It was like this at the dozens of piers down the West Side, around New York, down the East Coast. Many ships were freightliners, and the crews were frantically removing the massive cargo containers to make space while armed Guardsmen held the crowds back. The White House had learned from hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and had mobilized as aggressively as the most powerful nation on earth could. From New Jersey’s naval station Earle came the AOE supply ships that were now filling their holds with New Yorkers – the USS Arctic, USS Supply, and USS Seattle.
The ships were manned with skeleton crews, and hurried from the dock with unprecedented and unpracticed urgency.
Over the heads of the crowd, Travis could see the towers of a cargo frigate pulling away.
“This way,” Gerry said. “I think there’s more movement by that terminal.”
A fight erupted to their left, four men tearing at each other while a woman screamed. A Guardsman fired his weapon into the air, shocking the fighting men into passivity, but the effect on the crowd was to finalize the impression of chaos in America, that weapon fire was now necessary to maintain control. There was a surge forward under the strength of this new panic. Travis and his group were well into the crowd now, and he held Darren in his arms. Gerry held his bag with the pull-handle by his side. Corrina still pushed hers on the ground, keeping it in front of her feet. As they held themselves close, they said only with eye contact, Stick together!
“Don’t worry, Darren,” Corrina said. “Don’t worry, Darren.”
They were within fifty yards of one of the terminal entrances, and soon they were inside the vast hall. The flow of the crowd now was bounded by the building, and differentiated into streams to each stairway to the embarkation levels. There was terrific screaming, echoing in the huge room as groups argued over which ship on each side of the terminal to try for, which stairwell was flowing best. The flow had its own natural course, and individual choices were rendered meaningless by the brute power of it.
Upstairs, security had been turned inside out: doors everywhere were open, and security screening sections and metal detectors abandoned. National Guardsmen waited on the building’s exterior apron, maintaining order as Travis and the others emerged again to the open air. The ship itself loomed over them now, filling their vision, a great bulk of white and blue steel and circular windows, belted by lifeboats midway up, and capped by decorative spikes and curves of the top deck satellite globes, radar trees, the bridge, the logo-painted smokestack and other towers, just showing above the top.
A gangway rose up from the dock to an opening one floor up, and a human stream poured up and into the ship’s belly, emptying NY and filling the boat. Ships fit for thousands emptying a city of millions. Travis thought of a mosquito on an elephant.
There was a surge from the left, hitting Travis and Darren first, pushing them into Gerry and Corrina. A large circle in the surge began to fall, and in the tight space, the group was all pulled down together in the mass. Men and women were climbing over each other to get up.
“Darren! Darren!” Travis heard Corrina amid the screams.
“I’ve got him,” Travis shouted. With Darren still in his arms, he was sinking while the other bodies were pushing up around him. There were seconds until the crowd would surge again and he and his son would be under it.
A pair of black hands stretched down to him out of overcoat sleeves and white shirt cuffs. The hands grabbed his arms and pulled him upwards. Travis could see the man tensing his body to resist the pressure from behind him. He was in his fifties, dressed in a suit and overcoat, the tie gone. With his help, Travis was able to turn himself and pull himself upright behind Corrina.
Darren bawled, and Travis could just give him little squeezes on his back to calm him.
“Thanks,” Travis said without being able to see the man behind him then, feeling him pressed into his back.
“Soft spot for kids,” the man said.
Travis turned his head and just caught the forced smile that lit up the man’s furrowed face.
He saw that Gerry and Corrina’s suitcases were gone.
They could see armed National Guardsmen in the space between the stairs and the ship’s hull. The Guardsmen themselves had a desperate look; they were there to protect these people. How would they act if the people became the danger? Travis could see another ship beginning to pull away. He couldn’t see the crowd beneath that ship. He heard gunfire, and then screaming filled the air. Pushing Corrina ahead of him, with the stranger pushing him from behind, he was on the gangway stairs. The move up was halting, but manageable.
There was shouting around him now distinct above the other screams.
“This way, this way!”
“Matthew! Matthew!”
“Don’t lose me!”
“This way! Please follow the crew!”
This was a voice with authority. The voice assured Travis, and he felt the tension around him ease, too, with the voice. Looking out at the Hudson, he saw another cruise ship on its way down river, following closely behind a freighter whose deck was packed with escapees.
Travis heard all the voices around him going up the stairs. It was a habit he could not break. He was an observer of people and a listener, and he always heard the voices around him.
“I have to go back!”
“Oh God, help me!”
“This way, through here!”
“Please, I have to go back!”
“My leg is broken! Please help me!”
“Follow the crew!”
“Please, I have to go back!”
Corrina was suddenly gone ahead of him, and Travis was pulled off the gangway through the opening into a great hall by white-sleeved arms. He was shoved to the left. He was aware of soft light and colors around him, weird on this dark day.
“This way! Follow the crew inside!”
“Please, I have to go back!” he heard one last time from behind him.
5
He had seen fear before, in places of conflict and famine, where the worst things happen and life is carried out in unceasing desperation. The low ground, he called that state of living in his own private lexicon. So many millions of people around the world had lived there in the last twenty, fifty or hundred years – yet it was a completely alien place to most Americans. The low ground had followed him home. The low ground had found his son.
These Americans, Travis thought, have never considered death this way: announcing itself to each of them at once, for their families and friends and neighbors. He wondered what showed in his own face, how the possibility of losing everything was displayed in his eyes.
They were shuffled down the hallway by staff standing alongside another opening in the wall, from which a bright glow lit those turning and disappearing into it.
“Head to the light,” the staff called.
There was no need for the direction, the pump was primed and the flow set. The group turned into the light, a wide white-on-white staircase leading only down. After the first flight, the staircase walls gave way to banisters and railings and the open belly of the vessel. Travis saw the vast area of the ship’s Grand Atrium, a football field space with the feel of a Roman plaza, 70 foot gold-foil columns and drapes piercing the great hall vertically, the floor level marked by fountains, flower boxes, food counters and bars, lined by shop-fronts on all sides. The central fountain featured a great marble statue of a thin, broadly-finned fish, its angular impressionistic form curled into a violent surface dive through the array of water sprays. There were several of these staircases, and all those on the port side funneled the refugees in here. The space was already crowding.