by Isaac Marion
A blast of wind hits the window and I feel it in the glass like an angry shove.
“We need to get out of here,” I announce to the room.
“Oh, you think so?” Nora says, prepping another staple.
“Fucking shit!” M shouts.
“I mean now. City’s emptying out. I think it’s—”
“Shitting fuck!”
“It’s a hurricane,” Julie says, and this gets their attention. “Probably a big one. And considering half of Manhattan is below sea level . . .”
No one speaks. M suffers the next staple in silence.
“So they are taking her to safety,” Abram murmurs into his palm. There’s an unnervingly boyish, singsong quality to his voice. “That’s good. She can play with the Dead kids. Your Dead mom can adopt her. That’s good.”
“Abram,” Julie says, trying to catch his eyes. “We’re going to find her.”
He smiles at the floor.
JULIE CHECKS the stairwell door. Locked.
I try the elevator. Keycard required.
We rummage through the other offices and conference rooms, some of which haven’t yet been converted into jail cells, but we find nothing useful in their musty drawers. Just pencils and pens and absurd Axiom paperwork. Accounting forms listing ammo crates as income. Human trafficking receipts.
“There’s no way out,” Tomsen says, watching us through the bars of her cell window. Her cell is dark. I don’t know why she put herself back in there now that all the guards are gone. “Sorry, but I’ve tried everything. I’ve been in here two months and I’ve tried everything. There’s no way out.”
Julie stands in the hallway tapping her foot and twisting her hair.
“I’ve broken into a lot of buildings,” Tomsen continues. “Almost all of them. Sears Tower. Chase Tower. Key Tower. Wilshire Grand Tower. Bank of America Building. Chrysler Building. Woolworth Building. GE Building. Met Life Building—”
“Tomsen?” Julie says, cutting her off as politely as possible. “Are you going somewhere with this?”
Tomsen pauses, thinking. “GE Building. Trump Hotel. Columbia Center. Transamerica Pyramid. Sinopec Tower, before they exed it. Comcast Technology and Innovation Center—”
“Tomsen!” Nora shouts from the other room. “Get to the point!”
Tomsen cocks her head, perhaps retracing her steps to find the point. “I know how to get in and out of buildings. But this one’s different.” She shoves her hands in her pockets and starts pacing her cell. “Security is double, triple. Redundant. Ridiculous. They must spend hours a day just entering codes and turning locks.” She digs her fingers into her kinked brown curls and pulls her face tight, suddenly distraught. “I hate this building! Nothing makes sense! I can pick key locks but not code locks. I’m not a hacker! I’m a journalist! I can’t get you out of here.”
A blast of wind hits the building and doesn’t let up. The building creaks like a tree fighting a bulldozer. I’ve never heard of a hurricane felling a skyscraper; surely they’re built to withstand strong winds. But then again, the drowned ruins surrounding this island attest to the old world’s lack of foresight. And this is the new world. There are new winds.
Above and below us, I hear windows breaking.
“I’m sorry,” Tomsen says, wiping furiously at her face. I realize with some alarm that she’s crying. “I can’t pick the code locks. I can’t get you out of here. I’m sorry.”
Julie glances at Nora through the cell door as if seeking backup, but Nora is still busy with M, tearing strips off the dead guard’s clothes and tying them around M’s wounds.
Julie knocks on Tomsen’s cell door. “Can I come in?”
Tomsen doesn’t answer, so Julie pushes the door open and steps through, shooting a look over her shoulder that tells me to follow. I am her backup backup.
Before addressing the woman frantically pacing her cell, I have to take a moment to absorb the cell itself. It’s like stepping inside a particularly manic issue of the Almanac. The floor, the walls, and somehow even the ceiling are covered in words and sketches, some scratched into the drywall, others finger-painted with food or perhaps less savory substances. The content itself—what little is legible—appears to be a detailed account of life in this cell. Feeding schedules. Descriptions and portraits of guards. Speculations on the unfathomable purpose of her detainment. Everything is written in the same bubbling style as the Almanac itself, all her world-exploring energy compressed into this tiny room.
