We'll Have Manhattan

We¹ll Have Manhattan

August 24^th, 2014

Orientation crawls on forever. Let us out of Jersey, let us go home. There are endless forms they want us to sign, electronic and hard copy. Yes, we understand the risks, it¹s all been fully explained. No, we will not hold the Federal Government or the State of New York liable for whatever happens. Covering their asses, that¹s all this little summer camp is about.

Meanwhile, I¹m trying to make some friends, forge some alliances; 612 of us have been here since last week, and twenty more joined us yesterday. A lively assortment of Terminals, Chronics and Rocky Drugsters. We don¹t get enough time to hang out and socialize among ourselves, with all the seminars, safety films and VR sessions, and hands-on how-to classes with our medical palm pilots. (I¹ve already named mine Spot. Maybe if I think of it as some kind of symbiotic pet, I won¹t mind being monitored so closely.) But I¹d say there are seven women and fifteen men I¹m on a joking, easy, first-name basis with here, aside from Leonard. And that¹s good. ŒCause all we¹re gonna have is each other, once we hit the Baked Apple.

Leonard and I are rooming together, and we turn some heads, but not like we would have back in Des Moines. Hell, Leonard could¹ve turned heads there just by Walking or Driving While Black. Now, we¹re close enough to home, to what used to be the City, that it¹s not such a big deal, us a couple. He¹s a dramatic-looking guy, though: tall, solid as a fridge, dark and bald. With a rich, rolling, Jamaican accent and an easy, courtly manner that prison has not dented. So, maybe some of the double-takes we get are just because I¹ve got myself such a fine-looking man.

They want us to introduce ourselves and our situations in these diaries, so briefly. Leonard¹s the reason I¹m doing this. Holed up in Des Moines as I¹ve been for most of my exile, I caught sight of an ad he placed in the main on-line journal for people like us, the NYC Diaspora. His item said that he was interested in the re-settlement process, was filing the papers there in Sing Sing and wanted to hear from others who were considering it.

I poured out my heart in my letter to him one of those over-the-top emails to a stranger you write when you¹re lonely and you¹ve hit bottom. I told him about the MS. How I wasn¹t sure if I¹d be classified as a Terminal, and they were still debating whether to let Chronics come. How I¹d tentatively looked into participating in the experiment, and my court-appointed ³counselor² kept telling me it was tantamount to threatening suicide, and ³flagging² my distress, and I didn¹t see any way he¹d certify me as sane and rational enough to go, no matter what I said.

Leonard earned a BA during his twelve years in prison, plus a law degree. He walked me through the legal ins and outs of handling the shrink and the paperwork. Lots of emails and IM talks and picturephone talks . . . and then months of VR sex, and then I was able to go see him for real, and spend weekends with him. It¹s funny, Œcause there were years back when I was healthy when I was light years away from finding a good guy.

The socialization sessions this afternoon were not ³coed,² the men had the big hall since they greatly outnumber us, and me and Carla, a zoologist who may be exaggerating the severity of her heart condition in order to get a look at whatever is going on in the Park, and Latasha, a woman who¹s been locked up for decades under, you guessed it, the Rockefeller drug laws, played hooky from our session. We hung out in a back room of the building, gossiping about the scientists in charge, and smoking. I don¹t smoke, but I figured I ought to, as part of our private little ³socialization² activity. It felt nice and naughty in a junior high way.

Three more days of this. And then we¹re City-bound at last.

August 28^th, 2003

We¹re staying at the Plaza! Another life-long dream come true.

The frogmen (what we call the guys turning on the power in the designated buildings, Œcause you should see them in their rubber suits and gas masks) were still galumphing through the lobby as Leonard and I ³checked in.² We¹re taking ourselves up and down in the elevators, and we¹ve got a room on the tenth floor with a beautiful view of the Park. I love the moldings and draperies and the old-fashioned-hotel stuffiness of the place, which I only know from reading Eloise as a kid. The view is cool, though the empty street is kind of creepy, especially as it grows dark. The Park is largely defoliated, but some trees have hung on. The pond has dried up. I rang for room service but, surprise surprise, nobody answered.

