After one of these wars, there are going to be some difficult years, with high inflation, random shortages of goods, rising unemployment, and the like. Things that would have been little more than inconvenient in more stable times will be calamities now, leaving people sleeping on the sidewalks and crowding emergency rooms: a heat wave, for example, or a strike by subway conductors. Many of the buildings that were built during the boom years will change hands, and some of them will be empty. Even the fanciest and most expensive parts of town will feel deserted and in disrepair: the stately old residences off of upper Fifth Avenue, the golden lobbies on Riverside, the sharp sleek towers in Tribeca. There will be torn carpets and outdated signs in the lobbies of banks, a wall will collapse in Central Park, a few tourists will be robbed, or maybe killed, and the neighborhood where they happened to be staying will gain a reputation for being especially dangerous. Many people will have a hard time getting by, and, at the other end of the scale, quite a few fortunes will be lost. But for others these will be the happiest of known days, because they’re young, say, or because they come from someplace else, where things are even worse; and they will complain, because everyone complains, but they won’t mean much by it.
Certain cultures will thrive: comedy, for example, which on the one hand will get very dry and recondite, and on the other hand will enjoy a depravity that would have been unimaginable just a few years earlier, with jokes about the war and the soldiers who’ve returned, about sex on its most daring day, about the assassinations of political leaders—those that happened, those that could have happened, those that should happen. These schools of comedy, loosely known as the Metaphysicals and the Yallers, will each have their own clubs, their own neighborhoods, their own audience, though in truth the differences between them will be exaggerated, and there will be some performers who can move freely between the two.
And a great ocean liner is going to come into the harbor, an event that will appear on the front pages of newspapers for days beforehand: people will be excited to see such a thing, because they’ll like the reminder that the city is built upon a harbor, and that it was once a sophisticated and elegant place. The ship will be on its maiden run from Europe, it’ll be as large as the largest building, and the people on the deck will wave and wave to the people on the shore, just like they used to do. There will be a brief vogue, after that, for naval clothing: sailor caps, white bell-bottoms, deck shoes.
Soap operas: these will do well in the new poor city, too, and the area around the studios where they’re shot will host a cluster of bars and restaurants, where fans go in the hope of seeing some of their favorite stars; and the stars will go to those same restaurants, surrounded by elaborate and somewhat fanciful teams of security, with the hope of being seen by their fans. The neighborhood will be called Silhouette Town, and the bodyguards will be as broad as oxen, very well compensated, and famous in their own right. And there will be new art but not so much dance, quite a lot of music but very little writing, and much less film. Better to be a man than a woman; better to be very young or very old than anything in between; bad to be a teacher or a politician—during an I Love New York campaign, the mayor will lose the ability to say either love or New York—but the wind down Sixth Avenue will be crisp and clear, and what a wind, the birds will ride it and banners will snap.
There’s going to be a place on the edge of downtown, known to many and yet still a secret. It’ll be a section of the north end of Union Square: from the fountain at the bottom, along the left-most path, the one that curves westerly up toward 16th Street and then curves back again, a vague area with uncertain borders, but a place just the same. It will be known as the Winter Market, and drugs will be bought and sold there.
The drugs themselves will not be illegal, not as such, anyway: they’ll be prescriptions, new medications for old diseases, some fatal and some chronic; and medications for new diseases, some so new that no one is going to know for sure how they’ll progress. Many of the treatments will be experimental, and many of them won’t work. The buyers will be people who can’t afford the drugs on the open market, or whose doctors have refused to write for them. There will even be some doctors among the customers, either because they’re sick themselves or because they’re looking for treatments for their patients, substances which, because of shortages or delays in the government’s approval process, they can’t get by other means. They’ll be an especially nervous lot, the doctors, for if they’re caught they’ll lose their licenses, and if they’re recognized they may be beaten.
