengers and the car. "We just

left the land of rest-stops behind. The next toilet you see will be called New

York." And we'll be lucky to find proper fuel there, he thought to himself;

I'll probably have to leave the carburetor set for gasoline.

"Dad-ee," Jennifer cried in horror. "Why didn't you tell me before we

passed the exit?"

"For the same reason you didn't ask me, princess," he said as patiently

as he could. Jennifer required him to explain the obvious considerably less

often than might most fourteen-year-olds; consequently he tried to bear her

occasional lapses. "Because I didn't think of it. Sorry."

"Can't be helped," his wife said at once. "We'll survive, Jennifer. Hang

on to it-it's good exercise."

Russell almost glanced at Dena, wondering if she meant what he thought

she meant. But he preferred not to find out.

Besides, the road demanded his full attention. "Get the map for me,

would you, hon?"

Dena keyed it to display on her side of the windshield.

"We want the Bruckner Expressway, I think. It'll say either that or

'Route 278.'"

"Got it." He liked the way his wife gave directions. Short, clear,

accurate. It was one of several thousand things about her that he liked.

They came to a toll booth. Dena got out the coins, and he fed them to

the hopper when they reached it. "Welcome to the Empire State," Jennifer read

aloud.

It was as though the invisible border between Connecticut and the State

of New York had real, tangible existence; things changed. It began

subliminally. The traffic seemed no heavier or more aggressive than it had

been since Boston-but the individual cars were older, shabbier, more battle-

scarred. Potholes became worse, then more frequent.

The sky itself seemed to darken just perceptibly.

But the first change that Russell Grant consciously noticed was the

sound. It grew from a hum to a distant rumble, audible even over the sound of

traffic and the rush of air through his open window.

The realization of what he was hearing struck him all at once. It was

the approach of New York City. The three days' drive from Halifax, Nova Scotia

was nearly over.

Russell was more than ready for the trip to end: his whole body was one

large cramp. Above and beyond the physical discomforts, he had been, for the

last eight hundred klicks or so, an uneasy combination of bored silly and

scared to death, with absolutely nothing to do except meditate, chat with his

wife and daughter, listen to music, watch yellow and white lines whiz at him,

and foil the occasional and unpredictable attempt of a homicidal psychopath to

kill them all.

But as he realized now how eager he was for this journey to end, Russell

realized simultaneously, and for the first time, how little prepared he was to

reach his destination. A small voice in his head whispered, you have not

thought this thing through. Somehow in the last umptyhundred klicks of highway

narcosis, of jumbled thoughts and boredom, he had neglected to get ready for

New York.

It rumbled now on his horizon, approaching at over 100 kph, and heaven

help him if he slowed down.

"Damn," he said, trying to sound cheerful. "I can actually hear the city

coming."

"I can smell it," Jennifer said grumpily. She was not ready for New York

either.

Russell raised the car windows and put the air conditioning on low.

"Nonsense. That's the East River you're smelling. The smell of the city itself

could never penetrate that."

But his attempt at light humour fell through, because by then they were

barreling through the South Bronx, and what was visible to their right struck

them all speechless.

"Harsh!" Jennifer was the first of the three to regain her powers of

speech. She was a prodigiously bright and imaginative child; both her father

and stepmother had laboured mightily-and successfully-to develop her faculty

of empathy; nonetheless, she was fourteen years old. The horror of the South

Bronx in the year of Our Lord 1999 was, to her, primarily an aesthetic

offense.

"Fuck," Russell breathed finally. He ordinarily made a point of cussing

creatively, but on this occasion invention failed him. "It's worse than I

remember. It's worse than I read. It's worse than I imagined."

Russell was forty-eight years old. He had been born in New York, but had

not lived there since early adolescence; he had been living in Canada, in the

pleasant seaport city of Halifax, for the last twenty-odd years. Aesthetic

dismay was a strong component of his own reaction. He was a designer; this was

obscenity. But human empathy for the pain implicit in what he was seeing

shocked him just as badly.

And there was a third component to his emotional turmoil, represented by

the foreground past which he saw the South Bronx. In the background, the

burned out cars were black; the burned out buildings were black; the

glassless, curtainless windows opened onto a deeper black; the doomed faces

seen in some of those windows were mostly black; the few doomed people visible

on the streets were black. He saw all this past the hair, the nape and part of

the left cheek of his wife, all of which were also black.

