A Hundred Hours of Night

by Anna Woltz

  “We didn’t arrange anything!” I cry. “I was sitting here in front of a closed door and I was wondering if I should give up and … ” I’m a bit out of breath. “But of course your mom’s home now and maybe she doesn’t want me to … ”

  He shakes his head. “She went to stay with Bridget uptown. She wanted us all to go, but Abby had a fit. She insisted on staying with you and Jim, and she got so hysterical that Mom eventually gave in.”

  “So the hurricane shelter is still in business?”

  He laughs. “Yeah. We’re still open.”

  As I follow him up the stairs, almost stumbling when I hear something mousy dashing about, which might in fact be a mouse, I feel as if I’m someone who matters. As if people who hear about my life would be happy to swap with me. This afternoon, I was walking around the most beautiful museum in New York with Nora Quinn. Then we got a pastrami sandwich at a diner. And now I’m back home with my friends.

  “Emilia!” Abby waves enthusiastically at me from the couch. “We’ve been waiting forever—I was so scared you’d never come back … ”

  Jim grins. “I gave up on you long ago, but Seth kept dashing downstairs in the dark to see if you were there. Without him you’d have been standing outside all night, that’s for sure.”

  I glance at Seth and then down at the floor. Without Seth I’d have been standing outside all week.

  Jim and Abby are sitting close together under a blanket. Seventeen tea lights are lit around them, and the radio is on. It looks nice and Christmassy, but it’s desperately cold in the apartment, and it smells like baked-on chili con carne.

  “Was your dad still being dumb?” asks Abby. “Was he sending text messages all the time you were trying to talk to him?”

  “I only saw my mom. But that was okay.” I remember us sitting together in the gleaming diner. As if we were just a couple of hungry people.

  “If you wrap yourself in plastic from head to toe,” says Jim, “you can come under the blanket with us.”

  “Plastic?”

  “Duh,” says Abby. “Bacteria!” I drop down onto the couch beside her. I don’t need to keep my millions of bacteria inside the plastic with me. Let the little critters hop onto the others instead.

  “And what about me?” asks Seth. “I was sitting there!”

  I slide closer to Abby. “Go on, then. Sit down.” I point at the corner. “There’s enough space for you.”

  He hesitates.

  “Who has hygiene issues now? You can come sit next to me, can’t you?”

  Abby sighs. “It’s not bacteria he’s scared of. It’s girls!”

  “Very wise,” says Jim.

  Without looking at me, Seth sits down beside me. He only just fits. We pull the blanket to our chins and Seth turns up the radio.

  First we listen to the news. As the four of us sit there snugly on the couch, we hear about looting in neighborhoods without power, fights for gasoline, and people having to stand in line for hours to get food.

  We listen in silence to the story about a mother who tried to run from the hurricane with her sons on Monday evening. When her car got stuck in the mud, she decided to continue on foot, carrying her younger son and holding the other by the hand. But an ice-cold tidal wave snatched both children from her arms, and the current swept the boys away. The mother spent all night looking for her children, but she never found them.

  The police finally located their bodies this morning.

  Abby holds my hand tight under the blanket. Her fingers are cold.

  On the other side, I can feel Seth’s shoulder against mine. His thigh against mine. Hey, just imagine, I think. If I’d sat down next to Jim, I’d be touching a movie star. All my friends would have been seriously jealous.

  But then I realize something strange. Something that makes me a little short of breath.

  I wouldn’t rather be sitting beside Jim. Even if I’d been able to choose, I’d have sat here. Next to Seth.

  We don’t move. We just listen.

  The guy on the radio asks what kind of music has gotten us through the past few days. He wants to hear which songs we’d like him to play on this cold, dark evening, and people start calling in. They tell their stories, and I feel the same thing I felt by that white camping table with the power strips. A sense of connection with people I’ve never met. We don’t know one another, but we’ve been through the same experience.

  As soon as the callers say which part of the city they’re in, we know: He’s in the dark too. She’s cold as well. They’ve been busy wandering the city and surviving for the past few days, just like us.

