To the Bridge

They packed to head home against news of the storm. In Big Pine they folded their clothing and their fear into two black suitcases, sweating with the sun on their backs as Hurricane Joaquin coagulated like a blood clot off the sandy artery of the East coast.

At 2 PM, Mila shut the door to the cool breezes rippling through her apartment. She paused before swinging the wooden pendulum closed, feeling the silky air as if called to stand and be touched by the calm pleasure of late summer. This weather was so curiously clear; the East had sucked away the reserve of clouds and fog that usually reached over the Northwest like a layer of cream.

 She locked the door against the instinct to stay on safe ground.

Harry, already in the hallway with their skinny suitcases, said nothing when she asked him, he noted for the first time, how he felt about leaving so suddenly. Thinking he was being reserved, she picked up his hand and wrapped it comfortingly with her fingers, but Harry was ready to speak first.

“I know you’re afraid,” he said. Mila’s jaw set. There was nothing she hated more than to be comforted; the admission of softness directed towards instead scraped her like an expression of weakness. Harry knew this.  

She was once very attuned to the deep-set voice that filled in for Harry’s soft shoulders and thin jaw, but four years of cohabitation had worn away its ability to sweeten her defenses.  

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she picked after him. “They’re still letting people land in the airports, which means no one is in critical danger. This threat; I know it’s all made up.”

“Everything is going to be fine,” Harry continued as if she had agreed with him. “This is the right decision, no matter what.”

In reality, Mila thought, it was difficult to tell what was risk, what was propaganda, and what was panic-driven myth.

The airports were open only to a weak trickle of jets carrying those people who had petitioned case-by-case at their state customs bases, hastily thrust into operation by the Supreme Court just two weeks prior.  Mila’s aging parents lived and cared for their own parents in a first-floor apartment in Brooklyn; she was allowed to stay with them. Harry, her husband, said there was no way she was going to be the only solid rock between four elderly people, raving wind and a city packed with alarm; the very real possibility of a crowd frothing for escape at the steel bit of the subway system made him uneasy enough to tell Mila how things were going to go.

This was the dark cloud that drove Harry from sleep the night they decided to leave, but he didn’t share his apprehension with his wife, who dreamt her own florid nightmare about a school of sharks patched from black clouds. When the rubbery fish opened their mouths, instead of teeth she stared down rows of people with faces distorted in a thousand expressions of terror. When she woke up she found Harry already looking at her. He told her they were both going to New York.

“Now even the support beam needs another support beam.” He knew she’d want go alone, stone-cold in her stern heroism, careless that Harry would be left in the sun to worry while she sacrificed herself to the random evil of weather.

The inconvenience of the cross-country flight ban had flared into protests. The Farmers, a small but fiery grassroots group, had posted incisive blog posts about the caution tape the federal government had issued to insulate the country. As the criticism was linked from website to profile, the cry of logic went up: if even death-row inmates were allowed the luxury of a choice last meal, then it was unethical to prohibit ordinary people choose to die beside their families- especially if they weren’t flying directly through the storm.

The flight staff consisted of a few hundred rotating volunteers traveling daily to and from the ominous coast; countless gallons of fuel were donated anonymously. Some of these donors were struck by the romantic notion of choosing one’s own destiny, and others had long wanted the government to pay greater attention to fortifying frail infrastructure rather than tracking where its citizens chose to hide from the rain.

Mila had been at the Laundromat, watching a debate about the ban on the C-Span channel, and remembered seeing the woman in sweats and pink nails who had jumped out of her seat, yelling in frenzy, “It’s a celebrity culture, people! They government keeps death-row slobs well-fed to show how good they are up from up in those offices, how much they care, but when it comes to me and you, they keep us locked up here like animals waiting to get blown away!”

“Amen,” someone shouted from the front seat. It was no longer C-Span; it was action TV. Mila wondered if the fuzzy shape on the screen knew that her words would be used to inspire emotion, that animals would be spray-painted and stickered on walls as the mark of lurking distrust, maybe she wouldn’t have worn sweats to the town hall. She wondered if the woman had ever taken an interest in debate, ever wondered that her outbursts could cause a chain reaction, before she had the bejesus scared out of her. Mila was better-dressed, probably better-educated, and better-mannered than this woman now known to every eye in America, but before the catastrophe neither had she given a thought to what clever mechanics might be crafting the arc of law.  And so it must have been with many.

The storm was nicknamed “Hurricane Hades”. Within a single week, news networks hatched and grew the monster in the imagination of its audience, and the bigger it grew, the more urgently it needed a moniker. It lurked in legend and fit alphabetically at the heels of Hurricane Holly, the last wrecker to terrorize Florida: Hades, the chaos predicted to burst apart eastern cities by their neatly seamed streets. 

