The Stone War

by Madeleine E. Robins

  From the Hudson Bridge he could not see much; the barren gray of leafless Inwood Hill park blocked most of his view. Above the park a long flat bar of smoke hung across the brilliant blue of the morning sky, a gray slash interrupting the scudding clouds. Sunlight reflected crazily off the island beyond the trees, and the dazzle bounced off the smoke, creating an odd sandwich of dark smoke, light, and gray trees. He could see no details, only the layer of smoke from the fires of the night, and the underbelly of light.

  His stomach set up a protesting growl. Tietjen tried to remember when he had last eaten. Breakfast in Whittendale, two days before. He was sure as hell hungry now. He looked one more time out toward New Jersey and the peaceful landscape there. There’d be something to eat in the city. The sooner he started, the sooner he would be fed.

  The phrase caught him up short for a moment; it was an echo of one of Irene’s maxims: “sooner begun, sooner done.” She said it often to the boys.

  He shook his head clear and began walking.

  He had to step carefully around spots where the pavement was torn through; he could see the lower tier of the bridge below and, in places, the dull green flow of Spuyten Duyvil lower still. He had never owned a car, rarely driven in the city, but he had gone over the Henry Hudson Bridge enough times to know that its signs had not been in good repair for years. But the casual neglect he remembered was different from this: some signs were twisted, actually shredded, as if by some enormous hand that had crushed and torn them between thumb and forefinger. One, ripped in half and hanging in two pieces, welcomed him to New York City and demanded four dollars, cash or EZ-Pass. Tietjen caught himself, hand in pocket, reaching for his coins.

  He reached the far shore and Manhattan without incident. The cold sharp air was eerily silent: no street sound, no cars, birds, not even the usually unnoticed bass hum of the city’s functioning. Tietjen found it easy to believe himself the only living soul in Manhattan, an idea both terrifying and exhilarating. Inside, the voice that had driven him in panic from Massachusetts sighed: Home. More mundanely, his stomach growled again.

  The Henry Hudson Parkway was badly torn up; in places where it would have been impassable by car it was nearly so on foot. Huge chunks of pavement thrust upward, guardrails scattered across the lane, burned out cars and—he turned his head but could not avoid the sight, nor the later memory—bodies scattered in the clear morning sunlight. One young man was curled fetally on the hood of a red sportscar, his face frozen in giddy rictus and his eyes wide open; there was not a mark on him. Looking east and uphill from the highway through the tangle of gray branches, Tietjen could not make out the tower of the Cloisters, but ribbons of color ran down the gray stonework that fronted the highway. Paint? he wondered. He had a vague notion that he might come back to find out another time; right now he couldn’t stop. He trudged on.

  The parkway followed along the Hudson River, curving back and forth on itself; the leafless trees hid, then revealed, the broad untroubled breadth of the river on one side, and the gray stonework of the MetroRail tunnels to the other. He became a little hypnotized by the curves, the sensation of being hidden away from the danger of the city here on the road; he didn’t look up ahead. When the road curved to the left again and he did look up, it took him a long moment to realize that the big blocks of stone that littered the parkway had fallen from the overpass that led to the George Washington Bridge. One had hit a car passing underneath; Tietjen kept his distance from the car, his head craned backward, gawking. He was so close it was hard to make sense of what he saw. Suspension cables, tangled together or swinging free and deadly in the breeze, made a low, rumbling song. The upper deck of the bridge, and its bases, looked to be intact, but the stanchions that rose above were tilted, nudged left or right. The whole thing looked frighteningly unstable. Tietjen sprinted a hundred yards or so, just to get out from under the overpass. Then he continued quickly south, turning again and again to look backward, up at the bridge. Earthquake, he thought. Nothing else could have done such a thing. What he didn’t understand was why the parkway showed no signs of it.

  A while farther south, a complex of public housing buildings was burning in a slow, leisurely way, flames blackening the old brick, twisting the aluminum fixtures, while the dry wood of the trees planted along the pathways burned fast and hot with sooty smoke. No bodies visible there; it looked like a ghost town on fire.

