1 Brooklyn was the end goal, but first I had this idea. One of the things Lux and I used to talk about when we got drunk was where we would go if the world turned into a zombie movie. The place we always decided would be best was The Met. There were those replica rooms from the 1800s that you could sleep in, there was food and water from the cafes, there were weapons, there was the canoe in the Inuit art section that we could cut down from the ceiling and paddle into New Jersey. There were all those paintings, so you would never be bored.
And there were those paintings by Vincent van Gogh. Lux and I had gone to look at them one day, back before the storm. We had never seen them before, and the other paintings were nice, but those were the ones we really saw. We stopped in front of the two dead sunflowers, one looking up and one face down. Fucking van Gogh. I don’t know what it was. I started wiping my nose, which had suddenly started to run. It took me a few moments to realize that I was crying.
“What’s wrong?” Lux said. She put her arm around me.
“They’re so . . . like . . . dirtfucking dead,” I said. I knew about van Gogh. I knew about the lifelong sadness, the madness, the severed ear, how his art dealer brother Theo was his only friend and confidant, and even he couldn’t sell his paintings. I could see all that in there in those dead sunflowers. The shitty goddamn heaviness his life had been; that even that which he had once seen as bright, yellow, and full of life, ended up facedown, brown, shriveled, and dead.
“But look,” Lux said, pointing. “Look at how they’re still bright, how there is motion all around them. How much life he saw even there. He was filled with life. Maybe he just couldn’t take how much it filled him up, you know? How much he could see and feel of it.”
That was Lux. She was light.
I wanted to go there. I wanted to see those van Goghs now that everything else had turned into a motherfucking train wreck. I convinced José and Sebastian that we should go and stay for a little while. That it would be an adventure, that it would be something we could never do again in our lives if we didn’t do it now. After that we’d go to this building that everybody was talking about in Brooklyn.
Macombs Dam Bridge hadn’t been destroyed, so we walked it, and then down through Harlem. It was a long walk, and we were carrying bookbags with a metric fuck-ton of water and food, some clothes, and whatever pills I’d been able to salvage. It had been hard figuring out what to take and what to leave behind. That’s materialism for you: even in those shitty conditions I still wanted to keep all the stuff we had hoarded. I’d taken my bolt cutters and crowbar and lock pick kit like I do everywhere, but a lot of stuff we just left. I had this half-hope that someone else would find it, find the place we’d called home and use it, make it their own. I hoped it would be some family or something, or a kid who had nowhere like we’d had nowhere. The thought of the place empty made me feel so alone, like places could have feelings and this one would be aware of its abandonment. I tried not to think about it. Shitty goddamn feelings only slow you down when you need to be sharp and on your game. I didn’t have time for that stuff, not now.
We didn’t talk a lot along the walk. Sebastian was kind of huffing and puffing, still weak from being sick for so long. But at one point, he touched my arm and I stopped.
“What do you think happened to all the animals in the Bronx Zoo?” he asked.
The street all around me was ruined—overturned cars, downed stoplight, buildings with their doors open like a mouth of a dead person. All around us was destruction. José had gone ahead, his superior athleticism putting distance between us. I thought of the dog back in the pharmacy, and how I had killed it without thinking twice. But that had been different. That had been an attack. And I don’t really care about animals, I’ve always thought all the punk vegans are pretty silly with how much they do, but there was something about those animals in those cages that made me pause.
“Maybe someone got those fuckers out before,” I said. “And took them somewhere safe.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Or maybe they died in their cages. Maybe they drowned and maybe they’re still there rotting.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know, Sebastian. What the fuck do I know?”
There wasn’t much else to say, so we started walking again.
It was a long walk down the cracked remains of Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd. The farther we got from the Bronx, the more we saw nice buildings that only looked somewhat destroyed and people working on making them nicer. When we got to Central Park, we expected it to be ruined like everything around us had been. But there were FEMA trailers, and people milling around, working and cleaning. Sebastian wanted to go by the turtle pond. It was clear where it had overflowed, and there were so few turtles left in it. He wondered out loud if they had lived or died, or gotten washed to sea in the storm surge. I told him to shut the fuck up about the fucking animals already. But I didn’t feel that way. Some part of me that I pushed down really wanted to know, too, if they were okay.
We came up on The Met through the trees of Central Park, and walked around to the front. It was this beautiful, stately white building, with marble arches and stairs. As we came around the front, we saw all these men in black, with huge guns milling around on the front steps. There hadn’t been all these guards anywhere else we’d looked. It suddenly hit me that one room by Frank Lloyd Wright was more valuable to the kind of people who ran the world than ten families in the Bronx. Than a million people like us.
