The other wall has a door set into it, prison bars in the classic style. Beyond them is darkness. Billy wonders briefly why the cell is lit but not the hallway, but, with no answer forthcoming, he lets the question go.
Aside from his shoes, which are missing, he’s still in the clothes he wore to the reading. A quick pat-down, however, reveals that everything in his pockets is gone. Phone, wallet, keys. Fuck, he thinks. He realizes, distantly, that he was supposed to be at work this morning. He’s not sure what time it is or if he still has a chance to save his job, but if he’s late, he can’t call in with some excuse. He can’t call Anil to get him to cover for him.
Anil. It occurs to Billy suddenly that he doesn’t know where Anil is or whether he’s safe. Billy knows nothing about anything that happened after the Tasing. For all he knows, Anil, the Ghoul, Denver, Elisa, they could all be trampled to death.
Okay, Billy thinks. That kind of thinking? Not helpful.
It’s your fault if it’s true, he thinks. Everyone was there because of you.
One thing at a time. He looks under the bunk and finds his shoes there. They still have laces in them, interesting. So he could at least still kill himself. Not really his number one choice at the moment but it feels good to at least have an option, any option. He looks around, briefly, for a beam he could hang himself from, finds nothing. But still. He feels certain he could make his laces into some kind of noose if he tried hard enough. He looks at the shoes in his lap, mentally unlaces them, tries out patterns of knots in his head, and eventually realizes he has absolutely no idea how he’d go about using his shoelaces to kill himself. He wishes, for a moment, that he had access to the Internet.
He puts his shoes on.
He tries standing. It hurts, but he can do it. Something in his pelvis seems banged out of alignment; he feels like if he twists at the waist something will pop and accord a degree of relief. He attempts a few test pivots but they don’t help.
He looks around. Something about the whole cell feels familiar. He can’t quite place it. He looks at the combination sink/toilet unit. It’s ingeniously designed, in a kind of depressing way, but he has a foggy memory of having marveled at this precise ingenious design at some point in the past. Maybe just from some stock photo of a prison cell, accompanying some article he read once upon a time? He looks back at the sink/toilet unit, and he thinks I’ve been here before.
That can’t be right. He’s never been in jail. The closest he came was one time that he had to run from the cops: that was also, he remembers, the first night he met Jørgen, three years ago this past summer.
He recalls the story. The Ghoul had somehow fallen in with this group of bored German pyrotechnicians, three guys in town to engineer special effects for an alien invasion movie that was annoying everyone by shutting down streets all over Manhattan. These guys—young, severe-looking guys from Berlin—were really only needed to orchestrate a few big explosions, which had gotten delayed, so they had a lot of time during which they were basically expected to wait around and do nothing. They quickly grew weary of fucking around in their hotel, the Ghoul explained to Billy, so they had begun hanging out in this art space in the Bronx, taking suggestions for things around the city that could be exploded, and then actually going ahead and exploding them, as little under-the-radar art events, or something. Their next event involved plans to detonate a row of chemical toilets at the edge of a torn-up lot down in Brighton. Billy and the Ghoul had been feeling pretty bored themselves that summer, and so when the night came, they went.
They gathered with others in the pleasant early dusk, watching the German guys drill holes and run wires mirthlessly at the row of toilets, trying to make sense of the badly-translated Situationist pamphlets that had been passed out to the crowd, drinking wide-mouths. And this guy Jørgen had come over and engaged Billy in conversation. They got to arguing about the merits of Olde English 800 versus Colt 45, something like that, and by the time the German dudes shrilled upon their whistles to indicate that they were ready, Billy had thought Hey, maybe I’m making a friend.
One more whistle blast. Billy, Jørgen, and the Ghoul huddled together behind an army-green plastic tarp. And then the lead German threw a switch and the toilets blew.
It remains a sight that comes to Billy’s mind whenever he’s trying to define beauty.
He remembers a string of tiny but deafening bangs crisscrossing the base of the toilets, opening a rift through which sluiced out a marvelously disgusting blue-green tide of chemicals and sewage, the sight of which elicited a tremendous collective groan from the audience, who had suddenly become concerned about their footwear, which they hadn’t been, just a moment before. One second later the plastic shells of the toilets were sundered by ribbons of terrifying white fire, a fire so hot and bright that it clearly indicated the presence of fantastic military-grade combustibles, the kind of thing that ordinary citizens just should not have. At the heart of the inferno, the toilets held for a second and then simply liquefied, becoming a pool of molten slime, still burning, producing a towering, fetid black cloud. And that’s when two cop cars screeched into the lot, their whirling lights suffusing the great, persistent pillar of smoke with color: red and blue, playing together to produce the most lovely range of violets. It seemed maybe like it had been intended as a final touch, and the audience broke into confused applause as the cops began barking imperatives through a megaphone.