Warday

The Approach to New York—Ghosts

Monday, October 4, 1993: The Northeast was more beautiful empty than it had been populated. Some of the drama of the old wildness had returned, in the thick foliage that scraped the windows of the train, and in the rioting fields that once were ordered. As we moved into the commuter belt, though, ruin took the place of wildness.

Images from the window of the train: empty suburban stations whose parking lots once glittered with commuters’ BMWs and Buicks; dark doorways and vines everywhere, spreading in the most unlikely places, along streets, up telephone poles, jamming the empty hulk of a bus.

Beneath all the brick and concrete, this land was always fertile.

Green things, full of confidence and ambition, were reasserting themselves everywhere. The effect of all this was much more powerful than the kind of abandonment we are all familiar with, because this was so total, and the Northeast had been so vastly and intricately populated.

The thousands of fragile reminders of human presence intensified the emptiness.

The New York Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area contained nine million people in 1987. The official population is now seven thousand. According to General George Briggs, USA, the Commandant of the New York Military Area, there are roughly twenty thousand illegal inhabitants in the city. Officially, New York is a Red Zone, under martial law with a twenty-four-hour curfew, violators to be shot on sight. But General Briggs, a tall man with narrow gunsights of eyes, said that his men hadn’t ever shot anybody. “There’s been sufficient death here,” he said.

Amtrak goes as far south as White Plains. From there it is possible to take a bus east to Stamford, but there is no public transportation into New York at all.

We arrived at the White Plains station on the Twentieth Century, which we had left in Cleveland for our detour to Pittsburgh.

From the moment we got off the train, we were aware of two things: this was U.S. Army territory, and there was a massive salvage operation going on.

First impressions: blank-eyed kids standing around smoking, wearing uniforms that were threadbare before the war, carrying M-16s the way exhausted majorettes might carry their batons, as if all their magic had been transformed into weight.

It was cloudy, but there were signs of fair weather. During the night it had rained, and the streets of White Plains were shining in the shafts of light that were breaking through the clouds. There was a smell something like creosote in the air. A convoy of salvage trucks roared past on the Bronx River Parkway. There were buses out in front of the station, and our thirty fellow passengers all got into them. Soon quiet descended on the station. A soldier, who had been playing Sunshine’s “Glee” on a harmonica, stopped and began staring at us. He was wearing an MP armband. He hitched up his web belt, unsnapped his holster flap, and came over. He regarded us. His shoulder stripes said he was a staff sergeant. His name tag identified him as Hewitt.

“Can we be of service, Sergeant?” Jim asked, when he did not speak.

“Identification, please.”

“What kind?” I asked. My identification consists of a Texas driver’s license and an ancient MasterCard, unless you count the false California ID.

“Federal. British. Whatever you got.”

Jim showed him his Herald News press card. “We’d like to arrange an interview with General Briggs,” he said.

The young man looked at us. “Okay,” he said, “you’ll find him over at the armory. You know where it is?”

“You’ll have to direct us.”

“We’re goin’ over there ourselves, now that the train’s come in. You can come with us.” He turned to the knot of soldiers lounging nearby. “Okay, guys, excitement’s over. Time to get back to the Tire Palace.”

The Tire Palace?

We rumbled through the streets of White Plains in, of all things, a massive, roaring, turbine-driven armored personnel carrier. “What the hell is this?” I asked. “We could’ve used a few of these in ’Nam.” It was like riding in a safe—massive steel doors, quartz window slits.

“This is the Atomic Army,” Sergeant Hewitt said. “You could blow off a hydrogen bomb right on top of this thing, and you know what’d happen?”

“What?”

“We’d be vaporized.”

We rode on for a few minutes. Sergeant Hewitt pulled the lever that opened the door. Before us was a Gothic building of fairly massive proportions, designed to look like a castle, with towers and parapets and narrow windows set in red brick. Soldiers came and went. The convoy we had seen on the parkway was now parked across the street. Beneath the tarps I could see that the trucks were loaded with rusted steel beams and stacks of aluminum sheathing from buildings. One truck contained nothing but intact windows, each carefully taped and insulated against breakage. A soldier was walking along with a handheld computer, taking inventory.

This scene was my first experience of the work of the famous salvors, who are methodically dismantling Manhattan. Salvage is the latest business in which Great American Fortunes are being made, and the salvors, in their dashing khaki tunics and broad-brimmed hats, were romantic figures, lean men who stood around and gibed the neat officer with the computer.

A helicopter landed on a pad in the small park in front of the armory, disgorging five men in white radiation suits, who began to examine the salvage with geiger counters amid a good bit of derisive laughter. A peacock, standing in the patch of grass in front of the building, gave throat and spread its tail.

“General’s office is the second door to the right,” Hewitt said. “It says ‘Commanding General’ on the door. At least that’s what it said the last time I looked at it.”

Even though I knew you couldn’t see New York from the streets of White Plains, I found myself looking south. The sky revealed nothing.

The moment we entered the armory, we found out why the soldiers called it the Tire Palace. The place reeked of rubber. The central foyer was stacked with tires. There were tires in the hallway.

Farther back I could see a vast, dim room, also filled with the tall, shadowy stacks.

Nobody ever explained to us what they were there for.

As we entered General Briggs’s office, a bell tinkled above the door. A master sergeant, lean and moist with nervous sweat, labored at a brand-new word processor, his fingers flying. I saw Jim’s eyes glaze with envy. I suppose mine did too. No writer who has ever used one can forget the joys of the word processor. I couldn’t resist a look at the brand name. It was an Apple, a new model called an Eve. The Eve had a nine-inch screen no thicker than a pancake. I noticed that the sergeant typed normally, but directed the word-processing program by speaking into a microphone around his neck. He said, “File two-four-two,” and the disk drives blinked.

How beautiful! Ever since I saw it, I haven’t been able to get the Eve out of my mind. What wondrous capabilities it must have.

I used an Apple II Plus from ’79 to ’84, and a Lisa after that, so I have an affinity for Apple machines. Nowadays I am a pencil-and-paper man.

We had no trouble getting in to see General Briggs, and he was willing to give us a short interview. Most of our respondents have agreed to an hour, but General Briggs gave us only ten minutes, which, as it turned out, was a generous amount considering how busy he is.

Manhattan is almost free of radioactivity. It is still a Designated Red Zone, though, because of the city’s other problems. First, there is no water supply. By Warday-plus-ten, the city’s reservoir system was drained dry because of thousands of uncontrolled leaks in Brooklyn and Queens. The old water mains couldn’t stand the stress of losing pressure and drying out, and in subsequent months many of them collapsed. It would take years to repair the system.

It is contamination that prevents this work from being done.

