Noah and Amy ran into the ferry terminal through a portal of finely shredded glass. Eunice had grabbed my arm and was pulling me toward our goal. Two ferries had just disgorged their last screaming Manhattan passengers. Who was piloting these ferries? Why were they still crossing the bay? Was there safety in constant motion? Was there any safe place left to dock?
“Lenny,” she said. “I’m telling you right now that if you don’t take me to Tompkins I’m just going to go with Noah. I’ve got to find my sister. I’ve got to try to help my friend. I know I can help him. You can go and be safe at our house. I’ll come back, I promise.”
One ferry, the John F. Kennedy, had begun to chortle in the water in preparation for departure, and we headed for its open hold. Noah and Amy had already clambered on board and were huddled beneath a sign that read “ARA Transport—Ain’t That America, Somethin’ to See, Baby.”
You can go and be safe at our house. I had to say something. I had to stop her, or she would be shot just like the LNWI protesters. Her Credit was bad enough. “Eunice!” I shouted. “Stop it! Stop running away from me! We have to stick together right now. We have to go home.”
But she shook off my arm and was running toward the Kennedy just as the ramp of the ferry had started lifting. I grabbed her by one tiny shoulder, and, with the intense fear of dislocating it, of hearing the crunch that meant I had hurt her, pulled her toward a second, waiting boat, its bridge bearing the legend Guy V. Molinari.
A black chopper circled overhead, its armed golden beak pointing in our direction and then at the island bristling with skyscrapers in the immediate distance. “No!” Eunice shouted, as the Kennedy pulled away, my friends, her new hero Noah, aboard.
“It’s okay,” I said. “We’ll meet them on the other side. Come on! Let’s go!” We clambered onto the Molinari, elbowing our way through the young people and the families, so many families, full of new tears and drying tears and makeshift embraces.
“LENNY,” Nettie Fine teened me, “WHERE ARE YOU NOW?” Despite all the confusion, I quickly teened her that we were on a ferry to Manhattan and safe for the moment. “YOUR FRIEND NOAH SAFE WITH YOU?” she wanted to know, sweet, solicitous Nettie Fine, concerned even about people she had never met. She was probably GlobalTracing us in real time. I wrote her he was on a different ferry but as safe as we were. “WHICH FERRY?”
I told her we were on the Guy V. Molinari and Noah was on the John F. Kennedy, just as stray gunfire opened up behind us, thundering up and down Hamilton Avenue, the resulting screams sneaking into my earlobes and momentarily turning them off. Deafness. Complete silence. Eunice’s mouth twisted into cruel words I couldn’t understand. The Guy V. Molinari’s oblong snout cut into the warm summer water, and we displaced ourselves furiously in the direction of Manhattan, and now more than ever I hated the false spire of the “Freedom” Tower, hated it for every single reason I could think of, but mostly for its promise of sovereignty and brute strength, and I wanted to cut my ties with my country and my scowling, angry girlfriend and everything else that bound me to this world. I longed for the 740 square feet that belonged to me by law, and I rejoiced in the humming of the engines as we sailed toward my concept of home.
A single raven appeared above Noah and Amy’s ferry. It lowered its golden beak, and its golden beak turned orange. Two missiles departed in rapid succession. One explosion, then two; the helicopter casually turned and flew back in the direction of Manhattan.
A moment of nonscreaming, of complete äppärät silence, overtook the Guy V. Molinari, older people holding tight to their children, the young people lost in the pain of suddenly understanding their own extinction, tears cold and stinging in the sea breeze. And then, as the flames bloomed across the ferry’s upper decks, as the John F. Kennedy reared up, split into two, disintegrated into the warm waters, as the first part of our lives, the false part, came to an end, the question we had forgotten to ask for so many years was finally shouted by one husky voice, stage left: “But why?”
