Michael Chabon

I stood with a quarter half-slid into the coin slot, my thoughts a jumble of preambles and strategies, having decided firmly but in some bewilderment that I could not call Uncle Lenny. It would have to be my father. I say bewilderment because I still did not really believe that the premature arrival of the police had anything to do with my father, and so I couldn’t quite see why I should call him except that I’d told Cleveland I would. It was intolerable enough to have to alarm my father for a good reason, but for more of Cleveland’s nonsense! I pinched the quarter, full of dread, wondering whether I shouldn’t just call to say hello. I read fifteen times an obscene graffito on the aluminum corner of the phone booth.

“Collect call to Joseph Bechstein from Art,” I said, and in a minute I heard my father saying that he would not accept the charges. In the second before my heart sank, I felt how odd it was to hear his high, clipped familiar voice and not be able to speak to him, as though the operator had raised an unhearing ghost or oracle; this woman held the switches and wire that connected us. My father would hang up, and then I would, and she would be left wherever it is that operators are.

“Dad!” I said. “Please talk to me!”

I heard the sudden silence as the woman broke the connection; then, as she blandly suggested that I dial direct, I heard the sirens growing in the distance. I dropped the receiver with a loud clunk and ran back toward the parking lot. For a few seconds I saw his motorcycle, very far away, before it disappeared from view. He must have flown past the wrong street corner, past two cops in a car with a description and an APB. One, then two, three squad cars went red and glittering after him. For the next few minutes I jogged helplessly back and forth, hopped into the air, climbed the steps of the museum, trying to catch a glimpse, aware of nothing around me but ceaseless demonstrations of the Doppler effect. I knew so little what to do that it actually occurred to me to call the police.

“Help, oh, help,” I whispered.

Then I saw Cleveland emerge from a street over behind the library, the street I had walked in my efforts to avoid Phlox, and simultaneously heard the drone and terrible flutter of hundreds of beating dove wings. The helicopter swung low and hung, it swept its single straight beam across Cleveland, and its metal voice issued an incomprehensible command. Cleveland hesitated a moment, probably from the shock of suddenly finding an uproar of wind and brilliance above his spinning head, then shot toward me, toward the Cloud Factory, as the police cars appeared behind him. The helicopter jerked upward, then dropped down again onto Cleveland. He reached the curb not twenty yards from me, let his bike fall, with its rear wheel still whirling, and ran toward the Cloud Factory, pursued by the light from above. I ran after him.

“Get back!” said the helicopter. “Keep away!” Cleveland scrambled up over the chain-link fence, tottering at the top, and then I lost sight of him. The police pulled up, left their cars, and came jingling and rattling toward me. One of them detached himself from the group and, with a shove and a hammerlock, took me into custody. I could not say that I had nothing to do with this. We watched, I and my cop. The searchlight caught Cleveland on an iron ladder, drunk and terrified and climbing very badly, a flash of white-pink under his arm. I cried out. Down, I thought, down, go down. But he continued his upward climb, running wildly along each catwalk to the next ladder, encased every step of the way in the solid tube of light, until he reached a ladder fastened to the side of the building itself, a series of bars like staples punched into the brick.

“Go down!” I said.

“He can’t hear you,” said the cop. “Shut up.”

Cleveland’s pursuers were already scaling the building around him, from all sides, when he attained the summit of the Cloud Factory. I saw him, legs apart, in the shadow of the magic valve, one waving hand extended toward the oncoming helicopter to shield his face from its light, the other clutching the naked doll. In that one long second before he lost his footing and fell head over heels over head, the spotlight hit him strangely, and he threw a brief, enormous shadow against the perfect clouds, and the hair seemed to billow out from the shadow’s head like a black banner. For one second Cleveland stood higher than the helicopter that tormented him; he loomed over the building, over me, and over the city of secret citizens and homes beneath his feet, and the five-foot shadow of the doll kicked and screamed.

23

XANADU