War Day

by Whitley Streiber; John Kunetka

  New York, New York

  My first glimpse of it shocks me, not because it seems different but because it doesn't. I remember this skyline. From the back of an army truck bouncing down the Saw Mill River Parkway it gleams as it has always gleamed, tall and imperial and elegant. I can pick out the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center, the slanting roof of the Citicorp Center.

  But then I notice an enormous difference. It is in my ability to see details. As it was when we arrived in White Plains yesterday, the air this morning is absolutely clear, more so than I have ever seen it in New York. I can make out the hollows of windows and see long black scars on the Gulf and Western Building. Then I realize that the Empire State Building has no antenna, and that makes me huddle into my jacket.

  Jim stands beside me, his feet wide, his hands gripping the rail that runs along the back of the truck cab. He is silent, his careful eyes on the horizon.

  We have been processed by the army bureaucracy in White Plains, and now carry mimeographed papers that, among other things, give us the right to be in Manhattan without risking arrest or being "shot on sight." I look at the kids in the truck with m e —eighteen , seventeen, some even younger. They aren't very 327

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  fierce, and I believe General Briggs's claim that nobody has ever actually been executed here. These kids are not soldiers in the prewar sense of the word. They are the uniformed custodians of a great, shattered treasure house.

  I suspect that these soldiers might be obsolete, and they just might sense this also. Perhaps that is why they have chosen to protect empty places—the San Antonio and Washington perimeters, this ruined city.

  Maybe the rivalry between the United States and the USSR

  went on so long because both sides knew that without it the central governments were as unneeded as they were unwanted.

  So much of the ferment Jim and I have seen in our travels relates to this question of centrality. Perhaps there is a limit to the size of human states, beyond which they become too inflexible and inefficient to last very long.

  We arrive at the rusting toll plaza that marks the entrance to the Henry Hudson Parkway. The truck stops. A spit-and-polish MP

  master sergeant walks to the back, his helmet gleaming in the morning light.

  "Lay 'em out, you guys." The men start handing over their Army ID cards. The master sergeant looks at each one, comparing it to the face of the man who handed it to him.

  Jim and I give him our mimeographed sheets. He studies them both. "We'll have to verify these. Come over to the command post, please." I feel a surge of resentment, quell it quickly. His right hand rests ever so lightly on the butt of his .45. The CP is a tiny prefabricated building just off the road.

  He hands the sheets to another spit-and-polish soldier, this one a second lieutenant. "Have a seat, gentlemen," the close-cropped boy says in a piping voice. "I'll just make a quick phone call." He picks up a brown telephone and speaks into it, reading off the serial numbers of our documents. After a moment more he puts the receiver down. "Now if you'll just countersign on the first line," he says. I sign. He spends a long time comparing my new signature with the old one. "Your S is a bit off, but I suppose it's okay."

  He hands me my document, then checks Jim's. His J is the source of another mild complaint. Once these documents are coun-

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  tersigned twice, they're worthless—an assurance that they won't be reused. We are allowed one entrance to the city and one exit from it, and no more.

  General Briggs put it this way: "You will remain with your designated guide. You will not contact anyone else you might encounter there. For your own safety, you will not remain overnight"

  We proceed. Soon we can see the George Washington Bridge looming over the sparkling Hudson, and the red tile roofs of the Cloisters. There isn't a boat on the river, and the bridge is empty.

  The only sound is the roar of our truck. I wonder about the Cloisters as we pass beneath the cliffs of Fort Tryon Park. I believe that I might have first kissed Anne in the herb garden there.

  Perhaps not, but that's where I fell in love with her. It could easily have been the innocence of her enthusiasm for the tapestries that did it. I wonder about them. Were they saved, or do they lie now in heaps on the floor, providing nesting places for rats and mice?

