War Day

by Whitley Streiber; John Kunetka

  I realize that I'd always imagined it was waiting for us to come home, that it was the same as before, except empty. I had forgotten that even this most human of places belongs, in the end, to nature.

  336 WARDAY

  My mind turns with half-remembered poetry. "My name is

  Ozymandias... round the decay of that colossal wreck

  Jenny's flashlight hardly illuminates the long, echoing cavern.

  Soon, though, a flickering yellow glow starts up in the tunnel, and we hear a heart breakingly familiar sound. Any New Yorker knows the noise of subway cars coming down the tracks.

  As the light draws closer, the rattling of the cars is joined by the high bellow of a great engine. This subway is drawn by one of the old diesel work engines that the MTA used to haul disabled cars off dead tracks.

  We are illuminated by its powerful headlamp. As the train enters the station it gives off loud blasts from its horn. "Shave and a haircut, two bits."

  Brakes squeal and the thing stops. Diesel fumes are bellowing around us. "Hiva. Jenny," the driver shouts from his cab. "Where to?

  "Bleeeker," she shouts back.

  The doors on the cars that this train hauls are permanently fixed open. Inside, the cars are lit by gas lanterns hung from the ceiling ventilators. "Hey, Jenny," shouts a huge man in a filthy radiation suit, "who the h e l l . . . whatcha got here, tourists?"

  "They're reporters. They want to do a story on the Big Apple."

  "The core or the damn seeds?" He laughs. "You stick with me, you s;uvs. You'll see a hell of a salvage We're takin* out five tons of copper wire a day." He extends a huge hand as the train lurches off. "I'm Morgan Moore. I de build buildings." He roars with laughter. He is an incredibly wrinkled man, maybe fifty, his eyes glim-mering like dark animal eyes in the light of the swaying lamp.

  "You look so goddamn clean, you must be from Lousy Angeles.

  Am I right?"

  "We're from the Dallas Herald News," Jim says. He already has his recorder out. "We'd like to interview you."

  "Whar's yer hats, cowpokes?" Morgan Moore cries amid general laughter. "Y'all cain't be Texas boys without yer hats, can yuh?" There's no derision in Morgan Moore's voice, only humor.

  And his interpretation of a Texas accent is hilarious. We laugh too.

  As we rattle along I observe that there are about ten people on NEW YORK 337

  the train, none of them minding their own business as in the old days, all interested in the phenomenon of the reporters.

  "Seriously," Morgan Moore says, "you guys gotta put a story about what we're doing at the World Trade Center in your paper.

  It's worth front page."

  Another voice: "We pulled over three miles of wire out of the South Tower just yesterday. You're talkin' eighty gold dollars'

  worth of copper in one day."

  "We'll be down to the structural steel in another three months," Morgan Moore adds.

  We stop at Fourteenth Street, and four people get on. One of them is a black man in a three-piece tweed suit and a homburg. He carries a neatly furled umbrella, and he doesn't say anything to anybody. He is totally unexpected, and there is no real way to explain him. The salvors do not make jokes about him. Jenny Bell might have smiled at him, and he might have nodded, but that is the only indication of familiarity.

  He is a welcome indication that, despite everything, the old spirit of this town still flickers.

  Soon the brakes squeal and we are at Bleecker Street.

  " 'S dog country," Morgan Moore says. The gentleman with the umbrella stands beneath the lantern, staring blankly. The other salvors murmur agreement with Morgan Moore.

  Jim asks him if he will do an interview for us. He agrees at once—as long as Jim comes down to his World Trade Center site with him. There is a moment's hesitation. We are both supposed to stay with our guide. And we aren't even supposed to talk to local residents, much less record interviews with them.

  "Have a big time," Jenny says. "We'll catch up with you at the TC

  by—let's see, it's ten now—say two o'clock. You wait for us there." m

  Then she and I step onto the platform. The train grinds its gears and roars off down the tunnel.

  "There's an awful lot of foliage in this area," Jenny says as we near the stairs. "And dogs, like Moore said. You stay close to me.

  And I mean close. No more than three feet away."

