****
Clay was struck by the almost usualness of it all as he moved through the street. Shopkeepers were busily sweeping their sidewalks, pushing the debris into the curb, then arching their backs to relieve the tension from the motion. Women in slickers walked their dogs, stopping to talk in little groups as their children toddled along after them.
Of course, there was the occasional limb, twisted and broken from the terrifying winds of the night before, but he was surprised that his neighborhood had not suffered more damage. Sometimes in the midst of the tempest a leaf lays still and is not tossed and therefore suffers, as we all do, from a lack of perspective.
He had listened to the radio through the night as winds howled and lights flickered but had not yet seen any proof of the kind of apocalyptic damage the reports were describing. He had long since given up television in an effort to cut himself off from the endless assault of technological input, and thus had not seen the images of houses pushed from their foundations and fires burning out entire city blocks. The reports had stopped just short of saying that the world had come to an end, but what they did not say they always implied. Here, however, he found that life was creeping onto the streets. There were occasional cracked windshields on occasional cars, and street signs and shingles and leaves tossed about, but nothing like what he had expected to find. The winds were still gusting and the rain came in sheets as he cut between Boerum and Cobble Hills, and he found himself glad that he had been on higher ground when the storm hit.
From the Promenade he could begin to make out the reason for the heated reporting. Sea trash lay down along the waterfront greenway, and trees were uprooted on the paths. From the height of the visible waterline, he imagined—though he could not see from his vantage point—that other low-lying areas of Brooklyn were crushed by the weight of the water. Sure enough, as he walked, he heard conversations from people huddled in groups. Red Hook, Gowanus, and DUMBO had been submerged in water and debris. Rumors and rumors of rumors were shared about the devastation and its aftermath. People talked of water rushing into homes as fast as the inhabitants could gather their things and rush out.
It was disconcerting to hear the flurries of conversation and watch the waves that had now receded back within their banks. The surge had sent six feet of water flooding onto the street during the night, but now, the waters were roiling past, and the murmurs of the people silenced the water’s burblings. Clay did not join the conversations. He merely wove in and out of the scattered groupings and watched the people watching. He stopped only occasionally to take a picture or to look out over the East River, but he had not come to dawdle and gawk, or, as so many of the others around him had, to lament the destruction of their city and gird themselves to rebuild it once again. He had merely come to witness nature’s powerful force firsthand and then walk into the wilderness to join it.
At the end of the Promenade he stood along the railings and took a final view of the New York City skyline. It was beautiful in its graphic simplicity, its skyscrapers formed like architectural representations of the ups and downs of stock market shares that were so closely tracked just over the river. Still, as he stood and took it all in, Clay couldn’t help feeling that the concrete and steel rising into the dense grey clouds rushing overhead were more dangerous than the storm that had just passed. The storm spent its fury in the space of a single night, but the weight of the oppressive city had strangled men since the days of Cain, and would, it seemed, go on doing it forever.
Turning on his heel, Clay headed west and cut along Orange Street on the northern end of the neighborhood he’d just circled. He wound his way back through the grid of streets and passed along Pineapple Walk to the Cadman Plaza and then through the great lawn of the War Memorial. Trees and branches and leaves littered the streets, mixed with odd bits of siding and shingles that had come slicing down from the sky. The cumulative effect of the damage began to make an impression. Trees that had been young when Henry Ford was scratching out ideas for assembly lines had toppled over to crush the products of his imagination. Buildings that had been built before Coolidge took office were pock-marked with evidence of windfalls.
Clay stepped around and over and through the storm’s fingerprints like a cop who had no respect for a crime scene. Thick wet foliage clung to the soles of his boots, but he shook it off as he kept moving. He was walking with a purpose now.
He walked into Whitman Park – nestled, perhaps ironically, perhaps not, in the shadow of New York’s Emergency Management office. He snapped the clip around his waist meant to hold some of his backpack’s weight off his shoulders, and slid his arms out of their straps. He dropped the pack to the ground and spun it around and unzipped a front pocket. He reached inside and took out an energy bar and sat down on a bench nearby. He had come to pay respects to the poet who had written in a time when Brooklyn could still be called rural. It was not just a passing indulgence. When he had packed his bag several days before, he put in only the items he felt he’d need for the journey—a change of clothes, a small box of matches, a few small bottles of water, and a Walkman radio with an extra pack of batteries. He didn’t bring any food except a few energy bars, figuring that he had money and could buy whatever he needed along the way. He wasn’t survival camping in the outback after all, and he wanted to minimize the weight he’d have to carry. He’d been forced to make a decision about which books he wanted to bring. A well-worn copy of Leaves of Grass had been one of only two to make the cut, the second being Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. The former was to remind him to live life, the latter that, even if he failed the first, the earth would still abide. He was serious about traveling lightly. He hadn’t even brought his cell phone.
It was Cheryl who had taught him to love Whitman. Before the girls came along, they would sit out under the stars on a blanket at the farmhouse and she would quote When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer. It was partly those moments, the biggest part, that had brought him to Brooklyn in the first place after she and the girls had died.
