Pandemonium
Page 41

It is roughly twenty miles to the northern boundary of Manhattan. It’s hard to keep track of time, but I think it has been at least six hours before I see, in the distance, the high concrete wall that marks the city’s border. The going was slow. I have no flashlight, and the moon was often lost beyond the thick tangle of tree branches above me, all interlocked, skeletal fingers clasped together tightly. At times I was practically feeling my way. Thankfully the highway to my right reflected some light, and served to orient me. Otherwise I’m sure I would have gotten lost.
Portland was enclosed entirely in a cheap chain-link fence, rumored to be electrified. In New York, portions of the boundary are built of concrete and loops of barbed wire, with high watchtowers interspersed at intervals along the wall, beaming floodlights into the dark, lighting up the silhouettes of the trees on the other side, in the Wilds. I am still several hundred feet from the border—its lights are just visible, winking through the trees—but I drop into a crouch and move toward the highway slowly, listening for any sounds of movement. I doubt that there are patrols on this side of the border. But then again, things are changing now.
You can never be too careful.
There’s a long, shallow gully fifteen feet from the highway, coated in a thin covering of rotting leaves, and still patchy with puddles from rain and melting snow. I maneuver down into the gully and press myself flat on my stomach. This should make me pretty much invisible from the highway, even if someone is patrolling. Dampness seeps through my sweatpants, and I realize I’ll need to find a place to change and something to change into when I make it into Manhattan. There’s no way I can walk the city streets like this without arousing suspicion. But I’ll have to deal with that later.
It’s a long time before I hear the rumble of a truck engine in the distance. Then headlights bloom from the dark, lighting up swirling mist. The truck rattles by me—enormous, white, and stamped with the logo of a grocery chain—slowing as it approaches the border. I prop myself onto my elbows. There is a gap in the border wall, through which the highway extends like a silver tongue; it is barred by a heavy iron gate. As the truck comes to a stop, two dark figures emerge from a guardhouse. Backlit by the floodlights, they are nothing but etched shadows and the black shape of rifles. I’m too far away to make out what they are saying, but I imagine they are checking the driver’s papers. One of the guards circles the truck, inspecting it. He does not open the truck bed, though, and check the interior. Sloppy. Sloppiness is good.
Over the next few hours, I watch an additional five trucks pass. In each case, the ritual is repeated, although one truck, marked EXXON, is opened and thoroughly searched. As I wait, I plan. I move closer to the border, keeping low to the ground, moving only when the highway is empty and the moon has skated behind one of the heavy, massed clouds in the sky. When I am no farther than forty feet from the wall, I once again hunker down to wait. I am so close, I can make out individual features of the guards—both men—as they emerge periodically from the guard hut to circle the approaching trucks. I can hear snatches of conversation, too: They ask for ID, they verify license and registration. The ritual lasts no longer than three or four minutes. I will have to act quickly.
I should have worn something warmer than a wind breaker. At least the cold keeps me awake.
By the time I see an opportunity to move, the sun is already rising behind a thin covering of fleecy dark clouds. The floodlights are still illumined, but their power is diminished in the murky dawn, and they’re not nearly so blinding.
A garbage truck, with a ladder that extends up one of its sides and onto its metal roof, shudders to a halt in front of the metal gate. I move into a crouch and wrap my fingers around the rock I selected earlier from the ditch. I have to flex my fingers a few times just to get the blood flowing. My limbs are stiff, and aching with cold.
One guard circles the vehicle, completing his inspection, cradling his rifle. The other stands at the driver’s window, blowing air onto his hands, asking the usual questions. Where are you coming from? Where are you headed?
I stand up, cupping the rock in my right hand, and thread quickly through the trees, careful to step only where the leaves have been trampled to wet mulch—a good muffler for my footsteps. My heart is drumming so hard in my throat I can hardly breathe. The guards are twenty feet to my right, maybe less. I have only one chance.
When I’m close enough to the wall to be sure of my aim, I wind up and rocket the stone toward one of the floodlights. There’s a miniature explosion when it hits, and the sound of falling glass. Instantly I’m retracing my steps, circling backward as both guards whip around.
“What the hell?” one of them says, and starts jogging toward the damaged floodlight, shouldering his rifle. I’m praying that the second guard follows. He hesitates, shifting his gun from his left hand to his right. He spits.
Go, go, go.
“Wait here,” he says to the driver, and then he, too, moves away from the garbage truck.
This is it: This is my chance, while the guards are distracted, examining the shattered light forty feet down the wall. I have to approach the truck at an angle, from the passenger’s side. I double over and try to make myself as small as I can. I can’t risk letting the driver get a look at me in his side mirror. For twenty terrifying seconds I’m on the road, totally exposed, free of the trees and gnarled brown bushes that have been serving as cover, and just then I have a memory of the first time Alex took me to the Wilds—how scared I was sneaking over the fence, how exposed I felt—raw and terrified, as though I’d been cut open.
