Innocence

“I live from dawn to dawn, all day every day, but I go out only at night, if I go out at all.”

She said, “There’s not just danger in the city by day. There’s beauty, too, and magic and mystery.”

“The night offers much the same. I’ve seen things that I don’t understand but that nonetheless delight me.”

Eighteen (#ulink_07634f1f-22f3-5fcb-b602-36377d5878a4)

THINGS THAT I DON’T UNDERSTAND BUT THAT nonetheless delight me …

Two weeks following my arrival in the city, after I had been saved from fire by Father and taken under his protection, we were out on a mission in the hours when most people sleep most deeply, and for the first time I saw a ledge-walker.

Father was educating me in the ways that our kind must operate in a great city, teaching me the subterranean maze, the techniques of stealth that allow us the next thing to invisibility, and how to get into and out of essential places with all the grace of ghosts who can walk through walls.

By means that I’ll explain later, he had obtained a key to the food bank operated by St. Sebastian’s Catholic Church. Because the church gave away the food to those in need, and because the key had been freely provided to Father, we were not stealing when we entered the food bank after hours, to resupply our larder.

On the night of which I write, we exited the building into the alleyway behind it, where we discovered a power-company truck parked atop the storm-drain manhole that was the nearest entrance to our underground haven. The two workers were apparently in the transformer vault that lay behind the truck, from the open cover of which rose voices and a shaft of light.

Before we could be seen, we hurried toward the continuation of the alley in the next block, where we hoped to find another entrance to the drainage system. This required us to cross a brightly lighted six-lane street, which we were loath to do even though the great majority of our fellow citizens were abed and dreaming.

Father scouted the way, found no traffic, and motioned for me to follow him. As we approached the island separating the six lanes into three westbound and three eastbound, I saw movement four stories above the street, a man walking on a ledge. The sight halted me, for I thought he must intend to jump.

In spite of the cool weather, he wore hospital blues, or so it appeared. The ledge was not wide, but he walked it with a casualness that suggested that he didn’t care about his fate. He peered down into the street, whether at us or not I couldn’t tell, but also tipped his head back to gaze up at the higher floors of the buildings across the street, as though searching for something.

Realizing that I had halted at the island, Father stopped, looked back, and urged me to hurry.

Instead, I pointed to the walker on the ledge. “Look, look!”

I thought now that the man in blue wasn’t reckless, as he had first seemed, but confident, as though he had walked tightropes in circuses the world around. Perhaps the narrow ledge posed no serious challenge by comparison to the death-defying feats that he had performed far above admiring audiences.

A taxi rounded the corner a block away, the driver glorying in the speed that daytime streets did not allow. The flare of headlamps reminded me of our perilous position. If the vehicle had been instead a police patrol car, a man and a boy in hoodies, bent under backpacks, running into an alleyway at that hour, would have invited pursuit.

We were of little interest to the cab driver, who no doubt lived by a hear-no-see-no-evil code. The car sped past without slowing as we dashed into the mouth of the alley.

There I hesitated again, looking up, as the walker turned the corner of the ledge. He stepped nonchalantly from the north wall of the building to the east wall, seemingly unconcerned about a misstep, as if he could walk on air as readily as on stone.

When he moved with such agility from the street to the darker alleyway, I realized that he was no jumper, that he was one of the Clears. His light had not been evident in the brighter street, but here in shadows, he glowed up there on the ledge.

I had seen Clears in unusual places, doing peculiar things, but I had never seen a Clear walking a ledge before. Of course, back then, I hadn’t been long in the city.

How to describe a Clear to those who can’t see them? The light of which I speak is not a searing beacon but a soft glow, and it has no locus but radiates evenly from them, head to foot. I once referred to it as inner light, but the word implies that they’re translucent, which they are not, being as solid in appearance as anyone. Besides, their clothes shine as softly as their skin and hair, as if they are refugees from a science-fiction movie in which they were irradiated in a nuclear incident. I call them Clears not because they are transparent, but only because the first inexplicable beings that I saw, as a child, were the Fogs, and when next I saw two of these radiant people together in a moonlit meadow, the name that occurred to me was Clears, for they seemed to be the antithesis of the Fogs.

They were not ghosts. If they were anything as simple as spirits of the dead, Father would have called them that. He could see them, too, but talking about them made him apprehensive, and he routinely discouraged any line of conversation involving either the Clears or the Fogs. The man on the ledge and others like him weren’t interested in haunting anyplace or spooking anyone. They didn’t rattle chains or turn the air cold by their presence, or toss furniture around the way that poltergeists were supposed to do. They were not anguished or angry as ghosts are reported to be. Sometimes they smiled and often they were solemn, but always they appeared serene. Although they lived invisible to nearly everyone, I believed they were as alive as I was, though their intentions and their meaning were unknown to me and perhaps unknowable.

