The Young World Read online

  This is my way of making an excuse for saying—I’ve got a bad feeling about this. I’m feeling… if we keep going, we won’t be coming back.

  Me (to Jefferson): “You’re going no matter what?”

  Jefferson: “No matter what.”

  Me: “Fine. I’m in.”

  Inappropriately cheerful applause. Jefferson seems pleased. Not just pleased that I’m going, but pleased that I’m going with him.

  Screw Wash and his stupid letter.

  It’s not like I know what the use would be in going back to the Square anyway. If the whole world has caught the Sickness, ain’t nobody coming to save our bacon.

  But it can’t be more dangerous than what Jefferson has in mind.

  CHAPTER 21

  THE WAY I FIGURE IT, the only way out is through.

  It’s too dangerous to head back to the Square to reequip. The Uptown band may still be south, waiting for us. So we’re going to head north, then east over the Triborough Bridge to the island.

  But first, we’ll reequip at the Bazaar. We’re low on supplies. I never saw where the Ghosts put our packs, and we only had a little food anyway. Our night-vision stuff is gone, and I lost my rifle in the fight at the library. Peter’s got his Glock, and Donna has her Ruger carbine back. But ammunition is a problem.

  In the early days, everybody just emptied their mags at anything that moved, like they were in an action movie. It was a while before we realized that people weren’t making any more bullets.

  If only we had your average Walmart to pillage, we’d have piles of ammo. No such luck.

  Wash wanted to manufacture his own, but he couldn’t find the right tools. You need a special press, a caliber, all sorts of stuff.

  Some kids got into archery, but to be honest, at about fifty yards, you can dodge an arrow, even from one of the new compound bows. And if you’re working in close quarters, they’re pretty near useless; try firing an arrow down a New York stairwell. Forget it. That’s the reason I carry Dad’s wakizashi instead of the longer katana. It’s more useful at close quarters. Watch The Twilight Samurai if you want to know what I’m talking about.

  So the Bazaar is our first stop. I went there lots, back when it was a train station, but I haven’t seen it since it became the Mos Eisley cantina or something.

  Once we got things organized in the Square, we didn’t really need to trade with anybody from outside. The foraging grounds of lower Broadway were ripe, and Brainbox managed to MacGyver the stuff we didn’t have. Besides that, Wash was against going too far uptown. We didn’t get much news from abroad, but based on the few accounts from randoms and stragglers that we did get, things were hairy. The word on the Bazaar was that it was the Wild West.

  But the word was also that you could get anything—absolutely anything.

  I didn’t put much stock in that. I have a theory, which I call the Bullshit Radius Theory. That is, that the accuracy of somebody’s account of the truth is in inverse proportion to its distance in space and time. So if somebody tells you about something that happened yesterday, it’ll be more accurate than if they tell you about something that happened a week ago. And if they tell you about something that happened two miles away, it is bound to be less accurate than if it happened next door.

  It’s nobody’s fault. It’s just human nature. People bullshit. They can’t help it. They twist memories to serve the story they’re telling about themselves, the one in which they’re always in the center of the screen, and the world is propagating in a horizon around them, like in a video game. It’s hard enough to know what happened inside your head a second ago. Knowing the truth about something after it’s been drip-filtered through distance and rumor and fabrication and misunderstanding? No way.

  The only constant is change.

  Donna would put this attitude down to my Buddhist side. Maybe she thinks… maybe she thinks I can’t even believe I’m in love with her, because I believe everything changes. I guess nonattachment is not much of an argument for a relationship.

  For instance, the Buddha abandoned his wife and kid. Just took off in the middle of the night without saying good-bye. Treated his family like it was collateral damage. Another thing you’ll lose anyway, so why even bother.

  I’ve always kind of worried about his kid. The poor guy was called Rahula, which by some accounts means “fetter” or “hindrance.” I wonder if he was one of those damaged celebrity children. My dad? Yeah, he’s the Buddha. Yeah, it’s cool, I guess. I never really knew him growing up.

