Michael Bunker - WICK

Clay didn’t tell him that he was right, that he once had a few unsavory days after Cheryl was gone when he turned to drink a little too hard and got tired of some guy running his mouth. Nor did he tell him what he’d been thinking about the city, or why he had to get out. All that was behind him now, and he didn’t feel the need to talk about it.

“You know,” Red Beard said, “many of those people are political prisoners, jailbirds of circumstance who just happen to find themselves on the wrong side of whatever 51% of the people have decided is wrong at a particular time in history. Walk around drinking laudanum on the streets in 1850 and you’d fit right in. Get caught with some Vicodin not prescribed to you in 2012 and you’ll likely get to see the inside of a jail cell.” The man went on, seeming not to notice that Clay was fidgeting with his hands in his pockets. “Even some of the most violent prisoners are sometimes prisoners of circumstance and epoch. Rats in cages will turn on each other violently… for no other reason than they have nothing better to do. And stealing? Ha! Well, that, too can be relative when bankers are handed trillions in bailout dollars—money printed for the purpose by the government—to patch up the hole left after they lost trillions on risky speculation in derivatives.” The man stopped and looked at Clay intently. He wanted Clay to pay attention, to hear him. “You can be the little Dutch Boy and stick your finger in the dam, or you can lay back and watch the dam burst, learn to swim, get baptized in the wash. Me? I got my floatin’ shoes on. I’m going to learn to walk on water.”

Clay wanted to hug him, but didn’t. He reached out instead and put his hand on the man’s shoulder, feeling the frayed textures against his hand and gave the shoulder a squeeze. The man looked at Clay and, for the first time since they had begun to talk, flashed a hint of some vulnerability. Something in the eyes.

“I wish you well, my brother.” Red Beard smiled at Clay and looked down. He stepped onto the pedal and pushed himself up and over the seat. Steadying himself, he steered the handlebars toward the city he’d just come from and began to roll slowly down the hill… and was gone.

Clay took a quick detour through Wall Street. It was an extra bit of walking, but he didn’t mind. He had heard on the radio the night before that downtown had been destroyed, and he wanted to see it for himself. Not that he had any love for the place, or had spent any real time there. It was more like a morbid curiosity. Wall Street was the engine that generated the city, one of them anyway, the most powerful, and he liked the idea that the money centers that the man with the red beard had just spoken about would now have to fix a few leaks of their own. He imagined the headline in the dailies over the next several days: Manhattan Annoyed. Queens Destroyed. Quick! Fix Manhattan.

There was something else out there in the city that he was trying to identify. Worry. Maybe not worry. Concern. It was a taste in the air, palpable but light and airy, like the smell of ink and leather in the lobby of a nice hotel. You could barely make it out, but it was growing.

Not that any of the hotels smelled like ink and leather at the moment. In fact, they smelled like seaweed. Wet sea trash spilled across the sidewalk, pushed up the streets four and five blocks in, when water that would drown a man had poured across downtown. It had settled into the cracks of the cobblestones, reminders of an earlier age, salty and toxic and rank. Vegetation, where it existed among the concrete and steel, bent over and clung to the earth, already beginning to turn yellow from the chemicals.

Clay watched the men work in their bright yellow jackets and orange helmets and bulky police and fire gear. He stepped around the occasional yellow tape and bright orange cones, walking as if he meant business. He passed like a ghost among the men who were too busy stringing hoses from the buildings out into the street to notice him. Generators purred, pumping the water that had flooded the buildings onto the sidewalk where it splashed in fan shapes onto the concrete and poured over the curb and ran down the street and into the drains and back towards the sea.

Carpets on floors of banks and insurance companies steamed and fogged the insides of windows, making it impossible to see out into the street, into the future. Con Edison men stood drinking coffee, waiting for their turn in the buildings. Where did they get the coffee? There isn’t a shop in sight open. Police sat in cars or on the hoods of cars, watching the men do their work.

Italian and Arab men picked through their stores, lifting the thick wet boxes that had washed across the floors, spilling out their contents, and carried the boxes, dripping and coming apart, out into the street where they piled them in asymmetrical heaps. Chinese women swept the floors of their taco stands.

Clay walked through the wet steamy mess with an economy all his own, cutting down side streets, dipping in alleys, winding through the maze of trucks lining the curb. When he’d seen enough, he came out on Broadway and headed toward midtown.

The city was quiet in a way that made him feel like he might be in the middle of a Twilight Zone episode. Here and there a siren would chirp and out of a radio somewhere— battery powered? —a news reporter talked about the election, how the candidates for president would deal with the aftermath of the hurricane. Altogether the city sounded quieter. Muffled. Different.

Clay felt good. Not emotionally, maybe, but physically. His joints were loose and the gear on his back felt light, and lightly carried. The walk was invigorating, and he felt a small bead of sweat run down his chest in the space between his skin and the fabric of his shirt.

A small delivery truck rumbled by, and a distinctive squeal came from the brakes as the driver drove two-footed—simultaneously pressing the gas and the brakes. Clay heard a shop owner comment that power wasn’t the only problem, but that gasoline was about to be really hard to come by.

As he made his way uptown, he shifted his path back and forth like a ship captain tacking to follow the stars. There were avenues that were closed off here and there, and as the chaos of downtown resided, there were police officers who wouldn’t allow passage. He stopped for a moment at one point and looked back down 5th Avenue towards the Flatiron Building that stood as a timeless waypoint emphasizing the city’s rigidity. He kept moving, a fish swimming upstream through the now fluid events and persons.

A woman in a business suit, looking out of place today for some reason he couldn’t quite pin down, asked Clay if he had a cell phone she could use to make a call. She explained that her battery had died, that she couldn’t find power, and held the unit up to him like a defunct passport. It was her lifeline. It was her life. He shook his head no and shrugged apologetically. She looked at him as if he were an alien.

Had he heard that a building had collapsed in the West Village? Had he heard that the subways might be out of service for months? Did he know where you could get some coffee? Strangers who would normally pass him on the street without looking up now stopped him and sought information. Was it the backpack that made them think that he might know? As they passed, they shared their own news. Bits of gossip reached him on the air, some of it trivial, some of it ludicrous, some of it frightening with bluster.

Sidewalks could tell tales that would make men blush on any normal day. There was something about walking through the city after the storm that made Clay feel like a voyeur. People were out in the streets, stripped of their pretensions. It was like when the city gets hit by a snowfall and everyone comes out in community, but now they had a slight helplessness in their eyes. A homeless man passed Clay and asked for a cigarette. He was used to despair.