The moment Police Commissioner Henrietta Stevenson stepped out of the cruiser, her eyes watered, attacked by smoke that still clung thickly to the air. For a moment, she staggered, hobbled by a fit of asthmatic coughing that made her seem every minute of her seventy two years of age. Turning away from the two officers who flanked her, she hacked up a huge loogie, and wiped away the spittle from her mouth with the back of her hand. Then, she stood up straight, gingerly adjusting her uniform so that it rested taut across her body. She turned back to the two officers of her detail and, with a flick of her fingers, motioned one to bring a mask for her face.
On the ride up from one police plaza, her detail had guided the cruiser along the perimeter set up by the National Guard, weaving around screeching fire trucks still frantically putting out conflagrations everywhere. The Commissioner’s cruiser had passed the blazing luxury retail stores of 125th street, slowly making its way from 7th to 6th avenue. She’d observed the burning condos on 6th avenue from 125th to 145th. She’d studied the scorched storefronts of merchants on 145th street heading from 6th to 7th avenue. As she’d headed from 145th back to 125th, she’d viewed the smoldering trees of the wooded landscape that had recently been installed across 7th and 8th avenues, connecting to the historic St Nicholas Park.
All this she had taken in with an air of detachment that was almost preternatural. As the car had looped back up and over to 6th avenue and 135th street, she bit her lip, and took in a sharp breath. She had the urge to laugh hysterically, a nervous tick that she’d learned to manage way back in elementary school.
Tonight, the streets were empty. This part of the city was on a mandatory curfew that had begun at 7pm.
Mechanically, she took out her personal VR, and reviewed her schedule for the evening, steeling herself for her parlay with the commanding officer on the ground, General Jason Michaels. Tonight, the perimeter would be handed from the Federal Government back to the City’s Command, after nearly 36 hours of violent conflict. All this because Harlem suspected a black trillionaire was dead.
Commissioner Stevenson nodded now and then as the General briefed her some moments later, her eyes alternating between the square man in front of her, and the mammoth black edifice just an avenue over on 7th. She had of course driven by it on her perimeter sweep, but she’d purposely averted her eyes. Now she studied the monstrous edifice with some intensity. It appeared from her vantage point that the skyscraper was untouched, but she’d observed on her VR the General’s implant walkthrough enough times to know that the front of the building was a different story. She was also familiar with the damage that the executive suite had sustained as seen through the eyes of the big man briefing her. Now, it was time for her to investigate in person.
As she strode up 135th toward 7th avenue, flanked by the General and two officers, the Commissioner objectively observed police tape on the ground, where the conflict between the Neo-Nubian militia had felled some two officers of the NYPD. She looked up ahead and could see where the police had retaliated, killing five Neo-Nubians.
It had been then, 12 hours into the conflict, that Mayor Corrigan and the governor had demanded the National Guard intervene.
The Commissioner passed the YMCA, and noted that even it had not escaped damage, despite it having been a part of the community for generations. The lower wing, which had been completed months before, was completely burned out. Scrawled above what had been the entryway, in block letters, were the words “MENACE TO SOCIETY is a MENACE TO SOCIETY.” Beside it, in somewhat smaller scrawling, she saw several epithetes directed at the police. Her eyes lingered on one in particular.
“Stevenson is fucking KLANSMEN SELLOUT!”
For a moment, the Commissioner's felt laughter well up in her belly, threatening to burst forth past the mask strapped firmly across her face. She remembered that she had taken swim lessons at this very YMCA. She’d had her 10th birthday party in the Y’s community room.
Get a grip, she commanded herself, momentarily digging her long manicured nails into her wrists. With perfect impassivity, she soldiered on.
“Hi everyone,” General Michaels called, ascending a podium some forty feet from the entrance to Creedman Tower. A gaggle of reporters began clamouring as they saw the Police Commissioner round the corner onto 7th, yelling out questions in rapid fire succession.
