Warday

New York, New York

My first glimpse of it shocks me, not because it seems different but because it doesn’t. I remember this skyline. From the back of an army truck bouncing down the Saw Mill River Parkway it gleams as it has always gleamed, tall and imperial and elegant. I can pick out the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center, the slanting roof of the Citicorp Center.

But then I notice an enormous difference. It is in my ability to see details. As it was when we arrived in White Plains yesterday, the air this morning is absolutely clear, more so than I have ever seen it in New York. I can make out the hollows of windows and see long black scars on the Gulf and Western Building. Then I realize that the Empire State Building has no antenna, and that makes me huddle into my jacket.

Jim stands beside me, his feet wide, his hands gripping the rail that runs along the back of the truck cab. He is silent, his careful eyes on the horizon.

We have been processed by the army bureaucracy in White Plains, and now carry mimeographed papers that, among other things, give us the right to be in Manhattan without risking arrest or being “shot on sight.” I look at the kids in the truck with me—eighteen , seventeen, some even younger. They aren’t very fierce, and I believe General Briggs’s claim that nobody has ever actually been executed here. These kids are not soldiers in the prewar sense of the word. They are the uniformed custodians of a great, shattered treasure house.

I suspect that these soldiers might be obsolete, and they just might sense this also. Perhaps that is why they have chosen to protect empty places—the San Antonio and Washington perimeters, this ruined city.

Maybe the rivalry between the United States and the USSR went on so long because both sides knew that without it the central governments were as unneeded as they were unwanted.

So much of the ferment Jim and I have seen in our travels relates to this question of centrality. Perhaps there is a limit to the size of human states, beyond which they become too inflexible and inefficient to last very long.

We arrive at the rusting toll plaza that marks the entrance to the Henry Hudson Parkway. The truck stops. A spit-and-polish MP master sergeant walks to the back, his helmet gleaming in the morning light.

“Lay ’em out, you guys.” The men start handing over their Army ID cards. The master sergeant looks at each one, comparing it to the face of the man who handed it to him.

Jim and I give him our mimeographed sheets. He studies them both. “We’ll have to verify these. Come over to the command post, please.” I feel a surge of resentment, quell it quickly. His right hand rests ever so lightly on the butt of his .45. The CP is a tiny prefabricated building just off the road.

He hands the sheets to another spit-and-polish soldier, this one a second lieutenant. “Have a seat, gentlemen,” the close-cropped boy says in a piping voice. “I’ll just make a quick phone call.” He picks up a brown telephone and speaks into it, reading off the serial numbers of our documents. After a moment more he puts the receiver down. “Now if you’ll just countersign on the first line,” he says. I sign. He spends a long time comparing my new signature with the old one. “Your S is a bit off, but I suppose it’s okay.”

He hands me my document, then checks Jim’s. His J is the source of another mild complaint. Once these documents are countersigned twice, they’re worthless—an assurance that they won’t be reused. We are allowed one entrance to the city and one exit from it, and no more.

General Briggs put it this way: “You will remain with your designated guide. You will not contact anyone else you might encounter there. For your own safety, you will not remain overnight”

We proceed. Soon we can see the George Washington Bridge looming over the sparkling Hudson, and the red tile roofs of the Cloisters. There isn’t a boat on the river, and the bridge is empty.

The only sound is the roar of our truck. I wonder about the Cloisters as we pass beneath the cliffs of Fort Tryon Park. I believe that I might have first kissed Anne in the herb garden there.

Perhaps not, but that’s where I fell in love with her. It could easily have been the innocence of her enthusiasm for the tapestries that did it. I wonder about them. Were they saved, or do they lie now in heaps on the floor, providing nesting places for rats and mice?