The Swing Voter of Staten Island (10 page)

Uli soon realized the full ramifications of the explosion. Aside from the fact that the upper echelon of the Crapper leadership, including Mallory, had been wiped out, gone too was any possibility of him leaving Rescue City.

He worked feverishly with his team at the northern wall, hoping against hope that they might still find Mallory alive. Each group created a human chain of thirty or so people passing buckets of bricks, two-by-four studs, hunks of broken dry wall, and miles of electrical wiring.

The blast had occurred around 2:30. By 4:30, half an hour after his team had assembled, they located the first cluster of victims—four crushed bodies: the Councilman from Chelsea, his top aide, a clerical worker, and Dropt’s secretary with the unicorn-horn hairdo. By 5:30 Uli had stripped down to his T-shirt and was passing the buckets from a middle-aged man named Lucas to a guy named Marky behind him. Uli learned that both had come to Rescue City to fulfill Alternate Service requirements—instead of going to Vietnam—and had been working with the Crappers on local social programs.

“First we get evacuated due to a terror attack in the old town,” Lucas said. “Now we’re getting it here.”

Over the ensuing hours, as the three became friends, Uli explained that he suffered from acute amnesia and asked, “What exactly happened to the original New York?”

“A terrorist attack,” Luke said with fatigue, handing an empty ten-gallon spackle bucket to Uli.

“A series of around fifty contamination bombs went off in lower Manhattan,” Marky elaborated.

“A missile attack?”

“No,” Marky replied, after cutting through a section of piping with a chainsaw. “Pitchblende, an ore they use in some old fluoroscope machines. About two tablespoons of it was stuffed in small sections of lead foil, using an M-80 as the detonator. Extremely low-tech, but lots of them.”

“How many dead?” Uli asked.

“None immediately,” Luke replied. “The worst part at first was that Manhattan had to be evacuated. A lot of poorer neighborhoods in the outer boroughs were flooded overnight by the newly displaced middle class.”

“Albany was quick to respond,” Marky reminded him with a smirk. “They immediately suspended all rent stabilization and control laws, so that within two years almost all rents skyrocketed.”

“Keep in mind the city was near bankruptcy,” Luke elaborated. “They were terrified of losing their dwindling middle class, even if it meant screwing over their poor.”

“Within a year or two, almost all tenants who had been living in low-income neighborhoods for decades couldn’t afford the rents anymore,” Marky continued. “Illegal evictions were epidemic. The working poor found themselves forced into the streets.”

“You’d see piles of furniture dumped out onto the sidewalk.”

“What did the city do about them?” Uli prodded.

“Initially, they were sheltered in Shea and Yankee stadiums,” Marky said, “but things quickly degenerated. Angry mobs started moving throughout the city, breaking into stores and shops. The National Guard and the city tried to make smaller encampments, turning the city parks into trailer parks—”

“Don’t forget upper Manhattan,” Lucas cut in. “Harlem became a massive tent city.”

“When did the federal government get involved?”

“July of 1971 was incredibly hot,” Marky replied, scooping up a bucket of crumbled plaster board. “When the big blackout first struck, all the poor just went bananas. For three days everyone rioted. They broke into all the new businesses that had finally resettled after the Manhattan attack. Within three days the city was totally trashed all over again.”

“So everyone was just rounded up and brought here?” Uli concluded.

“There was a big class-action lawsuit that was going nowhere in the courts,” Lucas said. “But after the blackout, Lindsay and Rockefeller appealed to Nixon for help. The federal government had a plan, but things got screwy.”

“Many agreed to come here because they were promised that once Manhattan was scrubbed down, they’d be brought right back,” Marky added.

“And all the poor out here were told they would be given priority housing in Manhattan as a kind of restitution.”

“Who initiated this?” Uli asked. It didn’t sound like something Nixon would do.