“Police Commissioner Stevens will appear along with Mayor Corrigan at the scheduled press conference in about 90 minutes. Thank you.” The General's tone was smooth yet firm. The Commissioner hoped she’d be able to follow that act later, when it was her turn.
The first floor rotunda of Creedman Tower had been the only part of the building that had been opened to the public. It had been a “liberation center”called Adam Clayton Powell Bookstore, named after some obscure Nubian figure from 20th century politics. Henrietta Stevens vaguely remembered that 7th avenue in Harlem had once been known by the same name.
On the curved back wall, a stenciled mural of Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X, and Barack Obama holding hands was illuminated by high powered LED Police lamps. The wild heat from the thermos that had torched the center had made the shapes of the historic figures a blur of browns, but the insipid smiles of these Nubians still eerily loomed over the place.
Even through her mask, the Commissioner could smell the reek of soot and wet paper, the remainder of the fire department’s tussle with the blaze that had raged here. The floor to ceiling glass that had encased the storefront was entirely blown out.
As Henrietta Stevens followed the Commanding General, her boots crunched over a thick packet of paper, bound on the side. In wonder, she picked up the flimsy item. She turned it about in her hands, and could felt the soggy pages. The front of the packet was blackened, but she could just make out words on the top of it: Assata: An Autobiography.
What the hell is this place? thought the Commissioner. My mother doesn’t even read print materials any more. Where the hell did they get this old stuff?
She handed the relic to one of the officers of her detail, and approached the seven doors that stood directly beneath the Center’s massive mural. The General began a rambling explanation, pointing at the entryways as he spoke to emphasize his point.
“General Michaels,” Henrietta said, cutting off the white man’s monologue, “you mean to tell me that in a building this size, there’s no elevator? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Well...yes...and no,” replied the General, his blue eyes flashing in impatience. It was a rare moment that he was interrupted.
“There is a working elevator, a manual pulley system that’ll work even with the power stripped as it is now. It’ll take us directly to the executive suite, but we’ve got to climb to the 23rd floor to get it.”
Henrietta remembered that this had been communicated to her, and she sighed. She was glad she’d skipped the gym today, not that she had had the time to go anyway.
“Alright, well, what are we waiting for?” The Police Commissioner pushed ahead, to the nearest door to her, directly beneath Malcolm X.
“Ma’am---could you just...hold on a second.”
The General tapped his left temple, and his blue eyes rolled to the back of his head. A moment later, they snapped back to the Commissioner’s face, and he studied her obvious disgust with amusement.
Stevenson’s distrust of the implant was a well documented fact, and open displays of the device were studiously avoided in her presence by those under her command. Jason Michaels, of course, answered to Washington.
“Ok, Commish,” the General said colloquially, “The thing is, each of these doors leads to a different staircase. Six of them only go up to the 19th floor. The one we need is over here.”
Michaels escorted the Commissioner and her detail to a door halfway between Harriet Tubman and Barack Obama, and stepped through.
The climb was close, and scorching hot. While the weather outside was cool for October, the bowels of Creedman Tower had limited circulation, especially as the building’s ventilation system had been shut off with the power. The Commissioner marched in front of the two officers of her detail, and just behind the General. Henrietta noted that her accompanying officers had snapped on LEDs, though they had certainly been outfitted with implants courtesy of New York City tax dollars. They could easily set their eyes to infrared mode, as the General leading the way had done.
I’m old school, Henrietta thought as she puffed her way up the stairs. Nothing in my head buzzing but this big ole noggin.
Before she could grab a hold of herself, she began laughing at her own funny, a rolling titillation that soon consumed her whole body.
“Commish?”
The blinding light of the General’s headlamp nearly toppled her.
Oh, so he does own a headlamp, thought the Commissioner sarcastically. Her laugh had morphed into a full blown whistling cough.
One of the officers moved to help her, but she waved him off.
