The New Order Page 15

  Brainbox says it’ll come down to rational decisions about how we want to live. But I know that most decisions aren’t rational. Especially political ones.

  But when I tell that to Jefferson, he has a snappy response.

  “So? Politics is just the organization of hatreds,” he says. I know he got that from somewhere, but I’m not going to give him the pleasure of telling me. “We don’t have to love one another. We just have to understand that it’s in our interests to act that way.”

  There’s barely time to settle into the old crib before we head back on the road. Chapel follows me up the dark stairwell, down the dark hallway, into my dark apartment. I throw open the blinds I closed months ago, and my giant Facebook wall is struck by the sun.

  Chapel says, “You know nobody uses Facebook anymore, right?”

  “You trying to make me feel old?”

  Chapel has a look in his eye, and if it’s not pity, it’s definitely pity-adjacent. Like, you poor, poor boy, all you’ve been through.

  “What?” I say. “Don’t feel so bad for me. I would never have been able to afford this place if it weren’t for the apocalypse.”

  He laughs—I appreciate that.

  The last time I was here, I was gearing up for my little jaunt with Donna. It was a blue spring day, pleasant but for the smell of decay, and our whole lives were behind us. Now who knows?

  I walk over to the Facebook wall. Wipe out the status Out kicking ass. Pick up a piece of chalk and write in love.

  He doesn’t laugh.

  CHIQUITA, OUR BELOVED armored pickup truck, was put to the torch by the Uptowners outside of the public library long ago, so we’ve got to proceed by foot to the UN, which occupies a big complex of buildings by the East River in the Forties. There’s about twenty of us, sporting rifles and as much food as the camp can spare. Given our latest run-in with the Uptowners, we figure it’s best to head east first, outside their turf, before heading north.

  It’s a no-man’s-land most of the way to the river, except for a little enclave at Tompkins Square Park in the East Village. Before What Happened, this used to be a hot spot for heroin, then it was a sort of homeless campground for a bit, then yuppies started buying up the buildings around the square and the cops booted all the transients out. Now it’s back to a pregentrification feel, nylon tents by the basketball courts and mangy dogs prowling the perimeter. The local tribe calls themselves the Dead Rabbits, which they got from some movie or other, and they’re working a sort of hipster, murderer vibe with a lot of old hats and wooden clubs.

  We exchange a few trade goods (cigarettes, bullets) and spread the gospel of the Gathering of the Tribes. I promise them they won’t regret it.

  On we go up the East River, with a flock of kids following now. People hover close, as if, because the Cure came from my blood, there’s something magic about me. When a sailboat full of Fishermen—river pirates—slips up the water toward us, my people safety-tackle me the way the Secret Service used to do to the president in movies. But the Fishermen don’t want to fight; for one thing, we’re too many and too well armed, and for another, they’re curious about seeing two tribes together strolling up the FDR Drive. Chapel evangelizes, and soon enough, they’ve been recruited to spread the word up and down the island.

  The United Nations Secretariat is a big concrete slab shadowing the river up around Fortieth. We cut in from the water, over the shell that makes a tunnel of the FDR, to the front of the UN.

  We come to a statue that looks like a giant revolver whose barrel has been twisted and tied off.

  A body hangs from it. The statue isn’t actually big enough to have served as a gallows; this was just a convenient or symbolic place from which to suspend a corpse. There’s a piece of paper pinned to the body. I recognize the writing as Cyrillic, but can’t translate. Presumably it’s the name of the crime he committed.

  We arrived in a state of optimism, and this lowers our spirits just a bit. It also makes me realize that for some reason we had presumed the UN complex would be uninhabited. Now the buildings seem anything but hollow and inert. I think about the halls of the public library and the cannibals living there. If they get the message about the Gathering, will they come? Can they ever be turned back to sanity and civilization? Should they be? Or should they be put down, sacrifices to the new order?