He’d moved into the city because he had grown tired of wandering around the farmhouse, watching the dust motes drift through the early morning light, listening for the stirrings that would never come again. He had moved to the city to experience firsthand what she’d always admired from afar, in the hope that, by losing himself in the blur of faces, he could somehow lose his memory. Try as he might, though, he’d not been able to love Brooklyn, perhaps because, try as it might, it had not been able to make him stop loving her.
He thought back to the day that the call had come in. Frightening silence—all but the labored breathing of his beautiful wife. Cheryl and the girls had been in Boston visiting her parents when they’d driven back through the tunnel on their way to Logan. Clay had stayed behind to lay new tile in the kitchen, and he was just putting the finishing touches on the grout when he heard the phone ring. Seeing her number pop up, he had cheerily picked up and made some crack about their sleeping late and missing their flight. There was dead silence on the other end, except for the sound of his wife wheezing and slowly pushing out that she loved him. She whispered that there had been a terrible accident. Something had crushed the car. She didn’t know what and didn’t know if they would make it. He gripped the phone in confusion and desperation and began to cry into it helplessly. Baby? Baby? Oh, God… Baby?! Are you there? The noises of chaos eventually rose to overtake his wife’s whispers and then the line had gone dead in a horrible screech of metal.
The next hour, the longest of his life, was spent on the phone with area hospitals, and police and fire departments. No one could tell him anything. Eventually, he got a call from Mass General, an Officer Somethingorother. “Mr Richter…” The tone in the voice told him all that he needed to know.
The rest had been a blur of details. A concrete panel had come loose from the ceiling in the Big Dig tunnel just as his wife had passed underneath it. The resulting blow had caved in the driver’s side compartment and sent the car
careening into the walls of the tunnel. His wife had survived the initial crush, but his two daughters had been thrown from the vehicle. All were now gone. He would need to come to Boston to identify the bodies.
Clay thought of that moment a thousand times since that day, but it never stopped leaving an ache. It was a still-opened wound. It left a pang now as he took the last bite of his energy bar and stood up and slipped on his backpack. He knew it was foolish to wish that it had happened to him, as though the wishing could somehow alter the hands of fate. It was the kind of thinking that led to a comment he’d heard a man make while walking along the Promenade. The man had been walking with a friend and shaking his head in disbelief, when he stated, “I was watching the news on CNN about New Jersey, and I almost feel guilty that those poor people got hit so hard when we didn’t.” Clay thought this was exactly that kind of death wish thinking that life in the city promulgated and that he was now escaping.
He came out of the park and jogged quickly north to Prospect where he ascended the stairs to the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge walkway. Looking up at the thick, twisted cables that formed a warp and weft like a net in the sky, he thought they looked as much like a snare as they did a support. The granite and limestone towers rose in their neo-Gothic austerity across the span of the two shorelines. The waters swirled past in their still dangerous attitude that, even at that moment, had shut down the tunnel servicing the subways and the ferries offering conveyance.
The bridge stood massive in its impact and arrogance, having just laughed off Sandy like she was a bad joke. Untold “Wonders of the World” had come and gone like so many flowers in a summer field, only to disappear into the dusts of history. Some, like the Lighthouse of Alexandria, had lasted millennia, while others, like the Colossus of Rhodes, had lasted but the blink of an eye. In the modern age, the bridge had done better than most, outlasting other suspension bridges due to its deck and truss engineering. It had even housed, during a time when the Cold War was raging across the land, a bunker intended to outlast a nuclear bomb. Now, as Clay stood before it on the morning after the storm, he couldn’t decide whether its towers looked more like watchtowers seeing out into the future, or guard towers of a prison.
Always leave yourself a way out. His father had told him that one day, a lifetime ago, when he’d watched the old man playing cards with a group of his buddies. He had watched his father draw hand after hand of bad cards and yet, at the end of the night his old man hadn’t lost any money. “Life doesn’t owe you anything, but you don’t have to take it lying down, son. Sometimes, the only thing you can do is to walk away, but always leave yourself a way out.”
The lesson had stuck. Though Clay didn’t know what was ahead of him, he was certain that he no longer wanted what was behind. Frost wrote that the best way out is always through. Clay was thinking something like that as he turned up his collar against the cold, whipping winds, and set out across the bridge.
CHAPTER 2
The rich, deep voice of Johnny Cash came blasting out of an old school boombox. It was one of those black-cased, dual deck affairs with the chrome rimmed speakers and thin sliding buttons. Made it look like a ’65 Plymouth. Heightening the effect, the box was strapped, with a variety of hooks and multicolored bungees, to the handlebars of a broken-down bicycle that was slowly weaving in and out of pedestrian traffic. Johnny Cash’s voice asked how high the water was, echoing a refrain heard throughout the area on that day.
The man on the bicycle wore bright orange pants and a long trailing coat made from a textured fabric that might have looked better on a vintage couch. It was mostly green, the coat, but it was hard to tell for certain with its sun-faded pattern and the fact that much of it was covered by the man’s long red hair and a beard that was graying on the ends, spilling out of his neck.
