Warday

It was the sky over Queens and Brooklyn that enforced the notion of a nuclear bomb. Through the dusty air I could see ash-black clouds shot through with long red flames. These clouds were immense. They stretched up and up until they were lost in their own expanding billows. There was no impression of a mushroom cloud, but I knew that was what it was, a mushroom cloud seen so close that it didn’t look like a mushroom. The coldest, most awful dread I have ever known came upon me then.

I knew it for certain: a nuclear device had been exploded at the eastern edge of the city. I thought, My God, the lives. Later it was estimated that a million people had died in the instant of the explosion. Hundreds of thousands more were dying right now.

I was walking on a grate above the Fourteenth Street subway station when a blast of dank, dirty air from below practically blew me off my feet. It was accompanied by the most horrible screaming I have ever heard, then the nasty bellow of water. Though nobody knew it then, the tidal wave caused by the bombs that had detonated at sea had arrived and was filling the subway system.

Those screams still come to me in the night.

A man came up out of the station, wet from head to foot, his right arm dangling. “Agua,” he kept saying, “agua!” Then he made a bleating noise and staggered off into the swaying crowds.

My mind said: Grace Church School, Grace Church School, Grace Church School. I ran.

My greatest fear was fire.

I found the school closed and locked. There were lots of broken windows, but the lower floors were barred. I shouted and the Latin teacher opened the front door for me. Inside, the kids were sitting quietly in the great hall with their teachers.

“What’s going on?” Mr. Lewis asked me.

“I think we’ve been hit by an atomic bomb,” I replied.

He nodded. “We all think that.”

I went to my boy. He jumped up and flew into my arms, and then started screaming because he saw all the blood on my back.

The school nurse came over to tend the wound. She said I needed at least five stitches. But what could we do? I ended up with a brushing of Betadine and a bandage.

The phones weren’t working, so I couldn’t call Anne. It was then that I made the decision that saved my life.

I didn’t know it at the time, but like all people caught outside during the initial stages of the disaster, I had received a radiation dose. If I had gone out even another fifteen minutes at the height of the fallout period, I would have quickly dosed red and then lethaled. What kept me from doing so was my belief that my wife’s instinct would also be to come to the school and I was more likely to find her by waiting than by searching.

Not ten minutes later she appeared. She was wearing my felt hat and carrying an umbrella. I will never forget how it felt to kiss her at that moment, to feel her in my arms. And then Andrew said, “Let’s have a family hug.” We held each other, and I told them both what I thought had happened.

Anne is a practical person. She had no idea what had happened—in fact, her theory was that a volcano had erupted—but she suspected that in any case we might get hungry, so she’d brought a box of freeze-dried food we had put aside years ago for a camping trip and never used. She’d also brought a little news of home: the power was out, the radio and TV were dead, the phones weren’t working, and there was hardly any water pressure. Every window in the apartment was broken. The dishwasher was stopped on rinse and the clothes washer on spin. She reminded me that I had the video recorder set to tape a movie on HBO at five o’clock, and the power failure was going to mean that I would miss it.

Other parents were now arriving at the school. The Head moved the children into the gym, which had no windows, and we decided to make that a shelter for all the families who wanted to stay. Anne and I went to the locker room and took long showers.

Some of the parents who did not take this precaution died in days.

Others were unaffected. For the most part it depended on how long they had been outside, and whether or not they had been shielded from the initial burst of gamma rays from the blast. We had the church right there, of course, attached to the school. Grace is probably New York City’s most beautiful church, and it served us well in the next few days. It could be reached from the school without going outside. While the city died, we prayed there. At that time I wondered if humanity would prevail. Despite what was happening, I found myself trusting the goodness in us more than hating the violence. I still feel that way.

Of that night there remains with me the memory of a particular noise: footsteps on pavement. It was persistent thunder, and mixed with the cries of the hurt and desolate, it defined those hours.