I said I would, and we chatted for a bit. I was struck by how calm Irena was. The power failure had tweaked a deep chord in me, making me feel as if I"d lost a sense, as if I was blind or deaf without the hum of the machines. Next door, surrounded by Chuck"s gadgets and gizmos and the steady noise of the radio broadcaster, I felt almost normal. With Irena it felt different, colder certainly, but also calmer and more secure.
She was from a different generation. I guessed the machines weren"t a part of them like they were of us.
Thanking her for the tea, I went back to check on Luke. A collection of neighbors had congregated in the hallway. Bundled up in winter jackets and scarves, they looked decidedly less happy than I felt.
"G.o.dd.a.m.n building administration!" growled Richard, looking toward me as I came out of the Borodins". "Someone"s going to lose their job for this. Do you have any heating?"
"No, but Chuck has some heating gadgets, you know how he is-"
"Could I buy one from him?" asked Richard, starting toward me. "My place is b.l.o.o.d.y freezing."
Holding up my hand, I waved him back.
"Sorry, but this bird flu thing, you should stay back. I"ll ask Chuck, but I don"t think so."
Richard frowned but stopped.
I opened the door to Chuck"s, immediately feeling the warmth wash over my face. This morning is getting better and better. Entering, I was about to have a laugh with Chuck over my encounter with Richard, when I found everyone sitting still, staring at the radio.
"What?"
I closed the door behind me.
"Shhhhhh," said Lauren tensely.
"The extent of the crash is still unknown, if it is a derailment or a collision," said the radio.
"What happened?"
Chuck moved around the couch, pushing aside boxes and bags. He was favoring the hand that the door had banged into, holding it up toward his chest. The snow beat urgently against the windowpanes as the wind violently churned the air outside. I couldn"t even see the next building, not twenty feet away.
It was a complete whiteout.
"There"s been a crash," said Chuck quietly. "A train crash. Amtrak. Halfway between New York and Boston early this morning, but they didn"t find it until now. At least, this is the first they announced it."
"- terrible loss of life, at least in the hundreds, if not from the crash itself then from freezing to death in the blizzard-"
12:30 p.m.
"WHY COULDN"T WE have stuck this inside and vented it out?"
Even with the heavy gloves, my hands were numb, and I was getting tired of leaning halfway out a window nearly a hundred feet above the ground. No matter how much I tried to shake it off, the driving snow piled up on my face and neck and melted uncomfortably into the nooks and crannies where clothing met skin.
"We don"t have time to weld and pressure-test any joints," explained Chuck.
Mounting the generator outside their living room window was proving to be harder than we"d thought. It didn"t help that Chuck could barely use one hand. His injured hand had swollen up like an angry purple grapefruit.
Tony had gone to help some residents on the second floor, and Pam had returned to the Red Cross station. We had Lauren and Susie take the kids into the spare bedroom and play with them while we opened the windows. The apartment was freezing cold and awash with melting snow.
"A slow death by carbon monoxide poisoning is peaceful," added Chuck, "but not what I had in mind for Christmas."
"You almost done?" I groaned.
"Just connecting cables."
I could hear him fumbling around and swearing.
"Okay, you can let go."
With a relieved sigh, I released the plywood platform we had the generator sitting on and leaned back into the apartment, swiveling closed my window as I did. Beside me, Chuck gave me a grin, his injured hand resting carefully on the generator. He pulled on the starter chord with his good hand, and the generator stuttered and growled to life.
"Hope the G.o.dd.a.m.n thing doesn"t freeze out there," said Chuck, closing up the window with the generator hanging outside it, but leaving a small gap for the power cords to get in.
The apartment had no balcony, and we didn"t want to risk putting it on the fire escape in case someone got the idea to come up and steal it. So we"d balanced it outside a window on an improvised platform.
"I"m more worried about water getting into it," I mused. "Not sure it"s weather proofed for sitting under a foot of melting snow."
"We"ll see, won"t we?"
