Warday

“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 Willard at the Uris. Another for Virginia Slims, a third for McDonald’s.

Avan from Wadley and Smythe, florists. When I was a gofer on The Owl and the Pussycat, I used to call in producer Ray Stark’s orders. Flowers for Barbra Streisand, the film’s star. Flowers for others of his friends. Spectacular flowers, exotic flowers, perfect flowers.

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. “My name is Ozymandias… round the decay of that colossal wreck.”

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.