The couple started the ignition on their Volvo at 2:30 PM. Mila watched out of the window of the car as Harry inched towards a ferry in the idling molasses of traffic.

At 3 PM Western time, Joaquin began to dip its outer fingers into the waters of Virginia and stir. Families watching the slate sky through boarded windows saw flocks of birds swirl restlessly through pinprick sheets of rain. The deer grazing in forested backyards, calmed by the mysterious absence of human traffic, merely perked back their ears.

Harry and Mila escaped the hideous chatter of the ferry’s radio inside their muggy car.

 “The mayor of Norfolk has ordered 10,000 body bags to be marched down Main Street, Mayor Evans announced today. ‘Even if we evacuate the maximum amount of people, we may still find the streets flooded with bodies when this is over. There may be nowhere left for those who remain behind at this time. Be prepared. Stay in your homes and follow instructions carefully.’” The reporter wrapped up the segment: “The message is clear: if you are still here, it’s too late.”

The XM radio, broadcasting from Harry and Mila’s destination, skittered nonstop threats across the deck. The boat sailed calmly, holding the car aloft like a water-hating cat above a big blue river.

“Bullshit,” Harry whistled. “Then why is this crack still there?” He pointed at the boat’s speakers, indicating the disembodied reporter.

“He’s doing his civic duty. Crawling through mud and stuff for the story, being a hero,” she said gravely. She decided she was kidding, but it always seemed that Harry either ignored or couldn’t tell when she was deadpan.

“So are we, but we’re doing it for ourselves,” he said quietly, focusing a few inches past Mila’s right left black pupil.  

At 5 PM they arrived at the airport for their evening departure and found themselves staring down a line of almost three hundred people, each one vying for admission onto one of the last scheduled flights to take them home.  Some of these people must not even have tickets, Mila realized. They just came here, hoping against reason that fate would find a seat for them.

Everyone was thoroughly searched for weapons and tickets, and those without papers were turned away by tired, sweating airport attendants. Several of the women in the crowd were dotted with tears, forgetting from sheer exhaustion that their families probably would do better taking care of themselves. They were like little animals goaded into panic by a whip of words, and Mila found it contagious. She squirmed in her cashmere sweater, trying to center her mind in the soft fur of her jacket and away from the flooding tension.

Flights, they were told, were being tapered in preparation for Joaquin. Lightning clouds were reported drifting through the heartland states, but they were merely a ripple tiding of something bigger blowing in from the sea.  All departures would have to wait for the storm to temporarily break.

A seated woman disinterred a cello from its plastic egg and began to loosen and re-tighten the strings. Harry mentally urged her to break the barrier play, to break the barrier of his wishful thinking, to ignore her own private bundle of nerves and stoke the fire of camaraderie. The flow of events was a lucid nightmare, why couldn’t he hope for a ridiculous stroke of good luck? But like everyone else, she was probably trying to hold back from shitting herself. It was a strange and intimate thing to know about three hundred people.

Harry had long associated string players with his own, non-musical wife. Several months into dating Mila, he took to hear a string trio perform Bach. Harry was the kind of person whose mind itches to accommodate all matter; this was his playtime.

Mila liked to try everything once, and Harry had a feeling that he was the arbiter of her first impression of a live classical performance. He wanted her to begin to love this special thing and to know that he planted the seed in her ear.

As the half-light died with the sound of the closing bell, Harry snuck a side glance at his woman to gauge her reaction. Darkness had settled like ink into the thin skin near Mila’s mouth, dividing her face into a well of eyes and crags where there were none before; she looked sculpted, older.

The man on the stage, his hair frayed as a white fleck of snow, began to scrape a vibrating sound out of his violin. It threaded through the hawk’s-wing expanse of air in the concert hall, delivering moments of music that at moments felt like glass breaking, and at times like the end of the world.

A cellist accompanied the old man: a young woman with a stern face, slight in her black silk slip. She had the stony musician’s expression that cloaked everything personal about her except the concentration of mountains.

She threw her body against the cello as if trying to draw blood, re-creating the movement intended by its wild-eyed composer centuries ago. Her music was deep and guttural, produced from the contact between her own hidden physical cavities and the coffin-shaped echoing chamber of the wooden curl gripped between her thighs.

Harry watched the cellist’s black-heeled foot peek from behind the instrument, aroused by the elegant bones that tensed and curled with her rocking.  