  "The dogs are that dangerous?"

  "This is their city, Mr. Strieber. They're the kings here. Our 338 WARDAY

  best defense is to stay the hell away from them. But since you want to see the Village—" #:

  We emerge into the light and fresher air of Lafayette and Bleecker. There have been more aggressive fires around here.

  East toward the Bowery most of the buildings are caved in, their rubble spread into the street, covering the inevitable ruined vehicles. "You go down toward the Holland Tunnel, the cars really get thick. And in the tunnel, all the way to where it's drowned down near the middle."

  My heart is beating harder. Many, many times I emerged from this same station on my way home. In a few minutes we'll be able to see 515 West Broadway.

  Ahead is Broadway, the ruins of the Tower Records store on the ground floor of the Silk Building. I think to myself, the destruction of this city is so vast, so intricate, that it is not possible to grasp it, let alone tell about it.

  New York was immensely wealthy, and so it was detailed. It is the ruin of this detail that impresses—the thousands of cars, the sheer weight of salvage, the numberless little things that together once defined the place: ballpoint pens, mag wheels, plastic rain-coats, videotapes, canned goods, masonry and glass and asphalt, an endless list of objects destroyed.

  It is a fine morning, though, and the light spreading down has the familiar sinister sharpness peculiar to New York skies. We begin moving along the center of Bleecker, between Washington Square Village and Silver Towers. The trees are much taller than one would expect after five years, and the grass has extended on a bed of creepers right to the middle of the street. Bleecker seems like a country lane set amid exotic, crumbling colossi.

  To the right, the Grand Union grocery where we used to shop is completely destroyed, burned to a few stacks of seared brick, and covered by vines and grasses.

  Then I see 515.1 am absurdly grateful. I could kiss this taciturn girl for bringing me here. The building does not look well. The slate facade has fallen off almost completely and lies shattered on the sidewalk. I can see broken windows with rotting curtains blowing out of them. Up close, the quiet of desolation is hard to bear. I took Andrew in and out of this building in a stroller. He learned to NEW YORK 339

  ride a bike on this sidewalk. Behind those walls my love for Anne matured and became permanent.

  It is not until Jenny Bell puts an arm around my shoulder that I realize I've begun to cry.

  "I want to go in."

  "These old buildings are dangerous."

  "Still—"

  She sighs. "You're crazy. But I suppose you know that. I'm crazy too. I work in New York, for God's sake."

  The doors are busted. We could go right in."

  it A place like this never got cleaned. There might be particles."

  "I want to see my apartment. If you'll let me, I'd like to go.

  Alone, if you prefer."

  "You aren't going anywhere alone. What floor is it on?"

  "Six."

  "Of course. Naturally. You wouldn't live on one or two, not you. A seven-story building and you live on six. So come on."

  As we enter the building I see a couple of dogs asleep on the sidewalk about half a block away. Two dogs, not very big.

  The lobby is badly deteriorated. The walls were carpeted, and the carpet now hangs to the floor. When I push some of it aside to open the door into the stairwell, at least two hundred roaches scut-tie away. "They like the glue," Jenny says.

  The place has a sweet, rancid odor, something like stagnan
t water. I suppose the basement must be permanently flooded. "If the water table's risen, why couldn't people simply dig wells? We'd be able to repopulate Manhattan."

  "Toxins. The water's poisonous. Godawful. When dogs drink out of the basements, their lips get eaten away."

  "How do they live?"

  "Rainwater, rats, and squirrels. And people."

  "You're not serious."

  "All the damn time. We find new kills every few days. Drifters figure that with so many buildings the city must be a squatter's paradise. Wrong. Those who don't get dogged die of waste poisoning from coming across Jersey. You can't walk from Newark to the Hudson and live. It just ain't possible."

  I think of the sins of the past. Then, it was so easy. Now I real-

  340 WARDAY

  ize that I, like everybody else, was directly and personally responsible. The land was not despoiled by chemical companies, nor the war caused by countries. It was us, each one. We are all account-able for our era.

  A sharp tang enters my mouth, something I wish I could spit out.