  A girl of fifteen calls from SoHo—that’s our neighborhood. She says she’s wrapped up in blankets with her parents and her bulldog on the big bed, and that she wants the DJ to play Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds.” We listen to the song cheerfully telling us that every little thing gonna be all right. I want to believe it.

  “I don’t get it,” whispers Abby. “How can those people be calling from the darkness?”

  “On a landline,” says Seth. “They’re still working.”

  “That’s strange, isn’t it? When there’s a hurricane, we need candles, a radio, and a landline. People from the Middle Ages were better at surviving than us!”

  The next caller is from the West Village. We nod sympathetically. Yes, it’s dark there too. A man with a quiet voice says that his wife is eight months pregnant and over the past few weeks she’s been playing Tchaikovsky’s “Autumn Song” to the baby, so the baby would recognize something when it came out of her tummy.

  On Monday evening, as Sandy raged, they were playing “Autumn Song” to their unborn child when the power failed. The baby hasn’t heard any music at all for three days now, so the man hopes the radio station will play the piece for them.

  Of course the radio station will.

  “It’s so weird,” I whisper, “that this is really happening now, right at this moment. A kilometer away, that man and his wife are listening in the dark. With candles and with blankets around their shoulders.”

  “I wish it was always like this,” Abby says quietly. “That we all did the same thing at the same time.”

  “Try going shopping on a Saturday,” says Jim.

  Bright piano music fills the dark room. I feel the warmth of Seth’s arm and let the notes wash over me. I’ve never listened so closely to classical music before. Sometimes my mom plays Mozart while she’s painting, but I like words, and I miss them when they’re not there.

  This time, though, I make up the words myself. I listen to “Autumn Song” and hear the story of that man with the quiet voice and his wife with her big belly. I hear candles burning in the darkness, I hear people crying in the church, I hear the calm after the storm, I hear my mom looking at Vermeer, I hear my dad lying in a darkened room waiting for the pain to go. I hear the bacteria gently swaying to the music, and I imagine them holding tiny little cell phones in the air with their tiny little bacteria arms.

  If only I had a tiny phone, I’d join in.

  Or maybe not. Because then I’d have to move my arm and I wouldn’t feel Seth’s warmth anymore.

  On Friday morning I wake up shivering. It’s as cold inside the apartment as it is outside. The bathroom stinks, the water in the bathtub is almost gone, there are crumbs everywhere, and the stove is covered with splashes. It’s a miracle we’re still alive. We don’t even have colds.

  Seth searches through all the kitchen cabinets and discovers a baking dish that still seems fairly clean. We pour two cans of soup into it and put the dish on the stove. I hold my hands to the heat as Seth stirs the soup. Since yesterday evening, I haven’t dared to look at him.

  “I have a kind of … announcement to make,” Jim says.

  He stinks the worst of all of us, partly because he’s been wearing the same clothes for four days. All his clothes were dirty when Sandy hit, and the Laundromat has obviously been closed ever since.

  “It’s pretty lame an
d sad, I know. But I’ve made up my mind.” He takes a deep breath. “I’m going back to Detroit.”

  “For the weekend?” asks Abby.

  “Forever.”

  We just stare at him.

  “I mean … ” He puts a spoonful of peanut butter into his mouth. “There’s no way I’m staying there for the rest of my life. But it’s going to be months before I can work again, with this hand, and I have ten dollars in my account.” He shrugs. “So I’m going back to my mom and dad. And back to school. Because that’s something I can do with eight fingers. It’s extremely boring, I know. And embarrassing.”

  “Seriously?” asks Seth. “You’re going back to school?”

  “Ridiculous, huh?” Jim sighs. “But adults think a diploma means everything. And now I finally get how it works. You have to follow their rules for a while to start with. Live with their killer robots and atom bombs and the wheel. And then, when you’ve been good and gotten an education, when they think you’ve been deactivated, you strike. And then you can change the world.”