Something will have gone wrong with the way medications are invented, marketed, priced, distributed, something no one knows how to fix, how even to begin fixing. There will be a lot of arguing among public figures about what has caused it: a failure of economic planning, the avarice of the companies that make and sell the drugs, or simply the fact that there will have been so many new diseases in recent years, illness branching off of illness, each with its own means of transmission, its pathology, its resistance. That will be the year they sell wonderful mechanical bunnies on street corners, for example, which hop across a tabletop or a floor: but they’ll turn out to be only half-mechanical and the other half real, and they’ll pass on an especially ferocious strain of the flu to some of the people who buy them. There will be a small resurgence of polio, a fourth serotype, less devastating than the original ones and significantly harder to transmit, but it will be immune to known vaccines and treatments. Everyone will agree that the process that had served for a hundred years had stopped working when no one was paying attention.
Though the Winter Market will be a busy place, it’ll be a rare night, maybe once every two weeks, that the police come through and roust everyone out, and even then they usually won’t make arrests. Still, any night could be the wrong night, and both the buyers and the sellers will be tense, eager, suspicious, and there will always be the possibility that an argument will break out, or even a fight. The bigger dealers will hire small gangs of very young boys and girls to steer customers toward them and warn them if the police are coming, or if a fight has started somewhere else, or if another prominent dealer has entered the park; so the air will be filled with private signals, hisses and whistles, callouts and clapping. It’ll be one of those open-but-closed places, nightclubs, homeless encampments, brothels and the like—the kind you can’t look for, you just have to know where they are.
They are going to be a mixed group, the sellers. Some of them will be looking to unload something that didn’t work for them, or a regimen left unused when someone died, because there will be cash in the black market, and cash is the king of the city. Others will be people who’ve managed to get the drugs prescribed by lying to someone, or finding a doctor who will accept a bribe. Yet others will be thieves and insiders: nurses, pharmacy assistants, people who work for shipping companies, where things get lost. A last group, so disgraceful that they really only exist in rumors, consists of those who have pilfered the drugs from living friends and relatives.
And the buyers will be, if anything, even more sundry: shopkeepers, secretaries, husbands and wives, bankers and brokers, drivers and delivery boys, managers, students, and even a politician or two. Some will look healthy and some will look sick; some will be seeking advice, and some will know exactly what they need. In this regard, the Market will reflect the character of the city, its variety and ingenuity, its endless calamities and its canny resources. Indeed, it will occupy a part of the square that’s served as a trading place of one sort or another for more than a century. Produce was sold there; narcotics, for a time; books and pamphlets, many years previously; flowers back in the days when the neighborhood to the east was home to many wealthy families, who would send their servants out every morning to purchase fresh bouquets. This is going to be the common understanding, anyway, though it may not be true. The unlucky like to think that they once were lucky, the dispossessed that they once had homes, the frightened that they used to be confident, the dying that the world they fought will be remembered.
Of course, all of this will happen at night, under gloomy treetops and vaporous skies. Soon after sunset the Market will open, slowly, as these things do, almost casually, with a glance and a transaction; then another, apparently unrelated, a few yards away; then a few more, like birds settling in the trees. Exchanges will be made behind bushes, behind benches, from hand to hand without eye contact, in part out of uneasiness and in part out of that faint shame that comes with showing weakness in a public place, in a way that could be mistaken for tenderness, if it weren’t for the awkwardness and the hurry. Buyers will come in from the south side—as if by instinct, there being no fixed rules—and approach the Wall, a low, freestanding brick slab that once served to mark the entrance to the subway, opposite the raised statue of George Washington on horseback (known as Rider because few passersby will have ever checked to see who is depicted). On the light posts, beneath the pale globes gone dead from austerity, there will be taped-up flyers announcing what’s for sale, with the pseudonym of the dealer who has them: Superman, White Boy White, Godzilla, MVP, Nobody Johnson, names whispered out of the grey air as the buyers walk the paths: Reactrive/30 spansules/$300 —> the Speaker. Subvir/100 X 1 + needles/$650 Come see Big Baby. Drugs for trade, new treatments marked with exclamation points, and beside them, a few notices of friends and loved ones who’ve gone missing, and memorials to those who died; the path will be littered with sheets of paper that have come unstuck and drifted to the ground.
