The Young World Page 12

  Now I see this kind of deal being arranged all along the ramp. Girls and boys, rubbing up against customers, taking cash.

  We keep descending.

  At the bottom of the ramp is a wide marble-walled room with soaring ceilings. Big chandeliers hang down, and the exposed bulbs are actually working. There are about ten big diesel generators, each around the size of a car, chugging away on either side—“Twenty-five K’s,” Brainbox says, meaning each one puts out twenty-five thousand watts. Each one is more powerful than anything we have back in the Square. And each one has an armed guard. In camouflage and uniformly shaven-headed, they’re the closest thing to authority that I’ve seen in a long while. The camo reminds me unpleasantly of the Uptowners.

  We enter the Grand Concourse. And it’s almost like stepping outside again. That’s partly because the vast ceiling, a hundred feet high, is painted blue like a late afternoon sky, complete with constellations marked out in gold. Partly because the inside is bigger than a football field. Hanging at one end, there’s a gigantic American flag, strangely intact except for a few bullet holes.

  Dad used to take me and Wash to Mets games, and we’d change here from the Lexington Avenue six line to the Queens-bound seven line, or from green to purple, the way we saw it. He would always make us get out at Grand Central in the middle of the trip, even though it meant spending twice as much. He’d walk us around the Grand Concourse, and we’d pretend not to gawk at the crowd. We were city kids, and we didn’t want to seem like tourists. And we’d synchronize our watches to the big clock on top of the information booth in the center of the hall. The faces were made of opal, Dad said. He’d buy us the “funny papers,” which is what he called comic books, at Hudson News. If we had time, he’d take us downstairs into the vaulted belly of the station for lunch at the Oyster Bar. Wash and I would whisper to each other in the corners of the parabolic arch in front of the restaurant and be amazed to hear each other every time. Dad would eat Kumamoto oysters under the vaulted brick ceilings, and we’d crunch on the salt crackers, saving space for hot dogs at the ballpark.

  “Isn’t this something else?” Dad would say, before getting back onto the subway. And he’d go a little misty-eyed. Which was weird, because he didn’t do that much, not even when we sang the national anthem before the game.

  Where there used to be waves of commuters heading for the trains and clumps of tourists gazing openmouthed at the ceiling, it’s now nothing but feral teenagers of every description. Ragged, costumed, dreadlocked, wigged, made-up, armed, unarmed, talking, gesturing, clamoring, singing, dancing, buying, selling. It sounds like a thousand YouTube videos open on your laptop, all playing at once. You can feel it on your skin.

  What looks at first like chaos resolves itself once you notice that hundreds of marquees, tables, and cubicles, everything from reproduction Moroccan tents to salvaged trade-show booths, are arranged in a rough horseshoe shape around the central clock. There’s a sort of esplanade in the middle, and the shops are stacked several rows deep. Signs advertise all kinds of goods. Ammunition, medicine, tools, water, canned food, clothes, fuel, cosmetics, jewelry, maps. Everything swirls around this hub, but there are substorms of activity going on. Animated conversations, kids making out, kids getting high, kids eating. Up one of the grand stairways to the side of the hall, there’s a bunch of kids in drag. Above that, on a platform overlooking it all, a band, an actual live band, is playing. Opposite that platform, on the other side of the hall, there’s the old Apple Store, airy and bright, like Space Church or something. The logo is still there, only it’s graffitied to say WELCOME TO THE BIG (APPLE). EAT IT.

  “You’re new, aren’t you?”

  The voice belongs to a short, smelly kid dressed in black. He’s got a scraggly beard, and beneath that, a pair of goggles hanging around his neck and a black dust mask with a skull and crossbones design on it.

  “What? No,” I say.

  “Really? Because you look like you have no idea what’s going on,” says the guy.

  “Who asked you?” I say.

  The guy shrugs. “Just offering to help is all.”

  “You know what?” says Donna. “We don’t have any idea what’s going on.” She smiles at the guy like she’s known him all her life. “I’m Donna. What’s your name?”

  “People call me Ratso,” he says. He shrugs again. “It’s from a movie.”

  “What’s your real name?” asks SeeThrough.