  I asked Dad about it once, and he looked at me like I was completely nuts.

  “Well, you’re a Buddhist,” I said. “So would you just up and leave me and Wash and Mom?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “But that’s because you love us, right? And, I mean, isn’t that a problem? I mean, isn’t that an attachment?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  See, he couldn’t even say, Of course I love you. That was kind of an issue with Dad. If he had really been pressed, I think he would have said it was silly even to ask, because it should have been obvious that he loved us. But deep down, I think that he wouldn’t say it, because it made him weak. It made him attached.

  Basically, a lot of people just don’t have the ability to explain what they believe most deeply. What they hold most dear. And that’s kind of a tragedy, isn’t it?

  But when he passed, I realized what he couldn’t explain. See, no matter what, we up and abandon people in the middle of the night. It’s called dying.

  Still, the Buddha could have made it up to his kid. No matter what your philosophy, that was a Grade-A dick move.

  We emerge from the hotel to find ourselves on Forty-Fourth Street, which is where our panic left us last night, I guess. The sun is out, and the smells aren’t so bad.

  We walk eastward to Fifth, our eyes sniffing for trouble.

  I feel strange without my rifle. As if my arms have become very, very short, and I don’t know what to do with my hands. As if I’ve lost my voice. That’s the way we talk to one another nowadays. Through gun barrels.

  On Fifth, there’s a smoked-out Duane Reade, a Staples, a Best Buy. Somebody has marked up the awning:

  YOU BEST BUY AT MY SHOP, FOOLS

  TODDLY’S IN THE GRAND CONCOURSE

  There’s a big arrow spray-painted on the ground: DON’T DIE NOW! ONLY TWO BLOCKS MORE!

  This makes me antsy. It seems too much like the traps Wile E. Coyote used to set for the Road Runner. I bring us to a halt and then zigzag my way across the street while the others watch me, bemused. When I make it across the street, they zigzag across, too, making fun of me.

  Past Fifth along Forty-Fourth, there’s a Brooks Brothers on the left and the Cornell Club on the right.

  “I guess that’s, like, the university?” says SeeThrough.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Didn’t you want to go to college there?” says Donna.

  “My mom did. But it’s too cold and depressing.”

  Everybody starts laughing.

  At the next corner, Peter suggests that we approach from Forty-Second “for aesthetic reasons.”

  “For once, I don’t want to enter from the back,” he says, and then, pleased with his innuendo—“Boom! There it is.”

  We take a right and head down Madison. All the while, I’m imagining Cheekbones and his pals waiting for us to get close enough for a head shot. There’s plenty of places to mount an ambush. Scaffolding, subway entrances, a low rooftop on Forty-Second…

  Donna and SeeThrough, meanwhile, are completely oblivious to the danger, smiling and whispering about something.

  Halfway to the vanishing point down the canyon of buildings, you can see the Chrysler Building—my favorite. I was always annoyed when they blew it up in movies. The spire shines like nothing has happened.

  And then we encounter a trickle of randoms, like ants heading back to the hill. We automatically clump closer, but they don’t take
much notice of us. Most of them seem intent on the Bazaar. They’re pulling handcarts, pushing shopping carts, hefting stuffed Day-Glo backpacks smutted over with grime. Everyone is armed; a few even have guns. I see Glocks, some shotguns, but most of all the ever-popular AR-15 in its various incarnations.

  I miss my gun. How messed up is that?

  There’s a crustiness, stench, and disorder in appearance that in the old days I would have associated with homeless people. I suppose we are all homeless now, depending on how you interpret the term. The crowd gets thicker as we get closer to the Bazaar. I notice some kids look more dressed up. Some sport looks you might have called “fashionable” back in the day; some are wearing costumes or even uniforms. There’s face paint, tattoos, body armor, scarification.

  Sitting on the fringes of the last approach to the Bazaar are beggars.

  The only time I can remember seeing beggars this young was around Tompkins Square Park before It Happened. Those were young runaways, I think—kids walking on the razor’s edge of society.