  As soon as we pass the Cloisters, the bridge looms up on the right. I see that there are long festoons of vines, some of them scarlet with autumn, hanging from the cables and girders. The truck begins to rattle and bump along as we pass the bridge and enter the old West Side Highway. At this point Jim and I sit down on the wooden bench at the front. We hunch forward, our hands between our knees, bracing ourselves as best we can. The truck growls and stumbles on. Soon the road is pitted, cracked, and we pass over long stretches of grass. Up the side streets I can see rusting cars, long loops of wire between the buildings, and rows and rows of dark windows.

  Our mission is to reach Columbus Circle, where we are to be met by a guide who is, of all things, an employee of the City of New York.

  We turn off the highway at Seventy-ninth Street and take the cleared route to our destination. I realize that the streets are literally choked with abandoned vehicles of all kinds—cars, trucks, buses, and an occasional piece of Are equipment standing out from the jumble. Broadway has had a central path created between the cars. There are vines everywhere, vines and shrubs and things like stinkweed and dandelions growing in every available crack. Some buildings are glutted with plants, others are empty. I realize why: certain species of potted plants grew and seeded, and expanded their dominion.

  Then we pass a magnificent ruin. I recognize the Ansonia. Its copper-sheathed roof has been salvaged. There has also been a scarring fire. The Pioneer supermarket on the first floor is a blackened hole laced by flame-red vines. As we pass there is a fusillade of furious barking. It is low and aggressive and powerful. The soldiers nearest the rear of the truck finger their carbines. "No good shots," somebody says as we pull into Columbus Circle.

  "Shit."

  The Ansonia lingers in my mind. I can imagine Florenz Ziegfeld coming down the steps to his enormous Packard, afloat in champagne laughter.

  There is an olive drab Chevy Consensus parked in front of the New York Coliseum. But for the lack of glass in the entrance and the grass spurting up through the sidewalk, the structure looks almost unchanged. The marquee reads, 56TH NY A U T O C 18-3. I remember the New York Auto Show.

  A young woman gets out of the Consensus. We climb down from our perch in the truck. Across the street, the vast glut of Central Park roars with birds, a furious jungle just touched by autumn. The sidewalks around it are completely gone to vegetation, as are the abandoned cars choking Fifty-ninth Street. There are vines well up some of the elegant buildings that line Central Park South.

  "I'm Jenny Bell," the woman says, shielding her eyes from the bright morning sun. She wears a heavy tunic closed by a web belt.

  There is what looks like a long-barreled .357 Magnum slung on her right hip. Her left hip bears a big, curved knife. She is wearing leather trousers and heavy boots. She carries a canteen, a backpack, a heavy-duty flashlight, and at least twenty feet of rope and a selection of climbing equipment. She does not smile, she offers no more words of explanation. She is simply there.

  We introduce ourselves and get a quick handshake. "Let's go,"

  she says. We leave our soldiers, who have instructions to pick us up here at 5:00 P.M. The Consensus is cramped. I sit in front because I can't manipulate my pad and pencil in the back seat. Jim, NEW YORK 331

  with that fancy recorder of his. has to endure the confinement of the hard bench in the back.

  "I understand that you're a city employee," I say to the young, expressionless face. The beautiful face. How old was this girl on Warday? Eighteen is my guess.

  "That's right."

  "So there's still a city government?"

  "That's right." />
  Jim shifts in his seat. "Is there any particular reason you won't talk, or are you just being a hardass?"

  The girl drives in silence, bouncing us down Broadway. A spring has opened up in the middle of the street between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-sixth. We are forced nearly to the sidewalk to avoid the bed of the little creek it has made. I see crystal water dancing among the skeletons of electrical conduit and pipe. It is young water, wearing and active. The stream goes on for blocks, finally disappearing into the gutters at the corner of Forty-fifth. I remember from some book about New York in the early days that an oak tree grew where Broadway now intersects Forty-second Street. A snatch of song echoes in my head—"those dancin' feet

  . . . " The melody continues until we reach our first stop.

  When I start to get out, the girl reaches over and locks my door. "Wait," she says. She steps into the middle of Times Square.

