The Swing Voter of Staten Island (13 page)

As darkness came, so did more people. Theaters and movies let out. People slowly evacuated until there were only a few homeless ones lodged in vacant doorways. Soon a new sun arose on Times Square.

Dawn—at 42nd and Seventh Avenue. Before rush hour could commence, Uli watched a tall, older figure wheeling a shopping cart. The man took an object out of his cart, left it on the curb, and waited for the light to turn green. Once a few cars passed, he walked out into the middle of the empty street with the object and lobbed it high in the air. He missed whatever he was aiming at but carefully caught the object as it fell. It resembled a large bola—two weights connected by a long string. He repeated this exercise until the light turned red, then retreated back to the corner and again waited for the light.

Uli tried flying down to see what the bola-like object was, but he couldn’t budge. After ten minutes of tossing, Uli finally moved closer. The object appeared to be an old pair of sneakers tied together. Again the man dashed into the middle of the street, aiming for the arching bar holding the yellow metal casing around the three circular lights. Finally, the dirty laces of the two sneakers, which were knotted together, wound several times around the end of the narrow metal bar.

The old man returned to the corner, grabbed his shopping cart, and slowly wheeled it away. All that remained was the street and the sneakers dangling from the pole.

By the rising and setting of the sun, Uli could tell that time was speeding up. Yet life seemed to stop. The zebra flashes of day and night brought no more people or cars or trash or anything. Nothing but the wind and strobes of days and nights.

Eventually people started returning to the streets. One by one, the many cheap hotels and little porn theaters were renovated and improved. New chain stores replaced small businesses. The decrepit and isolated men and women were transformed into pudgy jolly families from out of town. Even the sidewalks were pulled tight and clean like new gray sheets.

As though someone had changed a TV channel, a flash of a family seated around a table interrupted his vision. It was the turn of the century now. Not in America. Strange soldiers burst into a dining room where a young husband, his beautiful wife, and their two children were eating from a platter of pilaf and lamb. He recognized the woman somehow.

Although he couldn’t hear anything, Uli saw the family being forced outside. There they were joined by other members of their village. Something more than the rolling hills told him that they were in Asia Minor.

Again he tried to remember 42nd Street, and he was now back in midtown Manhattan. A nearly transparent force rippled and rushed like a surge of water down flooded avenues and streets. Uli realized he was literally seeing time. Instead of rushing steadily forward, time pushed forth and pulled back out: A fluttering of architectural corrections and stylistic revisions built up and receded in each of the many buildings. Then, one by one, the buildings shuddered, flaked, and collapsed as though suffering heart attacks. Newer, sleeker, taller buildings quickly rose in their places. Finally, time stopped and the city of buildings seemed to present itself across the ages all at once. Small, ancient wooden shacks mingled with towering futuristic skyscrapers.

The walkways came alive, trembling and broadening from dirt paths into stone slabs and cement sidewalks. They carried the interplay of varied city dwellers: occasional Native Americans from hundreds of years earlier, Dutch settlers from the early seventeenth century, subjects of the Crown in tricornered hats, bearded pioneers of the mid-nineteenth century, top hats and waistcoats from the Gilded Age, a pageantry of turn-of-the-century immigrants. They weren’t merely walking side by side, but overlayed like transparencies, occupying the same space as the Depression-era downtrodden and happy-go-lucky hippies. Like shadows breaking off from darkness, sleek figures appeared who had to be citizens from the future. The entire city was becoming one giant shimmering termite hill. Communities with different races gave way to a single group of homogenized Americans.

T
he rope suddenly snapped. No longer some goddamned bird, Uli was just a man falling to his death. Throwing his arms down to block the fall, he hit something wet. The pungent reek of shit filled his sinuses. He realized he was shivering in the bottom of the canoe. The others were sitting upright, gliding in the bright moonlight back over the flooded airfield. He could make out the dark figure of a rusting aerial tower overhead.

A massive front-lobe headache pushed away all thoughts. His entire body felt like a single aching board. At the same time, utterly exhausted, he couldn’t stop shivering. He couldn’t remember ever feeling so cold.

“He’s freezing,” Tim said, rubbing Uli’s hands.

“We’re almost there,” replied Bea.

In another minute the muscle man jumped onto the muddy banks of Staten Island and pulled the narrow boat ashore. Bea and Tim tried lifting Uli, but the older man had trouble holding his legs, so Bea carried him in her arms like a child. She took him inside a small army surplus tent, where she dropped him into a pile of blankets and skins and started tearing off his clothes. In another moment, semi-delirious, he became aware that she was pressing against him naked, rubbing and tumbling her slick hard body against his quivering flesh.

“Thank … you …” he shivered out the words, then passed out.

10/31/80

U
li woke to the sound of drumbeats and distant chants. Though a great deal of time seemed to have passed, it was still the same night. Bea was lying naked, bracing him tightly in her arms. He felt so grateful to her, he wanted to kiss her, but be also knew she hadn’t done anything for romantic reasons.

“You okay?” she asked.