  These ones have already fallen off the edge. We all have. We’re all beggars now, I think, hefting the hotel pillowcase that’s replaced my rucksack. We’re all bag men and hoboes and scavengers. There’s no society to be on the margins of.

  Or is there? Why haven’t I seen beggars anyplace before? It’s because nothing out there supports them. They starve or they get killed or they kill themselves or, God help us, they even get eaten. The fact that people are begging here, at the edge of the Bazaar, means that they have some hope, however slight, of being helped. It means that there may be some kind of surplus for people to give away. Maybe it means there is a society, of sorts. What a thought.

  Donna thinks I’m a dreamer or something. But I can’t help feeling we could rebuild. We could make something better than we had Before. She’s all tied up in the past. Still mourning the crappy world we left behind. She even carries her iPhone with her. Like one day she’ll turn it on and somebody will call. It’s Apple here. We have decided to reward your loyalty. You have shown great faith, and all will be restored to you.

  A statue of an eagle perched on a sphere looks down on us from the corner of an ornate colonnaded sandstone building. The eagle has been painted in red, white, and blue, and the sphere has been turned into a globe. Atop the main entrance, there’s a big clock with hands of gold, and above that, three gods look down on us impassively. We took a school trip to study them once. There’s Hermes, with the winged shoes, for speed; Hercules for strength; and Minerva for commerce. She’s holding her hand to her head as if she has a migraine.

  The abandoned streets around Grand Central Terminal, now known as the Bazaar, have become a sort of outdoor market. There are more people milling around than I have seen since It Happened. Hundreds, maybe thousands. Smoke rises from a hundred little cook fires and melts against the hulking silhouettes of abandoned office buildings. Under a blue-green wrought-iron overpass, people haggle over scraps laid out on folding tables. Kids are leaning over the upper roadway’s edge, sunning themselves and chatting like they’re perched on the balcony at a party.

  Some shop windows from Before, when the civic building was colonized by commerce, have been miraculously preserved. Inside, the mannequins have been stripped. Each is headless, a fact that has been emphasized by red paint pouring down their chests. Signs over them read:

  NO FIGHTING—TAKE IT OUTSIDE

  NO PUBLIC DEFECATION—USE THE PLATFORMS

  DON’T MESS WITH THE GENERATORS

  NO BARTER

  Red awnings over the windows read BANANA REPUBLIC.

  “I don’t get it,” I say. “No barter. How are we supposed to buy anything?”

  Donna shrugs.

  We had counted on trading a gun for some supplies. I wasn’t happy about it, but I couldn’t see any other way to get what we needed.

  You see, after What Happened, money became useless. It only worked if you thought it meant something. Otherwise it was just scraps of green paper. When the government collapsed, nobody believed in money anymore. I suppose you could say nobody bought it. What could you actually do with a dollar bill? Wipe your nose, if you didn’t mind the dirt.

  Money was a good idea. A way of keeping track of how much you owed somebody. If you owed somebody some money, they kind of had a rooting interest in your being around to pay them back. So in a way, capitalism was a method for people to keep connected. That kind of glued people together, gave them a better way of getting one another to do things than just using flat-out force.

  The problem was that things got out of hand. Some people piled up too much, and other people had too little. Which was a way of saying that some people owed other people more than they could ever, ever pay.

  But when the grid went down, and the banks closed, and the ATMs stopped giving out cash, the only numbers that mattered were calories and calibers.

  So we started trading stuff we actually needed.

  And barter sounds great, at first. But this got complicated, too. How many pairs of boots was a mattress worth? What if the person who had the mattress you wanted already had boots, and what she really wanted was toothpaste, but you didn’t have any?

  At first the answer was IOUs. If you gave me a mattress and I didn’t have something you wanted, I would give you a signed IOU—“I owe you for one mattress.” It was just a way of remembering that, sometime, you’d have to pay up that debt. But soon people realized they could sign them over—so that somebody would come to me, eventually, with an IOU I’d given, say, to Peter. They’d given something to Peter for the IOU—and now I was expected to pay them. Of course, I wouldn’t pay them by giving them a mattress. That would be pointless, since the whole thing started when I bought the mattress in the first place. I’d pay them the equivalent of the idea of how much the mattress was worth. Maybe it was a pair of boots. Maybe something else.

