August 16, 2003
Lights out
Outside we smoked cigarettes and watched people tapping on their cell-phones, trying to get a connection. A few families of tourists were coming down the street with their chubby kids heading towards Times Square; others looking more frantic, were coming back up the other way.
"Is it just this block?"
“Dunno.”
Down the street Times Square wasn’t blinking.
“This doesn’t look good. If Times Square is off it’s going to take them a while to put it back together.”
You make plans now, for this sort of thing; plans, and then contingency plans, like: “If something happens, we meet at 48th street. Unless Time Square is smoking, or filled with men in biohazard suites, or being trampled by giant lizards. If that happens, then we try and meet at the corner of Park Avenue and 59th. Unless the Taliban are down their shooting people from their range rovers or the C.H.U.D. have emerged from beneath the manhole covers. In that case, you walk across the bridge to Queens and go back to the apartment.
The problem with the plan is that it doesn’t take into account the vagueness of time. What if she hadn’t left yet? So I went to the Fox News building to try and find her.
It was a sea of people there--some coming out of the building, some standing reading the tickertape that must have been running on a generator. Bret Hume was out front with a camera crew. He looked pale and sickly, like some kind of underwater creature, but damned if he wasn’t reporting the hell out of the obvious. A huge crowd gathered around where he stood in order to watch him, adding their mass to the crowd of people filing out of the building and piling onto the streets. It was too much. The crowds were relentless, and I couldn’t find her.
So I walked with everyone to the bridge. I passed a man in African clothes next to a table-full of knock-off purses. He was dozing off, relaxed with the knowledge that today, at least, the police wouldn’t move him along. A few restaurants were serving people beers on their outdoor patios. Tourists were standing in front of ATM machines swiping their cards in disbelief. Cars honked as waves of workers filled the streets and blocked traffic. At busy intersections the crowds ignored the pleas of the police to keep the lanes open for vehicles and blocked traffic.
At the fifty-ninth street bridge the crowds were funneling up onto the ramps. I bought an apple there from a street vendor, and was pleased to see that the price of apples was still 50 cents, even though I would have paid more. On the bridge we all walked slowly and in time with one another--hot and exhausted, back to Queens. People hopped on the bumpers of delivery vans, they cursed at the police officers who were trying to keep one lane open for cars, they made references to stealing things that night when the sun when down. A white helicopter hovered over the middle of the bridge, while other helicopters dangled over the city like curious dragonflies.
On the other side, in Queens, some maintenance workers opened up the Siamese pipes and offered water to people as they came stumbling and sweating off the bridge. On 31st street a pair of enterprising men were selling bottles of water for a dollar from the back of their van. I walked under the empty elevated train–line back to my stop.
My roommate was already at home, but there was no sign of Angie, so we sat outside and drank water and tried unsuccessfully to get through on our phones.
She showed up about twenty minutes later.
“You remembered the plan!”
“I was waiting in front of your building.”
"Um... I was in front of yours too."
“We need another plan.”
In the dimming light we went down the block to a bodega that was serving customers one at a time through the window. The back of the store was lit by candles, and the owner yelled orders to his runners. “Two six-pack! Twelve ounce Gatorade! One can Pringles, pizza variety!” The man in line in front of us was upset because his water wasn’t running. Another man walked down the street mumbling “motherfucker.” There was a general confusion as to whether we should be angry, panicked or neighborly.
A Chinese restaurant next door was doing brisk business by candlelight on gas range stoves, and a greengrocer stayed open by hanging candles from the ceiling. The men who cook chicken kebabs filled the dim night with smoke.
“You bought beer?”
“Yes”
“We have fifteen dollars between us, no access to our checking accounts, and you spent ten dollars on beer?”
“Yes, well, fifteen dollar’s wouldn’t have gotten us very far anyway once the gasoline runs out.”
“Don’t talk to me.”
It was so dark. You forget about the dark. Children were running around like it was a first snowstorm. “Look, mommy, I can’t see my hands!” Where Manhattan usually glows over the river there was nothing but black. We sat in the backyard and drank the beer and enjoyed the stars until someone down the street decided to unload their gun in the night sky.
“Let’s go inside”
“Yes, let’s”
Tonight our power is back on, but most of the city is shut down, and the trains still aren’t running. Across from my room there’s a train stuck up on the tracks, empty, but with its lights on, frozen in time at four o’clock yesterday afternoon. I wonder when it wakes up if it will remember any of this at all.
