The World as We Know It (15 page)

The thought took me back to Maria. Was it selfish of me to leave her at home while I set off to restore my dignity? Why had her love not been enough to satisfy that sense of purpose I so desperately craved?

We took the old Lincoln Tunnel under the Hudson River into the city and headed toward Leah’s Long Island home. As the colossal Manhattan skyline grew around us, I realized that it was the first time I had entered one of the
old urban areas since the collapse. It was an eerie parallel version of the city I remembered. The streets were busy with pedestrians, though still only about half as crowded as they had been before. There were no cars. One of the few horses in sight was attached to the reins in my hand and was walking down the middle of the asphalt streets paying no mind to the yellow and white stripes designating traffic lanes. Signal lights were still standing, but they were black. The streets were cleaner than I remembered and lined with both timeworn and contemporary architecture that seemed to mimic what our lifestyle had become.

Leah decided to take me on a detour while we got acquainted. She led me up through Central Park, which was then home to hundreds of people living in a vast neighborhood of tents. Children were swimming and people were bathing in the lake. The grass had grown tall. We stopped to pick fruit and berries from trees along the way, and then we wound through block after block of ghostly architecture from generations past. Leah’s pace was slow, devoid of the urgency that used to possess the place like a religion or a cult. People smiled at each other on the street.

As night fell, we came upon Times Square, and what had once been one of the brightest and liveliest parts of any city in the world was nearly silent and vacant. There were no Asian tourists snapping pictures with zoom lens cameras. No flocking teenage girls with their hands occupied by designer purses and cell phones, each engaged in her own conversation separate from the next. The
darkness of it was difficult to swallow. All of the light screens on the walls were black and lifeless. Street trees were untrimmed. Banner advertisements were faded and falling. It was one of the more empty parts of town, a place rife with old shops that no longer served any purpose. The emptiness was almost painful. So wasteful, I thought.

As the evening sky grew darker, the orange glow of firelight began to pop up on the streets and in the windows of the lower floors of buildings. Once we had gotten to know each other, Leah and I set out to have some fun that night, something she could see was lacking in my life. She said it looked like I was due for a good time. It seemed that the “City That Never Sleeps” had maintained its nightlife, and we headed to her favorite nightspot to lift my burden and numb my conscience. Leah didn’t bother preparing for the evening the way the girls used to. There was nobody to impress. Back home, Maria had always followed the same routine before we would go out.

“Hair straight or curly?” she would ask.

“Half and half,” I would say.

“Joe!”

“OK, curly.”

“But I know you like it better straight,” she would say.

“OK, straight then.”

“But that takes longer.”

“Well, you’re beautiful either way.”

“Cute, Joe. Jeans or skirt?”

“Both.”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“I can’t win.”

“I married you, that’s your win. Now you have the privilege of helping me decide what to wear.”

I wanted to be back there in our grand bathroom with his and her sinks and a Jacuzzi tub in the bay window, watching her paint her face with makeup that she didn’t need. She was beautiful when she woke up in the morning. Just her presence by my side raised my status, but she never thought she was good enough. She was always good enough, though. Always. I wished I had told her that before I had left her.

Maria refused to leave my mind, particularly as I took a seat on a fire lit patio to drink whiskey with a woman I had just met. At the same moment, my wife was at home wondering where I was that night. Every night.

The patio matched the old brick buildings that lined both sides of the once heavily trafficked street. It was nestled behind an iron gate that stood open all of the time. Instead of speeding headlights, candles bobbed slowly past in both directions. I settled into a handmade wooden chair at a table that wobbled on the uneven masonry. Leah brought over two glasses of whiskey, served neat, and sat one on the table in front of me. She shot hers back and slammed the empty glass down on the table.

“Impressive,” I said, my eyes following her as she walked around behind me.

“Thank you,” she replied, resting her hands on my shoulders. “I think you need help relaxing. Drink up. It’s good stuff.”

She began to massage my shoulders. I didn’t stop her. It felt too good.

