Warday

There is a loud click, then the pistol cracks. The report echoes off empty buildings. Pigeons rise from eaves, and a flock of guinea fowl burst out of the ruined front of Tape City, leaving feathers around a crackling poster of Paul Newman in the ’86 picture Jury of One.

Through the hubbub of the birds I can hear a dog screaming in agony, and more dogs barking. Many more dogs.

“Okay, come on out and take a look. You know Times Square?”

“I lived in this city for eighteen years,” I say.

“So I don’t have to talk.”

The dogs are in front of Bond’s Disco. They are dark, scruffy things. Two of them are worrying something long and angled like an arm. Our guide keeps her pistol in her hand.

“Many dog packs?”

“Yeah.”

“You love this city, don’t you?”

“I was born a few hundred yards from here, at St. Clare’s. It’s stripped. They stripped the hospitals first. I went to Dalton and then to Stuyvesant. I was in my senior year when it hit.”

“And you stayed on?”

“Most of my class did. We formed a volunteer action group. I’ve been working ever since. I haven’t had a vacation in five years.”

“What’s your group called?”

“At first we were Volunteers to Save the City. Now we’re part of the city government. Officially we’re called the Office of Salvage Management. I’m area manager for Chambers Street to the Battery. My job is to make sure that all salvage in my area is carried out by licensed salvors, and that the withdrawals are duly recorded and entered into the city’s record books.”

A glance at her hands tells me that she doesn’t wear a wedding ring. “Are you married—if you don’t mind me getting personal.”

“I haven’t got time.” She gets back into the car. “Come on. Next stop Sixth Avenue.”

“You don’t call it Avenue of the Americas,” Jim says.

“What’s the point?”

We move slowly down Forty-second. A narrow passage has been cleared between reefs of abandoned cars. Once again she takes out her pistol as she stops the car. There are no dogs about this time, so we get out. Through the distant overgrowth of Bryant Park I can see an immense and familiar shape. My heart almost breaks. There are vines pouring out of the windows of the Main Branch of the New York Public Library. I have the horrible thought that they must be somehow rooting in the books. Rot and mildew and moisture are changing them to a fertile soil.

“Is there any salvage for the library?”

“One-of-a-kind books only.”

It is a kind of lobotomy, the loss of a place like that.

Jim asks another question. “Do you actually live in the city?”

For the first time, she smiles. “I have a house on Eleventh Street. It once belonged to Nikos Triantaffilydis, 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?”