“Let’s keep going General,” wheezed the Commissioner, steadying herself against the railing. She’d already sweat through her uniform, and cursed herself for committing to a session in front of the media so soon after what was turning into an expedition.
Stevenson observed that they had only reached the 10th floor when her knees began to scream at her in pain. She found it hard to believe that the black trillionaire had made this trek in any type of regularity.
“The sonofabitch is a fucking masochist” she whispered to herself, almost sending herself into another fit of laughter. She never cursed, not even in her mind, and the obscenities rolled off her tongue like the words of a foreign language.
It was somewhere around the 13th floor that she realized that she’d been walking to the beat of a song from her childhood.
“I wanna rock your body, over me…You don’t have to admit you, wanna play.”
It was a tune her older brother used to play over the speakers in the living room of their 2 bedroom apartment whenever their mother was at work. The subwoofer would thump mercilessly against the floor, causing endless arguments with the downstairs neighbors.
But, that’s not why the song stood out in her mind.
When she’d been at City College, she’d lived in a two bedroom apartment just off 7th avenue at 134th street. She’d lived with her Grandpa, helping him to pay the rent and looking after him at the same time.
She remembered every word of the letter she’d penned to him when he’d gotten sick during the global pandemic that had just appeared out of nowhere, the one she’d meant to send him when he’d been shipped to a hospital bed at Mt. Sinani.
Henreitta had been Henri back then, a man who had not yet embraced the woman she had always been inside.
Hey Grandpa,
I tried to call, but the nurse said you won’t be able to talk for awhile, so I thought I would write you a letter, just like old times. Nothing like snail mail.
Lately, I’ve been having trouble breathing. Don’t worry, I’m not sick. I just haven’t gotten used to wearing a mask yet. Everytime I breathe, I fog up my glasses, making it hard to see where I’m going, what I’m doing. It’s hard to know what happens next.
Harlem’s been pretty wild. Well, maybe you wouldn’t think so compared to back in the day. It’s actually kinda quiet, a lot of the time. No kids clowning around, chasing each other and whatnot.
A lot of places have been serving meals, so I guess that’s cool. Actually, your church over on 129th has been serving 3 meals a day. Got a long line there. I been eating ok, you know, just whatever they’re serving.
But Harlem IS wild Grandpa. Sirens everywhere. You can tell the ambulances going to Mt. Sinai, cuz they go “Way-Do-Way-Do,” each “Way” and “Do” about the same length, in slow oscillation. No Doppler effect at all.
Then there’s the ones going to Harlem Hospital, just down the way. They sound like “Wee-oo-Wee-oo,” quickly alternating between the two sounds like the siren in itself is in a hurry.
The police been out too. They been pushing around all the dope heads out here, telling them to “social distance,” but these cops aren’t really into it. They don’t really care if black folks die out here. They just don’t want oldheads chugging 40s outside at 11am to be the new normal.
Problem is, it is the new normal. Or maybe, it’s what’s always been. The earnest young white teachers used to distract from these old drunkheads. The kids playing in the street. The young black and brown professionals strutting to work. The gentrifying families buying up whole brownstones. Where are these people now? Do they all have summer homes to escape to, away from this urban blight? Or, maybe they’re like me, bunkered down, alone.
There’s this one dude outside, one of them old guys, high on malt liquor. He’s always yelling.
“YOU shut up, how ‘bout THAT?” and “Coronavirus, suck my DICK.”
He sings too, ““I wanna rock your body, over me…You don’t have to admit you, wanna play.” It’s a song Curtis use to sing when we was kids.
Before everything, this guy out there on the street...he was a known quantity. But against the backdrop of sirens and quiet, he’s the only live entertainment around.
The main event of the show is him sitting in the middle of the street, legs crossed.
“COME FOR ME! I AIN’T SCARED!” he shouts.
I can see him from my window, just begging to be run over, daring someone to put him out of his misery. The whole thing—this new routine brought to us by infectious disease—is crazy. A couple times, the police come, and ask that he move, but as I said, they don’t really care. They just don’t want the cans of Tecante coursing through his body to spill onto the fresh asphalt poured just last summer. Might stain.