He glanced back at Mila after a pause and was stunned to see a look of intensity heating her baby face.  In that moment, Harry could see Mila’s future: the lines that would crinkle her skin like paper, her posture and long curve of neck that would continue to proudly carry the weight of her shoulders. He felt sure that the raging on the stage lived as potential in Mila, and he wanted to be near her every exciting contradiction. It was as close as he’d ever gotten to what moved him most. Harry fell in love with Mila that night.

Theirs was the last plane into New York. The boarding was blissfully short and efficient. There were no luxuries on this trip, just water bottles. Harry extended half a Clanapin to his wife, who gulped it down along with the small shot of Jack they brought in a mouthwash container. Mila hated flying. Time melted nervelessly as she watched a white line of airplane lights ascend into the night sky, and she closed her eyes as their metal box trundled down the runway.  

In the air, Mila had a dream. She dreamt that she was trying to sleep in a bed inside a dark room. She was completely relaxed, thinking no thoughts, when she felt the sensation of a warm mouth kissing her wrist. She felt no body attached to it. The kiss was like a spider, light but insistent, pink sucking lips creeping towards the papery underside of her elbow. It caressed over her bicep, crawled to her heart, and slowly made its way to her own mouth where it paused, tenderly waiting for her response. Mila tried to brush it off, but petrified, found that her arms were frozen. She didn’t know what she was afraid of in that small, warm, respirating cave on her body; it wasn’t that it might try to steal her breath or suffocate her, but in her watery dream logic Mila experienced the phobia that the mouth would begin to breathe for her, letting her forget the usefulness of her own lungs.  

She woke in a haze. Harry’s hand was on hers. His skin was almost as cold as his wedding ring. The plane rang with alarming silence.

“Is everything ok?” she whispered.

“Yes, everything is fine,” Harry answered. “Well. It should be fine. You’ve been asleep for hours. We’re already somewhere over New York, but it’s been too stormy to land. Most of the other planes were diverted to Buffalo, but the pilot came on the intercom saying he took an extra hour’s worth of fuel, so they’ve kept LaGuardia open for us. We’ve been circling for 50 minutes. We all hope we’re going to get on the ground soon. Very, very soon,” he repeated.

Mila looked across the aisle and saw that the plane was nodding in turbulence. Mostly everyone had closed their windows and put on their headphones, trying to distract themselves. She had a window seat still open. Through it she saw an indistinguishable porridge of steel-wool clouds churning, and the plane was dipping in and out of the morass. Flashes sparked randomly in the storm, causing some of the passengers to stifle a squeal, but Mila heard no thunder. A man behind her was talking to himself, whispering “Oh god, oh god, oh god,” over and over again, urgently as if something was hurting him.

Harry, however, was smiling. His eyes and the corners of his mouth were relaxed. Mila, strangely, also felt no fear. All she knew was that the plane was in the sky and that at some point it would be on the ground. She wasn’t concerned with the method. She could feel the same magical confidence seeping from Harry.  The TVs were turned on in the cabins, and he kept his profile to the screen as he nestled his hand discreetly under Mila’s sweater and between her thighs.

The plane disappeared into the storm without a word from the pilot as lightning tongued around it. The woman on the outer edge of Mila and Harry’s row gripped her seat so tightly it seemed that she was trying to hold the plane up herself, the way that cartoons could levitate above a chasm by holding themselves up by the ears. Several times the plane nosed around in the clouds before it finally hit the shining, wet runway, and when it did everyone cheered. Mila did not. Harry kept his hand where it was.

The scene in LaGuardia airport was inversely calm to the one they had departed. All the shops were gated, and only one path of lamps lit the light-headed travelers to their luggage. The airport’s thick glass windows were locked with boards, and at several stood police members in full bulletproof vests.

“I think we just landed in hell,” said Mila.

“It makes sense. I’ve never felt that kind of turbulence before,” said Harry, ushering her ahead as they passed by the guards, whose eyes followed them down the runway. A man in an outfit that made him look like a SWAT member led the group towards the still baggage carousels, where luggage was already waiting. Everyone remained instinctively in line as he checked their boarding passes and ID’s, saying the same short, terse, “You’re clear” and waving each escapee towards their belongings.

A line of cabs was parked outside in the rain. It was 4 AM Eastern time, and the thunder wasn’t nearly as loud as they had expected.  Mila turned on her phone, fingers trembling, remembering that she didn’t call her mother when they landed. She had forgotten the focus of their flight; her mom’s face, for the first time in a week, didn’t stare at Mila in the back of her mind like the light at the end of a long tunnel.

