Michael Bunker - WICK

That was where he knew he’d find Pyotr Alexandrovitch Bolkonsky.

Warwick was a nice enough town, if one were merciful enough to forget, even for a moment, its purpose in the world. Nestled deep in a thick forest, in a sleepy little hollow shielded on all sides by ancient mountains cut through by dissecting rivers and grinding glacial ice, the town was beautiful in its way, like many New England towns.

In the spring and summer, its verdant plateau was adorned with the delicate purple blooms of the deadly nightshade and the brief yellows of lady slipper orchids. In the fall, the leaves of its towering canopy of yellow birch, black cherry, red oak, and white pine trees drifted lazily through the crisp mountain air and piled along the streets and in the forest bed in heaps of luscious reds and golds. It was a quaint place, shrouded in antiquity, despite its relative youth.

One might easily have found resting in those piles of leaves, for example, on a normal autumnal evening, a man who by dress and mannerisms resembled (if one didn’t know better) the image of a colonial Rip Van Winkle. Or a man looking like that mad monk Rasputin might have been found raking those leaves, gathering them into neat little piles to be composted as he nodded to the women passers-by, or watched the children playing Cossacks and Robbers in the street.

All in all, Warwick (often called Novgorod, as a nickname, by the locals) had the quality of a foreign town in a foreign land, as if the inhabitants had come from some other country and brought the bricks and stone and wood of their ancestral homes with them, along with their clothes and language and customs. It was the kind of place one rarely sees in the landscape of American modernity. This, in the particular case of Warwick, was especially convenient, since almost no one had ever seen it.

There was only one road leading into and out of Warwick and, in the recent twin natural disasters—the raging superstorm called Sandy and the even more powerful blizzard that followed in its wake—even that route had been cut off.

Where the town had drawn its sustenance, beyond the ample and well-worked vegetable gardens and the livestock that dotted its streets and lay hidden in its valley, had always been something of a mystery, even to those who lived there.

There had been no convoys of trucks along its lone corridor, no planes flying low and touching down on a secluded runway. Somehow the town had simply, since its inception in the late 1950’s, in a time when two superpowers were engaged in a cold war, been re-supplied through capillary action from some unknown source or sources. The Spar grocery and the smaller specialty markets—the butchers, the bakers, and the candlestick makers—seemed to remain perpetually well stocked, though the selection was probably more limited than one might find in a land where competition thrived.

Most American towns, villages, and even tiny hamlets either grew or they died. Warwick, by contrast, just maintained. The same forces that multiplied or diminished growth in small town America were not at work in Warwick. Competition for labor from nearby cities, children escaping small town life for college or for excitement in the Metropolis, young adults fleeing the staid and boring village for… well… for anything else, even for war, these were not defining factors in Warwick.

Other American towns either provided a boon for encroaching modernity, enticing new and bigger businesses to come and build and supply the needs and dreams and lusts of modern life, or they suffered a drain of the young and dull or best and brightest. Because of the centuries-long culture war against the traditional home and multi-generational families, modern American small town life had become a fleeting thing for all but the old-timers, and this reality—outside Warwick—meant that the market forces that feed or starve a town were usually pretty evident to anyone who cared to look. By contrast, somehow Warwick lived and breathed and regenerated itself almost invisibly.

There had been rumors once of an underground passage, something like a Moscow Metro-2, but these rumors (like those about the very existence of Warwick) had never been confirmed by anyone who had ever been there and made it out alive. Sure, trucks delivered goods and supplies, just like in any other town. This isn’t, after all, a fairy tale; the shelves are not stocked by elves at night. But the trucks that carried the lifeblood of urban life to Warwick came from warehouses within town, and where those warehouses got their goods and supplies, very few people actually knew.

The town was a closed loop, but it had not always remained completely hermetically sealed. Alumni existed… somewhere. There had been such people, for example, a rare and storied few souls who had escaped the town during what was known as the Great Confusion in 1992 — when the Soviet Union had collapsed and the town’s nominal reason for existence had come into question. Later however, with guards and dogs patrolling its surrounding forest, and that forest extending out to a distance of five football fields and sometimes more, crisscrossed with listening and heat detection devices, the town’s topographical subterfuge had served its purpose well in keeping the residents in, and hikers or other curious onlookers who might stumble onto the place out.

Before the twin storms, even airlines didn’t fly over the area. Instead, they followed the dictates of the jet stream and the regulations for air traffic set down by military and intelligence planners. Like other strategically cloaked areas—one thinks of Area 51 or RAF Menwith Hill—the town of Warwick had been established and maintained in absolute secrecy, with every effort made to ensure that prying eyes were kept out. Any eyes that had crept in, and there had been a very few, were pried out, which is to say that any intruders that actually saw the town, and were caught, usually disappeared or met with some unfortunate accident in the forest. Electronic prying was equally difficult. Satellite photos and maps showed only an endless expanse of trees.

There was, in fact, in the same region of New York State, another Warwick — another village by the same name. However, even this was a diversion. That other Warwick, around since the beginning of American Independence, served as a convenient placeholder for anyone who ever had a question about rumors, or who made an inquiry concerning whereabouts.

This Warwick, this hamlet built during a war that was always expected but, like Godot, never seemed to arrive, was an anachronism. It was a wick, the archaic name for community, built for a war that was never a war.

War-Wick.