  Her gun is out. She holds it in both hands. It is a heavy weapon, too heavy for her to aim accurately any other way.

  There is a loud click, then the pistol cracks. The report echoes off empty buildings. Pigeons rise from eaves, and a flock of guinea fowl burst out of the ruined front of Tape City, leaving feathers around a crackling poster of Paul Newman in the '86 picture Jury

  of One.

  Through the hubbub of the birds I can hear a dog screaming in agony, and more dogs barking. Many more dogs.

  "Okay, come on out and take a look. You know Times Square?"

  "I lived in this city for eighteen years," I say.

  "So I don't have to talk."

  The dogs are in front of Bond's Disco. They are dark, scruffy things. Two of them are worrying something long and angled like an arm. Our guide keeps her pistol in her hand.

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  W A R D A Y

  "Many dog packs?"

  "Yeah."

  You love this city, don't you?"

  I was born a few hundred yards from here, at St. Clare's. It's stripped. They stripped the hospitals first. I went to Dalton and then to Stuyvesant. I was in my senior year when it hit."

  "And you stayed on?"

  "Most of my class did. We formed a volunteer action group.

  I've been working ever since. I haven't had a vacation in five years."

  "What's your group called?"

  At first we were Volunteers to Save the City. Now we're part of the city government. Officially we're called the Office of Salvage Management. I'm area manager for Chambers Street to the Battery. My job is to make sure that all salvage in my area is carried out by licensed salvors, and that the withdrawals are duly recorded and entered into the city's record books."

  A glance at her hands tells me that she doesn't wear a wedding ring. "Are you married—if you don't mind me getting personal."

  "I haven't got time." She gets back into the car. "Come on.

  Next stop Sixth Avenue."

  "You don't call it Avenue of the Americas," Jim says.

  "What's the point?"

  We move slowly down Forty-second. A narrow passage has been cleared between reefs of abandoned cars. Once again she takes out her pistol as she stops the car. There are no dogs about this time, so we get out. Through the distant overgrowth of Bryant Park I can see an immense and familiar shape. My heart almost breaks. There are vines pouring out of the windows of the Main Branch of the New York Public Library. I have the horrible thought that they must be somehow rooting in the books. Rot and mildew and moisture are changing them to a fertile soil.

  "Is there any salvage for the library?"

  "One-of-a-kind books only."

  It is a kind of lobotomy, the loss of a place like that.

  Jim asks another question. "Do you actually live in the city?"

  For the first time, she smiles. "I have a house on Eleventh Street. It once belonged to Nikos Triantaffilydis, the Greek ship-

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  ping magnate." Her smile widens* "I commandeered it for special purposes. We have that authority."

  As she speaks I hear a faint but very familiar sound. "Surely that's not the subway?"

  "You better believe it." She glances at her watch. "That'll be the 9:00 A . M . Westsider. It runs on the old D line from 145th Street to Grand. A lot of salvors live up in Washington Heights and commute into the salvage areas."

  "I thought the subway was flooded on Warday."

  "Below Twenty-third. It drained away over the six months after Warday. There are two working lines, the Westsider and the Eastsider. Each runs a three-car train. There are three morning and three afternoon runs, and one at noon. At nine-thirty the Westsider will be back."

  Suddenly Jim curses and slaps furiously at his head. "A bird! It flew in my hair."

  "It's probably hunting for nesting materials. They don't see enough people to worry about hands. It thought you were a nice hairy dog."

  I smell a faint tang of diesel smoke rising from the subway grating. I want to ask Jenny Bell if we can ride on that subway, if we can go down to the Village, to my old neighborhood. My chest is tight. Until now I haven't realized just how much it means to me.

  Jenny has opened up a little, but her steel shell is just waiting to snap closed again. This matter will have to be approached very carefully. "You live on Eleventh Street. That means that the Village is—"

  "It's almost a countryside down there. Fires leveled most of the West Village, and now everything's covered with green. I like it. I like the look of it. And I like the sound of the wind in the ruins."

