The first book in a new series, Slow Fall, publishes on Thursday. It’s about the collapse of civilization in the most terrifying way: slowly and without most people realizing what’s happening until it’s too late. Interspersed among the main storyline of five characters negotiating the collapse, I have short “elsewhere” vignettes. This is one:
MANHATTAN
That morning, the last normal morning, the woman left her apartment on 114th Street at 7:15 AM because she was out of coffee and milk and it was a Thursday and that was what you did on a Thursday.
The bodega on the corner was closed. This was unusual but not alarming. The owner kept irregular hours. She walked to the Associated on Broadway. The steel gate was down. Two women were standing in front of it looking at their phones. She looked at her phone. She had one bar and then no bars and then one bar again. She tried her husband and got nothing. She tried again and got a fast busy signal, which she had not heard since she was a child.
She walked back toward her block.
A man she didn’t know was loading cardboard boxes into a Honda. He was moving fast and not making eye contact with anyone. She watched him get in the car and pull out and drive the wrong way up the street because Amsterdam was already backed up and he knew something she didn’t, or he thought he did, and either way he was gone.
She went upstairs and woke her husband and said something is wrong.
He was a reasonable man and he put on his shoes and they went out together because reasonable people investigate before they panic. They walked to the Westside Market on Broadway and there were forty people in front of it standing on the sidewalk. The doors were open but two employees were at the entrance and they were letting people in two at a time and the produce section visible from the door was already stripped bare.
The man behind them in line said it had been like this since they opened.
Her husband asked what happened.
The man shrugged. His wife pulled at his arm. He turned away.
She got her phone to load the news but it would not fully load, just headlines half-rendering before the connection dropped. She saw the word Bronx and the word fire and then she saw the number 11 next to what might have been the word incidents and then the page went gray.
So many things had been odd for weeks, this seemed just more odd. Everyone was off, the world spinning more erratically.
Her husband was already doing the math she was doing. They had some canned things. They had what they had and they did not know how long what they had needed to last. Worse, they really didn’t know how long what they had would last. They had not thought about this before because there had never been a reason.
They left the line when the two employees indicated no more would be let in, there was nothing more to get. They went to the hardware store on 110th and bought two flashlights and eight D batteries and the owner watched them from behind the counter with an expression that was not quite fear and not quite recognition but something between them. He did not make change from the register. He took two twenties for a thirty-dollar purchase and turned back to the window.
They walked home through Morningside Heights and people were on their stoops, which on a cool October morning with leaves coming down off the trees looked almost normal, like a block party starting slow, except for the suitcases and the silence and the way no one was talking to anyone they didn’t already know. A woman she half-recognized from the laundromat was sitting on her steps with a rolling suitcase. Just sitting with it. Not going anywhere. Not yet.
The cell service came back for eleven minutes around 9 AM. In those eleven minutes she learned that the bridges were backed up, that there had been fires in the Bronx, that the subway was not running, that there was something happening in Crown Heights. She learned this from three different people’s social media feeds because the news sites would not load and the city’s emergency alert page would not load and 311 played a recording that said they were experiencing high call volume and to please try again.
She called her mother in Yonkers and got through on the second try and her mother said come here, things are bad, and the woman said we’re trying and then the call dropped.
Her husband pulled up the map to look at the roads. Everything was red. Not the dark red of usual gridlock. Something else, the color the app turned when traffic had stopped entirely and was not moving at any speed. Every bridge. Every tunnel. He turned the phone so she could see.
They went back upstairs and stood in their kitchen.
They argued for fifteen minutes, the woman accusing the husband of not listening to her warnings, of not preparing. The man taking the view that if she really believed all the portents of doom she’d spouted, she should have done it herself.
As with all such arguments it solved nothing but did vent their frustrations.
The real question was whether to go. The question was whether not going was a decision they were making or a thing that was being made for them by the backup on the roads and the shutdown subways. The question was where they would go if they went. How could they get anywhere? Like many New Yorkers, they didn’t own a car. Not that it seemed that would matter given the roads.
Her husband filled the bathtub with water because he had read once that this was a thing you should do. He did not know why he remembered this now. He stood in the bathroom watching it fill.
From the window she could see Amsterdam Avenue. The uptown and downtown lanes were locked solid, not moving, not honking now, just stopped, engines running, a long line of people who had made their decision and were now simply waiting to find out if it had been the right one. The fact both directions were full meant no one really knew where they were going. Four of the five boroughs of New York City are on islands and not many New Yorkers had spent much time thinking about how to get off their particular island if getting out was needed by everyone, all at once.
A family was walking on the sidewalk beside the cars, the father in a flannel shirt, the mother with a child on her hip, an older kid pulling a rolling suitcase through drifts of brown leaves banked against the curb. Walking uptown. Toward the bridges, the woman assumed. The George Washington and New Jersey? Or to the Bronx and then upstate because for people in New York City, every other part of New York State was upstate. Toward something.
The woman watched them until they were gone.
She went to the kitchen and looked at what they had. A bag of rice. Twelve cans of assorted food. Half a bag of flour. Three apples going soft. Eight ramen. She stood there doing the arithmetic and when her husband came in from the bathroom she turned and looked at him and he looked at her and they both knew what the arithmetic said.
They didn’t have enough for long. Maybe eight or ten days if they were careful.
Her mother was alone in Yonkers and sixty-three years old and the roads were red on the map and the phone was not connecting and the question they were standing in, the one neither of them could say out loud yet, was whether the eight or ten days belonged to two people or whether it belonged to three if they took everything with them.
And if they could even make it to Yonkers on foot.
Should they stay or should they go?