I wonder about G. That’s his name, the man on the street. Where are his people? He couldn’t have always been like this.
Mostly though, I think it’s messed up that he is literally screaming at the top of his voice, obviously crying for help, but no one comes to rescue him. Guess I’m guilty too. Honestly, I sometimes feel like joining him out there, hollering away.
To be honest, I’m sitting on the stoop in front of the building right now, drinking Colt 45. Calm down, it’s like five o clock. I’m not a degenerate. Yet.
I noticed something watching the old heads out here, up close: Some of them aren’t that old at all. Addiction is a disease that does a number on your face.
The world is sick right now. It’s not just Pandemic. It’s the poverty out here. The desperation.
I don’t know how I’m gonna be able to pay this rent by myself if you don’t pull through, Grandpa. I’m still working at the market, but that only pays so much. I just heard summer classes are cancelled. Guess I’ll start school in the fall, maybe.
I know Grandpa, I have to be strong. We have to be strong, you and me. It’s like you used to say back when I was little. Do you remember when you used to show all them Superman cartoons? We used to run around with towels tied around our necks, soaring above it all.
“Grandpa,” I’d ask, “how come Superman don’t exist in real life?”
“Oh,” you use to say, “but he does exist.”
“Well…” I’d reply “how come people never seen him?”
“They have,” you'd say, your eyes twinkling. “They just don’t know they have. Son, YOU ARE Superman. WE are superman. BLACK superman”
Guess we gotta save ourselves, huh.
“You hear me Commissioner?”
The General had turned the light of his LED on to her face again, utterly unfazed by the outrage that crossed her eyes as she snapped back to the reality of their endless ascension. Ahead of them, the staircase had concluded at a platform where a steel cage elevator sat.
“This is the 23rd floor,” the General repeated, his voice salted with just a hint of condescension. “You’ll need to leave your detail here, though.”
He followed the Commissioner's gaze to the drawstring pulley in the middle of the elevator.
“It’s hydraulics assisted, but I won’t be able to pull all 4 of us up. I’d assumed you were briefed on this, no?”
In the hubbub of managing the unfolding crisis in Harlem, she’d only been able to devote so much time to studying the architecture of the Tower owned by the richest man in the world. She’d known, of course, that the 110 floor expanse had been “under construction,” for nearly a decade and that no one except for the original architects and construction crew had ever been above the 1st floor. They had all signed a non-disclosure agreement for their silence.
It was also clear that over the course of the last year or so, Creedman himself and his assistant Florida Lopez Sanchez had taken up their residence in the Tower, periodically broadcasting from what appeared on VR as an expansive executive suite.
What hadn’t been obvious was the Herculean effort it required to get to said suite.
Creedman isn’t just a little eccentric, the Commissioner thought, remembering a profile of the Trillionaire published in the Times some years before. He’s downright crazy.
The Commissioner looked up at the pitch black elevator shaft above her, and was reminded of a VR broadcast depicting 18th century life in some corner of the Caribbean. It was a cheaply produced mini series featuring nearly naked black skinned men smiling at the camera while performing the back breaking labor of harvesting and processing sugar cane.
One of the episodes titled “Home life on da the Island” had featured ebony women with enormous breasts and babbling babies attached at the hip, standing over a well and slowly pulling up water from an underground cistern. They’d pulled haltingly, struggling against the weight of the collected rain water they drew, all the while chanting a song that sounded vaguely African. Sometimes the strength of the women failed, and the bucket lurched downward, splashing precious water.
It was this image, of the swinging bucket inching upwards, that occupied the Commissioner's mind as she stared at the caged box in front of her. She had visions herself and this self important white man tumbling wildly to their deaths.
“My M.E. is up there already, correct?” Her deep alto sounded off the walls of the stairwell.