I can¹t quite believe I¹m here. We came by ferry, a series of ferries, because the dirty bomb above Columbia made coming down via the GW Bridge a bad idea for however many decades. But the view of the Palisades as we rode over, and of the Manhattan skyline, was just spectacular. Water was churning beneath the ferry, and Leonard and I kept hugging each other, and I was jumping up and down like a kid. We had to walk all the way from the makeshift dock on the West Side to Central Park South; these are the first buildings where the frogmen have switched on power for us. And they¹ve got the water running in the bathrooms, though they want us only to drink the bottled water they ship in.

They¹re going to ³turn on² a number of buildings on the East and West Side of the Park; they¹ve painted huge, ugly day-glo orange marks on the ones they have powered up. I¹m outraged. Have the beautiful buildings in this part of the City been preserved for a decade only to be defaced now? Why not just hang flags on those buildings? But the soulless twerps running the experiment did not consult me about their MO.

I don¹t want to stay forever on Central Park South. The abandoned carriages and horse skeletons, which I try not to see when I look out the window, are depressing. Leonard and I are gonna check out Central Park West tomorrow. We¹ll find a nice, homey apartment. Anything we find, we can keep: clothes, jewelry, furniture, gadgets, an apartment we like. We¹re beyond the laws of the healthy, normal people now, in Real America the people who never believed in Manhattan anyway.

The frogmen deliver us nasty food in plastic envelopes, like something astronauts would have to eat. Devora, a big woman who has Sickle Cell, and a guy named Danny whose body is no longer responding to his drugs for HIV, are really good cooks, so they say, and they teamed up back at orientation (maybe before?) They¹re in the Plaza also (I keep my cell phone as close to me as Spot, and it knows all my friends¹ numbers) and they¹re looking into getting real, fresh food delivered, which they¹ll prepare and serve in the dining room. I¹m not a bad cook; maybe I¹ll try to lend a hand . . .

September 1^st, 2014

According to Spot, my condition is not worsening. My left leg is a little numb, but that¹s par for the course with me. I¹m having some hypochondriacal symptoms in my own mind but those have been with me for years, from before the MS was diagnosed. This bastard disease took my mother and sister, and watching them die from it made me jumpy. But it¹s not gonna get in the way of my enjoying every minute of being home.

Danny¹s medpilot says his T cell count is dropping. But is that radiation or just a coincidence, since his condition has been deteriorating anyhow? A shortage of T cells is not exactly a problem for me . . . The people the scientists will learn the most from are Rocky drugsters like Leonard and Latasha; us sickos have too many things going on already to generate meaningful data. Leonard says he feels great. He¹s just so damned tickled to be out of jail, he acted like that dreary orientation week was a trip to the amusement park.

We¹re in a penthouse apartment on West 63^rd at the moment. Maybe we¹ll make our way slowly uptown, as the weeks go by. These people had such ridiculously luxurious tastes, and everything is marble and Grecian, and I find it all kind of cold and depressing reminds me of the honeymoon of my doomed early marriage, when we visited Pompeii.

But with this penthouse, you can walk all around on the outdoor roof garden patio thing, with the empty planters, and we can see some of the devastation way uptown, and down in the Times Square area. Just charred blackness and buildings fallen in I don¹t like to look for long. The Chrysler Building has lost a lot of its luster, though not all; it¹s blackened like old, old silver. And the Empire State Building is still there, and it¹s a mind-bending trip for me to look across the rooftops at it; I go up to the rail and peer at it for hours. On the other side I have a great view of Lincoln Center, which I wish the frogmen would light at night, (maybe turn on the fountain? Make it festive!) and some nice tall buildings still standing at Columbus Circle. And of course, we¹ve got a great view of the Park.

We ventured into the Park for the first time yesterday with Carla. She headed there first thing, first day practically lives there. She says insects have mostly vanished, (and with them the spiders) but she has found several ant colonies that are doing well.

The squirrels all seem to be gone, just a few skeletons on the ground. We saw some large, light brown animals we thought might be bunnies in the tall, uncut bushes and grass, and got excited. But Carla tells us that they¹re all just rats, grown large and bold. Brrrrr. There are some migrating birds in the trees; a short spell here apparently doesn¹t doom them all. But where are the pigeons in the streets, and the roaches in the buildings? Along with the rats, those were the creatures that everybody thought would survive.

