“You want to use my boys diving for the tourists?”
“The boys sure, but mostly it’s you I’m interested in.” He moved his hand over a glass surface then pointed at something behind me, wanting me to turn and look. I wasn’t doing that, but I stepped back, kept him and Tagalong in my sight. Tagalong shook his head like he couldn’t believe me.
What I saw was a flat screen. It took a second to know I was watching myself. First I was on the riverfront that summer with Dare and the boys. Then Dare and I walked through the early morning streets before the sun got bad, and we kissed. Next we were at the UN clinic in Times Square getting ointments and medicine.
“If we meant you harm we could have done it many times,” Caravaggio said. “I’ve been thinking of you, imagining you in a film. The tourists you saw today were impressed by these pictures and were impressed by you.” Mai Kin’s face popped up on the screen. “At my suggestion Mai Kin has been redone in your image.” Seeing her again, she didn’t look that much like me.
Next I saw myself in the evening, walking all alone down an empty Fifth Avenue. This was fake; none of us ever went anywhere alone. Caravaggio talked on the sound track.
“Once this was the most famous city in the most powerful nation in the world,” he said. “Then the bombs fell, the earth quaked, the waters rose, the government collapsed. Around the world, cities and nations fell, but none fell further. Mighty Gotham is a ruin at a crossroads, with local warlords like Liberty Land and the Northeast Command fighting for possession.”
He touched the surface again, and I disappeared. Color and faces exploded on the screen. A girl in leather smashed mirrors in some huge bathroom. Maybe it was a party, maybe it was a riot, but the camera spun around in an enormous space. A mob dressed better than anyone in the city is now, poured fuel on chairs and set them on fire, smashed glass doors, shot out the lights high overhead.
“A fiesta of destruction made a ruin of Madison Square Garden,” Caravaggio told me. “Caught for my first full-length film. But places remain on this planet where people are still rich and bored. The films I’ve made have kept the eyes of that world on us, and that’s what I’m still doing.”
The city opened before me. Buildings were down, but ones I’d never seen before stood. The streets were full of people. Cars went by; I saw a bus! It was New York after the bombs but before the quakes. A girl in a silk dress walked arm in arm with a chimera gorilla.
“What did you bring me here for?” I asked.
“I want you in a film. I’ll use you as Mai Kin’s body double. She’s more a prop than an actor. You’ll stand in for her in certain scenes. But it will be more than that. They think to use me to film the New York sequences for an episode of that idiotic series.
“But I’m going to use THEM to tell the story of kids on the waterline. I want you and your crew. Anything can be faked, but what’s true will always stand revealed.”
“I want a hundred gold pieces a day,” I said, because that’s as much money as I’ve ever seen at once and because gold is the only thing everyone trusts. “I want the first day’s pay up front,” I said, because that’s what I know about doing business.
“I created the legend of Jackie, the angel of divers,” he said, like he hadn’t heard me. “Now I want to give the tourists a taste of the desperation of diver kids’ lives.”
I said, “What about the money?”
“Once I dreamed of showing Jackie returning to the city like an avenging angel come to save the place,” he said. “My new vision of the city will be you and your friends.” Again his hand moved over a glass surface in front of him.
A boy in long hair and shorts stood on a pier in the full light of day. Big crowds of people watched as a coin was flung and the boy leaped, seemed to flicker like silver light in the gold sun. He skimmed over the water and caught the coin in his hand. It looked fake.
What got to me was how the riverfront wasn’t all smashed up. The water was lower than the walks. New Jersey was wrecked but not totally. Boats sailed and people didn’t look scared. I remembered some of that from when I was real little, and got angry it was gone.
I wanted to see more but the screen went blank. I got careless and reached for Caravaggio, wanting to see what he remembered. I touched his brain and saw a jumble of faces, heard a tourist talking about a hundred- million-yen deal, tasted the wine he had just drunk, caught the smell of Silken Night, a perfume he remembered.
Caravaggio looked startled and confused. He tried to stand, and knocked over the wine bottle. Tag caught it, stared at me wide-eyed like he had a hint of what just happened.
It was stupid to give myself away. But I just shrugged. Then I remembered what we’d been talking about before Caravaggio started showing me pictures.
“A hundred gold pieces, right now,” I said. “And I’m not going in the water.” I didn’t say that, even if I got as dumb as a boy, I couldn’t swim.
“We’ll talk about that,” he said. “Fifty. Any more will get you and your friends killed.” He was suspicious, maybe frightened after what he felt me do.
We settled on seventy-five, and he said shooting began in a few days. Tag counted the coins out for me in a little room near the front door of the studio. He whispered, “I followed you around and took those shots of you and your crew. I got him interested.” He looked at me, curious and scared, like he guessed my secret. I nodded and kept quiet, but now I knew Depose had nothing to do with my getting hired.
In that huge front room, an owl showed humans how to make posters of Jackie look old and how to tell tourists they had found them in old trunks. I knew that even the ones who said there had really been a Jackie Boy also said Caravaggio kept him chained like a dog and only let him out to make movies, until he escaped.
The bear and the truck waited for me outside. As we drove away I looked back: the lights, the guards, the street with people standing outside their buildings talking, little kids playing after dark, was magic and I wanted all of it.
Riding home I was cold, and the only light ahead of us was the glow from the Tourist Zone way uptown. I thought about the city Caravaggio showed me and remembered how my mom died when the superflu was killing everyone. The UN medics couldn’t stop it. Some of them died. They told me I must have good genes and wanted to know who my father was, but I couldn’t help them.
It was then that I met Dare. Her mother was dead too, so we had that in common and she was tough, took me under her wing, protected me until I got able to take care of myself. She had done gold diving but gave it up when she saw what happened to older kids. Together we worked out the deal with the boys.
The truck stopped in Madison Square, which is semi-wrecked buildings around a park that’s a jungle nobody wants to go near. We have a lair in the cellar of a building that still stands on the west side of the square and has water, and we’ve got the entrances booby-trapped.
Lott, who’s too sick to dive, guards the place night and day. We brought in Rock as his replacement. Ursus made the truck wait while I rattled the gates and said the password, and Lott let me in before they drove away.
The Indians at the clinic say Lott’s got a few things wrong but it’s lung cancer that’s going to kill him. Dare thinks it’s because we got him too late and if we’d been looking out for him sooner he’d be okay.
The boys were behind the curtains at the back of our place, laughing about the way we’d stood down the bike boys and Regalia. I could hear Lott’s heavy breathing.
Dare said, “I don’t much trust any of them.” I didn’t either, but it was the best deal we’d ever had. I wanted to show her the studio, but when I tried, what I found in her was fear that she was going to lose me.
So instead I told her about Caravaggio and Tagalong and the studio, made it funny and had her laughing.
4.
Once we started shooting, I spent more time in the deadly sun with less protection than I had all that
