By the time they called it quits they had put a couple thousand people into the hospitals, Vlade reckoned, and another thousand into the Met. There was room in the building for that many people, of course, as long as they didn’t have to have actual beds.
And on that night a dry floor was enough. Residents brought down extra blankets and did what they could. For sure their food and water supplies would now quickly run out, but that was going to be true everywhere, so there was nothing to do but give people shelter and see what happened. It was said that Central Park was being used as a refugee camp, that many people now homeless were taking refuge in their big park. It was a case of finding ground higher than the surge, and waiting out the storm.
“Damn, I wish I knew where those boys were,” Vlade said as he was falling asleep on his bed, Idelba out on the couch in his office. He had seldom been more tired, and as far as he could tell, Idelba had fallen asleep the moment she hit the couch, wet hair and all.
“They’ll be okay,” she said dully. And then Vlade was out.
The next day it was still windy and raining hard, sometimes pelting down, but all within the norms of an ordinary summer storm—drenching, cool, blustery—but compared to the two days before, not very dangerous, and much better lit. White gray rather than black gray. Also the tide, though the dawn began with a high tide, was no longer a storm surge. It was down to only a couple feet higher than an ordinary high tide. Now on the buildings around Madison Square there was a faint bathtub ring of leaves and plastered gunk much higher than the usual high tide mark. The surge had apparently already poured back out the Narrows and through Hell Gate into the Sound. It had to have been one hell of an ebb run.
Vlade could now get back into his boathouse, and so he unsealed the door to it and began to sort out the confusion created by having all the boats floated up into each other, and in some cases crushed a bit against the ceiling. Many of them were internally flooded by this, but oh well. Could be pumped out and dried out.
Getting the boathouse sorted took half the day, and after that he could go out in the Met runabout and inspect the building and the neighborhood. The canals were everywhere filled with flotsam and jetsam, pieces of the city knocked loose and floating around. People were back out on the water, although the vapos were not running yet. Police cruisers zipped around ordering people out of their way, stopping to collect floating bodies, animal or human. The health challenges were going to be severe, Vlade saw; it was already warm again, and cholera was all too likely. The freshets of rain that came that day were a good thing in that sense. The longer it was before the sun hit the water and began to cook the wreckage, the better.
Idelba’s tug now served as a good passenger ferry up Park Avenue to Central Park, where there were some new jury-rigged docks, very busy with lines of waiting boats, most of them unloading people from downtown. The glimpses into Central Park that they got before they returned down Park were shocking; it looked like all the trees in the park were down. Which seemed all too possible, and at the moment was not their problem, but it made an awful sight. They returned to the Met and took a last load of refugees out of the building, ignoring the occasional protester, telling them the building was maxed and more than maxed, and Central Park was now becoming the better place for them to get shelter and refugee status. “Also, we’re out of food,” Vlade told them, which was close enough to true to allow him to say it. And it worked to get people to leave.
Inspector Gen had been out working since the storm began, but she had come back home the night before on a police cruiser, to change clothes and catch a couple of hours of sleep. Now she asked for a ride up to Central Park, where her people said she was needed again.
“I believe it,” Idelba said. “Won’t be long before New Yorkers start to riot on you, right?”
“So far so good,” the inspector said.
“Well, but it’s still raining. They can’t get out to protest yet. When it stops raining they will.”
“Probably so. But so far so good.”
Vlade had never seen the inspector look as tired as she did now, and this was just the start of it. What was she, forty-five? Fifty? Around the same age as him, he thought. Police work was tough, even on inspectors. “You’d better pace yourself,” he said to her. “This is going to be a long haul.”
She nodded. “How did the building do?”
“Held up fine,” Vlade said. “I haven’t had a chance to check it all out yet, but I didn’t see anything horribly wrong either.”
“Did the farm shutters hold?”
“Jesus!” Vlade said. “I don’t even know.”
When they dropped off the inspector and the last load of their building’s refugees, some of whom were grateful but most of whom were already focused on their next problem, they turned around and headed back down to the building. When Idelba dropped him off he hiked up the stairs as fast as he could, and got to the farm floor huffing and puffing, and shoved the door out to have a look.
“Ah shit!”
The farm floor was thrashed. Only a few storm shutters remained in place, ironically on the south wall; the rest were gone, a few remaining flat on the floor among fallen hydroponic lines, broken vegetables, tipped boxes, and so on. The massive steel posts at the four corners, and every twenty-five feet across the exterior walls, were revealed in all their strength; the central elevator core remained; aside from that, it was a wreck. The wooden boxes of soil that had been bolted down were still in place, but all the rest were tipped over or shoved across the floor to the north railing, their crops ripped out of them.
Luckily they had gotten about half the planter boxes inside the halls of the floor below, but aside from those, they would have to start over. Which, as it was already June 27, was bad news, in terms of food self-sufficiency. Not that they had ever been self-sufficient, the farm had always provided only a modest percentage of their food, from about fifteen percent in summer to five in winter; but this summer it was going to be much less than that.
