Tree branches were down in the park, and leaves, many of them still green, stuck to the damp sidewalk in clumps and lay thick in the gutters and along the foundations of buildings. Across the occasional street lay a fallen tree snapped at the trunk, the roots still buried under concrete. Workers were climbing over the debris like ants, carrying it away to some field somewhere to be stacked and mulched.
After disasters, people usually come together. It happened after 9/11, and Clay could sense it happening today on a smaller scale. There wasn’t the terror that had been present on that day, with its overwhelming reality of the apocalypse hanging in the air in dust and cancer and ash and death. 9/11 had been huge and monumental and devastating. It had fundamentally changed the world, and this was nothing like that. Still, Clay could sense the beginnings of an inkling that something was in the air. He just couldn’t identify it quite yet.
A few more blocks up 5th Avenue and there on his left as he passed by was an ice cream vendor who had just opened up his cart and was giving away his ice cream for free. Maybe he couldn’t keep it frozen, or maybe this was his way to lift spirits, but a sign lettered by hand with a thick, black Sharpie simply said FREE. People stopped and talked and licked their cones and shivered in the damp.
Walking faster now, block after block disappeared behind him, and above 34th Street, just past the Empire State Building, he noticed that the power was up. It became apparent first by the street lights, and the traffic plugging the avenue. Life seemed almost, but not quite, normal. Normal. A funny word. What is normal anyway? Clay had recently read a UN report that claimed that over 1/2 of the world’s population now lives in cities, and cities are almost inevitably located on coasts, along fault lines, in areas where major disasters are most likely to occur. Is that normal? He’d spent some time thinking about the implications of this. It was one reason for his flight. Millions of people living on top of one another in an artificial system, supported by a crumbling and unsustainable infrastructure, provided for by criminally deficient food grown on industrial farms and shipped thousands of miles on government roads. This is not civilization. It is madness. He watched the cars, piled up like toys in the streets, emitting their fumes into the fast rushing clouds, carrying their overheated toxins into the atmosphere, readying the next storm. If this is going to be normal, he thought, where does one go to hide from it?
A sign said, “Free Juice, We’ll Share.” But it was not fruit juice that was being given away. A power strip ran from an extension cord somewhere inside a coffee shop, and every empty outlet was filled with plugs and cords leading to phones and devices. One man was sitting at a laptop, trying to check his Facebook page. The life-blood of modern society. People had walked up from Downtown looking for power and news and normal. A woman asked the man if he was almost done and then walked inside to tell the owner that he ought to limit how long people can hog the power.
Mid-town. Here some business was going on, and there was a whole lot less damage. A yellow cab pulled over to the curb just north of 42nd Street, opposite the library. Its doors opened and passengers spilled out onto the sidewalk. They looked like clowns piling out of a Volkswagen. Four, five, six fares, squeezed into a single cab. More fares piled in, and the Jamaican driver smiled at him and said, “You want to ride in this cab, mon, you got to get on top!” Clay laughed a little, smiled, and just shook his head. He was walking out of Gomorrah.
At the end of the block on east 43rd, Clay stepped into Little Italy Pizza. It was clean and bright and open, and he bought a slice so he could use the bathroom, which was something he’d increasingly needed to do. He set his backpack on the ground and felt his shoulders roll in their sockets. Pausing to eat his slice, he listened to voices and stories for a moment, and as he did, the veneer came off of everything. Clay realized that he was living one of those moments in time when an entire society or culture experiences some event at the same time. Like the bombing of Pearl Harbor, or VJ Day, or Kennedy’s assassination. Or 9/11. Maybe this wasn’t that big. Maybe it wasn’t even as big as Katrina. But it was big in a way that mattered. A kind of widespread ground zero had been slung across the city; and beyond that, the state; and beyond that, the tri-state; and beyond that, the nation. It was the nature of such things. The farmer in Iowa pays for the recovery in New York through his taxes and his grain. As the government has increasingly turned to the declaration of ‘national’ disasters, and as the course of societal events has increasingly led to the likelihood of disasters, both natural and man-made, there is a kind of shared experience that attends to these things. And nature had outdone herself here in providing reason for the focus. The enormity of the timing of his escape really began to occur to him for the first time.
One very energetic woman in a bright red jacket was telling her husband that the HMS Bounty (“a by-god, full-on 18th century sailing ship”) had sunk off the Carolinas, and that a freighter was now in the middle of Staten Island, and that the Boardwalk in Atlantic City had floated out into the ocean. Clay thought about news that was occurring elsewhere during the storm, as people were focused on their immediate locations. Being cut off from the world, how would people deal with the world at large? Or would they care to? What would happen in the upcoming elections? He wondered about news that would slip through the cracks in this moment, how nations would prepare for war against other nations, how children would be snatched from their parents, how celebrities would shill for their causes. He wondered how he would know these things without the woman in the bright red coat to tell him.
Outside again, Clay started to walk, and for the first time he began to feel tired. Even in his well-broken-in boots his feet were starting to hurt a little. Noon was moving into afternoon, which would then slide into evening, and it occurred to him that he wasn’t making good time. If he kept on walking at this pace, he was going to be in Harlem at dark fall, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He wondered if looting or riots might start, and if they did, would they be confined to the areas currently without power? Things have a way of falling apart, and Clay wasn’t sure he wanted to be out in the street if and when they did. He lengthened out his stride and made an effort to put the city behind him.
CHAPTER 3
Clay walked into Harlem in the late afternoon. He was tired in his bones and began to feel a chill. He’d walked the last several miles along the avenue deep in thought, past St. Patrick’s Cathedral on his right and NBC Studios on his left, past the long stretch of glitzy stores with their high-end commercial excess, past the high-rise mansions of Central Park East with their celebrity tenants and media moguls, and past the row of museums housing the world’s great treasures. None of these worlds felt real to him in their religion of consumerism and stilted aesthetic tastes. Even Central Park, with its languorous urban sprawl, felt false in comparison to the experience of sitting on the front porch swing at Ithaca in the early light of fall and listening to the green frogs greet the sunrise. He was feeling alienated and tired. He needed to find rest.
As he came around the northernmost end of the park, he walked into the small, circular amphitheater where Duke Ellington’s statue stands as a testament to the meeting of two worlds, and sat down on the concrete risers. He undid the straps of his backpack, shook himself out of the harness, and flexed his feet inside his boots, feeling the tension in his calves tighten and then release.