When I saw all those guards, I remembered this day a while back, before I met Lux or José or Sebastian. I was traveling around, and I’d ended up in Pittsburgh. I’d wandered into this museum. I think it was a Carnegie Museum. I had some time to kill and I wanted to stand around and look at paintings and get lost. I wasn’t bothering anybody, but people kept giving me these looks, the kind you start to notice if you get them long enough, even if you’re just trying to mind your own business. Maybe they couldn’t figure out what I was, because I was wearing a skirt, but my legs were super hairy and showing, and my hair was short, and I had on a Brando shirt over a binder and torn-up men’s combat boots. I went from one room to the next, and in every room, a museum guard came up to me to ask if I was looking for someone, or if I was lost. After a while, to get them to leave me alone, I’d say things like, “I lost my mom,” and give them these outlandish descriptions of drag queens I’d met once at a party in Bayonne.
Finally, one of the guards in a room with Warhols walked up to me. He had these kind eyes, and I could tell he didn’t want to fuck with me.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I just wanted to see the shitty fucking paintings,” I said, finally honest. “Isn’t that what they’re there for?”
“You smell,” he said to me quietly, as if he was trying to spare my feelings. I knew I smelled bad. I’d been on the road for weeks, no shower, no bed, no change of clothes. “You smell and you’re disturbing the other patrons. Please just leave.”
I’m not sure why, but I got tears in my eyes. I think it was the way he lowered his voice, like he didn’t want to embarrass me. I didn’t want him to see that I was crying, so I started making a scene.
“What the fuck are you?” I asked. “The fucking patron saint of odor? Fuck you, motherfucker!”
I ended up getting thrown out. Like, literally. They said that I was lucky they didn’t call the cops.
Pittsburgh. Whatever.
So back in New York, looking at The Met, seeing all those guards, I waved for José and Sebastian to cross the street.
“This isn’t the right place for us,” I said. “We’ll try somewhere else.”
2 We kept walking.
“What about Ellis Island?” Sebastian asked. “And the Statue of Liberty? I’ve never seen those.”
“How would we get there?” José said, somewhat derisively. “We’re going to have a hard enough time getting to Brooklyn with all the bridges down. Should we swim to Ellis Island?”
“I don’t know,” Sebastian said. “It was just an idea.”
“We’ll find somewhere cool,” I said. “That whole city is ours now, right? There’s got to be some place we want to see that we’ve never seen before.”
We walked downtown with lighter steps. We were laughing and joking, and even José who’s normally such a miserable jack-off slowed down and walked and joked with us. The destroyed landscape had nothing on us. I hadn’t felt this way since that night that we were goofing off and Lux disappeared.
As soon as I thought of her I stopped laughing. What if she was in one of those awful hospitals where people would call her sir and treat her like a man because she’d never had the money to do anything besides take hormones? I’ve heard of places like that, she’d been in one before. They had taken her to New Jersey, I was pretty sure. What if she was in some awful situation right now and here I was laughing and joking?
I wondered if they fixed her and sent her home. That would be even worse. Lux had tried to kill herself once when she lived there. She’d gotten her exit bag ready and had the helium and everything, and was going to lie in bed and just go, you know? She posted a suicide note to a support group she was part of on LinxUs, and then turned off her notifications and sat down to pet her cat, who she really loved and was sad to be leaving behind. Turned out a lot of people cared what happened to a fucked-up sixteen-year-old trans girl, because in the time she petted her cat, someone had found her info on the internet and called the authorities. They took her and locked her up for a while in a crazy house, she told me. They put her in the men’s ward, and all the men catcalled and harassed her except for one guy who called her baby and said he wanted to run away with her. She got out and detransitioned for a while to cope. Then she couldn’t take it anymore, retransitioned, and got kicked out.
“Hey,” Sebastian said, pulling me out of my thoughts. “Aren’t we near the Tenement Museum?”
We were walking down the east side of the island, through Alphabet City. There were huge condos all around us, abandoned now, but rising up to the sky like redwoods. Fucking overdeveloped city. All these people were gone, now, though, and their homes empty. We tried scrounging around in some of the dumpsters as we walked, but everything was long since picked over.
“Yeah. It’s down on Orchard Street, I think,” I said. “We should head over that way and check it out.”
We got there before too long. The Tenement Museum was easy to find—it was the only building that wasn’t a highrise or a 24/7. It looked so weird, this little brick building squished between all these behemoth condos. It had a historical landmark protection, I think, or it would have been gone a long time ago, too.