SECURITY SITUATION IN PROGRESS
FROM THE DIARIES OF LENNY ABRAMOV
AUGUST 7
Dear Diary,
The otter came for me in a dream. Not the cartoon otter that interrogated me in Rome, not the graffito otter I saw on Grand Street, but a true-to-life otter, a high-definition mammal, whiskers, fur, the dampness of the river. He pressed his wet plush black nose into my cheek, into my ear, kissing me with it, blessing my hungry face with his hot familiar and familial salmon breath, his little muddy paws destroying the clean white dress shirt I had put on for Eunice, because in my dreams I wanted her to love me again, because I wanted her back. And then he spoke to me in Noah’s voice, in that edgy, improper, but basically humane voice, the voice of a thwarted scholar. “You know Americans get lonely abroad,” he said, pausing to gauge the look on my face. “Happens all the time! That’s why I never leave the brook where I was born.” Staring me up and down to see if I found him entertaining. “Did you meet any nice foreign people while you were abroad.” Not a question, but a statement. Noah had no time for questions. “I’m still waiting for that name, Leonard or Lenny.” I felt my dream mouth move to betray Fabrizia yet again, but this time I couldn’t pry it open. The Noah-otter smiled as if he knew exactly what kind of man I was and wiped his whiskers with a human paw. “You said ‘DeSalva.’”
Noah. Three days after the Rupture. Instead of mourning, instead of grief, shallow memories of us sharing a joint on the gravel mounds of Washington Square, our early friendship as tenuous and goofy as a young love affair. Politics on our tongues, girls on our minds, just two guys from the suburbs, freshmen at NYU, Noah’s already working on one of the last novels that will ever see print, I’m working on being the friend of someone like Noah. Are these memories even real? This is my life now. Dreams, nothing but dreams.
I’ve been sleeping on the couch. Eunice and I have barely spoken since I dragged her home and away from her goddamn Tompkins Park, from whatever or whomever she thought she could save. Her mysterious male friend? Her sister? What the hell would Sally be doing in the middle of a battlefield?
“I don’t think this is going to work,” I had told Eunice of our relationship after she had sulked in the bedroom for the better part of that blood-soaked day. “If we can’t take care of each other now, when the world is going to shit, how are we ever going to make it? Eunice! Are you even listening to what I’m saying? I’ve lost one of my best friends. Don’t you want to, like, comfort me?” No response, dead smile, retreat to the bedroom. E basta.
The booms, big and small, faraway and close, the pounding in my head, tracer rounds against the overcast moon, tracer rounds lighting up the secret, hidden parts of the city, an entire building of crying babies, and, even scarier, the temporary absence of those wails. Relentless. Relentless. Relentless. You can see the magenta flashes even against the fully closed curtains, you can hear them on your skin. At night, the sound of metallic scraping coming off the river, like two barges slowly crashing against each other. When I open a window, the strange bloom of flowers and burnt leaves hits my nose—a sweet, dense rot, like the countryside after a storm. Oddly enough, no car alarms. I listen for the comfort-food sounds of ambulances presumably rushing to keep people alive—every few minutes the first day after the Rupture, then every few hours, then nothing.
My äppärät isn’t connecting. I can’t connect. No one’s äppäräti are working anymore. “It’s an NNEMP,” all the thirtysomething Media wizards hanging out in the lobby of our building are saying with finality. A Nonnuclear Electromagnetic Pulse. The Venezuelans must have detonated it high above the city. Or the Chinese. Like anyone knows. Like there’s any difference between the quality of “news” since the Media’s gone out.
Venezuelans detonating something other than an arepa.
Whatever, as Eunice would say, if she still spoke to me.
I point my äppärät out the half-opened window, trying to catch a signal. I can’t reach my parents
. I can’t connect to Westbury. I can’t connect to Vishnu. I can’t connect to Grace. And nothing from Nettie Fine. Complete radio silence since Noah’s ferry exploded. All I have is the Wapachung Contingency emergency scroll. “SECURITY SITUATION IN PROGRESS. REMAIN IN DOMICILE. WATER: AVAILABLE. ELECTRICITY: SPORADIC. KEEP ÄPPÄRÄT FULLY CHARGED IF POSSIBLE. AWAIT INSTRUCTIONS.”
In the next room, she’s crying.
I’m so scared.
I have no one.
Eunice, Eunice, Eunice. Why must you break my heart, again and again?
Five days after the Rupture, instructions.
WAPACHUNG CONTINGENCY EMERGENCY MESSAGE: SECURITY SITUATION LOWER/MID-MANHATTAN IMPROVED. PLEASE REPORT TO YOUR DIVISION HEADQUARTERS.
