by Mark Joseph
“Hi,” he said, picking up a copy of The Watchtower. “Who are these people?”
“The trains aren’t running.”
“The trains?”
“To Philadelphia. It’s too far to walk so I asked them in. Mrs. Finklestein has Baptists.”
“Don’t you want to know where I was?”
“No. Yes. Where were you?”
“Across the street.”
“Oh. That’s nice.”
“Shirley, have you been into the Prozac?”
“Mm hmm. You know, Jon, you have a store full of food you can’t sell. Have you thought of giving it away?”
Spillman could hardly believe his ears. Shirley’s idea of charity was sending five dollars to Israel to plant a tree. She’d never given a homeless beggar a second glance, let alone a quarter.
“Are you serious?”
“Are you going to let it rot?”
It was a strange night that turned spouses into strangers and strangers into best friends. If the world was upside down, Spillman thought, you had to stand on your head.
“I’ll need help,” he said.
“I’m sure the Witnesses would be delighted. And Mrs. Finklestein’s Baptists.”
While Shirley roused the millennium faithful from the entire building and explained to them the Jewish concept of mitzvah, or doing good, Spillman ran back across the street and made Copeland come along to the grocery store.
“C’mon. You don’t want to sit in your house all night, anyway.”
“Yes, I do. I’m happy to sit here with my dog and watch TV. ABC is back on the air.”
“Come on, Donnie. We’re gonna give away the store.”
“You’re fuckin’ crazy, you know that?”
The Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Baptists, some Methodists from Newark, a half dozen Upper West Side Jews and a couple of Buddhists marched up Broadway to the Safeway. Spillman found aprons for everybody. Cans and boxes from the riot still lay in the aisles. The Baptists immediately began straightening everything out.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” Spillman announced. “Open up two bags and put them in a cart. They can fill the bags and carry them away. Don’t let too many in the store at one time. And don’t let anybody go to sleep and block the aisles.”
“How much is your inventory worth?” Copeland asked.
“A couple of million, maybe. Safeway can afford it.”
The lines formed quickly, and by four in the morning they wrapped around the block.
* * *
For once it was quiet on the third floor of the old building on Nassau Street. No music, no police scanners, no blaring TV.
Ronnie was curled up asleep on one of the couches. Carolyn walked over and methodically shut down Adrian’s terminal. She sang softly, “I … bin working … on the raaaailroad … all … the livelong … daaaay.”
Bo stood up and stretched. “Anybody hungry?” he asked.
“I’m too damn tired to eat,” Judd said, heading toward the kitchen. “Besides, all we got are some Pop Tarts.”
“I could go for some pizza,” Bo said.
“Hey!” Judd shouted from the kitchen. “Look at this.”
He came out with a bucket of caviar in one hand and a bottle of Mumms in the other.
“Where’d this come from? Doc?”
“I think they went back in the bedroom,” Carolyn said.
Judd knocked on the bedroom door and it swung open. The room was empty. On the bed were five briefcases labeled “Bo,” “Ronnie,” “Adrian,” “Carolyn” and “Judd.”
Judd went in, picked up the briefcase with his name and opened it.
“Holy shit,” he swore to himself, and walked out to show the others.
“You’d better wake Ronnie up,” he said. “She’ll want to know what a million dollars in cash looks like.”
* * *
They walked lazily through the snowfall, footsteps gently echoing off the walls, and Doc told Jody his plan to sand and varnish an old speedboat, rebuild the old Caddy V8 or maybe buy a brand-new engine. He told her about a beautiful lake in Wisconsin with a stone house on a peninsula surrounded by pines. He liked to putter around and fish for bass and pike all day, then play cards and bullshit all night. Did that sound good to her?
“Are there mosquitoes?” she asked.
“Fierce mosquitoes. You bathe in bug spray.”
“Would a small-block Chevy fit into the engine bay?”
His jaw dropped. “Oh, man,” he said. “This must be a fairy tale.”
At the corner of Beaver and Williams they entered the splendid old-fashioned bar at Delmonico’s. While the world was crashing into the 21st Century, Doc felt like retreating to the 19th, to the old New York of wood paneling and leaded glass.
The bartender greeted them with a smile. “Evenin’, Doc.”
“Howdy, Nick. Two double fifty-year Macallans, straight up.”
“Got cash?”
Doc laid a hundred-dollar bill on the bar.
“Yes, sir. What happened to your cash register?”
“Locked up, wouldn’t open after midnight,” the bartender said. “I tried to pry it open with a crowbar, but I didn’t want to wreck it.”
“What’s the mood around here?” Doc asked.
“It ain’t happy new year.”
Businessmen and women clustered around tiny tables, deeply engaged in earnest conversation. By the looks on their faces, they’d all taken Y2K hits of considerable magnitude. Their Asian and European markets were gone, and no one knew for how long. Transportation was a mess. Fuel supplies were uncertain. The meager news that filtered in from outside the city was almost all bad.