  Ahead of us are the main buildings—a long white chevron of marble abutting a black-and-gray shoe box. Half the windows are smoked out and broken from the fires that followed the Sickness. A row of tattered flags snap fitfully in an uneasy wind.

  There’s about a hundred of us by now, an enthusiastic rabble from all over. Word has filtered out about the Gathering, and people just attach themselves, pulled by hope and pushed by a sort of epic desperate boredom. Our procession has a weird noisy holiday feel, as if the danger of walking openly in the street were somehow held in check by our numbers and spirits. It all reminds me of the First Crusade chapter from Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, which we read for AP history. But I tell myself not to be so cynical.

  Now the wave of enthusiasm has broken against all the evidence of chaos and violence left over from What Happened. The skeleton of a moving van juts over the huge metal wedge of a safety barrier; whatever exploded from inside it smashed the guard kiosk to bits. Another car bomb twisted back the bars of the fence; they look like the exploded space jockey’s ribs from Alien.

  Bodies—really just skeletons with a light frosting of rotting flesh and torn uniforms—are scattered all over the forecourt. Some kind of battle went down here, right around the time the Sickness was hitting.

  But why? What happened here? I cast my mind back to the days before all the power went and the news as we knew it shrank from the vast scope of the global news to the isolated domestic tragedy of our apartment.

  We tried to triangulate the truth in those days, as if surfing between Fox, CNN, and MSNBC—right, middle, left—might give us some more accurate picture of where reality might be hovering somewhere in between.

  In the last days there was a conference on the Sickness, convened at the UN. The president was there—I remember Donna told me that she had seen him when she was on a field trip to the Security Council. Other world leaders attended, but some took a pass. They were concerned that nobody could guarantee attendees’ safety from the Sickness or an opportunistic attack by terrorists. The concern was not unfounded. The situation in New York at the time was often described as “pandemonium.”

  Trivia? The word pandemonium means “all of the demons.” It was invented by Milton for Paradise Lost, referring to the congress of defeated angels that Satan addresses when he’s planning the fall of man. This more or less fit the right-wing view of the UN, actually; to them, it was the headquarters of a secret cabal that aimed to take down the United States. You’d hear a lot of that kind of thing on Fox in those final days. To them, the meeting on the Sickness was a sort of Black Mass to celebrate the ultimate downfall of America. This idea, that the spread of the Sickness was due to some sort of conspiracy, was really attractive to a lot of people; it had a contagion of its own. And, though it signaled the end of our way of life, there was a certain satisfaction for the Cassandras—you could detect the glee concealed in the faces of some pundits, even as they bemoaned the tragedy.

  I know that the release of the Sickness from Plum Island was an accident, albeit one that couldn’t have happened had we not been developing it in the first place. But in the stew of paranoia, legitimate fear, and contempt that came with What Happened, there was no way to get at this truth. The irony of holding a conference in New York being roughly equivalent to holding a conference in Freetown, Sierra Leone, during the Ebola epidemic was lost on most Americans. Nonattendance by heads of member states was viewed as a betrayal of our trust, and long-standing alliances frayed as America finally lost its grip on centrality and influence.

  The jihadists invoked God’s wrath as the explanation for the disease,
an opinion shared (again with little appreciation of the irony) by Evangelical Christians.

  So what we see in the forecourt may be the evidence of some kind of terrorist incident, or riot, or militia attack, or all three. One way or another, it’s hard to avoid the stink of history here, the smell of decayed hopes and fears.

  “You still sure this is the place for it?” I ask Chapel.

  “Yes,” he says, his face set. “This is the place for it. If you’re going to rebuild the government—your government—do it in the right environment. You do it in a high school gym, people are gonna think they’re running for student council. You do it in the UN Security Council…”

  He may be right. Or it may end up as pandemonium.