Leah was always asking about Jake. What was he doing? Who was he with? She didn’t seem thrilled with his new trade, but I assured her that somebody had to keep us fed.

“He’s killing things now?” she asked. “We’re going to have words about that.”

“Somebody has to do it,” I said in his defense.

“Well, I don’t like blood. Never have, even in the navy.”

“You were in the navy?”

“Yep. Jake and I met at Annapolis. He was a Jarhead, I was a Squid. He never liked guns either, but I think the appeal for him was more patriotism than war. Some guys just liked the violence until they were caught in the middle of it and realized they weren’t the big men they thought they were. Jake was a true patriot. He believed in what he was defending.”

“What was that?” I asked.

“A lot of things that no longer need defense.”

The operator of the small distillery, a man named Eli, came to join us after a while, bringing with him a full bottle of whiskey that shifted the weight of the table. Leah took her hands off of my shoulders to pull out a chair for herself. When she introduced us, we both paused for a moment before sharing a laugh and shaking hands.

“Have you two met?” she asked.

“Just this morning,” I said.

“We changed the weather over at the registrar.” Eli laughed. She shook her head at his nonsense as he took his own seat.

“It’s a small world,” I said.

“But a big city. What are we drinking to, Joe?” Eli asked, pouring himself a glass.

I held up my glass contemplatively. Then I said the first thing that came to mind.

“Love!”

Eli raised his eyebrows and looked toward Leah. “Drink to love!” he said, raising his glass.

“Love to drink,” she replied as the three of our glasses clinked. Her mouth smiled, but her eyes were sad, as if love was something she preferred not to discuss.

Eli and Leah were quite friendly. It seemed she was a regular patron and a big drinker. I never would have guessed from the looks of her, but I learned the hard way. I wanted to ask what it was she was trying to escape from. Perhaps it was the stress of the collapse. Perhaps her lost love. Or maybe it was just a relic from her days as a yuppie in NYC.

My vision blurred as the clear portion of the whiskey bottle grew. I began to relax, and my life back home followed my consciousness as it stumbled toward obscurity. The crowd on the patio around us thinned, and for hours we told stories and laughed together. Leah’s hand would land on my leg to keep her stable when she lost her balance. Then she would correct her posture and pretend it was an accident.

I could see the expression on Eli’s face beginning to change at the sight of her charade, but I was without my own wits and conscience. The wooden chair upon which she sat gradually moved closer and closer to mine.

“Are you all right?” I asked her.

“I’m fine,” she said, taking my hand. “Are you?”

A chill shot through me. I looked up into her eyes, gazing back at me longingly.

“I love your hair,” she said, leaning close and running her fingers through it, her other hand still loosely rested in mine. I glanced over toward Eli, who was looking on in disapproval. He excused himself from the table, and I looked back at Leah.

“I like yours,” I replied, leaning in and brushing her hair away from her face and behind her ear. “It shines in the moonlight.”

She closed her eyes and rested her cheek in my hand with a contented smile.

I woke up on a stone floor that was cold everywhere except for the blistering sunbeam that I happened to be lying in. My shirt was drenched in sweat, and my pants were covered in a mysterious orange substance and lying on the floor on the opposite side of the room. My head felt like someone had driven a chisel into my skull and was slowly prying it apart. I sat up, looking around for some evidence of where I was and how I had gotten there. Then I saw Leah making breakfast in a fireplace.

“What the hell happened last night?” I asked her.

“You drank too much.”

“Clearly.”

“Want some breakfast?”

“Definitely,” I said, climbing to my feet.

“I don’t usually take home strange men, but I couldn’t leave you out there all alone with Eli. He likes to have fun with people who pass out at his place. You might have woken up in the East River, especially since you’re friends with Jake. I think he’s a little jealous.”

“Jealous of what?” I asked.

“Oh, never mind.”

“I have a sneaking suspicion that Jake is not the one who made him jealous,” I said as pieces of the night fell back into place.