Hector is going to go down to the Winter Market past midnight one Thursday, still warm, though summer has recently ended. He’s going to take the train in from Astoria, a half dozen other people in the car with him, but no one on the platform when he gets out except an old woman asleep on one of the benches and, on the opposite platform, two Sikhs staring exhaustedly at the tracks. It’s going to be his first time shopping for medicine this way, and he’s not going to know what to expect, he won’t even be sure that the place exists; but he’ll have heard about it, and known stranger things that were born in rumor and appeared in fact. He’ll have gone home from work that evening, all the way back out to Queens from the Upper West Side, and gotten into bed with the alarm set for one and the clock nestled under his pillow, where he clutched at it in his sleep. He’ll be looking for something to cure his brother, Antonio, whose disease is so new the researchers are still deciding on the name. No one will know how it’s transmitted, whether it’s hereditary or environmental, infectious or inert, whether it preys on the weak, the sinful, or the unlucky; and no effective treatments will exist at all, though some new drugs, each unrelated to the others and originally designed for a different illness altogether, are rumored to alleviate some of the symptoms.
He’ll have five hundred dollars in cash, carefully converted into twenties, which are collected into hundred-dollar rolls, fixed with rubber bands, and placed in each of his four pants pockets, with an extra one tucked into his right sock. It will be money he’s saved from his job as a doorman in a building uptown, putting his Christmas bonuses in an empty coffee jar and using his tip money to send remittances home to Ecuador. It will be as much money as he’s ever carried and not a sum he’s likely to see again soon, which will make him apprehensive, worried that he’ll lose it or have it stolen, that he’ll get arrested, taken advantage of, ripped off, and end up feeling foolish among these people who have been working this forbidden economy for so much longer than he has, and no doubt know much more than he does about which forms of treatment are worth pursuing and which are useless.
He’ll be looking for something called Provix B, a drug distributed in small, oblong, bright red pills. That will be just about all he knows, the name and what they look like. He’ll have little sense of how much they cost, in a pharmacy or on the black market, still less of what they do, but he’ll consider it a great success if he can acquire some. Antonio will be the only family he has, now that his mother is gone: Antonio with his fencer’s posture and quick smile, the wise and wised-up one, three years older than Hector, and his tutor and protector back when Hector was a chubby and clumsy and quiet boy.
He’ll emerge from the subway at the south end of the park, and what he will see will bewilder and amaze him: a small society, a different economy. He’s going to think, Now, who are these men and women, and what have they been through, what’s going on in their heads and what do they want? As he starts north toward the center of the market he’ll come across the stragglers, the margins of even this marginal world. They’ll mutter names of drugs to him, cures he’s never heard of, for diseases he can’t imagine, so many of both. Now, how does this work? he’ll ask himself. What are the rules? Can I bargain or are the prices fixed? And how am I supposed to know that what I’m getting is really what I’m paying for, rather than some aspirin wrapped in tinfoil, or worse yet, something poisonous, like the coarse white powder the super laid down for rats in the basement of the building where he worked? The previous week he’ll have helped his brother to the bathroom and balanced him on the scale, weighing him at ninety-seven pounds; and his skin was painted with blue and purple streaks, both delicate and deadly. Hector will be sure that if he can get those streaks to fade, then his brother will be all right. Like unpainting a painting, and maybe that’s what this drug, this Provix B can do, erase the streaks from his brother’s skin and let him start over again, like an apartment wall that’s had its nail holes spackled over and a fresh coat of paint applied, maybe not as good as new but better than it was. Everybody’s got some holes in them, but if you can’t see them then they don’t count. There was an old man named Cortez, back in the neighborhood, who showed up on the block one day wearing a perfectly fitting oyster-grey suit and a spotless Panama. Nobody dies from looking too good, he said to Hector. The idea was so striking to him, and the man who voiced it such proof, that he began to believe in it, more literally than he would have admitted, certainly enough that he’ll have begun to think of saving his brother as saving his brother’s looks. He’ll gaze up above the treetops to the surrounding office buildings, empty as mausoleums; he’ll look at the lampposts, with their fluttering offers, supplications and prayers, but he’ll find their numbers overwhelming.
Instead, he’ll start up the path, and right away a man will approach him, tall, thin, and colorless, eyeing him, the corner of his mouth open as if he’s about to say something, and Hector will open his face too broadly on him, so that the other man looks down at the sidewalk, says nothing, and retreats back under the trees. Hector will turn around to watch him go, conscious as he’s doing so that it’s a mistake, that it makes him look new; and yet he can’t help himself, so he’ll start to follow the tall man, not knowing, after all, where else to go, clinging onto this one contact and this single clue, though smart enough to make himself appear aimless as he follows the dwindling curve toward whatever lies at the end.