It occurs to me what cruelty this is. It occurs to me that to a person whose life is a search, to a person who has never stopped moving, two months in this place must feel like a century.
The cell is dark because the lights are broken out. The writings on the wall are punctuated by fist holes.
“Tomsen, listen,” Julie says. “We’re not expecting you to get us out of here. We’re going to get out together, and we’ll take any help you can offer.”
Tomsen keeps pacing. Julie watches her for a moment.
“How long have you been writing the Almanac?”
“Since nine from BABL,” Tomsen says without slowing.
“What made you start?”
“Was already on the road looking for the tower. Figured might as well share whatever news I found, connect the world at least a little, light a few shadows. Best I could do until the tower falls.”
“So you were out there alone, trying to find the jammer . . . for eleven years?”
“Not alone, I had Barbara! She has so much personality, I wish you could meet her. She got me so close. I was in the tower, I’m sure of it, I had the bomb, I was about to do it and then those fucking—those men, they . . .”
Julie is waiting. Tomsen finally notices the silence and stops pacing.
“I know how hard it is,” Julie says. “Feeling like it’s up to you to save the world. Like you’re the only one trying.”
Tomsen stares at her with damp, expressionless eyes.
“I felt that way for a long time, wandering around the country watching my parents slowly give up. Moving into an enclave full of people who were happy to die in a cage.” She cocks her head. “You went there, actually. The stadium in Post? I think you described it as ‘closed, hostile.’ Pretty accurate.”
Tomsen continues to stare.
“Anyway, I just want you to know that you’re not working alone anymore. You’ve got a crew now, and we can help each other.”
Tomsen blinks the remaining moisture out of her eyes. “A crew?”
“Like Nora said, we’re huge fans. It’ll be an honor to work for you.”
“Abram worked for Axiom,” I add. “He might have info you don’t.”
“Right,” Julie says. “So let’s just try it. Open all the doors you can. See how far we get.”
Tomsen nods. She nods so hard I worry about her neck. “Okay. Okay, we’ll do it.”
I’m looking over her shoulder, watching that grinning billboard wrench and sway on the neighboring tower. And then something else catches my eye. Something bright red and spinning.
“Uh,” I say. “There’s—” No time for words. I revert to body language. I tackle the two women to the floor as a stop sign spins through the window like a saw blade and sinks into the drywall. Wind screams through the broken glass.
“Can we do it now?” Julie shouts to Tomsen, brushing glass out of her hair.
Tomsen pulls a pouch of improvised tools out of her pocket and runs to the stairwell door.
M is on his feet; Nora tries to support him but he brushes her off. “I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“You do good work. I’m fine.”
We gather around Tomsen as she goes to work on the lock with a paper clip and what looks like a straightened binder ring. Abram lingers in the cell doorway. He doesn’t move to join us until the lock clicks and the door swings open. We run down the dark stairwell as windows shatter behind us, bits of debris punching through like a hail of bullets.
• • •
In violation of every building code imaginable, there is a locked door between every floor. If there were a fire, the top-floor employees would be slow roasted to perfection before they got halfway to the bottom.
The stairwell doors are solid slabs, but the doors to the offices themselves have windows, and I peer through them while Tomsen picks the locks. Vacant. Unlit. Most look like strange hybrids of corporate work floors and military barracks: cubicles with cots, copier rooms with rifle racks. A few look like jails, but we appear to be the only prisoners left behind. Was this a passive-aggressive execution or were we just forgotten in the shuffle? It’s hard to tell with this company. Despite its apparent craving for order and security, the new Axiom feels like a broken machine, a flopping, flailing contraption loaded with explosives and set loose on the world.
“Okay, what now?” Tomsen says. “I’ve been this far before but I can’t unlock this one so what now?”
