If I stay here any longer I’ll never get away. There was a siren call to the burning building, a silent lure that could draw him in and keep him; he took a few steps toward the gaping doorway before he stopped himself. The urge to surrender was very strong: what else had he come home for if not to find out what had happened to his family? Now he knew, and he needed something: a place to go and something to do when he got there. He’d come back with a purpose: somewhere the city was still home. He could not imagine anything else.
He decided at last to head for his own apartment on West Seventy-sixth. It meant crossing Central Park again; that very nearly turned him against the whole idea, but after a moment he looked away from the burning building, from the guard—his name was Larry, Tietjen remembered—slumped over the security desk, and turned back toward Park Avenue.
After so much crying and fear he now felt … light, empty. He catalogued disasters as he saw them, but without much feeling for what he saw: fire; explosion; quake; flooding. Madness, he thought, when he saw a storefront shattered by gun blasts. Then he realized that the stuff littering the doorway was human bodies, and the shock of it cut through his lightheadedness. He stood stock-still for a moment, watching for movement, but there was none. In the middle of the street a tangle of electric cable was threaded through a manhole and lay bared for thirty feet of the crosswalk. It had electrified an MTA bus; the big blue and white bus was still humming with electricity. Once Tietjen thought he heard laughter again, but he saw no one when he looked down Ninety-third Street toward the East River, toward the sound.
At Park he started south again. A few minutes later, through the ruined grille of the Eighty-eighth Street gate, he saw a whole row of town houses pushed askew and leaning, perfectly ordered, at a forty-five-degree angle, windows and doors in neat slanting parallels. This morning the impossible things had been to him curious but real; now he began to doubt his eyes.
So much of the destruction he saw was things that couldn’t have been done by man—like the skewed buildings. He saw some signs of looting, but most of what he saw seemed to be purely acts of God. Then, as he came down Park Avenue, he looked east, down a gated side street. The two-story mesh fence was intact, and from it someone had hung severed human hands, feet, legs, and arms, some still wearing shreds of clothing. They were hung with rope and wire and even ribbon. At the top of the fence a whole body had been hung, a man whose feet had been forced through the holes in the mesh; his ankles were broken. He was grimacing joyfully.
Tietjen turned and ran south, stumbling blindly, until he was several blocks distant from the fence. Then he stopped, chest heaving, and threw up.
From then, he walked on with a kind of tunnel vision, taking in details of specific horrors, but not letting them surprise him. So he didn’t see what he was walking into until he was almost upon it; ten city blocks had collapsed into the ground, leaving a sea of stone and concrete nearly level with the street. The subway, he thought dimly: the Lexington Avenue tunnel must have collapsed and brought all of this down with it. The apricot glow of afternoon light made the rubble shimmer slightly, moving in the windless air. Without more than a moment’s thought Tietjen turned west again, toward the Park, to walk around the crater.
He rested on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The building looked untouched, comfortably ordinary, banners still fluttering between the paired columns; only the settlement of street people who lived on the steps and plaza was gone without a trace. Maybe, he thought, they’d gone inside. Maybe the place to find people would be in public buildings like this: the Red Cross would set up in large buildings, housing the homeless and tending to victims. Surely survivors would come to places like this, to the museums and armories and courthouses.
He was hungry for people. He was hungry for talk. He wanted to tell his story and hear others’, to talk about what he had seen and find out where the madness lay: in his mind or across the streets of the city.
Tietjen rose stiffly from the step and climbed the stairs to the museum doors. What, after all, did he have to lose?
The main doors were locked, the glass unbroken. Behind them Tietjen could see the dim vault of the museum lobby. Neat signs stood at the doors: MUSEUM CLOSED. HOURS:. He checked each of the side doors and the last moved ponderously at his touch. For the first time since he had left the bridge that morning, something going right. Cautiously, Tietjen entered the museum.