The tall man will be gone. Two other men will be sitting on a bench, their legs drawn up so that they face each other, quietly sorting something between them under the watchful gaze of a much larger man—enormous, really—who stands in front of them, legs slightly apart, staring at Hector as he makes his way past them, not looking, not even nodding, and then crosses an even darker region, through a curtain of hanging tree branches, and then, suddenly, out into the Market itself, a place so open and busy that for a second he’ll pause, turn, and almost run, convinced that he’s made a mistake, or that someone must have made a fool of him, that this place, with all of these people milling around, all doing something subtle with their hands, must be a trap, a joke, maybe a movie set, someplace he doesn’t belong.
He’ll stand there, unmoving and ignored, his eyes flickering across the scene: mostly men and mostly young, but there’ll be a few women among them, all looking like they’re trying not to look like anything—not a bright scrap of cloth on anyone, except for one man wearing a red leather cap. He’ll turn his head this way and that, trying to find something on which his gaze might alight, but no one will even catch his eye, they’ll be so caught up in the matter of asking and offering, passing things from hand to hand; he’ll feel like he’s happened on a dance in a town square in some foreign city, something where the partners change according to beats he can barely hear, within an unfamiliar music. He’ll step back into the shadows and pat his front pockets. Look, now, the patterns: the sellers moving forward just a few feet from their perches and then settling back again, while the buyers traced more eccentric routes, perturbed like the planets, dawdling and reluctant until they find something they want; then they’ll quicken a bit, pause, start forward hesitantly, and finally, with the transaction upon them, they’ll thrust the money at the vendor, wait for it to be counted, and then hasten away. He’ll find himself fascinated by the entire process, its complexity and then again its unexpected formalities, too loose to be rituals but too keen to be random. The first open look, a mild flirtation, the first exchanges with a potential partner, the quick decision whether to continue or not, even the few polite words spoken—we’re good—OK, man—when it was clear the match wasn’t right, to soften the rejection and make the entire process feel a little lighter, a nodding goodbye, hands up as if to say, I’m no threat to you.
A bearded man in a green army jacket is going to approach him and say, What’ll it be? Provix B, Hector will reply, though he’ll feel self-conscious about saying it, concerned that he’s pronouncing it wrong, or that everyone but him knows that the stuff is useless, or alternately, that it’s so sought-after that a newcomer like himself couldn’t hope to find it, nor afford it even if it were offered to him. And sure enough, the bearded man will smile and say, You won’t find any of that around here, and if you do, it’ll probably be counterfeit. But I’ve got something else, proven in clinical trials. It’s called Mirapin. Works just as good as the other, that’s what my clients tell me, and they keep coming back for more. Only difference is you have to take it four times a day instead of just once.
What does it do? Hector will ask, and the other man will say, It’s just what you’re looking for. Provix B, Hector will say, and the man will say, This is better. That’s what I’m telling you. But Hector will know that only a fool buys from the first person who’s selling, and he’ll say, No, no, shaking his head and backing away before turning and walking on.
After the man in the army jacket, there will be two boys, both about fourteen years old, one of whom will hold out a dirty plastic bag containing a half dozen pink football-shaped pills. Hector will ask what they are and the boy will scowl and shrug. Then he’ll meet a round, sweaty man with blister packs in various pockets of his long grey wool coat; then a weary man with a trembling Adam’s apple and a pink-tipped nose, who’ll catch Hector’s eye and approach him hesitantly, saying, Hey, man, what can we do for each other? But the weary man will turn out to be another buyer, not a seller, and he’ll be so near death that there are flecks of blood in his eyes, and blood between his teeth when he tries to smile. What are you looking for? the other man will say, and Hector will pause, unsure he wants to reveal such information, especially to someone who has nothing to lose—but the other man’s voice will be kind. Provix B, he’ll say, and the other man will nod or, it may be, flinch, like a dog’s legs jerking when you scratch its belly, nothing deliberate at all, just a tic brought on by his mashed-up nerves, and he’ll say, Someone’s got it. I heard someone say it.
