In those days, the city was at fever pitch, as if everyone could feel the storm coming, the air electric, crackling with potential. Her parents thought it demented, but to her it seemed the sanest and most logical course: if the world was on fire, you might as well burn bright. Late nights that turned into early mornings; just enough money to buy coffee wherever she happened to end up. Walking home in the dawn hours to save cab fare, watching the city shift from gray to gold as the sun rose. She went to parties, danced, kissed strangers just to see what would happen. Often they’d end up in someone’s bed—hers, theirs, someone else’s. Beautiful men. Beautiful women. The world, at that time, was full of them, all of them furiously incandescent like dying stars.
Later, when she thought of that time she would picture a nightclub, the air thick and black and steaming around her. Bodies jostling, slick with sweat. Flecks of light circling the room, fragments of illumination: an eye, a lip, a hand, a breast. The feeling of dissolving into a crowd, a shapeless sweaty pulsating thing, all of them moving separately to the same beat, bound together by the moment. Above their heads: bright lights that would flick on when the night was done, if they hadn’t fled yet. Below their dancing feet: the floor grown sticky with spilled liquor. There was no curfew yet.
* * *
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It started slowly at first, the way most things did. She’d been a junior. Shops began to shutter, windows soaped over from within. Here and there at first, like cavities in teeth, and suddenly whole blocks were empty, all over the country. The rents too high, the customers too few. More panhandlers, rattling coins in paper cups plucked from trash cans, more signs markered on scraps of cardboard. family of 5. lost my job. anything helps. Everything cost more and everyone had less to spend. Clothing stores marked down their sweaters—ten percent off, twenty, forty-five, and still they dangled on the racks. No one even tried them on. No one had the money, or the time, anymore. One in ten unemployed, the statistics ran. Then: one in five. People began to lose their cars, then their homes. People began to lose their patience.
The restaurant where Margaret worked shut down: forty-five years in business, but no one came in anymore except the men who ordered coffee and lingered in the corner booths, sipping it long after it grew cold. Her boss wept as he pulled the grate across the door; he’d played behind the counter as a boy. When she asked other restaurants if they were hiring, some of them laughed. Some of them simply shook their heads. One manager told her, gently, to go home. It’s going to get worse, he said, before it gets better. If it gets better. He had a daughter about her age who had just lost her job, too.
They would never fully agree, the economists, on what had caused it: some would say it was just an unfortunate cycle, that these things happened periodically—like cicadas, or plagues. Some would blame speculation, or inflation, or a lack of consumer confidence—though what might have caused those would never be clear. In time, many would dredge up old lists of rivalries, searching for someone to blame; they would settle, in a few years, on China, that perilous, perpetual yellow menace. Seeing its sabotage behind every stumble and fracture of the Crisis. But at first all they agreed on was this: it was the worst crisis since the 1980s, then since the Depression, and then they stopped making comparisons.
Those who’d been at the top locked their doors, hunkered down to wait it out. As stores closed, they ordered from afar, paying the rising prices. Those who’d been comfortable tightened their belts, began cutting coupons, cutting back, cutting down on everything they could—no more travel, no more leisure, only less, less, less. Those who’d just barely stretched a paycheck from one Friday to the next stumbled down a steep staircase of losses: first their jobs, then their leases, then their pride. All across the country, people couldn’t make rent; by then evictions were happening daily. The pictures were everywhere: furniture dumped unceremoniously on the sidewalk, families huddling curbside on their couches, passersby gawking as the landlords changed the locks. Foreclosures rippled block to block until swaths of neighborhoods were deserted.
A correction, the news called it at first, as if all that time when people had mostly gotten by, had mostly been fed and housed, had been a mistake; as if things were getting better, instead of the opposite. In Houston, the lines at food banks stretched for blocks; in Sacramento, you’d wait for hours and come away with a can of beans, a few boxes of crackers. In Boston, people dozed in the pews of churches, waiting out the night, and in the morning there were more outside.
Soon there were protests in the streets. Strikes. Marches that were peaceful. Marches with guns. Windows smashed, things seized or set aflame: anger and need made manifest and tangible. Police in full battle gear. All across the country, the same story repeating, just at different scales. In New York, Margaret watched the city begin to empty around her. The ones with houses and families elsewhere sought shelter with them, sharing expenses, making do. The ones who didn’t disappeared in other ways: hiding, or holed up, or dead. You could hear birdsong, suddenly, between the pillars of buildings. The economic crisis, the newspapers began to call it, and then, as it became more than economic, as people began to lose their confidence, their sense of purpose, the willingness to wake up in the morning, their ability to keep trying, their optimism that something could be different, their memory that anything had ever been different, their hope that anything would ever improve—other phrases took hold. Our ongoing national crisis, the headlines kept saying, and soon, economizing even in words: the Crisis. The capital C the only extravagance still allowed.
At the college, classes were postponed, then cancelled. The dorm grew quieter and quieter as parents called children back to the safety of their homes. From Margaret’s parents, somber updates: furloughs at the factory, shortages at the stores. I’m okay, Margaret told her parents, I’m staying, everything’s fine, don’t worry about me. Be careful. I love you. Then, after hanging up the phone, she scoured the hallways, gleaning what she could from bags of trash abandoned on the way out. Clothing and too-big shoes, which she took anyway. Blankets and books, half-eaten packages of cookies. Most of the rooms were shut, their message boards wiped bare, except for one, a scrawl of black: see you on the other side. She touched her finger to the letters. Permanent.
Three weeks later, she ran into another person in the halls for the first time: Domi. They’d had a class together, back when there still were classes: Marxism and 20th-Century Literature. Chic and worldly Domi, perfect streaks of eyeliner winging their way toward the sky. Rhymes with show me, she’d said, one brow arched. Now, without makeup, her eyes looked bigger, younger. More rabbit than hawk.
Didn’t think anyone else was crazy enough to still be here, Domi said. Come on. Time to go.
Domi had an ex who had a girlfriend who had a sister with a two-bed in Dumbo. Six of them squeezed into it now: the sister and her boyfriend in one room, the ex and his new girl in another, Domi on the couch and Margaret in a sleeping bag on the living room floor. The room so small that, when they held out their arms in the dark, their fingers intertwined.
* * *
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In the darkened brownstone, she tells Bird these things as she unwinds wire from the spool, strips the red plastic away to reveal gleaming copper marrow. There is a deftness to her work, a precision, like watching a clockmaker set each gear into place. Bird sits, knees hugged to chest, mesmerized: by her story, by her hands. Outside the blackened windows, it is midmorning, the Crisis is long over, the city pulses and churns, but inside it is eerily quiet in the glow of the single lamp. The two of them together in the soundless bubble, listening.
* * *