I sat on the fire escape, listening to the boys sounding so grown up as they expertly divided food between the littles. After a while, Ken joined me. A cool mist had settled in. I was praying for rain, to the extent that I pray.
“That picture in the hallway...”. He held out the bowl toward me. There were two peanuts left in the bottom, with a speck of chocolate clinging to them.
“Warhol’s Mick Jagger. That’s a Jackson Pollock over the kitchen table, though I think the kids have been coloring on it. I can’t tell.”
“And the photos?”
Black and white. Ilford, mostly. Architectural detail. Form. Grace. “Alot of those buildings are gone now.”
“Are you still shooting? Do you have...”
I popped one of the peanuts in my mouth and began to chew. It’s important to chew when you are starving. The more you chew, the more nutrients you get. A old woman in Chinatown stood on her steps for days telling everyone who walked by to chew. Everyone told everyone else.
I had pulled apart my attic darkroom to make room for kids to sleep. I wasn’t going to photograph the slaughter, the destruction. The death throes.
“Manna from heaven,” Ken said. “Unless you have a peanut allergy of course.”
I swallowed. “We had two toddlers here with peanut allergies. They both died.” Mothers clinging to them as they gasped for breath, their small fragile bodies rigid with anaphylactic shock.
“That’s horrible.”
“Last news I saw months ago, they were reporting the body count as something like 65,000 people. Not a big percentage of 2.2 million, except that every one of them had a mom, a dad, a kid, a spouse, so that’s a lot of people affected. Another couple hundred thousand unaccounted for in the rubble, eaten by rats. Then there’s the soft numbers, the ones who died because there’s no medicine, no hospitals. Toddlers with peanut allergies are the tip of the iceberg. Women in childbirth, diabetics running out of insulin, people having a heart attack or stroke or getting an infected cut that could have been solved with penicillin. I’m going to guess we’re back down to a million, maybe a million and a half people. It’s genocide.”
Ken was scribbling hard in his notebook. “It’s not technically genocide,” he said. “You aren’t all the same ethnicity. If you were all, like, Palestinians, it would be genocide. But you’re...”
“New Yorkers,” I said. “Double Ziplock bags. A high-end dive watch. I’m guessing you came in under water.”
He paused his pen and nodded. “I put in up by Yonkers in a big inner tube, floated down to Pier 99. Left the tube under a dock and dove from there to Little Island.”
“Some folks scuba’d their way off island back in the beginning. But there aren’t a lot of dive shops in Manhattan.”
“Yeah, I was hoping to pick up fresh tanks, but that doesn’t seem likely.”
“There was a place in Alphabet City. Kids used to go there for helium for party balloons, that’s the only reason I know about it. So the Hudson hasn’t been mined?”
He shook his head. “Not that I saw. I stuck close to the shore, though. You were telling me about the chocolate chips.”
“Where was I?”
He flipped pages in his notebook. “Manhattan Avenue. Three a.m.”
“Right. So we pull packing blankets over us, the kind they wrap food deliveries in, like bubble wrap but made out of space blankets, that silver stuff, and wait for the sun to come up.”
“Why didn’t you go through Central Park?”
“Central Park at night? Fuhgeddaboudit. Wouldna done it twenty years ago, and the situation hasn’t exactly improved for chrissakes.”
“Alright, I was just...”
I was starting to figure Ken out. Couldn’t get into Columbia, so he went to Stony Brook. Couldn’t get a job at the Times or WaPo, so he’s a stringer for a socialist weekly. “Just shut the fuck up and let me tell you the story. So we’re parked in this narrow spot behind the Apollo, waiting for the sun to come up. And I’ll tell you why. Because the human body is 98 degrees. Once the streets heat up it’s harder for thermal imaging to see us. I mean, not impossible but harder. Like that guy who sailed in with my butter and eggs. He thought his black sails, black paint on his boat, coming in at night, they’d never see him. But in cooler temps, against the water, his body heat stood out like a huge zit on the end of someone’s nose. When we moved slowly down the blacktop of 125th in full sun on a 110 degree day, seeing us was more like those tests at the eye doctor, the number in color dots surrounded by other color dots, like camouflage.
So me, Curvy, Marta, and Josen, slowly slowly inch our way down the block, and we see what’s left of Frank-n-Frank’s, and we go around the corner, and there’s the truck on its side, with the back wall of the building, like a brick wall, draped over it like a garden arch. Except it’s all shade, and it’s still relatively cool, and now we’re all overheated, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
And Marta’s got like these hand drills, these old fashioned things, they have an offset handle and you hold the knob on top and turn, and she’s drilling holes in the bottom of the truck. Then she’s got cutters, like scissors, whaddya call ‘em, tin snips. Josen takes over, because he’s a moose, and in less than an hour, we have a hole in the bottom of the refrigerator unit.
Meanwhile I swear I can smell things growing, so I slip up to the top of the block, and there’s a vacant lot, must have been community gardens, except it’s covered with fuel from the missile, and dust from the blast. There were, like, peppers and squash and herbs. And I try to pick some but they were oily and rotten, the leaves going black. It kills me, like it was put there to taunt me.