Dena's curly hair was the kind of black that is sometimes called blue

black. Her complexion was very close to true black, the deep, glowing black of

lightly burnished obsidian, and as she turned her face forward Russell saw

that it might as well have been carved out of that volcanic glass.

What must it be like for her? he wondered. His designer's mind groped

for an analogy. Perhaps an American Jew driving past Dachau in a brand new

Ford, while the ovens were still in operation? That made him the Nazi behind

the wheel. Dena had been born and raised in Halifax-not in the North Preston

ghetto outside Dartmouth, or in the tiny slum district around Gottingen

Street, but in the South End of the city. Both of her parents full professors

at Dalhousie University, she had been one of the comparative handful of

Haligonian blacks who grew up in, and were fully accepted into, white society.

Poor blacks were as despised and feared in Halifax as in any other city

(although some met with great tolerance in rural Nova Scotia, where everyone

was poor), but middle-class blacks fitted in well.

Halifax was one of the few remaining cities in North America in which

interracial couples-such as Russell and Dena-could walk together anywhere

without the slightest paranoia. While no black grew up anywhere without a deep

awareness of racism, Dena had throughout her life been subjected to about the

absolute minimum of personal contact with it.

Now they were racing together toward the Big Apple.

Tell me again, he said to himself, why this is necessary.

Remind me, please.

Okay. Dena is a dancer. Not, Dena dances sometimes, or Dena has done a

lot of dancing, or even Dena dearly loves to dance. Dena is a dancer, a Modern

dancer. Not a choreographer, a dance maker. Not a particularly good teacher. A

dancer. Give her some choreography, put a dance on her, and she will go out

there and dance it better than almost anyone on earth, make it live and sing.

Dena is a gifted dancer, gifted by God. And God is an Indian giver.

Dena is a thirty-seven-year-old dancer...

The injuries have been coming more frequently, taking longer to heal,

healing imperfectly. A normal human being would probably envy Dena her

physical conditioning; nonetheless she has no more than one or two good years

left. If that long: tomorrow an ankle or a knee could let go, just like that,

or that fourth lumbar could decide to start chewing on her sciatic again-and

not let up this time.

And her old friend Lisa Dann has offered her a chance-one last chance-to

dance in New York, and not just in New York but at the Joyce Theatre, the

showcase, the worldwide Mecca of Modern dance. The opportunity cannot be

passed up...and so the Grant family is entering the combat zone.

Only temporarily, Russell reminded himself. Only for three months. A

quick smash-and-grab; hopefully we'll be in and out before the city notices

we're there.

As if on cue, the skyline of Manhattan appeared on the port bow,

shimmering in the heat.

"There it is," Russell said a little too jovially, glad to end the

uneasy silence in the car. "La Grande Pomme."

"Gee." Jennifer was impressed. Child-geniuses were even harder to

impress than normal fourteen-year-olds-but this was New York.

"Sure looks pretty," Dena said quietly. (Was there the slightest hint of

emphasis on the second word?)

"Just look at the energy being thrown away," Russell said.

"One day they're going to have to put a Fuller Dome over that town."

"Yuck," Dena said as politely as that syllable can be said.

"New York is dark enough already."

"Transparent dome."

"And how long would it stay transparent over that smog?"

"Hmmm. Touché. But dammit, look at that thing. You couldn't design a

more efficient energy waster-all those hot spires sticking out into ocean

breeze, like the biggest radiator in the world. The only thing I can think of

that has that much built-in waste is..." His voice trailed off.

Dena waited, then said softly, "Something?"

"Huh. It just came to me. The two most energy-wasteful appliances in the

world. Just as stupid, in their own way, as that skyline. Two of the most

common appliances in the world-naturally."

"CD players and VCRs," Jennifer said at once.

Russell chuckled. "No, princess. The refrigerator and the stove. A

fridge spills money on the floor every time you open it. And an oven spills

money on the ceiling the same way. Now, if you designed a fridge to lay on its

back, like a freezer, and moved the heat-sucker so it wouldn't be

underneath...or if you designed an oven door to roll up like a garage door..."

"The fridge would take up too much room," Dena said argumentatively.

"And it'd be too hard to get at stuff in it."

