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A single siren sounds, disappears, and arrives again: the heartbeat of the city.
She views this building like churchgoers view their sanctuary. Here lie answers. Solutions. Strategies. Rapid responses. Death happens, yes, but here it makes sense. Here they can do something to stem the black tide of horror that lives beneath the glistened surface of the city that never sleeps. Fires and floods, storms and crashes, blackouts, pandemics, and terrorist attacks. It’s a numbers game and they do what they can. The reality of this, the pure rationality, energizes Esme.
Arjun Varma knows something is wrong right away. He doesn’t know if it’s the normal “something’s wrong” or a bigger “something’s wrong,” but he knows. This is a city where many things are wrong all the time. There are people dying and getting lost and messing around and calling 911 for fun. There’s the hurricane coming, people going crazy with apprehension. There are the couple who live above him and fight with what must be violence, the people who pass out on the street, the people who call the police on those people, but none of that is his place. He doesn’t make the calls; he doesn’t even
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The first rule of emergencies is you never know what will happen until it happens. That’s what makes it an emergency. Otherwise it’s just a bad day.
The F train pulls up to the platform right as he approaches, a magical moment that makes him nervous but also excited—and what’s the difference? Nerves are nerves—because he can’t say for certain where it will take him, but the train ahead has screeched away and another one is coming, so either they’re all going to die or everything is fine, and since he’s a member of the Emergency Management field team, it seems important for him to discover what happens either way, so he gets on.
With so many people in this jungle of a city, you can never be alone in your pain. While you cry, a truckful of tears falls to the ground. When you have a stroke, someone else strokes harder. Is that supposed to make you feel better? It does not. Arjun and his three trainmates are not alone in being trapped beneath the ground.
But the bosses told everyone not to worry, because first of all, nothing was happening, at most a mass hallucination, and second of all, even if there was something happening, it was a freak thing in a freak town that would never happen to New York City, the citiest of cities, the impermeable, impenetrable, not with them at the helm, no, and third of all, it didn’t look that bad. But fourth of all, it definitely wasn’t real.
It feels right, being here, in this grand room with its high ceilings surrounded by screens with news reports and video feeds and, everywhere you look, life. Being here has always felt right. Problem, answer. Problem, answer. Too many problems? Take them one at a time. If only you could fit an hour in a minute. If only Esme could pull time apart and walk inside it. On a busy day, she achieves timelessness. A single moment passes and then it’s hours later and she’s ready to collapse, like after a good hard run in the rain.
Esme believes in the system. She believes that when she passes on data, it will get to the right place and lead to the right action. She believes that doing what she’s told to the best of her ability will create the best outcome. That everybody has their role and that if each person in each role is doing their job with care and dignity, then they can solve anything. One person cannot stop a disaster but two hundred people can work as a group that becomes more than the sum of its parts.
There’s something about the mechanics of how everything fits together, all that energy fluttering from computer to computer, that feels almost beautiful. Yes, beautiful. He knows he shouldn’t feel any positive feelings right now, not with what’s happening out there, still so much unknown—how many explosions, however many injured or dead—but he can’t help it; he’s excited, and the feeling seems to pervade the room, people running left and right just to give their energy somewhere to go. That’s what Arjun needs. His nerves need an outlet,
He is quickly learning what has stayed the same: parks, trees, the shoreline, the pavement on the streets. And what has changed: everything else.
Living in the city, it feels like you’re inside even when you’re outside; no matter where you go, you’re surrounded by walls. In the woods, she feels open. Wide open.
Cummings was the one whose plan was to not make a plan. He never seems to think beyond the present moment. But this is a useful trait during an emergency. If you threw a ball at him, he’d catch it.
“Go home and stay home.” The mayor’s voice is calm and collected. “If someone goes missing, don’t go out looking. Call the authorities and submit a ticket. Don’t be a hero. We’ll get through this. We’re strong. We’re together. We’re New York.”
“It reminds me of tree blindness,” she pondered. “The Unmapping.” “Tree blindness?” “You know how most people can’t tell one tree from another? And even when you learn about things like maple and oak, it’s still difficult, especially in winter when there are no leaves. Any given tree is obviously extremely different from any other tree, like with its bark pattern and branches and height and everything. And yet we see one tree and to most people, it’s just a tree. Maybe trees feel the same way about humans. About houses. One house is just like another house. What’s the difference?”
Most people who’ve had time to actually think about this believe it has something to do with global warming. The energy we put into our atmosphere creates entropy. Entropy, by definition, is the degree of randomness. Theoretically it’s possible for you to jump through a brick wall—all of the cells in your body could bypass all of the molecules in the brick—it’s just a matter of probability. The theory is that global warming makes the unlikely more likely.”