  Riverside Church, where he had once taken Irene for a concert, rose tall and elegant to overlook the highway. Only, when Tietjen looked back at the delicate tracery of the spire he saw something that made his skin crawl: the church had been neatly sliced in half, one side left standing and the other side crumbled, a spun-sugar decoration on which someone had dropped a brick. The rubble spilled out in a puddle in front of the modern annex to the church itself.

  Then the highway disappeared. The road itself suddenly twisted sharply to the left, crossed over the northbound lane in a maneuver never imagined by its designers, and dropped down into the narrow park that separated the highway from Riverside Drive. Looking south there were only trees and a muddy riverbank for blocks, until the river curved around out of sight. Tietjen stayed on the road as it arched up and curved east, until it met the grass and earth of the shoulder and became part of it: the asphalt of the highway seemed to grow out of the patchy grass and gray dirt, guardrails and lane dividers and a lone abandoned car rising out of mud as if by magic. It was so weird Tietjen could hardly take it in: a sort of numbness overtook him. He felt distantly curious: what the hell could have done that?

  He headed east for a while, trudging uphill toward Central Park. He had expected to see bodies, but there were very few here; only a smell—what Tietjen imagined must be the smell of death—followed him as he went. On Broadway, Amsterdam, Columbus avenues as he walked along 104th Street he saw comprehensible, almost comfortable disaster. Building grilles fallen from the huge old apartment buildings lay like crumpled tinsel, glittering in the sunlight. Burned-out storefronts, cars, trucks, and buses piled into each other, the streets churned and broken by earthquake. The Art Deco marquee of a movie house lay on the ground, blocking entrance to the theater. Wares of a small greengrocery were mashed and rotting in front of the otherwise undamaged store. Everywhere there was a smell of rot and decay, diluted in the cold clear air, but strong enough. Tietjen’s nose wrinkled with the effort to filter out the scent of death and transmute the smell into something bearable.

  The feeling of walking through someone else’s dream increased; buildings he passed looked as though they had been hit by bombs, flattened by hurricanes. Tietjen thought of old photographs he had seen of Hiroshima and Beirut, London after the blitz. Sometimes there were bodies; he didn’t look too closely. Other times there were just the buildings and their dust and rubble. From time to time he thought he heard laughter from the buildings; he hoped it was just the wind.

  Central Park was a gray maze of trees not just bare of leaves but dead, skeletons reaching for the sky. Despite the bravado with Irene, Tietjen had not walked in the Park in years; he paused before he entered the Park, and once inside he walked quickly, trying to scan around him, uneasy in the silence, expecting the worst there. The hair on his neck stood up, his heart beat in heavy strokes, and he was certain something terrifying was waiting for him in the Park. There was no one, not gangs, no homeless camps, nothing. The emptiness was more frightening here than it had been in the littered, shattered streets. Tietjen was grateful when a gaunt squirrel, the first living creature he had seen in New York, eyed him from one of the bleached limbs of a maple tree. Hopefully, he made clicking noises, wishing he had something, crumbs, an apple core, to offer it. The thought made his own stomach growl again. He and the squirrel watched each other for a long moment; then the squirrel turned, chittering angrily, and disappeared down a bole in the trunk.

  “Hey, wait—” he began. I’ve been reduced to begging for the company of a Central Park squirrel, he thought. But he didn’t want t
he squirrel to go: something about the empty Park made him subtly uneasy in a way that was worse than the horror of walking among the ruins of the buildings. But except for the ashy barrenness of the trees there was nothing visibly wrong in the Park that he could see—nothing like the wreckage of Riverside Church or the eldritch twisting of the West Side Highway. He was thankful when he reached Fifth Avenue.

  He continued east on 102nd Street. There were more bodies here: some looked as if they had dropped in midstride, others as if they had battled with each other for their lives. They all had the gray, bloated look of death, and the smell was appalling; Tietjen stayed as far away from the bodies as he could. Someone should be picking them up, taking them away, he thought. It was weird that they were still lying there.