Ten feet, five feet, two feet. And then I’m swinging myself up onto the ladder, the metal freezing, biting my fingers. When I get up to the roof I press myself perfectly flat, belly-down on a coating of bird shit and rust. Even the metal smells sick and sweet, like rotten garbage, a smell that must have seeped over the years into the truck frame. I turn my face toward the cuff of my wind breaker to keep from coughing. The roof is slightly concave, and ringed by a two-inch metal rail, which means at least I won’t be in danger of slipping off when the truck begins to move. I hope.
“Hey!” the driver is calling out to the guards. “Can you let me through or what? I’m on a schedule.”
There’s no immediate response. It feels like an eternity before I hear footsteps returning to the truck, and one of the guards says, “All right, go ahead.”
The iron gate clanks open, and the truck begins to move. I slide backward as the truck picks up speed, but manage to wedge my hands and feet against the metal railing; I must look like a giant starfish from above, suctioned to the roof. The wind whips by me, stinging my eyes: a biting cold that carries with it the smells of the Hudson River, which I know must be close. On our left, just off the highway, is the city: billboards and dismantled streetlights and ugly apartment buildings with purple-gray faces, bruised complexions turned toward the horizon.
The truck rattles down the highway, and I strain just to hang on, to keep myself from getting bounced off and onto the road. The cold is an agony now, a thousand needles on my face and my hands, and I have to squeeze my eyes shut because they’re watering so badly. The day comes dark and slow. The red glow at the horizon quickly smolders and burns out, getting sucked up behind the woolen clouds. It begins to drizzle. Each drop of rain is a tiny shard of glass on my skin, and the roof of the truck becomes slick and difficult to hold on to.
Soon, thankfully, we are slowing and bumping off the highway. It is still very early, and the streets are mostly silent. Above me, apartment buildings loom, enormous fingers pointing toward the sky. Now I can smell food scents carried out onto the street through open windows: gasoline and wood smoke; the closeness of millions and millions of people.
This is my stop.
As soon as the truck slows at a light, I retreat down the ladder—scanning the street to make sure no one is watching—and jump lightly onto the pavement. The garbage truck continues its lumbering journey as I try to stamp some feeling into my toes and blow hot air onto my fingers. Seventy-second Street. Julian lives on Charles Street, he told me, which is all the way downtown. Judging from the quality of the light, it must be a little before seven—maybe a little later, since the thick cloud cover makes it hard to tell time accurately. I can’t risk being seen on a bus looking the way I look—water-spotted, covered with mud.
I double back toward the West Side Highway, and the footpath that cuts north to south through the long, well-tended park that runs parallel to the Hudson. It will be easier to avoid people here. No one will be strolling on a rainy day this early in the morning. At this point exhaustion is burning the back of my eyes, and my feet feel leaden.
But every step brings me closer to Julian, and to the girl I pledged to become.
I’ve seen pictures of the Finemans’ house on the news, and once I reach the tangle of narrow streets in the West Village—so different from the ordered grid that defines the rest of Manhattan, and in some ways a surprising choice for Thomas Fineman—it does not take me long to find it. The rain is still coming down, moisture squelching in my sneakers. The Finemans’ townhouse is impossible to mistake: It is the largest house on the block, and the only one that is encircled by a high stone wall. An iron gate, hung with brown nests of ivy, gives a partial view of the front path and a tiny brown yard, churned mostly to mud. I walk the street once, checking the house for signs of activity, but all the windows are dark, and if there are guards watching Julian, they must be inside. I get a surge of pleasure from the graffiti someone has scrawled on the Finemans’ stone wall: murderer. Raven was right: Every day, the resistance is growing.
One more turn around the block, and this time I’m scanning the whole street, keeping my eyes up, looking for witnesses, nosy neighbors, problems, escape routes. Even though I’m soaked through, I’m grateful for the rain. It will make things easier. At least it keeps people off the streets.
I step up to the Finemans’ iron gate, trying to ignore the anxiety buzzing through me. There’s an electronic keypad, just like Julian said: a tiny LCD screen requests that I type in a PIN. For a moment, despite the rain and the desperate scrabbling of my heart in my chest, I can’t help but stand there, amazed by the elegance of it: a world of beautiful, buzzing things, humming electricity, and remote controls, while half the country flounders in dark and closeness, heat and cold, sucking up shreds of power like dogs picking gristle from a bone.
For the first time it occurs to me that this, really, might have been the point of the walls and borders, the procedure and the lies: a fist squeezing tighter and tighter. It is a beautiful world for the people who get to play the fist.
I let hatred tighten inside of me. This, too, will help.
Julian said that his family kept clues embedded in or around the gate—reminders of the code.
It doesn’t take me long to figure out the first three numbers. At the top of the gate, someone has tacked a small metal plate engraved with a quotation from The Book of Shhh: HAPPY ARE THEY WHO HAVE A PLACE; WISE ARE THEY WHO FOLLOW THE PATH; BLESSED ARE THEY WHO OBEY THE WORD.