It is not until Jenny Bell puts an arm around my shoulder that I realize I’ve begun to cry.
“I want to go in.”
“These old buildings are dangerous.”
“Still—”
She sighs. “You’re crazy. But I suppose you know that. I’m crazy too. I work in New York, for God’s sake.”
“The doors are busted. We could go right in.”
“A place like this never got cleaned. There might be particles.”
“I want to see my apartment. If you’ll let me, I’d like to go. Alone, if you prefer.”
“You aren’t going anywhere alone. What floor is it on?”
“Six.”
“Of course. Naturally. You wouldn’t live on one or two, not you. A seven-story building and you live on six. So come on.”
As we enter the building I see a couple of dogs asleep on the sidewalk about half a block away. Two dogs, not very big.
The lobby is badly deteriorated. The walls were carpeted, and the carpet now hangs to the floor. When I push some of it aside to open the door into the stairwell, at least two hundred roaches scuttie away. “They like the glue,” Jenny says.
The place has a sweet, rancid odor, something like stagnant water. I suppose the basement must be permanently flooded. “If the water table’s risen, why couldn’t people simply dig wells? We’d be able to repopulate Manhattan.”
“Toxins. The water’s poisonous. Godawful. When dogs drink out of the basements, their lips get eaten away.”
“How do they live?”
“Rainwater, rats, and squirrels. And people.”
“You’re not serious.”
“All the damn time. We find new kills every few days. Drifters figure that with so many buildings the city must be a squatter’s paradise. Wrong. Those who don’t get dogged die of waste poisoning from coming across Jersey. You can’t walk from Newark to the Hudson and live. It just ain’t possible.”
I think of the sins of the past. Then, it was so easy. Now I realize that I, like everybody else, was directly and personally responsible. The land was not despoiled by chemical companies, nor the war caused by countries. It was us, each one. We are all accountable for our era.
A sharp tang enters my mouth, something I wish I could spit out.
The stairs are dark in a way that the subway was not. This is absolute blackness, not the presence of dark but something more profound, the absence of light. I remember that these stairs were like this during the great blackout of ’85. We set candles along the banisters then, and shared the hot night and songs, and survival stories. We were New Yorkers. We were getting through.
I am a little sick to be passing Joseph and Sally Boyce’s bikes, the two beautiful Raleighs they got in June of ’87. There is a bag beside them. Jenny’s flashlight reveals a sweatshirt wadded up in it, so rotten that it turns to dust at a touch. I know that shirt; we gave it to Joseph for his birthday in ’87. If it could have been opened out, it would have read WHIPPETS on the front and LAKE WOBEGON, MINN. on the back.
At the sixth floor I hesitate before the fire door. We peer through the glass. Jenny’s flashlight reveals that the foyer on the other side is in perfect condition. It looks as if it has been preserved in a museum. The door creaks as Jenny opens it. Even the picture we and our next door neighbors put on the wall of the foyer is still there. “Deux,” it’s called. Photographs of two old men, one bright and smiling, the other in shadow. My neighbor was the bright one. The other represents me. There are just two apartments per floor in our building, and both doors seem securely locked. I put my hand on my old doorknob and rattle it. I wonder if we can even get in.
“Just a second,” Jenny says. She gives me the flashlight and produces a small hooked bar from a sling in her belt. “We have to do this fifty times a day.” She inserts the tool into my supposedly burglar-proof lock and in an instant the door swings open.
Sunlight floods the living room. It was always a bright apartment. After a moment my eyes get used to the light. The first thing I see is the bulging, rotted ruin of our L-shaped couch, maroon with tan padding and foam jutting out. The ceiling above it slopes far down into the room.
But it’s our apartment, very definitely. It hasn’t been looted.
The rosewood dining table still has a note stuck in the crack in the center. I take the brittle brown paper. Jam at the school, says Anne’s hasty scrawl. My first impulse is to take the note. But then I find myself putting it back, as if our whole past might collapse if this last, critical rivet were pulled out.
I want to see the rest of the apartment. But when I start for the back, where the bedrooms and my office are, Jenny stops me.
“Hold it.” She nods toward the floor. “Spoor.”
“Spoor?”
“Animals have been in here.” She nods toward the fire escape. “Window.” She touches a brown bit of the dung with her toe. “Dry. Wish I knew what the hell dropped it.”
“Not a dog?”
She shakes her head. “They don’t come up this high. Big, though. Maybe a zoo animal. Some of them around. A few. All the way down here, s’funny. I wouldn’t expect it.”
Jenny has her revolver out.
“You think it’s still here?”
At first she doesn’t answer. When she moves toward the back rooms, I follow. I make a mental note that we can go down the fire escape if we have to. Jenny takes a deep breath. “Doesn’t smell like animals,” she says softly. I notice that she cocks the pistol.
In places the floor has a disturbing springy quality to it. If I jumped, I don’t doubt that I’d end up in the apartment below.
We reach Andrew’s room. There is his Apple computer on his desk, his bed forever unmade, his paintings on the walls, most of them rotted beyond recognition. His dresser has fallen apart.
There is a dried cowboy boot in the middle of the floor. As this room faces west and north, winter blows in here, and his bookshelf is a bulging, sodden ruin.
The room echoes with so many past voices, him and his friends, a thousand bedtime stories.
It is in my office, where I wrote The Hunger and Catmagic, that I see my first clear sign of the last desperate days of this city.
There is a can of Sterno on the floor, and three empty tins from the kitchen, their contents and even their paper labels long since eaten.
I wonder who was here. Could it have been our neighbors? What might have happened to them? Elizabeth, the model, tall and gentle, her face at the edge of unforgettable beauty. Roberto, full of laughter, a native of Italy, wine importer, friend of evenings. Until this moment I have not remembered them, and I feel guilty for it.
“Come here,” Jenny says. She is looking into the bathroom opposite my office, where I used to soak in the tub to ease the lower-back pain of a sedentary life.
Bones, jumbled, gnawed, skulls pocked and pitted, teeth grinning, bits of clothing adhering to gnarls of ligament.
I cannot help myself. I scream.
Jenny neither scolds nor laughs nor sympathizes. When I stop, she begins talking again. “Stay-behinds. You see ’em all over the place.”
“How did they die?”
“Every way you can imagine.” She flashes her light into the bathroom. “That vent. Probably brought in short-half-life dust, so they mighta gotten radsick. Or maybe they were scared to leave and they starved. That happened too. Or violence. Suicide. Take a coroner to tell you, and that I’m not.”