“They all shouted, ‘I’m here!’ They started calling that out in their Sioux language, all around that awful contraption that was about to kill them. People who heard it said it was awe-inspiring.” (Not awesome.) “No one ever forgot it. Then they hanged them. All of them. At one moment. ‘I’m here.’ As if that made it all right for them. Made death tolerable and less awful. It gave them strength.” Sally shook her head. Her tear of anguish for long-ago 1862 did not emerge. She held her book tight to her front and smiled at me mournfully, across the glass-topped table where I’ve eaten possibly three thousand breakfasts. “I just thought you’d want to know about that. I’m sorry to ruin your breakfast.”
“I’m glad to know about it, sweetheart,” I said. “It didn’t ruin my breakfast at all.”
“I’m here,” she said and seemed to embarrass herself.
“So am I,” I said.
And with those words she got up, came around the square table, kissed me once on my forehead, still embarrassed, then went away, carrying her book back to where she’d come from in the house.
MIDWAY ON THE BRIDGE, HEADED ACROSS TO DARKEST Seaside Heights, where who knows what awaits me (heartstrings plucked, outrage, wronged rectitude, and all that’s right corrupted), I realize there’s nothing I can really do for Arnie Urquhart’s domiciliary suffering, or to make things jake. Jake’s already blown out the window and all but forgotten, from what I’ve seen on TV. And yet: you bear some responsibility to another human you sell a house to. Not a financial one. Conceivably not a moral one. But one in which, even rarer, the professional and human operate on a single set of rails. A priestly, vocational responsibility. Though for all I know, Arnie might just as easily feel relief that his house is an ass-over-teacups total loss. It may have been just the thing he’d lain in bed and dreamed about — like the day you sell your vintage, lap-sided Lyman in-board: the runner-up best day of your life, after the day you bought it. Second-house ownership is often like that. People know they’re going to rue the day long before they sign the papers — but they do it anyway. Arnie may just be pretending to mourn. After all, he now owns a hunk of prime, undeveloped oceanfront — even if the taxes stay high. He can sit tight and wait for destiny — assuming anybody ever wants oceanfront again.
Though what I sense with my ex-realtor’s brain is that Arnie may simply want me to take the trouble to be there — to be his witness. It’s what the Christers all long for, dawn to dusk. It’s why there are such things as “best men,” “pallbearers,” “godfathers,” “invitees to an execution.” Everything’s more real if two can see it. A flying saucer. A Sasquatch. The face of the Redeemer in an oil smear at Jiffy Lube. And today I’m willing to say “I’m here” to whoever can hear me, and for whatever good it might do for man or beast.
AN UNUSUAL SIGHT GREETS ME AS I CURVE DOWN off the bridge into what used to be Seaside Heights (Central Ave., north to Ortley Beach, south to Sea-Clift). A New Jersey State Police command-post trailer has been hauled across the roadway to block unauthorized vehicles. Sawhorses are piled against Jersey barriers, red and silver flashers spinning on a striped trooper car that’s parked alongside — everything but razor wire and a machine-gun nest — beyond which the wound of the storm’s destruction assaults my eye. Up Central, toward my old office, as far as I can see along the beach side of the avenue, civic life has sustained a fierce whacking — house roofs sheared off, exterior walls stripped away, revealing living rooms full of furniture, pictures on bed tables, closets stuffed with clothes, stoves and refrigerators standing out white for all to see. Other houses are simply gone altogether. Great, heaping Mount Trashmores (one with a Christmas tree on top), piled with building debris, dirt, sand, ruined Halloween decorations, auto fenders, cabinets, toilets, mailboxes — all that could be bashed into and blown to smithereens — have risen on every corner. Awaiting what, it’s not clear. Meanwhile, a god’s own lot of human activity’s underway beneath the mottled sky, up the avenue and down the side-leading residential streets, ocean to bay. Much of it, I see, is police activity — large men in SWAT-team garb, and National Guard troopers in desert issue, their tiny lethal riflery strapped to their chests, patrolling. There are State Health vans with workers in white hazmat suits. Power-line people are here with cherry pickers (they come in convoys from Texas and Minnesota, and won’t be kept away). As well, there’re trucks of every species — Datsuns like the terrorists in Kabul use, new F-150s, raised Dodge muscle rigs, all the way to elephant-size dumpers and decommissioned garbage scows — conscripted to get destruction, pain, the memory of pain and destruction, up, out and away and into some landfill in Elizabeth like the 9/11 remains. Nothing’s livable or OPEN. There’s no power. A carpet of ocean and beach sand has been driven up onto the streets and yards and under all the ruined cars, as if The Shore in a single night had turned into Riyadh. It’s a post-combat zone, though in its own way perfectly pacific and orderly. I expect to see buzzards circling in the misty air. Though instead, a squadron of brown pelicans floats along the beachfront, seeking something familiar or edible or both.
