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The sister with the apartment still had a job, one of the few that did. She worked for the mayor, taking calls, trying to match people with the services they needed. What people needed was rent, meals, medicine. Reassurance and calm. What she had to offer was sympathy, a promise to pass their concerns along. Another number they could try. Sometimes broken bricks came through the office windows; other days, bullets. Soon the desks huddled at the centers of the rooms. Her boyfriend was a security guard in an empty skyscraper in Midtown, once so busy there were three banks of elevators: one for the lower half, one for the upper, one an express straight to the top. Now everyone had been sent home—furloughed or fired outright—and he circled the lobby beneath eighty-one floors of abandoned rooms. There were computers up there, ergonomic desk chairs, couches of tobacco-hued leather. Those who had sat in them no longer had access to the building, and those who owned them were in their houses on Long Island, in Connecticut, in Key West, waiting for the Crisis to abate. One day, when no one had any money and they were all hungry, the boyfriend snuck upstairs, filched a laptop, sold it, and brought home nine overstuffed plastic bags of groceries so heavy they cut rings into his hands. They’d eaten for two weeks off that.
Domi’s ex and his new girlfriend took odd jobs where they could: boarding up the windows of businesses gone bust, loading crates onto trucks for those leaving the city. He was a stocky, burly guy, bald by choice; his new girl was sandy haired and wiry and quick, both of them alert to opportunities. A warehouse in Queens closed down and they’d celebrated: nearly a month of pay loading pallet after pallet onto a cargo ship, until it sailed away—back to Taiwan or possibly Korea, none of them knew where, just away—and the warehouse stood empty and echoing, shafts of sunlight slicing down through dusty air. When they couldn’t find work they scavenged, combing the streets, collecting cans to sell for scrap, anything useful they could repurpose. They visited the rich neighborhoods where the garbage held treasures, the owners watching them from behind double-paned windows above as if they were crows picking carrion. Once they’d spotted a man in Park Slope being carted out on a stretcher, draped with a white sheet. His brownstone, for the moment, left unguarded. After dark, they’d come back and crept in. The furniture and clothes were all gone already, but they’d stripped yards of copper pipe and wires from the walls, and the girlfriend found a watch—a small silver bangle of a thing, still ticking, engraved To A from C—which she’d buckled onto her wrist before they vanished into the night with their haul. None of them felt guilt, at least not then. Things could sit unused and wasted or they could be turned into heat, a full belly, a night spent tipsy and giddy as they all waited for either the Crisis or the world to end. An easy choice to make.
As for Domi and Margaret: they became messengers. Cycling through the city, down half-empty streets, in the unnerving quiet of a half-deserted Manhattan. It was cheaper than mailing things, and the post office was struggling—fewer funds, carriers laid off, gas exorbitant, packages stolen right off the truck—and for three dollars a biker would get it there in an hour. Margaret went first: one morning she’d spotted a bike propped against a stoop, and when it was still there that evening, unchained, she took it without regret. A fleet of messengers crisscrossed the city, and she recognized their faces, learned their names as their paths overlapped. A few weeks later, when they found another bike, Domi joined them, too.
At night, parts of town turned rough. Men out of work sat in the park, burning their last few dollars on a fifth of whiskey, and by evening they grew resentful and belligerent. Women learned the hard way to avoid them. Since childhood, Margaret had mastered how to check over her shoulder, to gauge risk from a gesture, to fight if she could not flee. Domi, who’d grown up in Westport with her father—summer house, riding lessons, in-ground pool—was less prepared. Sometimes she cried out in her sleep, hands flying to shield her face, as if someone were trying to gouge out her eyes. Margaret climbed up beside her, held her tight, stroked her hair, and Domi stilled and quieted. In the mornings, the few stores stubbornly clinging to life might find their windows smashed, shelves stripped bare, alarm bell ringing ferociously, though no one had answered the call. Some people tried not to go out at all, and soon Margaret was running errands and delivering messages, too. Five dollars a run, then ten, though for those in need, she would do it for one. Medicine from the drugstore, a bag of groceries. Tampons, batteries. Candles. Liquor. All the things people needed to survive another day. She folded the dollar bills they gave her and tucked them into the cups of her bra; at the end of the night, back in the apartment, she counted them, soft as damp felt with her sweat, and smoothed them out again. By then she wasn’t thinking about poetry at all.
You got used to it, after a while: all the new rules the city and the governor imposed, trying to keep order—when you could go out, when you had to stay in, how many people could gather at one time: few, then fewer. Sometimes waves of sickness rippled over the city, then the state: not enough people at work to pay hospital bills, not enough doctors or medicine anyway, just referrals for Advil from the drugstore on the corner, or something stiffer from the liquor store next door. Lines everywhere, everything in short supply except anger, and fear, and grief. Tents clustered like toadstools at the feet of overpasses and bridges. Based on the news, it was the same everywhere. You got used to waiting, to the men who squatted on sidewalks, holding signs scrawled on cardboard: anything helps. You learned to keep watch on them without meeting their eyes, to skirt them at a distance. Your ears pricked for the sounds of shouting, the high jangle of breaking glass; even before you recognized it, your feet would already be turning you down another street, steering you safely around. You got used to sandwiches of whatever you had—ketchup, mayonnaise, salt, whatever made bread palatable enough to choke down—to rebrewing coffee grounds, once, twice, sometimes for a whole week if you needed; even mostly water, it was something to keep you warm. You got used to not speaking to people on the street, to edging past them, both of you on your way to somewhere else, and to the sirens that flared and then quieted like an infant’s stifled cry. After a while you stopped wondering where they were headed, stopped thinking about whose need they were going off to serve. Somewhere out there, you knew, wealthy people were barricaded in their fortresses, fed and warm, if not happy, but soon you stopped thinking of them. You stopped thinking about other people at all. You got used to that, too, eventually, just as you got used to people disappearing: gone back home, gone elsewhere hoping for better, sometimes simply gone.
What you couldn’t get used to—what she never got used to—was the quiet. In Times Square the lights changed red to green and back again and sometimes not a car went by. Overhead the gulls screamed and dove toward the empty harbor. When she spoke to her parents it was brief, a few minutes at a time; service was spotty and minutes were expensive and all they needed to know, really, was that the other was still alive. Sometimes she would ride through Central Park and see not a single person, not on the footpaths, not on the lake, no sign of a single other human except the tents that dotted the Sheep Meadow, springing up overnight, disappearing just as quickly when word of police sweeps came. In the silence between things there was too much time to dwell and no matter how fast she pedaled, she couldn’t leave her thoughts behind.
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