The air was dusty. He heard echoes, but when he listened there was no sound save his own footfall. He put it down to the resonance of empty space, and cautiously started across the lobby, through the arched metal detectors and past the information desk with its bright fans of brochures in French, Spanish, Korean, Tagalog. The security doors to the left, leading to the Greek and Roman art and the Rockefeller wing, were ajar. The stairs ahead were empty expect for the statuary on the landings. The immense floral arrangements that sat in granite urns were wilting, decaying sweetly.
Not too loudly he called out. “Hello? Anyone here?” The echo in response unnerved him, and for a long moment he waited, wondering which way to proceed. Then another sound answered the echo of his call. He went left, toward the Rockefeller wing. He thought the noise might be a voice answering his.
He had to stop inside the door to let his eyes adjust to the darkness; without artificial light the hallway was filled with steely shadows and black shapes. Tietjen made his way cautiously along the left side of the hall, one hand skimming lightly along the surface of the wall. The hall let onto another hall, and another, finally ending in a smaller stairwell that glared with afternoon light. He stood blinking for a moment, until a sound of footfall behind him made his stomach lurch. Tietjen swallowed and turned.
“You’re real! It’s hard to know when a noise is a
noise,
if you know what I mean.” The man was tall and bone thin except for a sloping paunch; he wore a suit that struck Tietjen immediately as professorial, curiously dapper under the circumstances. His manner, too, seemed cocktail-party sociable, but his voice was steady and the hand that he offered to Tietjen did not tremble. Tietjen held out his own hand, bemused, feeling like the old joke about English gentlemen dressing for dinner on a desert island.
“You hear things in an old building like this when it’s empty. I’m glad you’re real and not just another shifting block of granite.” The man turned in the direction he had come from. “Come on, I’ll take you downstairs. Are you hungry? Of course you are. You’ll want to see what I’ve been able to save, won’t you? I was the Assistant Curator for Eastern Art, but of course now I’m sort of Curator Pro Tem. Until things get sorted out, you know.”
Tietjen revised his first estimate; okay, a little crazy, but benign. The curator’s eccentric cheer made Tietjen feel more solid. What had the man called him? Real. And it rather cheered him to think that in the midst of all the destruction someone was taking care of the Met’s art treasures. “I’m John Tietjen,” he said, matching his stride to the curator’s.
“Tietjen. Is that Dutch? Down these stairs. The emergency generator is working downstairs, so there’s light, but I’m afraid that the main stairs are flooded below this level—thank God most of the doors were sealed and nothing was badly damaged. This area is for staff only; acquisitions and restoration. Dutch, right?” He turned to smile again at Tietjen. “I suppose you’re hungry.”
While Tietjen listened to the stream of chat, the curator led him down the narrow stairs. When the upper floors cut off the daylight from above, Tietjen heard for the first time since the night before the voice inside his head, a vague unhappy whine.
He ignored it. I have to trust someone. Maybe he knows what happened.
“Let me see, let me see,” the man was murmuring to himself.
“Let’s feed you first, then we can see about getting you settled. It’s rather a responsibility being in charge of the whole museum. Of course, it’s more like a field promotion, as it were. I think the Board will approve what I’ve done, on the whole.”
“I’m sure,” Tietjen said politely. “Look, were you here when all this happened? Did you see—”
“Here in the museum? Lord, no, I was on my way home—I live in Greenpoint, but when I heard what was happening I turned right around and came back. Thank God I did, too. On my way back in I saw what was happening at other museums—bricks through the windows of the Whitney; the tower fell right in on top of MOMA—sort of poetic justice, I thought—” the curator nattered on.
“I mean,” Tietjen broke in doggedly. “Did you see how all the—the damage started? What happened? Where did it start?”
“Start? I don’t know. I was on the bus, but I got out—at an unsecured stop, too—and came right back. Someone had to stay with the museum. Here we are.” The man stopped before a large door marked STAFF ONLY, and opened it with a key from a janglingly overfull ring. Inside was a cluttered office furnished with gunmetal gray cabinets, files, desks. An old bulletin board covered in clusters of old notes and paper notices hung by the door, with a newer electronic board hanging beside it, its backlit screen dark; one desk had been turned into a makeshift kitchen with a pair of hot plates, a small store of dishes, glasses, and silverware, and neat stacks of cans and packages. In a corner behind two filing cabinets Tietjen saw blankets laid out precisely against the wall, with several books and a lantern neatly arranged on an upturned carton.
