traveled for a few weeks. She was pretty but she had an intravenous drug habit. He wouldn't have sex with her. He'd seen two advanced AIDS patients coming out of a burning Harlem walk-up once, living skeletons. Besides, he hadn't survived the WTC just to get whacked a stupid way. His refusal to fuck had the effect of making the girl do more drugs. But he knew that if he stayed with her, he might eventually have sex with her, maybe shoot some of the heroin she kept in her knapsack. He told her he was going to leave and she tearfully admitted this was a good idea. He paid a man with a truck to take him to the next town. A few days later he was in the Philippines. In an outdoor restaurant, he saw some big blond guys who looked like sunburned surfers from California. They weren't. Aussies. Relief workers. Lounging around in their boots and sunglasses. He sat down and shared a beer with them. They asked where he was from. New York, eh? Long way from home? They'd just flown in, they'd said, were waiting. A typhoon was hitting the eastern islands. They would be dropped in by a C-5 military transport as soon as the trailing edge cleared the coast. Advance team with sat-phones, tents, water. He asked if he could join them, help out. No, they said, we don't take tourists. The tone of the conversation changed, became awkward. He didn't push it. When the bottles were almost empty, one of the guys asked him why he was in the Philippines. Drifting, said Ray. What do you do there in New York, mate? Ray took a last pull from his beer. Used to be a fireman, he said.
'Fire department, New York City?' said the Aussie, his voice more energetic. 'Whereabouts?'
'Company Ten, 124 Liberty Street, lower Manhattan.'
'Certified first aid?'
'Yes.'
'Rope trained, rappelling, the whole bit?'
'Sure. Smoke-plunge and failing-structure rescue. Roof collapse, floor collapse, wall collapse.'
'Construction analysis? Post-and-beam, masonry?'
'I can tell if it's going to fall down,' said Ray.
'You can drive a lorry?'
'Lorry?'
'Truck?'
'I've driven a pumper and the hook and ladder.'
The Australian nodded. 'Gimme a minute, mate.' He rose and found the others. They turned and looked at Ray.
Two days later he was in the top of a mangrove tree, trying to rescue a terrified eight-year-old girl clinging to a branch. She'd been in the stripped branches for thirty hours, after the waters had gone down. Her mother stood waiting. When he reached the girl, she clung to him so tightly he could feel her heart hammering against his chest. Her arms squeezing his neck for all she was worth. The best feeling ever, in his life. Ever. The best moment of his life. I'm going to remember this until I die. He struggled not to cry when the mother raced to her daughter. The crew spent three days digging out corpses from the mud. They directed airdrops of bottled water and foodstuffs and distributed them to thousands of hungry hands. They saw hundreds of people dying from dysentery. Three weeks later the crew was rotated out and given medical exams. His parasites were not unusual, but he'd lost twenty pounds. The scar on his stomach sank inward. They offered him a job. From there on it was six months in the field, off two weeks. All over the world. He didn't read many newspapers, he just lived-in the place, in the time, and with the people.
Was he finding life? Not exactly. Or yes, in the midst of a great deal of death. From time to time he saved someone again. Not that others would not have saved the same person, but it was Ray who happened to be there, with the rope, the oxygen bottle, the hand. He remembered these moments, tried to understand them but could not. Understood less and less, in fact. No continuity. He lived in a stream of moments. Smoked opium a few times, mostly drank beer to relax. He read the Bible, then the Koran. Then some of the Hindu texts. Most of the cities had a bookstore where you could buy books in English. He followed the news about the war in Iraq, the war in Somalia, the little wars everywhere. He saw UN workers selling pallets of tires to local middlemen. He saw a man holding a pair of pliers walking through a field of bodies, each thick with flies; the man searched for the bodies whose mouths were open wide enough to pull out teeth with gold fillings in them. In Somalia, after having his truck emptied, he was handed an AK-47 and told to keep watch for raiders seeking to steal more relief supplies. The gun felt strange in his hands, so light. Inevitably the crew's work intersected with war zones. They were held up at gunpoint a few times, their money taken. Sometimes local gangs needed to be paid off, warlords placated with gifts of medicine. It came to him that there was a certain futility to what he did. The more relief work you did, the more you saw how much there was to be done. Some of the aid workers got sick, or outright collapsed. Others just flaked, didn't make the flight, called in their resignations. But most of them kept going, not really knowing what else to do. No one in the rest of the world much cared.
I had some good times here, Ray thought, looking up at Jin Li's apartment, a walk-up in the East Nineties. He had with him a set of fireman's skeleton keys, which contained the master forms provided by the major key manufacturers as well as a variety of trial-and-error sets created by the fire department's research department. Using the keys was sometimes faster than breaking a door down, especially if it was metal and dead-bolted. You were supposed to turn them in if you left the FD, but no one ever did.
He put on his old fire department suspenders and boots, carried his bag of tools plus a water pressure gauge, and clipped his old ID to his shirt and figured this might help him. His father owned an old police radio that didn't work very well but crackled and popped convincingly, and he carried this in one hand, too.
At the front door he encountered a little old woman who had dyed her hair but forgotten to do the eyebrows.
'Ma'am, I'm going to follow you in.'
She turned in alarm. 'You are?'
'Yes.'
'Who are you?'
'Fire department.'
'Where's the fire?'
'No fire. Just checking something.'
'What is it?' she demanded to know. 'Why isn't the super letting you in?'
'Between you and me?' He leaned close. 'I'm an inspector. We have a confidential tip regarding the building's automated sprinklers, and letting the super know I am coming would be potentially disadvantageous to the safety of the residents.'
The woman nodded in keen understanding of such a stratagem and her eyes narrowed in conspirational pleasure. 'I see. Just give me one detail so I can understand.'
'Yes, ma'am. We require sprinkler systems to be on their own piping system so that a regulatory constant pounds-per-square-inch pressure may be maintained and so also that shut-down repairs to dwelling plumbing systems do not impair the readiness of the fire sprinklers. However, maintaining two water piping systems is more expensive, and-'
'Yes!' the woman exclaimed. 'This building is so cheap you can't believe it!' She opened the door and pushed at him to go in, right past the mailboxes he was supposed to break into to find a telephone bill. 'Come on, get in quietly,' the woman insisted. 'I won't tell anyone until it all comes out. We'll expect a full report to the tenants' association. What floor will you be on?'
Jin Li lived on the top floor, as he remembered. 'The structure has five floors and we are required to start at the top to check the pressure there first.'
'Yes, yes, hurry, please. I live on the third floor. I'll be waiting for you.'
He followed her up the stairs, carrying a bag of groceries for her along the way. 'How long will you be before you get to our floor?' she asked.
He showed her the water pressure gauge, as if that explained everything. She nodded eagerly. 'Perhaps an hour, okay?'
'Yes, thank you.'
He continued on to the fifth floor, the hallway of which corresponded to the L-shaped building, and followed it around to Jin Li's apartment, which lay at the end of the hall. He tried his fancy skeleton keys one by one. He found three that went in but none that worked. Which was why he was glad he'd brought the stubby and heavy gas- powered Saws-All. He would be making a lot of noise for fifteen seconds. Couldn't be helped. He started the saw,