  Politics is the systematic organization of hatreds. That’s Henry Adams. On the one hand, it’s a pretty cynical remark: There is no political harmony, no Utopia, only the pragmatic and momentary balance of opposed groups. On the other hand, it is a sort of comfort: As ugly as the emotions at play may seem, a sort of order can emerge from it. I remind myself that I’m not looking for agreement. I’m looking for cooperation. My aim is to get kids who have been killing one another and competing for food to help one another. Maybe I’m starting on an impossible venture. Or maybe I can manage to organize all our hatreds.

  I survey the littered paving stones, the addled façades of the buildings. I can feel the past buzzing up from the ground, buzzing out of the buildings, louder than hope.

  We have a week to get ready for the Gathering. Security, sanitation, food, power. Chapel, who knows a surprising amount about the complex, borrows Peter and Brainbox to locate an emergency generator and get it cranking. We send some of the Dead Rabbits out to siphon fuel and start scavenging for food. Others head to the Bazaar to spread the word. With any luck, the Uptowners won’t kill them.

  I’m still not sure how the Uptowners will respond to the call. Both they and the Harlemites aimed at nothing less than owning Manhattan; but I never could see much point in the ambition. At the current rate of the Sickness, there can’t be more than two years left to most of the kids alive today. I can offer them something better. If I can bring them to heel.

  Inside, the air is thick, choked with dust as Carolyn, Ayesha, and I crab our way through the darkness, flashlights taped to the ends of our rifles. We’re looking for the Security Council chamber, where the emergencies of history were debated, bold statements decided upon and issued and then ignored by the powers that won the Second World War.

  The designers hadn’t seen fit to provide sufficient illumination from the outside, a strange casino-like rejection of the world and its time frame that slows our progress through the obstacle course of office chairs, drifts of paper, and temporary barricades.

  There was a battle here, or more than one. We walk over a ground mulch of uniformed security guards and a higher stratum of more recent casualties, their makeshift clothing no more than rags. In the sickly glare of the flashlights, it takes on a nightmarish quality, like the engravings in an edition of Inferno I used to have back at the Square—naked, twisting bodies, suffering flesh everywhere.

  I remember the Ghosts at the public library on Forty-Second. When this began, Peter and Donna and SeeThrough and Brainbox and I went to the main branch to find the scientific journal that Brainbox thought might give a clue to the source of the Sickness. We found it; we also found a cult of murderous cannibals welcoming the End Times, and barely escaped. Now, inching our way through another benighted Cyclopean maze, I start at every scurrying rat and rustling paper.

  Bad things have happened here. There are bodies that fell still stabbing each other, and decay has blended their flesh together; heads bludgeoned with laptops, bodies garroted with headphone cords. Clubs fashioned from table legs. Flags turned into spears.

  Plowshares into swords, I think.

  “You believe this shit?” asks Carolyn, prodding at a half-naked body, a broken sword sticking up from the rib cage.

  “Yeah, I do,” I say.

  We make our way up a staircase clotted with the dead. As we strike deeper into the heart of the building, closer to the Council chamber, the crowd of bodies becomes thicker, as if we are getting to the epicenter of a gyre of violence.

  “Do you remember Aliens?” asks Ayesha.

  “The part where they’re going through the atmospheric processing plant and nobody’s there and suddenly the aliens start coming from everywhere?”

  “Yeah, that part.”

  “Yeah.”

  At last, behind a wrecked safety cordon, X-ray machines, and security scanners toppled to make a barrier caked with dried blood, we find the entrance to the Security Council chamber. The windows set in the door have been smashed to opacity; through the cracks between them, nothing but blackness.

  In the seconds we count down before kicking open the door, I reflect, in the vast relativity of the tiny moment, on what it’s like to be afraid of dying now that I know I might live another half century or more. And I realize that I have become more frightened. It was much easier to risk death when I thought it was coming soon anyway. Death and I had a nodding familiarity. Now that He has retreated into the shadows of the future, He feels vast and strange and unknowable, a terrorist in a distant country who might contrive some outlandish scheme to snuff me out at any moment or just let me stagger on in the dark tunnel of the present.

