Michael Bunker: WICK

Turning on his heel, Clay headed west and cut along Orange Street on the northern end of the neighborhood he’d just circled. He wound his way back through the grid of streets and passed along Pineapple Walk to the Cadman Plaza and then through the great lawn of the War Memorial. Trees and branches and leaves littered the streets, mixed with odd bits of siding and shingles that had come slicing down from the sky. The cumulative effect of the damage began to make an impression. Trees that had been young when Henry Ford was scratching out ideas for assembly lines had toppled over to crush the products of his imagination. Buildings that had been built before Coolidge took office were pock-marked with evidence of windfalls.

Clay stepped around and over and through the storm’s fingerprints like a cop who had no respect for a crime scene. Thick wet foliage clung to the soles of his boots, but he shook it off as he kept moving. He was walking with a purpose now.

He walked into Whitman Park — nestled, perhaps ironically, perhaps not, in the shadow of New York’s Emergency Management office. He snapped the clip around his waist meant to hold some of his backpack’s weight off his shoulders, and slid his arms out of their straps. He dropped the pack to the ground and spun it around and unzipped a front pocket. He reached inside and took out an energy bar and sat down on a bench nearby. He had come to pay respects to the poet who had written in a time when Brooklyn could still be called rural. It was not just a passing indulgence. When he had packed his bag several days before, he put in only the items he felt he’d need for the journey—a change of clothes, a small box of matches, a few small bottles of water, and a Walkman radio with an extra pack of batteries. He didn’t bring any food except a few energy bars, figuring that he had money and could buy whatever he needed along the way. He wasn’t survival camping in the outback after all, and he wanted to minimize the weight he’d have to carry. He’d been forced to make a decision about which books he wanted to bring. A well-worn copy of Leaves of Grass had been one of only two to make the cut, the second being Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises . The former was to remind him to live life, the latter that, even if he failed the first, the earth would still abide. He was serious about traveling lightly. He hadn’t even brought his cell phone.

It was Cheryl who had taught him to love Whitman. Before the girls came along, they would sit out under the stars on a blanket at the farmhouse and she would quote When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer . It was partly those moments, the biggest part, that had brought him to Brooklyn in the first place after she and the girls had died.

He’d moved into the city because he had grown tired of wandering around the farmhouse, watching the dust motes drift through the early morning light, listening for the stirrings that would never come again. He had moved to the city to experience firsthand what she’d always admired from afar, in the hope that, by losing himself in the blur of faces, he could somehow lose his memory. Try as he might, though, he’d not been able to love Brooklyn, perhaps because, try as it might, it had not been able to make him stop loving her.

He thought back to the day that the call had come in. Frightening silence—all but the labored breathing of his beautiful wife. Cheryl and the girls had been in Boston visiting her parents when they’d driven back through the tunnel on their way to Logan. Clay had stayed behind to lay new tile in the kitchen, and he was just putting the finishing touches on the grout when he heard the phone ring. Seeing her number pop up, he had cheerily picked up and made some crack about their sleeping late and missing their flight. There was dead silence on the other end, except for the sound of his wife wheezing and slowly pushing out that she loved him. She whispered that there had been a terrible accident. Something had crushed the car. She didn’t know what and didn’t know if they would make it. He gripped the phone in confusion and desperation and began to cry into it helplessly. Baby? Baby? Oh, God… Baby?! Are you there? The noises of chaos eventually rose to overtake his wife’s whispers and then the line had gone dead in a horrible screech of metal.

The next hour, the longest of his life, was spent on the phone with area hospitals, and police and fire departments. No one could tell him anything. Eventually, he got a call from Mass General, an Officer Somethingorother. “Mr Richter…” The tone in the voice told him all that he needed to know.

The rest had been a blur of details. A concrete panel had come loose from the ceiling in the Big Dig tunnel just as his wife had passed underneath it. The resulting blow had caved in the driver’s side compartment and sent the car careening into the walls of the tunnel. His wife had survived the initial crush, but his two daughters had been thrown from the vehicle. All were now gone. He would need to come to Boston to identify the bodies.

Clay thought of that moment a thousand times since that day, but it never stopped leaving an ache. It was a still-opened wound. It left a pang now as he took the last bite of his energy bar and stood up and slipped on his backpack. He knew it was foolish to wish that it had happened to him, as though the wishing could somehow alter the hands of fate. It was the kind of thinking that led to a comment he’d heard a man make while walking along the Promenade. The man had been walking with a friend and shaking his head in disbelief, when he stated, “I was watching the news on CNN about New Jersey, and I almost feel guilty that those poor people got hit so hard when we didn’t.” Clay thought this was exactly that kind of death wish thinking that life in the city promulgated and that he was now escaping.

He came out of the park and jogged quickly north to Prospect where he ascended the stairs to the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge walkway. Looking up at the thick, twisted cables that formed a warp and weft like a net in the sky, he thought they looked as much like a snare as they did a support. The granite and limestone towers rose in their neo-Gothic austerity across the span of the two shorelines. The waters swirled past in their still dangerous attitude that, even at that moment, had shut down the tunnel servicing the subways and the ferries offering conveyance.

The bridge stood massive in its impact and arrogance, having just laughed off Sandy like she was a bad joke. Untold “Wonders of the World” had come and gone like so many flowers in a summer field, only to disappear into the dusts of history. Some, like the Lighthouse of Alexandria, had lasted millennia, while others, like the Colossus of Rhodes, had lasted but the blink of an eye. In the modern age, the bridge had done better than most, outlasting other suspension bridges due to its deck and truss engineering. It had even housed, during a time when the Cold War was raging across the land, a bunker intended to outlast a nuclear bomb. Now, as Clay stood before it on the morning after the storm, he couldn’t decide whether its towers looked more like watchtowers seeing out into the future, or guard towers of a prison.

Always leave yourself a way out . His father had told him that one day, a lifetime ago, when he’d watched the old man playing cards with a group of his buddies. He had watched his father draw hand after hand of bad cards and yet, at the end of the night his old man hadn’t lost any money. “Life doesn’t owe you anything, but you don’t have to take it lying down, son. Sometimes, the only thing you can do is to walk away, but always leave yourself a way out.”

The lesson had stuck. Though Clay didn’t know what was ahead of him, he was certain that he no longer wanted what was behind. Frost wrote that the best way out is always through. Clay was thinking something like that as he turned up his collar against the cold, whipping winds, and set out across the bridge.