Oh well! At least the building had held. And no one in it had died, as far as he knew. And the animal floor had held like every other floor but the farm, so their animals were okay. If Roberto and Stefan came back in safe and sound, all would be well. So the farm was a bit of a luxury problem.
Vlade stumped back down to the common room and shared the news. For a while he sat there, eating reheated stew and thinking things over. Then he sought out the young finance punk. The Garr.
“Hey, when the rain stops?” he said to him. “Would you take your hydrofoil out there and have a look for the boys?”
“What?” Franklin exclaimed. “They weren’t here?”
“No, they got caught out fooling around. And they left their wristpad behind so we couldn’t track them.”
“Brilliant.”
“Well, you know them. Anyway, Gordon Hexter says they were going up to the Bronx to see if they could steal Melville’s gravestone.”
“Fuck. The Bronx will be a mess.”
“As always. But if they hunkered down up there, they should be okay. I’m just worried about them, is all. They’re almost certain not to have taken any food or water with them. Or warm clothing, for that matter.”
“Fuck.”
“I know. Will you do it? I’d go but I’ve got to see to things here.”
“I’m busy too!” Franklin exclaimed. But then he saw Vlade’s look and said, “All right, all right, I’ll go have a look. Why break my streak with these guys?”
All life is an experiment.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
b) Inspector Gen
Gen got the call like every other police officer in the tri-state area: emergency, all hands on deck. In her case she was told to stay in her immediate vicinity during the storm itself, which she did. Then the day after the hurricane had passed she was directed by headquarters to Central Park, and she joined a big cruiser of water cops in a run up to the tide dock on Sixth.
The storm surg
e had washed right up into the southeast end of the park, they were told by the cruiser’s pilot, such that waves had been crashing into the pond and overrunning the Wollman ice skating rink. Farther west the Sixth Avenue dock, a long thing that floated or lay on the avenue as the tides dictated, had had to be recovered and flipped back right side up before it could be redeployed down Sixth again, where it went back to rising and falling at the high end of the intertidal. Again boats were docking at its south end and unloading people and goods to move north over the dock to dry land. The need for it was so great that the cruiser carrying Gen had to wait its turn, and then they all disembarked in a hurry.
Walking up into Central Park, Gen was amazed by what she saw. First the crowd: the park was packed with people, it was like nothing she had seen before. Second, they were all standing in some kind of open field. The trees were gone. Not gone, exactly, but down. All down. Most had been knocked down roughly northward, either broken off at the trunk or tipped out of the ground, with their roots torn up and the muddy root balls facing south like splayed hands. Some trunks were still standing but were broken at their tops, snapped or splintered off at some height or other, relieving the pressure of the wind and allowing the trunks to stay standing, like useless poles among their fallen fellows.
The devastation of the trees made the park a less than satisfactory refuge, but it was what they had, so people were there. Some part of the crowd, uninjured and looking for things to do, had begun to collect broken branches and pile them into big stacks of broken wood. The smell of torn leaves and splintered wood filled the humid air. This cleanup was itself a dangerous business, resulting in new injuries, because the ground was saturated, and the downed trees and fallen branches were heavy. Gen listened to the police officers already on hand and took their point: the first order of business was to get the crowds who were doing cleanup work to consider their own safety and desist. The groups were self-organized, however, and full of energy, having survived the storm and the devastation of their park. They did not necessarily take kindly to police trying to quell or even organize their activities. It was a New York crowd, and so it took diplomacy to walk around asking people not to be a danger to themselves.
“We’ve had enough injuries already,” Gen said over and over. “Please don’t add more now.”
Then she would either put her shoulder under a branch, if there was a need and some room for her, or move on to the next cluster of workers to discuss it with them, or crouch with sitting survivors to ask how people were.
It was heartening to see people mostly calm and semiorganized. She had heard of it, she had seen it at smaller scales from time to time, but never had she seen anything like this, where it looked like the entire population of the city had flooded into Central Park. It meant that essential services were overwhelmed, no doubt about it. Nowhere near enough water, toilets, food. Lines for park toilets were long, and the sewers were going to be overwhelmed, the surge having backed them up anyway. The park itself would become the toilet. Problems were going to rapidly mount, for a week at least and probably longer, depending on how relief efforts went.
Beyond that obvious set of problems, it was a matter of recovering from seeing the park so devastated. The rest of the city must be similarly thrashed, but to see not a leaf left on a standing tree anywhere—to see every single tree broken or down—it was shocking. They were going to have to start from scratch when it came to restoring the place. In the meantime it looked like a bomb had gone off somewhere to the south, some kind of concussive blast knocking everything down without a fire.
Many wild animals were dead, and their bodies would have to be disposed of as soon as possible. For now they were being piled beside some of the giant piles of broken branches. Then also injured people kept arriving, and these were helped or carried to the aid stations. Certainly there was lots of help for stretcher carries. People were milling about looking for ways to be a help. But what about water? What about toilets? What about food?
