Warday

The government men stood on the pier in their orange Uncle Sam rad suits and took potshots at the boats that were heading downriver instead of across to Manhattan. They just did it because they were pissed off. They didn’t try to hurt anybody.

You think of New York as being, like, empty in those days.

Half burned out and empty and glowing like a goddamn hot cow.

It’s empty now. But then it was still full of people. Manhattan, anyway. Part of the Bronx. There were taxis running. Buses. The old stuff that hadn’t been knocked out by EMP. There were cops all over the place. People were starin’ at our rad suits. In those first couple of years, they’d condemn hot spots until they could be cleaned up, and people would just move to another building for a while.

That first night in New York I went to see You We the Top and then we sat around at a place this guy knew, called the Monkey Bar, where this female impersonator sang and played the piano. A can of corned-beef hash was eighty dollars paper on the menu, so we decide, we’ll share one can between ten of us. We’d come up a few bucks short, but they’d live with it, we figured. I remember that stuff to this day. God, it tasted good. One small mouthful, but it was the first meat I’d had in I don’t know how long. The Monkey Bar, and that guy all dolled up singin’ “Memories of You,” and eating Armour Star corned-beef hash off expensive hotel china. Holy God.

We slept in the basement of the B. Dal ton bookstore on Fifth Avenue. The Plaza Hotel and the old Gotham had teamed up and made the world’s fanciest dormitory in there. You couldn’t sleep above ground; you might get a dusting if the wind came from the east across the boroughs that did get hit. We were broke, but they let us in anyway. Salvors on their way downtown had credit. They figured we’d be back through, and God knows what we’d have with us.

Salvors were taking the treasures of the world out of that city.

That was the year Salvage Team Victor, Inc., took out seventeen hundred pounds of gold, all assayed and ready to go, from the vault of the Republic National Bank. So when people saw that our paper said One Chase Manhattan Plaza on it, they just said, “When you’re on your way back, remember who gave you a free bed.”

I stayed in my rad suit the whole time. I was scared to death.

Those people were all nuts in New York. There were people on the streets with the radiation trembles. People doing heaves right in the middle of everything. But they were staying put. There were actually only about a quarter of a million who stayed. But that’s still a lot of people. They were the total New Yorkers, the ones who just couldn’t imagine themselves anywhere else.

You still had the tail end of the long fires then, so the whole place was full of smoke all the time. Smelled sort of like a mattress fire, or burning hair, when the wind came across the East River.

And you wondered, am I gonna inhale a particle or two? Maybe a little cesium is gonna get in my mask, or a little strontium 90.

Well, when we got to Forty-second Street, there was this barrier made of plywood, with skulls and crossbones stenciled on it. It went right down the middle of the street. You crossed it and there was nobody. They were living in the northern half of Manhattan and in the Bronx. The hits in Queens and Brooklyn had dusted lower Manhattan with the dirty stuff. I remember we went through the barrier. We tried to laugh it off. Nowadays the problem is more uptown, from the chemical spills to the north. But back then it was radiation. Every step we took, the geiger burped some more.

By Thirty-fourth Street it was going continuously.

We were all set to walk to Wall Street when up comes the god-damnedest thing—a city bus all covered with black tarp. Comes right up the middle of Fifth Avenue, picking its way around the abandoned cars. They’ve been pulled here and there to make a path. It’s slow going, but the bus is making it. The side streets were solid cars in those days, and so were all the avenues except Fifth and part of Sixth, and Broadway below Canal.

Anyway, it’s an ancient jalopy of a bus and the sign says “Special.” So we get in. The driver’s in one of those ancient city-issue rad suits, the olive drab ones from the civil defense stores that were put aside in the fifties. They weighed about a hundred pounds. He’s slumped over the goddamn wheel. So what happens?

We get on the bus and he says, “Hey, don’t you guys know you’re supposed to pay a fare?” The guy is at the end of the world and he wants a fare. It’s a buck seventy-five each. Nobody had thought about deflation yet. We don’t have the money, but before we can give him the bad news this jerk says, real rude, “You gotta have exact change. I’m not allowed to make change.”