Nowhere to Go

The first sign of trouble was the silence from our aging analog radio. Frida and I woke up most days to a rock ’n roll classic floating out on the air, great songs we had known the lyrics to forty years earlier.

It was the missing music that woke me. Once my eyes were open, our bedroom was suspiciously dark, and when I looked out the window, the traffic lights on the streets below weren’t working. The paltry morning traffic was unsettling for a typical New York workday. It was raining hard. The face of the bedside clock had stopped at 2am, our only sign. 

Frida was buried under the blankets, fast asleep. 

I leaned over and put my mouth against her ear. “Frida, wake up honey” I said softly. She groaned and looked up at me through her messy curtain of hair. 

“What? What is it?”

“The power is out. The internet is down.”

“OK…and?” She was way behind me on this one.

“No, it’s weird. There’s no traffic, no lights. It’s a complete black out. My cell phone isn’t even working. I can’t tell what the time is.” 

Frida sat up and took a few seconds to look around, then threw the covers back and went to the window. She poked at her cell phone, mumbling to herself “what the hell time is it?” Annoyed, and ignoring me, she swept out of the room I assumed to find her computer. I followed, experimenting with the light switches on the walls with no luck.

Her computer told her that it couldn’t connect to the server. Mine said the same thing. I could see Frida was starting to worry. “This isn’t good, Josie,” she said mostly to herself. “I think it’s about 8 o’clock but hard to tell. I need to call work. You should too.”

But the phones weren’t working. We foolishly tried with the remote to turn on the TV, already knowing that without power it wouldn’t work either. “Let’s ask Marilyn if she knows anything” we both said more or less at the same time.

Marilyn was our neighbor in the next apartment. She had always worked from home, long before the pandemic, writing her column for Good Housekeeping. When she wasn’t home, she was traveling overseas to see her ex-pat son and his wife as they moved around Europe and Southeast Asia. When she didn’t answer the door I assumed she was away but then I remembered I’d seen her going into her apartment the night before. 

“She left early this morning,” Harley announced flatly from his open door down the hall. Harley was our super. “She took a suitcase with her," he added.

Frida and I shuffled toward Harley’s dark apartment in our nightclothes. Maybe he had some answers.

“Do you know what’s going on Harley?” I asked. “Any news?”

He looked from Frida to me and back again. Marilyn had told us Harley didn’t approve of Frida and me, the lesbian ladies in 3A, but he’d been friendly enough as far as we could tell.  

“The whole city looks deserted. It can’t just be this rain that’s causing the black out,” Frida said.

“Ladies, I have no idea,” Harley said. “We’ll have to wait and see, won’t we?”

We all stood there in the shadowy hall, waiting for someone to say more. When it was clear we were all at a loss, I took Frida by the hand and went back to our place. I gathered up our boots and raincoats, an umbrella and my dead phone. 

“Come on Frida, let’s get out of here.”

Downstairs in the street, there were a few taxis crawling by without passengers. The rain came down in heavy, lazy drops. After two people hurried by under matching black umbrellas, determined to get somewhere, Frida stopped a moon-faced heavy-set man in a suit and a hooded jacket. His rubber boots squeaked on the concrete. “Can I help?” he said.

“Well, yes, I hope you can” Frida said. “Do you know what’s caused the blackout? We have nothing. Nada. How much longer? Have you seen a newspaper? Are there any newspapers? No Internet, no phones…” she was beginning to whine.

“I hope there are newspapers” he said in an Irish accent. “I’m on my way to the Times Building now. I work there, a copywriter. It’s going to be quite a walk. What is it from here, about 20 blocks? I assume the subways aren’t working. Let’s hope it will be worth it. Otherwise, I’m sorry to say I don’t know a thing.”

Irish Man’s unruffled outlook was reassuring, if only because he was an adult person with something close to a plan. He looked about 10 years younger than us, two jittery older women standing in the street in their galoshes.

Not surprisingly, Frida jumped in. “We’ll walk with you if that’s ok.” 

He nodded and the three of us headed toward 8th Avenue. I checked my dead phone far too often, hoping it had turned itself on in my pocket. The dark sky never changed, the rain didn’t stop. A few fellow humans were scattered around us on the sidewalks, seemingly going somewhere. 

Frida and Irish pointed out to each other the darkened apartment houses and closed up shops, the lack of traffic lights, taxis, Ubers and the like. We were often stopped by people with troubled faces who asked if we’d heard anything. Everyone gripped their worthless phones, waiting for them to wake up and speak. A few people, once they knew we were going to the New York Times, stepped in line and walked with us, adding their own theories about our circumstances: Chinese and/or Russian terrorists (take your pick), Eco-Terrorists had blown up up a hundred power stations, tech companies had been sabotaged by disgruntled ex-employees. And more.