Ironically, radiation is only a small part of the problem. The serious pollution is chemical. Hundreds of thousands of tons of hazardous chemicals were burned in the Brooklyn-Queens firestorm.

Dioxins were produced, PCBs from insulation were released into the air, and deadly fumes mingled with the radioactive fallout.

Over the years, untended chemical-storage facilities deteriorated, especially along the Harlem River and on the New Jersey side of the Hudson. The whole of southern New Jersey is now uninhabitable, and Manhattan and the Bronx are severe hazard zones. People cannot remain in the Bronx for more than a few hours at a time, nor live in Manhattan north of Twenty-third Street.

Despite the dangers, we felt we had to go in. We asked for and obtained General Briggs’s permission to enter the city. I suspect that he knew we would go in, even if he didn’t give us the necessary papers. We were lucky to have gained his confidence. Had we not been under the guidance of Army and city personnel, we would not have lived through our trip to Manhattan.

Rumors from the Northeast

RUMOR: The complete records of the United States government were preserved in a mountain in Colorado, and officials are just waiting for the right moment to put them to use in getting the country reorganized.

FACT: This is one of the most persistent stories we heard in this part of the country. In fact, there was and is a redoubt in the Rockies. It is the NORAD Aerospace Defense Command in Cheyenne Mountain, and it is back in operation despite battle damage. It is being run by a joint U.S.-U.K.-Canadian command. But it contains only military equipment and electronics, most of it preserved by the mountain from EMP effects.

RUMOR: There is a Council of State Governors that will soon meet to appoint an interim Congress, which will in turn appoint an interim President, whose primary responsibility will be the reorganization of the federal government.

FACT: The federal government in Los Angeles gave no hint of any such plan, nor is there any functional national governors’ organization.

RUMOR: Even though it was terribly damaged, the Soviet Union remained in one piece while the U.S. did not. Thus the Russians won the war, but they need time to rebuild before they occupy America. Stories to the effect that the USSR has broken up are planted by Soviet intelligence to lull the Americans into complacency and create a false sense of security.

We think this rumor is false, and here’s why: First if Russia were still intact, Europe and Japan would be arming themselves as quickly as possible. There is little evidence of this. And the Russians apparently do nothing to resist the Royal Navy’s attacks on isolated Soviet submarines, of which we have an excellent account elsewhere in this book.

Second, an intact Russia would already have invaded western Europe. The Russian armies in Poland and in some of the other Eastern Bloc countries disintegrated after the war because they had no orders from Moscow and no idea what had happened at home.

Third—the smallest but most telling fact—during the clothing shortage in 88–89. the British brought in freighters loaded with uniforms. Everybody remembers them because we were all wearing them. They were dyed black, but they were Soviet summer uniforms, apparently liberated and sold to the U.K. as surplus by the Poles when the Soviet armies stationed in Poland collapsed.

INTERVIEW General George Briggs, New York Military Area

What the U.S. Army is engaged in here is the mission of protecting the property of American citizens and managing the most massive salvage operation in the history of the human race.

This salvage will continue until everything of value is physically removed from this area. And I mean everything. Let me read some statistics. In the past four years we have salvaged, among other things, 816,000 typewriters, 235,561 automobile parts, 199,021 kitchen appliances, over seven thousand tons of steel, four thousand tons of aluminum or other sheathing, more than three million meters of copper wire, eighty-eight thousand windows, 199,803 business suits and 204,381 articles of women’s clothing from stores and factories, 9,100 toupees, 6,170 pieces of bridge-work and artificial teeth, and one set of prosthetic rear legs suitable for a medium-sized dog, which were found at the Animal Medical Center. We have also saved 14,126,802 books, 2,181,709 phonograph records, and enough video and audio tape to stretch to the moon and back twice. Working in association with various art galleries and other types of museums, we are aiding in the salvage of such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan, the Museum of Natural History, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, the Frick, and many others. Among the items we have saved are the entire contents and paneling of the Fragonard Room at the Frick, which was transferred to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. We have also saved the embalmed brain of a Mr. A. J. Carnegie, which was found in a closet at New York University. The how and why of that one remains a mystery. If you wish, you can see the brain. It’s in our collection here at the armory, along with a number of other especially unusual exhibits.

The decision to salvage New York rather than attempt to repopulate it was made by the Joint Chiefs of the Continental Military Command, which consists of General Youngerman, USA, General Joe Point of the USAF, Admiral Whitaker, General Sir Malcolm Law of the British Continental Military Advisory Command, and General Topp of the Canadian Army.

Their decision was made as a result of the water and pollution problems I outlined to you earlier. The chemical spills have created an effective Dead Zone in eastern New Jersey every bit as lethal as any nuclear-impact area. Thus this region, in which most of New York City’s primary petrochemical, food, and fuel supply points were located, has been evacuated. There is also the matter of the abandoned nuclear power plants, and the possibility that one or more of them could emit radioactive materials at some time in the future. Also, whenever the wind comes in from the east, Manhattan receives a dusting of thousands of particles of strontium 90 and cesium 137. Unfortunately, the bombs were so designed that the primary issuing particle was strontium 90 which has a half-life of nearly thirty years. Of the particles we collect, fifty-six percent are this element, thirty-one percent are carbon 14, and thirteen percent are cesium 137.

Thus there are so many obstacles to the repopulation of the city that the Joint Chiefs were compelled to make the determination to undertake salvage instead of resettlement.

As you know, Manhattan is identified as a Red Zone, which means that unauthorized persons are liable to be shot for intruding. Nevertheless, the island supports a small population consisting of people who either refused to leave or have returned and are intent on protecting their former property. There is even an impromptu real-estate market. A few months ago, two individuals applied to the State Office of Title Reclamation in Albany for a grant to clear title to a property in the city, then the right to transfer that title between them. It turned out that both were active in this strange Manhattan real-estate market, and they lived in the city.

Both were arrested.

Of course, what they were doing is meaningless. All property in Manhattan has been sequestered by the Army. The state government in Albany has no authority over military areas. Salvage proceeds go to the Special Refugee Account for use in areas where the most former New York City residents now live.

You requested that I add as much personal color to this report as I can. I am married and have three children. My wife is Joyce Keltie Briggs. The kids are George Junior, Mark, and Nancy. We are members of the Baptist Church. My age is forty-three, and I have no living parents, sisters, or brothers. I was born on June 12, 1950, at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. I am an army brat, the son and grandson of army brats. I live with my family in Bronxville, in a home on Birchbrook Avenue, which has been designated as Residence, Commanding General, New York Military Area, by the Continental Army Command. This home was not owned or occupied at the time it was commandeered by the U.S. Army.