  “My name… is for my friends,” he says in a fake British accent. Then, “Never seen that? No? Whatever.” The guy’s behavior is off-putting.

  “What do you want?” says Peter.

  “Like I said,” says Ratso, “I just want to help.”

  “Why?” I say.

  “Why not?” says Ratso.

  “You want to help?” I say. “Can you tell us why our money doesn’t work here?”

  “Lemme see,” he says. SeeThrough shows him the twenty. He snatches it out of her hands and, before any of us can take it back, has inspected both sides and returned it. “Thanks, pretty lady. It’s not stamped. Ain’t worth shit.”

  I’m kind of embarrassed, because we’re living up to Ratso’s first impression. But it’s too late to pretend we know what we’re doing.

  “Okay, so where do we get our money stamped or whatever?”

  “You don’t,” says Ratso. “Here, give me that again, will you?” SeeThrough hands him back the bill, and he unceremoniously tears it in half. “Worthless, see?”

  I grab him by the lapels of his black coat. “Easy! Easy!” says Ratso.

  Yesterday you could have burned a pile of hundred-dollar bills in front of us and we wouldn’t have minded. Now that things suddenly have a price, we care, a lot.

  “I can get you money,” says Ratso, and I let go of him. “Have you got any stuff? Any stuff to trade?”

  “I saw a sign that said no barter,” I say.

  “It’s not barter. I’ll show you. Let’s go to the bank.”

  Ratso straightens his lapels and heads off to the ticket booths. We look around at one another like a bunch of morons, then follow him.

  CHAPTER 22

  SO, THIS BAZAAR place is a big family-size bucket of crazy with extra cray sauce.

  I can tell right off the bat that Jefferson is loving it. Like, Here, in the center of our great metropolis, we can rebuild! A new society rises like a phoenix from the ashes of the old!

  Which is a lot to say for a flea market in an abandoned train station.

  I’ve got to admit that it looks like there’s fun to be had, which is not to be sniffed at in these crappy times. Peter’s eyes are zapping out on stalks like in a cartoon. Okay, some of the clothes people are wearing are cute. There’s even, like, these girls? These model-y girls walking around in full-on evening wear like they’re on the red carpet. Each of them has a boyfriend or a bodyguard or whatever trailing around with them. Weird. There’s also these douchey guys—they’re all guys—in camouflage gear with shaved heads stalking around, glowering like cops.

  There’s a bunch of them by the ticket booths that line one wall under a dead electric billboard labeled NEW HAVEN LINE DEPARTURES. That kid Ratso takes us to a window with no line in front of it. A grille of tarnished brass separates us from the teller, a plump boy with a jeweler’s loupe tilted back on his forehead.

  I’m wondering how on earth he managed to stay overweight post-apocalypse and daydreaming about eating when his voice wakes me.

  Plumpy: “What’ve you got?”

  Ratso: “What’ve you got? To sell, he means.” (Then, to the teller.) “Take it easy on him; he’s new.”

  I kind of like Ratso; at least, I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But I can tell he makes Jefferson uptight. I mean, it doesn’t take much.

  Jefferson: “Somebody give me their gun.”

  And I’m like, Uh, sorry you lost your gun, pal. I’m hanging on to mine. Nobody else wants to give up their gat, either.

&n
bsp; Me: “Why don’t you sell him your samurai sword?”

  Jefferson: “Please don’t call it that. It’s a wakizashi, and it’s been in my family for centuries.”

  Me: “Well, my gun is a carbine, and it’s been in my family for more than a year.”

  Jefferson: “Why don’t you sell that teddy bear you stole from the library?”

  Me: “Are you high? This is a relic. Pooh stays with me.”

  Plumpy: “Look, you don’t have anything to sell, move on.”

  Jefferson (remembering something): “Oh!”

  He takes a pharmacy bottle out of his pocket and shakes it.

  Plumpy: “What is it?”

  Jefferson: (Steps to the window, opens up the bottle, and drops an orange pill onto the counter.) “It’s—”

  Plumpy (smiling): “Adderall. Haven’t seen that in a while.”