Father hooked a manhole cover and levered it aside with a tool that he had devised. He called to me that I was risking our lives by dawdling, and reluctantly I turned away from that spectacle above. But as I preceded Father down the ladder, into the tributary drain, I glanced back and up for one last glimpse of the glowing Clear who walked high ledges fearlessly, while I must always worry through backstreets and crooked byways.

Nineteen (#ulink_e6188af0-60d6-5514-a98f-eeddce8887b5)

THE ADDRESS THAT THE GIRL GAVE ME WAS adjacent to Riverside Commons. She lived in a block of handsome detached houses, some of brick and others of limestone, that faced the park. About half were still single-family homes. She occupied the fourth floor of a four-story house that had been converted to apartments.

Under the commons lay Power Station 6, which once stood in plain sight. Decades earlier, to beautify the neighborhood, they buried the utility in a deep and massive vault, and built the park atop it. The workers’ entrance, air intakes, and expulsion vents were along the river quay. Station 6, like the basement of the library, could also be entered by a tributary drain in the floor, provided in the event there should be a rupture in the pressurized water lines supplying the natural-gas-powered boilers that fed the steam generators.

Entering through a manhole, we were on the lookout for power-company employees, though fewer staffed the graveyard shift, when the plant produced below maximum potential. The drain lay at the west end of the structure, behind ranks of boilers, turbines, generators, and transformers. Workmen seldom had reason to venture into that shadowy space. Ten feet from the drain, a door opened on a concrete spiral staircase, a secondary exit in the event of an emergency.

I had instructed Gwyneth to go directly to the door, while I eased the manhole back into place. Haste was the key to passing through unseen. We didn’t need to be concerned about noise because the spinning vanes of the turbines, the rotors of the generators, and the laboring pumps provided us with cover.

In the stairwell, with the insulated door closed, the clamor fell to a quarter of what it had been. As we ascended turn by turn, it steadily diminished.

With her natural grace, Gwyneth rose in the stair light, not as if climbing but as if she were all but weightless and were drawn up by a draft that I couldn’t feel.

The light fell bright enough to reveal me within my hood, and I kept my head down in case she glanced back. I wanted this unexpected adventure to last for a while, wanted to be able as long as possible to share the night with her.

The door at the head of the stairs opened into a dark building that served as storage for the riding lawn mowers and other equipment used to maintain the Commons. With flashlights, we found the exit.

I followed Gwyneth outside but paused, holding the door. As an emergency exit from Power Station 6, it was always unlocked from the inside; but it would be locked from the outside when closed. I didn’t have a key. Some homeless people lived in the park, and although most were timid and kept to their hidden nests in warrens of shrubbery, now and then one would be belligerent, stropped to sharp edges by either mental illness or drugs, or both.

This December night, no one approached us. The park lay as quiet as any place in the city could be, and we didn’t need to retreat.

We followed a footpath across lawns, past the pond where, in warmer seasons and in a full moon, half-sleeping koi sometimes rose into view. They were thick from eating bread cast to them by daytime visitors, too spoiled to take night insects off the surface.

As if she knew my mind, the girl said, “By now they will have netted the koi and moved them inside for the winter.”

At home in my hammock, when I slept, those fish sometimes swam into sight, mottled and pale, fins wimpling in the gentle currents, smoky presences. On the mirrored water of those dreams, I saw my face reflected darkly. The koi shimmering under my reflection had a place where they belonged in this world. Waking from such a dream, I was always filled with longing, yearning for a home in the light, a garden flowering and fruiting as it ought to be.

Now, at the Kellogg Parkway entrance to the Commons, as we stood under a towering pine, Gwyneth pointed to a house across the street. “That’s one of the places where I live. Come in for coffee.”

Having no friends, I had no experience of such invitations, and I stood speechless for a moment before I could say, “I better not. The night’s nearly gone.”

She said, “There’s almost another hour and a half of darkness.”

“I have to go to the food bank, get supplies before they open.”

“What food bank?”

“St. Sebastian’s.”

“Come up, have breakfast. Go to the food bank tomorrow night.”

“But I’ll be seen going in your place. Too dangerous.”

She said, “No doorman. Nobody’s coming or going at this hour. Quick up the stairs.”

I shook my head. “I shouldn’t. I can’t.”

She pointed to a narrow walkway between her house and the one next door. “Go through there to the alley. At the back, there’s a fire escape.”

“No. I really can’t.”

“You will. Comeon.” She ran into the street in the wake of a passing limousine with tinted windows as black as its paint job.