Gun Machine

Twenty

THE HUNTER awoke gently from a peaceful sleep at the break of dawn, its rosy fingers softly touching his face as he slept beneath a great Central Park cypress by the water. He sat up, cross-legged, silent, breathing deeply as the rising sun warmed him. The hunter then stood, pulled some leaves from the cypress, crushed them in his hand to release their oils, and rubbed them under his armpits to minimize his odor.

Walking quietly around the park, he gathered cattail shoots from the water’s edge, lamb’s-quarter leaves, hen of the woods mushroom flesh, a little mountain mint, and wood sorrel, and he returned to his spot under the cypress to eat it with a piece of squirrel meat. He was always careful never to take too much from one plant. He was a hunter, and that meant he never knew when he might have to rely on foraging to live. The moment he allowed himself to believe that the movement of seasons was perfectly repeating and broadly predictable, he would be creating the conditions for his own death.

Having eaten, the hunter began to walk. He exited Central Park at East Seventy-Second Street.

Within a few minutes, the hunter was where he wanted to be: in sight of the Aer Keep Tower, a forty-four-floor glass spike sunk deep into the island. There was no strobing superimposition of Old Manhattan in his vision now. Something this viciously contemporary had him fully impaled in the present day.

The building repulsed him on a basic level. Nothing about it came from nature, not its alien glitter nor its computer-generated shape. It was a thing created in a lab. It had no place in his green world. It was the device of an invader.

He walked its perimeter. It was surrounded by high concrete walls, an urban blast bunker against the visual assault of the nearby public school, far too charmless and real for the unprotected eyes of the tower’s inhabitants. The residents’ view didn’t start until higher up, where all the adjacent streets and buildings became nothing but distant pretty toys laid out around their feet. The comfortable perspective of giants.

There was no true pedestrian entrance. The only way in or out was through the underground garage. If you wanted to leave on foot, you had to emerge from beneath the building and walk the driveway to the main gates. The design obviously dissuaded the more adventurous rich from going on a walking safari. Far better to leave in convoys of black SUVs with tinted windows and discuss in gyms and bars how the possession of money made them prisoners of New York City.

Or perhaps not, thought the hunter, surveying the main gates. Perhaps they thought themselves a new wave of colonists, inhabiting an airtight biosphere and exploring the moon of Manhattan.

This was where Jason Westover lived. Jason Westover and his wife.

The hunter watched cars dock and undock from Space Station Upper East Side for a while, calculating his own trajectories.