Emerging from the train, I found it was fully night, the air excited by foreboding and something else, something like the feel of a childhood snow day when time was emancipated from institutions, when the snow seemed like a technology for defeating time, or like defeated time itself falling from the sky, each glittering ice particle an instant gifted back from your routine. Except now the material form of excitation wasn’t ice: the air around Union Square was heavy with water in its gas phase, a tropical humidity that wasn’t native to New York, an ominous medium. In front of the Whole Foods where Alex told me to meet her — it was a preposterous idea to shop at Whole Foods, given that it was always already mobbed, but they were the sole carrier of a tea on which Alex claimed to be dependent, one of her few indulgences — a reporter bathed in tungsten light was talking to a camera about a run on flashlights, canned food, bottled water. Children were darting back and forth behind her, stopping now and then to wave.
Alex greeted me and I noted to myself a difference in her appearance, an unspecifiable radiance, but, as we began to push our way as gently as possible through the crowds, I realized the alteration was most likely in my vision, because everything remaining on the shelves also struck me as a little changed, a little charged. The relative scarcity was strange to behold: in what were typically bright aisles of superabundance, there were now large empty spaces, especially among prepackaged staples, although plenty of outrageously priced organic produce still glistened in the artificial mist. Alex had some kind of list — storm radio, hand-crank flashlight, candles, various foodstuffs; they were out of almost everything on it at this point. We didn’t care, and circulated through the vast store on the current of other shoppers, shoppers who seemed unusually polite and buoyant, despite the presence of police near the registers.
I want to say I felt stoned, did say so to Alex, who laughed and said, “Me too,” but what I meant was that the approaching storm was estranging the routine of shopping just enough to make me viscerally aware of both the miracle and insanity of the mundane economy. Finally I found something on the list, something vitaclass="underline" instant coffee. I held the red plastic container, one of the last three on the shelf, held it like the marvel that it was: the seeds inside the purple fruits of coffee plants had been harvested on Andean slopes and roasted and ground and soaked and then dehydrated at a factory in Medellín and vacuum-sealed and flown to JFK and then driven upstate in bulk to Pearl River for repackaging and then transported back by truck to the store where I now stood reading the label. It was as if the social relations that produced the object in my hand began to glow within it as they were threatened, stirred inside their packaging, lending it a certain aura — the majesty and murderous stupidity of that organization of time and space and fuel and labor becoming visible in the commodity itself now that planes were grounded and the highways were starting to close.
Everything will be as it is now, just a little different—nothing in me or the store had changed, except maybe my aorta, but, as the eye drew near, what normally felt like the only possible world became one among many, its meaning everywhere up for grabs, however briefly — in the passing commons of a train, in a container of tasteless coffee.
Alex found her tea. We got one of the last cases of bottled water — Alex wanted to carry it because I’m not supposed to lift anything heavy enough to increase intrathoracic pressure, but I wouldn’t let her — and then, since we were hungry, we went to the steaming buffets of prepared foods, on this night the least crowded part of the store, and piled high our plates with an incoherent mix of overpriced perishables: samosas, vegetarian chicken, chicken, various dishes involving quinoa, Caprese salad. We paid for these and our tea and coffee, exchanging jokes about our ill-preparedness with the teenager who checked us out, pink highlights in her black hair, then took the train back to our neighborhood, deciding by the time we got to our stop to head for Alex’s apartment.
We turned onto her street and it started to rain, but it felt as if it had already been raining on her street and we’d walked into it, parting it like a beaded curtain. I might have mistaken my intensified attention to the wind for intensifying wind. We passed the community garden and saw two girls huddled together in some furtive effort. I thought they were trying to light a cigarette, but they separated and we could see the sparklers they held, brilliant white magnesium slowly phasing into orange. A small dog yapped at the leaping sparks as they moved around the garden describing circles, laughing, maybe writing their names. I felt acutely aware that nothing slowly flashed across the sky, that no one looked down on the city from above, banking hard on the approach.
In Alex’s apartment we reheated the prepared foods on the stove while listening to the latest radio reports of the storm’s progress — it was gaining strength — and we did most of the things we were told: filled every suitable container we could find with water, unplugged various appliances, located some batteries for the radio and flashlights. I was pleased to see Alex had a substantial cache of wine, most of it probably left behind by the lawyer, and I opened the bottle of red with the label displaying the most distant year, taking pleasure in the knowledge that its value would be lost on me. I poured myself a glass in a clean jam jar and, while Alex showered one last time before we had to fill the tub, I looked at the now no longer entirely familiar photographs on her fridge: here was Alex as a child — gingham and braids — with her mom and stepdad; here I was with Alex’s little second cousin, whom she called her niece, at a party thrown last summer: I was placing a construction-paper crown on her head with mock solemnity, trick candles sparking in the cake beside her. Everything in the photograph was as it had been, only different, as if the image were newly indeterminate, flickering between temporalities. Then it wasn’t. A schedule of unemployment benefits was affixed to the fridge with an NYU School of Public Service magnet.
It was only when we sat down to eat by the light — even though we still had power — of some votive candles Alex had discovered that the danger and magnitude of the storm felt real to us, maybe because our meal had the feel of a last supper, maybe because eating together produced a sufficient sense of a household against which we could measure the threat. The radio said the storm would make landfall around 4:00 a.m.; it was about ten now and the surges were already alarmingly high. How prepared are you, the radio asked, for days without running water? The food tasted better than it was, since it might be the best we’d have for a while, and Alex finished hers, whereas we almost always switched plates late in a meal so I could eat what she’d left over. She asked me not to get drunk as I finished the bottle, at least not until we knew how bad it was going to be. You don’t want to be hung over without water, she said, gathering her brown hair into a high ponytail, and I’m not letting you drink up our supply.
Was I drinking quickly in part because I felt a little awkward about staying the night at Alex’s, something I’d done countless times before? I was just uneasy about the storm, I said to myself, as I cleared the table and did the few dishes. As was our habit, we decided to project a movie on the bedroom wall; a former employer had given her an LCD projector into which she plugged her computer. Because the Internet could go out at any minute, we selected from the few disks she owned. The Third Man looked best to me, maybe because it’s set in a ruined city, and I put it on while Alex changed into pajamas, then we got into bed together, although I remained in street clothes, storm radio and flashlight near me on the bedside table for whenever the power failed.