Scareship_Issue8

of chocolate milk, and is on his way downtown, past the office (it
just doesn’t seem likely, and he can always stop there on the way
home), through Grand Central (no people, no notes or signs of
anybody, no break-ins—but the night sky of the ceiling is as
remotely lovely as always), through Times Square (dead headlines
circle overhead, outdated stock prices with no sellers or buyers,
sports scores with no fans—OK one fan, damn Knicks lost again—
two nights ago), to Port Authority (nobody) and Penn Station
(nobody, although there is a bicycle sprawled like roadkill in the
middle of Eighth Avenue, the traffic light at that hour, then the
rider suddenly gone). Two blocks later, he curses, turns and goes
back for the bicycle. It’s a delivery bike, and the pizza boxes in the
carrier over the back wheel, he dumps out, grimacing. “Extra
cheese and mold please, thanks.”
By Union Square he screams, and much later, on Wall Street,
he screams. The same scream, a one-word greeting, question, plea,
with the same answer: silence. “This island was more inhabited
before the Dutch, and English, and everybody freaking else
freaking came here!” Down at Battery Park, gulls swirl in sunlight
over the water, their voices disturbingly human. He asks the tall
bronze lady with the lamp to shed some light on what’s happened.
If she says anything, a gull drowns it out. It doesn’t matter, he
doesn’t speak French anyway.
He pedals back uptown as the sky darkens, past City Hall (are
they perhaps out investigating this outrage? Municipal workers?
Hah.). He pedals back and forth from the East River to the Hudson
a few times, going up several blocks each time before crossing
back, then up, then back.... Nothing. Banks, stores, restaurants,
office buildings. Signs calling out to the empty streets. Laundry on
a line three stories up, stretched across an alley—that’s wild. But
everything is empty, all shells and driftwood along a huge deserted
beach across which he scuttles in terror and hope, afraid now to
shout out for the lack of response, afraid that he won’t stop
screaming. He sees a bar up ahead with the door open, and decides
90