We made a sad trip over to the Central Park Zoo. The tanks had dried up, but through the crusting on the glass you could see polar bear skeletons inside, and seal skeletons in their open pool. Upsetting. We didn¹t go into the bird house or anything like that. We were startled, suddenly, when the clock struck. Went running over like children, to watch the animals spin around on the Delacorte Clock. I found myself crying and laughing, as the tinkly music box music played, and Leonard, who moved from Jamaica, West Indies to Jamaica, Queens twenty years ago and had never seen it before, put his arm around me. The hippo playing the violin has always been my favorite.

September 5^th, 2014

Leonard and I have moved again. We¹re in a homier, more modest place on West 72^nd. Not the penthouse, but the view of the Park from the ninth floor is still nice. Jimmying the lock took a long time, but Leonard is good with tools, and he has the lock closing securely once again.

I¹d never be a woman alone here. They gave us some self-defense classes during orientation, but they were kind of a joke, and yeah, I¹ve got a gun in my purse, and there¹s a ³black box² inside of Spot to record what happens to me if I press an alarm but the threat of getting caught is not much of a deterrent for someone here who wants to lash out. We¹re not people who have much to lose, and if one of us turned violent and then wanted to get lost in the city how hard would the frogmen try to pursue him? The women who came here alone or in couples strike me as really brave; I admire them, but I¹m not sure I could have done it.

In theory, we¹ve all been screened and we¹re all beautiful human beings who think like a community now. I actually think that¹s true of the majority of us, and plenty of the Rocky drugsters are as gentle and nice as Leonard and Latasha and Chris and Brian and Nelson. But there¹s something a little depressing and unsettling about all these empty buildings, the empty hive of the City, I have to admit it and the dark, tangled wilderness of the Park now. The whole place has a Lord of the Flies feel to it for me, whenever I¹m walking outside without Leonard, even for a moment.

The people who lived here in 9-A had three little girls. Two of them shared bunk beds, I get the feeling they were a two years apart in age, seven and five judging by the photos, and the parents actually gave them the biggest room. The baby¹s crib is in the parents¹ room. I¹m not sure what they were planning to do when she was bigger move her in with Tara and Claire, or section off part of the living room into a new room, or what? Claire has a lot of drawings in her desk, with her name scrawled in the lower corner. I hope they made it out okay, all of them, but the odds are pretty bad for the baby making it I just mean statistically.

It¹s a little bit creepy poking through other people¹s lives and homes this way: all the dusty, once-hip appliances and trendy books and toys from the Œ90s and Double Zeros (these girls appear to have been heavily into Elmo, the little Muppet from Sesame Street) but I just keep telling myself that nobody wants this stuff back, it¹s tainted goods, we¹re tainted goods, we¹re performing a great experiment for Mankind and Our Country, and it¹s okay if we¹re nosy voyeurs and have fun while we do it.

The daddy¹s name was Steve Graham, and I¹m noodling around with his blueberry colored iMac. It is so fucking quaint, and I used to have one like this in green, back in the day. Obviously, with equipment this old, we can¹t access a lot of what¹s on-line now. But the frogmen aren¹t gonna be bringing us new computers any time soon, and the NYC Diaspora and some other sites are creating special dumbed-down text versions we can access with this old equipment, out of solidarity with us brave guinea pigs here. It¹s a nice gesture, though I don¹t feel a need to read the Diaspora now that I¹m back . . . some of us are writing for them, of course, and negotiating book deals. It¹s good the ex-prisoners can line up a future, in case they want to split in a year or so, with their sentences commuted . . . for us sickos, I don¹t think it matters. Our participants¹ fees and the fees for these diaries should be more than we need. But then some people do have families to send money to.

I¹ve gone over this place with a Dustbuster (remember them?) and it feels less like we¹re living in a museum now. The dust may be radiation-heavy; I was glad to see it go.

We¹re gonna walk downtown and have dinner at the Plaza again tonight. Or maybe take a quikcart the little go-cart things the frogmen have set out for us to get around in. Danny and Devora and Yves and Raul definitely do not need help from the likes of me, when it comes to preparing food. They¹ve had training as professional chefs. We promise them ³credits² for food that seems to be the barter system that¹s shaping up. They prepare fabulous meals, and we promise part of our future participants¹ fees for them or their families in two years¹ time. They keep track of who owes what on a palmpad. I guess it beats shells or beads.