I have held a commission since 1972, when I graduated from West Point. I was promoted to general officer on January 14, 1990, and assumed this command in February of the same year.

I see that I have a couple of minutes remaining before I have to inspect the Critical Minerals Salvage Holding Depot in the rail-yards, so I would like to make a statement to all Americans who read your book. My statement is this:

Documents from the Lost City

It is hard to believe silence in relation to so big a place as New York. You can hear a single truck coming for miles on the New York State Thruway. And that is usually a military truck. I cannot help wondering what it will be like here when even the soldiers are gone.

The documents I have gathered for this section are related to the management of the human withdrawal from New York. In an odd way I find their crisp tone reassuring. After the first panic, we did our leaving well. We were told that the city picked up tens of thousands of shoes in the days after Warday. But later there were staged withdrawals and organized retreats from Dead Zone to Red Zone to Orange Zone to elsewhere.

Beyond those early assessments, there really isn’t much documentation about New York. I would have liked to include some sort of a list of paintings or books or valuables still in the city, or perhaps an evaluation of the present condition of buildings. Such documents did not present themselves.

I could have listed the orders of the day for the New York Military District, for every day since they have been here.

But those orders aren’t important. The remaining valuables aren’t even too important. There is no document that describes the emptiness of this city, no more than there is one to describe the immense complexity of the mind that caused it.

Nineveh, Babylon, and Rome each bustled a time in the sun. So also, New York. Nobody ever called it an eternal city, it was too immediate for that.

But we all thought it was one.

New York, New York

My first glimpse of it shocks me, not because it seems different but because it doesn’t. I remember this skyline. From the back of an army truck bouncing down the Saw Mill River Parkway it gleams as it has always gleamed, tall and imperial and elegant. I can pick out the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center, the slanting roof of the Citicorp Center.

But then I notice an enormous difference. It is in my ability to see details. As it was when we arrived in White Plains yesterday, the air this morning is absolutely clear, more so than I have ever seen it in New York. I can make out the hollows of windows and see long black scars on the Gulf and Western Building. Then I realize that the Empire State Building has no antenna, and that makes me huddle into my jacket.

Jim stands beside me, his feet wide, his hands gripping the rail that runs along the back of the truck cab. He is silent, his careful eyes on the horizon.

We have been processed by the army bureaucracy in White Plains, and now carry mimeographed papers that, among other things, give us the right to be in Manhattan without risking arrest or being “shot on sight.” I look at the kids in the truck with me—eighteen, seventeen, some even younger. They aren’t very fierce, and I believe General Briggs’s claim that nobody has ever actually been executed here. These kids are not soldiers in the prewar sense of the word. They are the uniformed custodians of a great, shattered treasure house.

I suspect that these soldiers might be obsolete, and they just might sense this also. Perhaps that is why they have chosen to protect empty places—the San Antonio and Washington perimeters, this ruined city.

Maybe the rivalry between the United States and the USSR went on so long because both sides knew that without it the central governments were as unneeded as they were unwanted.

So much of the ferment Jim and I have seen in our travels relates to this question of centrality. Perhaps there is a limit to the size of human states, beyond which they become too inflexible and inefficient to last very long.

We arrive at the rusting toll plaza that marks the entrance to the Henry Hudson Parkway. The truck stops. A spit-and-polish MP master sergeant walks to the back, his helmet gleaming in the morning light.

“Lay ’em out, you guys.” The men start handing over their Army ID cards. The master sergeant looks at each one, comparing it to the face of the man who handed it to him.

Jim and I give him our mimeographed sheets. He studies them both. “We’ll have to verify these. Come over to the command post, please.” I feel a surge of resentment, quell it quickly. His right hand rests ever so lightly on the butt of his .45. The CP is a tiny prefabricated building just off the road.

He hands the sheets to another spit-and-polish soldier, this one a second lieutenant. “Have a seat, gentlemen,” the close-cropped boy says in a piping voice. “I’ll just make a quick phone call.” He picks up a brown telephone and speaks into it, reading off the serial numbers of our documents. After a moment more he puts the receiver down. “Now if you’ll just countersign on the first line,” he says. I sign. He spends a long time comparing my new signature with the old one. “Your S is a bit off, but I suppose it’s okay.”

He hands me my document, then checks Jim’s. His J is the source of another mild complaint. Once these documents are countersigned twice, they’re worthless—an assurance that they won’t be reused. We are allowed one entrance to the city and one exit from it, and no more.

General Briggs put it this way: “You will remain with your designated guide. You will not contact anyone else you might encounter there. For your own safety, you will not remain overnight”

We proceed. Soon we can see the George Washington Bridge looming over the sparkling Hudson, and the red tile roofs of the Cloisters. There isn’t a boat on the river, and the bridge is empty.

The only sound is the roar of our truck. I wonder about the Cloisters as we pass beneath the cliffs of Fort Tryon Park. I believe that I might have first kissed Anne in the herb garden there.

Perhaps not, but that’s where I fell in love with her. It could easily have been the innocence of her enthusiasm for the tapestries that did it. I wonder about them. Were they saved, or do they lie now in heaps on the floor, providing nesting places for rats and mice?

As soon as we pass the Cloisters, the bridge looms up on the right. I see that there are long festoons of vines, some of them scarlet with autumn, hanging from the cables and girders. The truck begins to rattle and bump along as we pass the bridge and enter the old West Side Highway. At this point Jim and I sit down on the wooden bench at the front. We hunch forward, our hands between our knees, bracing ourselves as best we can. The truck growls and stumbles on. Soon the road is pitted, cracked, and we pass over long stretches of grass. Up the side streets I can see rusting cars, long loops of wire between the buildings, and rows and rows of dark windows.

Our mission is to reach Columbus Circle, where we are to be met by a guide who is, of all things, an employee of the City of New York.

We turn off the highway at Seventy-ninth Street and take the cleared route to our destination. I realize that the streets are literally choked with abandoned vehicles of all kinds—cars, trucks, buses, and an occasional piece of the equipment standing out from the jumble. Broadway has had a central path created between the cars. There are vines everywhere, vines and shrubs and things like stinkweed and dandelions growing in every available crack. Some buildings are glutted with plants, others are empty. I realize why: certain species of potted plants grew and seeded, and expanded their dominion.

Then we pass a magnificent ruin. I recognize the Ansonia. Its copper-sheathed roof has been salvaged. There has also been a scarring fire. The Pioneer supermarket on the first floor is a blackened hole laced by flame-red vines. As we pass there is a fusillade of furious barking. It is low and aggressive and powerful. The soldiers nearest the rear of the truck finger their carbines. “No good shots,” somebody says as we pull into Columbus Circle.

