Bombshell (30 page)

“Fuck you, Robert, if you think I would still marry you.”

“Fantastic. I can't marry you anymore, either. But the answer to our question was that it was Christmas 2009,
Lexington
Avenue, next to the Chrysler Building. I'm looking at it
right
now.
And the whole fucking thing is in flames!
Hold on. Hold on, sweetie. I have to piss.” The Chrysler Building was engorged with flame, crashing in roiling waves from its
exploded windows, melting the metal eagles at its cornices. The smoke made a shroud around the stem. A yellow taxi had been driven into the lobby and set ablaze. “Anyway, I'm in New York to kill your dyke cunt friend,” he slurred, “Varyushka Cash.”

“You stay away from her, motherfucker! Listen to me: I met a friend of yours last night. I went over to your apartment to see if you had gone home.”

“Oh yeah?” He sounded nonchalant. “Who?”

“Royce. He said his name was Royce, and I asked him if he was from the magazine, and he said that he didn't know what I was talking about, but that his buddy Robert Dresner did not work for any magazine.”

“That asshole.” Dresner swigged at his vodka. “What was he doing there? Yes, I
do
have a secret, secret life. I'm not a journalist. I work for the CIA of the USA, a group of swinging young men dedicated to pleasuring America. Royce works for me. I put black bags over the heads of Arabs, terrorists, communists, and sand-niggers, Iraqis, agitators, collaborators, dykes, fruits, fags, students . . . Call them what you will. Then I take them on plane trips and torture them, and recently they've started dying. I also like whores, but I've been too busy for them lately. Say, honey, do you have a cell phone number for your Soviet terrorist friend? I'm supposed to put a bag over her head, too.”

“If you are in New York, you're dead meat. Didn't you see the TV news?”

“No, they had porn in the hotel.”

“Then didn't your CIA tell you?” She feigned compassion. “Robert, you are very drunk. I would like you to come home this instant.”

For a moment, believing her through the vodka, he was silent. His voice was broken with sudden tears. “I can't.”

“I know, sweetie,” Janelle told him softly. “Because if you did, even at death's door, I would still cut your balls off. Stay away from Cash, you piece of shit, and I hope the fallout eats you alive. Good-bye, Robert.”

Laughing, Dresner limped down the expanse of Lexington Avenue, away from the Chrysler inferno. He continued to walk south, planning to visit the Winters Corporation tower. After all, their murders had drawn him to this contaminated place. Yet, the open city presented myriad distractions, lost luxuries, and a kind of prurient apocalyptic tourism. It overwhelmed him. Somewhere, amid the glamorous chaos of the stripped city, lost within the vertiginous wheeling of tall structures and bright lights, he collapsed from the vodka in an arcade of treasure.

CASH MOVED BENEATH THE CONCRETE AND STEEL SKIN OF MANHATTAN.
She traveled through nineteenth-century conduits and freezing arteries, a coiling system of subterranean aqueducts, pipes, funnels, vents, fan blades, and tubular hallways. She crawled through the dripping visceral system, inhaling the waste of millions of citizens. She watched rats roll in the shallow fluid that ran between her boots and flies illuminated by dim service lights hanging from corroding metal hooks like an underground abattoir. All that remained were the scurrying vermin of a metropolitan
Marie Celeste
. When she had climbed down into this maintenance shaft during what must have been the afternoon before, to set herself apart from the riots and the crush and clamor of the evacuation, she had found a worker's flashlight at the rusting base of the narrow ladder. She told herself that even here, the contamination from Indian Point would finally reach the groundwater, and it would cackle through the sewers. But she had no intention of remaining below the streets for long. The mortar was aged and weak between the
brickwork of the cylindrical veins that were her subway. The real subways had become lethal during the riots and the panic. Sometimes, she felt herself passing close to them, one tunnel overlapping the other, feeling the vibrations from the final carriages leaving downtown. Through the close-knit plexus of walls, she listened to arguments, weeping, sporadic gunfire, and the distinctive noises of assault and rape. She would press her ear against the helpless bricks, her gun held close to her breast, as she pictured women being dragged down. But as the dank hours expired, the voices were fewer, the percussion of the riots infrequent and, finally, Cash decided, they must have become exhausted.