  More weirdness: half a block in from Fifth Avenue, a new block of condominiums with tattered red, white, and blue bunting in the windows, across the doorway and stringcourse, and on the steel security barrier a pristine sign that read MODEL UNIT OPEN FOR VIEWING. GRAND OPENING. Behind the sign the building was split in two, crumbling in on itself: grand opening. Tietjen found himself chuckling. The sound was shocking. He stared at the building for a long moment before he turned again toward Third Avenue and the building in which Irene and the boys lived.

  The building was less damaged than many others he had passed. The steel grille that had made an ornamentally protective shell around the plaza and bottom stories of the three towers was crumpled, melted in places by the blast of an explosion that had ripped out the northwest corner of Irene’s building. The outer door, inches thick and made of dull-finished steel to resemble the door of a vault, lay on its side propped against the wall of the building; the inner doors, more decoratively fashioned of steel and glass, were shattered. From across the street Tietjen could see the security desk with its banks of blank video screens; slumped over the top of the desk was one of the guards—he could not remember the man’s name—with a hole several days old in the top of his head.

  Trembling, Tietjen looked up past the two-story-high gape in the building where explosion had ripped through the concrete and brick and steel, up and up to where a fire was still burning, the flames randomly visible in one window, another, throughout the top ten stories of the building. The dark brick of the building was blackened, and smoke hovered over the building like a black halo, like a setting for the tongues of orange flame that reached up through the windows. The fire was frightening: it raged slow, fluttering in the midmorning air with eerie deliberateness, picking and choosing what it would destroy. The air around the upper stories rippled in real time with the slow-motion heat.

  The fourteenth floor, where Irene’s apartment was, was dead center in the fire. The corner of the building where the fireproof stairway had been had been ripped open, and the stairs hung into open space eight stories up. If Irene and his sons had been in the apartment when the fire began, they would have been trapped in the fire.

  Tietjen did not know at first that he was crying. Tears coursed down his face through the grime and soot, and fell on the fabric of his topcoat. When he heard a wet choking noise Tietjen started and looked around him, stunned to realize that he had made the sound himself. He staggered back a few paces and leaned over the hood of a car, his empty stomach clenched on grief.

  He cried for a long time, and afterward he stood, looking mutely up at the dark orange flames that licked casually from the windows of the fourteenth floor, dull against the blue sky. He tried to tell himself stories of how they might have survived, but all he could imagine was death. It was a long time past noon when Tietjen looked around him, thinking dimly that he could not stay where he was forever. He felt lost, dispossessed. He had returned to the city to do something, and now could not remember what it had been or why it had seemed so important. His stomach gurgled with the hollowness that follows long, harsh weeping.

  If I stay here any longer I’ll never get away. There was a siren call to the burning building, a silent lure that could draw him in and keep him; he took a few steps toward the gaping doorway before he stopped himself. The urge to surrender was very strong: what else had he come home for if not to find out what had happened to his family? Now he knew, and he needed something: a place to go and something to do when he got there. He’d come back with a purpose: somewhere the city was still home. He could not imagine anything else.

  He decided at last to head for his own apartment on West Seventy-sixth. It meant crossing Central Park again; that very nearly turned him against the whole idea, but after a moment he looked away from the burning building, from the guard—his name was Larry, Tietjen remembered—slumped over the security desk, and turned back toward Park Avenue.

  After so much crying and fear he now felt … light, empty. He catalogued disasters as he saw them, but without much feeling for what he saw: fire; explosion; quake; flooding. Madness, he thought, when he saw a storefront shattered by gun blasts. Then he realized that the stuff littering the doorway was human bodies, and the shock of it cut through his lightheadedness. He stood stock-still for a moment, watching for movement, but there was none. In the middle of the street a tangle of electric cable was threaded through a manhole and lay bared for thirty feet of the crosswalk. It had electrified an MTA bus; the big blue and white bus was still humming with electricity. Once Tietjen thought he heard laughter again, but he saw no one when he looked down Ninety-third Street toward the East River, toward the sound.