“Shit.”

The Ansonia lingers in my mind. I can imagine Florenz Ziegfeld coming down the steps to his enormous Packard, afloat in champagne laughter.

There is an olive drab Chevy Consensus parked in front of the New York Coliseum. But for the lack of glass in the entrance and the grass spurting up through the sidewalk, the structure looks almost unchanged. The marquee reads, 56^TH NY AUTOC 18-3. I remember the New York Auto Show.

A young woman gets out of the Consensus. We climb down from our perch in the truck. Across the street, the vast glut of Central Park roars with birds, a furious jungle just touched by autumn. The sidewalks around it are completely gone to vegetation, as are the abandoned cars choking Fifty-ninth Street. There are vines well up some of the elegant buildings that line Central Park South.

“I’m Jenny Bell,” the woman says, shielding her eyes from the bright morning sun. She wears a heavy tunic closed by a web belt.

There is what looks like a long-barreled .357 Magnum slung on her right hip. Her left hip bears a big, curved knife. She is wearing leather trousers and heavy boots. She carries a canteen, a backpack, a heavy-duty flashlight, and at least twenty feet of rope and a selection of climbing equipment. She does not smile, she offers no more words of explanation. She is simply there.

We introduce ourselves and get a quick handshake. “Let’s go,” she says. We leave our soldiers, who have instructions to pick us up here at 5:00 P.M. The Consensus is cramped. I sit in front because I can’t manipulate my pad and pencil in the back seat. Jim, with that fancy recorder of his, has to endure the confinement of the hard bench in the back.

“I understand that you’re a city employee,” I say to the young, expressionless face. The beautiful face. How old was this girl on Warday? Eighteen is my guess.

“That’s right.”

“So there’s still a city government?”

“That’s right.”

Jim shifts in his seat. “Is there any particular reason you won’t talk, or are you just being a hardass?”

The girl drives in silence, bouncing us down Broadway. A spring has opened up in the middle of the street between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-sixth. We are forced nearly to the sidewalk to avoid the bed of the little creek it has made. I see crystal water dancing among the skeletons of electrical conduit and pipe. It is young water, wearing and active. The stream goes on for blocks, finally disappearing into the gutters at the corner of Forty-fifth. I remember from some book about New York in the early days that an oak tree grew where Broadway now intersects Forty-second Street. A snatch of song echoes in my head—“those dancin’ feet…” The melody continues until we reach our first stop.

When I start to get out, the girl reaches over and locks my door. “Wait,” she says. She steps into the middle of Times Square.

Her gun is out. She holds it in both hands. It is a heavy weapon, too heavy for her to aim accurately any other way.

There is a loud click, then the pistol cracks. The report echoes off empty buildings. Pigeons rise from eaves, and a flock of guinea fowl burst out of the ruined front of Tape City, leaving feathers around a crackling poster of Paul Newman in the ’86 picture Jury of One.

Through the hubbub of the birds I can hear a dog screaming in agony, and more dogs barking. Many more dogs.

“Okay, come on out and take a look. You know Times Square?”

“I lived in this city for eighteen years,” I say.

“So I don’t have to talk.”

The dogs are in front of Bond’s Disco. They are dark, scruffy things. Two of them are worrying something long and angled like an arm. Our guide keeps her pistol in her hand.

“Many dog packs?”

“Yeah.”

“You love this city, don’t you?”

“I was born a few hundred yards from here, at St. Clare’s. It’s stripped. They stripped the hospitals first. I went to Dalton and then to Stuyvesant. I was in my senior year when it hit.”

“And you stayed on?”

“Most of my class did. We formed a volunteer action group. I’ve been working ever since. I haven’t had a vacation in five years.”

“What’s your group called?”

“At first we were Volunteers to Save the City. Now we’re part of the city government. Officially we’re called the Office of Salvage Management. I’m area manager for Chambers Street to the Battery. My job is to make sure that all salvage in my area is carried out by licensed salvors, and that the withdrawals are duly recorded and entered into the city’s record books.”

A glance at her hands tells me that she doesn’t wear a wedding ring. “Are you married—if you don’t mind me getting personal.”

“I haven’t got time.” She gets back into the car. “Come on. Next stop Sixth Avenue.”

“You don’t call it Avenue of the Americas,” Jim says.

“What’s the point?”

We move slowly down Forty-second. A narrow passage has been cleared between reefs of abandoned cars. Once again she takes out her pistol as she stops the car. There are no dogs about this time, so we get out. Through the distant overgrowth of Bryant Park I can see an immense and familiar shape. My heart almost breaks. There are vines pouring out of the windows of the Main Branch of the New York Public Library. I have the horrible thought that they must be somehow rooting in the books. Rot and mildew and moisture are changing them to a fertile soil.

“Is there any salvage for the library?”

“One-of-a-kind books only.”

It is a kind of lobotomy, the loss of a place like that.

Jim asks another question. “Do you actually live in the city?”

For the first time, she smiles. “I have a house on Eleventh Street. It once belonged to Nikos Triantaffilydis, the Greek shipping magnate.” Her smile widens. “I commandeered it for special purposes. We have that authority.”

As she speaks I hear a faint but very familiar sound. “Surely that’s not the subway?”

“You better believe it.” She glances at her watch. “That’ll be the 9:00 A.M. Westsider. It runs on the old D line from 145th Street to Grand. A lot of salvors live up in Washington Heights and commute into the salvage areas.”

“I thought the subway was flooded on Warday.”

“Below Twenty-third. It drained away over the six months after Warday. There are two working lines, the Westsider and the Eastsider. Each runs a three-car train. There are three morning and three afternoon runs, and one at noon. At nine-thirty the Westsider will be back.”

Suddenly Jim curses and slaps furiously at his head. “A bird! It flew in my hair.”

“It’s probably hunting for nesting materials. They don’t see enough people to worry about hands. It thought you were a nice hairy dog.”

I smell a faint tang of diesel smoke rising from the subway grating. I want to ask Jenny Bell if we can ride on that subway, if we can go down to the Village, to my old neighborhood. My chest is tight. Until now I haven’t realized just how much it means to me.

Jenny has opened up a little, but her steel shell is just waiting to snap closed again. This matter will have to be approached very carefully. “You live on Eleventh Street. That means that the Village is—”

“It’s almost a countryside down there. Fires leveled most of the West Village, and now everything’s covered with green. I like it. I like the look of it. And I like the sound of the wind in the ruins.”

I think of 515 West Broadway, where Anne and I raised Andrew, and had some very happy years. I knew everybody in that building—there were only fourteen apartments—but I lost track of them all. We left every single thing we owned at 515.