Something in the cool misty air made Cash’s voice ring out with an otherworldly clarity. It amplified the gospel choir hum underlying the voice and the dum-thwacka-dum of the guitar’s choppy train strokes. When the key shifted higher, the voice might have been in the room, if it had been a room.
The red-haired man moved in meandering undulations past the people who were turning to watch him. He was barely even pedaling, merely turning the handlebars and letting the natural momentum of the bike carry him forward, until he came to a stop at the foot of the brownish grey tower. Clay watched him as the man squinted his eyes and peered up at the sky to the clear patch of grey that was framed by the parallel lines of the cables. A helicopter came into the space and circled around and then headed back up the river.
Clay had always loved the city’s misfits, even if he preferred to take them one at a time. The man leaned his bicycle against the tower’s sides and reached in a pocket and pulled out a handful of balloons. Balloons? Then he knelt down next to a small, curious boy, whose mother was busy talking to another man as they looked out over the river. She didn’t notice the boy reaching for her hand.
“What’s your name, little man?”
“Gareth.”
“Were you scared last night in the storm?”
The little boy began to nod, but Clay could see his heart wasn’t in it. He didn’t like the implication, even at his age, but he was mesmerized by the man’s beard and the colors in his clothing.
“Or maybe… You were brave?”
The boy’s eyes lit up. This was more like it. “Bwave.”
The man took a balloon and pumped a lungful of air into its long curved shape, then began twisting it into a circle. Then he took another and asked the boy what was his favorite animal. Puppy. He twisted the balloon into a zig-zag shape that rose up from the circle and curled up at the end. It looked nothing at all like a puppy. If anything, it looked like one of those graphic blue waves found on a surf shop door. The little boy didn’t mind, though, and the man reached up and placed the balloon like a crown on the boy’s small head.
As he did so, the woman looked down and smiled, and another young boy, older than the first, came up and asked for an elephant. The man quickly fashioned the exact same hat. He handed it to the boy.
“Hey… That’s not an elephant,” the boy said, in obvious disappointment.
“Little fella, if you’d seen what I saw last night, you’d think that everything looks like a wave, too,” the red bearded man said, and he reached up and patted the boy on the head.
He stood up, and Clay, who had stopped to watch the show, laughed out loud, causing the man to turn and bow. As he did so, his hair poured out onto his chest. “Pat Maloney, at your service,” the man said. The song on the boombox, which had repeated at least once, maybe twice, while Clay stood there, wound down to its final thrum.
Clay reached into his pocket and pulled out a dollar. He extended it to the man but was waved off. The man told him he wouldn’t know what to do with it, that he lived by the seat of his pants. “Consider the lilies, my friend. They neither toil, nor spin…” Clay found the man charming and believed him. They stood for a while and talked as the clouds and the waves and the people rolled by.
The man told Clay that he had passed the storm in a shelter at a nearby high school. He’d wanted to stay in the streets, just for the experience, but he’d gone down to Battery Park in the afternoon (“To see if our lady was still standing…”) and the water washed up over the barricades and came up to the bench he was standing on. “I decided it didn’t make sense to die yet.”
They began to walk and, as they did, they talked about everything under the sun. Clay was surprised at the man’s knowledge. He quoted Russian poets as easily as he did the stock pages. Clay found him intriguing, and asked if he had a secret, if he was actually some trust fund millionaire in hiding or maybe a journalist on undercover assignment. The man shook his head and said no. “You are assuming that I am homeless,” he said. “And in that you’d be correct. But who isn’t? In fact, there are a lot of people who are going to be homeless now. This storm is going to wake people up.” Clay didn’t tell him that it had
already done so for him. “Do I have a secret? No. I celebrate myself and sing myself. And what I assume, you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” Again, Clay didn’t tell him that he knew Whitman well and appreciated the sentiment, and the man, in turn, didn’t seem to care what Clay knew or didn’t know. Not once as they walked over the bridge to Manhattan did he ask Clay where he was going. He didn’t have the need to find out. Nor did he explain why he was walking with Clay in the direction he’d just left. He just walked and talked, pushing his bicycle along, simply passing the time with a friend.
Clay had met such people before, but never one quite so lucid. They seemed to live in the shadows of the city, just biding their time, willing to drop everything and follow where life leads. Clay had wondered how people like this man made it, somehow able to string along with nothing in a city that taxed you in the morning when you stepped out your door. He himself had struggled to bring the ends together, even with the settlement he had received from the contractors responsible for the death of Cheryl and the girls. Clay imagined that the man with the red beard had simply decided the world of material reality could do nothing to help or harm him.
Clay once had a college professor tell him, as they walked across a parking lot next to a McDonald’s, that with the knowledge he carried around in his head he could flip burgers and be happy. Clay decided that this man had made much the same decision.
They came to a box for the exit that drops down over Park Row. Clay told the man that he was getting off there and the man reached down and fiddled with the buttons on his boombox. The voice of Johnny Cash began to sing about how he kept a close watch on his heart, how he kept his eyes wide open.
Wick - The Omnibus Edition Page 2