Last night we had coq au vin. I bet this is the best food the Plaza has ever served. They¹re training people to serve up spicier stuff at Harry Cipriani¹s at the Sherry-Netherland across the way, but I¹m not up for it.

September 6, 2014

This has been a really fun day!

At dinner last night, a lot of people were talking about the stores, especially on Fifth Avenue, and how the frogmen and the scientists can¹t be bothered about them. Turns out some of these folks are engineers and architecture buffs (that¹s partly why they¹re here) and they know how to power up the buildings¹ emergency generators. So, we gathered at the Plaza at nine this morning, and we started with FAO Schwartz. They didn¹t have the escalators running, but the lights were on, and we played and played, and practically trashed the place. Boy, some of those stuffed animals are huge, and when you bang the dust off of them, very appealing. A lot of the electronic and battery-operated trains and proto-robotic toys still work. There were nearly a hundred of us clambering through the store. Leonard helped himself to five different kinds of Lego he¹s in Tara and Claire¹s room now, building a battleship.

I wandered into a sort of a shrine to Barbie and just stood there, transfixed. What the hell is it about Barbie? They had her in old movie costumes, and wearing those Double Zero fashions, like low-rider jeans and retro-1970s stuff. They had her dressed for every profession, and with various buddies and there were dolls of Britney Spears when she was younger. I walked out with an armload of Barbies of the world, and a Marie Antoinette and a Cleopatra Barbie, and a Dorothy and a Scarlet O¹Hara, and a few generics . . . now what do I do with them? The normal ones are the most fun; I¹ve been dressing them up in various outfits. Leonard says we¹re permanent blackout looters now, and I guess that¹s so.

Anyhow, we all met again, in our quikcarts, on Fifth Avenue in the afternoon, and started to do some hard-core exploring. We went to Tiffany¹s. You¹d be surprised how much stuff was left there, though it can¹t be that tainted and dangerous. Can it? Leonard was nervous about touching it he can¹t shake the feeling they¹re gonna take back what they said about us being free to touch everything, take anything. He does not want to go back to jail! But most of us were less restrained, and a lot of glass cases got bashed open. If people can figure out how to sell this stuff outside (a no-no) there are gonna be some very rich spouses and grandchildren out there. I settled for some emerald and diamond earrings, a silver and onyx salamander broach, and a beautiful Fabergé egg with a set of tiny Russian dolls, fitting into each other, inside. I have simple tastes.

Tomorrow we¹re gonna do Saks and Bloomies. Well, we¹re pioneers after all, we¹re explorers, and it¹s high time we started pushing back the edges of the frontier!

September 7, 2014

I didn¹t spend much time in Saks. I took some lingerie, a beaded gown, and some scarves. It was winter when the dbombs hit, and that¹s the kind of clothes they were showing, and the weather is still mild now; these clothes feel wrong.

And I¹m not feeling so hot. Spot is recording some ominous readings, though the scientists are probably making better sense of them than I am. Numbness in my left leg is making me walk funny, and my right hand is doing its claw/spastic routine and God, how I hate that. I haven¹t had it since I went into remission, and I surely did not miss it. Leonard is great, but I don¹t want to eat with the others, don¹t want to be seen. I gave Bloomie¹s a miss altogether.

Plus, I feel nauseous. And that¹s not the MS; that may be a reaction to whatever vestigial radiation. I haven¹t compared notes with the others. I wonder if I¹m the only one? What will they do if the experiment is a success, if those who came here healthy like Leonard do okay, or reasonably okay? Will they let the people who lost everything come back in? Will some people have to give back their refugee compensation from ten years ago, if their stuff is still intact? (Mine isn¹t, probably. My co-op was too near the Times Square dbomb; they¹ve forbidden me to go back and take a look.) Will they let poor people from across the country have the best housing in Manhattan mega cheap, or ship a lot of homeless people here, or what?