  He leans back and calls to someone in the back of the booth. A wiry-looking kid in a beret pokes his body around the window, lights up when he sees the tablet, reaches his hand out, and snatches it before anybody can react.

  Jefferson: “Hey!”

  Wiry Guy: “Gotta test it.”

  He uses the butt of a revolver like a hammer to smash the pill into powder, then leans his head down to the counter and snorts it. He looks up. Smiles. Nods to the plump kid.

  Plumpy: “Ten bucks a pill. Take it or leave it.”

  Jefferson: “Okay, that’s two hundred dollars for twenty tablets, including the one you just hoovered.”

  Wiry Guy: (Shakes his head.) “Bank fee.”

  So we hand over the Adderall for a hundred and ninety bucks.

  There’s an ornate stamp in the space over the face of the president. The two towers of the World Trade Center with NEVER FORGET in, like, medieval script.

  Jefferson: “Oh.”

  Ratso: “Only bills with the stamp are valid. All other bills get seized.”

  Jefferson: “Seized by who?”

  Ratso nods toward the thugs with the camouflage.

  Brainbox: “If everything has to be stamped, then presumably there’s no coinage.”

  Ratso: “Correctamundo.”

  Jefferson: “Why don’t people just fake the stamp and issue their own money? All you would need is some ink and a bunch of bills you can get anyplace.”

  Ratso: “Oh, I wouldn’t do that.”

  Me: “Why not?”

  Ratso: (Makes a face.) “Trust me, you don’t wanna know.”

  Brainbox (to Jefferson): “Fiat currency.”

  Jefferson: “Backed up by a state monopoly on violence. Amazing.”

  Me: “If you guys are quite done with AP Economics, can we get cracking?”

  Jefferson: “Well, you want to go shopping?”

  Uh, yes?

  We scan the tables and booths around the big clock. Not buying anything yet, just sizing up what’s available and how much for. We don’t meet the eyes of people hawking their wares. We must look like a bunch of tourists on a budget.

  Jefferson eyes some boxes of ammo at a stand called Aw, Shoot. He’s moving on to one of the competitors, International House of Killing People, when he stops in his tracks, alert.

  I think it must be the Uptowners.

  I slip a finger over the trigger guard of the carbine.

  But it’s not trouble. It’s coffee.

  Jefferson is staring at a shiny chrome espresso machine with a grinder sitting next to it. There’s a dude with a red Mohawk standing behind the folding picnic table that supports it, nodding and smiling at Jeff, like, Hell, yeah, this is what it looks like.

  Mohawk Guy: “Just about to open a new can.”

  Jefferson: “No way.”

  Yes way. The guy opens a silvery tin of coffee beans, and it lets out a hiss of air that was trapped before It Happened. He holds it up for Jefferson to sniff. Jeff sucks in every last molecule of coffee smell.

  Mohawk Guy: “Espresso or cappuccino?”

  “Milk?” says Jefferson. We all gather around to look as the guy opens a cooler that has ice—real ice—in it. A bunch of little plastic cartons are neatly arranged inside.

  Me (astonished): “How did you get the ice?”

  Mohawk Guy: “They make it at Camp Arctica, downstairs. Got some machines. The milk is my secret.”

  Jefferson, who has been squeezing our roll of cash tightly in his fists, looks back at us with begging kitten eyes.

  Me: “Go for it. Live a little.”

  Jefferson: “How much for a double cappuccino?”

  Mohawk Guy: “All I make is doubles. Two bucks.”

  Jefferson looks back again. We nod. Jefferson hands over a ten and gets back eight dollar bills, each with the red stamp.

  The guy, who tells us his name is Q, pours the beans into the grinder. “A Mazzer,” he tells us proudly, which seems to mean something to Jefferson. Then he goes through the ritual of preparation—grind, charge, tamp. Finally he loads the little handle thing into the machine.

  Jefferson: “Can I—can I do it?”

  Q pauses, then says, “Why not?” Jefferson reaches out and reverentially presses down the arm that starts the water flowing. We watch as the thick black liquid drips into a chipped ceramic cup.

  Jefferson (to himself): “Civilization.”