It was merely a matter of time before the bridges to the island would be demolished. To the north, a high wall of exclusion would be erected to delineate and confine the contaminated zone with razor wire and sheets of impenetrable metal, a Berlin Wall for New York. She retrieved the last energy bar from her bag, opening the silver foil packaging with her teeth, and began eating frantically. She knew that she must return to the surface, at some point, even merely to eat. She did not know how far she had come. She was disoriented. Her back and legs cramped from the hours of crouching and crawling, entangled in the stillbirth of new alienation. Suddenly, she became aware that she had entered a dry tube of pristine bricks and fresh mortar, either a section of restoration or a new artery under construction. As the drafts became more pronounced, Cash resolved that she would let this be her exit. She would follow it and escape by whatever breach or service hatch presented itself.

April 22, 2011. Cash came at evening to a floodlit cavity, the tubular service shaft opening into a sunken foundation space, concrete and thick rebar pointing at the obscure stars like anemones from the pit, shimmering under arc light and cranes. She realized that it must be the crater
left by the destruction of the World Trade Center. They were rebuilding a new tower. The foundations and stub of it reflected the white industrial light. Scaffold and girders cast shadows in the brilliant panels illuminating the floor. Ramps the width of highways and industrial containers spread to the perimeter of ashen stone, where the walls rose to the height of cliffs. Beyond the lattice of cranes, cables, and fence wire, she saw the tight formations of the Financial District. She crawled from the tunnel and dropped five feet to the stone-strewn crater. The aurora shimmered between the gargantuan buildings that surrounded her beyond the site. She watched its hypnotic emerald sparkling. The new tower would never be finished. She wondered what would be said. On the outside Manhattan was quarantined forever; perhaps New York had finally met a catastrophe that it could not overcome. Unlike the voided city of 1986, where silence cloaked the drab streets and stillness descended on all but the flickering branches of the Wormwood Forest and the stray dogs and condemned horses, for a time the empty city of 2011 was all noise and automatic motion. For her alone, the electronic billboards continuing their lurid, virtual existence, lending an eerie cast to the evening, overlapping displays for theaters, fashion, boutiques, products, electronics, fast food, and hieroglyphic luxuries branded in flashing light. Streetlights had lit automatically, electronically sensing the encroaching darkness. Car alarms pulsed sonic shocks through the high-rise blocks, lamps flashing in the echoing canyons; security alarms rang from almost every building, smashed facades and barking dogs. The crosswalks emitted their shrill tones, automated department store doors malfunctioned in their broken glass, opening and closing, scraping debris. Music blasted from desolate nightclubs and bars without patrons. Cash studied the enormous bulldozers, excavators, and trucks stalled in the pit. She climbed one of the colossal access ramps that would lead her to street level, conscious of every breath that she took. She wondered how long the city would be allowed its automaton existence, thermostats,
timers, and cybernetic twitching, before, remotely, the power would be disabled. Sometimes, when she found herself in a part of the city without power, where silence spread over the wreckage, she thought that she could hear her name echoing through the voided tenements and along the dead boulevards.

The last ferry had departed the South Ferry Terminal; trash swirled on the jetties in the salt wind. Cash roamed Battery Park, imagining the thousands of people that were now replicating her being, ejected from their lives, spat out across the land, harboring strange sickness. In the empty city, her memories seemed to be carried by the scuzzy pigeons that picked in the short grass, by the rats in the tangled guts of the machine. The Manhattan atoll and all of its alienated empire was hers. She would live on beneath the wild flag of the aurora.

Cash stared out across the cold waters at the edge of her abject country, to Ellis Island, clearinghouse of aliens, and beyond that to Liberty Island and the statuesque woman, green as trinitite, with her arm raised into the air. Cash ran her hand across the stubble of her scalp. The two statues were part of her narrative.
Portlandia
delivered her to earth with her extended hand, delicately placing her on the street where she could be discovered, and here, decades later, upon the opposite coast, Cash felt that she witnessed the same woman, raising her flaming torch in triumph, admonishing the troubled seas in proud maternity, an Amazon woman, a wondrous power in her mighty arm, her eyes betraying no fear of men.

