“I’m not sure I follow,” said Jane. “I know you’re not saying that you want to canoe to New Jersey, because only a crazy person would say something so obviously crazy.”
He saw how it would be to surge through the wave breaks, the river licking up against their prow, Bergen County vastly looming ahead.
“So I’m stuck in a boat with a lunatic,” she said. “A raving, deranged—”
“Not at all. It doesn’t get more pragmatic than this.”
“You’re not doing this to be romantic, are you?”
“I’m doing it to survive. Our worst-case scenario is also the most likely one. We stay indoors, we starve. Or worse—we’re attacked by looters searching for food. It’s safer on the water.”
“I guess … Maybe we’ll come across a police boat. I thought I heard a helicopter, but I don’t think they can see down here until the fog clears.”
The canoe had veered, without Mitchell’s notice, toward the east side of the street, and now they were over the sidewalk, floating beneath the arcade of a fifty-floor office building. The canoe skidded over a round planter in which a ficus tree had somehow survived the storm. Its sodden leaves dragged in the water. The glass windows and doors that separated street from lobby had blown out, and Mitchell had the impression of entering an aquarium tank. There was a disturbance on the surface, and he noticed a pair of fish, each roughly three feet long, with large, puckering mouths and upper bodies streaked with olive and brown lines. They swam in lazy figure eights in front of the half-submerged security desk.
“Striped bass,” said Jane. “Why not.”
With a hard pull Mitchell pivoted the canoe around a black column and they were back into the middle of the avenue.
“I’m thinking we stay east,” said Mitchell, “then we can cut across once we’re farther north.”
“Why not go west? That way we can at least make it to dry land. The flooding must be worst closer to the East River. Doesn’t the elevation drop as you move east?”
“Yeah, the gradient is pretty sharp. The middle of the island is probably dry. But if we abandon the canoe, we might end up stranded, and surrounded by water. Out here at least we can move around.”
But Jane, on the verge of tears, insisted, and Mitchell conceded that there was probably a better chance of being rescued on the dry part of the island. At the corner of Fortieth Street they turned west. The water level dropped the farther inland they went. By the time they reached Lexington it was shallow enough that they could see the pavement beneath their oars.
“Almost there!” said Jane. Her brow was smudged from the black water. “I knew it.”
He felt good. Strong even. But then he started to hear the noises.
* * *
First there came a large splash directly ahead of them. This, in itself, was not particularly odd; they’d been hearing objects falling into the water ever since the moment they’d left Mitchell’s apartment building: burning debris, chunks of plaster. For that reason they’d kept to the middle of the street. But this first splash was followed directly by a second, and then a third, so it began to seem as if someone were tossing objects into the water on purpose. A window exploded, as if struck, and finally, unmistakably, they heard the sound of hollering men. It was difficult to make out words, but the voices were anxious and violent. After they glided past Park Avenue Mitchell told Jane to stop paddling and they drifted, listening. Once they were within about twenty yards of Madison, the canoe ran onto dry macadam, coming to rest behind a van parked in the middle of the street. There was a crash ahead and they began to make out through the mist the dark forms of men swinging metal bars into the windows of a deli on the corner. When the windows shattered, the men kicked the glass into the street. Then they attacked the store, overturning shelves and counters, grabbing as many liters of soda, beer cans, bags of potato chips, and boxes of candy they could carry. Already they had become animals. Snarling, brutish, hateful. Was it that easy, the transition into savagery? Was it also inside him?
In the middle of the avenue two men wrestled on the ground. Beside their entangled bodies stood a shopping cart loaded with bundles of logs and bags of charcoal. The cart tipped over when a gang of young boys ran by; they were chasing a bald man with a liver spot on his forehead. He wore a torn blazer. The boys laughed and shouted obscenities; the man was sweating profusely despite the cool, foggy air, and screaming for help. In his arms he cradled a gallon-size tank of water like it was a fat baby.