The phone rang until the answering machine picked up. Mila rang again. This time the rings were tinny, obstructed, and the message machine garbled. There was no beep to leave a message. Harry told her the service was probably poor because of the rain. Mila resigned herself to being ushered into the next open SUV, anxious to be in her parent’s apartment even though she was sure they weren’t being battered by the weather.  Harry slid next to her.

“We’ll figure out what is going on once we get closer to the city. I don’t like all of these police. I knew that they were supposed to be patrolling the waterfronts, but it’s still barely raining. This just doesn’t make sense,” he said mostly to himself, redundantly pointing out his and Mila’s mutual discomfort.

The cab driver was a bald head above the rearview mirror.
“Going into town?” he asked. His throat had a smoker’s grit.

“Yes,” the couple murmered simultaneously. Harry continued, “How have the roads been? Is it as bad as they’ve been saying?”

“You can say… it’s been interesting,” replied the driver. “Tom” was the name tag stuck on the divider between his seat and the passenger’s. Tom’s face, as it was portrayed on the sticker, was heavy-set and thick-browed. He had a small tear tattooed near his right eye.  

“How so?” Harry’s body stiffened for the first time that night.

“Honestly, we’ve been driving people into the city all week, but yesterday we started getting blocked by cops. They’ve literally circled off the city. You can’t get in.” The cabbie coughed.

“Can you get out?” quietly asked Mila.

“I don’t know. All I know is that you can’t get in.”

“So where are you taking us?” Harry pushed on, trying to contain his voice. His arm inched towards the door handle.

“I’ve been letting people off near the Brooklyn Bridge. I mean, I can’t drive over it. It’s barricaded. It’s a weird situation, you know, because we’re not allowed to leave you in the airports either. “

“Harry, my parents!”  Mila whispered urgently. She was no longer worried about imagined storms. She was imagining police helmets and locked doors. Harry put up his hand. There was nothing to be said. Tom told them that the news reports stopped broadcasting Joaquin’s progression, saying that all evacuees were safe, and all residents inside the city were to be contained from danger until the storm of the century dissipated overhead. Subway and bus service, to this effect, were halted.

They neared the mournful, misty bridge. Tom turned around to face the couple, waving away their folded cash. He was much older than he looked in his cabbie’s photo, and the tear near his eye had faded to a crusted, mole-like dot.

“I live in Hoboken,” he told them. “They’ve locked us down over there too; it’s so close to the water. I got up yesterday, and when I got to the airport, the police told me I had to come right back after my shift ended. The crazy thing is, they knew when my shift ended. This doesn’t smell right, but there’s nowhere to go. Sorry you came all this way, you two. Good luck.”

Mila and Harry left the car, shouldering their backpacks.  New York looked ghostly pale in the dawn. They searched down the road and found two more cabs approaching them. They stopped, released a tall man in a business suit and a young guy wearing duck boots. They all walked towards one another.

“So…. Do any of you know what the hell is going down?” asked the boy. The businessman rubbed his red eyes and shook his head. He was trying to find his father at Mt. Sinai hospital and had worked himself a migraine.

“We could try to cross the bridge. It looks so empty here, and the weather’s calm, and I’m sure no one will care about a few crazy people trying to get to the other side,” suggested Mila. She tugged at the businessman’s shoulder; he had started to fall asleep on his feet, and a bit of moisture had pooled near his chin. Like a zombie, he followed the three, moaning softly. They neared the bridge entrance. There was a great amount of yellow caution tape strapped to a gate fashioned from wooden boards. A policeman, black boots clacking on the pavement, walked out from behind the barricade. Harry stepped out to confront him. The policeman, his face obscured by a mask, nodded at the confused trespasser.

“Hi. Hi, how are you,” Harry began. The policeman nodded again. “We just flew in. We’re all very tired and we need to get to our families. Is there a way to get across the bridge?”

The officer looked down at the four from his elevation on the bridge. In their fatigue, he seemed to loom taller than the scraggly group combined.
“You can’t enter.”

“Please. Please. Look, we went through a lot to get those plane tickets. We weren’t informed that there could be a curfew, or a blockade, or whatever is going on here,” Harry pleaded. The wind picked up speed and whipped his hair back from his forehead, which had turned white. He wished that he could momentarily freeze Mila, deafen her from this cruel turning away. Harry eyed the officer’s gun holster, but felt that if he let go of his rage and let his fists fly, he could grab the air and rip away this horrible, surreal reality, and behind the curtain they would again be looking through their window in Big Pine.

“I’m sorry. You can’t enter. Please follow Officer Rangley. He will take you a mile down the road to a shelter. It’s open for passengers who have been delayed from entering the city due to the state of emergency. You will be given a room. Please follow Officer Rangley.” The cop turned to another cop who had appeared from behind the boards, shorter but otherwise indistinguishable from one who had been sentencing the travelers, who by now felt so wired that they thought he could be a hallucination.