  Q: “You guys must be—”

  Me: “New in town, yeah. We get that a lot. So how does it work? You pay off the goons so you can operate?”

  Q: “I pay the bank. They control the real estate. The ‘goons,’ as you call our fine constabulary, are in their employ.”

  Me: “And you—you must have to buy everything you need here, right? You can’t eat dollar bills.”

  Q: “Well, you’ll find that a lot of people in the area accept bank dollars because they know they work here. But I don’t have much reason to wander. I live up in the old MetLife Building.”

  Me (to Jefferson): “You believe this?”

  But he holds up his hand to silence me. His eyes are closed as he savors the coffee.

  Peter: “So what’s the catch?”

  Ratso: “The catch is that you can only buy things with bank dollars, and the bank buys wholesale and sells retail. And the bank controls the electricity business.”

  With my eyes I follow the cord leading from the espresso machine. It joins up with a standard surge protector, which plugs into some kind of rectangular thing that Brainbox knows the name of, which has a thicker cord stretching toward a hexagonal box by the entrance to the hall, and an even thicker cable snakes around the entryway toward, no doubt, one of the big generators with the armed guards.

  Q (annoyed): “This guy with you?”

  Me: “Kinda.”

  Q: “Take my advice. Stay away from Mole People.”

  Ratso (with an innocent look): “No such thing as Mole People.”

  Jefferson takes a deep breath and puts down his cup, which has nothing but a fleck of foam and a smear of coffee round the edges. “Thank you,” he says to Q. “Thank you all,” he says to the rest of us, smiling.

  Q reaches for the cup, but Ratso snaps it up first. He quickly licks the inside of the cup clean.

  Ratso: “Waste not, want not.”

  Q: “Watch him.” He snatches the cup back and sprays it with soapy water from a plastic bottle.

  Ratso shrugs and moves on, and we follow.

  You heard about Mole People even before the Pocky. The rumor was that there were homeless people who lived in the subway tunnels. I always found this pretty easy to believe, because anything horrible was possible in New York, and generally people didn’t do anything about it. Don’t get me wrong—there was amazing stuff, too. But just to get on with life, you had to ignore all kinds of stuff that would make you hurl if you thought about it. For instance, I once saw this guy fall off a skateboard, and everybody rushed up to help him, and they called an ambulance and everything. But if you saw some guy just lying on the ground, and he looked, you know, poor? Well, people would just walk on by. Like there wa
s some rule that everybody knew: Only render aid to people like you.

  So, yeah, people living their whole lives underground? Why not?

  Didn’t make much sense now, though. It wasn’t like rents were high or anything. I figured the Mole People were a Pocky myth. You always heard about some guy who knew a guy who never came back after he went on a scout in the subway.

  But I never saw signs of them. No two pinpoints of light flashing from the deep or anything.

  Ratso: “You guys want food and ammo, right? This way. I know a guy’s got MREs, Tasty Bites, whatever you need.”

  Me: “Hey, Ratso?”

  Ratso: “What is it, pretty lady?”

  Me: “Why did that guy say you were a Mole Person?”

  Ratso: “Like I said, there’s no such thing as Mole People. Everybody knows that. He just doesn’t like fixers. So he calls me names.”

  Jefferson: “Fixers.”

  Ratso: “I help people. I fix situations. I’m a matchmaker. I introduce supply to demand.”

  Jefferson: “You’re a middleman.”

  Ratso: “That’s a very pedestrian way to put it, but sure.” He stops in the flow of people, like he really wants us to understand. “Now, your average doofus, he doesn’t understand that I lubricate the wheels of commerce.”

  Peter: “You’re grease.”

  Ratso: “Yes. Johnny Starbucks over there, he doesn’t understand the world. He thinks your ground-level economy is frictionless. What he doesn’t know is that it takes people like me, working hard to help people like you. Like the way I got you a good price for those pills.”

  Jefferson: “You did?”

  Ratso: “ ’Course I did. See, you don’t know that the bank usually buys Adderall at eight bucks a pop. But when I’m around, they know they can’t get away with it.”

  Jefferson: (Doesn’t look convinced.) “Yeah, thanks.”