Leaning against the window, he gingerly pulled off lengths of duct tape from a roll, handing them to me so I could seal up the gap.
"With enough duct tape, you can fix anything," he laughed.
"Perfect. I"ll give you a thousand rolls and send you down to Con Edison to get the power back on."
We both laughed at that.
The radio was continuing with updates about the train crash, the increasing severity of the storm, and the power failure. All of New England was paralyzed. It was another Frankenstorm-this one a powerful nor"easter colliding with a low-pressure system rising up from the Southeast. They were predicting it would dump three or four feet in the New York area as it sat on the coast. Fifteen million people and counting were without power, and many were without food or heating or any access to emergency services.
The train accident was a ma.s.s of conflicting information. Some eyewitnesses said the military was onsite almost immediately. News outlets didn"t report the accident for several hours, leading to speculation that the military was trying to hide the accident for some reason, and no cause was reported.
As the scale of the storm became clear, and rumors around the train accident spread, the mood in the apartment had shifted from cheerful to quiet anxiety.
Pulling off my hat and scarf, I unzipped the parka Chuck had loaned me and tried to shake off the crust of snow that had wedged down the back of my neck. Chuck walked to the kitchen counter, stepping through boxes and bags, to turn up the kerosene heater, and then began rummaging around for extension cords.
Just then there was a knock on the door.
Pam appeared.
"Back so soon?" I asked. Lauren and Susie heard the knock and came into the main room.
"I had to leave."
She looked around the room as if she was trapped.
"What happened?" asked Lauren.
"Only one doctor and half the nurses showed up today. We did the best we could, but it turned from people worrying about bird flu to people asking for medications, demanding shelter, and then the emergency generator quit."
"My G.o.d," said Lauren, putting one hand to her mouth. "What happened?"
"We tried closing, but it was impossible. People refused to leave. The battery-powered emergency lights came on, but people panicked and starting grabbing anything they could get their hands on. I tried stopping them, but-"
Pam burst into tears, putting her face in her hands and trembling.
"People aren"t prepared because they a.s.sume that somebody else will always fix the problem, and they"re usually right," she said tearfully. "But there"s no help out there."
It was true.
New Yorkers somehow felt invincible, no matter how dependent they were on infrastructure working for survival. In the small town outside Pittsburgh that I"d come from, the power could go out any time from storms, or even a car hitting a pole, but in Manhattan a blackout for any length of time was nearly incomprehensible. Typical emergency shopping lists for New Yorkers included things like wine, microwave popcorn and Haagen-Dazs, and their biggest fear during a disaster was often boredom.
"There"s help in here, Pam," said Chuck rea.s.suringly. "Come on, sit down and have a cup of tea. We"re about to start the show." He held up an extension cord and waggled it in the air.
Lauren and Susie went to Pam, putting their arms around her, talking quietly and going into the kitchen to put some water on with the propane burner. Chuck and I went back to plugging in the extension cords to the generator. We were going to power up some lights and the TV to see what was happening on CNN.
"The gossip in the hallway is that it"s more than just one train crash," whispered Chuck to me. "They"re saying there was a plane crash at JFK, and more all over the country."
"Who said that?" I asked in a hushed voice, sitting on a box. "They didn"t say anything on the radio." I sat silent for a moment. "Don"t say anything to Lauren."
"Did her family get out before the bird flu alert?" asked Chuck. Lauren"s mother and father were supposed to have left for Hawaii the day before.
"We didn"t hear anything," I said quietly, realizing there was no way we could have heard anything.
"I hope GPS isn"t knocked out in this mess," said Chuck. "There"s over half a million people in the air at any time, and without GPS the pilots flying over water would be reduced to dead reckoning."
I plugged in the last of the cables. "Let"s just get CNN on. Should I do the honors?"
Chuck nodded and stood up, handing me the power bar we"d plugged the TV and lights into. He went to sit on the couch and picked up the TV remote with his good hand.