“What would you like? There’s soup, stew, the usual things. I’m afraid it’s not haute cuisine, but it’s food.”
Tietjen was suddenly giddy with hunger. It had been two days since he had eaten. “Anything at all. Do you have anything to drink?”
The curator emptied a can of stew into a pot and put it on the hot plate. “There’s bottled water. I hope that will do. I took most of this from the restaurant kitchens. They do have a wine cellar, but I don’t want to encourage drinking during the crisis. One never knows where it might lead.” The stew began to bubble thickly, filling the close room with the smell of beef stock and onions. Tietjen’s mouth began to water. In a few minutes the man spooned the contents of the pan into a delicate porcelain bowl and handed it to Tietjen with a beautiful, delicate silver spoon, beaten so thin it seemed a touch would bend it. Seeing his guest examine the bowl and spoon, the curator laughed. “From one of the exhibits upstairs. Georgian. They were made to be used, after all. Besides, no one’s going to complain: the woman in charge of housecrafts and jewelry was crushed under an Apollo on the second floor. Eat up.”
Tietjen ate, unquestioning. The stew was gone too soon, but it left a warm glow in his stomach and he found himself able to focus again on what the man was saying.
The curator had stopped talking while Tietjen ate, and sat with his ankles crossed, watching his guest with a musing stare. “All done?” he asked. “Splendid. Would you like to see the others?”
Tietjen looked up. “You’re not alone down here?” He felt suddenly edgy, cautious. He wanted to trust the man, the first person he had met in the city.
The guy’s okay.
Defiantly,
I’m okay.
“Of course I’m not alone. I’m just the curator. Come on, I’ll show you.” Tietjen stood to follow the other man. Back out to the corridors again. Deliberately, the man pulled out the weighty key ring and locked the office up. “It’s going to take a long time to get the collection back to where it should be.” He murmured to himself. “Dutch, you did say Dutch?”
The curator started off deliberately down the hall and stopped before another locked door. “The Asian wing was badly damaged. It’s going to be a problem.” He seemed preoccupied with other thoughts. Again he brought out the key ring and went through a self-important process of unlocking the heavy door. “Hello! I’ve brought someone.”
The door swung heavily open; Tietjen smelled dust and the faint trace of decay he was beginning to recognize. He blinked in the dim light of one yellow emergency light at the back of the room. It was a large storage space: frames and exhibition easels stacked against each other, a few canvases, their faces turned to the wall, shelves that divided the room into small aisles. There was movement from different sides of the room; farthest left Tietjen saw first a glitter of eyes in the amber light, then a restless, shrugging motion. Tietjen stood, disbelieving. The voice cried in his head:
too late, too late.
Behind Tietjen the curator clicked a switch and an overhead light flickered on.
“Hello,” the curator repeated amiably. “How are you today?”
The man he addressed, swarthy, young, dressed in the institutional whites of a food services worker, stared at the curator with dumb hopeless eyes. A rope was tied to one of his wrists and to a heavily laden metal shelving unit. The knot could easily have been untied, but the prisoner looked in shock and quite helpless; Tietjen doubted he was capable of it. He stole a look at the curator, who was professional, enjoying the role of docent.
Be easy
, Tietjen told himself.
Wait for the right moment to run like hell.
“Italian, but not the best. Primitive.” The curator pushed aside a box that stood partially in front of one of the small areas to reveal a black girl, maybe seventeen years old, dressed in street leathers. The gaunt beauty of her face warred with feral rage in her eyes. There was a dark slash of dried blood across her forehead and both her hands were tied. Tietjen would not have vouched for his own life or the curator’s had she been able to free herself.