Four floors from the bottom, we have hit a keypad door. Its thick steel solidity removes any thought of breaking through, although various dents and scrapes suggest past attempts.
“Abram,” Julie says. “Did you ever work in this building? Do you know any access codes?”
Abram looks at the lock and says nothing.
“Abram?”
“I didn’t even know the code for Pittsburgh,” he says quietly. “Everything’s different.”
A surge of wind roars through broken windows and the building sways. It’s a subtle movement but the effect is terrifying, like gravity has rebelled and we’re about to fall off the earth.
“Fuck it,” Nora says with wide eyes and starts punching numbers at random.
“I do know,” Abram adds like an afterthought, “that these locks have explosives in them.”
Nora’s finger freezes.
“Three wrong entries and you lose a hand.”
Nora steps back. Julie is shaking her head incredulously. “What is wrong with these people?”
I open the interior door and step into the dark, wind-blasted expanse of office space. Papers flutter around like leaves. Chairs roll back and forth. Inspirational animal posters flap against the wall—wolves eating deer and worms eating wolves, all with the same caption: WIN.
There is so much I don’t understand about this thing I helped build. My grandfather was greedy and cruel and nearly every other pejorative, but he wasn’t quite insane. I’m unable to imagine us designing this building. This city. These experiments with death and these grinning automatons. Where did all this come from? What created this fevered exaggeration of the world we envisioned? We may have drawn the outline, but something else filled it in.
I hear someone calling my name—the one that I’ve earned and lived in and cared for, not the one pinned to me at birth and stained beyond recognition—but it’s far away. Each step I take into the office is a step down a staircase. I descend to my basement. I begin searching the musty boxes.
Where is it? I ask the dirt-smeared derelict chained to the stairs.
Where’s what? he snickers.
What I need to get out of here. Show me.
Why should I?
Because you’re selfish. You look out for you. And as much as I hate to say it, I’m you.
He considers this. Fair enough.
He kicks over a box.
“Excuse me,” I say, touching Tomsen’s shoulder. She is staring at the keypad and rubbing her fingers through her hair and she jumps at my touch. She looks at me, sees something in my eyes, steps aside.
“What were you doing in there?” Julie says to me, straining to push the office door shut. The stairwell has filled with windblown debris.
I look at the keypad. I look over my grandfather’s shoulder as he shows me our private family code, which I’m to pass on to my children and grandchildren and—
“R, don’t!”
Atvist enters his code.
The door clicks open.
“Mother . . . fucker,” Nora says. “I knew it.” She glances at Julie and M. “I mean, we all knew it, right? His clothes? All those freak-outs?”
Julie is staring at me, not exactly shocked, but shaken. She’s waiting for me to say something, and I sense that the right words right now could fix all this, bridge our chasm of secrets and finally bring her back to me. And the words she’s expecting are easy: I remember my old life. I was an Axiom employee, just like M and Abram, a deluded cog in an evil machine, and now I’m not.
If that were the truth, I would blurt it out and be done with it. But the truth is a much longer confession, and it allows no simple handwashing. It invites no sympathy or supportive back-patting, no assurances that I’m among friends and safe from judgment. It’s too big for that. It’s not a few regrettable mistakes; it’s a life, a person, woven inextricably into the person I am today.
My secret is myself. How can I confess that?
I step through the door and descend the staircase. Freedom Tower sways beneath my feet like a woozy dream.
WE
WE ARE RELUCTANT to watch the school. The things that occur there penetrate veils and creep uncomfortably close to us, scrawling fragments of sentences into disparate books on Higher shelves and Lower shelves and strange hidden nooks never meant to be found. Such intrusions have not been possible for many centuries, since before the world became solid, and now that it has softened again—or perhaps cracked open—we are no longer sure what can happen.