“You’re probably right.”

“Well, I’ve always had a weakness for Wild Turkey.”

I picked up my pants and sniffed them, but my head was too congested to smell anything. I walked around collecting the trail of my socks, shoes, and belt, which were strewn about, and then carried them all over to Leah.

“What’s this?” I asked, presenting her with the stain on my pants.

“That? That’s vomit.”

“Vomit? Whose?”

“Yours. You puked everywhere. I haven’t seen anything like that since college. It was like
The Exorcist
.”

“Oh, Lord,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s fine, at least you did it outside. My neighbor’s dog already cleaned it up.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“Yeah, well you should take a look at yourself.”

“So…” I hesitated. “We didn’t…”

“No.”

I sighed with relief.

“You must have had a lot of sorrow to drown last night,” she said. “A nice hangover will give you something else to focus on. Go get cleaned up while I finish breakfast. You’re coming to work with me today.”

Work was at an old brick foundry that then doubled as a float glass manufacturing facility. It made sense to pair the two, as the production of float glass required the use of molten metal. That was how their windows were made. The foundry was one of many old buildings in the city that still served its purpose. The more modern, vertical parts of the city had become the least inhabited, and some of them were eerily vacant. The oldest buildings, however, were the most similar to our new construction outside the urban centers. Architecture evolves with the needs of the user, and because our lifestyles had become so primitive, construction took a few steps into the past. Some of the contemporary architecture was being disassembled and making its way to various foundries to be recycled. They used the old metals to cast and forge new tools and components. The foundries were powered by natural gas primarily and coal or petroleum coke when necessary. Fuel sources were being extracted, processed, and distributed on a limited basis. There was even a
functional wind farm, I heard, generating minimal amounts of electricity.

Leah was the person in charge of glass production at that particular facility. Once formed, sheets of float glass would be shipped to a woodworking house, where they would then be framed into windows. Elsewhere, building materials like concrete, brick, and mortar were in production. I watched their new construction industry as it took shape, requiring the unselfish cooperation of thousands of visionaries with the foresight to see the world as it could be rather than as it was. Labor without the expectation of compensation, but also without the damning authority of any oppressor, was somehow liberating. Each person worked not only for him or herself, but also for the great community as a whole. That community, in turn, provided for each member of its population.

My hangover rendered me rather unproductive, so I spent the day observing. Never before had I seen such a great variety of people working under one roof. There were three men in particular whom I watched diligently all morning, seeking to learn as much as I could about their trade to take back to the farm with me. The sweltering heat of the foundry didn’t seem to affect their mood. They bantered and laughed while they worked as if they were laboring alongside best friends or brothers, though their varying skin pigments flaunted their diversity. It became increasingly evident that those three men, who clearly hailed from very different backgrounds, viewed
one another not merely as friends, but as family. I was as impressed by their camaraderie as I was by their trade.

Some time midmorning, my headache and exhaustion got the better of me, and I dozed off. I awoke abruptly to the sound of a scream as one of the three men tripped while crossing an overhead walkway and went tumbling over the edge toward the molten metal bed below. A flowing sheet of glass, no longer destined to become a window, would break his fall in the final agonizing moments of his life. Adrenaline pulsed through me and I shot to my feet, but I was too late for action. Through the steam between us I caught only a glimpse of what had happened, and I was certain he had been killed. I panicked. My ears rang with the sound of his voice and then with the clanking of footsteps as another of the three darted across the steel bridge above. His call echoed around the room, though I could see nothing but a white wall.

“Hang on, we’ve got you!” I heard him yell through the scalding fog. The opaque world around me was spinning in slow motion.

Then the cloud of steam cleared, and I saw the man who had fallen dangling by a chain he had grabbed at the last moment on his way down. It was run taut through a series of pulleys in the ceiling, and as my eyes traced its route back to the floor, I saw the third man at the other end of the chain, pulling back with all his might to keep his friend from falling. His feet were braced against a wall, fighting the weight of the man in the air.