A New Day in America (4 page)

“Jake,” he says, and they shake. “Sorry, sweetheart,” he tells Naomi and pats her head. “Just being careful.”

A small generator hums and keeps a flickering light alive. Jake’s daughter, a young pregnant woman named Madeline cooks a skillet of beans. She is maybe twenty-six, her face gaunt and blue, and it seems that the baby in her belly is suckling her last drop of life. Beneath her gasmask, her face is that of a younger Jake with blonde hair. He remembers them from one of the pictures on his father’s floor. There was an older woman in the picture who Nos assumed was Jake’s wife.
She doesn’t seem to be home
.

“Bridie caught the sickness,” says Jake. “It was just after…” His thoughts trail off, and the room goes quiet with the sizzle of beans.

Madeline and Jake look up to the roof at once, their jaws the same shape, skin the same pale white.

“After…”

Jake shakes his head. “Didn’t see them after that. Didn’t want to push our luck. She and Ben didn’t come back out ever. Was over a year back. Maybe he got sick, too. Maybe he just couldn’t live after she passed.”

Naomi reaches and touches Madeline on the shoulder. Madeline shows an uncomfortable smile.

Nos nods to Madeline’s pregnant belly.

“How far along?”

Jake is quiet.

“Six months,” says Madeline.

“Have you seen a doctor?” asks Nos.

“A doctor did help us. Dr. Samuel Ray.”

“Know how to find him?”

“Don’t know much about how anyone can be found. He was barely getting by—we gave him what we could. Headed to the city. He got sick himself. Know a few people went that way, got sick, got desperate, and caravanned together to the city on rumor there was medicine. Never heard from any of them again. I wouldn’t ever want to go to the city, but the island of Manhattan is your best chance.”

“Know anything about Tommy?” asks Nos.

“Last I heard, your brother was in Indiana at an Army base.”

“Yeah. Was thinking of trying to make it out there to Indiana. Got to be better there than here.”

“Worth a shot.”

“No word from Tommy?” asks Nos.

“No, no word.”

“I see. You know about as much as we do.”

“We know a whole lot of nothing, other than what you see in these walls right here,” Jake says absently.

Madeline shifts her belly to get more comfortable.
Six months
, thinks Nos.
Seems they’ve had no outside contact with anyone but each other, and yet she’s six months pregnant. Could it be? Dark times
.

Nos looks at Jake. Jake looks away.

Nay and her pa are standing on the breezy roof. She watches as Pa lays one rolled up blanket on top of the other. She sees bones and hair sticking out of the blankets. There is a pile of broken up wood under the blankets. Pa was breaking up a stool and the piano for a little while. Now all the parts are neatly underneath the blankets
.

Pa takes one shard of wood and flicks a lighter to the end and keeps it there until the wood catches fire. He holds the flame in his hand and he lights the cigar in his mouth. He puts the fire to the wood and it all goes up in flame pretty quickly. It burns bright and huge in the night sky and the black smoke goes up toward nowhere. Pop puts his arm around her. He watches it burn for a long time. He doesn’t say anything
.

The old gray man comes back up to the roof
.

“Going to lock up. If you don’t want to stay, you should move on, too, the smoke will attract scavengers.”

“Thanks, Jake,” Pa says, but he doesn’t look at the man, he just watches the fire and smokes
.

The older man gets a few steps toward his roof door and stops
.

“The generator—it was his. It’s yours if you want it. I took it, after Ben passed.”

Pa nods. “Forget it, Jake. Keep the generator. Take good care of your…”

The old man nods really fast, and his beard brushes against his shirt
.

“Your daughter,” says Pa. “And your grandchild.”

Nay is confused. The fire grows bigger, and it’s not so cold on the roof anymore
.

The old man is crying. He shuffles in a circle, crying and crying. He falls to his knees. Pa watches the fire
.

“You don’t know,” he says. “What you’re capable of. In the wrong circumstances, you don’t know,” he says, still crying. He looks at Naomi. His eyes are crazy, and he scares her
.

