Page 1 of View From the Bottom
ONE
a piece of you
The heatin my apartment had grown stifling. An assaulting drudgery had overtaken even the most mundane tasks: standing up, taking a piss, leisurely ambling through the compact space that some might consider a living room. All of it had become too much over the course of a couple of hours, a couple of hours spent wasting away in scorching temperatures without relief from natural air flow or electricity. How tacitly we’d all come to accept our unwavering reliance on technology. How sloth-like we’d grown in our inability to function without it.
Cool breezes weren’t streaming in from the window-unit air conditioner in my living room and refreshing gusts weren’t playfully swirling in through the open windows. The city was in the midst of one of the hottest days on record, but I’d flung every last one of them open anyway. It hadn’t made a difference. A small window in the bathroom next to the sink, a decent-sized opening in the bedroom just next to my bed, and three rectangular apertures framing my living space—two behind the couch and one in the kitchen—allowed for no reprieve from the sweltering heat.
Even though I had a corner unit on the fourth floor of my walk-up, no relief found its way inside. There was simply noreprieve from the one-hundred-and-one-degree temperatures that had been hovering over the normally bustling streets of Manhattan the last three days, no respite from the swelter growing stagnant along the once busy avenues.
The oppression waned slightly in the hours that grew dark—briefly. The conditions, if we were lucky, plummeted to the high eighties overnight. But the humidity went nowhere, content as a clam to lumber over the city, making breathing difficult and adding strenuous labor to simple movement.
From nine to two the last couple of nights, one would have thought Tenth Avenue had been magically transformed into Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras. Revelers drank in the streets and loud music bubbled up into the air as those less accustomed to the structured culture of the states celebrated a less severe climate during the wee hours. The people of my neighborhood found relief in the outdoors during those brief moments of descending temperatures in the middle of the night. Many of them shared small apartments with four or five other bodies, apartments that lacked air-conditioning, and I’m sure their spaces had become even more unbearable than mine.
Today had been a test in resilience for the people of New York City. Rolling brownouts had been washing over the city for days as the power grid worked hard to keep up with the demand to stay cool. Earlier this afternoon, however, the grid became overwhelmed, and we had fallen victim to a city-wide blackout.
Two hours and thirteen minutes had passed since every source of cool air in my apartment—basically, the air conditioner and the refrigerator/freezer—had kicked the bucket. I’d tried not to open the refrigerator door since the power had gone out in hopes of conserving the few perishable items I had stashed away. The water in my building had gone out as well. I’m not sure how. There were only five stories, and my building didn’t have awater tower on the roof, so we should’ve been fine. But just like everything else in New York City, it was a mystery.
I’d picked up a case of bottled water from the market down the street a couple of days ago and hadn’t consumed any of them until today, an act of fortuitous serendipity. Twelve of them rested on a shelf in the refrigerator, warming by the minute. The rest sat on top of the fridge, just as stagnant as the air inside my apartment. I’d indulged in two since the water had gone out. I’d save the rest for when I really needed them.
The boredom was starting to get to me. I could have read a book. Hell, I could have written a novel. I had nothing else to do and nothing but time on my hands. And every time I thought about reaching for my phone, I quickly remembered that I’d have no way to charge it in current conditions, and set it back down to collect dust. The moments away from its time-sucking grasp would likely be beneficial to me in some way I didn’t have the aptitude to understand. Certainly not in my current state; sweating my brain cells away along with my will to live.
Every item around my apartment was attached to some type of power source or charging apparatus: the TV, the microwave, the coffeepot, even my toothbrush. I’d never really thought about how subservient I’d become to those devices. How dependent I’d become on the maze of electrical wiring that traipsed through every wall and nook and cranny of the building in which I lived. It was really quite frightening when I actually took the time to ruminate on it; the currents and synapses and sparks that shot through every supporting wall of every building on every block in every neighborhood of the city, at every hour of day and night. It seemed as though one little misstep, one little mistake, could send the entire city into flames.
I’m sure there were backstops and safety nets in place for situations like that. But when I thought about how old most of the buildings that lined these city streets were, and how mostof them were probably constructed before any source of modern electricity existed, it made me question how they retrofitted the spaces for such contemporary amenities in the first place.
I was so bored that I’d started taking inventory of my space. The walls in my apartment were an unpleasant shade of off-white and lacquered in thick layers of paint that went back so many years that my nonna was probably birthed long after the first coat was applied. The front door was black on the outside but had been painted the same color as the walls on the inside. The grooves that cut rectangular panels into the door were permanently stained in places, stains that appeared to be the same color as a ring from the bottom of a coffee mug placed on a white kitchen counter sometime long ago. I’d been living here for four years, but I hadn’t painted because I wasn’t sure how long I’d call this place home, and I didn’t want to have to paint it back when my time here was up.
It was an old New York apartment: choppy and cramped and well-worn. Some of the furniture had been handed down from my ma years ago, and it didn’t all match. The deep green couch and the slate-gray armchair in the living room didn’t complement one another in the least, but neither of them looked bad with the area rug, the wall décor, and the potted banana-leaf plant I’d picked up when I first moved in. It was no less than a miracle that the thing was still alive.