“Uhuh,” quipped the General, “And your two lead detectives. And two of my guys. Just like we talked about.”
The General stepped into the cage frame of the elevator, and opened the door.
“Ladies first,” he said. The Commissioner was reminded of the less than subtle digs she’d gotten as a younger officer on the force decades ago after she’d first transitioned.
Moments later, the General pulled at the drawstring, and the elevator began an even ascent. Commissioner Stevenson was surprised at how quickly the LEDs of her officer below turned to specs.
“You don’t mind if I turn off this LED, do you?” Without waiting for an answer, the General snapped off his helmet lamp, leaving the two in profound darkness.
“So,” the General said after a while, “what's your take Commish? Is the rich guy really dead? Did the boogeyman get him?”
It irked the Commissioner that the General could see her with the aid of his implant, but that she could not see him.
“I suppose we’ll when we get there, won’t we,” returned Stevenson diplomatically.
Her comment was greeted by the whooshing air of the elevator gliding slowly but smoothly upward.
“The animals really went crazy, huh? Burning up everything,” the General said some time later, chuckling to himself.
Henrietta Stevenson tensed. As Commissioner, she rarely wore a weapon, a practice she was at this moment deeply regretting.
“I mean,” the General continued, “you give them education, and opportunitunity, and even representation. Hell, Commish, they got YOU to look up to you, right?! And yet still, this is what they go and do.”
Something isn't right.
The Commissioner considered yelling out to her detail who were undoubtedly on their way back down to the ground level, and hesitated. Even if she could alert them, there was no way they would be able to get to her, locked as she was in the steel cage. She thought she might wrestle the pulley from the General, but she doubted she could support them both. She did not know how the elevator locked onto a particular floor, and dreaded a free fall of any distance.
She decided that the best course was to say nothing at all.
The elevator made its way up, and up and up. In the dark, the Commissioner marveled at the unnatural strength of the big man pulling them. He never faltered, and never took a break even as 10 minutes stretched to 20.
He’s on a performance tab, the commissioner thought, a shiver of revulsion shooting through her. She knew many of her own officers used the illegal pills, but then the NYPD could only afford blood screenings of its employees once a year. National Guard officers, she knew, certainly got regular screenings.
“Who are you?” the Commissioner husked, feeling laughter rising in her throat.
As if on cue, the scent of burning metal and flesh reached the Commissioner’s nostrils, overpowering the mask she still held to her face.
“Relax Commish,” the General drawled as Stevens’ asthma threw her into a coughing fit.
For a moment, the elevator seemed to dip a little bit, and she wondered if the white man had finally begun to tire. Then, she heard a loud click from above.
Squinting through the caged darkness, the Commissioner could just make out a platform ahead.
Suddenly, she was blinded by the General's LED. She recoiled as the man made to grab her hand, assuming a boxer’s stance that had won her many a battle at the sparring gym in Long Island City she’d attended for over 30 years.
“I’m not gonna hurt you Henri-etta,” the big man sang, accenting the Etta at the end of her name to let her know he respected her identity.
“You’re a little dark, no doubt, but you’re one of ours.”
“What do you want” growled the Commissioner, her body already fatiguing in the fighter’s position she maintained in the middle of the elevator car.
“Well, right now, I want you to get off this steel trap.” His voice was casual, almost bored.
The two remained frozen in a standoff for a long moment.
Then, in a blur of unnatural speed, the General grabbed her from the elevator and deposited her onto the platform. The elevator door slammed behind them, clicking it into place.
Almost immediately, the elevator began to move downward. The big man whistled at the gaping emptiness below them.
“Turns out the building has a working generator that powers the elevator. It can be controlled with an implant.” He tapped at his left temple and laughed heartily. For a horrifying moment, the Commissioner thought she might join in.
Abruptly, the General swung around to the hallway leading outward to the executive suite.
“Come on Commish!” He lilted as he strode down the hallway. “Let’s go see about this dead nigger.”