Officer Rangley walked to a blue NYPD van, black in the lack of light. He herded them in, but as Harry pulled his legs into the vehicle, the boy with the duck boots backed away.

“No. I’m going to get over the bridge. This is so fucked. Who are you? I’m not getting in your goddamn van,” he yelled.

“Sir, calm down and get in the van,” warned the officer.

“Fuck you!” The boy moved to run, but the officer caught him by the arm, with lethal expertise pulled him into his chest and stifled his neck with his baton.
“Either you get into the van or you will be court-martialed for trespassing on government property.”

The boy spit on the ground and let Officer Rangley lift him into the van. The door slid shut. Four whites of eyes peered at one another like bats in the night.

The officer let them out in front of a brick motel. Rangley took note of their bags and tagged each with a stamp, then opened the door to the lobby. Instead of a clerk, yet another black bodysuit stood behind the polished desk. All the lamps were off, and there was no hum from an air conditioner.  There was no familiar noise from the flat-screen television or a radio.

“Can I get your names, please?”

They were each handed a key and steered up a flight of stairs. Few vacancies remained in the Great Flushing Motel, but neither Harry nor Mila could have told it was inhabited; the silence was so thick and deathly. The elevator was bound to the lobby, so they all walked up the stairs to their rooms. The businessman exited first, shaking Harry’s hand in solidarity. The couple’s room was on the top floor. Mila collapsed on the bed, her thighs burning. The room was as dark as the one in her strange dream. 

 Harry wanted to knock on the neighboring doors to scout for more answers, but to his unsurprised chagrin found that the handle wouldn’t budge from the inside. He leaned against the door and, without warning from his stomach, dry-heaved. Mila called him over to her.

She felt Harry’s weight move the bed. Mila allowed him to pull her close.

“Harry, this kind of thing isn’t supposed to happen,” she murmured. He sidled close to her and nuzzled her ear.

“But this is the kind of world where things don’t work like they should. This is the kind of world where things break and get dirty. We forget this, because there’s always been someone to hide it from us.” She wanted to continue, to rail against the rotting wrongness penetrating the good, clean day she lived yesterday, but Harry again slid his hand between her thighs, as he did on the plane. This time his palm was insistent.

Mila stopped talking and lay still. She tuned into Harry’s breath, his mouth, and remembered the mouth on her wrist. And now, knowing whose lips were on the back of her neck, she wanted them.

 Mila wanted Harry. Not Harry- his living body. She wanted his otherness, his distance, to melt. She felt alone, and she felt something older than she, old as the earth, old as the forests surrounding her windows back home in Big Pine, old as the underground roots that fed them. She felt a huge, urgent need that ran deep below steel and the panic above it like a blind worm that knew nothing about itself but a universe of hunger. She turned to face the man in the bed. Harry’s eyes glinted danger.

He grabbed her shoulders and folded his muscular body around her, already sweating.  This violence was under their control.

He pushed her deeper into the bed, ripping clothes and twisting soaked bed sheets. Harry grappled with her wrists and pinned her ankles, pulling her backwards, daring her spine to snap against the unbending force of his abdomen.  She remained elastic.  He pulled her with one hand clasping her around the collarbone and the other seizing her wrists, releasing her belly as she unfolded as naturally as a thin moth spreading its wings with its back to him. Mila looked down at the pulsing above her pubic bone, coming from within, and seeing this, she yelled. There was no pain or fear, only the release of her yielding to a place she could not take herself.  

They tried to drag one another in through the pores. When it was over, they fell into a long, bottomless sleep without dreams.

The morning greeted them with sun and an unlocked door.  Harry roused Mila. Stretching, she asked him what time it was.

“It’s time to leave. The door to the hallway’s been unlocked. We should go outside and try to find our luck across the bridge again.”

“Okay. I feel good today, babe,” she told him. “We’re going to be all right now, no matter what. Like you said,” she told him.

Harry and Mila left the room hand-in-hand. They walked downstairs, past the vacant concierge desk, and through the door, emerging into light that thundered into their pupils like white horses. A clean wind scattered pieces of paper freely around building corners, dancing without the obstruction of human limbs.  Rivulets of water, muddy from cleaning the silt of sidewalks, trickled into the roadside drains. The city was empty of movement. The human outlines of policemen stood as still as if filled with cement, holding the straight, sparkling lines of their batons in unwavering hands. The clouds moved apart and let the sun strengthen the color of distant red tape netting across the Brooklyn Bridge.