Once in the park she wandered around feeling sick. The devastation was so complete it was hard to believe. It felt like she was dreaming, stuck in one of those jagged nightmares in which a montage of terrible unrealities etch themselves one after another on the eyeball of the helpless dreamer. Where there had been trees there were now people, so that the park looked both bigger and lower, like a giant piece of prairie expanding out of the space where the park had used to be. All the people gave it the look of a sepia Hooverville photo, or some earthquake-shattered favela.
She walked around in a kind of dazed exploration. The crowd extended out of the park into the streets. Her various walking routes from years past were all gone. Giant root balls stood up from the edges of gaping holes in the ground, facing south together like sunflowers. Broken branches everywhere exposed the inner flesh of trees, blond and grainy, like limbs of different kind of flesh. Every once in a while she stopped and sat down on the ground, feeling melodramatic, like she was acting out an emotion in a theater exercise, but she had to do it, her knees were buckling under her; it was a real thing, this old expression “her knees grew weak.” How strange that these old clichés had their origins in real physical reactions, common to all. She wept a few times, and saw around her in the crowd faces that had wept recently, or were at that moment crying, quite often with the person involved seemingly unaware of the tears streaming down their faces. Ah my town my town, when again will I see you? Most of the downed trees were decades old, some of them hundreds of years old. It would be many years, or decades maybe, before the park would look anything like itself again.
And the people. They were organized already into circles and groups, many into small bands of twenty or so, but there were quintets and couples and isolatoes too. Families, groups of friends, people from the same destroyed building. Thousands of them altogether, sitting on the ground or on concrete benches or on boxes, or the knobs of ancient stone sticking up out of the ground, the bones of the island offering seating now to its inhabitants. Lines of Walt Whitman’s glanced off her mind half-remembered, something about the streaming of faces across the Brooklyn Bridge, the suffering of the soldiers in the Civil War. The sense of Americans in trouble together.
She tapped her wristpad like she was trying to break it, and called the mayor. Who actually answered. “What?”
“Where are you?”
“At City Hall.”
“What are you doing about this?”
Short pause to indicate amazement. “I’m working! What do you want?”
“I want you to open up the uptown towers.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. More than half the apartments uptown are empty because they’re owned by rich people from somewhere else. Declare an emergency and use all those rooms as refugee centers. Eminent-domain them.”
“I already declared an emergency, and so did the president. She’s almost here. As for eminent domain, I can’t do that.”
“Yes you can. Declare an emergency, exercise executive privilege or whatever—”
“None of that is real. Get real, Charlotte.”
“—martial law! Or at least contact every single owner and ask them for the use of their place. Tell them it’s needed, their place and their agreement. Talk them into it. As many as you can.”
Silence on the other end.
Finally the mayor’s voice said, “There’s way more people in need than there are places like that. All it would accomplish is more capital flight out of here. We’d lose even more people than we already have.”
“Good riddance! Come on, Galina. Show some guts. This is your moment. Your city needs you, you have to come through for it. Now or never.”
“I’ll think about it. I’m busy Charlotte, I have to go. Thanks for your concern.” And the line went dead.
“Fuck you!” Charlotte shouted at her wrist. “Fuck you, you fucking coward!”
People were looking at her. She glared back at them. “The mayor of this city is a tool,” she told them.
They shrugged. The mayor was of no interest to them.
Charlotte gritted her teeth. No doubt these people were right. Push comes to shove, politicians were useless. Best bet was the army, the National Guard, the bureaucracies. Emergency services, emergency room doctors and nurses. Police and firefighters. Those were the people who would help, the ones you hoped to see show up. Not the politicians.
She recalled hearing how after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, they had built prison camps faster than medical facilities. They had expected riots and so had put people of color in jail preemptively. But that was back in the twentieth century, in the dark ages, the age of fascisms both home and abroad. Since the floods they had learned better, hadn’t they?
Looking around the crowd in the broken park, she couldn’t be sure. People were gathered in groups. It was a kind of organization. They were doing the best they could with what they had.
But after every crisis of the last century, Charlotte thought, or maybe forever, capital had tightened the noose around the neck of labor. Simple as that: crisis capitalism, shoving the boot on the neck harder at every opportunity. Tightening the noose. It had been proved, it was a studied phenomenon. To anyone looking at history, it was impossible to deny. It was the pattern. The fight against the tightening noose had never managed to find the leverage to escape it. It had a Chinese finger-trap quality to it: fight it and you justified the heavy response, the prison camps instead of hospitals.
Finally Charlotte gave up thinking and began wandering the park again, stopping to talk to people huddled around the various smoky fires, which existed more for cooking than warmth, or just to be doing something. She stopped at group after group and told them she was a city employee working for the Householders’ Union, and that shelters were going to be opening up uptown. Over and over she said this.
Finally, exhausted, disgusted, she made her way back south to the intertidal and waited in the line on a dock for a water taxi to take her back down to the Met and home. It was a long wait; the line was long, and there weren’t very many water taxis out yet. She got hungry. She sat on the dock with the rest of the people in line. They were New Yorkers and not inclined to talk to strangers, which she appreciated.
At a certain point she tapped her wrist again and called up Ramona.
“Hey Ramona, Charlotte here. Listen, do you think your group might still be interested in me running for the Twelfth District seat?”
Ramona laughed. “I know we would. But listen, you’re aware that Estaban is backing her candidate pretty actively?”
“Fuck Estaban. She’s who I want to run against.”
“Well, we can definitely give you that.”
“Okay. I’ll come to the next meeting and we’ll talk it over. Tell people I want to do it.”
“That’s great news. She’s pissing you off, eh?”
“I’ve just been in Central Park.”
“Ah yeah.”
“I told her to open uptown for the refugees here.”
“Ah yeah. Good luck with that.”
“I know. But it’s something to run on.”
“I think so! Come on down and we’ll talk more.”
By the time she got back to the Met she could barely walk. She made her way to the dining room and realized she was going to have to take the stairs up to her room, and couldn’t face it. A forty-story walk-up, great.