This is an entire city of haunted houses, rows and rows and towers and towers, softly crumbling into obscurity.

“Can we go down to the Village on the subway?”

“We’d have to go over to Grand Central. The nine-thirty Westsider is an uptown train. The Eastsider’s downtown. They’re staggered like that.” She gets in the car and starts it. Soon we are once again moving along the cleared path in the center of Forty-second Street. The silence in the car is split by a loud crash and a lingering roar somewhere off to the left. “Masonry falling,” Jenny says.

“The Facade Law’s unenforceable without any owners. And we haven’t got the manpower to identify all the cracked walls. We just have to let it go.”

I wonder if there were civil servants like Jenny Bell in ancient Rome—smart, tough people managing the death of their city.

The world has always had a great city, one place where all races and occupations met—a rich, dangerous place where the best men and women make themselves fabulous and the worst come to unravel them. First the World City inhabited Ur. A thousand years later it took its bells and moved to Babylon, then briefly to Athens, then to Alexandria, then to Rome. In Rome it lingered and made legends. Then the site was Constantinople, later Paris. It remained Paris for three hundred years, until, like all before it, the City of Light became too ripe, too perfect, and wars and fortune passed the jewel to London. Sometime between the first two world wars, the treasured office of man’s great city came to New York.

I lived in its evening, when the sorrow was already painted on the walls. The World City has left America altogether. I don’t know if the party has settled yet, in Tokyo or perhaps back in London.

A squirrel sits on some vine-covered stones that have long ago fallen from 500 Fifth Avenue. It is eating some sort of nut. The trees in Bryant Park, I realize, are swarming with creatures. There are so many birds that their sound is a roar. They rise in a cloud as the car passes, and the squirrels leap from limb to limb. A pack of dogs laze in the morning sun at the corner of Fifth and Forty-second. They pant at us, their eyes full of lusty interest.

We stop at the corner of Vanderbilt and Forty-second, across the street from Grand Central.

Here there is little foliage and the frozen, rusting traffic is solid the other side of Vanderbilt. I can see why the street hasn’t been cleared further: there are at least thirty buses between here and Lexington. They stand silent, motionless, amid the Hondas and the Buicks and the yellow cabs and the vans. Details: A cab from the Valpin Cab Company, its windows rolled up, doors neatly locked. The inside is thinly filmed with gray.

Signs on a bus: an ad for the musical Willard at the Uris. Another for Virginia Slims, a third for McDonald’s.

Avan from Wadley and Smythe, florists. When I was a gofer on The Owl and the Pussycat, I used to call in producer Ray Stark’s orders. Flowers for Barbra Streisand, the film’s star. Flowers for others of his friends. Spectacular flowers, exotic flowers, perfect flowers.

An Interdec Data Transfer truck with a notice painted on the door: “Contains no valuables. Only bookkeeping records.” How funny, considering what happens when the bookkeeping records are erased.

I could continue this list for twenty pages. We pick our way across not to Grand Central but to the subway entrance in the old Bowery Savings Building.

“I’d like to see Grand Central,” Jim says.

“Structurally unsound. Our voices could be what makes the roof cave in. Sometime soon, it’s gonna go.”

We follow her into the dank, swamp-stinking blackness of the subway station. Her flashlight provides the bare minimum illumination we need.

We descend into a maw, past encrusted turnstiles and across muck-slicked floors. The sound of dripping water echoes everywhere.

“You’ve gotta understand that the water table’s been rising in Manhattan,” Jenny says. I wonder about the structural soundness of the steel girders that support these tunnels.

I am in a very strange state because of the difference between what is here and what I remember. These tunnels are weird and terrible, dissolving in the water. It’s only a matter of time before they cave in.

To me there was something eternal about Manhattan. But it isn’t even close to that now. It’s flimsy.

I realize that I’d always imagined it was waiting for us to come home, that it was the same as before, except empty. I had forgotten that even this most human of places belongs, in the end, to nature.

My mind turns with half-remembered poetry. “My name is Ozymandias… round the decay of that colossal wreck.”

Jenny’s flashlight hardly illuminates the long, echoing cavern.

Soon, though, a flickering yellow glow starts up in the tunnel, and we hear a heart breakingly familiar sound. Any New Yorker knows the noise of subway cars coming down the tracks.

As the light draws closer, the rattling of the cars is joined by the high bellow of a great engine. This subway is drawn by one of the old diesel work engines that the MTA used to haul disabled cars off dead tracks.

We are illuminated by its powerful headlamp. As the train enters the station it gives off loud blasts from its horn. “Shave and a haircut, two bits.”

Brakes squeal and the thing stops. Diesel fumes are bellowing around us. “Hiva, Jenny,” the driver shouts from his cab. “Where to?”

“Bleeeker,” she shouts back.

The doors on the cars that this train hauls are permanently fixed open. Inside, the cars are lit by gas lanterns hung from the ceiling ventilators. “Hey, Jenny,” shouts a huge man in a filthy radiation suit, “who the hell… whatcha got here, tourists?”

“They’re reporters. They want to do a story on the Big Apple.”

“The core or the damn seeds?” He laughs. “You stick with me, you s’uvs. You’ll see a hell of a salvage We’re takin’ out five tons of copper wire a day.” He extends a huge hand as the train lurches off. “I’m Morgan Moore. I de-build buildings.” He roars with laughter. He is an incredibly wrinkled man, maybe fifty, his eyes glimmering like dark animal eyes in the light of the swaying lamp.

“You look so goddamn clean, you must be from Lousy Angeles. Am I right?”

“We’re from the Dallas Herald News,” Jim says. He already has his recorder out. “We’d like to interview you.”

“Whar’s yer hats, cowpokes?” Morgan Moore cries amid general laughter. “Y’all cain’t be Texas boys without yer hats, can yuh?” There’s no derision in Morgan Moore’s voice, only humor.

And his interpretation of a Texas accent is hilarious. We laugh too.

As we rattle along I observe that there are about ten people on the train, none of them minding their own business as in the old days, all interested in the phenomenon of the reporters.

“Seriously,” Morgan Moore says, “you guys gotta put a story about what we’re doing at the World Trade Center in your paper. It’s worth front page.”

Another voice: “We pulled over three miles of wire out of the South Tower just yesterday. You’re talkin’ eighty gold dollars’ worth of copper in one day.”

“We’ll be down to the structural steel in another three months,” Morgan Moore adds.

We stop at Fourteenth Street, and four people get on. One of them is a black man in a three-piece tweed suit and a homburg. He carries a neatly furled umbrella, and he doesn’t say anything to anybody. He is totally unexpected, and there is no real way to explain him. The salvors do not make jokes about him. Jenny Bell might have smiled at him, and he might have nodded, but that is the only indication of familiarity.