“It’s something like brain chemistry. If you consider the planet an organism, you’re at the mercy of its whims. Animals in stressful situations will act strategically to avoid threats—mostly we’re talking about predators, but also, say, floods and storms—until their strategies no longer work. At a certain tipping point, their brain floods with a stress hormone, and their behavior switches from strategic to random. It’s almost the same as the entropy argument. There’s too much energy, too much stress, and the city needs to shake it loose, like how boiling water happens when it’s too hot and
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Some idiots think we’re in purgatory and need to commit mass suicide to set ourselves free, and we need to stop those idiots from spreading their idiocy. There’s also something about aluminum Christmas trees. I can’t remember.” “Which one do you believe?” “I don’t know, that we’re in a giant AI-powered simulation that’s either glitching out or testing us. If so, doesn’t matter; I’m just trying to keep our city under control.
and we’re just trying to get through to tomorrow, when everything will change again, and we’ll have an entirely new set of problems to face.”
Outside this door, there are dozens of people waiting for her. They talk too much. They need too much. It’s too much for one brain to handle.
She believes in data. She believes in fingers on the keyboard. She believes in the digital images on her screen, her eyes all over the city. What can one person do on their own? Nothing. What can they do with data? Everything.
All these strangers, they don’t know Antony, but each of them has their own private grief based on the past half week. Grief for the future. Grief for what has been lost. Grief that no one wants to admit: that their lives, as they know it, are gone.
Delhi was a city that lived in the streets. They laughed and danced and ran in the streets. Monsoon season was the best, because the air was clear and the puddles stretched for miles. Once you were soaked past the point of no return, you could stay out there for hours, feeling invincible. Surrounded by people. People who would never harm him. People who knew him. Somehow in a city of sixteen million, he always saw someone he knew. An uncle or a classmate or one of the many, many cousins keeping tabs on him. He could never feel lost or alone in the city. They knew who to trust. They knew how to
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What about here? What happens when you put five boroughs through a blender and tell them to stay home? They won’t stay home, not for long. New York has logic and structure. Or so he thought. Now Arjun senses the grief and fear in this city. There is only so much one human can bear, let alone eight million. All these people dancing, it stems from this fear. They dance because there is nothing else they can do. Logic has forgotten itself. All it takes to save a boy is to paint. All it takes to spark a movement is to dance.
Days pass in a new rhythm. Just before four, everything that can shut down does shut down. Water, electricity, gas, everything. Hospitals and government buildings switch to their backup generators. Apartment buildings turn on their old, mildewing rooftop water towers, freshly outfitted with new filters. Then the world turns. Then the work begins, and Esme watches a city come back to life.
There are many conflicting directives. Don’t panic buy. Do prepare. Sleep well. Wake at four. Use spare bottled water for your toilet tank. Don’t even think about wasting it that way. When the water is on, stock up, and also, share. Don’t trust strangers. But listen to the volunteers telling you where to find shelters. For the love of all that is good in this world, please don’t kill yourself. Stay off social media. But stay on to receive the city’s important updates.
It’s not possible to understand everything in the universe, but Esme is giving it her best effort.
She arrives at her desk at 3:55 to be the first to discover the day’s new world. Then she flits between task forces like a bee in a flower field, learning just enough to give her input before moving on to the next one—she learns, she explains, she leaves, in a give-and-take that feels harmonious to her.
Patience. She needs patience. Marcus is out there and she just needs to keep working until he turns up. She’s aware of the disorganization at the shelters. It’s just a matter of time until they catalog everyone correctly and update their records. This is not their first priority. Their first priorities are food, water, and health. Not names. So she will wait. She is good at waiting. She’s been waiting for four years to get married. What’s another day? What’s another week?
She needs to understand. There are infinite ways to examine any one thing but she wants to find out the truth. She needs the nonsensical to make sense.
There’s another strange thing about the tan-and-pink house with the bright light. Every day so far, this house showed up right next to the Empire State Building. It’s something that would make her believe in signs if she believed in signs. No, she simply likes it for a reason she can’t explain. It feels right. She writes down its coordinates and stares at the numbers until her eyes hurt. She finds the house with the light, and when she sees it, she feels hope. • • • The wife in the house with the lights has never felt so hopeless.
The world is just as moldable as dreams, he told them in a voice that had transformed from grating to soothing as they sat in a semicircle. He had practice, this was clear. He said a great transition was coming, something impossible to explain but that they’d recognize when it came. (Serafina, of course, recognized the Unmapping immediately as what had been forewarned.)