“We should never have left your house,” said Jane, her voice a frantic whisper.
Mitchell hooked one leg out of the canoe, pushing backward until the water was deep enough to float it.
“It’s OK,” he said, as much to himself as to her. He began backpaddling frantically. “We’re OK. We’ll go east.”
“How do you know that will be safe? The water will be higher.”
“You can trust me,” he said.
The crazy thing was that he actually believed it.
3.
Grand Central was darker than he expected—larger too. As they glided in, the two-tiered concourse opening around them, it was like passing from the mouth of a river into a lake—or a sea, since it was impossible to perceive its boundaries. The great arched windows on the terminal’s west wall had lost hundreds of panes during the storm, and the light that filtered through was viscous and gray. The expansive vaulted ceiling was as dark as the night sky, and the pinprick constellations were impossible to make out with their LED lights extinguished. The water was flat and still, some three feet deep. Only the marble counters glowed dimly, picked out by the faint shaft of light that fell diagonally from the lunette windows on the north wall.
“Thanks,” said Jane. “I needed this.” It was difficult to hear her. The cavernous room had a muting effect. It swallowed up her voice.
She removed her PFD and rested it over the thwart behind her. She lifted her legs onto the gunwales, and leaned back until her head came to rest on the orange pillow.
“Ten minutes,” said Mitchell. “Then we have to make another push.”
The clock over the information kiosk emerged from the darkness, a giant yellow cat’s-eye. It read 5:22: the time power had cut out.
“I can make out one of them,” said Jane, staring upward. “Andromeda.”
“I don’t even see any stars.”
Jane, without sitting up, lifted one of her arms and pointed overhead. Mitchell tried to follow her finger, but all he saw was blackness.
“The Chained Woman,” she said. “That’s what Andromeda means.”
Mitchell didn’t have his glasses—after Jane had expressed her distaste for them he put them in the drawer of his office desk and they were still there—but even when he squinted he couldn’t see the stars. He decided that Jane couldn’t either.
Slowly she lowered her arm and closed her eyes.
He would let her sleep. She needed it. He also needed it, but he wouldn’t be able to turn himself off while the adrenaline was so high in him. Too much was happening, too much, much too much: the future was on him, and he was trying to make sense of it all, but there was too much. He paddled past the kiosk, listening. No voices, no footsteps, no life. Only the sound of the water, parted by the canoe, lapping gently against the limestone walls. The stairwell to the lower level, on the eastern end of the concourse, was completely submerged, as were the tunnels off the main floor that led to the Metro-North tracks. And somewhere ahead, at the western end of the concourse, was the twinned staircase that led to Vanderbilt Avenue and high ground. And there were Mitchell and Jane in the Psycho Canoe, floating slowly across the giant floor of the concourse.
It was like being in the middle of a lake all right, or a grand swimming pool, peaceful and quiet, and Mitchell understood how Jane, exhausted and addled, could fall asleep. But he was only becoming more agitated. It wasn’t the thought of all the people who might have been trapped in stalled trains when the tracks flooded that did it, or the
scattered pieces of luggage that bobbed in the water here and there, each no doubt containing a person’s most valued possessions, packed frantically at the last moment. It was the silence. The silence didn’t make any sense. Grand Central Terminal was the perfect place to wait out the storm: large, impregnable, stone, with restaurants stocked with food. It was one of the first places rescue teams would target. If nobody was here, there was probably a reason.
Then he saw the reason. The Psycho had drifted past the kiosk, and the western staircase had begun to emerge from the blackness. The tunnel between the twin marble staircases was like a large, greedy mouth drinking the water. But clogging that mouth, and against the bottom of the stairs, were bodies. Not just one or two, as he thought he might have glimpsed on Third Avenue, but at least fifteen, maybe twenty, and the number kept getting larger the closer he got. He began to make out bare arms and legs and gray, puffy faces. It was as if they had been stacked there on purpose. And then came the smell—a sour, mildewed ghastliness. Mitchell backpaddled, hard, and the boat rocked. Jane shifted but did not open her eyes.