“Did you know that George Washington fought the first battle of the Revolution a few miles from here, right over in Brooklyn?” Doc asked, and when Jody said yes, she’d paid attention in the eighth grade, Doc continued anyway. “Did you know he got whipped by the British something fierce and retreated to right here? He camped right where this bar is today, and then the British came over and kicked his ass again. The Redcoats held New York to the end of the war, but the New Yorkers didn’t mind. They were only interested in business, faithless sons of bitches that they were. Washington was in bad shape. His army was in rags and deserting, tired of getting beat up by the Brits, but old George never gave up. The point is, these guys are crying in their beer because they’ve taken a whipping. So will they get up tomorrow and carry on the fight, or are they gonna cave?”
“I don’t know,” Jody said.
“I don’t, either,” Doc said. “That’s why I’m going to the lake as soon as things settle down and I can get gas.”
“Did he really camp right here?”
“No,” he said, deadpan. “I made that part up.”
18
Time neither accelerated nor slowed down, but rather ticked along as it always had, complex and perhaps unknowable even by Stephen Hawking. A pink sun rose over Brooklyn. Six inches of snow blanketed New York, and Bernie’s Delicatessen was open.
“You think there’s gonna be a Superbowl?” Spillman asked.
“I dunno,” Packard said. “I don’t think anybody’ll play this weekend.”
“Wouldn’t you know it?” Copeland sneered, disgusted. “The first time the Jets get into the playoffs in twenty years, and this has to happen.”
Ed Garcia came in, tossed his hat and briefcase on the table and sat down heavily.
“Any of you guys get any sleep?” he asked, unbuttoning his tunic. “Don’t answer. I don’t wanna know.”
Bernie hollered at the captain, “You gonna eat?”
“Yeah, gimme a minute, will ya?”
“Jeez. Take it easy. Hey, any you guys see the fireworks?”
“They got some fireworks over in Jersey City,” Garcia said. “Some chemical plant is on fire.”
“Only one?”
“Far as I know.”
“Hear what happened in Frisco?” Spillman asked.
�
��Nah, what?”
“Some guys robbed the Bank of America. Sixty million bucks.”
Copeland went white. “Where’d you hear that?” he demanded. “Who knows what’s going on in California?”
“I heard it, that’s all. From a guy.”
“From a guy, from a guy. Oh, that’s great. That’s called a rumor.”
“Oh, fuck you.” Spillman turned from Copeland. “Hey, Bernie, gimme sausage and scrambled and a side of white toast.”
“Sausage and scrambled. Toast dry?”
“Yeah. And turn on the TV.”
“Always with the TV. Get a life.”
“How’s your Jesus?” Packard asked Garcia.
“Out of his mind, if he ever had one. You hear from your old lady in Maine?”
“No. No phones. I’m going up there today if I can.”
“You got gas?”
“Full tank.”
Bernie turned on the TV, flipped through a number of whited out channels until he landed on ABC.
“Hey, Donnie, look. That’s your building.”
In the dim light of dawn ABC had a truck in front of Copeland Investments on Nassau Street. The camera panned over the dark red brick facade, while a reporter’s voice narrated a brief introduction.
“The story is emerging this morning about a small group of computer experts in this building who kept the lights on in Manhattan. Consolidated Edison has revealed that a team of programmers here at Copeland 2000, led by Donald Copeland and working in partnership with ConEd and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani…”
Copeland beamed. Bernie scrambled eggs. The voice on TV called him the Man Who Saved New York. The reporter interviewed Bo and Carolyn, both wearing Midnight Club T-shirts. Break for commercial. Chase Manhattan. Year 2000. We’re ready.
Author Note
The author would like to thank the following people for their invaluable contributions to this work: Mike Phillips of San Francisco for first mentioning Y2K as a subject worth writing about; Nick Ellison, my agent, for suggesting the millennium as a topic of wide interest; Daniel Starer of Research for Writers, New York City, for his extraordinary ability to provide a nuclear reactor on demand; Professor Charles Shapiro of the Physics Department of San Francisco State University for teaching me to understand Dan’s reactor; radio guru Peter Gerba for his patient explanations of telecommunications; architect William Rosenblum of New York for his descriptions of many New York buildings; business adventurer Peter Winslow for his detailed analysis of life in Manhattan; day trader Barry Shapiro and entrepreneur Mark Lediard for making sense of Y2K, the stock markets and financial institutions. Lastly, and most gratefully, I would like to thank my editor, Jim Fitzgerald, for finding a thousand flaws, providing the big fix and making this book Y2K compliant.
Also by Mark Joseph
Typhoon
To Kill the Potemkin
This is a work of fiction. Although some institutions and persons in this story resemble actual companies and people, the entities in this work were created in their entirety by the author. The real Safeway has no store on Guam Island. The real Consolidated Edison’s 59th Street Station in New York generates steam, not electric power for the Metropolitan Transit Authority. The real Chase Manhattan Bank has no relationship with a firm called Copeland Solutions. The real General Motors has no subsidiary known as GM Electronics. Errors of fact cannot exist where there is only artifice.
DEADLINE Y2K. Copyright © 1999 by Mark Joseph. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
“Wake Up Niggers” Copyright © 1970, Douglas Music Corp.
All rights reserved. Used by permission.
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First Edition: February 1999
eISBN 9781250085993
First eBook edition: May 2015