He is a welcome indication that, despite everything, the old spirit of this town still flickers.

Soon the brakes squeal and we are at Bleecker Street.

“’S dog country,” Morgan Moore says. The gentleman with the umbrella stands beneath the lantern, staring blankly. The other salvors murmur agreement with Morgan Moore.

Jim asks him if he will do an interview for us. He agrees at once—as long as Jim comes down to his World Trade Center site with him. There is a moment’s hesitation. We are both supposed to stay with our guide. And we aren’t even supposed to talk to local residents, much less record interviews with them.

“Have a big time,” Jenny says. “We’ll catch up with you at the TC by—let’s see, it’s ten now—say two o’clock. You wait for us there.”

Then she and I step onto the platform. The train grinds its gears and roars off down the tunnel.

“There’s an awful lot of foliage in this area,” Jenny says as we near the stairs. “And dogs, like Moore said. You stay close to me. And I mean close. No more than three feet away.”

“The dogs are that dangerous?”

“This is their city, Mr. Strieber. They’re the kings here. Our best defense is to stay the hell away from them. But since you want to see the Village—”

We emerge into the light and fresher air of Lafayette and Bleecker. There have been more aggressive fires around here.

East toward the Bowery most of the buildings are caved in, their rubble spread into the street, covering the inevitable ruined vehicles. “You go down toward the Holland Tunnel, the cars really get thick. And in the tunnel, all the way to where it’s drowned down near the middle.”

My heart is beating harder. Many, many times I emerged from this same station on my way home. In a few minutes we’ll be able to see 515 West Broadway.

Ahead is Broadway, the ruins of the Tower Records store on the ground floor of the Silk Building. I think to myself, the destruction of this city is so vast, so intricate, that it is not possible to grasp it, let alone tell about it.

New York was immensely wealthy, and so it was detailed. It is the ruin of this detail that impresses—the thousands of cars, the sheer weight of salvage, the numberless little things that together once defined the place: ballpoint pens, mag wheels, plastic raincoats, videotapes, canned goods, masonry and glass and asphalt, an endless list of objects destroyed.

It is a fine morning, though, and the light spreading down has the familiar sinister sharpness peculiar to New York skies. We begin moving along the center of Bleecker, between Washington Square Village and Silver Towers. The trees are much taller than one would expect after five years, and the grass has extended on a bed of creepers right to the middle of the street. Bleecker seems like a country lane set amid exotic, crumbling colossi.

To the right, the Grand Union grocery where we used to shop is completely destroyed, burned to a few stacks of seared brick, and covered by vines and grasses.

Then I see 515. I am absurdly grateful. I could kiss this taciturn girl for bringing me here. The building does not look well. The slate facade has fallen off almost completely and lies shattered on the sidewalk. I can see broken windows with rotting curtains blowing out of them. Up close, the quiet of desolation is hard to bear. I took Andrew in and out of this building in a stroller. He learned to ride a bike on this sidewalk. Behind those walls my love for Anne matured and became permanent.

It is not until Jenny Bell puts an arm around my shoulder that I realize I’ve begun to cry.

“I want to go in.”

“These old buildings are dangerous.”

“Still—”

She sighs. “You’re crazy. But I suppose you know that. I’m crazy too. I work in New York, for God’s sake.”

“The doors are busted. We could go right in.”

“A place like this never got cleaned. There might be particles.”

“I want to see my apartment. If you’ll let me, I’d like to go. Alone, if you prefer.”

“You aren’t going anywhere alone. What floor is it on?”

“Six.”

“Of course. Naturally. You wouldn’t live on one or two, not you. A seven-story building and you live on six. So come on.”

As we enter the building I see a couple of dogs asleep on the sidewalk about half a block away. Two dogs, not very big.

The lobby is badly deteriorated. The walls were carpeted, and the carpet now hangs to the floor. When I push some of it aside to open the door into the stairwell, at least two hundred roaches scuttie away. “They like the glue,” Jenny says.

The place has a sweet, rancid odor, something like stagnant water. I suppose the basement must be permanently flooded. “If the water table’s risen, why couldn’t people simply dig wells? We’d be able to repopulate Manhattan.”

“Toxins. The water’s poisonous. Godawful. When dogs drink out of the basements, their lips get eaten away.”

“How do they live?”

“Rainwater, rats, and squirrels. And people.”

“You’re not serious.”

“All the damn time. We find new kills every few days. Drifters figure that with so many buildings the city must be a squatter’s paradise. Wrong. Those who don’t get dogged die of waste poisoning from coming across Jersey. You can’t walk from Newark to the Hudson and live. It just ain’t possible.”

I think of the sins of the past. Then, it was so easy. Now I realize that I, like everybody else, was directly and personally responsible. The land was not despoiled by chemical companies, nor the war caused by countries. It was us, each one. We are all accountable for our era.

A sharp tang enters my mouth, something I wish I could spit out.

The stairs are dark in a way that the subway was not. This is absolute blackness, not the presence of dark but something more profound, the absence of light. I remember that these stairs were like this during the great blackout of ’85. We set candles along the banisters then, and shared the hot night and songs, and survival stories. We were New Yorkers. We were getting through.

I am a little sick to be passing Joseph and Sally Boyce’s bikes, the two beautiful Raleighs they got in June of ’87. There is a bag beside them. Jenny’s flashlight reveals a sweatshirt wadded up in it, so rotten that it turns to dust at a touch. I know that shirt; we gave it to Joseph for his birthday in ’87. If it could have been opened out, it would have read WHIPPETS on the front and LAKE WOBEGON, MINN. on the back.

At the sixth floor I hesitate before the fire door. We peer through the glass. Jenny’s flashlight reveals that the foyer on the other side is in perfect condition. It looks as if it has been preserved in a museum. The door creaks as Jenny opens it. Even the picture we and our next door neighbors put on the wall of the foyer is still there. “Deux,” it’s called. Photographs of two old men, one bright and smiling, the other in shadow. My neighbor was the bright one. The other represents me. There are just two apartments per floor in our building, and both doors seem securely locked. I put my hand on my old doorknob and rattle it. I wonder if we can even get in.

“Just a second,” Jenny says. She gives me the flashlight and produces a small hooked bar from a sling in her belt. “We have to do this fifty times a day.” She inserts the tool into my supposedly burglar-proof lock and in an instant the door swings open.

Sunlight floods the living room. It was always a bright apartment. After a moment my eyes get used to the light. The first thing I see is the bulging, rotted ruin of our L-shaped couch, maroon with tan padding and foam jutting out. The ceiling above it slopes far down into the room.