  The stairs are dark in a way that the subway was not. This is absolute blackness, not the presence of dark but something more profound, the absence of light. I remember that these stairs were like this during the great blackout of '85. We set candles along the banisters then, and shared the hot night and songs, and survival stories. We were New Yorkers. We were getting through.

  I am a little sick to be passing Joseph and Sally Boyce's bikes, the two beautiful Raleighs they got in June of '87. There is a bag beside them. Jenny's flashlight reveals a sweatshirt wadded up in it, so rotten that it turns to dust at a touch. I know that shirt; we gave it to Joseph for his birthday in '87. If it could have been opened out, it would have read W H I P P E T S on the front and L A K E

  W O B E G O N , M I N N . on the back.

  At the sixth floor I hesitate before the fire door. We peer through the glass. Jenny's flashlight reveals that the foyer on the other side is in perfect condition. It looks as if it has been preserved in a museum. The door creaks as Jenny opens it. Even the picture we and our next door neighbors put on the wall of the foyer is still there. "Deux," it's called. Photographs of two old men, one bright and smiling, the other in shadow. My neighbor was the bright one. The other represents me. There are just two apartments per floor in our building, and both doors seem securely locked. I put my hand on my old doorknob and rattle it. I wonder if we can even get in.

  "Just a second," Jenny says. She gives me the flashlight and produces a small hooked bar from a sling in her belt. "We have to do this fifty times a day." She inserts the tool into my supposedly burglar-proof lock and in an instant the door swings open.

  Sunlight floods the living room. It was always a bright apartment. After a moment my eyes get used to the light The first thing I see is the bulging, rotted ruin of our L — shaped couch, ma-

  NEW YORK 341

  room with tan padding and foam jutting out The ceiling above it slopes far down into the room.

  But it's our apartment, very definitely. It hasn't been looted.

  The rosewood dining table still has a note stuck in the crack in the center. I take the brittle brown paper. Jam at the school, says Anne's hasty scrawl My first impulse is to take the note. But then I find myself putting it back, as if our whole past might collapse if this last, critical rivet were pulled out.

  I want to see the rest of the apartment. But when I start for the back, where the bedrooms and my office are, Jenny stops me.

  "Hold it." She nods toward the floor. "Spoor."

  "Spoor?"

  "Animals have been in here." She nods toward the fire escape.

  "Window." She touches a brown bit of the dung with her toe.

  "Dry. Wish I knew what the hell dropped it."

  "Not a dog?"

  She shakes her head. "They don't come up this high. Big, though. Maybe a zoo animal. Some of them around. A few. All the way down here, s'funny. I wouldn't expect it."

  Jenny has her revolver out.

  "You think it's still here?"

  At first she doesn't answer. When she moves toward the back rooms, I follow. I make a mental note that we can go down the fire escape if we have to. Jenny takes a deep breath. "Doesn't smell like animals," she says softly. I notice that she cocks the pistol.

  In places the floor has a disturbing springy quality to it. If I jumped, I don't doubt that I'd end up in the apartment below.

  We reach Andrew's room. There is his Apple computer on his desk, his bed forever unmade, his paintings on the walls, most of them rotted beyond recognition. His dresser has fallen apart.

  There is a dried cowboy boot in the middle of the floor. As this room faces west and north, winter blows in here, and his bookshelf is a bulging, sodden ruin.

  The room echoes with so many past voices, him and his friends, a thousand bedtime stories.

  It is in my office, where I wrote The Hunger and Catmagic, that I see my first clear sign of the last desperate days of this city.

  342 WARDAY

  There is a can of Sterno on the floor, and three empty tins from the kitchen, their contents and even their paper labels long since eaten.

  I wonder who was here. Could it have been our neighbors? What might have happened to them? Elizabeth, the model, tall and gentle, her face at the edge of unforgettable beauty. Roberto, full of laughter, a native of Italy, wine importer, friend of evenings. Until this moment I have not remembered them, and I feel guilty for it.

  "Come here," Jenny says. She is looking into the bathroom opposite my office, where I used to soak in the tub to ease the lower-back pain of a sedentary life.

