The bus was running late. Mike checked his watch, only to find a bracelet of slightly paler skin, a reminder that he had exchanged it for a pair of portable phone chargers four days ago. Or five? Hard to tell now. Days had melted together. The watch had been helpful, but now the power outages had become sporadic, and he needed his phone charged.
Even without his watch, however, he knew the bus was undeniably behind schedule. Ordinarily it arrived five minutes or so after Mike did, first peering out from behind a bodega and then rolling around the corner in a sweeping turn, arguably too fast. Everyone else who rode the bus with him – those that had survived this long – had arrived at least ten minutes ago, but the bus itself was nowhere to be seen. He pinched his lips together and sighed. Unlike the vast majority of the city’s residents, he had places to be.
Mike defogged his glasses with his sleeve and glanced around at the other passengers. Ethan Marin scribbled at a notebook, face hidden by his Yankees cap, and chuckled to himself from underneath his bandana. Aisha Castle bobbed her head to an imaginary melody, tapping her fingers against the purple NYU logo on her sweatpants. Jack and Tamara – he always forgot their last name – huddled against one another, like always. How they had survived this long touching one another constantly was a miracle. Everyone else in the group made sure to stay as far apart as possible while still being able to hear one another; these two lived together and stuck together like magnets, even on the bus, and neither one had caught anything yet? Victoria Tazbach sat on a nearby bench and bounced her feet anxiously. Knowing her, she was probably practicing calf-raises. When the outbreak had reached New York she had holed up at her work, some gym in Chelsea, and used a roll of KT tape to make gloves and a mask. He admired her resourcefulness. She looked up, and they nodded a silent greeting at each other.
And that was it. It had started as a group of nineteen strangers who, seeking some degree of normalcy to their lives even as the country drowned in the outbreak, had found their way to the bus stop on Seventh Avenue and W 14th Street and reclaimed their daily commutes. Now it was down to this – six of them, and the bus driver, who was running late.
The driver, Tommy Espura, was an acquired taste to which Mike himself had never grown accustomed, not even through the extra hours the two had spent together. The man seemed genuinely or willfully ignorant of his surroundings, of the absence of other people on the streets, of the fact that each of his current passengers sat far apart from one another and allotted a fifteen second buffer when they boarded. “Hurry up,” he’d call out. “I got other stops to get to.” Every weekday he greeted them with an excessive optimism that made Mike grind his molars and wonder if Tommy was the stupidest person he’d ever met, or just the most sarcastic. Probably the latter – his cheery tone always seemed laced with mockery.
Mike’s phone twitched in his coat pocket. He dug it out and checked – nothing. Just him shifting his weight. He almost put it away, then decided to try calling Seattle. It was only around five in the morning on the west coast, but it was worth a shot. He scrolled through his recent calls, where a list of repeating numbers extended back into the previous days, weeks, months.
“I like your style,” Ethan said. Aisha had lowered her protective scarf to take a swig from a bottle of vodka. Iordanov. Mike could distinctly remember the bejeweled, grinning skull staring back at him from the front of the bottle. Nearly a decade ago, Mike’s job had taken him overseas to interview some Finnish millionaire, who had offered him a cocktail made with vodka from an identical bottle. Mike had asked how much it cost, and his interviewee had replied “couple thousand, I don’t know.” No way Aisha could afford that.
“Aren’t you twenty?” Tamara asked.
She was. They sang Happy Birthday last week on the bus. Which was still late.
Aisha pulled her scarf back over her nose and returned the bottle to her backpack. “I’m a hundred and four today. It’s my birthday.”
“Congrats,” Ethan said. “Way to prove you’re never too old to go back to college.”
Mike turned away and took a deep breath. He selected a phone number. Ringing, ringing, then the angry beeping of a busy line. He pocketed the phone and did his best to shake the call from his mind.
Victoria stood and asked, “Is Tommy coming? He should be here by now.”
“If he’s not here in fifteen minutes, we can leave,” Aisha said.
Ethan laughed. “Is this bio lecture?”
“You think he’s dead?” Tamara asked.
“Tommy? He’s not dead.”
“I mean, he’s not the type to be late, either, and it’s one or the other.”
Those were really the only two options? Mike began to ponder. Certainly there were more, right? Tommy couldn’t be gone. Mike couldn’t imagine anyone that sarcastic waking up one morning with the outbreak’s signature headache and being crushed by the realization that hours later he would be dead, just one more corpse among the millions scattered throughout the boroughs. Tommy’s mind wouldn’t allow for that kind of thinking. He would’ve just shrugged it off with a snort of crushed-up Advil and came to work anyway.
