The 87th Floor

    I’ve been in New York city for six years and in that time so much has changed. After spending nine years in LA with Sandra, my ex-wife, we escaped the West Coast. We bought a lavish penthouse in the heart of Manhattan with views that cost us multiple millions. We hired an assistant named Claire who moved into one of the bedrooms and handled the day to day cleaning, ran errands, managed our bills, did our shopping. I still remember meeting her for the first time and wondered how in the hell such a beautiful woman would coexist in this home with us without me fucking her. Sandra seemed distracted with work and Claire and I carried on an affair in secret. When Sandra was home on a business call in the office or when she was down at the pool, Claire and I would make love or sit and talk like we were a couple. It became clear very quickly that my love for Sandra had been redirected at Claire. And to think that we had talked about having children before moving to New York. 

    Sandra’s face was pure shock when she came home early from a business trip. She was holding the mail and must have been there for several seconds before I noticed. My cock was still inside of Claire on the sofa. And while at first Sandra tried to make a big deal that I had been fucking Claire, it was soon revealed that she had been sleeping with her boss. It was a rather quick divroce. 

    Claire was passionate about art. She would often catch me watching her from the doorway in the studio we created out of one of the spare bedrooms. She painted landscapes and portraits. I was her model more than once. How marvelous she was at everything. Its a shame she had to die so young. 

    I remember first reading about a spreading virus that originated somewhere in Europe. It was hitting all the places I had been on vacation in my previous life with Sandra. It was hard to imagine all those wonderful places that had once been so lively now filled with death. Eventually it would hit New York and spread across the nation killing millions. When Claire developed symptoms she fell to the illness quickly and when she died I wanted to die too. I would eventually find out that I had it too but didn’t develop any symptoms. It was like a sick joke. 

I’ve gotten used to the way the city looks now. The buildings towering like trees made of concrete and glass. Central park is a green symbol of culture and progress. What economy is left is deeply wounded and day by day like a starving animal it crawls across the landscape searching for sustenance. But all it finds is shuttered businesses and empty streets. The living are dead things that blink and moan from inside of their homes waiting for something new to happen. But nothing ever does. Life just goes on and people are always dying. They have always been dying, but now they die so often it's just rolling digits like numbers on a stopwatch. 

After Claire died I didn’t sleep. I still don’t sleep. I get by. I work for a very successful firm that despite the chaos is “killing it” in the global marketplace. But it doesn't really mean anything to me anymore. But every morning my alarm goes off to remind me that it matters to someone. The glow of the laptop illuminates my tired face and my fingers type away like nothing was amiss. 

    It's three in the afternoon on a Thursday when the power shuts off. The sudden quiet causes me to rise to my feet and I look out across Manhattan to see if anything else has changed. Ten seconds later the power clicks back on and it must be the building’s generators because I can see that the street lights are out. From this high up it feels like nothing bad could happen. The world is sort of distorted in its reality. If you choose not to look too closely everything seems normal. It's when my eyes begin to pry that I notice the streets are empty. A few cars drive up the long avenues unencumbered by traffic of any kind. The only thing in the skies are migrating birds. 

    I receive emails from others on my team that they’ve lost power. Many of them are spread out across New York. Someone an hour later notifies us that the problem may be a part of a larger issue. A terrorist attack on the grid. I recieve an email from someone from the executive team:

    Scott.. Grid is down. Maybe this is when it finally happens... The last few hours of sanity.  

 I shut the laptop and wonder what I have left to drink. I have been good at keeping the stress away with rigorous workouts in my gym, supplemented by yoga and meditation. But sometimes a strong drink works just as well. 

    Whiskey coke, an old habit from my London days. I turn on the TV, a huge 80” flat screen that envelops me. A woman news anchor, middle aged and attractive confirms the attack on the power grid. The source seems to be an anti establishment group that has been growing in power over the last several months. I turn the TV off. 

    Back at my computer I have an email from the building manager informing me of the power outage. The generators have been activated and if there are any disruptions to the generator I’ll be notified. Impulsively I walk to the elevator in the center of the penthouse and push the button. The doors open revealing the white marble interior and nothing more. I step inside but as the doors begin to close I stop them and cross the threshold back into the penthouse. 

I spend the next several hours getting drunk. When I wake up I”m laying on the living room floor and the lights are off and it's so dark I can’t see anything. When I finally make it to a window I see nothing but stars and the eerie figures of skyscrapers standing silent in a forest of black. Stars, I can see stars like i’ve never seen before. When I enter my bedroom to look for a flashlight I notice what looks like fire. And it is. Fire all over the streets, buildings burning. I watch it for a long time and can barely make out small figures in the dark on the street. There's hundreds of them like tiny insects devouring the city. 

The elevator doesn’t work and so I take the stairs. I forget to grab the flashlight and so use the one on my phone to light the way. I suddenly feel claustrophobic and need to get out. It's twenty five minutes later that I emerge into the lobby and there is a man standing at the concierge desk with a flashlight. He hits me with the beam and I cover my eyes. 

“What are you doing out here?” he asks. 

“Where is everyone?” 

“Who?” 

“Anyone?” 

“What do you mean?” 

“I mean where is everyone?” 

“No one lives here anymore. You’re the only tenant.” 

At that moment I hear a loud crash and someone has thrown a brick at one of the windows but the brick just bounces off. 

“I don’t think they can get through that glass. It's bulletproof,” the concierge says. 

I watch as a mob assembles outside with torches and rocks. They are battering at the glass and pulling at the locked door. The concierge looks terrified, he shines the light into the masked faces. 

I don’t say anything and slowly back up to the stairwell and begin the ascent to my penthouse. In the stairwell it's so dark and complete that no matter what direction I look it all looks the same. I’m swimming in a black pool of my own reality. It's only when the glow of my phone again lights the way that I can see where I'm going. I feel like a deep sea diver in a cave, a tether around my waist so that I can find my way back to the surface, or so that those up top can pull my corpse up after I've lost consciousness. After a few levels my phone dies and I realize I didn’t charge it. 

I go swimming in the great abyss. The cement cave where I can’t see anything and the imaginary tether isn’t actually there. And I know that I’ll eventually starve or be pulled to pieces by a mob.