"Well, maybe...but suppose you combined the two, the fridge and the

stove? Silly to have a heat-maker and a heat-loser side by side, unconnected."

"I don't see it. Connect them how?"

He did not answer. He went instead into something as near to a warm

creative fog as is possible for a man driving on a New York highway. His women

left him alone in it; he did not see the glance they exchanged. The fog lasted

through several successive toll booths, all the way through the Bronx and

across the Triboro Bridge.

And then he heard Dena's cry, and looked to his left.

"Creeping Jesus!"

The overpass that led to the FDR Drive was down. Russell knew just

enough about municipal construction to be certain that it had been dynamited,

recently, by a freelancer. That shocked him, but not as badly as the secondary

realization that he was now committed to driving his family through Harlem,

with a near-empty fuel tank.

Dena was already reading the map display. "Left on Second Avenue."

Traffic was slowing drastically.

"No good. Look." Second Avenue was sealed off by what looked like police

barricades. "I'll try Third."

"That's no good either-it's one-way uptown."

"Slithering mother of shitcakes and syrup." Traffic came to a halt, then

began a spasmodic crawl.

Jennifer picked up on the sudden increase of tension.

"What is it? What's wrong, Daddy?"

"Nothing, honey," Dena said. "Just a detour."

Russell glanced around: no other white motorists were visible anywhere.

Belatedly he remembered that the prudent New York driver monitors the radio

traffic bulletins. "What's the next entrance to the FDR south of here?" he

asked.

"This map doesn't say."

"Great."

At the beginning of their trip, Russell had, over Jennifer's protests,

tossed the car phone into the trunk. The symbolic gesture now seemed

excessive...

They left the bridge, heading west at an average speed of perhaps twenty

kph, stop and go. The squalor of East 125th Street was indescribable, on the

verge of incomprehensible. Those buildings still standing should not have

been. Garbage lined the street on both sides, Russell noted one abandoned

building which seemed to be entirely filled with trash from sidewalk to

rooftop. An incredible swarm of people surged on all sides, the summer sun

boiling them in their pitiful clothes. Some were in uniform; Russell reminded

himself that this country, unlike his own, was at war. (A jungle war-in

Africa. What must that be like for a black G.I.?) The sound, the chaos, defied

belief, and the smell penetrated into the air-conditioned car.

Russell had once spent a few days in Bombay, on the edge of a slum

district: this was worse. The only good news this neighborhood had seen in

years was the recent conquest of AIDS; intravenous drug users (and their

suppliers) must still be rejoicing.

The same question kept occurring to him as he drove, searching

feverishly for a way-any way-off 125th Street.

The question was: Why aren't they killing me? What is preventing these

people from opening my car like a can of deviled ham and pulling me out and

killing me with their hands and teeth? If I had to live here, and I saw a man

driving through who obviously did not have to live here, I'd kill him. And it

can't help, having Dena in the car...

He kept recoiling from the last thought.

Traffic came to a complete halt as they reached Third Avenue. A tomato

struck Russell's window, burst like a red blossom. He decided that his most

pressing need was to remain in motion at all costs; he turned uptown, shutting

down the air-conditioning. It was powered by a solar collector on the roof-one

of his many design modifications to his car-and its energy could give him a

few more blocks if his alcohol fuel tanks ran completely dry. He was up to

128th Street before he saw his chance, turned left and got the car up to forty

kph. But when he turned south on Lexington, he learned what had been holding

up traffic on 125th: the street was torn up from Lexington to Park for sewer

repair. He was forced to dogleg again, and again, which brought him up against

Marcus Garvey Park-where his luck ran out.

A red light immobilized him at a T-intersection, near an entrance to the

Park. Four youths saw him, grinned at each other, and left the Park to

approach the car.

His fumbling fingers could not identify the lock-all-doors button on the

armrest, and he did not want to take his eyes off the youths. "Jennifer, are

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NightOfPower(c)1985bySpiderRobinson;allrightsreserved.Thisbookmaynotbereproducedinwholeorinpartbyanymeanswithoutpermissionfromthecopyrightholder.ForinformationcontactSpiderRobinsonthroughBibliobytes.Thisisaworkoffiction,newlyrevisedforthis1994editionbytheauthor.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinth...

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Spider Robinson - Night Of Power

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