But Tommy never arrived late. He seemed like the type of person who would, but always managed to subvert that expectation. “Punctual Tommy, they call me,” he declared one morning, and Mike remembered wanting to punch him for it. Punctual Tommy? What the hell kind of nickname was that?
“What if he left the city?” Jack suggested.
“And went where?” Victoria asked. “He’d die before leaving New York.”
“Well, what if he got lost?”
“Didn’t he grow up here?”
“Well, yeah, I don’t know. Yeah, he did. We could walk to some of the nearby stops.”
“Why would he start going to a new one?”
“Let’s walk,” Mike said. “We’ll find a new stop.”
The group went silent and turned to face Mike, likely caught off guard by the sound of his voice. He had never been particularly vocal at any of these commutes. Why would he have been? He’d never talked to anyone else at a bus stop before the outbreak. He had lived in New York for nearly forty years and picked up on the city etiquette quickly, after a few attempts to strike up conversation on the subway in his first week in the city. “Excuse me, since you guys got on at Grand Central, you wouldn’t happen to know anything about the protests at the UN headquarters, would you?” “Man, how the fuck should I know?”
But now, it seemed important to speak up. He had no clue as to Tommy’s whereabouts, and each option seemed less plausible than the last. But he knew that if a bus driver didn’t show up in normal times, he would’ve walked to a different stop. That’s why they did this, right? To recreate normal?
“Alright,” Victoria said. “We’ll walk. Where are we going?”
He started toward Seventh Avenue, squinting to check for buses further along. The city felt new to him again. Brick and concrete buildings loomed overhead with no ground-level noise to distract from their magnitude. The sidewalks seemed overly wide with no pedestrians, and gave him the same uneasy feeling that the open ocean did.
The curbs, and sometimes the streets themselves, had remained lined with a row of cars. Many of them sat unlocked with their keys on the front seat. Ethan called them DIY taxis. The result of a tacit citywide consensus that nobody had anywhere to go, so why not help somebody out and offer your car to them. It was exactly the kind of thing Mike would have written about for the Times, an out-of-character but heartwarming gesture from your fellow Manhattan residents. Now, it just left him with wave after wave of interview questions and nobody to answer them. Why would you leave your car on the street, full of gas, for anyone to use as they please? Most of them probably just transformed into homes for rats anyway. Plus most of the couple hundred thousand people still in the city were holed up in their apartments anyway, oblivious to the cars left at their disposal. And what happened when things got back to normal? What was the plan then? Hope your ride was still there? Walk to the nearest car dealership? Please. Nobody would have done something so stupid or generous in normal times.
As he reached the crosswalk, he heard Ethan call out. “Not going to school today, grandma?” Mike turned to see Aisha walking back down 14th Street.
“No school today,” she said.
“What are you talking about? It’s Monday, isn’t it?”
Aisha shrugged. She turned and walked away, pretending to balance on the yellow line that stretched down the center of the road. The rest of them watched her from the crosswalk before continuing up Seventh.
No school today. What else did she have to do? Sit at home and twiddle her thumbs until the city trucks delivered her weekly allotment of food and water? Finish a three thousand dollar bottle of vodka by herself? And once that was done, what next? Too many questions. Too much uncertainty. He rubbed his eyes. Kids. He was glad he and Delia had decided against them.
“Is she going to be okay?” He could hear Tamara whispering to Jack.
“She’ll be fine.”
“I feel like she’s not going to be.”
“It’s okay,” Jack said. “We’re okay.”
He could envision them hugging, consoling, holding one another close behind him, and he gnawed at his cheek. Were they always like that, even with nobody around? Did they still fight? Did they fight before? What made them stick so close together? Would he have done that with Delia here? He hoped not. They had never been the showy type.
He caught himself and stopped wondering. Mike’s phone fidgeted, and he grabbed it. Nothing again.
“Vic,” he said.
Victoria jogged closer to him. “What’s up?”
“Why’d she leave?”
“I dunno.”
“She talks to you.”
“I mean, yeah, but she didn’t just now.”
“If you had to guess.”
“If I had to guess, I’d say she… she didn’t want to make the effort just to pretend to go to school. Too much work for, like, basically no payoff, you know?”
“Kay.”
“I mean, you have to admit this is a lot of effort, right? Like, it’s nice. But also, we haven’t actually gone to work in, like… I don’t even know, a while, I guess. So taking the bus, it’s kinda…”
“Kay,” Mike repeated. Victoria caught the hint and retreated from the conversation. Lucky she was here. The others might have pushed him for a response, and he didn’t want to ask or answer more questions than necessary.
“Hey, look!” Tamara said. The group had reached the intersection with 15th Street, where a white bus, striped once down the side in blue, had steered directly into a pastry shop. Mike’s heart stuttered. He knew that pastry shop. Delia loved their bear claws. He always got the chocolate eclairs. He preferred other bakeries, but at this one he got to watch her drop powdered sugar and sliced almonds all over the table.