  This got kind of sticky, because maybe nobody could agree on the value of a mattress. So for a while, people wrote IOUs in credits or even dollars—and we were back to money again. Except the problem was, you could make up whatever amount you wanted when you paid for something. Like, what if you give me an IOU for a thousand credits in exchange for a can of soup? The next guy can outbid you by offering ten thousand credits—but what does that really mean? It’s all made up. We were back to square one.

  So eventually, the tribe settled on just remembering who needed what. There were few enough people that you could just remind someone that you did them a solid, or you could tell them that you owed them one, or whatever. It made trading with anybody from outside harder, but we didn’t want anything to do with the outside.

  Plus, after all the dying was done, things weren’t that scarce. By things, I mean real things. I’d never realized how much people had spent on stuff that you couldn’t put your hands on. Phone calls, the Internet, entertainment. Entertainment—what a word! Paying to kill time. That was all gone for good. But if you wanted it, there was enough stuff to go around. Like, actual things that actually existed in physical space.

  For a while, there was even enough food. But that was changing. Like Wash had said, the shit was about to hit the fan.

  In the Square, we tried to distribute the things that were in short supply fairly and evenly. We shared the food we scavenged. If you didn’t want to do that, if you were only out for yourself, well then, you were welcome to leave.

  I guess that made us communists. I don’t know. It wasn’t like we were trying to take anybody’s freedom away or anything. We were just looking out for one another.

  So now I’m looking at a bunch of spatchcocked rats grilling over a garbage can, under a sign that reads, URBAN MINI RABBITS—FRESH—CAUGHT THIS MORNING!—FOUR DOLLARS.

  Dollars.

  The food smells delicious. I haven’t eaten anything but a candy bar since yesterday, and my stomach is writhing and twisting. I can see the others are feeling the same way.

  “Um, does anybody have any money?” I
ask. Everybody kind of shrugs, since we haven’t used it in over a year. We dig in our pockets. Finally SeeThrough comes up with a crumpled twenty-dollar bill.

  “Five rats, please,” she says, smiling.

  The vendor, a crazed-looking blond kid, looks at the bill. “That’s not stamped,” he says. Then, when it’s obvious that none of us understands, he says, “Oh. You’re virgins. Look, go to the ticket booths. I’m busy.” Somebody hands him an identical-looking twenty-dollar bill, and he starts to make change.

  We head into the terminal.

  Past the brass doors, there’s a long marble ramp, maybe fifty feet wide. The first thing you notice is the fumes pouring toward you, propelled by their own heat. I hear the rumbling of motors up ahead.

  “Diesel,” says Brainbox. “It doesn’t explode.”

  The next thing you notice is the crowd—milling back and forth, strangely relaxed. None of the habitual alertness to danger. Nobody even pays us much mind, like they’re used to seeing strangers. It’s almost like walking on the streets Before. I dodge the foot traffic, unaccustomed to making space for people, my hand on the hilt of my sword.

  The girl is on me before I know it. “Ten dollars for a hand job,” she says.

  I’m struck dumb. The girl’s face is round and sweet. Her eyes are circled in dark blue, her hair is bright pink. She stinks of perfume.

  “Or my boyfriend can do it for you,” she says. I shake my head, prying her hands off me.

  “Or both. Or he isn’t my boyfriend. Or he can watch. We can do whatever,” she says.

  I shake her off, and we keep going. I actually say, “No, thank you,” like I was being offered a doughnut or something. Judging by their looks, the others are as stunned as I am. I guess we forgot that money could buy that, too. Sometimes money was like a big invisible clawed hand gripping the back of your neck, forcing you to do things you didn’t want to. Sometimes you got control of the invisible hand and made people do things they didn’t want to.