by James Reich
The great avenue canyons of the Manhattan had, at first, retained some trappings of normality. The early stages of the evacuation of the city proceeded reluctantly, achingly slow, despite the imminent danger of radioactive contamination. But the escape routes were already becoming choked. People pressed like fish against the glass of yellow taxicabs, trunks overflowed with crude luggage, while breakdancers spun their angles on improvised sheets of cardboard and food vendors occupied their steel carts as though it were any other day. The department stores, coffeehouses, and restaurants remained open, and thousands of men, women, and children milled inside them, selecting purchases, exiting the revolving doors encumbered and talking without doubt or fear.
They tried to flee from the ghostly terror of contamination. The only trains arriving at Penn Station, or Grand Central, as at Yanov, brought no new passengers, but the empty carriages filled dangerously in retreat. In the panic, men and women fell from the overcrowded platforms, ribs were cracked in the forcing of more bodies into the cars, and the whimpering of suffocations went unheard in those claustrophobic, fearful tubes. People without vehicles began to walk between cars and overtook the grid-locked traffic on the wet streets. Cash listened to the blaring of horns in the dawn, the slow motion riot of impotent machinery. She sat down on the cold cement beneath the Ferris wheel, aware that the evacuation of the city would take several days and nights, and that against that continual stream would be many who would resist the compulsory clearance and the shutdown of the arcades and dormitories of New York. There would be a period of rioting and looting, as people weighed the possibility of accumulating commodities against accumulating radioactive contaminations. Picassos blew in tatters across the bloody steps of the Metropolitan Museum, a private Guernica of granite stripped and hollowed by petrol bombs; Rockefeller Plaza choked under obscene graffiti; the evidence of sexual assaults remained on the steps of St. Marks. The radiation was in every twist of the wind down the Hudson. New York had been shadowed by this oblivion, this blade of Damocles for so long, that now the city revolted against itself, against ever having existed. She looked into her backpack and checked the remaining ammunition for her pistol.
The violence began at an improvised bus terminal close to Canal Street and the Bowery, as thousands of residents sought passage across the Manhattan Bridge. The second wave of airdropped pamphlets, radio broadcasts, and television warnings had convinced her that a blockade was to be established from Red Hook, north through Brooklyn, through Williamsburg and Greenpoint, cutting off Roosevelt Island, the Queensboro Bridge, Astoria, and the RFK Bridge, and curving around La Guardia airport to Locust Point before turning north toward Port Chester. The southeastern perimeter would close the ferry terminals, the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, and on the western bank, the Holland Tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel, and everything at least as far north as Peekskill Bay, in the shadow of Indian Point, but upwind for the time being. The tens of thousands of residents trying to cross the tenuous bridges on foot found their passage blocked by stalled traffic and buses, a din of horns and crying, exhaust fumes billowing between the primer paint superstructures. Bus tires were slashed with knives and shot out, and a swell of astounding fury overturned one of the long vehicles before it was set aflame. Molotov cocktails exploded in blue alcohol flames against neon dragons and lurid plastic fascias, mock pagodas and paper lanterns. Electronic storefronts and steaming kitchens were ransacked; broken glass flowed through the Bowery, a river of razors. The subway turnstiles were jammed with women’s hair, torn shreds of clothing, and jettisoned luggage. Bodies fell from rusted fire escapes, clawing at laundry wires and the last bedsheets blackening in the smoke from the streets below. Muzzle flashes cut swathes through the panicked crowds, bullets ripped through designer billboards for perfumes, lingerie, and wristwatches, and strafed the luxury cars, splashing families across their upholstery like fish in a barrel, tiny splinters of bone stippling the leather headrests. The wounded fell in screaming tatters from the pocked passenger doors, slipping in the bloody street, trampled in their fur coats on the meaningless crosswalks. The downdraft of rotor blades churned the trash and dispossessed materials, doll parts, paper, scarves as Blackhawks hovered impotently over the carnage. Windows smashed and voices came like sheets of metal from the airborne PA systems as the riots spread over the island.
