Warday

Again she falls silent. The bus roars and bounces. This is not a spectacular road. In places we can hear the hiss of grass scraping the sides of the bus.

“Anything else?” Jim asks.

“Years ago I had a mad love affair. We were going to marry and live together always, all the usual things. When I got back to Scranton I found he had died of the flu. I think we would have been happy together. For a little while, life would have been perfect. I missed that chance.”

She rests her head back against the seat.

“I’m so tired. These days I really need my sleep. When I go to bed I imagine a little warm cottage where I 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.”