So they are waving me back to the truck, because I’m the smallest. I climb inside and yep, there are four 25-pound bags of Guittard semi-sweet chips. And I am secretly hoping maybe there would be something else, too, but there isn’t.”
“What were you hoping for?”
“Anything. Flour. Oil. But there is just the chips. I pass the bags out. Curvy wraps them in the insulated blankets. And then, I hesitate. I linger. That is a fatal error. It is just so cool inside the truck, and so quiet, so dark. For a moment I realize why monks like their little isolated cells. It’s bliss. It is all my fault.”
“What was your fault?”
“By the time I crawl out, the drones are on us. The four of us each have a sack of chips strapped to our backs. But my body temperature is down from being in the truck, and even those guys are cool from the shade. Curvy and Josen run back up to 125th, zigzagging. Marta and I bolt under the arch of bricks, down the alley. The drones are waiting for us on the other end. They spray us with machine gun fire. Marta falls back on me, full of holes, and we crash to the ground. The drone sprays us a few more times and then zips off down 126th.
I push Marta’s body off me. And I don’t have a mark on me, except my elbows bleeding from hitting the ground. I grab the ropes off her shoulders and put her bag on in front of me. So now I’m carrying fifty pounds of chocolate chips, but they are wrapped in the insulated blankets, and I’m thinking maybe that will confuse the sensors.”
“So you took the chocolate chips, but you didn’t take Marta’s body.” Ken’s voice oozed moral condemnation.
“We gave up rites for the dead months ago. One of the first things that we carved off our humanity. When we have the strength, we dump bodies in the river. Another reason why they actually have no idea how many people are dead. Nobody’s counting. So yes, I left Marta’s body lying there, and she’d of done the same.
So I make it back to the van, and Curvy’s there, his left leg half shot off, bleeding out. ‘Josen?’ I ask. He shakes his head, then passes out. I untie the ropes from his sack of chocolate chips and tie a tourniquet around his leg. Then I throw the bags and Curvy in the van, dig his keys out of his blood-soaked jeans pocket, and wait until the sun gets low enough cast shadows across the street.”
“With Curvy bleeding out in the van.”
Ken was starting to dislike me. I understood it now. He needed a hero story, and mine was not a hero story.
“Nothing I could do about that. But you know, this ain’t about getting my story out, is it Ken? This is about you finally making good, isn’t it. You figure there’s, what, a Pulitzer in this for you? The last reporter to interview people in wartime Manhattan before they all died? You got your phone charged up for some photos of those skeletal kids in there? Maybe you want to go upstairs and take a shot of Curvy dying of sepsis from his blown-off leg. We stopped giving him food and water, by the way. No sense wasting this last peanut on a dying man. Put that in your war-correspondent’s award dinner speech.”
The look on his face told me I was close to the mark. A raindrop hit the back of my hand. I pulled myself to my feet. “C’mon,” I said. “We gotta get buckets out on the roof. If you can bring yourself to climb another ladder.”
I scrambled up onto the roof and started pulling plastic buckets from the stack in the corner. “There’s gutters on the machine room over there.” I nodded toward the shack in the middle of the roof that held the elevator gears. “Get this bucket under the downspout. When it fills, stick the second bucket under, bring the first one back here and swap.”
We worked in silence, me lowering full buckets down to the fire escape landing on a rope with an s-hook, where a steady rotation of folks brought them inside, filled our motley collection of tubs--Rubbermaid totes, galvanized wash tubs--and attached an empty bucket back onto the rope for more.
When the rain ended, we sat on the floor of the kitchen, cradling mugs of dirty rainwater as if it was Earl Grey latte with extra honey and a shot of vanilla.
“So you got the van back here,” Ken said, averting his eyes.
“I drove the van back, yes.” Careening from one side of the road to the other, sobbing, up on the sidewalk, dodging bullets, Curvy moaning in the back. “The drones stopped following us when we crossed Broadway. They come down here to remind us that we are prisoners, picking us off one by one. But they concentrate their firepower on clearing out uptown.
You know, we did aid stations in midtown for a while, cooking big batches of soup, heating water to clean wounds, but they started shooting people who lined up for food. Who the fuck would do that. So now we’re in smaller clans. There are little village clusters, buildings are connected by back alleys or underground with shared cellars. Like extended families. We know the feds will eventually flatten lower Manhattan, too, but we’ll starve to death long before they get to SoHo.
So I get home with 75 pounds of chocolate chips. Josen’s bag was lost. And I bake this last batch of cookies. That was it. No more flour, butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla, nuts. Nothing.”
I waited for Ken to look at me. “I never quite cut it either,” I said. “I quit Fordham. Couldn’t stomach the family financial business. I just wanted to create things. Capture beautiful shape and structure through a camera lens. Smell cookies baking every day. That oven heat on my face, red glow of the coils, neat grid of the cooling racks, scrape of a spatula.”
“And I ate one of them.”
“You ate one of them. I mean, if you hadn’t, one of the kids would have, but that still would have been the end, no more tomorrow, so it doesn’t really matter.”
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