Where?
The other man will point further into the park. Back there somewhere. I don’t know. I don’t know.
So he’ll start back, it was like heading deeper into a hole in the side of a mountain, which opens first into a cavern and then narrows down, splits and branches, until it’s impossible to go any further and the only way to proceed is to turn around and start towards the entrance again. What are you looking for, man? What do you need? We got everything, we got it all. Month’s supply, and next month I’ll have more. He’ll have worked through about two-thirds of the market, now dizzy and near despair, when he’ll come across a young woman, all by herself, sitting forward on one of the benches with her elbows on her knees and her chin propped on her hands, one of the few who says nothing as he goes by, maybe she was just sitting there because she needed someplace to sit; but when he passes her again coming back out—two men down there with nothing but painkillers—she won’t have moved, she’ll be sitting in the exact same position, still gazing at the same spot on the pavement a few feet in front of her, and he’ll say, Excuse me. She’ll look at him, a white girl in a black beret, wearing a lot of makeup, her eyes outlined, a thin girl with her throat bare, angry, sad, sick. Still, she won’t say anything, and he’ll think about walking on; but she won’t avert her eyes, either. Are you buying or selling? The girl will stare hard at him, and then reach into the pocket of her coat and pull out an orange bottle, shaking it slightly from side to side so that he can hear the tablets inside. What is it? he’ll ask.
This—, she’ll say, her voice so hoarse on the first syllable that she’ll stop, clear her throat, and start again. This stuff they gave me. Went on it for two months. Provix B. It didn’t do anything, but I kept filling it. There’s three more months in there.
Hector is going to feel a beam of moonlight go right through him, a warm-cold sensation, dilating his ventricles and shortening his breath. He’ll touch the roll of bills in his right pocket. You’re selling it? he’ll ask.
It doesn’t work for me, she’ll reply. Maybe it’ll work for someone. She’ll look at him like a blind woman, as if maybe she had a witch’s wisdom and second vision, or maybe she just couldn’t see very well.
Is it for you?
He’ll shake his head. My brother. Antonio.
Yeah, she’ll say, and then she won’t say anything more. At first he’ll think that she’s changed her mind, but when she finally speaks he’ll see that the pause was just to gather her strength, and he’ll wonder if she’s going to die right in front of him. She’ll swallow, shake her head in frustration, and swallow again, weak as a newborn bird. You can have it, she’ll say.
How much?
She’ll shake her head, No. Just take it. It doesn’t matter.
He won’t understand. How much do you want? he’ll ask again, already reaching into his pocket.
She’ll draw her hand back as if she’s going to throw the bottle at him. It’s free, she’ll say. Just take it. A little breeze is going to come across the park, ruffling her bones.
He’ll put his hands up and shake his head, as if it were a robbery—as if, by refusing to take money from him, she were taking something even more valuable. But she’ll say nothing, just hold her thin arm out to him, the bottle dangling from her fingertips, nodding, Go ahead. He’ll reach out slowly and take it from her, wondering if maybe this is some white girl’s game, if she’s going to take it back, or scream for the police, or do something with sex, whatever it might be; but she’s just going to smile at him a little, revealing a slight overbite that will show how pretty she once was, and then, when the bottle is safely in his hands, lean back on the bench, a shade more ashen from the effort, breathing, breathing. He’ll turn it and look at the label, which looks right enough, though the woman has scratched out the prescription number and her last name, a common practice to prevent the police from tracing contraband back to the seller, while still allowing buyers to identify their connection. Is this you? he’ll ask. Are you Bridget?
She’ll nod and then say, It’s real. Don’t worry.
He’ll stand there, looking at her. Can’t I help you get home? She’ll shake her head. He’ll feel like he has to give her something, it won’t be right otherwise, so he’ll kneel down on the pavement, and take the folded bills out of his sock, thrusting them at her desperately. But she won’t take them, she’ll just raise her eyes and look at him, her eyelids juddering, sucking on her lower lip. It’s going to hurt him, that she won’t take anything from him, but she’ll just smile and say, Where I’m going, I won’t need money.