I put on a shirt and pants, feeling both scared and celebratory. The air conditioner had gone out and I had been living in my underwear, which made the pants feel like armor and the shirt like a shroud. Eunice was sitting by the kitchen table, staring absently at her nonfunctional äppärät. I have never smelled unwashed hair off her, but there it was, as strong as anything in the half-dead refrigerator. And that softened me for some reason, made me want to forgive her, to find her again, because whatever happened between us had nothing to do with me. “I have to go to work,” I said, kissing her on the forehead, not afraid to inhale what she had become.
She looked up at me for the first time in a hundred hours, eyes crusted over. “To see Joshie?” she said.
“Yes,” I said. She nodded. I stood there like a Japanese salaryman in my overwarm pants and stifling shirt, waiting for more. But it wouldn’t come. “I still love you,” I said. No response, but no dead smile either. “I think we both really tried to make this work. But we’re just too different. Don’t you think?” And then, before she could summon an emotion and deny it in the same breath, I left.
Outside, the streets were nearly empty. All the cabs had fled to wherever cabs come from, and that absence of moving yellow made Manhattan feel as still and silent as Kabul during Friday prayers. The Credit Poles were burned up and down Grand Street, and they looked like prehistoric trees after the glaciers retreated, their colored lights sagging down in a row of inverted parabolas, the racist Credit signs atop them torn down and ripped apart, coating the windshields of cars like old washrags. An old Econoline van with a bumper sticker that read “My Daughter Is a U.S. Marine in Venezuela” had also been torched for some reason—it lay on its back in the middle of the street, imitating a dead water bug. The A-OK Pizza Shack was open but had boarded up its windows, as had the local Arab bodega, the words “WE ACCEPT ONLY YUAN SORRY BUT WE ALSO HALF TO EAT” stenciled along each bit of cardboard. But, otherwise, the neighborhood looked remarkably intact, the looting minimal. The deep hush of the morning after a failed third-world coup seeped up from the streets and coated the silent towers. I was proud of New York, now more than ever, for it had survived something another city would have not: its own rage.
The F train entrance was stuffed with garbage, the subways clearly out. I walked up Grand, a lone man feeling the density of August along with the strange hunger of being alive, wondering what would come next. For one thing, I needed real money, not dollars.
Outside my Chinatown HSBC branch, a dragon’s tail of poor middle-class Chinese folk waited to hear the verdict on their life savings. I wondered if these ruined older men and women, the Tai Chi practitioners of Seward Park with their three-yuan trainers and mottled bald spots, could find a way to repatriate to the now wealthier land of their birth. Would they even be welcomed back? Would Eunice’s parents be if they decided to return to Korea?
I stood in line for an hour, listening to a Caribbean man dressed in head-to-toe denim, his cracked skin glistening with patchouli, sing to us his take on the world. “All these Wapachung people, all these Staatlin people, they takin the money and runnin. They messin up the economy, they messin up our pockets. This is extortion. This is Mafia doin. Why they shoot that ferry down? Who control who? That’s what I askin you. And you know we never fine out the answer, because we little people.”
I wanted to give the man an answer he could live with, but my throat remained blank, even as my mind was running. Not now, not now. Save the questions for Joshie.
My bank account was still big enough to warrant a special teller, an old Greek woman imported from a ransacked Astoria branch, who laid it all out for me. Everything I owned that had been yuan-pegged was relatively intact, but my AmericanMorning portfolio—LandOLakes, AlliedWasteCVS, and the former conglomeration of cement, steel, and services that had once formed an advanced economy—no longer existed. Four hundred thousand yuan, two years of self-denial and bad tipping at restaurants, all gone. Together with the Eunice-related expenditures of the past month, I was down to 1,190,000 yuan. From the standpoint of immortality, I was already on the mortuary slab. From the standpoint of survival, the new gold standard for all Americans, I was doing just fine. I took out two thousand yuan, Chairman Mao’s solid face and remarkable hairline staring back at me from the hundred-note currency, and hid the bills in my sock. “You’re the richest man in Chinatown,” the teller snorted. “Go home to your family.”