“I don’t know what happened. I thought I was going to die.”

“You were down too long. Do you remember anything?”

“Yeah, but … it was wild.”

“Do you remember anything about New York?”

“Yeah, I thought I was a goddamned pigeon. I felt as though I were gliding above Times Square, just hovering.”

“Nothing else?”

“Actually, I remember seeing this strange old man doing something, I’m not sure what … and then I saw New York over time …”

“Did you find out anything about your reason for being here?”

“No, not really. But I don’t know, I saw a lot of things.” Sitting up, he yawned. “God, I’m starving.”

“Me too,” she replied. “Let’s get some chow.”

A distant bonfire produced enough light for Uli to inspect her long lean body as she rose to dress. He watched her muscles ripple when she pulled on her shirt and shorts. After helping him dress, Bea led Uli outside to their large communal space, a dry patch on the former rec field, where the tribe of roughly a hundred had pitched tents behind the old terminal. For some reason the smell here wasn’t as bad as the rest of Staten Island.

It was a moonlit night and several circles of Indian-fusion types were celebrating on large homemade drums, all to a single beat. A bigger group was chanting. Among them were several large topless women swaying with their hands up in a trancelike state. In the middle, a small group of oddly dressed men and women were dancing in a circle.

“What’s all this? Are they on the war path?”

“No, it’s just a powwow,” she explained. “They do it for purification, friendship, the wiping of tears, all that stuff.”

“They have great costumes,” Uli said.

“They really strive for authenticity here. That thing is called the bustle.” She pointed out the colorful items sticking out of some of their backs: feathers and pointy quills that looked like they had been plucked from porcupines. “On their heads are war bonnets—those are optional.”

“What about that guy wearing the German shepherd?” Uli asked.

“That’s a coyote skin for animal medicine,” she replied. “Some of them are shapeshifters, but no one here is actually Native American, so in a way it’s all just an homage.”

“And how about the topless ladies?”

“They work for tips,” Bea kidded. The only person not dressed like a Native American was the blind, deaf old man who was now seated next to the drums.

Bea led Uli to another fire pit off to one side, where a collection of large cast-iron pots simmered from tripoded bars of steel over bright embers. She collected spoons and a pair of large wooden bowls and handed them to Uli, who held them out as she used a stick to remove a kettle top. With a large ladle, Bea filled the two bowls. From a small metal container, she took out a loaf of black bread, then the two of them walked over to the outer circle and sat down to watch the evening’s festivities.

“What’s with the blind old guy?”

“He just showed up one day. Someone said he came from across the desert, but who knows.”

“He doesn’t seem to be one of the tribe.”

“No, we feed him and look after him, but he’s locked in his own world.”

Inspecting the soup in the moonlight, Uli was surprised to see that it was purple. He nervously took a sip from his spoon and was delighted to find that it was a bowl of Russian borscht. “This is wonderful,” he said between slurps, ignoring the dancing and festivities before him.

“The cook still has her sinuses and taste buds,” Bea explained. “She also made some kind of stew in the big pot.”

The two returned to the tripods of crockery, where Bea served them several racks of what looked like lamb chops.

“This is the best food I’ve eaten since I got here,” Uli said with a full mouth. “What the hell is it?”

“Feral pigs. They’re all over the place out here.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Sometimes they grow as large as eight hundred pounds. It’s one reason I won’t leave.”

“What did you do before you came here? Back in New York.”

“Before coming here I had been unemployed for quite a while, which was one of the reasons I moved.”

“What did you do before you were unemployed?”

“A lot of freelance gigs.”

“Did you ever have a steady job?”

“Once, and I held it for about five years.”

“What was it?” he asked with genuine curiosity.

“I was the general secretary for the J.C.S.L.E.S.E.,” she said, as though it was universally known.

“What’s that?”

“That was the Joint Committee to Stop the Lower East Side Expressway. I had to quit because I got arrested and then we ended up disbanding after we won.”

“What was the Lower East Side Expressway?”

“Something that bastard named Robert Moses tried to build.”

“Why does that name sound so familiar?”

“He was a big New York politician for years.”

“I bet your parents didn’t like you taking a job that would put you in jail.”

“Actually, I ended up taking it because of them. See, I was born in the East Tremont section of the Bronx. When Moses constructed the Cross Bronx Expressway, it destroyed my neighborhood.”

“So you moved to the Lower East Side?”

“The Bronx turned into a ghetto. My father vanished, my mother got killed, and I ended up being raised by a foster family.”

“I guess things hadn’t really improved when New York got hit …”

“My life here is actually better, a lot better than in New York,” she said. “I’m pro-life, and if we were told we could return to New York tomorrow, I think I’d stay here. I really do. I mean, I’ve never felt so equal, or so powerful.”

“But don’t you feel cut off from civilization? Don’t you miss the technological advances? Men walking on the moon and all the electronic gadgetry?”

“You have no clue how much that stuff has taken from us.”

“Like what?”