I spent some time this afternoon hanging out with Lillian. She¹s a woman in her sixties, and she¹s staying in our building. She had an apartment at 92^nd and Broadway, inherited from her grandmother, and she¹s impatient to get into it, but they won¹t turn on the power in that building, she can¹t figure out how to get the elevator working on her own . . . She¹s thinking of bailing out of Manhattan.

She had an upsetting experience in a building on CPW and 85^th a few days ago. She went to claim an apartment and found human remains. Some elderly person who disobeyed the evacuation order, apparently, or couldn¹t bear to leave her cats (skeletons everywhere) or felt too weak to go. She¹s still upset by that; Leonard had to go all through her apartment across the hall from us before she would enter it. I¹m trying not to think like her, trying not to let the car shells on the streets and the quiet, and the darkness at night, and the animal skeletons and all of it get to me. I¹m home, and that¹s what¹s important. I¹d rather be here than in Des Moines.

But Lillian showed me a New York Times she found in that old lady¹s apartment, from the day of the dbombs. Cautious headlines and reckless statements from the swaggering, dimbulb politicos who took control during the Double Zero years: as destructive and intolerant and pious in their own way as the fundamentalist loonies were abroad and meanwhile, articles about snow sculptures in the Park, and a review for a new show for kids opening at Rockefeller Center . . . Creepy.

But I hope she doesn¹t decide to leave. I can¹t leave. I¹ve committed to this, me and Leonard. He¹s not going back to prison, and I¹m not going back to Des Moines. I wasn¹t even here on dBomb Day; I was visiting a college friend upstate. We saw it happen on CNN. The pandemonium after the first one hit; and then we could hear the explosions and screams in the background, during the broadcast, as the other two went off . . . I had left my husband three years earlier, because his idea of heaven was a house in Glen Cove, Long Island: beautiful, but it seemed a lot of our neighbors were rich and rude and empty-headed, doing the suburban thing and consuming designer drugs daily that poor Rocky drugsters like Leonard have never even heard of . . . not for me. The lawns were just too well-manicured. I needed people walking around at night.

I needed the grit and bustle of the City, the way cockroaches and pigeons and rats needed it, and he had no time for my needs, so I took off, and sank all my savings into a co-op just above Murray Hill, and I was seeing a guy named Mike who taught film history at the New School, and I was temping and going back to school and actually feeling pretty good about my life and then, suddenly nothing. I don¹t know where Mike was that day, but he was not teaching and he did not make it out alive. My dog Betty, a neighbor was watching her gone. The neighbor gone. All my friends, my only cousin and her kids, everything I own, everything that mattered to me, my City gone.

I went where they sent me. Des Moines was what I hit in the refugee re-settlement lottery. So I went, because nothing mattered, and then when the MS started I needed to be where they told me in order to get funds to see a doctor. I don¹t talk with an Iowa accent, but I can if I want to, if I want to blend in and not be known at once for the refugee I am. If they don¹t know you¹re from New York, you get to hear what they really think. What they felt at first, the rest of the country, was great pity and then a quiet sense that we had had it coming, Œcause we were Sodom and Gomorrah, and that¹s what the Bible says. And why did we tempt fate and continue to live there after 9/11/01?

In recent years, they¹ve gotten more flip about the whole thing.

Q: How do you make New York style pizza?

A: Pour the tomato sauce and cheese on the dough, and leave it outside.

Or, here¹s another one:

Q: How many New Yorkers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: None. New Yorkers don¹t need lightbulbs; they glow in the dark.

That¹s about the level of the humor you¹ll hear if you hang out in a Midwestern bar these days. And if you do let people know you¹re from NYC, out in Real America, they try to be kind and sympathetic, but they draw away from you, like maybe they¹ll get radiation sickness just from standing near you.

So, I withdrew into myself, I could barely bring myself to temp, I sure couldn¹t date or ³make new friends,² I had the survivor guilt going on, and some darkness and bitterness that did not even hit me when I lost Mom or my sister Alice. I was damned if I saw the point to any of it, and when the MS showed up, it gave me an excuse to feel that way.

If I get sicker, then so be it. But I¹m not going back out there. I¹m staying right here inside the Baked Apple, where I belong.