Once our chatty group reached 5th Avenue the rain began to let up. The park was soaking and deserted, and beautiful in an ominous way. Walking south, a teenage boy with a pretty Border Collie fell in with our group and walked next to me for a while. 

“Are you alone?” I asked, sounding like my mom. “Have you eaten anything?”  

“I heard some terrorist group knocked out the whole electrical grid early this morning. All over the country. The Internet too” he said, ignoring my question. “Maybe China.”

“Where did you hear this?” I asked.

“My stepdad. He’s a cop.” 

“And how does he know?” I asked, bemused at how confident my new friend was about wisdom automatically springing from authority figures in uniforms.

“Not sure,” young friend admitted. “He works with the FBI sometimes. Maybe he knows something we don’t know.”

My phone made a small buzzy movement in my pocket. Phones around us lit up and gave out pings and warbles. People audibly sighed with relief. The time on my phone said 10am, February 25, 2019. The wrong year but the right date. I saw Irish staring down into the green light from his phone. He stopped walking and turned to the group like a conductor, his arms raised high. He read aloud in his Irish brogue.

“Hello, people! The news on my phone — it doesn’t say from where, just text on a black screen — says the country is under attack…” Someone gasped. Irish kept reading.

“It says A major cyber attack. Prepare yourselves.The power is out all over the country. The Internet is down. Except now our phones seems to be working, so that…” Before he could finish, the light vanished in his hand. Every phone in every hand did the same. I felt panicky and looked for Frida. And then the kid with the dog. We three were next to each other in seconds.

“Let’s keep walking” someone yelled. Our group, now up to about 20 people, stumbled forward while the rain started up again. Only 10 more blocks to go. Irish was still at the front, his canvas coat soaked through and dripping.

The windows of the Times Building were lit by roaring generators parked on the sidewalk. The florescent lights inside wavered like candles in a drafty room. But when he tried, Irish’s key fob wouldn’t work at the door. He melted into the small circle of Times’ employees who stood around the front entrance. The rest of us formed an outer perimeter to listen in.

An older woman in a thick hoodie sweatshirt stepped away from her colleagues and addressed the crowd. 

“We have very little news I’m sorry to say, other than most of us think this is a planned attack on our country, or maybe the world, by a terrorist group. The Internet seems to have crashed completely. No messages in or out. We can’t reach our offices in D.C. or outside the country, though we’re continuing to try. Since we know the airlines can’t operate now, it’s going to be a challenge to fly anywhere. We’re checking to see if there are any boats leaving for Europe, though that seems unlikely.”

We stood quietly, understanding nothing, while a few men grumbled to each other that this was “bullshit.” There was nowhere to go then, except home to a cold breakfast. Frida and I would offer to take the kid and his dog with us, but he said he would walk back to his father’s condo on the west side. Irish was where he wanted to be, surrounded by smart people on a mission to figure it all out. 

I was grateful to have Frida with me. She told me she felt the same. We were cut off from help, no way to call or write our friends, no spark to heat a meal or listen to the radio. Squadrons of National Guards and the NYPD lined up around the city, then dissipated when no looters or rioters appeared. If Frida and I had a car, we would have escaped to my brother’s house in Connecticut. Maybe things were better there. But we didn’t know. It could be just as bad.

We knew we were lucky to have our unheated apartment. We used every blanket we had to stay warm. The food in our cupboards and the wine ran out after six weeks. The streets were empty, and no place to go.  The front door of the bodega down the block had been jimmied open. Once it was cleaned out of toilet paper and frozen dinners, we took the fresh fruit and vegetables. After those were gone, Harley told us about the canned food in the basement storage room. He couldn’t say who put those provisions there. It didn’t matter was all he said.

Months went by until the Internet was restored, though it was unreliable. For a hour a day, Frida and I searched the news sites for updates until it was obvious we were reading the same thing every time. Washington was apparently trudging through an investigation but there were no updates after that. The President asked for patience from the American people — indeed, the world — while the government did its best to fix the infinite problems around us.

I emailed my brother in Connecticut but he never responded. Snail mail was a thing of the past. So were rental cars. The trains to Connecticut — and everywhere else — had stopped running.

#

We see more military planes overhead these days, though whose military it is we don’t know for sure. No one is saying. Summer is here so we’ve opened our windows for the warm air and sunshine. There are still people here, some gathered in the park in the evenings to share food and a drink. And to talk about what they’ve heard might be coming next. 

All kinds of birds are back, singing for each other every morning and night. We listen to them when the sun comes up since we rarely hear music anymore. Frida has started growing vegetables in the containers we found on Marilyn’s fire escape. We’re vegetarians now.

We didn’t hear anything more about Marilyn after that first day, so we took the canned food from her cupboard too and the nice bottle of Scotch she had hidden behind the box of dishwasher soap. Harley is here too, though he stopped collecting the rent. He says no rush, let’s wait and see what happens.