In Pripyat, there were no riots because the fire at Reactor IV could be seen from all parts of the city, from the pebble-dash high-rise blocks and bleak dormitories to the greenhouses that caught the reflection of disaster in their panes. The people evacuated with nothing. Twenty-five years later, those to whom death remained as ineffable as the meteorological conditions that carried it along the Hudson River toward them were riven with suspicion, doubt, anger, and fear. Newspaper kiosks were sent crashing through jewelry store windows; knife-wielding children dripped diamonds in matrices of flashlight. What, in comparison, was the proletariat of 1986 to do—ransack the propagandist library, urinate on the screen of the Prometheus Cinema, steal scalpels from the atomograd hospital? In moribund conditions, capitalists will not hesitate from tearing one another apart. In 2001, according to authorities and newspaper reports, one looter was arrested for every fifty fatalities at the time of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center; the actual number of looters was, therefore, still larger. What looting took place at Pripyat came primarily in the months and years following the construction of the sarcophagus around the reactor, as squatters and souvenir hunters measured their risks against the inverted glamour of having visited the zone. The dying atoll of Manhattan was enthralled with bitter, resentful pyromania as fires broke out along the mirrored chasm of Wall Street, at Rockefeller Plaza close to the golden statue of Prometheus, where flames climbed the towers from a flashpoint of piled mannequins and televisions. Street gangs set up in the pale hive of the Guggenheim and ran amok along Park Avenue with automatic weapons. Behind her, the plateglass of a clothing store exploded, strafed by machine gun fire. Falling to the ground, she rolled for cover toward the blackened skeleton of a smoldering motorcycle. It was vital that she find some secure location to wait out the storm of violence and the tides of terrorized flesh that threatened to engulf her and drag her from the city as it receded. It was a holocaust where the atomic power of the stars was sewn into every fiber, licking every bone under the peeled back skin, miniscule fragments, filaments of dust, every trace of moisture incubated the incontrovertible diagnosis of death. The dragonhead, the gorgon plumes erupting from Indian Point blew their lethal steam. It claimed its territory: the irradiated teardrop of Manhattan.
Close to a subway station, Cash discovered an open construction site and dropped through the chevron barricade into the hollows beneath the street. From there, she could make her calculations and wait out the worst of the thunderhead from Indian Point, the radiation and the riots. Between the dripping brickwork of the conduit, she pulled out the shard of trinitite from the small leather sack at her throat and regarded it, a faintly glowing green light in the darkness. Just like Marie Curie and her pretty radium phials, she thought. Marie Curie carried her death in her white lab coat pockets. Cash bore the evidence and instruments of her birth and death in the gris-gris bag strung at her neck.
WHEN THE VIOLENCE SUBSIDED SUFFICIENTLY, AFTER WATCHING IT from the windows of his hotel, Robert Dresner left his room and began to stroll down Lexington Avenue, drawn on a thread of nostalgia. Despite his excitement, he felt strangely nauseous. During the night and early hours of that morning, he had fought his adrenaline and his desire to descend to the streets and to bathe in the mayhem, to exorcize his ferocious hatred on petrified men, women, and children as they tried to escape from New York. But the greater part of him understood that he must preserve that hatred, and the bitch that had brought him to such profound and depthless despair, loathing, and brutality that his only thoughts involved killing her. From this hell where all doubted him, he would emerge, exonerated.
He had taken a large bottle o
f vodka from the Meridian’s second-floor bar. He staggered drunken from the sidewalk, kicking a drained Molotov cocktail that had failed to ignite down the street of exploding steam. He squinted at the Moorish turrets and ornate orb-minarets, blinding clouds passing in the time-lapse of his intoxication. The doors to the synagogue were open. He moved closer to witness the disarray inside, the graffiti slashing obscenities across the pipe organ, the wrecked seating and broken windows, as though the building had been besieged, barricaded, and overrun. Dresner felt afraid of the echoing hall. He put his vodka bottle to his lips and pivoted on his heels to descend the steps back to the pavement. For a moment, he hesitated at the traffic lights and pedestrian crossing. The city shifted and warped. Then he continued south, toward a pall of tar-black smoke, pulling his cell phone from his jacket pocket, dialing as he neared the column of flame.