The front door wasn’t gaping open or anything like lots of the doors in other buildings were, but it wasn’t locked. There wasn’t anyone guarding the place. We made our way in, climbed some stairs, and were standing in this room that was made up super old-time. There was an ancient motherfucking monster of a sewing machine. There was a gas lamp and some other old, rusty things that could have been used for anything, I didn’t know what. José just sort of stood in the corner, looking around and not saying anything, but Sebastian and I walked through, touching things lightly with soft brushes. It was kinda awesome, being here alone. There were no guards, but nobody had touched the place after the storm.
We made our way around, quiet, talking about things, touching them. I found a room with a bed. It looked like it was made up to look like someone was in it, someone small. Were people smaller back then, or was this lump in the bed supposed to be a child? I didn’t know. I walked over and looked down. There was a little doll there, nestled in the bed. Who had put it there? It was old-time, too, with a creepy cracked face and milky eyes. Someone had left it tucked in.
There was a noise then, from another room. José grabbed some long pole from a wall and I pulled my crowbar out of my bag. We inched toward the noise, trying to make as little noise of our own as possible even though we had just been talking.
Crouched in the next room was a family. They were so skinny that I dropped my crowbar immediately. It fell to the ground with a clatter. They looked so scared.
There was a mother, a father, and a tiny little girl, no more than five. The little girl was in the mother’s arms, her face hidden in her mother’s neck, her black hair messy around her little head. It looked like it hadn’t been brushed in some time.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Home,” the man said, his voice cracking. “Home now.”
They looked so scared. They hadn’t even tried to defend themselves, even though they didn’t know who we were or what we would do.
We backed out the way we had come in.
3 We walked past the destroyed bridges and the loud crews working to rebuild them. By the time we reached the South Street Seaport, our legs were aching and our backs were tired from the heavy bags we carried. Everything was a wreck down there. There were still ships that had been tossed up onto the ground and wrecked and broken. They were lodged between buildings and down streets. We walked up to one, gaping at the big hole in the side where it had crashed, looking in at the blackness in the hull.
All along the wharf, there were boats that were still in use. Little boats, big boats, rowboats, and motorboats. The ones that weren’t moving along the water and slicing up the mirror surface were chained up. I pulled my bolt cutters out of my bag as we got closer. When we found a little rowboat chained to one of the docks, I waited for a moment nobody was looking and clamped the steel bolt cutters down over the chain. It was cut in an instant, and slid down into the water like it had never existed at all. I felt this super-shitty spasm of guilt. I was probably fucking over some guy who didn’t have shit but this boat. But what was I supposed to do? Hot wire one of the motorboats? I didn’t know how.
After the lock was cut and the guilt passed, I realized I’ve done a lot of things, I’ve been in a lot of places, and I’ve had a lot of experiences. But I’d be dog fucked if I ever rowed a boat before. I turned to José and Sebastian, but they just shrugged one after the other.
“We’ll get in and figure it out,” José said. “How hard could it be?”
The river pulled us downstream right away, and José grabbed the paddles, struggling to keep us in place. Even with his push-ups-every-morning muscles, we just kept jerking back and forth in the water, turning in circles, whirling around. After a while, though, he got the rhythm. Once he got it, Sebastian joined him and they each took a side.
“Let me help,” I said, after a while.
“You have the scrawniest arms known to man,” José said, grunting from the exertion of paddling. “You’d be able to paddle for five minutes. Just leave it to us.”
“No, to goddamn bullshit hell with that, you fucker,” I said. “You give me that fucking paddle.”
José handed it over, but just smirked from the end of the boat as I struggled to get it right. It took a while, and I started sweating and maybe my face got red, which just made José laugh even more. But then I got it.
“See, fucker?” I said. “Took me less time to figure it out than it took you.”
