“I like your tunes, by the way,” Clay said.
“Oh, you like Cash?”
“I do. I especially like his prison stuff.”
Clay paused for a moment, wondering if he should share any more with the man, and the man took the pause as a sign. “Yeah, I wonder whether those guys over there still like it or if they have switched to Jay-Z.” He motioned with his thumb over his shoulder to the Metropolitan Correctional Center, just visible over the barrier of the walkway, nestled in among a jumble of buildings down the street. “I don’t know,” Clay said, “I guess a little of both.” The man laughed. “I noticed you didn’t have to ask me what I meant… that’s OK. I like a guy who has done a little time. I think it does something to clean out the soul.”
Clay didn’t tell him that he was right, that he once had a few unsavory days after Cheryl was gone when he turned to drink a little too hard and got tired of some guy running his mouth. Nor did he tell him what he’d been thinking about the city, or why he had to get out. All that was behind him now, and he didn’t feel the need to talk about it.
“You know,” Red Beard said, “many of those people are political prisoners, jailbirds of circumstance who just happen to find themselves on the wrong side of whatever 51% of the people have decided is wrong at a particular time in history. Walk around drinking laudanum on the streets in 1850 and you’d fit right in. Get caught with some Vicodin not prescribed to you in 2012 and you’ll likely get to see the inside of a jail cell.” The man went on, seeming not to notice that Clay was fidgeting with his hands in his pockets. “Even some of the most violent prisoners are sometimes prisoners of circumstance and epoch. Rats in cages will turn on each other violently… for no other reason than they have nothing better to do. And stealing? Ha! Well, that, too can be relative when bankers are handed trillions in bailout dollars—money printed for the purpose by the government—to patch up the hole left after they lost trillions on risky speculation in derivatives.” The man stopped and looked at Clay intently. He wanted Clay to pay attention, to hear him. “You can be the little Dutch Boy and stick your finger in the dam, or you can lay back and watch the dam burst, learn to swim, get baptized in the wash. Me? I got my floatin’ shoes on. I’m going to learn to walk on water.”
Clay wanted to hug him, but didn’t. He reached out instead and put his hand on the man’s shoulder, feeling the frayed textures against his hand and gave the shoulder a squeeze. The man looked at Clay and, for the first time since they had begun to talk, flashed a hint of some vulnerability. Something in the eyes.
“I wish you well, my brother.” Red Beard smiled at Clay and looked down. He stepped onto the pedal and pushed himself up and over the seat. Steadying himself, he steered the handlebars toward the city he’d just come from and began to roll slowly down the hill... and was gone.
****
Clay took a quick detour through Wall Street. It was an extra bit of walking, but he didn’t mind. He had heard on the radio the night before that downtown had been destroyed, and he wanted to see it for himself. Not that he had any love for the place, or had spent any real time there. It was more like a morbid curiosity. Wall Street was the engine that generated the city, one of them anyway, the most powerful, and he liked the idea that the money centers that the man with the red beard had just spoken about would now have to fix a few leaks of their own. He imagined the headline in the dailies over the next several days: Manhattan Annoyed. Queens Destroyed. Quick! Fix Manhattan.
There was something else out there in the city that he was trying to identify. Worry. Maybe not worry. Concern. It was a taste in the air, palpable but light and airy, like the smell of ink and leather in the lobby of a nice hotel. You could barely make it out, but it was growing.
Not that any of the hotels smelled like ink and leather at the moment. In fact, they smelled like seaweed. Wet sea trash spilled across the sidewalk, pushed up the streets four and five blocks in, when water that would drown a man had poured across downtown. It had settled into the cracks of the cobblestones, reminders of an earlier age, salty and toxic and rank. Vegetation, where it existed among the concrete and steel, bent over and clung to the earth, already beginning to turn yellow from the chemicals.
Clay watched the men work in their bright yellow jackets and orange helmets and bulky police and fire gear. He stepped around the occasional yellow tape and bright orange cones, walking as if he meant business. He passed like a ghost among the men who were too busy stringing hoses from the buildings out into the street to notice him. Generators purred, pumping the water that had flooded the buildings onto the sidewalk where it splashed in fan shapes onto the concrete and poured over the curb and ran down the street and into the drains and back towards the sea.
Carpets on floors of banks and insurance companies steamed and fogged the insides of windows, making it impossible to see out into the street, into the future. Con Edison men stood drinking coffee, waiting for their turn in the buildings. Where did they get the coffee? There isn’t a shop in sight open. Police sat in cars or on the hoods of cars, watching the men do their work.
Italian and Arab men picked through their stores, lifting the thick wet boxes that had washed across the floors, spilling out their contents, and carried the boxes, dripping and coming apart, out into the street where they piled them in asymmetrical heaps. Chinese women swept the floors of their taco stands.
Clay walked through the wet steamy mess with an economy all his own, cutting down side streets, dipping in alleys, winding through the maze of trucks lining the curb. When he’d seen enough, he came out on Broadway and headed toward midtown.
The city was quiet in a way that made him feel like he might be in the middle of a Twilight Zone episode. Here and there a siren would chirp and out of a radio somewhere—battery powered?—a news reporter talked about the election, how the candidates for president would deal with the aftermath of the hurricane. Altogether the city sounded quieter. Muffled. Different.
