There is one other passenger on the Poughkeepsie bus, a small woman of delicate beauty. Her eyes are large and dark, her lips full, her brown hair framing her soft face, which is as pale as a shadow.
She tells us she is on her way back to Boston. Her family lives in Scranton, but she is in school at Harvard. She is studying twentieth-century English literature. I am delighted. It was a discipline I thought might have been abandoned in the rush to prepare people for practical careers. “I’ve applied to read at Oxford or Cambridge, but I doubt I’ll make it. There are a thousand American applications a semester, just for my field. They take six in modern literature.”
“What’s it like at Harvard?” Jim asks.
“Difficult, in the sense of physical survival. I’m a senior. I arrived there in the fall of ’88, right? I was just starting my freshman year when the war happened. I stayed there because it was obviously mad to try to get back to Scranton. I couldn’t even make a phone call home for months. I wrote, but the letters never got through. Harvard was in total chaos. People were leaving—students, professors, administrators. Trying to get home, wherever their homes were. Northeastern University, which is in the Fenway in Boston, officially closed. There were all kinds of problems there. The students rioted when they couldn’t get food. I heard that there were shootings in the Fenway. In any case, one can now get a former student apartment there for next to nothing.
“Harvard was a bit better off than Northeastern. We thought of the war as an awful sort of irony, because there had actually been a joint U.S.-Soviet physics conclave in session on campus when the war was fought, the first such conclave in years. The Russians tried to leave the next day. They set out for Logan Airport on foot, finally, even though it was obviously hopeless. Nobody ever saw them again.
“The famine caused riots in Boston, which grew so serious that the campus had to be sealed off. I found myself in the peculiar position of studying for my finals while doing guard duty in the Yard. I was lucky to fall only a semester behind. Despite everything, Harvard was still dutifully failing people at the usual alarming rate.
“Those times were very dramatic and dangerous. The worst problem was food. We ate odd things. The various kitchens kept coming up with jointly prepared meals. Pickles, corned beef, Wheaties, and Tang was the sort of thing we might get for dinner. Everybody was always babbling about how various unlikely things would make complete proteins when they were put together. To make a long story short, we all but starved.”
“What do you study?”
“Well, at this point my seminar in Joyce is probably my most interesting course. I went through a period of furiously deconstructing everyone from Barbara Pym to James Gould Cozzens. I think I agree with Cozzens about some things. You know what he said about Joyce? He said, ‘There’s no point fooling around with the English language. You can’t win.’ It’s a hilarious thing to say, but I think there’s something in it Please don’t think me a conservative, though. Actually, I suppose it’s possible that’s exactly what I am. I’m not really certain where I’m going, except that I feel most drawn to prose that is written with absolute clarity. Pym. Anthony Powell. Americans? Maybe Wharton, certainly Hemingway, although in his case the directness tends to bury what should have been subtle about the work.”
“Do you think it’s appropriate for somebody to be studying a subject as impractical as English literature right now?”
“Impractical? It’s not impractical at all. In fact, it’s very necessary if we intend to keep the civilization going. I can’t make widgets, it’s true enough. But not every single soul should. I’m a klutz anyway.”
We ride on, three people in a bus. If there weren’t medical supplies aboard, we wouldn’t be traveling at all. No bus company would release a bus with so few passengers unless there’s another, better reason to move it than their needs. We are quiet for some time. I have just closed my eyes when the girl begins to talk again.
This time her voice is low and rushed and full of tension.
“I have a lot of trouble with images that won’t leave my mind. I have to make room for them. For example, I have an image of a kid who was executed in Cambridge. Can you believe it, he had broken into a house and killed everybody and eaten their food. Then he did it in another house. He was caught and put in the town jail. Two weeks later he escaped and did it again. This was the only way he could think of to cope. When he was caught a second time, the town made a decision to hold a public execution. We were deeply shocked, all of us at Harvard. This was in the summer of ’89. We thought to mount some kind of a protest, but there was no time.
One morning there was an execution notice on various bulletin boards around town, and that afternoon they hanged him by pushing him out a window with a rope around his neck. He was left there for days. I am not sure that the threat of execution deterred anybody else from killing for food. Most people wouldn’t do it anyway, not under any circumstances.
“I have an image of the police finding the house next door to mine with everybody in it dead during the first week of the flu.
“I have an image of my dog, Nancy, the night I let her go. People killed their pets during the famine, but I let Nancy go. She never came back. I hope she learned to live by hunting. She was a smart dog.
“When the kitchens began to fail, Harvard organized foraging teams. We ate rats, ducks from the park, geese when they appeared, all kinds of things. We ate the city-issue cheese and the carrots and potatoes the Army brought in. I’ve heard that lots of people starved during the famine, and I’m not a bit surprised.
“I’ve just had the satisfaction of going home and finding, once again, that my family is well. I go every few months, even though we can now talk on the phone. I really am compulsive about it.”
“Does your interest in family life mean you want to get married?” I asked.
“Am I wrong, or is there a whiff of fatuousness about that question? I’m twenty-two years old and ought, I suppose, to be eager to support a house-husband on my possible stipend of two quid a week, assuming Oxbridge accepts me. Is that a sufficiently fatuous answer?”
“What do you remember most about being in Cambridge on Warday?”
“That’s easy. I remember the cloud. It blew out to sea before it hit us, thank God. All one day and night it could be seen from Boston Harbor, hanging over the Atlantic. God, it was big. It looked like a hurricane or something. People were leaving. The cops had bullhorns, telling you to go in the basement. It was awful. There was so much craziness. Kids went nuts in the Fenway, kids from Northeastern running crazy, naked, kicking people, burning cars, looting apartments.
“My romantic streak makes me wish it was about 1985 and I was a high school girl again, in love in the way one could be before the war, but which seems so impossible now.
“I wonder what I will do with myself. In a sense, my degree is certainly an anachronism. If I don’t make it into Oxbridge, I’ll have to do my graduate work here, perhaps at Yale. At any rate, I’ve applied there and to the University of Chicago—and to Stanford, where I have no chance because you can’t get a California Student Permit if you have a noncritical specialty. Oxbridge can lead to employment in England. If I have to stay here, I think I’ll quit and join my father’s company. They make windows. Dull, but it pays well.”
Again she falls silent. The bus roars and bounces. This is not a spectacular road. In places we can hear the hiss of grass scraping the sides of the bus.
“Anything else?” Jim asks.
“Years ago I had a mad love affair. We were going to marry and live together always, all the usual things. When I got back to Scranton I found he had died of the flu. I think we would have been happy together. For a little while, life would have been perfect. I missed that chance.”
She rests her head back against the seat.
“I’m so tired. These days I really need my sleep. When I go to bed I imagine a little warm cottage where I can cuddle up by the fire, sip wine, and be con
tent.”
She says no more. Like most people who live at a very low nutrition level, sleep comes suddenly to her, this porcelain beauty. After a moment Jim touches her cheek, but she does not awaken.
The bus pulls into Poughkeepsie in thin dawn light. When the driver wakes her up, she bustles quickly down the aisle and disappears without a word.
PART FOUR
New York
When pennants trail and street-festoons hang from the windows,
When Broadway is entirely given up to foot-passengers and foot-standers, when the mass is densest,
When the facades of the houses are alive with people, when eyes gaze riveted tens of thousands at a time…
—Walt Whitman, “A Broadway Pageant”
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 t
urned 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.
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