  At Park he started south again. A few minutes later, through the ruined grille of the Eighty-eighth Street gate, he saw a whole row of town houses pushed askew and leaning, perfectly ordered, at a forty-five-degree angle, windows and doors in neat slanting parallels. This morning the impossible things had been to him curious but real; now he began to doubt his eyes.

  So much of the destruction he saw was things that couldn’t have been done by man—like the skewed buildings. He saw some signs of looting, but most of what he saw seemed to be purely acts of God. Then, as he came down Park Avenue, he looked east, down a gated side street. The two-story mesh fence was intact, and from it someone had hung severed human hands, feet, legs, and arms, some still wearing shreds of clothing. They were hung with rope and wire and even ribbon. At the top of the fence a whole body had been hung, a man whose feet had been forced through the holes in the mesh; his ankles were broken. He was grimacing joyfully.

  Tietjen turned and ran south, stumbling blindly, until he was several blocks distant from the fence. Then he stopped, chest heaving, and threw up.

  From then, he walked on with a kind of tunnel vision, taking in details of specific horrors, but not letting them surprise him. So he didn’t see what he was walking into until he was almost upon it; ten city blocks had collapsed into the ground, leaving a sea of stone and concrete nearly level with the street. The subway, he thought dimly: the Lexington Avenue tunnel must have collapsed and brought all of this down with it. The apricot glow of afternoon light made the rubble shimmer slightly, moving in the windless air. Without more than a moment’s thought Tietjen turned west again, toward the Park, to walk around the crater.

  He rested on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The building looked untouched, comfortably ordinary, banners still fluttering between the paired columns; only the settlement of street people who lived on the steps and plaza was gone without a trace. Maybe, he thought, they’d gone inside. Maybe the place to find people would be in public buildings like this: the Red Cross would set up in large buildings, housing the homeless and tending to victims. Surely survivors would come to places like this, to the museums and armories and courthouses.

  He was hungry for people. He was hungry for talk. He wanted to tell his story and hear others’, to talk about what he had seen and find out where the madness lay: in his mind or across the streets of the city.

  Tietjen rose stiffly from the step and climbed the stairs to the museum doors. What, after all, did he have to lose?

  The main doors were locked, the glass unbro
ken. Behind them Tietjen could see the dim vault of the museum lobby. Neat signs stood at the doors: MUSEUM CLOSED. HOURS:. He checked each of the side doors and the last moved ponderously at his touch. For the first time since he had left the bridge that morning, something going right. Cautiously, Tietjen entered the museum.

  The air was dusty. He heard echoes, but when he listened there was no sound save his own footfall. He put it down to the resonance of empty space, and cautiously started across the lobby, through the arched metal detectors and past the information desk with its bright fans of brochures in French, Spanish, Korean, Tagalog. The security doors to the left, leading to the Greek and Roman art and the Rockefeller wing, were ajar. The stairs ahead were empty expect for the statuary on the landings. The immense floral arrangements that sat in granite urns were wilting, decaying sweetly.

  Not too loudly he called out. “Hello? Anyone here?” The echo in response unnerved him, and for a long moment he waited, wondering which way to proceed. Then another sound answered the echo of his call. He went left, toward the Rockefeller wing. He thought the noise might be a voice answering his.

  He had to stop inside the door to let his eyes adjust to the darkness; without artificial light the hallway was filled with steely shadows and black shapes. Tietjen made his way cautiously along the left side of the hall, one hand skimming lightly along the surface of the wall. The hall let onto another hall, and another, finally ending in a smaller stairwell that glared with afternoon light. He stood blinking for a moment, until a sound of footfall behind him made his stomach lurch. Tietjen swallowed and turned.

  “You’re real! It’s hard to know when a noise is a noise, if you know what I mean.” The man was tall and bone thin except for a sloping paunch; he wore a suit that struck Tietjen immediately as professorial, curiously dapper under the circumstances. His manner, too, seemed cocktail-party sociable, but his voice was steady and the hand that he offered to Tietjen did not tremble. Tietjen held out his own hand, bemused, feeling like the old joke about English gentlemen dressing for dinner on a desert island.