  I think of 515 West Broadway, where Anne and I raised Andrew, and had some very happy years. I knew everybody in that building—there were only fourteen apartments—but I lost track of them all. We left every single thing we owned at 515.

  This is an entire city of haunted houses, rows and rows and towers and towers, softly crumbling into obscurity.

  "Can we go down to the Village on the subway?"

  "We'd have to go over to Grand Central. The nine-thirty West-

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  sider is an uptown train. The Eastsider's downtown. They're staggered like that." She gets in the car and starts it. Soon we are once again moving along the cleared path in the center of Forty-second Street. The silence in the car is split by a loud crash and a lingering roar somewhere off to the left. "Masonry falling," Jenny says.

  "The Facade Law's unenforceable without any owners. And we haven't got the manpower to identify all the cracked walls. We just have to let it go."

  I wonder if there were civil servants like Jenny Bell in ancient Rome—smart, tough people managing the death of their city.

  The world has always had a great city, one place where all races and occupations met—a rich, dangerous place where the best men and women make themselves fabulous and the worst come to unravel them. First the World City inhabited Ur. A thousand years later it took its bells and moved to Babylon, then briefly to Athens, then to Alexandria, then to Rome. In Rome it lingered and made legends. Then the site was Constantinople, later Paris. It remained Paris for three hundred years, until, like all before it, the City of Light became too ripe, too perfect, and wars and fortune passed the jewel to London. Sometime between the first two world wars, the treasured office of man's great city came to New York.

  I lived in its evening, when the sorrow was already painted on the walls. The World City has left America altogether. I don't know if the party has settled yet, in Tokyo or perhaps back in London.

  A squirrel sits on some vine-covered stones that have long ago fallen from 500 Fifth Avenue. It is eating some sort of nut. The trees in Bryant Park, I realize, are swarming with creatures. There are so many birds that their sound is a roar. They rise in a cloud as the car passes, and the squirrels leap from limb to limb. A pack of dogs laze in the morning sun at the corner of Fifth and Forty-second. They pant at us, their eyes full of lusty interest.

  We stop at the corner of Vanderbilt and Forty-second, across the street from Grand Central.

  Here there is little
foliage and the frozen, rusting traffic is solid the other side of Vanderbilt. I can see why the street hasn't been cleared further: there are at least thirty buses between here and Lexington. They stand silent, motionless, amid the Hondas and the Buicks and the yellow cabs and the vans. Details: NEW YORK 335

  A cab from the Valpin Cab Company, its windows rolled up, doors neatly locked. The inside is thinly filmed with gray.

  Signs on a bus: an ad for the musical Willard at the Uris. Another for Virginia Slims, a third for McDonald's.

  A van from Wadley and Smythe, florists. When I was a gofer on The Owl and the Pussycat, I used to call in producer Ray Stark's orders. Flowers for Barbra Streisand, the film's star. Flowers for others of his friends. Spectacular flowers, exotic flowers, perfect flowers.

  An Interdec Data Transfer truck with a notice painted on the door: "Contains no valuables. Only bookkeeping records." How funny, considering what happens when the bookkeeping records are erased.

  I could continue this list for twenty pages. We pick our way across not to Grand Central but to the subway entrance in the old Bowery Savings Building.

  "I'd like to see Grand Central," Jim says.

  "Structurally unsound. Our voices could be what makes the roof cave in. Sometime soon, it's gonna go."

  We follow her into the dank, swamp-stinking blackness of the subway station. Her flashlight provides the bare minimum illumination we need.

  We descend into a maw, past encrusted turnstiles and across muck-slicked floors. The sound of dripping water echoes everywhere.

  "You've gotta understand that the water table's been rising in Manhattan," Jenny says. I wonder about the structural soundness of the steel girders that support these tunnels.

  I am in a very strange state because of the difference between what is here and what I remember. These tunnels are weird and terrible, dissolving in the water. It's only a matter of time before they cave in.

  To me there was something eternal about Manhattan. But it isn't even close to that now. It's flimsy.