Wunderland(17)
She resumed briskly walking, fear of the dark ceding to a New Yorker’s instinct to keep moving on streets where hesitation implied susceptibility. She kept her gaze fixed ahead, and so it was only after twenty or more minutes and a furtive glimpse up at a street sign that she realized she’d veered completely off course: she was heading not uptown but westward. Groaning in frustration, she wheeled the stroller around and set back again the way she had come.
What felt like hours later she turned back onto Second, where she began to make out shifting outlines and shapes in the dark: a glint of headlight-limned skin here. A chalk-white tank there. The lit tips of cigarettes, free-floating constellations in the gloom. At some point she noticed a group of shadowy figures drawing together several blocks ahead, like metal shavings clumping toward the end of a magnet. There were more shouts: not just blackout but exulted whoops and catcalls, and the rattling cough of steel gates being pulled shut. A chant started; slowing slightly, Ava strained to make out the words over the pounding of her pulse in her ears: “Hit th’ stores! Hit th’ stores! Hit th’ stores!”
Then, from somewhere even closer, came the abrupt and unmistakable retort: a gunshot. Then another.
Ava froze, as shocked as though she’d just been shot herself. Sophie burst into a fresh round of startled tears. Without a further thought for the hospital Ava swung the stroller around and set off back downtown at a jog: however sick Sophie was, it wasn’t worth risking their lives over.
As she raced over the steaming pavement Ava kept her eyes fixed ahead and her limbs loose, like a wrestler in the ring, stunned by how quickly order had deteriorated around her. How long had they been walking? The street now felt as populated as it had at noon; she found herself darting left and right with the same tight-jawed focus she’d once turned on arcade games. Swerving to avoid two men dragging a full-sized sofa between them, she nearly hit another with a mattress balanced precariously on his head. A woman with a boxed Barbie Disco Playset and a pile of buxom dolls dropped one right into Sophie’s lap, though a moment later the lone policeman who appeared to be giving chase (where on earth were the rest of them? Ava wondered) snatched the toy up again indignantly, as though Sophie were an accomplice to the heist.
“Be-be-be!” screeched Sophie.
“I know,” Ava panted, pausing to allow a woman practically mummified in cheap clothing to pass, plastic hangers clacking, price tags fluttering like tiny victory flags. “We’ll get you a new baby. I promise,” she said, though part of her was wondering whether there would be any merchandise left in New York after this. It couldn’t have been more than an hour since the blackout started, but the damage already seemed overwhelming: Doors defaced. Windows splintered. Walls splattered with food or paint or (could it be?) blood. The sidewalk was strewn with glass; pushing through one larger pile she felt a shard working itself into her sandal’s insole, pushing into the soft flesh of the arch of her foot with each step. She limped on, past a man grimly attacking a padlock with a saw and two more prying steel shutters open with crowbars. Across the street the crowd had jimmied a hardware shop gate up with a hydraulic jack, propping it open with a city garbage can and proceeding to strip it clean, some of the men even loading the stolen items into a waiting U-Haul. A few stores down, someone had driven a tow truck up onto the sidewalk in front of an appliance shop and was attaching the hook to the gate. As Ava passed she heard the truck’s engine rev and whine briefly, before the gate clamorously ripped away from its steel frame. A profane cheer went up. A man pushed past her, a KitchenAid blender held aloft like a sports trophy.
In the absence of working traffic lights the East 4th Street intersection was like the site of some vast, experimental urban art project. Cars honked and dodged in the darkness, loot-laden pedestrians maneuvering around them like gleeful mice in a maze. At first glance, it all appeared to be under the balletic direction of a barefoot man in dreadlocks and a striped tam, though neither drivers nor pedestrians were paying him any attention. After several false starts she got them across, though her heart remained in her mouth for the last few blocks home.
* * *
She awoke in grayish sunlight on the bathroom floor they’d collapsed on together following a prolonged battle to give Sophie baby aspirin. Sophie lay starfished on the mat, her blond curls damp and wild, her lips parted to reveal tiny pearls of budding teeth. She was so still that for one petrified moment Ava feared she’d stopped breathing. But then the baby flung one arm into the air and sighed, as though trying for a cloud she knew was beyond reach.
Carefully resting the back of her wrist against the damp pink forehead, Ava found to her amazement that it felt cool. She wondered whether the surreal events of the past twelve hours had simply been her own fever visions: a midsummer night’s nightmare, sparked by spiking temperatures and too much sugary wine. But the bathroom nightlight still wasn’t on, and the flip-clock on her bookcase remained frozen at 9:22.
For a moment Ava felt frozen as well: overwhelmed anew by the inky panic of the streets, by how quickly a known place could turn both unfamiliar and perilous. It was an awareness she’d had as a child and as a survivor of the Berlin bombings, but one she’d somehow lost since making New York City her home. She found herself wondering whether Ulrich had lost it too, in his brief window between moving to Israel and dying for it.
There followed a wash of yearning for him so sudden and dense that Ava’s insides seemed to physically ache with it. Squeezing her arms across her stomach, she found herself thinking: Why? Why did I let him go? Why, after that last night in Berlin, hadn’t she demanded that one of them change course? That he come to New York, or she go to Tel Aviv, or they go together someplace entirely their own?