“Forget it, Jake,” says Pa, smoking. “Just forget it.”

Fuel problems. Always fuel problems. Nos cuts the engine in neutral every chance he gets. Nos eases on the gas and rolls downhill toward downtown Brooklyn.

The Atlantic Center is smashed as the sun passes through empty window frames to alight the bare insides. Father and daughter speed further downtown, and Borough Hall is desecrated. Red spray paint covers the grandiose court buildings like eighties subway cars. The once white columns and roofs are now bronzed and ancient. Blood is splattered on the City Hall steps. Beside the blood is the outline of a body in red spray paint like mock police chalk, the blood spraying from the top of the silhouette’s head.

A statue of RFK is painted at the lips like a smiling clown. A heavy red stripe runs across his eyes like a blindfold. Nos slows the bike and examines the sullied bust. Below is a stone carved with a quote:
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself. But each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of those will be written the history of this generation. —RFK

Red spray paint is scrawled across the quote: CLOWNSTAR. Nos feels a chill.

Naomi senses her father’s unease. The blood and bodies do not scare him—it’s the chaos in the air. He thinks of his military days—there was always chaos. His job was to impose order in chaos. Find a target among the invisible Hydra-headed terrorists. Take out one head then grab intel—hard drives or cell phones, handwriting on scraps of paper—then track the next head. Take it out. Bad guys find themselves sleeping one moment and cuffed in choppers the next.
Behind a trigger one moment and catching a bullet the next
.

A gunshot fires from one of the municipal windows above. The laughter rises as other voices join from other courthouse buildings like hyenas calling to a kill.

They must have been spotted. Nos revs and drives on toward the Brooklyn Bridge.

Nay clings harder around Nos’ waist, hands trembling. What scares him scares her. He must not be afraid.

Nos rides the turn of the empty ramp. A yellow flashing light is on the bridge up ahead. As they drive closer they see two white vans blocking the bridge path and nearly a dozen black figures waiting. Nos stops the bike and gazes on at the gang. Nay peers around, and Nos moves his arm so she can see.

The gang notices and their distant blank faces turn toward them.

Nos glances north to the Manhattan Bridge. He sees some vehicles that aren’t moving but can’t tell which is the clearer path.
Crossroad
.

“God, Nay, which way should we go?”

“Can we go another way?” she asks.

“We can. There’s always another way.”

“Then let’s. I don’t want to go this way.”

“And the other way may be just like this way. It may be worse.”

Naomi nods. “Can we make it?”

Nos squints back toward the white vans. No car could pass, but he thinks their bike could squeeze through the shoulder.

“Yes. I think we can.”

“You think.”

“I think so, yes.”

“Pa,” she says, the tears falling to the yellow edge of her goggles.

Nos revs the motor, and the crew ahead begins to cheer.

Nothing to do now but do it. The anxiety before is always worse than the pain after
.

The clowns laugh, and he drives toward the laughter. Nay clings with everything to his waist as the motor blares. The smiling faces come closer and closer. The faces are white with silly, big, red shit-eating lips. At the last instant, Nos weaves to the side and burns past the van. The clowns are gone behind them.

Nos looks back, and the clown crew watches and record them. Their faces are painted to scare, to show others like them they are a unit. Faces painted but no masks.

No gas masks—and they’re still breathing.
No gas masks—could it be? The sickness passed, the air clean?
Nos smiles and glances to Naomi.
Could be she’s OK
.

No gas masks
.

Nos and Nay pass fly-ridden bodies along the shoulder. The faces are seared and horrid, some with mouths or eyes missing. Father and daughter look away and see the Manhattan skyline: abridged. Nos thinks the skyline looks like a king’s crown—skyscrapers line the outer rim, but nothing stands within. The tallest of buildings are reduced to rough nubs standing in piles of rubble. A raincloud of debris hovers. The island extends into the north beyond sight, as New York City rots on its deathbed.

They ride on with reluctance. The bridge is bumpy from the wrinkled road. The light darkens as they enter the concrete swamp. There’s no sign of life, though it’s sure to be lurking.