Janelle Gresham answered: “Robert? Where the hell have you been?”
His voice was solicitous, an over-enunciated parody of an actor in a fifties car commercial. “Honey, you’ll never believe what I’m looking at!”
“I don’t care. Where are you?”
Ignoring her, Dresner continued: “Honey, do you remember where we were when we first talked about getting married?” His voice distorted as he tried to pin his phone to his shoulder with his cheek so that he could open his trousers with one hand to urinate in the street, holding the vodka in the other.
“Fuck you, Robert, if you think I would still marry you.”
“Fantastic. I can’t marry you anymore, either. But the answer to our question was that it was Christmas 2009, Lexington Avenue, next to the Chrysler Building. I’m looking at it right now. And the whole fucking thing is in flames! Hold on. Hold on, sweetie. I have to piss.” The Chrysler Building was engorged with flame, crashing in roiling waves from its exploded windows, melting the metal eagles at its cornices. The smoke made a shroud around the stem. A yellow taxi had been driven into the lobby and set ablaze. “Anyway, I’m in New York to kill your dyke cunt friend,” he slurred, “Varyushka Cash.”
“You stay away from her, motherfucker! Listen to me: I met a friend of yours last night. I went over to your apartment to see if you had gone home.”
“Oh yeah?” He sounded nonchalant. “Who?”
“Royce. He said his name was Royce, and I asked him if he was from the magazine, and he said that he didn’t know what I was talking about, but that his buddy Robert Dresner did not work for any magazine.”
“That asshole.” Dresner swigged at his vodka. “What was he doing there? Yes, I do have a secret, secret life. I’m not a journalist. I work for the CIA of the USA, a group of swinging young men dedicated to pleasuring America. Royce works for me. I put black bags over the heads of Arabs, terrorists, communists, and sand-niggers, Iraqis, agitators, collaborators, dykes, fruits, fags, students . . . Call them what you will. Then I take them on plane trips and torture them, and recently they’ve started dying. I also like whores, but I’ve been too busy for them lately. Say, honey, do you have a cell phone number for your Soviet terrorist friend? I’m supposed to put a bag over her head, too.”
“If you are in New York, you’re dead meat. Didn’t you see the TV news?”
“No, they had porn in the hotel.”
“Then didn’t your CIA tell you?” She feigned compassion. “Robert, you are very drunk. I would like you to come home this instant.”
For a moment, believing her through the vodka, he was silent. His voice was broken with sudden tears. “I can’t.”
“I know, sweetie,” Janelle told him softly. “Because if you did, even at death’s door, I would still cut your balls off. Stay away from Cash, you piece of shit, and I hope the fallout eats you alive. Good-bye, Robert.”
Laughing, Dresner limped down the expanse of Lexington Avenue, away from the Chrysler inferno. He continued to walk south, planning to visit the Winters Corporation tower. After all, their murders had drawn him to this contaminated place. Yet, the open city presented myriad distractions, lost luxuries, and a kind of prurient apocalyptic tourism. It overwhelmed him. Somewhere, amid the glamorous chaos of the stripped city, lost within the vertiginous wheeling of tall structures and bright lights, he collapsed from the vodka in an arcade of treasure.