  “But we don’t want the world to change!” Abby cries desperately. “Everything should stay just as it is.” She takes hold of Jim’s arm as if she’s planning never to let him go.

  I go sit at the counter and don’t say anything.

  Jim looks at me. “Aren’t you proud of me? Don’t you think I’ve become admirably wise and mature?”

  “If you want to be all boring and good, then go ahead,” I snap.

  He raises his eyebrows. “You asked me yesterday if I had a plan.”

  “But that was so I could hear that you didn’t have one! We were the people without plans—remember? But then you suddenly decided to be all sensible!” I can feel something trembling in my stomach. “In two hours, I’ll be seeing my dad again. So what do you want? For me to be all grown-up too? For me to forgive him and for all of us to go back to the Netherlands as a happy little family?”

  “That’s different,” he says calmly.

  The soup comes to a boil. As Seth fills four mugs, everyone is quiet. The first spoonful burns my tongue.

  “My dad,” says Jim, “is a loser who drinks too much and my mom is a sweetheart who cheats on him with God. But they’ve never done anything to hurt me. Not like your dad with his text messages, I mean. You have every right to be mad. I don’t.” He sighs. “And I’m two years older than you. It’s about time I tied my shoelaces.”

  “But they’re cool!” says Abby. She kicks my chair. “And people who leave are dumb.”

  “Megadumb,” I say.

  She looks at me angrily. “What are you going to say to your dad? When you see the weirdo, what are you going to say? Do you know already?”

  I shake my head.

  “You don’t have a plan?” asks Seth.

  “Of course not! What do you think?” I put down my spoon and hold out my empty hands. “You guys can come up with one. You know what he did. Make a plan for me. What should I say to him?”

  I would never ask my friends in the Netherlands anything like that. God, those girls seem so far away right now. Since Bastiaan’s article was in the paper, they’ve known I’m in New York. They’ve sent me messages full of exclamation points and little yellow faces, but I haven’t even answered.

  Now that I’m on the other side of the ocean, I can see how dumb it really is. The way you end up in a class with thirty other kids and you have to put up with them. Those thirty kids are your life. If you’re lucky, some of them will be your best friends. But if you’re unlucky, you’ll be in a classroom full of vague acquaintances for years. Acquaintances you really don’t want to ask for advice about how to live your life.

  Jim takes another spoonful of peanut butter. Seth wrinkles his forehead, and Abby licks her mug empty as far as her tongue will reach.

  “I know,” she says. “You have to pay attention to what kind of shoes he’s wearing. So that you remember forever. And even if you have a good memory, you need to write it down. To be on the safe side.”

  “Okay,” I say. “I’ll pay attention.” I mean it.

  “Tell him he’s an asshole,” says Jim. “Tell him he had no right to do something like that to you and your mom. Tell him to keep his paws off his students and yell at him like you did with that journalist. Show him you’re not a scared little girl anymore.”

  I clear my throat and nod. And then I look at Seth.

  “Just ask him,” he says. “Why he did it. Ask him if it was a zero or a one. Or something in between.”

  For the first time since Sandy, the sun’s shining. It’s icy cold and bright, and New York looks stunning. Even the streets without power are boldly gleaming away.

  I don’t know if it’s the sun, but suddenly there are more people out and about. In front of a dark soup shop there’s a wooden table with big pans and happy people. “Free chili!” they call. “Take a croissant or a doughnut too—all free!”

  On the next block, a café has put out all the stock that was in the freezer. They’re giving away fruit and chocolate cakes and sandwiches. I don’t take anything, of course, because I understand perfectly well what’s going on. These restaurants held on to their food for as long as they possibly could. Even if the lights and the refrigeration come back on now, they can’t sell those cakes to customers. And so they’re letting us have it for free.

  The others grin and gobble down chocolate cake as I study the cast-iron facades. I feast my eyes on the pillars and the rusty fire escapes, and suddenly I think: What if I became an architect? You have to be good at math and physics, but you’re secretly an artist too. You don’t just provide someone with a roof over their head, you also create something for their soul.