Gen got on the wrist with headquarters and made the same reports and requests as everyone else, judging by the responses she got. “We know,” they kept saying.
“Are the feds coming?” Gen asked.
“They say they are.”
Gen went over to the Wollman ice rink, where it seemed like they should be able to clear an area big enough for even the largest helicopters to land. It had indeed been flooded by the surge, which was amazing, but now the waters had receded and it was left muddy, with a shallow pool filling the rink area. Actually with the trees gone, helos could land anywhere once an area was cleared. Airships could tie off on the towers at Columbus Circle, and indeed all around the park. A lot of airship traffic could be accommodated, which was good, because all the bridges to the island were out of commission. The George Washington Bridge had survived, but the causeway to the west of it crossing the Meadowlands bay had been flooded and was wrecked. For a while they were going to be a true island again.
Water would be okay, if they got a helicopter or two of lifestraws. These came in kitchen and personal sizes, and by using them they could drink and cook using the water taken from the park ponds, or even the rivers. Lifestraw filters were a wonder. Food was still cached in restaurants and stores and apartments around the city, presumably. They would need more, but drops could be made, and ferry trips, as to any other disaster site. Same with medical aid.
So in fact the hardest problem might be toilets. As she reported to headquarters. “We know,” they said.
As she wandered the park doing what she could, Gen started making lists in her head, redundant lists, as obviously the various emergency services already had them, but she couldn’t help herself. Beyond that she just helped people who asked for help. She answered questions, she took reports concerning some petty crimes—very few, she was pleased to note, and the complainants themselves often none too reliable, she judged. Mainly she helped by her presence to create the sense of an orderly space. Police were still walking the beat, protecting and serving where necessary. Would eat offered food. New York was still New York. But what a devastation! She saw face after face, distraught and red-eyed: here a young blond child, crying that she had lost her parents; here a heavyset Latino man, confused and maybe demented, mouth hanging open, startling blue eyes looking for something he could recognize; here a skinny black man with dreadlocks, holding one forearm with the other hand and grimacing; here a weasel-faced white youth, dancing in place and singing a song written on his wristpad. People were lost, had lost other people, were in shock. She had to go to that police officer’s place of dissociation, easy for her most of the time, a bit harder today, but it was a big place in her, and she was comfortable there. Every day in a police officer’s life was a succession of disasters, so now that the city had been crushed, it was like, Hey people, welcome to my world. I know this psychic space, let me guide you. Let me help you. It is possible to live here without freaking out, it’s possible to stay calm and cope. Believe me. Do it like me.
She slept at the precinct house at West Eighty-second, because it would have taken too much time to get back down to the Met, and she was beat. It was beginning to register that with the skybridge network in disarray, she was going to have to get used to getting around lower Manhattan on police cruisers, or the vapos when they started running again. The city felt bigger. She fell asleep on a bench and woke up before dawn, sore and cold. Looked out the door; it was predawn, but the rain had stopped. She went to the bathroom (which worked, she was pleased to see) and then walked outside and down into the park on the Sixty-fifth Street transverse. People were stretched out everywhere. On plastic bags, under blankets and sleeping bags, under the occasional tarp or tent, but mostly, exposed to the night. Luckily with the storm passed they were back to the usual steamy midsummer heat and humidity. That would make for problems of a different kind, but in terms of getting through the night it was a good thing. It was strange to see people sleeping outdoors on the ground together, their slee
ping faces dim in the late moonlight. A vision from an earlier age.
Then the sun was up and people were sitting around smoky little fires, looking stunned and dirty. They were finding out that green wood didn’t burn well. It was against the law to have fires in the park, but Gen waved at them. Nature would put those fires out soon enough, or people with gas would get them going hot enough to burn something. Could cremate dead animals. People would be a danger to themselves.
Helicopters as big as tugboats began to chomp in and land near Wollman and on the meadows at the north end of the park. Blimps were now filling the sky, as usual but more than usual, either bringing relief or trying to get images for news programs, or both. Gen kept doing the work of a beat cop, and there were definitely more problems to conciliate, more petty crimes reported. They were shifting out of emergency mode into the phase of stupendous hassle, at which point people would get irritable, more prone to argument and complaint and fighting. This she had seen many times before, even with crowds leaving an entertainment event. People were now ready to leave this event too, getting anxious to leave, in fact, but they couldn’t; the show was still on, and that was just the kind of obstruction that set certain people off.
So she spent the day mediating, directing traffic, shooing away sightseers. “Go back uptown,” she suggested to people who looked like uptowners, identifiable by their fresh look. She hated looky-loos, but impersonally. In this case they were a sign that eventually the city would probably come through this all right. In the depth of the hurricane and the immediate aftermath this had seemed questionable, the storm a true crisis. Now it was becoming just another fucking disaster.
But it had to be gotten through, so she got through that day, and then another. At the end of that day she took a cruiser back down to the Met and collapsed. Vlade awarded her a shower. The day after that she was ordered back to Central Park. After that she was put on boat patrol in lower Manhattan, cruising the canals and helping the drowned city.