On the second day after the storm I called Sinai to confirm that Alex’s appointment had not been changed; they said nothing at the hospital had been disrupted. It was a sunny, unseasonably warm day. There were some buses going into Manhattan from downtown Brooklyn, but the lines were so long, and the routes so confusing, I convinced Alex to let us take a cab. The traffic was slow, but not intolerable; it flowed easily enough once we crossed the Brooklyn Bridge into unelectrified lower Manhattan, although we had to treat every intersection as though it had a stop sign, since the traffic lights were out. Police were everywhere, but it seemed more like they were preparing for a parade than dealing with the aftermath of a disaster. Many businesses looked open, although I did see a few dumpsters overflowing with what I assumed were discarded perishables. The streets were relatively empty, as though it were an early Sunday morning. As we progressed north — past intermittent clusters of FEMA, Con Edison, and news trucks — Manhattan shaded rapidly back to normal. Our driver pointed out a crane in the distance above Midtown; it had come loose from a giant condo building during the hurricane and was now dangling precariously above an evacuated block. Other than that, with lower Manhattan behind us, it was a day like any other.
We arrived at the office nearly an hour early, having overestimated how long the journey from Brooklyn would take. We watched — there was no position in the waiting room from which you could avoid watching — the coverage of the storm we kept failing to experience. They spliced Doppler images of the swirling tentacular mass with footage of it reaching landfall, of houses being swept away, of emergency rescues of the elderly. Then the president was talking about the damage, projecting, as they say, leadership; the elections were rapidly approaching. For the first time, national politicians were speaking openly, if obliquely, about extreme weather’s relation to climate change, about the need to storm-proof our cities. Then the governor of New Jersey was surveying damage from a helicopter. I reminded Alex that in 2010 Stephen Hawking claimed the survival of the species depended on moon colonization. She reminded me the Mayan calendar indicated the world would end this coming December 22. She found a New Yorker on the table among the parenting magazines; “I can’t get away from this thing,” she said, moving her jaw around, probably unconsciously, as if it were sore. I thought of Calvin claiming his had thinned from radiation. At least one of the Indian Point reactors had been taken off-line as a result of the storm.
Say that, from a small swivel chair beside the plastic reclining one, I watch as the doctor covers Alex’s stomach and the sonographic wand with clear gel. The GE Vivid 7 Dimension Ultrasound System is the Rolls-Royce of ultrasound machinery, offering 4-D imaging capabilities along with blood-flow imaging, tissue tracking, and color flow. Normally the sonogram is conducted by a tech, not the doctor herself, but the tech, the doctor explains, lives in the Rockaways — or at least she did before the hurricane. On the flat-screen hung high up on the wall, we see the image of the coming storm, its limbs moving in real time, the brain visible in its translucent skull. The doctor dwells on the rapidly beating heart, then lets us hear it at high volume. It has only been a couple of months since I heard mine on a similar machine. The heartbeat is strong, she says, perfect, which is welcome news; Alex has had some unexplained bleeding, even some clotting, which we’ve been warned increases the already high rate of miscarriage. Confirming a heartbeat lowers the risk, although the chances the creature will never make landfall remain significant. It will be months before we can look closely at the aorta. As the doctor measures the diameter of the child’s head, I can’t avoid thinking of the baby octopuses. Neither Alex nor I speak, have any questions for the doctor, or take each other’s hand, but there is that intimacy of parallel gazes I feel when we stand before a canvas or walk across a bridge.
Then we were walking. We moved slowly south along the park in silence. Given the storm, the normality felt bizarre: a tourist asked me to take her and her friends’ picture on the steps of the Met; I looked into the viewfinder and half expected to see inside their bodies. The pushcarts were out selling pretzels and hot dogs; there were joggers and dog walkers and nannies pushing multiples in thousand-dollar strollers. There was nothing in the speech or laughter or arguments I overheard to indicate crisis or emergency, no erratic behavior among the squirrels or Columbidae.
Around Fifty-ninth Street we decided we should determine how to get a bus back to Brooklyn, but it was harder to figure out on my phone than I expected, and my network connection was slow, intermittent. I realized I couldn’t smell the sad horses that were normally hitched to carriages along Central Park South; where did they hide them in the storm? We decided to keep heading downtown and, as night fell, I told Alex we should take another taxi; although, according to the GYN, the recent bleeding was unrelated to physical exertion, I thought she should take it relatively easy until she’d made it out of the first trimester. It was impossible, however, to hail a cab, although there was a steady stream of them; I wasn’t sure if this was because it was around five, when the cabs have their shift change, or because they didn’t want to head south because of the storm; regardless, innumerable yellow cabs passed us, but they were all off-duty. Still, I was confident we’d get one eventually if we just kept trying as we walked; I raised my arm each time I saw one approaching and finally, in the upper Thirties, one stopped, albeit tentatively. At the very mention of the word Brooklyn, however, he sped away. This happened two more times and soon we arrived at the threshold of electrification, the streets below us dark.
Reader, we walked on. A couple of restaurants and bars were open, selling drinks, at least, by candlelight. There was a diverse crowd on the corner of Eighteenth, and when we joined it, we saw that people were taking bottles of water from ten or twelve boxes that somebody had stacked there, probably the National Guard. No cab would stop, and Alex had to pee. When we got to Union Square, multiple food trucks were operating, and people were charging cell phones on their outlets. FEMA seemed to be using the park as a kind of hub. Somehow the giant Whole Foods had power, the illumination startling amid all the dark buildings. I hadn’t been there since the night before the last hurricane. I waited outside while Alex went to the bathroom. A reporter was filming a segment nearby and I walked within range of the camera and tungsten lights and waved; maybe you saw me.
When Alex emerged from the store, a bus stopped on the corner, but it was so full only the first few people in line were allowed on; it was heading south, but we had no reason to think it would ferry us to Brooklyn. I asked a cop on the corner of Broadway and Fifteenth how we could get back to Brooklyn, and he just shrugged dismissively; to my surprise, I felt a surge of rage, fantasized about striking him, and only then realized how many contradictory emotions were colliding and recombining within me. My smile was probably strange and Alex asked if I was okay. Between Whole Foods and the various generators police and city trucks were using, Union Square had been relatively bright; as we walked farther south, the dark was enveloping, cut less and less frequently by headlights; driving in the unregulated night was dangerous. Trying to remember the bustling uptown neighborhoods we’d left an hour or two ago, let alone the Brooklyn we’d set out from early that afternoon, was like trying to recall a different epoch. The sense of stability, the Upper East Side architecture, French Renaissance and Federal, seemed to belong to a former age, innocent and gilded, while the ultrasound technology seemed to me in the dark like a premonition from the future; both were too alien to integrate into a narrative. I felt equidistant from all my memories as my sense of time collapsed: blue sparks in Monique’s mouth when she bit down on wintergreen candy; hallucinating from a fever in Mexico City; watching the shuttle disaster on live TV. I looked up at the looming buildings whose presence I could now sense more than see and wondered how many people were still inside them. Here and there you could perceive a beam moving across a window, a flame, the glow of an LED, but the overall effect was of emptiness. I told Alex I felt fine. For some reason I imagined there were Sabbath elevators in each building, imagined that they were still running quietly, drawing their power from some other source, some other time.