My family. How were they surviving? What had happened on Long Island? Would I ever hear the warble of their anxious birdsong again? On a street corner I saw a man flagging down a car, then bargaining over the price of a ride. My father had told me this is how he used to get around Moscow when he was young, once even flagging down a police car, its captain looking to make a ruble. I stuck out my hand, and a Hyundai Persimmon decked out in all things Colombian pulled up to me. I negotiated twenty yuan to the Upper East Side, and for the next few minutes the city slid past me, demure and empty against the outrageously joyous salsa that colored the inside of the Hyundai. My driver was something of an entrepreneur and on the way over sold me a hypothetical bag of rice that would be delivered to my apartment by his cousin Hector. “I used to be scared of things before,” he said, pulling down his sunglasses to show me his sleepless eyes, their brown orbs swimming in the colors of the first and last bars of the Colombian flag, “but now I see what our government is. Nothing inside! Like wood. You break it open, nothing. So now I’m going to live my life. And I’m going to make some money. Real money. Chinese money.” I tried to be his friend and economic confidant for the duration of the ride, saying, “Mhh-mm, mhh-mm,” in the usual noncommittal tone I use with people I have nothing in common with, but when we got to my destination, he hit the brakes. “Salte, hijueputa!” he shouted. “Out! Out! Out!” I clambered out of the car, which squealed immediately in the opposite direction, the fare left uncollected.
The street was full of National Guard.
I had not seen any military on the streets since I left my apartment, but the Post-Human Services synagogue was entirely surrounded by armored personnel carriers and Guardsmen, whom my äppärät cheerfully identified as Wapachung Contingency. (In fact, upon closer inspection, the National Guard flags and insignia were almost completely scraped off their vehicles and uniforms; now these men were pure Wapachung.) They were protecting the doors of the building from a riotous horde of young people, apparently our just-fired employees, our beautiful Daltons, Logans, and Heaths, our Avas, Aidens, and Jaidens, who had tormented me in the Eternity Lounge and were now massed against Joshie’s synagogue, the very source of their identity, their ego, their dreams. My nemesis Darryl, the SUK DIK guy, was jumping around like a locust on fire, trying to get my attention. “Lenny!” he shouted to me, as I walked up to the Guardsmen at the door, had my äppärät scanned, and was curtly nodded admission. “Tell Joshie this isn’t fair! Tell Joshie I’ll work for half-salary. I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings! I was going to stand up for you at the Miso Pig-Out in November. Come on, Lenny!”
I glanced at them from the top step of the synagogue’s entrance. How perfect they looked. How absolutely striking and up-to-the-minute and young. Even in the middle of calamity, their neuro-enhanced minds were working with a
lacrity, trying to solve the puzzle, trying to get back in. They had been prepared from an evolutionary perspective to lead exalted lives, and now civilization was folding up around them. Of all the rotten luck!
And then I was inside, the main sanctuary jammed by further Guardsmen in full battle regalia. The Boards were ticking madly as the bulk of our staff were getting their TRAIN CANCELED. The sound of flaps turning on five boards at once made it sound as if gangs of pigeons had flown into our headquarters to engage in winged combat. I stood before one of the stained-glass windows depicting the tribe of Judah, represented here by a lion and crown, and for the first time considered the fact that to several thousand people this had once been a temple.
A small remnant of our staff still haunted the offices, but their conversations were funereal and dense. No mention of pH levels or “SmartBlood” or “beta treatments.” The word “triglyceride” did not echo in the bathroom where we Post-Human Services men took our lengthy organic shits, straining to be free of whatever greenery tormented us. On the way up to Joshie’s, I stopped by Kelly Nardl’s desk. Empty. Gone. I reached instinctively for my äppärät to shoot her a message, but then realized all outside transmissions had ceased. Apropos of nothing, I felt scared for my parents again.
Two National Guardsmen stood outside Joshie’s office. The emergency feed of my äppärät must have alerted them to my importance, because they stepped aside and opened the door for me. There he was. Joshie. Budnik. Papi chulo. Under siege in his minimalist office as the young voices outside brayed for his SmartBlood. I made out the uncreative and juvenile “Hey, hey / Ho, ho, / Joshie Goldfuck’s gotta go,” and the much more hurtful “Our jobs are gone, / Our dream’s been sold, / But one day, jerk, / You will get old.” Joshie was wearing a gold yuan symbol around his neck, trying to look young, but his posture looked embattled, the skin of his earlobes sagged in a peculiar way, and a Nile delta of purple veins ran down the left side of his nose. When we hugged, the slight tremor of his hands beat against my back. “How’s Eunice?” he said immediately.
Super Sad True Love Story Page 27
