We must have headed east as streets had dead-ended, because we were on Lafayette and Canal when two men approached us, at least one of them drunk, and asked for money. In the absence of streetlights and established order there was a long moment in which I couldn’t tell if they were begging or threatening to rob us, making a demand; relations were newly indeterminate, the cues hard for me to read, as if, along with power, we’d lost a kind of social proprioception. I said I didn’t have any, and the men persisted, but without any explicit threat; before I could decide what to do or say, Alex gave the men a couple of dollars, and they vanished.
It was getting cold. We saw a bright glow to the east among the dark towers of the Financial District, like the eyeshine of some animal. Later we would learn it was Goldman Sachs, see photographs in which one of the few illuminated buildings in the skyline was the investment banking firm, an image I’d use for the cover of my book — not the one I was contracted to write about fraudulence, but the one I’ve written in its place for you, to you, on the very edge of fiction. Its generators must have been immense; or did they have special access to a secret grid? Soon we were heading south and west and the dark felt briefly total; I thought of Marfa, the buildings around me like permanent installations in the desert night. I tried to describe this feeling to Alex, but my voice sounded weird in the lightless streets — loud, conspicuous, although there was plenty of other noise: somebody was hammering something nearby; I could hear, but not see, a helicopter; the slow, high-pitched braking of a large truck in the near distance sounded submarine, like whale song. A cab surprised us as we turned onto Park Place, the felt absence of the twin towers now difficult to distinguish from the invisible buildings. I had the sensation that if power were suddenly restored, the towers would be there, swaying a little. Although I could see that someone was in the back of the car, someone I imagined as on both sides of the poem — Bernard and Natali’s daughter, Liza, Ari — I tried to hail the cab; I’d heard cabs could pick up multiple fares as a result of the storm, fares from multiple worlds, but it didn’t stop for us.
I asked Alex how she was holding up; she said that she was fine, but I knew she was tired and cold. What if she were eight months pregnant and I’d accidentally led her into this state of nature? You haven’t led me anywhere, she said, laughing, when I expressed the concern aloud. There was a small mammal developing within her — this was the week for taste buds, teeth buds. We would work out my involvement as we went along. A bodega was weakly illuminated by a generator and I went in to get a bottle of water and a couple of granola bars, as we hadn’t eaten since our early lunch. There was a strong smell of vegetable rot; the refrigerated cases had all been emptied, but there was some old produce on a shelf, and the floors were still wet. I didn’t see any water, but when I asked for it, the man behind the counter produced a large bottle. I asked him how much it was and he said ten dollars. I saw the other goods he had secured behind the counter like the treasures that they were: packages of batteries, flashlights, strike-anywhere matches, Clif bars, instant coffee. I asked the price of each in turn, and each time he said ten dollars, smiling. A few miles away they would cost no more than before the storm; prices rise in the dark. I bought the water and a Luna bar for Alex with the weakening currency and we resumed our walk.
As we passed City Hall and approached the Brooklyn Bridge there were plenty of people and headlights, police were directing traffic, and there were clusters of city trucks — fire, ambulances, sanitation, etc. There were two military jeeps parked on Centre Street. Brooklyn was illuminated across the river, sparkling in a different era. We had already walked some seven miles, having not planned to walk more than one; I asked Alex if she wanted me to inquire about a bus, but she said no, that she’d prefer to “do it all.” A steady current of people attired in the usual costumes was entering the walkway onto the bridge and there was a strange energy crackling among us; part parade, part flight, part protest. Each woman I imagined as pregnant, then I imagined all of us were dead, flowing over London Bridge. What I mean is that our faceless presences were flickering, every one disintegrated, yet part of the scheme. I’m quoting now, like John Gillespie Magee. When we were over the water, under the cables, we stopped and looked back. Uptown the city was brighter than ever, although as you looked north you saw the darkened projects against the light. They looked two-dimensional, like cardboard cutouts in a stagecraft foreground. Lower Manhattan was black behind us, its densities intuitive. The fireworks celebrating the completion of the bridge exploded above us in 1883, spidering out across the page. The moon is high in the sky and you can see its light on the water. I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America:
In Brooklyn we will catch the B63 and take it up Atlantic. After a few stops, I will stand and offer my seat to an elderly woman with two large houseplants in black plastic bags. My feet will ache only then, my knees stiffen a little. A snake plant, a philodendron. Everything will be as it had been. Then, even though it would sound improbable in fiction, the woman with the plants will turn to Alex and say: Are you expecting? She will explain there is a certain glow. She’ll guess it is a girl. The sonar pings will prove to be the ringtone of a teenager in the seat behind me who will answer her phone by yelling, “I’m basically there. Chill, I’m basically there.” It and everything else I hear tonight will sound like Whitman, the similitudes of the past, and those of the future, corresponding. We’ll get off where the bus turns right onto Fifth and walk east. It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. We’ll see the ghost bike — a memorial for a dead cyclist — chained to the street sign. We’ll see the sidewalk littered with flowers from an early-blooming Callery pear. The plywood placard will say her name was Liz Padilla; Why not dedicate, Alex will ask, this book to her? The small flame in a gas lamp on Saint Mark’s will flicker across genres. We’ll give wide berth to a discarded box spring near the curb, as it might contain bedbugs, but tonight even parasitic insects will appear to me as a bad form of collectivity that can stand as a figure of its possibility, circulating blood from host to host. Like a joke cycle, like a prosody. Don’t get carried away, Alex will say, when she offers me a penny — no — strong six figures for my thoughts. In 1986, I put a penny under my tongue in an attempt to increase my temperature and trick the school nurse into sending me home so I could watch a movie. Did it work?
We will stop to get something to eat at a sushi restaurant in Prospect Heights — just vegetable rolls, as Alex is pregnant and the seas are poisoned and the superstorm has shut down all the ports. A couple beside us will debate the relative merits of condos and co-ops, the woman insisting with increasing intensity that her partner “doesn’t understand the process,” that this isn’t “the developing world.” Sitting at a small table looking through our reflection in the window onto Flatbush Avenue, I will begin to remember our walk in the third person, as if I’d seen it from the Manhattan Bridge, but, at the time of writing, as I lean against the chain-link fence intended to stop jumpers, I am looking back at the totaled city in the second person plural. I know it’s hard to understand / I am with you, and I know how it is.