  Well, at least for the souls that need that kind of thing. Some souls aren’t interested in buildings and would rather stuff three stale cakes into their mouths, one after another.

  When we start walking again, Jim is still looking anxiously at his phone to see if there’s a signal yet. Now that he’s decided to go back to Detroit, he wants to tell his parents as soon as possible. So that he can’t change his mind.

  I look at the boy with the bandaged hand and the model’s face that he doesn’t want to use for modeling. I think his plan is brave, but also dangerous. What if you take off your leather jacket and tie your laces and suddenly you’re just like everyone else? What if you discover that you can make lots of money by working with killer robots and iffy mortgages? And so you just go on doing that, without changing the world?

  Isn’t that basically what happened to all adults? They just surrendered and joined in.

  • • •

  “You guys go ahead,” says Jim when our cell phones start beeping. “I’m going to call my mom and dad.” He sighs. “Hey, how about we abolish parents too, when we’re older?”

  “No,” says Abby fiercely. “Parents will definitely not be abolished.”

  Jim grins. “Maybe Obama can at least order that they’re only allowed to be on for three hours a day. Even that would make a big difference.” He looks at me. “Don’t just fly back home to the Netherlands, okay? I want to know how it all turns out. You have to tell me before you go home. Promise?”

  I nod, clear my throat, and then just nod again.

  As I walk on with Seth and Abby, I look back only once. Jim raises his bandaged hand in a wave. “Good luck, Emilia. If you can survive a hurricane, you can face anything!”

  • • •

  We have another twelve streets to go before we reach the happy park I saw from the bus on my first day. I told my mom yesterday that’s where I want to meet my dad.

  It was ridiculous. It felt like I was meeting up with some kind of criminal. I instinctively wanted to meet outside. Somewhere with a lot of people, somewhere I can escape if I have to.

  “Do you want to walk the last bit on your own?” asks Seth.

  I shake my head. I don’t want any more time to think.

  We cross Thirty-Eighth Street. Walk the entire length of the
block without saying anything. Then across Thirty-Ninth Street. Shouting people, crowded souvenir stores, steamy kebab carts.

  And then we reach Fortieth Street. The park’s on the other side of the street. Yellow trees, glass stalls for the Christmas market.

  Seth hesitates, and suddenly I don’t care anymore. He’s probably thinking about the websites he’s going to build as soon as the power outage is over, and I’m sure he’d lose interest in me if he knew me for any longer than a week, but it still hasn’t been a week yet. And I need him. I take hold of his hand.

  “You guys have to come all the way to the park with me.” I don’t look at him. “Please?”

  The three of us cross the street together, in a line. Seth’s hand isn’t sticky. It’s warm and dry, and I don’t know if I’ve ever been so aware of feeling a hand. Until now I’ve only ever felt the bacteria.

  The ice rink isn’t working, almost certainly because of Sandy. But the glass houses selling Christmas stuff are open. We walk past herbal soaps and dancing Santas and socks with dogs on them. The paths are busy, but I hold on to Seth’s and Abby’s hands. One member of our boy band happens to be missing right now, but people can still see we belong together. They step aside for us.

  In the middle of the park there are green tables and folding chairs beside an empty fountain. And that’s where they’re sitting.

  My mom looks completely at ease, as if she’s on some desert island. Her red hair is blowing in the wind and she’s wearing a beautiful black coat with a collar that’s a work of art in its own right.

  My dad’s sitting next to her. I hardly recognize him because he looks exactly the same as all those times we cycled along the river and gazed at the stars from our roof. In my mind I’d made him look much more like a criminal, some sleazy porn producer with claws and drool.

  There are lots of things you can say about my dad, but not that he looks like a porn producer.

  He’s wearing one of his seven pairs of corduroy pants. His hair is thinning on top, and he looks like a guy who goes bird-watching on the weekend. He’s nervous. I can see that even from a distance.