lowered masonry and I-beams, great steel frames and slabs of granite and tinted glass and wiring, countless right angles, sun glinting off the geometry. After passing through the locks the ferry docked at Battery Park, lurching awkwardly to a stop. Not a person who disembarked could do so without craning his or her head at this miraculous rebuttal to the forces that poisoned dreams, this gobsmackingly contradictory, otherworldly, ingenious masterpiece. Abby’d seen footage of the late New York City, watched movies set in its boroughs, scrutinized cinematic representations of its shrieking subways and museums and trading room floors, but nothing, nothing, nothing could have prepared her for the scope of this majesty. She felt she might die of awe.
A long row of rickety fold-out tables staffed by disabled newmans in wheelchairs processed the newcomers. These were former workers whose limbs had given out, been amputated or lost in accidents. They were, however, still capable of speaking and processing social information—all they needed for that was a brain and a pair of eyeballs. When Abby reached the head of the line, a male newman with a name tag that read “Neal” prompted her to fill out her information on a note card with a pencil stub.
“How long do you expect to visit?” Neal asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe a couple months?”
“Are you interested in staying in any particular neighborhood?”
“Maybe Greenwich Village?”
“Ah, yes, here we are, Abby Fogg. We’ve got a nice nine-hundred-square-foot condo in the Village, fully furnished, with the amenities of a woman in publishing. Her name was Sylvie Yarrow.”
“Works for me.”
“Fantastic. Here’s your orientation packet! Cabs are to your left.” The newman handed Abby a manila folder containing a key to her new apartment, a two-month E-ZPass, some coupons for pizza and dry-cleaning, and a map of the city. Taking a deep breath, Abby stepped into the fractured grid.
The apartment was nothing special but it suited Abby fine. Everything in the place appeared as it had the morning before the city vanished from the face of the earth, the morning of Manhattan’s last scan and backup, from the stone and steel composing the building to the six inches of dental floss curled in the bathroom sink. The scan— involving some really far-out software and a butt-load of satellites—had been performed under quasilegal circumstances by a company called Argus Industries, who’d intended to replicate New York City for a full-immersion gaming environment. The transformation of Bainbridge Island into Manhattan wasn’t so much a matter of building a to-scale model as downloading the backed-up version of the city in which every molecule was accounted for. There’d been some glitches. Abby spotted a few in Sylvie’s apartment right away. A cross section of an incompletely rendered coffee cup sat on the kitchen counter, and the aquarium had been filled with concrete instead of water. A few of the books on the shelves were missing actual words. Everything down to the graffiti and faded posters on the walls was being resurrected by insanely efficient and tireless newman labor, but there were still spots here and there that needed work.
Standing in the bedroom Abby thought this was the closest she’d ever get to living in the era to which she truly belonged.
Abby spent two hours studying the contents of the apartment with an intruder’s giddy concentration. Sylvie Yarrow had been an editor at a publishing company headquartered in midtown. Single, with a taste for Japanese- print clothing that looked to be Abby’s size exactly. Three bookcases dominated the space, bursting with hardbacks. The kitchen table had yielded its surface to manuscripts under consideration, great cursed reams of paper bearing words doomed to obscurity. The kitchen was fully stocked, and apparently Sylvie’d had a thing for olives, there being a dozen varieties preserved in jars in the fridge door. Abby hated olives. These would have to go.
Pictures of Sylvie’s parents.
A framed, signed broadside of John Ashbery’s “Just Walking Around.”
A TV set, a Japanese cat figurine. Birth-control pills.
Abby took a seat on the sofa and spoke to the previous owner. “Even though this is a re-creation of your stuff, I’ll take care of it like it still belongs to you.”
She felt stupid as soon as she said this prayer of thanks or whatever it was. It appeared that Sylvie Yarrow had just stepped out and would return at any moment, that she hadn’t in fact died in a flash hundreds of years before. Miraculously, the clothes in the closet still smelled like a woman.
The phone rang. A chunky black thing connected to the kitchen wall, with a coiled cord running from the receiver to the box. After the sixth ring Abby picked up and said hello.
A man’s voice coughed out a greeting and said Sylvie’s name like a question.
Abby replied, “No, I mean, yes, this is her apartment.”
“Right, right. I know you’re not Sylvie. But her apartment is occupied now, huh?”
“Yeah, I guess. Who is this?”
“Sorry, I’m Bertrand. I was Sylvie’s boyfriend before the FUS.”
“What do you mean?”
“Yes, no, I mean I’m not really Bertrand. But I landed Bertrand’s apartment up here on West Sixty-third. My name’s actually Gavin? I got here last month? I’ve been going through Bertrand’s stuff, trying to figure out who he was, who he knew, what kinds of things he did. I’m wearing his clothes. He’s got a pretty sweet apartment. How’s yours?”
“Mine’s fine.”
“Bertrand was some kind of industrial designer. Designed stuff like computer printers and cell-phone cases. I’ve got a picture of him and Sylvie right here. You’re cute. I mean she was.”
Abby touched a picture of Sylvie and Bertrand magneted to the fridge. Even though Gavin was talking about someone else, Abby still protectively folded her arms over her chest as if Bertrand/Gavin was bringing secrets of her own out into the open.
“Bertrand was a bald guy?” Abby said, “Kind of tall? Black-frame glasses?”
“That was me all right,” Gavin said.
“I thought you were Gavin.”
“Right, right. It’s tricky. You know, a month ago there was me—Gavin—and there was Bertrand, and we were two separate people. I mean,
Gavin reminded Abby of old boyfriends, guys of limited intelligence and half-baked ambitions. Guys who got too excited about plans that never came to fruition. College sports enthusiasts. “Like we’re wearing ghosts,” she said.
“Exactly,” Gavin said. “Can I trust you with something? As someone representing the girlfriend of the guy I’m representing?”
“Sure, okay.”
“I think I’m having Bertrand’s dreams. I dreamed about you two nights ago. In the dream you were Sylvie but your voice was exactly the same as your voice right now. I thought I could figure out what I was supposed to do with my life in this city. But it got hijacked by Bertrand’s life. I’m eating different foods. I listen to strange old German electronic music. I make references to books I’ve never even read.”
Abby nodded. “This city is a kind of afterlife.”
None of this belonged to her. Not the asphalt and billboards she could see from the window, not the furnishings of this one-woman apartment. It was as though she had come into possession of an artifact she had no idea how to protect. Stepping from the building into the street she inhaled to the point of flattening her nostrils and swallowed particles of dust from the infancy of construction. Two cabbies conducted a shouting match in a long- extinct African tongue. She picked a direction—uptown—and started walking. Everywhere these false-looking humanoid figures with Manga features and plastic hair trotted out of buildings and conveyed themselves earnestly toward new projects. Here and there empty spots where buildings were supposed to go gaped like horrible wounds.