September 8, 2014

I slept a long time and woke up feeling stronger. First thing I did was call Miles, one of the guys who powered up Saks and the other stores, and got him to come over to turn on the power in Lillian¹s building, so she can go home for real. She¹s very excited, and maybe she¹ll stay now. I¹ll miss her on the hall, but I¹m hopeful that this will keep her from bailing out of the experiment.

I went to Bloomie¹s, and took some silk blouses and cashmere sweaters not that I need them with the weather the way it is now, but I¹ve always loved cashmere and a couple of Liz Claiborne skirts, and a Prada bag. I remember them.

I didn¹t feel up to going downtown on the expedition to the Village. But my hand was behaving itself, I wasn¹t self-conscious, and we had dinner with everybody at the Plaza tonight. Other people¹s medpilots are recording symptoms, and it turns out Leonard is nauseous too. And like me, he¹s not gonna budge. We spent the evening at the Museum of Natural History. It¹s such a weird shrine to Teddy Roosevelt, the whole museum is a museum piece, I¹m very fond of it. I enjoy the old dioramas and the stuffed animals. I kind of felt like I was inside a museum inside a museum (the City) and fought the feeling. But the Planetarium was glorious.

The people who went to the Village took their quikcarts all the way over on the East Side Highway, so as not to pass through mid-town. They say the old UN building looked beautiful, better than that new, tall, needly thing in Geneva. I believe it. The scientists told them they weren¹t allowed to go below Houston Street, but they said some of the trees in Washington Square Park are still alive, and it looked pretty, and recognizable. They brought back Village knick-knacks as trophies: rude slogan T-shirts and boots and spiky collars.

Two people swear they saw humans watching them, and then disappearing down Thompson Street and onto Houston. Dark, shaggy men, very dirty (well, what the hell could they have been doing for fresh water, all this time?) The idea that anyone stayed, avoided the evacuation, and survived all this time is pretty amazing. Terrifying and thrilling, both. But these guys spoke like they¹d had a sighting of wild animals, and wouldn¹t want to get any closer. I don¹t think they were making it up.

And a couple of people I don¹t like, who were making fun of the rest of us as cowards for not venturing downtown, got chased by wild dogs that were foaming at the mouth and covered with sores. Good.

There¹s a dance at the Plaza tomorrow night. We¹ve all got ball gowns and tuxes and Cartier watches to show off now. But I don¹t know if I¹m going to be up for it.

September 11, 2014

I¹ve been too low to write the last few days. Freaked out and furious over Carla¹s murder. After they found her body in the Park, the dance was canceled. Lillian came and found me and said she was leaving. The frogmen won¹t turn the water back on in her building, and Miles can¹t help with that, so she can¹t live there. She¹s upset about Carla, and she¹s taking some personal possessions with her that only mildly perturb the geiger counter, and she¹s gonna go live with her son and his unpleasant wife in Detroit, until the cancer in her bones takes her.

The rest of the world will hear about Carla and think: well, that¹s what New Yorkers are like. Of course there¹s crime, murder, since there are people living there again. And that¹s not what we¹re like! Most of the people I know here. We do stay in touch, we are forming a community. But maybe some crazy, somewhere among us, did this? Or could there really be Wild Men in the Park, like the ones people saw in Greenwich Village? Are we glancing at each other uneasily for nothing?

She wasn¹t raped, no one took anything from her, she was simply clubbed, from behind, so fast she couldn¹t even activate the alarm and black box in her medpilot. So, we¹ll probably never know what happened.

I¹m having dizziness, and I don¹t even know if it¹s from radiation or my MS getting worse. There¹s a ceremony going on over at St. Patrick¹s Cathedral, Miles and his geek buddies powered it up, to commemorate what happened on this day thirteen years ago. The Wall Street dbomb was the messiest, and so of course no one¹s trying to head to the old Ground Zero. All over the country they¹re observing today as a holiday, and wearing their little flags, like they do on dBomb Day, and saying how Everything Changed and they¹ll Never Forget. But it¹s just a nervous tic for them, a superstition like not stepping on the cracks. They¹ve forgotten already.