In all, there’s the palpable, ghostly urge to “put back” what was. Though, in my view — just arriving — it’s too bad it can’t be left as it is a bit longer, like a ghost that goes on spooking. Decades ago, in my unsatisfactory Marine Corps tour, a few of us privates were dispatched as forward observers from Camp Pendleton down to Ensenada, to surveil enemy buildup in the local bordellos and mescalerias. At the time, I noticed it was impossible to discern if the tumbled-down Mexican buildings we passed were actually tumbled down or half tumbled up, with new residents waiting somewhere offstage. Ortley Beach — what I can see of it now — looks that way, as I’m sure do all the once-sparkling beach towns north and south: locked into a moment of indecisiveness between being and not being. I once made a handsome living off this patch of now-salted earth. I should be able to envision the grains of possibility in what’s left of it. But for the moment, I cannot.
LOOTERS BEWARE! A SIGN ON THE SHOULDER OF THE exit curve warns all who’d enter and do ill. A skull ’n’ crossbones has been painted on in red to drive the point home. CURFEW 6 PM THIS MEANS U! fills out the space to make it personal. A forest of other signs is sprouted around like political yard art, announcing, WE’LL BUY YOUR HOUSE (OR WHAT’S LEFT OF IT). MARTELLO BROTHERS — REFUSE HAULING. HABLA INGLES — RAPIDO! LEARN GRIEF COUNSELING IN TEN DAYS. FAST MOLD REMOVAL. KNOW YOUR RIGHTS. WRITERS’ COOPERATIVE. NRA ICE-BREAKER AT THE TOMS RIVER HAMPTON INN. A DRUNK DRIVER KILLED MY DAUGHTER. FLOW YOGA. TANTRIC SEX WORKSHOP. FIRST RESPONDERS SPAGHETTI SUPPER. One sign merely says NOTHING BESIDE REMAINS (for victims with a liberal arts degree).
As I nose up to the command-post trailer, Copland turned off, a policeman steps out a side door down to the sandy pavement. No one’s permitted in except contractors, owners, and local officialdom (plus President Obama and our big candied yam of a governor). But I’m in luck. The cop, hiking up his heavy cop belt and situating his blue hat on his big cop head, is a man I know. It is Corporal Alyss of the Sea-Clift PD. Years back, I sold his house in Seaside Park when he was a rookie and his family size suddenly doubled, requiring a bigger, cheaper place — in Silverton.
Palm forward, Officer Alyss transforms himself now into a human Jersey-barrier, warning off looters, unauthorized rubberneckers, and sneakers-in like me. When I buzz down my window, he comes round to utter his discouraging words, big right hand rested on his big black Glock. He’s much larger than the last time I saw him. Portland concrete seems to have been added to his shape and size, in-uniform. He doesn’t quite move naturally — fully Kevlar’d with heavy, combat footwear as thick as moon boots, plus his waist-harness of black-leather cop gear: scorch-your-eyes perpetrator spray, silver cuffs, a walkie-talkie as big as a textbook, a head-knocking baton in a metal loop, extra ammo clips, a row of black snap-closed compartments that could hold most anything, plus a pair of sinister black gloves. He is the Michelin man of first responders, his police ball cap with gold insignia beetled down to his eyebrows. I want to laugh, since he’s a sweetie at heart. But he’s too uncomfortable not to be sympathized with. In any case, laughing at the police is a prime misstep in New Jersey.