If anyone was worried that one of their fellow inmates was escaping they didn’t give a visible sign. Not even Mrs. Grantham, that inveterate snoop, was peeking through the curtains of her cell. She was probably sitting on the edge of her couch, rubbing her hands together in that way she did, watching her cats eat their breakfast. Clay had sat with her on many mornings, locked in the interminable stillness behind a door laced with chains and deadbolts. Only moments ago, passing her door he’d thought, “Should I check to see if she’s OK?” but then he’d thought better of it. No way would that conversation have gone for less than thirty minutes. Even now, with the storm, he’d have had to hear about how one of the neighbors had committed some imaginary wrong, or how her daughter hadn’t called. For years he’d watched her hobble up the steps of the brownstone they shared on Dean Street, hunched over by the weight of her cares but unwilling to do anything about them. He’d always liked her in an odd way, in that way one humors a crank, but now as he made his break for freedom, he felt nothing but a vague sense of pity. Like Otis, she was the warden of her own confinement, drunk on the wine of the world’s expectations and neglect, and unable to put down the glass. She’s a prisoner, Clay thought, everyone around here is.
The boots on his feet felt tight and fine as he walked along Dean and turned north onto Court, which he would follow until he reached Borough Hall. He congratulated himself on his prescient cleverness, having bought the boots used (therefore already broken in) at a thrift store down the street a few weeks before anyone had ever even heard of Sandy. They were purchased on a whim along with the hiker’s backpack he now had strapped to his back, on a day when an ill-defined sense of foreboding that had haunted him for weeks had suddenly caused him to scratch an itch.
On that day, while walking home from work, he’d stopped in front of the shop’s window, halting out of spiritual necessity as much as any real physical need. In the shop he found both items neatly shelved in separate sections and was drawn to each for reasons that he couldn’t fully explain. Probably some hipster had used them on a summer trek across Europe, only to sell them when the rent was due. Both were high-quality items, with rich, supple leather, and they were exactly what he would have bought for himself if he’d gone in search of new ones. Now, making his way uptown, Clay liked the feel of their weight as he stepped around the debris scattered along the street.
His impromptu plan was to cut across Brooklyn Heights to the Promenade and walk along it to its end merely to see the damage from that elevated perspective. Then he’d make his way due north, over the bridge into Manhattan, into Harlem, and, if all went well, he’d just keep going. Out of the city. Away from this prison. Far from the Madding Crowd. He was ultimately headed home to the farmhouse in Ithaca. Home. The place where he’d shared life with Cheryl and his beautiful girls before the accident.
Despite the certainty of his goal, a feeling of foreboding still gnawed at his stomach as he weaved around the odd fallen tree or nodded to the occasional passerby. He chalked the strange feeling up to a claustrophobic sense of needing release from the city. He breathed in the morning air and kept moving.
He thought about that word… home. Home was where there was a certain tree at the edge of the field across the road that led to the front porch. That lovely tree was the first thing he and Cheryl saw as they rounded the sweeping curve of the country road on the day they first viewed the property. She’d taken one look at it as they drove into the driveway and said she was ready to buy if he was.
In a forest thick with trees, that single, solitary tree had always been his favorite. In it he’d hung that lazy tire swing, which had taken him much longer than it should have to accomplish. The branches reached so high that his rope would not loop over them no matter what angle—or how hard—he threw it. He’d finally succeeded by tying a bucket to the end of the rope to give it weight so that he could launch it over a branch and then lower it slowly to the ground. Then, reveling in this victory, he and Cheryl had sat on the lawn and watched the girls play in the sprinklers and push each other in wide arcs under the broad, shading limbs. Now as he made his way through Sandy’s wake, he wondered if that tree was still standing.
Clay was struck by the almost usualness of it all as he moved through the street. Shopkeepers were busily sweeping their sidewalks, pushing the debris into the curb, then arching their backs to relieve the tension from the motion. Women in slickers walked their dogs, stopping to talk in little groups as their children toddled along after them.
Of course, there was the occasional limb, twisted and broken from the terrifying winds of the night before, but he was surprised that his neighborhood had not suffered more damage. Sometimes in the midst of the tempest a leaf lays still and is not tossed and therefore suffers, as we all do, from a lack of perspective.
He had listened to the radio through the night as winds howled and lights flickered but had not yet seen any proof of the kind of apocalyptic damage the reports were describing. He had long since given up television in an effort to cut himself off from the endless assault of technological input, and thus had not seen the images of houses pushed from their foundations and fires burning out entire city blocks. The reports had stopped just short of saying that the world had come to an end, but what they did not say they always implied. Here, however, he found that life was creeping onto the streets. There were occasional cracked windshields on occasional cars, and street signs and shingles and leaves tossed about, but nothing like what he had expected to find. The winds were still gusting and the rain came in sheets as he cut between Boerum and Cobble Hills, and he found himself glad that he had been on higher ground when the storm hit.
From the Promenade he could begin to make out the reason for the heated reporting. Sea trash lay down along the waterfront greenway, and trees were uprooted on the paths. From the height of the visible waterline, he imagined—though he could not see from his vantage point—that other low-lying areas of Brooklyn were crushed by the weight of the water. Sure enough, as he walked, he heard conversations from people huddled in groups. Red Hook, Gowanus, and DUMBO had been submerged in water and debris. Rumors and rumors of rumors were shared about the devastation and its aftermath. People talked of water rushing into homes as fast as the inhabitants could gather their things and rush out.
It was disconcerting to hear the flurries of conversation and watch the waves that had now receded back within their banks. The surge had sent six feet of water flooding onto the street during the night, but now, the waters were roiling past, and the murmurs of the people silenced the water’s burblings. Clay did not join the conversations. He merely wove in and out of the scattered groupings and watched the people watching. He stopped only occasionally to take a picture or to look out over the East River, but he had not come to dawdle and gawk, or, as so many of the others around him had, to lament the destruction of their city and gird themselves to rebuild it once again. He had merely come to witness nature’s powerful force firsthand and then walk into the wilderness to join it.
At the end of the Promenade he stood along the railings and took a final view of the New York City skyline. It was beautiful in its graphic simplicity, its skyscrapers formed like architectural representations of the ups and downs of stock market shares that were so closely tracked just over the river. Still, as he stood and took it all in, Clay couldn’t help feeling that the concrete and steel rising into the dense grey clouds rushing overhead were more dangerous than the storm that had just passed. The storm spent its fury in the space of a single night, but the weight of the oppressive city had strangled men since the days of Cain, and would, it seemed, go on doing it forever.