“The Democrats started it,” Luke recalled, “but then critics kept hitting on things like Kennedy’s War on Poverty and LBJ’s Great Society and wasting money on the poor … so the Republicans wound up taking the lead—”

A severed foot emerged out of the debris before them. Sifting onward, they soon located a new clump of mangled bodies. For the next twenty minutes the three of them silently pulled out limbs, torsos, two heads, three more feet, and then what appeared to be a very large mouth.

By 7:30 their group had recovered six more bodies. Along with the other three crews, the total came to twenty-eight dead. In the hands of two corpses they found scribbled goodbye notes, indicating that some people had survived the initial explosion only to bleed to death while waiting to be rescued. This compelled everyone to work harder. Floodlights were brought in.

As it grew late, Marky, Luke, and the others on Uli’s line were gradually replaced. Only Uli remained from the original group. He was intent on staying until they had located Mallory. By 11 p.m. he started dropping his buckets and seeing double. His coworkers finally ordered him to get some sleep.

It was an unusually hot night for the Nevada desert. A series of food tables were unfolded on 7th Street between Second and Bowery. Outdoor showers and portable toilets were unloaded on 6th Street, as were a row of shower stalls. For volunteers who lived too far away to commute home, cots were brought in and lined up under the stars down 6th Street.

Uli dropped exhausted onto a hard cot, barely able to kick off his shoes.

10/30/80

F
lashing lights, shouts, and various engines revved up. Uli awoke to the news that the dead body of mayoral candidate James Dropt had just been located. The bright lights of the Crapper TV crew shone down on the catastrophe. Uli wandered over to Bowery just as the recovery team wheeled the gurney with Dropt’s mangled body past. All four crews stopped working and quietly lined the sidewalk to catch a glimpse of their fallen leader. With Dropt’s corpse found, the last vestiges of hope had vanished. Even Uli felt it—not so much sadness as a general despair from those all around. The possibility of the first Crapper victory since Mallory’s husband had been shot was blown asunder.

Dropt’s body was slid into the back of an ambulance, which departed slowly under a single police escort. Most of the crew workers either went back to work or returned to their narrow outdoor cots. As Uli thought about the leader he had only briefly met, he could hear men in the neighboring cots weeping. Following a shallow sleep, he arose with the first rays of the sun.

Sitting elbow-to-elbow, knee-to-knee with others at a community table over a bowl of flavorless cereal, Uli learned both good and bad news. Just an hour earlier they had discovered four people still alive, buried in the basement. Unfortunately, they had also unearthed twenty-two more crushed bodies, which included the last of the Councilpeople. They had accounted for all but two people, and one of those was Mallory.

Passing by the makeshift morgue set up near the rear of the headquarters, Uli spotted something that made him cringe. It was the crushed body of the baby kangaroo that Mallory had taken such pains to rescue. Seeing the little marsupial’s body, Uli knew in his heart of hearts that she was dead.

In the early afternoon, Uli saw a crowd gathering around a small TV. The Honorable Horace Shub, Jr. was in the middle of a speech denouncing the bombing and begging for reconciliation between the various gangs. Apparently, vengeful Crapper gangs from northern Brooklyn had ventured into weaker Pigger neighborhoods in Queens the night before and burned stores and slaughtered over twenty Piggers before order was restored.

“James Dropt was a greatly good man,” Shub said in his weirdly earnest way. “He believed in a peaceable resolution to our manifold problems. I am calling upon the Councilpeople of New York, both the Created Equalers and the We the People Party, to put an end to the anger and join me in working together and bringing peace to our greatly good, God-fearing municipality …”

U
li didn’t stick around to see how the mayor’s speech was going to end. As he walked down Bowery, his thoughts reverted to Mallory. He decided that as a tribute to her, he was going to do what he had initially set out to do for personal gain: He would venture down to Staten Island, locate the borough president, and try to convince Adolphus Rafique to cast his decisive vote in favor of the former matinee idol Ronald Reagan.