“Like that,” she said, pointing up. The brilliant glow of a million constellations burned brightly in the sky. “If you stare up there for ten seconds, you’ll count more shooting stars than you’ve seen in a lifetime. It’s more amazing than any TV show could ever be. And it makes you think more about God and man than all the college classes put together.”

An owl hooted nearby.

“And listening to nature is far more rewarding than most phone calls.”

“I’ve always been a city boy myself,” Uli replied.

“The price of all this technology is that people aren’t evolving spiritually anymore.”

Uli yawned, then apologized and explained that the day had knocked him out.

“Me too,” she replied. “Do you want to sleep in your own tent or would you like to come back with me?”

“I was very comfortable with you.”

She brought Uli to the line of latrines placed at the edge of the encampment so that all waste flowed into the polluted basin. While Bea was in the bathroom, Uli heard some rustling behind a clump of nearby bushes. Expecting to see an animal, he was surprised to come face-to-face with a naked old man scurrying around on all fours. The guy hissed at Uli, then ran into the distance. Uli watched him as he sniffed a large rock and then urinated.

“What the hell is he doing?” he asked Bea upon her return.

“Oh, that’s Sam. He’s just prowling.”

“Prowling?”

“You’d probably regard it as flaky,” she said with a smile. “He’s trying to become a badger.”

“A badger? Have you ever seen anyone turn into an animal?”

“I don’t know all the jargon, but there is worldwide documentation of shapeshifting. In Europe there are ample cases of werewolves, weredogs, werebirds … there are even claims of weredolphins.”

When they got back to Bea’s tent, she dropped to her fours and crawled in through the flaps. As she pulled her shirt and pants off, Uli dropped his line of questioning. He turned around, took a deep breath, and removed his own clothes. Together they got in under the thick quilt. Uli began gently stroking Bea’s back, amazed by how muscular she was.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I was wondering if you wanted to …”

“Not until the third date,” she said tiredly.

“Huh?”

“It’s my one rule: If I date anyone three times, I’ll sleep with them. And though this isn’t technically a date, I’ll let it count as the first.”

Exhausted after the long day, both were fast asleep within minutes.

T
he large cougar was asleep on their legs.

“Bea,” Uli softly prodded her, attempting not to panic. Still asleep, she reached out and swatted the animal’s flanks. It hopped to its feet and bound out of the tent.

“We could’ve been killed,” he complained with a sigh.

“We can always get killed,” she sleepily replied, and pulled him closer.

When he kissed her she didn’t stop him, but she didn’t kiss back. A bright sun was just peaking up over the hills. In a moment, they both started dressing.

“This place is really beautiful,” he commented.

“Want to go on a hike?”

“Sure.”

Before the camp could become busy with activity, Bea filled a bag with shipped-in oranges, apples, homemade biscuits, and some leftover racks of pork from the night before. She offered him a nose pin, but he still had the one he’d bought on the bus. Together they went out to the basin, where she grabbed one of the four handcarved canoes. They got in and paddled over the basin for roughly half an hour until they came to land on the far side. Bea pulled the canoe up on an isolated landing and led him on a walk through the sparse landscape. The region wasn’t all desert, and the two hiked over parched salt flats with strange mineral formations until they came to a steep hill. With sweat trickling down his face, peering back over the vast skyline and rolling hills, Uli felt raw, endless beauty in the soaring expanse. It was as if no other humans had ever set foot here.

Upon reaching the top of a hill, Uli spotted a seemingly perfect curve in the wild—a long, bending concrete wall in the distance.

“That was the original end of the retaining wall where the sewage river once flowed.”

“Where was it blocked?” he asked.

“A ways north of here. Want to see it?”

“Sure.”

“We won’t be back in Tottenville till later this afternoon.”

“My appointment book is wide open.”

Over the next few hours, as they hiked, Uli recounted how he’d found himself walking along a road near JFK without knowing who he was or how he got there. He had been programmed to kill Dropt, who was then murdered yesterday.

“Did your trip to the Goethals answer any questions?”

“Nothing clearly. At one point, I saw this family and I think they might have been Armenians during the genocide.”

“Maybe you’re Armenian.”

“Did Tim tell you anything about me?”

“He only said that an important person in deep trouble would be passing through.”

“I have this awful feeling that he’s mistaken me for someone else. It’s happened before.”

“The vision you told me about …” she started.

“I’d call it a dream.”

“Well, I’ve never heard of anyone being able to move through time.”

“A dream’s a dream,” he opined.

“Unless, of course, you learned something in that dream that you didn’t previously know.”

“Since my memory is missing, I’m not sure what I knew, and I have to confess right now that I think this entire Wovoka thing is a load of bullshit.”

“Consider this: If it’s
not
bullshit, he might’ve been showing you something.”

As they walked, Uli contemplated his dream sequence. He remembered the tall old man tossing the pair of sneakers over the Times Square sign pole. What significance could this have?

“So, what do you want out of life?” he eventually asked.

She shrugged.

“Do you want children?”

“Not anymore. Now that no one else can have them, it doesn’t really bother me.”