Our Missing Hearts (44)
At night, parts of town turned rough. Men out of work sat in the park, burning their last few dollars on a fifth of whiskey, and by evening they grew resentful and belligerent. Women learned the hard way to avoid them. Since childhood, Margaret had mastered how to check over her shoulder, to gauge risk from a gesture, to fight if she could not flee. Domi, who’d grown up in Westport with her father—summer house, riding lessons, in-ground pool—was less prepared. Sometimes she cried out in her sleep, hands flying to shield her face, as if someone were trying to gouge out her eyes. Margaret climbed up beside her, held her tight, stroked her hair, and Domi stilled and quieted. In the mornings, the few stores stubbornly clinging to life might find their windows smashed, shelves stripped bare, alarm bell ringing ferociously, though no one had answered the call. Some people tried not to go out at all, and soon Margaret was running errands and delivering messages, too. Five dollars a run, then ten, though for those in need, she would do it for one. Medicine from the drugstore, a bag of groceries. Tampons, batteries. Candles. Liquor. All the things people needed to survive another day. She folded the dollar bills they gave her and tucked them into the cups of her bra; at the end of the night, back in the apartment, she counted them, soft as damp felt with her sweat, and smoothed them out again. By then she wasn’t thinking about poetry at all.
You got used to it, after a while: all the new rules the city and the governor imposed, trying to keep order—when you could go out, when you had to stay in, how many people could gather at one time: few, then fewer. Sometimes waves of sickness rippled over the city, then the state: not enough people at work to pay hospital bills, not enough doctors or medicine anyway, just referrals for Advil from the drugstore on the corner, or something stiffer from the liquor store next door. Lines everywhere, everything in short supply except anger, and fear, and grief. Tents clustered like toadstools at the feet of overpasses and bridges. Based on the news, it was the same everywhere. You got used to waiting, to the men who squatted on sidewalks, holding signs scrawled on cardboard: anything helps. You learned to keep watch on them without meeting their eyes, to skirt them at a distance. Your ears pricked for the sounds of shouting, the high jangle of breaking glass; even before you recognized it, your feet would already be turning you down another street, steering you safely around. You got used to sandwiches of whatever you had—ketchup, mayonnaise, salt, whatever made bread palatable enough to choke down—to rebrewing coffee grounds, once, twice, sometimes for a whole week if you needed; even mostly water, it was something to keep you warm. You got used to not speaking to people on the street, to edging past them, both of you on your way to somewhere else, and to the sirens that flared and then quieted like an infant’s stifled cry. After a while you stopped wondering where they were headed, stopped thinking about whose need they were going off to serve. Somewhere out there, you knew, wealthy people were barricaded in their fortresses, fed and warm, if not happy, but soon you stopped thinking of them. You stopped thinking about other people at all. You got used to that, too, eventually, just as you got used to people disappearing: gone back home, gone elsewhere hoping for better, sometimes simply gone.
What you couldn’t get used to—what she never got used to—was the quiet. In Times Square the lights changed red to green and back again and sometimes not a car went by. Overhead the gulls screamed and dove toward the empty harbor. When she spoke to her parents it was brief, a few minutes at a time; service was spotty and minutes were expensive and all they needed to know, really, was that the other was still alive. Sometimes she would ride through Central Park and see not a single person, not on the footpaths, not on the lake, no sign of a single other human except the tents that dotted the Sheep Meadow, springing up overnight, disappearing just as quickly when word of police sweeps came. In the silence between things there was too much time to dwell and no matter how fast she pedaled, she couldn’t leave her thoughts behind.
* * *
? ? ?
In the honeyed glow of the lamplight her hands tremble.
The Crisis. The Crisis. Bird has grown up hearing about it: We must never forget the turmoil of the Crisis, everyone has said, his whole life; we must never again go back to that. But it is impossible to explain what it felt like.
Evictions and protests daily, then nightly, people clamoring for assistance, for any kind of aid. The police fired rubber bullets and sprayed tear gas; cars plowed into the crowds. Each night sirens whirred to life and wailed away across the city; the only question was which way. Fires began to spring up all over the country—Kansas City one night, Milwaukee and New Orleans the next—frantic signal fires from those deserted and desperate. In Chicago, tanks rolled past department stores on Michigan Avenue, protecting their glossy wares. No one agreed on who to blame—not yet—and with no focus, outrage and panic and fear swelled over everything, hot and thick, rasping your lungs. It was there in the silent darkened streets after curfew, in the slate-gray shadows of the buildings and the echoing footsteps of your shoes on the deserted sidewalk. It flashed sharp and bright in the lights of the police cars as they went by, always on their way to somewhere else more urgent, which was everywhere.
How to explain this to someone who has never seen it? How to explain fear to someone who has never been afraid?
Imagine, Margaret wants to tell him. Imagine if everything you think is solid turns out to be smoke. Imagine that all the rules no longer apply.