  I used to think of myself as a Buddhist; that was my background, anyhow, and we are told to take life lightly. Not to give it no value, but to realize that, like anything of value, it can be snatched from you, so it’s best not to become too attached to it. It served me pretty well, through one attempted robbery after another. But to be given more of life—an unexpected lavishing of riches—that’s the challenge. How not to become attached, a miser with a windfall, a traumatized lottery winner?

  I take a breath, signal to the others, and kick the door open, looking over the barrel of my gun.

  The flashlights glance over the backs of a dozen rows of leather chairs raked and oriented toward a horseshoe-shaped table at the bottom of an incline. Perhaps twenty people could sit at the far desk, eyeing one another across the empty keyhole of space that the curve makes.

  There’s a gloomy circle of light above, a thick window of opaque glass mediating the glow of the sun. We turn off our flashlights.

  There are people in all the chairs, sitting dead still.

  To my right, a line of bodies in various stages of decay, flyblown and swarming with maggots. A line of clasped hands, like a massive Thanksgiving grace, stretches down the row. At the end, a skeleton reaches its hand forward to the body in front, and the handholding snakes its way up the next row, down again in a chain to the front of the auditorium.

  “Damn,” says Ayesha. Other than that, the only sound is the buzz of a million flies.

  We make our way down to the horseshoe-shaped table, where the corpses face one another, appearing to smile as decay pulls their lips and gums back.

  Above it all, there’s a mural stretching across the back of the room. Idealized mannequin-like figures in uncomfortable attitudes and slashing strokes of gilt and tempera, contained within lozenge-like panels: At the center, a phoenix rises from its own ashes. A man and woman, a sort of dressed-up Adam and Eve, hold a bouquet between them. Dark, silhouetted soldiers strive upward. Children dance.

  I wonder if the diplomats who met here ever thought about these stout-limbed symbols, who look as if they have been flash-frozen in their incoherent motions.

  “Only the dead have seen the end of war,” I hear—a cracked, reedy voice.

  It isn’t one of us.

  I turn to look at the array of corpses lined up, staring back at us with hollow sockets. The voice came from somewhere among them. But none of the tattered, gnawed relics seems like it could be a living person.

  “Show yourself,” says Carolyn, “or I start shooting.”

  There’s no response. Carolyn fires into the chest of one of the c
orpses. The report rings through the chamber, and a spent shell casing tinkles down the aisle.

  Then one of the bodies stands up.

  “Welcome!” he says. “My name is Hafiz.”

  SOPH: “DRINK?”

  Me: “Why not?”

  Soph hands me a big tumbler of champagne, then asks for it back, then drops a couple of mushed raspberries into it. All’s quiet but for the occasional PLUNK of the pole as it hits the gravel bottom of the river.

  Rab is pushing the flat-bottomed punt along the water, expertly changing its direction with little tweaks of the pole during each after-stroke. Between pushes, he heaves the pole up and lets it slide down again through his fingers. Water slicks off the pole and trickles down his arms, matting his white shirt to his body and showing the tan skin underneath.

  Soph: “Go on, Donna. We’ve got a half case to get through.”

  Soph, Michael, Rab, and I spend most of our free time hanging out, drinking. At some point, we realized that my account at the Buttery—which is where we get our meal vouchers and other supplies—is being paid, automatically, by the government, no questions asked. (Actually, Rab had a few questions, like how I managed to get this sort of special treatment, but I put him off.) That—combined with the fact that the Buttery stocks this yummy champagne called Veuve Clicquot, which means “the widow Clicquot” (she doesn’t seem to have minded being single; in fact, she looks fat and sassy)—has made for a pretty bubbly term.

  My grief is dissolving in a solution of wine and poetry. I’m reading Byron as I lie in the punt, slipping downstream and sipping champagne. I read:

  There lies the thing we love, with all its errors