23
CASH MOVED BENEATH THE CONCRETE AND STEEL SKIN OF MANHATTAN. She traveled through nineteenth-century conduits and freezing arteries, a coiling system of subterranean aqueducts, pipes, funnels, vents, fan blades, and tubular hallways. She crawled through the dripping visceral system, inhaling the waste of millions of citizens. She watched rats roll in the shallow fluid that ran between her boots and flies illuminated by dim service lights hanging from corroding metal hooks like an underground abattoir. All that remained were the scurrying vermin of a metropolitan Marie Celeste. When she had climbed down into this maintenance shaft during what must have been the afternoon before, to set herself apart from the riots and the crush and clamor of the evacuation, she had found a worker’s flashlight at the rusting base of the narrow ladder. She told herself that even here, the contamination from Indian Point would finally reach the groundwater, and it would cackle through the sewers. But she had no intention of remaining below the streets for long. The mortar was aged and weak between the brickwork of the cylindrical veins that were her subway. The real subways had become lethal during the riots and the panic. Sometimes, she felt herself passing close to them, one tunnel overlapping the other, feeling the vibrations from the final carriages leaving downtown. Through the close-knit plexus of walls, she listened to arguments, weeping, sporadic gunfire, and the distinctive noises of assault and rape. She would press her ear against the helpless bricks, her gun held close to her breast, as she pictured women being dragged down. But as the dank hours expired, the voices were fewer, the percussion of the riots infrequent and, finally, Cash decided, they must have become exhausted.
It was merely a matter of time before the bridges to the island would be demolished. To the north, a high wall of exclusion would be erected to delineate and confine the contaminated zone with razor wire and sheets of impenetrable metal, a Berlin Wall for New York. She retrieved the last energy bar from her bag, opening the silver foil packaging with her teeth, and began eating frantically. She knew that she must return to the surface, at some point, even merely to eat. She did not know how far she had come. She was disoriented. Her back and legs cramped from the hours of crouching and crawling, entangled in the stillbirth of new alienation. Suddenly, she became aware that she had entered a dry tube of pristine bricks and fresh mortar, either a section of restoration or a new artery under construction. As the drafts became more pronounced, Cash resolved that she would let this be her exit. She would follow it and escape by whatever breach or service hatch presented itself.
April 22, 2011. Cash came at evening to a floodlit cavity, the tubular service shaft opening into a sunken foundation space, concrete and thick rebar pointing at the obscure stars like anemones from the pit, shimmering under arc light and cranes. She realized that it must be the crater left by the destruction of the World Trade Center. They were rebuilding a new tower. The foundations and stub of it reflected the white industrial light. Scaffold and girders cast shadows in the brilliant panels illuminating the floor. Ramps the width of highways and industrial containers spread to the perimeter of ashen stone, where the walls rose to the height of cliffs. Beyond the lattice of cranes, cables, and fence wire, she saw the tight formations of the Financial District. She crawled from the tunnel and dropped five feet to the stone-strewn crater. The aurora shimmered between the gargantuan buildings that surrounded her beyond the site. She watched its hypnotic emerald sparkling. The new tower would never be finished. She wondered what would be said. On the outside Manhattan was quarantined forever; perhaps New York had finally met a catastrophe that it could not overcome. Unlike the voided city of 1986, where silence cloaked the drab streets and stillness descended on all but the flickering branches of the Wormwood Forest a
nd the stray dogs and condemned horses, for a time the empty city of 2011 was all noise and automatic motion. For her alone, the electronic billboards continuing their lurid, virtual existence, lending an eerie cast to the evening, overlapping displays for theaters, fashion, boutiques, products, electronics, fast food, and hieroglyphic luxuries branded in flashing light. Streetlights had lit automatically, electronically sensing the encroaching darkness. Car alarms pulsed sonic shocks through the high-rise blocks, lamps flashing in the echoing canyons; security alarms rang from almost every building, smashed facades and barking dogs. The crosswalks emitted their shrill tones, automated department store doors malfunctioned in their broken glass, opening and closing, scraping debris. Music blasted from desolate nightclubs and bars without patrons. Cash studied the enormous bulldozers, excavators, and trucks stalled in the pit. She climbed one of the colossal access ramps that would lead her to street level, conscious of every breath that she took. She wondered how long the city would be allowed its automaton existence, thermostats, timers, and cybernetic twitching, before, remotely, the power would be disabled. Sometimes, when she found herself in a part of the city without power, where silence spread over the wreckage, she thought that she could hear her name echoing through the voided tenements and along the dead boulevards.
