Create my nature pure within
And form my soul averse to sin
Let Thy good spirit ne’er depart
Nor hide Thy presence from my heart
I cannot live without Thy light
Cast out and banished from Thy sight
Thy holy joys, my God restore
And guard me that I fall no more
O may Thy love inspire my tongue
Salvation shall be all my song
And all my powers shall join to bless
The Lord, my strength and righteousness
— Isaac Watts, “The Backslider Restored,” sung as “Pittsburgh Hymn” by Vivienne Richman on Folk Songs of West Pennsylvania (1959)
Denn die einen sind im Dunkeln
Und die andern sind im Licht
Und man siehet die im Lichte
Die im Dunkeln sieht man nicht
(There are some who are in darkness
And the others are in light
And you see the ones in brightness
hose in darkness drop from sight)
— Bertolt Brecht, “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer” (“Ballad of Mack the Knife”) from The Threepenny Opera (1931 film version)
It was three p.m. in December, a disgusting hour of the cramped day, a time which by all rights should be mid-afternoon but which the shortened hours transformed into the borderland of evening. Further confusing matters, it was freakishly warm: Christmas was drawing near, but the thermometer hovered around sixty, a taunting false spring before winter’s clutches froze all.
Sam Ciccarelli took a long draw of his Marlboro Red and gazed upon the desolation of the Philadelphia bus station. The building was squat and ugly, clad in rough, rock-like siding tinged black by decades of soot. The faux-innocent face of Peter Pan was perennially half-enveloped in sulfurous exhaust, a green devil presiding over the hell of Neverland. Surrounding him were the finest specimens of Homo autobusensis: the half-employed handymen and seasonal immigrant workers, the black men in tracksuit pants and white men in unseasonable basketball shorts, the old men and jacks-of-all-trades — in short, the afterthoughts of the American dream. Everyone who was ever exploited, born to Blake’s “endless night” and developing calluses pursuing a quixotic prosperity, they were all here: the baby mamas and the drunkards and the fat women and the skinny men and everyone else from the phantasmagoric underbelly of North America.
Sam was going home. Sam was going back to Pittsburgh.
Sam was something of an outsider. Alongside the gaggle of crust punks — whose white patches on black clothing gave the unwholesome image of dirt-stained Mickey Mouses — an eccentrically dressed woman, and a downwardly mobile millennial couple continuing their lame (500) Days of Summer pantomime far past its due date — Sam was the only passenger with a middle-class pedigree. It hadn’t come easy, of course. His parents rose from the rocky mill towns of Western Pennsylvania — McKeesport, this valley of fire, the old Slovak folk song went — to a level of prosperity which deranged them. There is nobody more psychotic than a poor person suddenly thrust into the upper middle class, and the Ciccarellis had repaid Sam in full for his real or imagined transgressions. They were born-and-bred yinzers, eyes perennially downturned, trundling down dreary main drags to shabby taverns selling Rolling Rock and Pabst Blue Ribbon, where hunkies of the lowest degree drank themselves into a Mariana Trench of self-annihilation. They had pummeled him, beat him, given him welters and black eyes, brandished knives and locked him out of the house — and still he returned home, year after year, a homing pigeon drawn instinctively to the Forks of the Ohio.
The front door of the bus opened and the driver — a Chinese man with a thick New York accent — stepped out. “This is the three o’clock bus to Pittsburgh, with a half-hour layover in Harrisburg,” he announced. A strange shadow fell over his face. “Anyone caught horsin’ around, or doin’ anything illegal, I will throw you off the bus widout thinkin’ twice.”
Here we go, thought Sam. On a scenic drive from the prison to the chicken plant.
The course of true love never did run smooth, and neither does a Greyhound bus ride through the bowels of Pennsylvania. Not even thirty minutes north of the city and the axles started acting up, necessitating an emergency pull-over in the parking lot of the King of Prussia Mall. “The aptly-named KOP,” mumbled Sam, “if you wanna have fun, you go to jail.” That earned him a sideways glance from a portly white woman, possibly around forty, in the midst of an epically long and angry phone conversation with some unknown male voice — her son? brother? husband? This was the low state of morality on the Greyhound bus out of Philly to Pittsburgh: you were judged for offhand flippancy by someone whose life was in total disarray. Jesus’ command to remove the plank in your eye before noticing the speck in your neighbors’ never seemed so apt — and boy, would Jesus’ return ever be welcome right now. Sam wasn’t a believer, but in this grubby world shivering in the shadow of an exuberant monument to go-go eighties excess — a place which most of these passengers could never afford to shop — perhaps the hot, angry light of the Lord was what would restore them all, saint and sinner alike.