“I don’t need to be comfortable. I’d prefer to keep working.”
this job is the most stressful thing Arjun has ever done in his life. Within the span of a minute or less, he talks people through the worst moments they will ever experience and he, alone, is tasked with making the correct decision, and when the phone clicks away, he has to hope for the best, monitoring the situation as well as he can, but ultimately having no way of knowing what happens to most of the voices on the other end of the line.
They call him to complain about the loud neighbors partying until four in the morning, about the various cults that are seeming to crop up, those women in red, the men in blue, the people camping in tents on the street; they worry about their missing dogs and cats, their missing mothers; they tell him they don’t want to live anymore, ask him if he thinks this is real or a mass hallucination; they see aliens in the sky; they feel their skin turning to computer parts.
There are thousands of little ants swarming around the dirt pile in between two concrete slabs, running around like their lives depend on it, completely unaware of the massive being with a sneaker that could easily smash their home to smithereens. What kind of ants are stupid enough to build a home in the middle of the sidewalk in downtown Manhattan? He thinks about stomping on it just for some relief. But he crouches down instead and watches the ants work. He admires their delicate walk up the steepest slopes and the way that when he puts a finger in their path they change course immediately
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Sometimes, he accidentally reposts fake stories or images, like a photo of the president holding a #FreeAntony sign, or a story about how aluminum trees are causing the Unmapping—but what if they were true? Still useful. Still interesting. Still getting him lots of likes and new followers.
The calls are banal or extreme with nothing in between. Time expands with boredom and adrenaline. Every moment is eternal. You could rearrange a whole new city with all the time you have in a job like this. But still. A job is a job and he can be a hero.
On the headset, on his screens, there are ten things happening at any given moment. Are the responders and respondees talking to each other? And what happened with the fire on former Flatbush Avenue and what about that huge pothole that cars keep crashing into? And yet somehow he needs to speak on the phone with a voice that is cool, calm, and collected, as people scream.
People need and need and need and Arjun thought he wanted to be needed, but now he doesn’t know what he wants. There is too much need and not enough Arjun, and whenever Arjun tries, he fails.
All Arjun wants to do is help. And yet they removed him from his post and put him on these phones and now the phone calls don’t matter anyway. He doesn’t know what to do.
She would prefer to make time stop. To turn a moment into a universe and walk around until she finds him. Or turn it around so she can go back. Or to make it simply cease, so nothing has been or ever will be.
The building sways. It’s a windy day, and the building tilts forward. The sway of the building frightened Esme at first. She’d only noticed it after they moved in, when their boxes were piled up in the middle of the room and they were taking a break on their little balcony together, admiring their own lives, when the building lurched in much the same way. She almost asked Marcus if they should move. But he predicted her question and told her he’d already talked to the landlord, who’d assured him that the building could withstand hurricane-force winds and that it would sway and that was
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She feels safe now, in this memory, when he put his arms around her and swayed her back and forth, gripping her tightly all the while, to prove that one could, in fact, sway and be safe. One could fall sideways but if you had the right support system, you would be secure. He was that for her. He was her anchor, her girder, her foundation.
She walks west through downtown to the Hudson River, where she reaches a park with a view of Hoboken. Esme can’t remember if Hoboken has unmapped or not. But she doesn’t know it well; she wouldn’t know the difference.
On a different day, a better day, Esme might look at all these people and feel some sense of solidarity. That they are all in this together. That they can hold each other by the elbows and fight for what they believe in, whatever that is. That Esme can find Marcus and those poster people can free Antony and the protesters will get what they want and that blonde woman can figure out what it is that brought her to the river. Now all Esme can think is: I’m too tired.
Down in the subway station, there is a new, sleeping city. Hundreds of colorful sleeping bags skirt the walls, filled with people dreaming and snoring and muttering in their sleep. The mood is quiet and the light is dim, with the occasional electric lantern providing the only source of shadow.
Who gets their water turned on first, and who hasn’t had clean water since this began? You know the answer. It’s always the poorest families that face the impacts first and worst. Even now, even when everything’s supposed to be all mixed up, the poor somehow still get the worst of it.
So everyone who comes down here, they know something’s wrong. Everyone knows. And I’m not just talking about the past week. There’s something deeper. Something stranger going on. Then we got the Unmapping and everything cracked open. But still they didn’t know what to do. Then they learned about Antony. There’s our moment. People are paying attention to this. It’s an opportunity.”
Esme is standing somewhere in Manhattan with no idea where she is or what to do or even what it was that made her stop running. There’s a parade of police cars and there are sirens everywhere and there are voices and yelling and nothing is familiar, nothing feels grounded; she could be on the other side of the planet, or transported to an alien world, where they built a new city only pretending to be New York.