We started inching toward the opposite shore. Out in the middle of the river, me and Sebastian paused in our rowing. The city loomed up on either side of us. The East River seemed cleaner than I’d ever seen it—no condoms or used tampons floating along it, no beer cans, no plastic bags poking up like the heads of turtles. The skyline reached up on either side of us, the Manhattan side a bit taller, but the Brooklyn side no less full of condos and affluence. Years ago, when I first got there, I met this old guy living out on the street one day. I sat down and talked to him, and it got to be nighttime, and I took what little money I had, and he took what little money he’d spanged that day, and we bought ourselves big bottles of malt liquor that we put in brown bags. We took what little money we had left after that and got ourselves rides on the train, and, to get our money’s worth, we rode it as far as we could. We rode all the way out to Gravesend, out to the beach. While we sat on the beach, he told me all about Brooklyn sixty years before, when he had been a bit older than me. He told me he’d had a favorite place to go, one that was just on the other side of the East River in Williamsburg. It was a dirty old bar with dirty Christmas lights in the window, and old fluorescent signs from beer companies, and they had big Styrofoam cups that they’d sell beer in for super cheap. He said that back then, he didn’t have much money, but enough that he could always get good and drunk there. He went there year after year, sitting in the red pleather booths, watching as the old Polish people from the neighborhood left or died, and the young hip people came in. Up until the early part of the century, he said, he’d go there and drink then walk down the side of the East River. Back then, it was still mostly populated by factories, old buildings made of brick where they still made things—not like now when all people do is sit around and make things with their computers. He’d go down to the river when it was still broken down and industrial, and he would climb out onto these long ledges of concrete that reached out in to the water. He would look up, and all around him would be blackness, and then there was the city, twinkling above him like a spectral vision. I never forgot that. That guy’s probably dead now, but I can still see the city the way he saw it.
Sitting now in the middle of the gray water, with the sun sparkling down and the wind blowing cold, and this huge built-up city on either side of us, I wondered what I was heading to out there. I felt this sense of dread fall over me, which was strange, because all I’d heard of this building that was waiting for us was wonderful things, utopian things. Yet there was this fucking dread. What if ? What if ?
Lux once said that the things that seemed the best in her head always became completely shitted up the minute they got out of it and into the world. Her transition, for example. She told me once about the feeling of happiness and accomplishment and epiphany that she’d had when she worked through all the shit in her head, all the stuff that had been put there by a lifetime of living in this world, that said boy. All the clothes she’d been made to wear, the haircuts she’d been forced to have as a child, the pronouns people had put on her, the things people expected of her. She told me that for a few days, before she told anyone, everything had been perfect. She had walked around with a smile on her face. She had felt like everything made sense.
Then she told her parents and the what-would-Jesus-our- Lord-and-Savior-think started. Then the harassment started. Then she figured out that the thing that could be perfect in your head could be a disaster when it got outside of it.
What if this building was like that? What if ?
4 Getting to Brooklyn wasn’t the end of it. We still had a long walk, and while I’ve been to Brooklyn plenty of times, I’ve always gotten there underground. Things look a lot different above ground. I honestly couldn’t tell one street from the next.
José had a subway map, because he’s good with things like that. A long time ago, I had made fun of him for having it, called him a tourist and lots of other things. We had cheapo handheld screens and shit and nobody even used maps in a fucking decade. I was glad he had it now. We walked where the trains went, making our way slowly from one station to the next. It wasn’t super cold out, Januaries are like that. It wasn’t bad weather to be walking, but we’d walked all the way from the Bronx and we were starting to feel it. My leg had been throbbing for a while where the dog had bit me, even though the wound was almost closed. Our bags were heavy.
That little family in the Tenement Museum kept coming back to me, popping into my thoughts. Would they make it? Why would they live there? Maybe they didn’t feel they had the right to one of those condos. I started getting mad, thinking about it. I looked down and my hands were clenched into fists.
It probably took us longer to get there than if we’d walked in a straight line, but we made it. We got to this neighborhood where everybody knew what was going on, knew the building. Someone pointed us to where it was.
It was huge. There were these giant windows that went all the way up to ceilings, and the floors were taller than in any building I’d ever been in. There were silhouettes moving against the dark windows, and down near the door.
We got closer to the door. There was a huge man there. Another came outside with him. There were more inside. I didn’t know if he had a gun or a knife. I knew I didn’t want to mess with him, no matter what I had.
“Who are you?” he asked.
I threw back my shoulders and got up in his face, even though it wasn’t completely necessary.
“We heard about what you’re doing here. We think we can help you. We think you can help us.”
The man standing there uncrossed his muscled arms from in front of his chest.
“You willing to slag? There can’t be anybody here that doesn’t.”
“Huh?”
“Work. Are you willing to work with us?”
“Yeah,” Sebastian said, stepping forwards. “We’ve been working to get by alone. We can work here, too.”
“You’re willing to cooperate with other people?” he seemed to be looking hard at me this time. People are always pegging me for the troublemaker.
“Yeah, of course,” I said.
“And you’ve got nowhere else to go?” he asked. His voice softened at this last question.
“If we did, we wouldn’t be here,” I said.
He stepped aside, just like that. And we walked in the door.