The sick, pale sun continued its awful descent. Its light glared off the great glass front of the mall and every car in the oceanic parking lot, a herd of gas-powered beetles in repose. Weighed down by cumbersome bags and suitcases, the passengers lumbered out of the bus and decamped alongside it. Sam pulled out another Marlboro Red and lit it; harsh and acrid while inhaling, rich and full-bodied upon exhale, it was the one dubious luxury this hardscrabble survivor allowed himself. He had no compunction living in a ratty, eccentrically-decorated house in the heart of a slum. He did not care he was putting his bachelor’s in political science to use slaving at a restaurant counter, paid sub-minimum wage under the table by its stingy proprietors. He merely wanted high-quality cigarettes. Was that too much to ask?
Besides him stood a lanky woman, somewhere in her late thirties. Her hair was frizzy and she wore a floral skirt with a green sweater top, and her skin was the strange brownish-yellow color of someone on the precipice of middle age still living in a shoebox with unemployed artists fifteen years her junior. She had started a small fire and atop it placed a small tin can belching sweet-smelling smoke with a herbal scent to it.
Sam finished his Marlboro and absent-mindedly flicked it into the woman’s flames. Before it even reached the fire, she quickly spun towards him — did she have precognition? — eyes narrowed and tongue sharp.
“You’re ruining my spells!”
“Pardon me?”
“My spells! The dead shall be unquiet now. This earth shall be cursed.”
“You do spells?”
“Yeah, I’m a witch. I am devoted to the goddess Freyja and her eternal splendor and beauty.”
“Whatever you are, the earth is already cursed. Too late to return that genie to its bottle.”
This remark was met with a derisive harrumph from the witch, who once again turned away and warmed her hands by the can. Sam gazed at them: she sported long and bony fingers, pale quills jutting into the late afternoon shadows. Once a minute, she flapped her hands from side-to-side like a seagull struggling to take flight.
“It’s a stim. I’m on the spectrum.”
Sam unthinkingly made an odd expression, somewhere between a side-away and bemusement. The woman’s face curdled yet again.
“Don’t look at me like that! This is Freyja’s gift.”
“I didn’t mean anything by it. I was curious. My brother’s also on the spectrum.”
“It’s not the same in men. They can’t touch the divine.”
It was Sam’s turn to look away, embarrassed. She’s got a point there. We men will never achieve divinity. We invent these faiths but women perfect them. Queen Esther. The Virgin Mary. Fatima, Muhammad’s daughter. Hildegard of Bingen. We can’t intuit anything. We can only hide the pain and retreat into our bodies and wait to die. It’s gray and cold inside our souls, just like the winter, with little sparks of faint fire burning in and out.
The engine trouble resolved soon enough, and the bus continued its westward journey across the Keystone State. With each passing minute, the gloom gathered, cloaking hills and farmland in deepening darkness. The sun blazed at the horizon line, vomiting up its hidden colors like a man on his deathbed. The pale yellow scattered into a series of odd hues, bloody reds and lurid oranges flooding the violet-black sky bearing down on the ragged Mid-Atlantic land. Venus appeared like a small pimple above the setting sun, her small eye blinking in and out.
A wave of unsettled somnolence swept the bus. The witch browsed Reddit on her phone. A skinny twenty-something man in a stained gray hoodie carried on some loudly inane conversation on his phone, yelling “gotta get rid of those fake people, yo” and “that bitch from Altoona, she can’t even read but she’s telling you what to do? Fuck that.” A pair of Mexican men in trucker caps watched YouTube Reels at medium volume, the dying sun faintly reflecting off their slick black hair. A portly single mom dozed off while her son fiddled with his Nintendo Switch. One of the crusties snickered at her as only an anarchist with a trust fund can.
After emerging from a tunnel bored into the bare-treed Berks County hills, Sam noticed that the darkness didn’t cease upon exiting. The sun had finally perished, and it would soon grow very cold.
