Someone said you’d want this. It’s yours if you do.
It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me, he said, Quentin, I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire . . .
Ellison unshoulders the black knapsack and unzips it. She takes out a pint bottle of J&B Scotch, cracks the seal, unscrews the cap, and has a long swallow before emptying the rest of the whisky on the grave. Then she reaches into the knapsack again, and this time she takes out a pack of unfiltered Camel cigarettes and a red, white, and blue “I Like Ike” campaign button; she sets them both on the ground beside the grave. She zips the knapsack closed and returns it to her shoulder.
“I just wanted to say that I don’t blame you,” she says, speaking just above a whisper. “Not for any of it. I figure, what you did, it was what you had to do, and mostly I think you did right by me, or as right as you were able, as right as they’d ever allow.” She pauses and checks the pocket watch again. It’s ten thirteen. “I don’t know what I’m going to do now,” she says, closing the watch and glancing towards the black Ford in the church parking lot, thinking about Albany and Nevada and her filthy, stinking apartment in LA, about the dope and Jehosheba Talog. “She’s dead,” Ellison tells the grave. “I killed her. She killed the hound, and I killed her. And there haven’t been any more whales turn up in Pennsylvania, so maybe it’s over.”
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, kiddo. Best we not go making any promises until we know how it all shakes out a little farther down the road.
“Just get some sleep, old man,” says Ellison Nicodemo, talking to a ghost if there’s any ghost listening, and then she turns and walks away, winding between the rows of headstones and footstones, careful not to step on any of the graves. When she was a girl, someone once told her that was the worst sort of bad luck.
18.: Exit Music for the Anthropocene
(April 2151, Isle of Brooklyn Proper)
A light wind is blowing from the northeast, and the morning smells like oil. The sky is filled with hungry, noisy gulls.
From her perch on the roof, Inamorata is using Old Duarte’s spyglass, trying to spot the slick she’s been told rose up in the night, a great black bubble freed by a breach in one of the ancient concrete storage tanks. It only takes her a moment to pin it down, a muddy, iridescent smudge marring the blue-green shimmer of Queens Bar, less than half a mile out from Prospect Beach. A slick that long, that wide, it could easily yield fifteen, maybe twenty thousand gallons. She’s seen bigger, but not for several years now, and not since the Hud extended its reach to the barrier islands. It’s surprising there’s not already a company team on the scene, siphoning it off. There will be soon enough, surely by noon, noon at the latest. One of the big sweeper skiffs docked at Carnegie Island and a host of support vessels will slip smooth and silent through the heat haze, set up shop, and get to it. And any jackals caught trying to nip a tub or three will be sunk on sight, with the governor’s blessing. But for now, the slick is a pristine blemish on the sea. In this light and at this hour, it’s almost beautiful, the way that so many poisonous things are beautiful.
Inamorata puts down the spyglass just as Geli comes up from below. She’s a sanderling girl, is Geli Núñez, stalking the drift lines for whatever refuse the tides fetch up. She’s nineteen, and most of her life she spent on the Row, with the other beachcombers and the crabbers and the bums. Before she met Inamorata, before they became lovers and Geli came to live with her in Old Duarte’s house on Cemetery Hill, she worked for one of the black-market agents. Now, Inamorata has her registered with a legal pickers syndicate, and Geli gets top dollar and doesn’t have to worry quite so much about the law.
“You seen it, then?” she asks Inamorata.
“I’ve seen it,” Inamorata replies.
“It’s a gulper,” says Geli, and she sits down near Inamorata’s perch and begins emptying her morning’s haul of plastic out onto the roof to dry and be sorted. In the sunlight, Geli’s auburn hair shines like a new copper pot.
“It’s big,” Inamorata tells her, “but it’s not as big as all that.”
Geli shrugs and pulls a fat wad of green nylon fishing line from her gunnysack, all tangled with wire weed and kelp. “Well, Joe Sugar, he says it’s a gulper.”
“Joe Sugar lets on, and you know he hasn’t seen it for himself. Good take?”
“Oh, just you see this,” Geli grins, and she looks up, squinting at the bright morning sky, cloudless and a shade of blue so pale it might as well be alabaster. “Down at the pilings, right in close to Fincher’s docks, there was a stranding. All of it starfish and urchins, hundreds upon hundreds of them—thousands even, maybe. Starfish and urchins big about as my hand. I think they might’a washed upcurrent from Park Sloop or the Slaughter.”
Inamorata looks back to sea again, staring out across the water towards the oil. “Could have been poisoned by the slick,” she says, half to herself.
“Maybe. There was some sheen on the sand, so might have been the slick got them. But, anyway, that ain’t the point of it,” and then Geli reaches deep into her sack and pulls something out from the very bottom. “This,” she says and holds it up for Inamorata to see. “Found it at the stranding, mixed in with