The narrow walnut-brown planks on the floor sometimes creaked if I stepped too deliberately. There were a couple of tiles missing from the black-and-white honeycomb-style floor behind the pedestal sink in the bathroom. The door to one of the upper cabinets in the kitchen was slightly crooked and didn’t close all the way. But the ceilings were tall. The apartment was fine. Way too goddamned expensive, but fine.
And it was mine.
I’d been working from home when the power went out. I was glad I hadn’t trekked into the office in vain, only to have to commute right back home when it was determined that nothing would be accomplished without power. I didn’t hate my job, but in the pits of hell in which I’d found myself, I was relieved to have the afternoon off. It wasn’t like I could focus on anything important while beads of sweat trailed down my back and the thickness of the air stole breaths from my body. Life in the city had effectively come to a screeching halt.
I stepped over my couch and emerged from an open window onto my fire escape to gaze out over the streets below. They’d become restless with people, many of whom huddled on green benches under the shade of the honey locust trees in the pocket park across the street. Kids lazed on the playground equipment while adults took sips of water from plastic bottles, then sent cascades over their heads or down their backs with the liquid that remained. It seemed an odd day to spend time outside, but in this heat, and in the midst of a power outage, I guess it made no difference whether one suffered inside or out.
Some of the businesses lining Tenth Avenue had locked their doors, shut their roller gates, and gone home for the day. The heat had probably been too much for some of the aging business owners. A few of them stayed open, though; a couple of bodegas and shops equipped with generators to keep the lights on. In the doorways, people gathered and shifted, hoping for occasional blasts of cool air from inside. Those popping in for sandwiches, bottles of water, and cold beer shouldered and elbowed their way through the crowds that amassed in the entranceways.
Some kids were trying desperately to open the fire hydrant on the corner in hopes of creating a pressurized waterfall that would wash over the street and provide some relief. They ran across the sidewalk to the hardware store in what I assumed was an attempt to persuade the shop owner to loan them a tool toaccomplish their goal. I secretly wondered if any water would sprout from its nozzle if they got lucky enough to jimmy it open, but I wished them well nonetheless.
City buses and cars occasionally whizzed by, slowing through the intersection where the stoplights had long ago stopped functioning and getting cursed out by locals who’d begun to use the streets as their personal sidewalks. Rules rarely applied in New York City, but especially not when there was some sort of disaster on the menu. I didn’t know where the drivers of those cars were going. There was nothing to do in the midst of a blackout. No shows to attend. No late lunches or happy hours at which to gather. Maybe they were driving home from work once they’d realized nothing would get done without the luxury of electricity.
For a while, I simply watched. Neighbors up and down the block had the same idea. On almost every level of almost every building, people relaxed on their fire escapes, lying on their backs or dangling their legs over the ledge or leaning against the railing, just like I was doing. Some of them listened to music from battery-powered devices, some of them smoked and drank, and some of them just watched as the world turned on its axis. The city looked just as colorful as it always had, but less vivid, almost hazy through the scorching waves of heat.
The rays of the sun burned hot, but at least clouds were passing by overhead, providing occasional respite for sun-kissed flesh. They did nothing to stop the sweat from forming on my brow or crawling down my chest, though. I needed to get out, if only to take a leisurely walk around the neighborhood. Maybe I’d pop by the pier and grab a drink from the bar that catered to tourists at the cruise ship terminal waiting to depart to someplace more hospitable, more habitable, than New York City in the dead of a summer heat wave. Maybe I’d catch a breeze off the water that flowed down the Hudson.
Nah.
IfI’dthought about it, a thousand others probably had too, and the place would be crawling with people just like me trying to escape the heat—if it was even open.
Maybe I’d stroll down Ninth Avenue to Chelsea and find a bar that was open. I’d heard the blackout was city-wide when the lights first clicked off—chatter wafting up from the street below had alerted me to that—but was power restored neighborhood by neighborhood? Perhaps they’d gotten the electricity switched back on in Chelsea even if they hadn’t made it up to Hell’s Kitchen just yet.
I thought about jumping in the shower to rinse the sweaty film from my body but quickly remembered that I had no water, so I did the best I could with what I had: a swig of mouthwash, a sanitary wipe, and a stick of deodorant. It would have to do.
If they were even running, the trains would be crawling on the tracks, so I walked. As I trailed down the typically quiet stretch of Forty-Fifth Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues—going with my gut, hoping for a block of sleepy solitude—I quickly realized the corridor was noisy with loiterers getting drunk, high, and doing whatever they could to ward off the heat by simply forgetting about it. Sadly, Forty-Fifth was no less busy than any other block in my neighborhood, but then, gut feelings couldn’t always be trusted.
But then, sometimes they could. As I approached Ninth Avenue with a bottle of water in hand, a beacon of carnal desire turned the corner, casually striding in my direction. Forty or fifty feet separated us but we quickly closed in on each other, and with each lumbering step he took, his features came into view more clearly. Six feet of height and probably a hundred and eighty pounds packed themselves into his rugged frame, all of which was tucked snugly into a white ribbed-cotton tank top, aperfectly baggy pair of dark denim jeans, and a set of fresh tan Timberland boots.