So we watch with caution, but we can’t look away. The boy, hovering over the chasm, is our closest link to the living, and more and more with each revolution of this burning, melting sphere, we feel a desire to be known.
The boy retreats into us for shelter as the sensory assault continues. He roams our dim halls, climbs up and down our living ladder, perusing other lives and other ages while the noise beats against the walls. He wishes he could bring his friends here. Joan and Alex are outside in the storm, grimacing as these unfathomable lessons attempt to rewrite their souls.
Then the lessons stop. The silence is so abrupt that some of the students shudder like an organ has been ripped out of them. A man in a beige jacket bursts into the room and converses with the two lecturers, but the boy does not listen to their words. He looks through the open door out into the hallway, where a group of children wait in a line. At the front of the line is a girl. She is about the age the boy was when his life was halted. The boy sees her black hair, her tawny skin, her single dark eye, then he blinks and sees her cells, her genes, intricate collages of fathers and mothers throughout history, endlessly combined and reconfigured. Then he blinks again and sees beyond cells. Beyond molecules. Roaring yellow light.
“Hi,” he says.
He is standing in the hall in front of the girl, his IV dangling from his arm.
“Hi,” the girl says. “I’m Sprout.”
We recognize her. We have felt her presence in our halls. Our familiarity leaks into the boy and he smiles.
“I’m . . . ,” he says, then his smile fades into astonishment. I’m who? I’m what? It’s the first time he has asked these questions.
“Your eyes are pretty,” the girl says.
“Thanks,” the boy says. “So is yours.”
“Wanna see my other one?” She reaches for the blue eye patch with the daisy painted on it, then the wind slams a piece of trash into the door at the end of the hall and she jumps. “There’s a storm,” she says, forgetting whatever she was going to show him.
The boy stares at the window. A square of light. And then he’s outside, walking behind the girl, and Joan and Alex are behind him and many others behind them, all tied together at the wrists. Men in beige jackets are marching them somewhere, and the wind is trying to tear his hair out, but the boy is gazing at the city around him and watching it change. There is another city behind it, visible in patches as if through worn fabric. The ruined high-rises are polished and full of people and lush gardens sprout from their tops. Canoes
and ferries traverse the canals that fill the streets. And the black cloud that looms over the city is splitting apart, opening like a curtain to reveal the sun.
The girl looks over her shoulder and smiles. “Do you see it?”
The boy studies these shifting, translucent layers, trying to choose his answer.
I
OPENING THE DOOR is like popping a champagne bottle. Wind and rain explode into the lobby, knocking me back a step. We are caught in the middle of an act of God, but whose side is he on this time? Is this the parting of the Red Sea or the ruination of Job?
A red-and-white triangle spins out of the sky and sticks into the trunk of a courtyard tree.
YIELD
I ignore this message like I ignored the other and I push out into the storm.
The hurricane has revitalized the city. Panic has returned its plodding populace to pre-apocalypse levels of exuberance as every last Manhattanite scrambles to move out. The organized evacuation efforts we witnessed earlier have devolved into the age-old game of every man for himself, with Axiom troops making little effort to direct the mob or curb the eruptions of violence.
The crowd seems to be flowing toward the Jersey Bridge, but I have no doubt we’ll be going against the current.
“Where did they take my daughter?” Abram shouts at Tomsen, and Julie nearly overlaps him with, “Where’s my mom?”
I might as well join in. “My kids!”
Tomsen glances from face to face, overwhelmed, then points south. “That way.”
We take a narrow side street to avoid the crowds, but the concrete canyon squeezes the wind into a face-peeling blast. M and I move to the front to break the force for our smaller companions; I imagine Julie blowing away, spinning off into the sky like a leaf. And as I watch the sky, imagining this and other horrors, I see the top of 432 Park Avenue in the distance. I see a helicopter hovering above it: a huge, dual-rotor beast built to haul mountains across oceans. What is it hauling now as it spins and sways above the tower, tilting almost horizontally against the wind?