Over the next fifteen minutes or so, exhausted young volunteers for the Crapper recovery effort gathered with Uli at the M3 bus stop. A number of them were still coughing and hawking up dust particles.

“How long is it to the very last stop?” Uli asked the driver when the bus finally arrived.

“A little over two hours, but I better warn you that Shub ordered a curfew because of the rioting, so there’s only one more bus going down there. Then they’re canceling service for the night.”

“What time is the last bus leaving there to head back this way?”

“Six o’clock sharp.”

Uli thanked the driver and took a seat, hoping to catch some shut-eye. Tired as he was, though, he couldn’t stop looking at the strange revisionist city passing around him.

He was able to remember more of the places from old New York that were missing here. Little Italy, SoHo, and Chinatown had all been consolidated into one tiny neighborhood—LittleHoTown. TriBeCa and Wall Street, on the other hand, were gone without a trace.

As they ascended the wooden bridge over the sandbagged wall protecting the Battery, foul odors began to rise.

There was something depressing about the low-level skyline of European buildings behind them that made up this odd simulacrum of Manhattan.

An old man slid his hand along the overhead aluminum bar as he walked down the aisle peddling something. Uli figured it was gum until he spotted a middle-aged woman with a bad dye job giving the fellow a sixteenth-stamp. In return he handed her a small padded clothespin that the woman duly clipped over her flared nostrils.

“Holy shit,” the man said as he approached Uli. “You’re—” Something behind Uli caught the solicitor’s attention, and he hastened past. Uli turned and saw a cardboard sign slung around the man’s stooped back:
NOSE PINS!

“Excuse me,” Uli called out. “What were you starting to say?”

“I was just looking at that.” The old man pointed out the window over the swampy waters of New York Harbor. Standing on a cluster of black rocks was a plastic lime-colored lady, about six feet tall—a mockery of the Statue of Liberty. In her outstretched arm someone had taped an empty beer bottle onto the torch. Over her arm where she held the Bill of Rights someone had strapped a golf bag with a single rusty club sticking out. Inasmuch as the entire place seemed like a miniature golf course done in a New York City theme, it sort of made sense.

Behind him, four young bucket-passers from the devastated Crappers headquarters were asleep across the rear seats.

“Want a nose pin?” the solicitor asked.

Uli purchased one, and as he clipped it on, the bridge they were passing over started swaying back and forth.

“Why is this thing so damn shaky?” Uli asked the pin seller, and added, “I’m new here.”

“The Feedmore Corporation gave us ten old ferry boats, but Staten Island here is a lot closer than in old town and the water is far shallower, so the local engineer submerged the ferries, laid planks over the tops, and turned it into this ratty-ass bridge.” The pin seller studied Uli’s face closely.

“But the sewage level is rising, isn’t it?”

“Not anymore. But at its worst, the water level came right up to the bridge. That was when Rafique decided to dig the canal, and in one day the water dropped six feet.”

When they reached Staten Island moments later, Uli noticed another bridge, dull and red with abruptly arching spans shooting northeast. “Is that the Verrazano?”

“Name’s been shortened like the bridge,” the man replied. “Here it’s just the
Zano
.”

The bus headed slowly down Richmond Road, past the row of submerged and semi-submerged luxury houses, all uninhabited. The paved street turned to packed dirt and sloped steeply downhill. A handmade sign read,
Hyman Boulevard
. It was the same street he had driven up with Dianne Colder strapped to his roof.

For the first mile or so, in the low swampy parts of the borough, more abandoned houses sprang up. They almost looked like homes on a military base. Though the land was mostly dry now, earlier flood waters had wrecked the area.

Crossing sporadic flows of black sewage, the bus stopped at various points along the succession of tiny Staten Island communities, all of which looked more barren than anywhere else he’d been on the reservation.

The further down they drove, the more primitive the little settlements appeared. Many of the structures were made from old packing crates and pallet wood, probably from when the Staten Island airport had been functioning. In one instance, Uli noticed a small circle of huts with thatched roofs that looked like they had been made with dry grass and stripped bark.