And the horror pounced on him, the roaches scrambling in his stomach, the panic sharp, cutting off his breath—he could see it all now, the waves rushing in from the East River, the water rising more quickly than anyone could imagine, surging through the Lexington Avenue entrances and down the long halls into the concourse. There must have been dozens, maybe hundreds of people in the terminal then, standing or sitting on the floor of the concourse, seeking shelter from the storm and waiting until the trains started running again. When the water began seeping into the station those people would have known better than to head down the ramps to the underground train tracks. Most likely they raced up the stairs, some of them abandoning their luggage, and ran out toward Vanderbuilt Avenue.
A second group of people would have been on the lower level, sitting in the open train cars, maybe lying across the seats, naively hoping to be on the first train out, once service was continued. As the water started rising in the tunnel, some of the people on the trains—the New Yorkers, the daily commuters—would have known to run out to the concourse and up the stairs, and they too would have escaped to higher ground.
But a third group, whether out of ignorance or pure panic, would have stayed put. That, after all, was the natural human response to disaster. Psychologists called it the incredulity response, or normalcy bias: most people, having never experienced a real catastrophe firsthand, don’t actually believe their eyes. This is why some pleasure cruisers don’t leave their cabins even as their ship is sinking, why some office workers continue sending e-mails even after they’ve learned that, on a lower floor, their building is on fire, why a stunningly high percentage of people who die in skydiving accidents are found to have never pulled the backup parachute line. The people waiting in the trains needn’t have waited very long. In the tunnels the pipes would have soon burst, and with the pumps overwhelmed, the water would have risen quickly from the ground. The whole thing might have been inundated within ninety seconds. Those people would still be there this minute, entombed in the submerged trains.
Yet there was also a final category of people: those who waited in the trains until it was almost too late, and then, rather than limply succumbing to their watery fate, came to their senses and ran out of the tunnel just in time. These people would’ve had to work hard, racing up the ramps against the cascading water—it would have been like running up a waterfall—only to reach the concourse. But by then the terminal would have been like the ocean, for in the first stage of flooding the water was undoubtedly deep and turbulent, gushing in from several directions, seeping up from the tunnels and in waves from Lexington Avenue. The floodwaters would have lifted the desperate people off their feet and swept them toward the western end of the concourse, as if the flood wanted to nudge them toward safety but didn’t know its own strength, until finally it crashed their bodies against the marble staircase. And so they would rest there, in a grotesque human dam, until the water subsided and the rescue crews arrived.
Mitchell didn’t wake Jane until they were back on Lexington Avenue.
“Why are you breathing like that?” she said.
“Like what?” he said, and they were under the real sky again, blinking in the sunlight.
4.
On Forty-fifth Street and Lexington a man was wailing. The noise seemed to be coming from an old tenement building that was barely standing; it leaned into the street at a cockeyed angle. They gave it a wide berth. On Forty-fifth and Third a woman was barking gibberish: “Ungh. Ronned. Shmoft.” And on a fire escape off Forty-fifth and Second a man was preaching to the sky, a waterlogged copy of the Bible bloating in his hands like a sea sponge. “Alas, that great city! God hath remembered her iniquities. In one hour so great riches is come to nought!”
They saw things they instantly tried to forget. The swollen corpse of a tabby cat, its head unnaturally inclined; doggy-paddling rats; a child’s coloring book, the bleeding ink turning the water different colors; a red sports bra. On Forty-sixth and Second, a brownstone had capsized, effectively damming the street with brick sections of wall and squat sandstone plinths. The rooms were completely bare inside; even the wallpaper in some places had been torn off by the wind. And once in a while they saw bodies. These tended to gather at street corners and beneath the parked cars. They were all half submerged, limbs sprawled and distended. Many were naked, their clothes having been torn off by the force of the flood.
