It is shatteringly loud. The regulators are blowing their whistles, directing foot traffic, and in the distance I can hear drumbeats and chanting. The demonstration doesn’t officially start for another two hours, but even now I think I can make out the rhythm of the DFA’s chant: In numbers there is safety and for nothing let us want…
We move north slowly, penned in on all sides, in the endless, deep chasms between the buildings. People have gathered on some of the balconies to watch. I see hundreds and hundreds of waving white banners, signs of support for the DFA—and just a few emerald-colored ones, signs of opposition.
“Lena!” I turn around. Tack shoves his way through the mass of people, presses an umbrella into my hand. “It’s supposed to rain later.”
The sky is a perfect pale blue and streaked with the thinnest clouds, like bare white tendrils of hair. “I don’t think—,” I start to say, but he interrupts me.
“Just take it,” he says. “Trust me.”
“Thanks.” I try to sound grateful. It’s rare for Tack to be this thoughtful.
He hesitates, chewing on the corner of his lip. I’ve seen him do that when he’s working on a puzzle at the apartment and can’t quite get all the pieces aligned. I think he’s about to say something else—give me advice—but at the last second he just says, “I need to catch up with Rebecca.” He stutters, just barely, over Raven’s official name.
“Okay.” We’ve already lost sight of her. I go to wrestle the umbrella into my backpack—getting dirty looks from the people around me, since there’s barely room to breathe, much less maneuver the bag from my back—when it suddenly occurs to me that we haven’t made a plan for after the demonstration. I don’t know where I’m supposed to meet Raven and Tack.
“Hey—” I look up, but Tack has already gone. All the faces around me are unfamiliar; I’m entirely surrounded by strangers. I turn a full circle and feel a sharp jab in the ribs. A regulator has reached out and is prodding me forward with his nightstick.
“You’re holding everybody up,” he says flatly. “Move it.”
My chest is full of butterflies. I tell myself to breathe. There’s nothing to worry about. It’s just like going to a DFA meeting, but bigger.
At 38th Street we pass the barricades, where we have to wait in line and get patted down and searched by police officers carrying wands. They check our necks, too—the uncureds will be in their own special segregated section of the demonstration—and scan our IDs, though fortunately, they don’t call everything into SVS, the Secure Validation System. Even so, it takes me an hour to make it through. Beyond the security barricades, volunteers are distributing antibacterial wipes: small white packages printed with the DFA’s logo.
CLEANLINESS IS NEXT TO GODLINESS. SECURITY IS IN THE DETAILS. HAPPINESS IS IN THE METHOD.
I allow a silver-haired woman to press a package into my hand.
And then, finally, I’ve arrived. The drums are furiously loud here, and the chanting a rolling constant, like the sound of waves crashing on the shore.
Once I saw a photo of Times Square: before the cure, before all the borders were closed off. Tack found it near Salvage, a homestead in New Jersey, just across the river from New York. We took refuge there while we were waiting for our forged papers to arrive. One day Tack found a whole photo album, perfectly intact, buried under a pile of limestone and charred timber. In the evenings, I would flip through it and pretend that these photographs—this life of friends and boyfriends and squinting, laughing sunshine shots—were mine.
Times Square looks very different now than it did then. As I move forward in the crowd, my breath catches in my throat.
A towering raised platform, a dais, has been built at one end of the enormous open plaza, underneath a billboard larger than any I have seen in my life. It is plastered all over with signs for the DFA: red and white squares, fluttering lightly in the wind.
The Unified Church of Religion and Science has colonized one billboard and marked it huge with its primary symbol: a giant hand cupping a molecule of hydrogen. The other signs—and there are dozens of them, gigantic, bleached-white walls—are all faded to illegibility, so it’s impossible to tell what they once advertised. On one of them I think I can make out the ghostly imprint of a smile.
And of course, all the lights are dead.
The photograph I saw of Times Square was taken at night, but it could have been high noon: I’ve never seen so many lights in my life, could never even have imagined them. Lights blazing, glittering, lit up in crazy colors that made me think of those spots that float across your vision after you’ve accidentally looked directly at the sun.