Whenever they went down a sharp incline, the smell worsened and the road would be washed out by an inlet of lumpy black water. The driver had to gun the engine to slice through the hazardous streams. Clearly the entire borough was one big environmental disaster zone.

Just like Manhattan, hand-painted planks corrupted the original names of deserted little outposts with their ramshackle huts:
Doggone Hills, New Dope Beach, Great Killers,
and so on. Large rodents, perhaps prairie dogs, sat on their haunches staring at the passing bus.

As the bus ventured to the southern tip of the borough, the road grew worse with ever fewer shanties. Occasionally, Uli saw people walking about. Most of them appeared grungy and sickly, much like the borough itself. On several occasions when people boarded the bus, Uli wondered how they could stand the smell. Looking over the swampy streams and arid dunes he kept wondering how much further the route continued. Sometimes when the bus lumbered uphill, they’d catch a desert breeze and there would be a fleeting reprieve from the heat and smell, but then the road would slant downhill again, through the liquid shit.

When the bus finally came to its terminus, only one passenger remained on board with Uli, a skinny kid curled up in the rear. How he could sleep through such stinking turbulence was a mystery.

“Tottenville—Nut Central!” the driver shouted, as he folded open the door. Uli wished him a good day and stepped off. The kid followed, then walked away in the opposite direction.

A huge terminal that had fallen into disrepair was balanced all alone on the edge of a hill. This was the southern demarcation of Staten Island, Nevada. Below it was a dusty recreation field that looked like it might once have supported a little league team, a haunting reminder of the absence of children. Beyond that a swamp of sewage covered the old airfield.

The oxidized copper ferry building was an homage to the old St. George Landing, even though it was at the opposite side of the borough than in old New York. In front of the station was a big hand-painted sign:
The Dastardly Notorious
VERDANT LEAGUE—
Adolphus Rafique will debate with anyone at any time (subject to availability)!

The terminal was covered with old paneled doors and large unwashed bay windows reinforced by wire netting, but there didn’t seem to be anyone inside. Uli followed a faded red arrow pointing around to the back of the building, where he heard a muffled ruckus. Semi-naked forms danced sweatily in the sun, chanting through plumes of smoke to the steady beats of handmade drums. They looked like a strange fusion of American Indians and urban homeless. Uli figured they were the tribe of environmental extremists that Mallory had mentioned—the Burnt Men. Semi-domesticated barking canines dashed about and chickens squawked. A smoky bonfire burned in the center of it all. An old man in a loincloth and white facial paint stopped dancing and stared at Uli. The banks of the swamp behind the dusty rec field were a honeycomb of tents and cardboard partitions.

Uli reached a set of open double doors in the rear of the terminal and came upon a heavyset security guard. He was sitting at a desk with a phone and several strange clerical-looking machines reading a worn paperback copy of Tolkien’s
The Hobbit.

“If you’re here for the Turning Toxic into Organic class, it’s been canceled till next week,” the man said, “but if you’re here for the Fantasy Literature course—”

“Actually, I was hoping to debate with Mr. Rafique.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No, but the sign says he’ll debate with anyone at any time,” Uli said.

“
If
he’s not out campaigning,” the guard amended. “He’s running for mayor and for the presidency, you know.”

“Is he available?”

“That depends. Are you Pigger or Crapper?”

“I’m neither.”

The security guard held his finger up asking for patience, then lifted his phone and dialed a number.

“Why does that sign say this is Templehof Airport?” Uli asked while waiting.

“That was the main airfield for the Berlin airlift. Before it was flooded, this was where the piloted flights landed with all the supplies, so they … Hello.” The guard asked if Adolphus Rafique was available to debate “an unregistered walk-in.” After another moment, he hung up and said, “Rafique’s there, but you have to have your paw prints checked and get cleared here first.” He took out a blank index card and an ink blotter.

“I can save you some time by telling you that there is no record of me.”