"Everyone!" I announced. "We"re ready to go. Can I get a countdown?"
Lauren came in the room and looked at me. "Just plug it in, Mike. Quit fooling around."
I shrugged. "Okay, here we go."
When I plugged the power bar into the generator, several of the lights we"d set up around the room blinked to life, and the TV clicked on. At the same moment, all the other lights in the house came on, and appliances in the kitchen started beeping.
I looked at the plug in my hand in amazement. "How in the world?"
Chuck motioned behind me. I turned to see lights on in the building across from us, shining faintly through the snow squalls, and then my mind clicked.
"The power came back on?"
Chuck nodded, shrugging, while he worked the controls on the remote. The girls had made some tea, and they brought a pot over to the coffee table while we all crowded onto the couch. The TV screen glowed as Chuck found the right channel.
I steeled myself for the worst, expecting to see burning aircraft wreckage in a snowy landscape. The image flickered, blocky and pixilated, going blank and then returning before finally stabilizing.
A fuzzy field of green appeared, unsteady as if being filmed from a helicopter, and then what looked like a field of wrecked houses. Destroyed houses. The image panned back to reveal a scene of devastation in a green valley, with the sloping, rocky sides of a canyon rising up into mountaintops in the distance.
"What, is that like Montana or something?" I asked, trying to make sense of what we were seeing. The text below the image was headlined with something about China. "Did the Chinese do this?"
"No," replied Chuck, "that is China."
The image flickered in and out again. We were getting sound in staccato bursts. I read the text below the image: Dam failure in the Chinese Shanxi province destroys town, hundreds feared dead.
The sound suddenly became clear.
"-warning US forces to back down. Both sides are denying any responsibility. An emergency meeting of the UN Security Council has been convened, but China is refusing to attend while the US has invoked Article Five of the NATO common defense treaty."
"Are they declaring war?" said Chuck. He got up, walked over to the TV, and banged on the cable box. The blocky image stabilized.
"This is Professor Grant Latham from Annapolis, an expert in information warfare," announced the CNN anchor. "What can you tell us about what is happening, Professor?"
"This is textbook cyber-escalation," said Professor Latham, looking at the camera. "Power outages across China have been reported, and this dam accident appears to be one of several critical infrastructure failures, but we have no idea of the scope."
"Cyber-escalation?" asked the anchor.
"An all-out attack on computer systems and networks."
The anchor considered this for a moment. "Do you have any recommendations for how people could be preparing themselves, anything they could do?"
Professor Latham took a deep breath and closed his eyes before opening them and looking straight into the camera.
"Pray."
7:20 p.m.
"HIS FEVER HAS definitely broken," said Pam, looking at the readout from the baby thermometer.
She showed it to me-101. I nodded and she pa.s.sed it to Lauren, who smiled and leaned down into the crib to coo at Luke. His face was still mottled red, but he was fidgeting and crying less.
"And that is definitely broken," added Pam, looking at Chuck"s swollen left hand.
Chuck grimaced but smiled. "Not much we can do about it right now."
"I can wrap it up," suggested Pam.
"Maybe later. It"s not so bad."
We"d invited Pam and Rory, along with Chuck and Susie, over to our place for dinner. With the power back on, the mood was more secure but still nervous, and the snowstorm was getting worse. Nearly two feet of snow had fallen already in the last twenty-four hours, with another storm coming close on its heels.
The storm outside, though, was taking second stage to the increasingly surreal drama playing out on the news networks.
Images of the destroyed village in China, and the storming of the US emba.s.sy in Taiyuan, had been replaced by images of burning American flags in Tehran. A video denigrating Mohammed had appeared on an Iranian web service and had quickly spread, sparking rioting in Pakistan and Bangladesh.
It seemed the world had turned against us.
The source of the video was unknown, and the Iranians were claiming it was the US government. Images played on TV of the Iranian president claiming that the East Coast storms, power failures, and bird flu outbreaks were the divine hand of G.o.d, striking down evil America.