“I can’t,” said Jane. “Oh, help us. Please help us.”
“Don’t look. I’ll do the looking. I’ll steer. Just paddle.”
It was not always possible to avoid looking. They passed very close to an old woman, a young man, another woman. But they rarely saw the faces. By some compassionate force of nature the drowned bodies floated facedown.
If they didn’t name what they saw, the things maintained an unreality. But just say the words “drowned cat” and, like a witch uttering abracadabra, the bloated belly, matted brown fur, twisted mouth, grasping paw, eyes watery with terror—the drowned cat appeared in their canoe, a third passenger, never to disappear. So they limited their conversation to canoeing directions, calling out debris and other obstacles. Almost immediately Jane had settled upon a simple code. Whenever they encountered a hunk of machinery, personal item, or a formerly living thing, she simply called out “flotsam” or “big flotsam”—or, in the case of the capsized brownstone, “really big flotsam”—and left it at that. Jane had become almost cartoonishly playful, as if determined to transform their journey into some kind of awful game. At first Mitchell was bothered by such blatant self-delusion. But as time elapsed and the fog held steady, he started to appreciate the tactic. It reflected one of the qualities that had made Jane so good at her job: she was a genius at beating back denial, at making improbable scenarios seem likely to occur. One of her favorite rhetorical tricks in consultation meetings had been to point out that an event that happens once every thousand days occurs on average, according to the math of probability, every two years. As it turned out, Jane was equally persuasive in making the case for denial. If Mitchell stared at the back of her head and avoided looking at the water, he could almost convince himself that he was back on Little Elkhart Lake, where the only obstacles he had to avoid were boulders and floating branches.
He wondered whether Elsa was dead.
About ten blocks ahead First Avenue passed through a short tunnel under the Queensboro Bridge. Since there was not much room between the surface of the water and the tunnel ceiling and Mitchell did not particularly relish the idea of canoeing through a dark cave, especially when the water level might suddenly rise at any moment, he hooked east, to Sutton Place. They’d have to veer even closer to the East River, but that seemed safer than heading west, back to Babylon.
A woman cradling an infant sat in a second-floor window in the middle of the block. The baby shrieked painfully, as if being assaulted. The mother spotted Mitch
ell and Jane and asked whether they had water or food to spare.
“I’m sorry,” said Mitchell.
“God bless you anyway. Be careful out there.”
They pushed their paddles hard into the water and glided away, as from another obstacle.
“That was hard,” said Jane. Her face was polluted by black, greasy smudges—residue of the oil and sewage in the water. It was all over their hands, and she kept touching her face to pull back her hair. “But it was the right thing to do. Once we see a rescue worker, we can tell them about her.”
He couldn’t stop thinking about the scene they had witnessed on Madison. The men running through the street, smashing glass, bags of chips falling from their arms. In his futurist calculations he had always counted on bad things happening. But he hadn’t considered the brutality of it, the primitive, selfish desperation that took hold when one’s life was threatened. He pulled his oar out of the water. Then he started to paddle in reverse.
“What are you doing?” said Jane. The fear in her was strong, animal, instinctual. But she maintained her composure while Mitchell handed the woman a carton of animal crackers and lemon-lime Gatorade. When they set off again, her relentless spirit of denial cracked.
“I’m sorry. That was the right thing to do. I’m sick. What’s wrong with me? I’m sick.” She put the oar on her knees.
“Don’t be sorry,” said Mitchell. “Just look out for flotsam.”
But she had frozen.
“Jane?”
They were drifting toward a floating skerry of flame. It had the circumference of a hula hoop. When Jane finally turned, black, greasy tears were sliding down her face.
“I can’t do this,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s too horrible.”
“Hey. Listen—”
“Why is this happening to us? A whole city…”
“Try not to think about it.”
“All the destruction. The death. Everything is dead. This city is dead. It’s a graveyard.”
Odds Against Tomorrow Page 16