Clay felt good. Not emotionally, maybe, but physically. His joints were loose and the gear on his back felt light, and lightly carried. The walk was invigorating, and he felt a small bead of sweat run down his chest in the space between his skin and the fabric of his shirt.
A small delivery truck rumbled by, and a distinctive squeal came from the brakes as the driver drove two-footed—simultaneously pressing the gas and the brakes. Clay heard a shop owner comment that power wasn’t the only problem, but that gasoline was about to be really hard to come by.
As he made his way uptown, he shifted his path back and forth like a ship captain tacking to follow the stars. There were avenues that were closed off here and there, and as the chaos of downtown resided, there were police officers who wouldn’t allow passage. He stopped for a moment at one point and looked back down 5th Avenue towards the Flatiron Building that stood as a timeless waypoint emphasizing the city’s rigidity. He kept moving, a fish swimming upstream through the now fluid events and persons.
A woman in a business suit, looking out of place today for some reason he couldn’t quite pin down, asked Clay if he had a cell phone she could use to make a call. She explained that her battery had died, that she couldn’t find power, and held the unit up to him like a defunct passport. It was her lifeline. It was her life. He shook his head no and shrugged apologetically. She looked at him as if he were an alien.
Had he heard that a building had collapsed in the West Village? Had he heard that the subways might be out of service for months? Did he know where you could get some coffee? Strangers who would normally pass him on the street without looking up now stopped him and sought information. Was it the backpack that made them think that he might know? As they passed, they shared their own news. Bits of gossip reached him on the air, some of it trivial, some of it ludicrous, some of it frightening with bluster.
Sidewalks could tell tales that would make men blush on any normal day. There was something about walking through the city after the storm that made Clay fee
l like a voyeur. People were out in the streets, stripped of their pretensions. It was like when the city gets hit by a snowfall and everyone comes out in community, but now they had a slight helplessness in their eyes. A homeless man passed Clay and asked for a cigarette. He was used to despair.
Tree branches were down in the park, and leaves, many of them still green, stuck to the damp sidewalk in clumps and lay thick in the gutters and along the foundations of buildings. Across the occasional street lay a fallen tree snapped at the trunk, the roots still buried under concrete. Workers were climbing over the debris like ants, carrying it away to some field somewhere to be stacked and mulched.
After disasters, people usually come together. It happened after 9/11, and Clay could sense it happening today on a smaller scale. There wasn’t the terror that had been present on that day, with its overwhelming reality of the apocalypse hanging in the air in dust and cancer and ash and death. 9/11 had been huge and monumental and devastating. It had fundamentally changed the world, and this was nothing like that. Still, Clay could sense the beginnings of an inkling that something was in the air. He just couldn’t identify it quite yet.
A few more blocks up 5th Avenue and there on his left as he passed by was an ice cream vendor who had just opened up his cart and was giving away his ice cream for free. Maybe he couldn’t keep it frozen, or maybe this was his way to lift spirits, but a sign lettered by hand with a thick, black Sharpie simply said FREE. People stopped and talked and licked their cones and shivered in the damp.
Walking faster now, block after block disappeared behind him, and above 34th Street, just past the Empire State Building, he noticed that the power was up. It became apparent first by the street lights, and the traffic plugging the avenue. Life seemed almost, but not quite, normal. Normal. A funny word. What is normal anyway? Clay had recently read a UN report that claimed that over 1/2 of the world's population now lives in cities, and cities are almost inevitably located on coasts, along fault lines, in areas where major disasters are most likely to occur. Is that normal? He’d spent some time thinking about the implications of this. It was one reason for his flight. Millions of people living on top of one another in an artificial system, supported by a crumbling and unsustainable infrastructure, provided for by criminally deficient food grown on industrial farms and shipped thousands of miles on government roads. This is not civilization. It is madness. He watched the cars, piled up like toys in the streets, emitting their fumes into the fast rushing clouds, carrying their overheated toxins into the atmosphere, readying the next storm. If this is going to be normal, he thought, where does one go to hide from it?
A sign said, “Free Juice, We’ll Share.” But it was not fruit juice that was being given away. A power strip ran from an extension cord somewhere inside a coffee shop, and every empty outlet was filled with plugs and cords leading to phones and devices. One man was sitting at a laptop, trying to check his Facebook page. The life-blood of modern society. People had walked up from Downtown looking for power and news and normal. A woman asked the man if he was almost done and then walked inside to tell the owner that he ought to limit how long people can hog the power.
Mid-town. Here some business was going on, and there was a whole lot less damage. A yellow cab pulled over to the curb just north of 42nd Street, opposite the library. Its doors opened and passengers spilled out onto the sidewalk. They looked like clowns piling out of a Volkswagen. Four, five, six fares, squeezed into a single cab. More fares piled in, and the Jamaican driver smiled at him and said, “You want to ride in this cab, mon, you got to get on top!” Clay laughed a little, smiled, and just shook his head. He was walking out of Gomorrah.