Presently they pulled into Harrisburg, the state capitol’s green dome glowing faintly in the dark like a loogie suspended in air. The bus stop was on a stretch of bare sidewalk across from the train station, a 19th century concoction with a stately Beaux Arts interior clad in what appeared like a chain of tall rowhomes. How fittingly Pennsylvanian: the interior is lovely, but the exterior looks like a coal town side street. Of course, they weren’t going inside the station. No warmth — however drafty — for them. No, only standing on this bland stretch of sidewalk, a trickle of ramshackle weirdos descending the bus stairs with a new crop of them joining the crowd.
They’d only have forty-five minutes, and Sam didn’t feel like loitering on this dingy sidewalk. It was time to re-enact his favorite Harrisburg ritual: taking a drink at Frankie’s Tavern.
Frankie’s wasn’t anything to look at: it was your classic hole-in-the-wall dive which dots every hollowed-out Rust Belt town. The windows glowed yellow-white, adorned with twisting Technicolor neon tubes proclaiming BUD LIGHT and YUENGLING. The cold synth stabs of Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” blared at top volume whenever the door opened. The whole thing appeared like a wartime bunker: those inside were protected from whatever surrounded them by the stench of stale beer and their own self-loathing, and passersby were kept safe from the reek of desperation and dying hope. Naturally, this little burrow was the type of place Sam Ciccarelli loved. It felt like home: it reminded him of his parents, of the drab hilly streets they’d abandoned and the leafy suburban hell where they’d decamped, the screaming and anger and welts and blood.
Sam plonked down on a barstool with a torn green cushion and ordered a bottle of Heiniken. Within a mere fifteen minutes — you had to be fast with these if you wanted to stagger back to the bus in time — he’d demolished two more. While intoxicated, Sam’s face contorted in strange and opposing directions, like a late-period Picasso. He saw his distorted visage in the lawn-colored Heiniken bottle, distended even farther like a particularly vile funhouse mirror, mocking him. You stupid guinea fuck, you think this is normal? Look at you, you pathetic scumbag. You’ve got a useless degree and now you’re drinking yourself into a coma waiting on a dingy bus for junkies so you can go home and get screamed at by your parents. You scumbag. You dago idiot.
Sam’s drunken haze of self loathing was interrupted by a sudden soft thud next to him, followed by a tiny squeak. To his right sat a haggard-looking white woman in her early sixties, wearing a stained gray-blue sweater with completely white hair, face criss-crossed with thin wrinkles and parenthesis like the Nazca lines, a Camel dangling from her lips. She ordered a Coors.
“Yo.”
“Hmmm?”
“You, yeah you. I’m talkin’ to you!”
“Yeah?”
“I used to smoke crack all the time back in the eighties. Nineties too. You ever smoke crack?”
“N-n-naw, n-never.”
“Fuckin’ pussy. I could tell that’s what you were the minute I saw you.. Fuckin’ pussy.”
“Well, I guess.”
“Yeah, you better guess.”
Sam felt a particularly vile lurch in his stomach and knew it was time to leave. He tossed over an inexact amount of crumpled bills and loose change on the counter and darted for the idling Greyhound, mere minutes from its departure. The bus driver greeted him with cool jocularity, lip curled into a half-smile coupled with a flinty stare.
“Almost pulled out without ya.”
“Uh, yup.”
Sam clambered to the back of the bus, snagging the last remaining open seat — indeed, almost falling into it. It was good to return to this dark wheeled womb of his.
Thirty minutes later — right after passing Carlisle — Sam felt a long, quiet finger insistently tap on his shoulder. He’d become so damn intoxicated during the Horror of Harrisburg that he didn’t even notice his seatmate.
“My name’s Jack. I’m headed home from a funeral in Rochester, New York. Call me Jack from Rochester.”
“Alright, Jack from Rochester. Did you get on in Philly?”
“Naw, Harrisburg.”
Sam peered at Jack’s form, almost totally cloaked in darkness. He couldn’t tell what he looked like, nor what he was wearing nor his race nor perhaps even his gender. Was Jack even human? Was he an angel sent to rescue Sam and establish him in the Glory, or a devil ready to drag him to Gehenna? Sam figured the latter, but Chris always loved the least of us.
“What’s your name, man?”
“Sam.”
“Aw shit, Sam. That’s my cousin’s name. He’s serving twenty in Michigan for robbing a Walgreens.”
“Oh, interesting.”
“Yeah, but I’m not involved in that shit. I try and keep things calm and positive, y’know? It’s a tough world out there.”
“That it is.”