But it’s our apartment, very definitely. It hasn’t been looted.

The rosewood dining table still has a note stuck in the crack in the center. I take the brittle brown paper. Jam at the school, says Anne’s hasty scrawl. My first impulse is to take the note. But then I find myself putting it back, as if our whole past might collapse if this last, critical rivet were pulled out.

I want to see the rest of the apartment. But when I start for the back, where the bedrooms and my office are, Jenny stops me.

“Hold it.” She nods toward the floor. “Spoor.”

“Spoor?”

“Animals have been in here.” She nods toward the fire escape. “Window.” She touches a brown bit of the dung with her toe. “Dry. Wish I knew what the hell dropped it.”

“Not a dog?”

She shakes her head. “They don’t come up this high. Big, though. Maybe a zoo animal. Some of them around. A few. All the way down here, s’funny. I wouldn’t expect it.”

Jenny has her revolver out.

“You think it’s still here?”

At first she doesn’t answer. When she moves toward the back rooms, I follow. I make a mental note that we can go down the fire escape if we have to. Jenny takes a deep breath. “Doesn’t smell like animals,” she says softly. I notice that she cocks the pistol.

In places the floor has a disturbing springy quality to it. If I jumped, I don’t doubt that I’d end up in the apartment below.

We reach Andrew’s room. There is his Apple computer on his desk, his bed forever unmade, his paintings on the walls, most of them rotted beyond recognition. His dresser has fallen apart.

There is a dried cowboy boot in the middle of the floor. As this room faces west and north, winter blows in here, and his bookshelf is a bulging, sodden ruin.

The room echoes with so many past voices, him and his friends, a thousand bedtime stories.

It is in my office, where I wrote The Hunger and Catmagic, that I see my first clear sign of the last desperate days of this city.

There is a can of Sterno on the floor, and three empty tins from the kitchen, their contents and even their paper labels long since eaten.

I wonder who was here. Could it have been our neighbors? What might have happened to them? Elizabeth, the model, tall and gentle, her face at the edge of unforgettable beauty. Roberto, full of laughter, a native of Italy, wine importer, friend of evenings. Until this moment I have not remembered them, and I feel guilty for it.

“Come here,” Jenny says. She is looking into the bathroom opposite my office, where I used to soak in the tub to ease the lower-back pain of a sedentary life.

Bones, jumbled, gnawed, skulls pocked and pitted, teeth grinning, bits of clothing adhering to gnarls of ligament.

I cannot help myself. I scream.

Jenny neither scolds nor laughs nor sympathizes. When I stop, she begins talking again. “Stay-behinds. You see ’em all over the place.”

“How did they die?”

“Every way you can imagine.” She flashes her light into the bathroom. “That vent. Probably brought in short-half-life dust, so they mighta gotten radsick. Or maybe they were scared to leave and they starved. That happened too. Or violence. Suicide. Take a coroner to tell you, and that I’m not.”

It is then that I see, standing in the door of our bedroom, the most enormous cat I have ever encountered. Its eyes meet mine and its ears go back. It crouches and hisses. “Damn,” Jenny says.

And then she pumps bullets into it until the head disappears into a red cloud of bone and blood. The creature slams across the room and then slumps to a tawny, blood-pumping heap on the floor.

“What the hell is that?” It looked like a cross between a blond Persian and a Manx, but four times as big as either.

“Damned if I know. Big cat.”

“Giant cat.”

“I’m gettin’ out of this hole, and so are you. You want to get killed, you can stay behind.” On the way out I see, lying on the floor of the living room, the china bud vase my mother gave Anne for one of her birthdays. I snatch it up as if it were a gold dollar and put it in my pocket.

Jenny won’t go near the fire escape, so we return down the stairs. The dark behind us seems so dangerous that it is all I can do not to run.

It will be a long time before I can think about that apartment again.

INTERVIEW Morgan Moore, Salvor

I entered the salvage business in 1989. I’ve been a salvor for four years now. Mostly we work the New York Reclamation District, Southern Division. But I’ve also got permits for the District of Columbia and an iron permit for freelance railroad work in the Northeast Corridor. I have twelve guys and about six pieces of equipment, including a heavy-duty wire puller that strips copper wire out of conduit, a couple of rivet poppers, a wrecking ball, and one hell of a good set of torches.

My lifedose has put me on the triage, which means I’m unbeatable, so I don’t give too much of a damn about counts. I work hard, and when I can, I have all the fun that money can buy. Life’s too short for anything else. I’ve got about eight-percent body coverage squamous, mostly face and neck. No pain. I’d like to wangle a trip to England. There’s a doctor there who might be able to get me a number, but he wants a thousand in gold. A thousand! So I take black-market radiums at a buck a pop. But I better not talk on that.

You want to know what we do? Simple. We work the salvage area for anything marketable. That’s what we do. Our P-and-L puts us high, but that’s mostly because of depreciation on the Demon, which is our main cutting tool. It gets a lot of work. Mostly we’re in for cutting out steel and copper from skyscrapers. We participated in the One Chase Manhattan Plaza demo for gold, though.

Now that was a hell of a demo. Salvors are still talking about it.

We were new, a small company. In those days we didn’t have the kind of equipment we’ve got now. I mean, I started up by just saying to myself. I want to make some of that goddamn salvage money. I was an assistant product manager for Triton Systems before the war. We marketed video games, can you believe it? That was a very big business. Multimillions. Even in new dollars we’d be grossing a hell of a lot. It was, like, I think thirty million in 1986.

Big.

So I was out on my ass after the war. Triton’s bank accounts had been erased by EMP. Then the stock market dissolved and all the Triton stock just ceased to exist. No different from everybody else. Except our inventory was destroyed. EMP burned every chip we owned, and ruined our fabrication equipment.

By ’89 I was stealing food. Trouble was, so was everybody else.

There was a point when I would have sold my sister for two minutes alone with a loaf of Wonder Bread. Here we were, living in a two-hundred-thousand-dollar house in Darien and there’s the five-year Connecticut moratorium on mortgages declared, so we got no mortgage to worry about. You know what it was like. People were starving all around us. I remember, I went into a supermarket with a shotgun. Big deal. Everybody else had a gun too. Bread is eight dollars a loaf and I have, like, a dollar. I would have given away my house for that Wonder Bread, plus sold my sister.

When that hot dust drifted down into the wheat and corn belts.

America learned what it was to goddamn not eat.

I figured we’re all going to die anyway, so I’ll just say the hell with rads and the hell with everything and go into salvage.

Now, of course, it’s a different story. We got a waiting list to enter the Salvor’s Association. We’ve been regulated by the Army.

But back when I started, people were scared of salvage work.