  Bones, jumbled, gnawed, skulls pocked and pitted, teeth grin-ning, bits of clothing adhering to gnarls of ligament.

  I cannot help myself. I scream.

  Jenny neither scolds nor laughs nor sympathizes. When I stop, she begins talking again. "Stay-behinds. You see 'em all over the place."

  "How did they die?"

  "Every way you can imagine." She flashes her light into the bathroom. "That vent. Probably brought in short-half-life dust, so they mighta gotten radsick. Or maybe they were scared to leave and they starved. That happened too. Or violence. Suicide. Take a coroner to tell you, and that I'm not."

  It is then that I see, standing in the door of our bedroom, the most enormous cat I have ever encountered. Its eyes meet mine and its ears go back. It crouches and hisses. "Damn," Jenny says.

  And then she pumps bullets into it until the head disappears into a red cloud of bone and blood. The creature slams across the room and then slumps to a tawny, blood-pumping heap on the floor.

  "What the hell is that?" It looked like a cross between a blond Persian and a Manx, but four times as big as either.

  "Damned if I know. Big cat."

  "Giant cat."

  "I'm gettin' out of this hole, and so are you. You want to get killed, you can stay behind." On the way out I see, lying on the floor of the living room, the china bud vase my mother gave Anne for one of her birthdays. I snatch it up as if it were a gold dollar and put it in my pocket.

  NEW YORK 343

  Jenny won't go near the fire escape, so we return down the stairs. The dark behind us seems so dangerous that it is all I can do not to run.

  It will be a long time before I can think about that apartment again.

  Interview

  Morgan Moore, Salvor

  I entered the salvage business in 1989. I've been a salvor for four years now. Mostly we work the New York Reclamation District, Southern Division. But I've also got permits for the District of Co-lumbia and an iron permit for free-lance railroad work in the Northeast Corridor. I have twelve guys and about six pieces of equipment, including a heavy-duty wire puller that strips copper wire out of conduit, a couple of rivet poppers, a wrecking ball, and one hell of a good set of torches.

  My lifedose has put me on the triage, which means I'm unbeat-able, so I don't give too much of a damn about counts. I
work hard, and when I can, I have all the fun that money can buy. Life's too short for anything else. I've got about eight-percent body coverage squamous, mostly face and neck. No pain. I'd like to wangle a trip to England. There's a doctor there who might be able to get me a number, but he wants a thousand in gold. A thousand! So I take black-market radiums at a buck a pop. But I better not talk on that.

  You want to know what we do? Simple. We work the salvage area for anything marketable. That's what we do. Our P-and-L

  puts us high, but that's mostly because of depreciation on the Demon, which is our main cutting tool. It gets a lot of work. Mostly we're in for cutting out steel and copper from skyscrapers. We participated in the One Chase Manhattan Plaza demo for gold, though.

  344

  NEW YORK 344

  Now that was a hell of a demo. Salvors are still talking about it.

  We were new. a small company. In those days we didn't have the kind of equipment we've got now. I mean, I started up by just saying to myself. I want to make some of that goddamn salvage money. I was an assistant product manager for Triton Systems before the war. We marketed video games, can you believe it? That was a very big business. Multimillions. Even in new dollars we'd be grossing a hell of a lot. It was, like, I think thirty million in 1986.

  Big.

  So I was out on my ass after the war. Triton's bank accounts had been erased by EMP. Then the stock market dissolved and all the Triton stock just ceased to exist. No different from everybody else. Except our inventory was destroyed. EMP burned every chip we owned, and ruined our fabrication equipment.

  By '89 I was stealing food. Trouble was, so was everybody else.

  There was a point when I would have sold my sister for two minutes alone with a loaf of Wonder Bread. Here we were, living in a two-hundred-thousand-dollar house in Darien and there's the five-year Connecticut moratorium on mortgages declared, so we got no mortgage to worry about. You know what it was like. People were starving all around us. I remember, I went into a supermarket with a shotgun. Big deal. Everybody else had a gun too. Bread is eight dollars a loaf and I have, like, a dollar. I would have given away my house for that Wonder Bread, plus sold my sister.