Forty Leap (7 page)

It was awful.

I noticed first the jungle jim in the park
across the street. It was split in two, each piece bent away from
the other as if a pile driver had come down on top of it and never
stopped moving. The two parts were mangled and bent, melted. There
had been trees in the park, too, but they were virtually gone. All
that remained were burnt husks and piles of ash. Great chunks of
the ground had come up from beneath to form concrete mountains the
height of buses. And there were buses. And cars. Some were still on
their decaying wheels while others lay on their backs like dying
beetles. Everything was covered with this layer of black soot. Some
of it had been streaked and there were finger writings in large
patches. The buildings, too, were soiled as far up as I could see.
While they still stood, great portions of them were severely
damaged and there wasn’t an unbroken window in view.

There were bodies, too.

Some were scorched beyond recognition, the
flesh gone and the bones fused. Others were just old and decaying.
Many showed signs of desecration. Not all of these people had been
killed by whatever had caused this destruction. Just standing where
I was, on the threshold of what had once been my place of work, I
could identify people who had been shot, people who had been
burned, people who had been bludgeoned. There was all manner of
death around me.

I thought I must truly have died and gone to
hell.

I thought this must be the culmination of my
condition, to have been transported to a place that simply could
not exist on Earth.

And then I knew that New York as I had known
it had ceased to exist between March 6
^th
, 2008 at around
6:00 pm and the time in which I stood at the moment. My concerns
about where and how I would be able to live as I missed weeks and
months of time were of no consequence now. Surely my apartment was
buried under a heap of rubble. Surely my accounts were no longer
viable. New York was gone. Perhaps the United States or even the
world was gone as well.

Jeremy.

Wyatt.

Livvie…

Maybe Morty and my mother had been lucky to
miss this.

Maybe I had been lucky, too.

Looking back at the entrance to K-Mart, I
debated going back inside. I cannot deny a morose interest in
seeing if I could identify any of the people inside. But my better
and weaker nature provided ample resistance. The anonymous death
around me was more than enough. I could not fathom seeing a
familiar face on a ruined body.

In a last desperate attempt to make contact
with someone, I pulled my cell phone from my pocket. There was no
signal of course, but the date and time were printed on the glowing
display. It was June 2
^nd
, 2009. It was four in the
morning. For a moment, the date didn’t even faze me as I realized
that its simple existence meant the cell satellite was still
functioning. At least I knew there was civilization somewhere. As
my harried psyche absorbed that bit of information I took in yet
another bit. It was 2009. Not only had I skipped from Spring to
Summer. I had skipped the entire year in between. For almost ten
minutes, I stood in the devastation of Union Square, looking from
my cell phone to the world around me, to the simplicity of the
unchanged sky.

4:01.

4:02

4:03

…

For me it was six in the evening. In a few
hours, when the morning was middle aged, I would be ready to get
some sleep.

But there would be no place to lay my
head.

I spent the dark hours wandering, shifting my
coat from arm to arm. I wanted desperately to be rid of it, but
couldn’t bring myself to discard it. At first, I headed north
toward my apartment. I must have walked twenty blocks before I
remembered that it was likely not to have been my apartment any
more. Additionally, I realized that I just didn’t want to see it.
Not really. After all, how would I react to the broken and burned
body of my super if I were to see it?

No. Not for me. I decided again to allow the
corpses to remain faceless.

The city around me was quiet but not dead. I
could hear shouts in the distance and smell the smoke of fires
wisping their way up out of the subway tunnels. Though I was
desperate for human contact, I could not fathom venturing into
those depths. Though it hadn’t happened in years, the old subway
cars used to lose their lights once in a while. It would only
happen for a moment, but the riders would be enclosed in the
darkness with nothing but the smoldering yellow of the track lights
as illumination. During those times, people would let out
exasperated sighs and businessmen would look up from their papers,
perturbed at the interruption of their reading. Then the lights
would come back on and everything would return to normal. But that
would not be so now. I knew that those tunnels would be black as
pitch with just those fires to cast terrifying shadows.

Again, not for me.

The dawn light left me feeling alone and
exposed. If asked, I wouldn’t have been able to name a possible
danger, and yet I had a terrible sense of dread. I felt the need to
be indoors so I took to one of the west side apartment buildings.
By then I had reached upper midtown, my walk having become more
manic and less touristy. The lobby of the building was, thankfully,
devoid of bodies. The security doors had been blasted off of their
hinges and a single elevator directly opposite them was missing,
the doors open to a gaping hole. I bypassed it and went for the
stairs. Though that door, too, had fallen off, the stairs
themselves were in a fair state. I was able to walk up the flights
with little caution. Instinctively, I went up three flights, as if
this was my building and I was going to my apartment. There were
actually several doors that were closed and looked very normal, but
I left them alone. I chose instead, an open door, letting myself
slowly into the foyer.

Though the damage was extensive, I could
still see remnants of its last occupation. The living room was
narrow with two bookshelves flanking a TV stand. The TV was gone.
The last vestiges of a brown and orange throw rug and a brown couch
were littered about the room along with other debris. There was
also a window that led to a fire escape, but it was broken. Letting
myself into the bathroom, I saw cracked tile, gouged walls, and a
toilet empty of water. Still, it had been several hours, and one
year, since I’d had the opportunity to use the bathroom and old
habits die hard. When I was finished, old habits prevailed as I
tried to flush, but there was just an empty click. I left the
bathroom, pulling the door shut (or as shut as it would shut)
behind me. At last, I made my way to the bedroom. The furniture was
in the same style as the living room, but what really caught my
attention was the full sized bed and mattress that was dirty, but
intact. There were no clean sheets or blankets. In fact, there were
no sheets or blankets at all. The apartment had been cleaned out. I
assumed by scavengers.