They still thought in terms of prewar life expectancies. People still thought they ought to feel young at forty.

Sally—that was my wife—she made my first rad suit. Sewed it herself out of an old swimming-pool cover. We used bonded lead epoxy in it that I made myself. I got the lead out of car batteries, just like everybody else. Stole ’em. I don’t mind admitting it. I hurt people to get the lead for that suit, and I’m sorry. But most of ’em didn’t last the winter anyway. I mean, we starved half to death and then the flu came, just when we were weakest. Darien probably lost half its people. Sally died in the spring of ’89. Just so weak, anything would have taken her. We had noodle soup that winter, from the Connecticut Allocation when it got started up in January. I remember, Christmas of ’88 we were living on soup made out of dandelion roots and salt and Fritos. We were just a little hungry.

I went down into New York on the second salvor call in ’89. I remember they had this big pier on the Hudson, Jersey side. All covered with plastic. About six government types. EPA, they said.

They got us to fill out forms and wear dose cards. They checked our suits by putting a geiger counter in ’em, closing ’em up, then sticking ’em out on the end of the pier. If you could hear the counter, you stayed at home.

They gave a geiger to one of every twenty men. Those counters were worth their weight back then, so half the men just took off. I mean, what’s the use of cutting steel and stuff all day that’s probably gonna be condemned hot anyway, when you can take a geiger counter worth maybe five hundred in gold on the black market and just walk away with it?

The government men stood on the pier in their orange Uncle Sam rad suits and took potshots at the boats that were heading downriver instead of across to Manhattan. They just did it because they were pissed off. They didn’t try to hurt anybody.

You think of New York as being, like, empty in those days.

Half burned out and empty and glowing like a goddamn hot cow.

It’s empty now. But then it was still full of people. Manhattan, anyway. Part of the Bronx. There were taxis running. Buses. The old stuff that hadn’t been knocked out by EMP. There were cops all over the place. People were starin’ at our rad suits. In those first couple of years, they’d condemn hot spots until they could be cleaned up, and people would just move to another building for a while.

That first night in New York I went to see You We the Top and then we sat around at a place this guy knew, called the Monkey Bar, where this female impersonator sang and played the piano. A can of corned-beef hash was eighty dollars paper on the menu, so we decide, we’ll share one can between ten of us. We’d come up a few bucks short, but they’d live with it, we figured. I remember that stuff to this day. God, it tasted good. One small mouthful, but it was the first meat I’d had in I don’t know how long. The Monkey Bar, and that guy all dolled up singin’ “Memories of You,” and eating Armour Star corned-beef hash off expensive hotel china. Holy God.

We slept in the basement of the B. Dalton bookstore on Fifth Avenue. The Plaza Hotel and the old Gotham had teamed up and made the world’s fanciest dormitory in there. You couldn’t sleep above ground; you might get a dusting if the wind came from the east across the boroughs that did get hit. We were broke, but they let us in anyway. Salvors on their way downtown had credit. They figured we’d be back through, and God knows what we’d have with us.

Salvors were taking the treasures of the world out of that city.

That was the year Salvage Team Victor, Inc., took out seventeen hundred pounds of gold, all assayed and ready to go, from the vault of the Republic National Bank. So when people saw that our paper said One Chase Manhattan Plaza on it, they just said, “When you’re on your way back, remember who gave you a free bed.”

I stayed in my rad suit the whole time. I was scared to death.

Those people were all nuts in New York. There were people on the streets with the radiation trembles. People doing heaves right in the middle of everything. But they were staying put. There were actually only about a quarter of a million who stayed. But that’s still a lot of people. They were the total New Yorkers, the ones who just couldn’t imagine themselves anywhere else.

You still had the tail end of the long fires then, so the whole place was full of smoke all the time. Smelled sort of like a mattress fire, or burning hair, when the wind came across the East River.

And you wondered, am I gonna inhale a particle or two? Maybe a little cesium is gonna get in my mask, or a little strontium 90.

Well, when we got to Forty-second Street, there was this barrier made of plywood, with skulls and crossbones stenciled on it. It went right down the middle of the street. You crossed it and there was nobody. They were living in the northern half of Manhattan and in the Bronx. The hits in Queens and Brooklyn had dusted lower Manhattan with the dirty stuff. I remember we went through the barrier. We tried to laugh it off. Nowadays the problem is more uptown, from the chemical spills to the north. But back then it was radiation. Every step we took, the geiger burped some more.

By Thirty-fourth Street it was going continuously.

We were all set to walk to Wall Street when up comes the god-damnedest thing—a city bus all covered with black tarp. Comes right up the middle of Fifth Avenue, picking its way around the abandoned cars. They’ve been pulled here and there to make a path. It’s slow going, but the bus is making it. The side streets were solid cars in those days, and so were all the avenues except Fifth and part of Sixth, and Broadway below Canal.

Anyway, it’s an ancient jalopy of a bus and the sign says “Special.” So we get in. The driver’s in one of those ancient city-issue rad suits, the olive drab ones from the civil defense stores that were put aside in the fifties. They weighed about a hundred pounds. He’s slumped over the goddamn wheel. So what happens?

We get on the bus and he says, “Hey, don’t you guys know you’re supposed to pay a fare?” The guy is at the end of the world and he wants a fare. It’s a buck seventy-five each. Nobody had thought about deflation yet. We don’t have the money, but before we can give him the bad news this jerk says, real rude, “You gotta have exact change. I’m not allowed to make change.”

We kind of displaced him by force and drove the damn bus ourselves. By the time we got to Broadway and Wall, where the cleared path stopped, we had a cop on our tail. Here comes this traffic cop, drags himself out of his car in his ridiculous heavy suit and writes us up a summons for “unauthorized commandeering” of the goddamn bus! Not stealing. It was crazy. I never did anything about the ticket and I never heard about it again. The people who used those old rad suits in New York were all dead by the end of ’89 anyway, so I guess the ticket got forgotten.

Now I’m starting to think about Warday. Three million people died in New York on that day, and the bombs damn well missed!

Crap. Lemme tell you, we’ve been pullin’ wire out of the World Trade Center for three months. Makin’ a fortune!

You know, this was a grand place years ago. The Consumer Electronics Show was held at the new Convention Center in July of ’86. We had a suite at the Waldorf. High times. Fat times.

“Never think about Warday.” That’s my motto, and talking into your machine is making me violate it. I have a tough life. I don’t wanta cry in my beer, but I’ve lost a hell of a lot. My wife. I had a boy—

Oh, hell.

Listen, this has gotta be the end of this thing. I can’t stand this.

I work. I don’t look back. I’ll tell you about the salvage of One Chase Plaza some other damn time.