They ride the FDR around the bottom of Manhattan. The East River now eats at the edge of the highway, and Nos can see the dampness where the tide has reached the city proper. The Battery Park tunnel is collapsed—no telling whether the blast or the water was responsible. He turns and drives the bike through the streets. The financial district is quiet. Weeds have sprouted from cracks in the sidewalk. He hears the scuttle of rodents and the flutter of wings and the
plop
of water. As they get closer to the river above the subway, the foliage thickens. The street is cratered even worse in Manhattan than in Brooklyn, and the water runs almost two feet deep.

They reach the area affected by the blast from the nuke. People called the bomb
The Big Apple
. Nos and Nay pass where the sidewalk curls upward like a pitch tent from the vacuum of pressure. A drainpipe juts up from underground. The iron girders of old buildings are stripped bare and twisted and covered in bird shit. As they cross Astor Place, he sees the motion of that hellish wave as it tore through the city. Every building is destroyed; towers crushed into dust. The rubble has sat still for long enough for a coat of brownish-green growth. Vines crawl in and out of window frames and wrap around exposed beams. Nos is surprised at how quickly nature works. Only a year and greenery has already rooted the mulch of the Empire city.
So soft is stronger than hard
.

He cannot get used to the open sky. This is New York City—referred to as simply ‘The City’ by anyone like him who grew up in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island, or the Bronx. Towers are supposed to be everywhere. You should only see a narrow zigzag of the sky when you look up. When he would visit as a kid he would try to find the stars at night, and he never could. The skyscrapers wouldn’t let him.

He feels the tallest buildings tower over him, like an amputee might still feel their lost limb. He thinks the skyscrapers are there, and then he stops and looks, and they’re gone.

The only buildings still standing are at the very edge of the blast. He sees some way uptown, maybe as far as Harlem. If the remains of the skyline is a king’s crown, he thinks, they’re standing on the head of the king. He looks around and chuckles.
If Manhattan is a crown, then the king is a corpse
.

Long live the king
.

***

Nos remembers the weeks following the blast where day would break with no light, and the black rain drenched the city as far as Ft. Green like tears through mascara. He watched through his scope from his roof as dehydrated people drank the radiation poison that would kill them within days. Then he and Nay began wearing masks. He began drinking again, all the booze Yvette had allowed in the house that past year gone before the first week was over. That was around when he and Nay had the talk.

“Mommy’s not coming home.”

“Where is she?”

Nos choked like a peach pit had lodged in his throat. Naomi, on the other hand, was just fine. She was curious and alert.

“A better place.”

There must have been tears in his eyes because she now looked at him harder, still curious but scared, too, because Pa never cried. She hadn’t yet made the connection with her mom.

“You OK?” she quizzed.

“Yes, sweetheart. You’ll be OK, too,” he said, even as he realized she still didn’t know why she shouldn’t be.

“OK.”

“Mommy’s not coming home. Neither is Jay or Mikey.”

“Where are they?”

“They’re dead, sweetie.”

She glanced down, to the left, searching herself now. “Like Lucky?” Lucky the Parakeet.

“Like Lucky. But they’re still with us, they watch us every day, they love us every day.”

“I miss Mommy.”

“Me, too. And Joachim, Mikey.”

“I don’t really miss them. Maybe Mikey. Jay pinches and tickles me. But I do miss Mommy.”

“You’ll miss them all someday.”

“When will I see them?”

Nos sucked at the air, seemingly insufficient for his lungs. His pulse was off the charts. “When you die.”

“When will I die?”

“Never, sweetie, as long as I live.”

***

As they drive uptown the rubble gets worse. The destruction is spilling into the streets and making them harder to pass. Park Avenue is blocked by an endless rusted barricade of shattered concrete, foundation, plaster, and marble, with the odd desk and chair thrown in. Nos pulls around to Lexington, where he makes it a few blocks before the shiny steel deco roof of the Chrysler Building stands in their way. The high sword of the tip seems to have fallen straight down as though through a trap door and then tipped east and collapsed in the street.