Turning back inland, through the blown trees of the park, she took the infant identity bracelet that had been hers at the hospital in Pripyat from its hanging place around her neck, with the shard of radioactive trinitite that was almost the same green hue as the statuesque woman in the fog. The crater at the World Trade Center site was now subsumed in the greater
tragedy borne on the wind from Indian Point. She came to the bronze bull statue fixed into the concrete of Wall Street, the Minotaur in its empty labyrinth. Outside the Winters Corporation building, in the district of Trinity, Cash located a public pay phone that had not been vandalized in the riots. She lifted the receiver and found the dial tone. Reaching the operator, she said, “I need to make a collect call to New Orleans, Louisiana.” Cash gave the operator the number and waited.

“I'm sorry ma'am, but that line is busy. You could try again later.”

“Yes. Yes, I will. Thank you.”

Like a prodigal daughter, Cash entered the Winters Corporation building. The doors were still intact. She resolved that she would spend the coming night in the arms of the enemy, a ghost in a computerized city. Outside, radioactive winds rinsed the island. Moving from the foyer, exploring silent offices and conference rooms, Cash collected some pretzel packs, chocolate bars, and a bottle of champagne that had been left in a small refrigerator in one of the offices. On the fourth floor, the white forensic outlines of Evelyn and Frederick Winters remained on the bloody carpet of the suite where she had assassinated them. She opened the champagne and kicked and scuffed the contorted shapes of the Winters men, delighting in their eradication. She found a flat-screen television and watched reruns of the riots filmed from helicopter cameras as she sipped from the foaming bottle: overloaded ferries leaving the terminals and endless lines of cars and walkers struggling as though held in slow motion to escape by tunnels and choked roads. Then the television showed the reactor. It burned uncontrolled, a molten teardrop from the sun, devouring, consuming, an imploding pit of suicidal grief. It was the disaster of all disasters.

Cash reached for one of the white telephones. It was still working. She dialed for Janelle Gresham. Janelle answered almost immediately, and Cash heard in her voice that she had been weeping.

“Janelle?”

“Cash! Please tell me that you got out of New York!”

“I'm upstairs at the Winters Corporation building. I can see the aurora from the window. It's beautiful.”

“You're in danger, Cash. Just get out of the city and we'll get you to a hospital.”

“Everyone else has disappeared. I wanted to say—”

“But you're not alone. Robert is there.”

At first Cash could not understand. “Robert, your fiancé? Why?”

“He's CIA. Please believe me. He's hunting you!”

“
Robert
?”

“He called me from Lexington Avenue. And I met another of them, but I didn't understand who he must have been. He was at Robert's apartment. Cash, I'm afraid that Robert has lost himself and he thinks that the only way back is through you.”

“It must have been his voice that I heard calling my name in the night.”

“Please,” Janelle implored, “get out of Manhattan. I have money now. I could help.”

“This phone might be traceable. I have to go. I love you.”

“Cash, no!”

“It's all right. I'll find him.”

APRIL 23, 2011. ROBERT DRESNER AWOKE IN A SMASHED DISPLAY
of lingerie mannequins. Remnants of fishnet stockings and coral pink underwear clung to the smooth unyielding plastic of the bodies about him. It was as though they had been witnesses to an extreme violence. Some were now missing limbs, chrome pins probed out of molded shoulders like antennae. Wigs of human hair had been torn from polished pink scalps, black nylon pulled from colorless artificial nipples, white cotton ripped and peeled low across a hard featureless pubis. They struck him as test dummies at a blast site, and he lay among them as though he too had been shattered by some incredible shockwave. An octopus of nausea rolled in turmoil in his guts. As he struggled to locate his phone, he realized that he had ejaculated in his clothes during the night, leaving a tacky mess showing through his trousers. The army of plastic women that surrounded him had entered his unconscious. His mind brought flashes of himself rolling among them, tearing at their expensive lingerie, ripping limbs from torsos, grinding his body against unyielding, impenetrable surfaces, drunkenly arranging their
positions. His degradation and his alienation were completed by this defeat in the zone of women. Unbidden, a vision of the Bikini atoll pressed upon him. He did not understand it, but unconsciously he recognized that he was entering the final hours of Cross Spikes.