the Greek shipping magnate.” Her smile widens. “I commandeered it for special purposes. We have that authority.”
As she speaks I hear a faint but very familiar sound. “Surely that’s not the subway?”
“You better believe it.” She glances at her watch. “That’ll be the 9:00 A.M. Westsider. It runs on the old D line from 145th Street to Grand. A lot of salvors live up in Washington Heights and commute into the salvage areas.”
“I thought the subway was flooded on Warday.”
“Below Twenty-third. It drained away over the six months after Warday. There are two working lines, the Westsider and the Eastsider. Each runs a three-car train. There are three morning and three afternoon runs, and one at noon. At nine-thirty the Westsider will be back.”
Suddenly Jim curses and slaps furiously at his head. “A bird! It flew in my hair.”
“It’s probably hunting for nesting materials. They don’t see enough people to worry about hands. It thought you were a nice hairy dog.”
I smell a faint tang of diesel smoke rising from the subway grating. I want to ask Jenny Bell if we can ride on that subway, if we can go down to the Village, to my old neighborhood. My chest is tight. Until now I haven’t realized just how much it means to me.
Jenny has opened up a little, but her steel shell is just waiting to snap closed again. This matter will have to be approached very carefully. “You live on Eleventh Street. That means that the Village is—”
“It’s almost a countryside down there. Fires leveled most of the West Village, and now everything’s covered with green. I like it. I like the look of it. And I like the sound of the wind in the ruins.”
I think of 515 West Broadway, where Anne and I raised Andrew, and had some very happy years. I knew everybody in that building—there were only fourteen apartments—but I lost track of them all. We left every single thing we owned at 515.
This is an entire city of haunted houses, rows and rows and towers and towers, softly crumbling into obscurity.
“Can we go down to the Village on the subway?”
“We’d have to go over to Grand Central. The nine-thirty Westsider is an uptown train. The Eastsider’s downtown. They’re staggered like that.” She gets in the car and starts it. Soon we are once again moving along the cleared path in the center of Forty-second Street. The silence in the car is split by a loud crash and a lingering roar somewhere off to the left. “Masonry falling,” Jenny says.
“The Facade Law’s unenforceable without any owners. And we haven’t got the manpower to identify all the cracked walls. We just have to let it go.”
I wonder if there were civil servants like Jenny Bell in ancient Rome—smart, tough people managing the death of their city.
The world has always had a great city, one place where all races and occupations met—a rich, dangerous place where the best men and women make themselves fabulous and the worst come to unravel them. First the World City inhabited Ur. A thousand years later it took its bells and moved to Babylon, then briefly to Athens, then to Alexandria, then to Rome. In Rome it lingered and made legends. Then the site was Constantinople, later Paris. It remained Paris for three hundred years, until, like all before it, the City of Light became too ripe, too perfect, and wars and fortune passed the jewel to London. Sometime between the first two world wars, the treasured office of man’s great city came to New York.
I lived in its evening, when the sorrow was already painted on the walls. The World City has left America altogether. I don’t know if the party has settled yet, in Tokyo or perhaps back in London.
A squirrel sits on some vine-covered stones that have long ago fallen from 500 Fifth Avenue. It is eating some sort of nut. The trees in Bryant Park, I realize, are swarming with creatures. There are so many birds that their sound is a roar. They rise in a cloud as the car passes, and the squirrels leap from limb to limb. A pack of dogs laze in the morning sun at the corner of Fifth and Forty-second. They pant at us, their eyes full of lusty interest.
We stop at the corner of Vanderbilt and Forty-second, across the street from Grand Central.
Here there is little foliage and the frozen, rusting traffic is solid the other side of Vanderbilt. I can see why the street hasn’t been cleared further: there are at least thirty buses between here and Lexington. They stand silent, motionless, amid the Hondas and the Buicks and the yellow cabs and the vans. Details: A cab from the Valpin Cab Company, its windows rolled up, doors neatly locked. The inside is thinly filmed with gray.
Signs on a bus: an ad for the musical
Avan from Wadley and Smythe, florists. When I was a gofer on
An Interdec Data Transfer truck with a notice painted on the door: “Contains no valuables. Only bookkeeping records.” How funny, considering what happens when the bookkeeping records are erased.
I could continue this list for twenty pages. We pick our way across not to Grand Central but to the subway entrance in the old Bowery Savings Building.
“I’d like to see Grand Central,” Jim says.
“Structurally unsound. Our voices could be what makes the roof cave in. Sometime soon, it’s gonna go.”
We follow her into the dank, swamp-stinking blackness of the subway station. Her flashlight provides the bare minimum illumination we need.
We descend into a maw, past encrusted turnstiles and across muck-slicked floors. The sound of dripping water echoes everywhere.
“You’ve gotta understand that the water table’s been rising in Manhattan,” Jenny says. I wonder about the structural soundness of the steel girders that support these tunnels.
I am in a very strange state because of the difference between what is here and what I remember. These tunnels are weird and terrible, dissolving in the water. It’s only a matter of time before they cave in.
To me there was something eternal about Manhattan. But it isn’t even close to that now. It’s flimsy.
I realize that I’d always imagined it was waiting for us to come home, that it was the same as before, except empty. I had forgotten that even this most human of places belongs, in the end, to nature.
My mind turns with half-remembered poetry. “
Jenny’s flashlight hardly illuminates the long, echoing cavern.
Soon, though, a flickering yellow glow starts up in the tunnel, and we hear a heart breakingly familiar sound. Any New Yorker knows the noise of subway cars coming down the tracks.
As the light draws closer, the rattling of the cars is joined by the high bellow of a great engine. This subway is drawn by one of the old diesel work engines that the MTA used to haul disabled cars off dead tracks.
We are illuminated by its powerful headlamp. As the train enters the station it gives off loud blasts from its horn. “Shave and a haircut, two bits.”
Brakes squeal and the thing stops. Diesel fumes are bellowing around us. “Hiva, Jenny,” the driver shouts from his cab. “Where to?”
“Bleeeker,” she shouts back.
The doors on the cars that this train hauls are permanently fixed open. Inside, the cars are lit by gas lanterns hung from the ceiling ventilators. “Hey, Jenny,” shouts a huge man in a filthy radiation suit, “who the hell… whatcha got here,
“They’re reporters. They want to do a story on the Big Apple.”
“The core or the damn seeds?” He laughs. “You stick with me, you s’uvs. You’ll see a hell of a salvage We’re takin’ out five tons of copper wire a day.” He extends a huge hand as the train lurches off. “I’m Morgan Moore. I de-build buildings.” He roars with laughter. He is an incredibly wrinkled man, maybe fifty, his eyes glimmering like dark animal eyes in the light of the swaying lamp.
“You look so goddamn clean, you must be from Lousy Angeles. Am I right?”
“We’re from the Dallas
“Whar’s yer hats, cowpokes?” Morgan Moore cries amid general laughter. “Y’all cain’t be Texas boys without