The conversation awkwardly ceased, the low rumble of the bus’ motor offset by the quiet rustling and whispered conversation of the passengers. Sam was nearly gone, his addled mind pickled and fried and turned inside-out. After a good five minutes of quiet — which Sam’s mind distended into an eternity — he felt Jack’s fingers tap his shoulder again.
“Hmmm?”
“I got a present for us, Sam.” Jack’s eyes shone with bloodshot yellow-white light in the dark. He reached in his left pocket and produced a small bag. Even in the darkness Sam could see the little twinkles like moonlight on newly fallen snow.
“Want some?”
“Sure.”
Sam’s voice was incredibly distant. He was technically on Earth but his mind was somewhere else, somewhere near the outer fringes of the universe where the weird morphing plasma beyond is visible through the translucent purple of the outer sky. He took a sniff and then Jack did, and then they repeated this again.
Suddenly the tired cosmic reveries melted away. Every little element within the bus became clear and present in a way they never were before. There wasn’t one kind of darkness but many. The headlight-lit asphalt ahead of them shone and dazzled, the lights pilot fish guiding this great metal shark-on-wheels towards its winter feeding grounds by the Monongahela. Images of black clouds belching out of hulking brown steel mills against vivid red horizons sped across Sam’s mind. He saw Czech peasant dances and Irish pub brawls. He remembered the entire plot of Fences down to the last detail and disgorged this information in a cascade of whispered word-vomit to Jack, who eagerly listened to every word in his zooted state of hyperconcentration, nodding vigorously with each new twist and tragedy in the plot. It was like Sam became a Pittsburgh encyclopedia, the cocaine transforming the entire world into a canvas of yellow and black.
Yellow and black. Yellow and black. Sam saw something yellow and black out of the corner of his eye. It was a sign fronting a trailer park right on the Cambria-Westmoreland County line, lit with lights flickering in and out, blaring to the world WELCOME TO STEELERS COUNTRY. They were nearly there. Sam Ciccarelli was moderately coked up and it was dark and they were nearly there. The foul lights of the Steel City drew nearer. Suddenly a wave of nausea passed through his stomach. Every inch of sweat on his clammy skin was another strand in a cocoon that kept him bound in this western wasteland.
Sam turned to Jack from Rochester. His head was tilted to one side and his breathing was gradually slowing. Equilibrium re-established her reign in their minds. The darkness was just darkness again. The lights were once more just lights. Once again their minds were listless.
“That was some good shit, Jack.”
“Fuckin’ A.”
The bus alighted at the downtown Pittsburgh station. A large chunk of the damned had found their Tartarus, and another crowd filed on, headed for Cleveland or Indianapolis or Chicago or other points unknown scattered across the Middle West which opened before them. Sam gazed up into the dark sky. It was colder now, and icy winds barreled off the Allegheny, ripping into his lithe frame. His jacket was too thin. His jeans were too thin. His beat-up shoes were close to coming apart. Headlights flashed through the darkness, dreadful tractor beams ready to vacuum him up into some alien hell.
The air was redolent with the spirits and haints who tormented these hills and hollers since times immemorial. They taunted the municipal boosters who proclaimed this dump the “Paris of Appalachia,” reminding them that the place they compared to the capital of all European art and culture was a ramshackle collection of soot-smeared spires and onion domes paired with shabby two-story houses at the junction where two minor streams formed a greater one.
And these days, it’s not even new soot. It’s old soot, the descendant of soot that’s floated through this town for a century and a half. Whatever created this soot decamped from this town long ago. We live with ghosts of soot. Ghosts of soot! Shoot me now.
A particularly sickly-looking pair of headlights beamed into Sam’s peripheral vision. He knew without thinking that this was his mother and sister. He knew on some deep, dark level that three weeks of hell would soon arrive. He gazed up at the unforgiving sky. The clouds were gray-brown smears. The sky was a sickly purple-blue. His eyes perceived nothing and his body was numb. Somewhere, deep inside him, the last remnant of his soul died. Something new replaced it. It would never end. It always would be. He was Its vessel. He carried It everywhere and he was the only member of Its diaspora. He saw Its images swirling in his mind’s eye: striking Irishmen ripped apart by National Guardsmen turned George Romero zombies, the white shock of Warhol’s hair, the blood-red sweater of Mr. Rogers, the malevolent glower of Henry Clay Frick merging with that of Michael Keaton’s Batman, an ocean whose deep azure was replaced by hideous black and gold.
He saw It, all of It. He became It. He fully knew what It was. It was Pittsburgh.