At the end of the block on east 43rd, Clay stepped into Little Italy Pizza. It was clean and bright and open, and he bought a slice so he could use the bathroom, which was something he’d increasingly needed to do. He set his backpack on the ground and felt his shoulders roll in their sockets. Pausing to eat his slice, he listened to voices and stories for a moment, and as he did, the veneer came off of everything. Clay realized that he was living one of those moments in time when an entire society or culture experiences some event at the same time. Like the bombing of Pearl Harbor, or VJ Day, or Kennedy’s assassination. Or 9/11. Maybe this wasn’t that big. Maybe it wasn’t even as big as Katrina. But it was big in a way that mattered. A kind of widespread ground zero had been slung across the city; and beyond that, the state; and beyond that, the tri-state; and beyond that, the nation. It was the nature of such things. The farmer in Iowa pays for the recovery in New York through his taxes and his grain. As the government has increasingly turned to the declaration of ‘national’ disasters, and as the course of societal events has increasingly led to the likelihood of disasters, both natural and man-made, there is a kind of shared experience that attends to these things. And nature had outdone herself here in providing reason for the focus. The enormity of the timing of his escape really began to occur to him for the first time.
One very energetic woman in a bright red jacket was telling her husband that the HMS Bounty (“a by-god, full-on 18th century sailing ship”) had sunk off the Carolinas, and that a freighter was now in the middle of Staten Island, and that the Boardwalk in Atlantic City had floated out into the ocean. Clay thought about news that was occurring elsewhere during the storm, as people were focused on their immediate locations. Being cut off from the world, how would people deal with the world at large? Or would they care to? What would happen in the upcoming elections? He wondered about news that would slip through the cracks in this moment, how nations would prepare for war against other nations, how children would be snatched from their parents, how celebrities would shill for their causes. He wondered how he would know these things without the woman in the bright red coat to tell him.
****
Outside again, Clay started to walk, and for the first time he began to feel tired. Even in his well-broken-in boots his feet were starting to hurt a little. Noon was moving into afternoon, which would then slide into evening, and it occurred to him that he wasn’t making good time. If he kept on walking at this pace, he was going to be in Harlem at dark fall, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He wondered if looting or riots might start, and if they did, would they be confined to the areas currently without power? Things have a way of falling apart, and Clay wasn’t sure he wanted to be out in the street if and when they did. He lengthened out his stride and made an effort to put the city behind him.
CHAPTER 3
Clay walked into Harlem in the late afternoon. He was tired in his bones and began to feel a chill. He’d walked the last several miles along the avenue deep in thought, past St. Patrick’s Cathedral on his right and NBC Studios on his left, past the long stretch of glitzy stores with their high-end commercial excess, past the high-rise mansions of Central Park East with their celebrity tenants and media moguls, and past the row of museums housing the world’s great treasures. None of these worlds felt real to him in their religion of consumerism and stilted aesthetic tastes. Even Central Park, with its languorous urban sprawl, felt false in comparison to the experience of sitting on the front porch swing at Ithaca in the early light of fall and listening to the green frogs greet the sunrise. He was feeling alienated and tired. He needed to find rest.
As he came around the northernmost end of the park, he walked into the small, circular amphitheater where Duke Ellington’s statue stands as a testament to the meeting of two worlds, and sat down on the concrete risers. He undid the straps of his backpack, shook himself out of the harness, and flexed his feet inside his boots, feeling the tension in his calves tighten and then release.
He looked up at the sky and tried to estimate the hour, then figured how much further he could go before he’d have to find shelter for the night. He had hoped, when he started out in the morning, to make it to the George Washington Bridge, but he’d badly overestimated himself and he’d spent too much time sightseeing. He was just over halfway there—mayb
e three-fifths—and it would be dark soon. He didn’t relish walking through Washington Heights late at night, particularly without knowing exactly what he would find when he got there. He was flying mostly blind, and the area was known to be questionable, even on a good day. No need to turn this into a suicide mission. Maybe I should just stop at the Y, he thought, and start again fresh in the morning.
As he sat and caught his breath, a young black man, somewhere around 14 years old, Clay guessed, came rolling up 5th Avenue from the direction Clay had just come. He was riding a longboard skateboard, and the syncopated sounds of the wheels striking the cracks of the sidewalk were deeper than one might have expected. Kerthump, kerthump... kerthump, kerthump. Clay watched him as he stepped off the board at the curb and flipped the end up to his hand, carrying it like a cane into the small park. He walked to the foot of the statue and looked up as if he was trying to peer over the open lid of the grand piano the composer was standing at and into the heart of the strings. He was tall, with thin hands and sharp cheeks, and had the earliest beginnings of what might eventually become dreadlocks, his hair twisted in tiny knots at the roots. The earbuds in his ears were obviously playing some song with deep syncopation like the kerthumps of the skateboard wheels, but it sounded, from where Clay was sitting, like jazz rather than hip-hop. He drummed his fingers on his skateboard and then became self-aware and noticed Clay looking at him, causing him to flash a sheepish smile and set his board on the ground and push off in a running start. Clay turned his head to watch him as he moved across the walk between the tree lines and jumped over the curb and crossed the street and headed west along 110th.
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