With nothing else for it and the low after an
adrenaline high crushing my bones and muscles with fatigue, I lay
my coat over the dirty mattress, crawled onto the bed, and fell
quickly asleep.

I was awakened by the sound of helicopter
blades in the distance. Upon opening my eyes, I was so disoriented
that panic set in quickly. Where was I? Who was I? Frozen in fear,
I could do nothing but lay there and listen to the roto roto roto
of the chopper. It was getting closer.

As the memories came back, I began to relax a
little. Truthfully, reality was not much comfort, but at least it
was grounded. I rolled over, having taken my most comfortable
position of sleeping on my stomach, and stared at the ceiling. The
light had gone mostly from the room, day having faded into night.
But there was light, a foreign light penetrating from the street
below. Startled at this realization, I sat up and looked around. I
was alone. It wasn’t the helicopter, which still sounded far off,
but a source, or several sources, from down below. The beams
flashed through the broken window and bounced off the ceiling,
temporarily illuminating the alien room.

Instinctively, I went to the window and
looked out. It never occurred to me that this might be a bad idea.
I just naturally assumed that whoever it was outside could help me.
Down below was a unit of soldiers accompanied by three military
vehicles. But I could see immediately that these were not American
soldiers. The vehicles displayed a flag that I did not recognize
and their uniforms were an urban grey. I caught a few spoken words,
but none of them made any sense. Instinctively, I dropped back down
under the window ledge.

“Did they see you?”

Startled, I turned to see a young girl
crouching by the bedroom door. She was wearing dusty blue jeans and
a tied off blouse with the sleeves ripped off. The jeans didn’t
look like they quite fit her. In fact, I was sure they were cut for
a man. Her hair was tied back revealing a deep scar along her
forehead and her skin was the color of chocolate powder. Beneath
the grime and bruises, I couldn’t tell much about her. She had a
furtive look in her eyes that was set in odd juxtaposition with a
pleading. She was a child, really, lost in this metropolitan
Armageddon. I don’t think she knew whether to trust me or to
run.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Well that was a stupid thing to do.” The
venom in her voice was clear and caught me off guard. She had that
New York inner city teen accent and used expressions that I didn’t
understand nor do I remember well enough to transcribe. The accent
made her accusation all the more forceful.

“I… didn’t realize.”

“You didn’t realize? There hasn’t been an
American unit through here in weeks.”

I didn’t know what to say. The light began to
fade from the room as the soldiers, apparently unaware of our
presence, moved on. As they went, we just sat there staring at each
other, she and I. She was sizing me up, I suppose. I couldn’t
imagine what she must have been through and I suppose she couldn’t
figure out who or what I was.

“Do you have any food?” she asked
suddenly.

I sat frozen for a moment, wondering at this
odd question, and then I remembered the candy bar. It was still in
my pocket and, though it was somewhat melted and bent out of shape,
it was still good. Gingerly, I stepped forward and held it out to
her. She twitched and her right hand went to a knapsack that sat on
the floor next to her. It was the first time I noticed it, a small
silver thing, filthy, with strings for straps. It was like dealing
with a timid animal. Would she bolt? But she had asked for the food
and I soon realized that it wasn’t fear or mistrust that had
stopped her up. It was the presence of a factory wrapped candy
bar.

“Where did you get it?” she asked, as she
studied it, almost completely disregarding my presence except as
the person who can answer the question.

“I bought it,” I answered because it was the
truth.

She laughed. It was a funny little noise,
tainted by her experiences. At one time, it must have been magical,
a little tinkling sound that reverberated just inside one’s ears.
Not now, though. Not anymore.

“You’re shitting me,” she said, then began to
examine me more closely. In fact, she got up from huddling in her
safe spot by the door and approached me. Her expression evolved
from one of disbelief to one of mistrust. “Who are you? You don’t
smell and your clothes are clean and not ripped. You’ve been
outside the city, right? How did you get in and out?”

I didn’t know how to answer these questions.
I didn’t even understand them. How could I explain to her the
truth? Should I even try? I did try.

“My name is Mathew,” I told her when I had
finished spilling the sloppy contents of my story.

She sat there, dumbfounded, searching for the
will to believe me and the truth if she didn’t. Finally, she sat
herself on the bed and tore open the candy bar. She looked at me
once and then took a tentative bite. She smiled.

Two bites later, she offered me some, but I
declined. She was Livvie’s age. Correction. She was Livvie’s age as
I remembered Livvie. She was fifteen years old and her name was
Jennie with an ie.
I can’t say that she accepted my story,
but she sat with me for a while, waiting, I suppose, to see if the
candy bar would make her sick. It didn’t. I asked her to tell me
what had happened and she did the best she could. As a New York
City teen, she hadn’t exactly been an avid follower of the
political arena. Current events to her consisted of who had gotten
pregnant and who had overdosed or been knifed in a gang fight.

As 2008 had worn through Spring and Summer,
the effects of the assassination of Arab leader Abdelaziz began to
spread across the globe. Even Jennie had heard of him and she
remembered discussing it in class (although I was under the
impression that she had not attended class very much). Her life and
her world remained much the same, but she began to catch snatches
of the news and the conversations of adults. She remembered hearing
things about the President over extending himself, fighting a war
on three fronts, and the country having become a pariah in the
world community (she actually did use the word
pariah
but
she badly mispronounced it). The winter of 2008 was cold and dreary
and led into a dark New Year. The United Arab Nation, under the
leadership of a new and more aggressive man whose name Jennie could
not remember, began to move troops overseas. They very quietly
stole support from the United Nations and when they finally
attacked the North East of the United States in February of 2009,
the President was on his own in the world community with the
majority of his troops overseas and his pants around his
ankles.