I¹ve been looking at crayon drawings in Claire¹s desk. Her parents and sisters. Her teacher, Mrs. Marinetti. A class trip to the Planetarium. That upset me because we just went, and the red glowing spot on Spot is looking to me like the angry red spot on Jupiter, and as always I wonder if my thoughts are growing jumbled due to MS and will I have memory loss, or is it radiation, or am I just cracking up . . . I talked to Leonard, and we¹re gonna get out of here.

September 15^th, 2014

We¹re on the East Side now, in a penthouse at East 89^th. There¹s a lovely view of the Park, and the water in the reservoir looks pretty.

This place doesn¹t have the cold, stony feel of the first penthouse but it doesn¹t oppress us as much with the sense of lives interrupted as living in the Grahams¹ place did. It seems to have belonged to a free-wheeling yuppie couple, no kids. Leonard is having a lot of fun with the CD collection turning himself and me on to lots of indie rock from the dbomb era, as well as showtunes and jazz we don¹t know enough about.

Leonard found a huge baggy of pot, plus rolling papers in the guy¹s desk drawer. That¹s why Leonard was convicted originally: he came over from the Island with a few connections and a recreational interest in ganja. He¹d get some for friends sometimes, and sometimes score people some coke and they sentenced him to thirty years for being a drug dealer. He was on Riker¹s Island when the riots happened, and they slapped another five years on his sentence, and shipped him up to Sing Sing. Well, at least it got him away from the dbomb downwind, which is all the rioters wanted and he says he kept some wilder guys from acting out; he himself did not hurt anyone.

You¹d think they¹d commute the sentences of Rocky drugsters, now that the laws have been repealed. But then, I guess, they wouldn¹t have as many potential recruits for this experiment . . .

Anyhow, Leonard keeps complaining about how stale this marijuana is, but it¹s a decade old, what do you want, and he¹s right it does help us with the nausea. We haven¹t been dining at the Plaza or the Sherry-Netherland much; this place has an electric stove, and a spice rack, and I¹ve stocked up the fridge with the frogmen¹s food baggies, and some fresh ingredients which we¹ve gotten them to distribute (to us, not just the hotel dining rooms!) and I¹ve been preparing food less conducive to queasiness, so that helps also.

My hand is acting up, and I shouldn¹t be self-conscious, but I am. But we¹ve decided we¹re going to the weekend dance, no matter what. We¹ve got some pretty fabulous stuff to wear. Our big outing yesterday was a trip to the Met. The frogmen have been overheard discussing removing some of the art. They had better not try. This is our City now, and that art belongs to us. There¹s a volunteer watchgroup forming, among the bigger guys, to keep any of us from walking off with Van Goghs and Monets and such. (Would someone really be stupid enough to try to sell them on the Black Market?) Maybe they can keep the scientists¹ frogmen out as well.

Tonight was lovely, just staying in, with Leonard playing a CD of Ella Fitzgerald singing Rodgers and Hart. We tried on our finery, (I¹ve got a blue gown of watered silk, and he looks pretty sharp in his tux) and we danced on the penthouse balcony. People turn on lots of lights at night now, along the Park. Not just in the apartments they¹re staying in; it¹s more cheerful to see lights all over. They were reflected in the water of the reservoir, and so was the moon. There¹s the faintest breeze now, but it still doesn¹t feel like autumn. Ella¹s voice was silken, and I just lost myself in the loveliness of where we are living. ³I¹ve a cosy little flat in what is known as old Manhattan, we¹ll settle down, right here in town . . . We¹ll have Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island too, it¹s lovely going through the zoo . . . ²

The lights really make it feel like we¹re home, like the City is not just an empty coral reef with all the organisms dead. Leonard has that rich, rolling laugh of an island man, and he laughed my anxieties away.

³And ŒMy Fair Lady¹ is a terrific show, they say, we both may see it close someday . . .² There are cashmere blankets in this joint. I almost wish it was cooler, so we could snuggle under them. But I¹ve got to stop hoping for some other moment, and just enjoy the moments we have right now. Tonight was sweet, beautiful, and I give thanks for it. ³The great big city can never spoil the dreams of a boy and goil . . .² I leaned my head into his chest and shoulder, and he didn¹t spin me, for fear of dizziness, he just rocked me in his arms, in the moonlight, for a long time. I felt the City was real, and living again, and we were floating above it. We¹ve turned Manhattan into an isle of joy.