Warday

can cuddle up by the fire, sip wine, and be content.”

She says no more. Like most people who live at a very low nutrition level, sleep comes suddenly to her, this porcelain beauty. After a moment Jim touches her cheek, but she does not awaken.

The bus pulls into Poughkeepsie in thin dawn light. When the driver wakes her up, she bustles quickly down the aisle and disappears without a word.

PART FOUR New York

When pennants trail and street-festoons hang from the windows,
When Broadway is entirely given up to foot-passengers and foot-standers, when the mass is densest,
When the facades of the houses are alive with people, when eyes gaze riveted tens of thousands at a time…

—Walt Whitman, “A Broadway Pageant”

The Approach to New York—Ghosts

Monday, October 4, 1993: The Northeast was more beautiful empty than it had been populated. Some of the drama of the old wildness had returned, in the thick foliage that scraped the windows of the train, and in the rioting fields that once were ordered. As we moved into the commuter belt, though, ruin took the place of wildness.

Images from the window of the train: empty suburban stations whose parking lots once glittered with commuters’ BMWs and Buicks; dark doorways and vines everywhere, spreading in the most unlikely places, along streets, up telephone poles, jamming the empty hulk of a bus.

Beneath all the brick and concrete, this land was always fertile.

Green things, full of confidence and ambition, were reasserting themselves everywhere. The effect of all this was much more powerful than the kind of abandonment we are all familiar with, because this was so total, and the Northeast had been so vastly and intricately populated.

The thousands of fragile reminders of human presence intensified the emptiness.

The New York Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area contained nine million people in 1987. The official population is now seven thousand. According to General George Briggs, USA, the Commandant of the New York Military Area, there are roughly twenty thousand illegal inhabitants in the city. Officially, New York is a Red Zone, under martial law with a twenty-four-hour curfew, violators to be shot on sight. But General Briggs, a tall man with narrow gunsights of eyes, said that his men hadn’t ever shot anybody. “There’s been sufficient death here,” he said.

Amtrak goes as far south as White Plains. From there it is possible to take a bus east to Stamford, but there is no public transportation into New York at all.

We arrived at the White Plains station on the Twentieth Century, which we had left in Cleveland for our detour to Pittsburgh.

From the moment we got off the train, we were aware of two things: this was U.S. Army territory, and there was a massive salvage operation going on.

First impressions: blank-eyed kids standing around smoking, wearing uniforms that were threadbare before the war, carrying M-16s the way exhausted majorettes might carry their batons, as if all their magic had been transformed into weight.

It was cloudy, but there were signs of fair weather. During the night it had rained, and the streets of White Plains were shining in the shafts of light that were breaking through the clouds. There was a smell something like creosote in the air. A convoy of salvage trucks roared past on the Bronx River Parkway. There were buses out in front of the station, and our thirty fellow passengers all got into them. Soon quiet descended on the station. A soldier, who had been playing Sunshine’s “Glee” on a harmonica, stopped and began staring at us. He was wearing an MP armband. He hitched up his web belt, unsnapped his holster flap, and came over. He regarded us. His shoulder stripes said he was a staff sergeant. His name tag identified him as Hewitt.

“Can we be of service, Sergeant?” Jim asked, when he did not speak.

“Identification, please.”

“What kind?” I asked. My identification consists of a Texas driver’s license and an ancient MasterCard, unless you count the false California ID.

“Federal. British. Whatever you got.”

Jim showed him his Herald News press card. “We’d like to arrange an interview with General Briggs,” he said.

The young man looked at us. “Okay,” he said, “you’ll find him over at the armory. You know where it is?”

“You’ll have to direct us.”

“We’re goin’ over there ourselves, now that the train’s come in. You can come with us.” He turned to the knot of soldiers lounging nearby. “Okay, guys, excitement’s over. Time to get back to the Tire Palace.”

The Tire Palace?

We rumbled through the streets of White Plains in, of all things, a massive, roaring, turbine-driven armored personnel carrier. “What the hell is this?” I asked. “We could’ve used a few of these in ’Nam.” It was like riding in a safe—massive steel doors, quartz window slits.

“This is the Atomic Army,” Sergeant Hewitt said. “You could blow off a hydrogen bomb right on top of this thing, and you know what’d happen?”

“What?”

“We’d be vaporized.”

We rode on for a few minutes. Sergeant Hewitt pulled the lever that opened the door. Before us was a Gothic building of fairly massive proportions, designed to look like a castle, with towers and parapets and narrow windows set in red brick. Soldiers came and went. The convoy we had seen on the parkway was now parked across the street. Beneath the tarps I could see that the trucks were loaded with rusted steel beams and stacks of aluminum sheathing from buildings. One truck contained nothing but intact windows, each carefully taped and insulated against breakage. A soldier was walking along with a handheld computer, taking inventory.

This scene was my first experience of the work of the famous salvors, who are methodically dismantling Manhattan. Salvage is the latest business in which Great American Fortunes are being made, and the salvors, in their dashing khaki tunics and broad-brimmed hats, were romantic figures, lean men who stood around and gibed the neat officer with the computer.

A helicopter landed on a pad in the small park in front of the armory, disgorging five men in white radiation suits, who began to examine the salvage with geiger counters amid a good bit of derisive laughter. A peacock, standing in the patch of grass in front of the building, gave throat and spread its tail.

“General’s office is the second door to the right,” Hewitt said. “It says ‘Commanding General’ on the door. At least that’s what it said the last time I looked at it.”

Even though I knew you couldn’t see New York from the streets of White Plains, I found myself looking south. The sky revealed nothing.

The moment we entered the armory, we found out why the soldiers called it the Tire Palace. The place reeked of rubber. The central foyer was stacked with tires. There were tires in the hallway.