The bus had violated the storefront, ripped the daffodil-yellow overhang from the wall and torn though its patio. The restaurant’s powder blue napkins speckled the ground, decorated with shards of glass. Mike looked away.
“Guess he wanted a bear claw,” Ethan said.
“Is that Tommy’s bus?” Tamara asked.
“I think there’s a driver in there,” Victoria said. “I think he’s dead, so don’t get too close.” She started toward the bus, and the others followed. Victoria turned back.
“Mike, you coming?”
“Tommy won’t be there,” he said. Tommy could very easily be there, slumped and unblinking over the steering wheel. But Mike wasn’t getting any closer to the storefront.
“What? Why isn’t… we should check, shouldn’t we?”
“I’m staying. He’s not there.”
The group hesitantly continued, and Mike turned away from 15th street. He picked up his phone. Maybe Seattle would answer. He selected the same number he’d tried earlier. Ringing, ringing, and then the slurred, grumbling voice of a woman on the other line. “Hello, how can I help you?”
His heart picked up. “Hi. Hi. I’m looking for a patient, I’m hoping to check in on her status, and, if, if she’s at a hospital.”
“What’s the name?”
“Delia Roth?”
A pause. “She’s not here, I’m sorry.”
“Wait, would you be able to check with any of the other, uh, hospitals? In the area?”
“Have you tried calling them?”
“Yes, I’ve been checking with–”
“If she’s not those, she’s in Tacoma. New patients are being moved there, we’re out of space in the Seattle ones.”
“But she was in Seattle when the outbreak hit, I figured she’d –”
“Sir,” she sighed. “If she’s not here, it’s a good thing. Or if she’s not at Tacoma.”
“But she could be – ”
“Sir, I know what you’re thinking, and trust me, it’s better that she’s not here.”
“I need to know if she’s… if she’s there at least –”
Movement in the corner of his eye pulled him away from the phone. Down Seventh Avenue, a figure on a skateboard wobbled across the intersection. Even as a silhouette in the morning gray, Mike recognized the bounce of his hair and flop of his gray bus driver’s jacket.
“Sir?”
“I’ll call you back.”
“Please don’t, we’re extremely –”
Mike shoved the phone back into his pocket. He shouted to the group investigating the bus on 15th Street, made sure he had their attention, then took off running, weaving through the DIY taxis that had been carelessly abandoned in the road. As he neared the intersection Tommy noticed him and hopped off the board.
“Mike?”
“Where the fuck were you?”
Tommy peered over Mike’s shoulder. His face lightened upon seeing the others emerge from 15th Street. “Oh, hey, everybody’s here. Except uh… where’s Aisha? Shit, is she…?”
“No. She left. She got tired of waiting for you. Where were you?”
“Tommy, what the hell?” Victoria called from down the street.
“You’re alive?” Ethan shouted.
“Yeah, I’m alive,” Tommy replied. “You for real? I’m invincible, everyone knows that.”
“Where. Were. You.” Mike squeezed the inside of his jacket pockets.
“I took a day off,” Tommy said, his eyes smiling. “Thought I’d call in sick.”
Mike’s lips tightened. The group paused, holding its breath.
“You could’ve told us,” Tamara said.
“Yeah, that was my bad. It was kinda a spontaneous decision. I am sorry about that.”
“We have places to be!” Mike felt himself shout.
Tommy rolled his eyes. “Come on, none of you have places to be.”
Mike stared through Tommy. “I do. You know I have places to be.”
“Yeah, okay, I’m sorry. I genuinely am. I just. I didn’t feel like driving all the way down to the tip of fuckin’ Manhattan today.” He shrugged.
Mike froze.
“The tip?” Ethan asked. “Like, down by Battery Park? Mike, I thought you went to Midtown. That’s where the Times building is.”
Tommy’s eyes widened. “Oh… oh, no… Mike, dude, I—”
Mike locked eyes with Tommy. For an instant, there was sympathy. Tommy hadn’t meant to. An accidental slip of the tongue, nothing more. But it didn’t matter. The promise had been broken, intentional or not. Once the rest of the passengers found out, nothing would stop the looks of pity, the looks of concern. Soon to follow would be the questions – why do you keep going, what if she doesn’t come back, when are you going to let it go? All the reasons he’d told Tommy to keep quiet. As soon as it came, the sympathy ran out. Mike hit him.
Tommy’s head jerked back. He stumbled, catching himself, and put a hand to the cheek where Mike’s fist had connected, and turned back.
“I said sorry, man, I—”
Mike hit him again, and Tommy collapsed, clutching his nose.
Victoria materialized in between them. “This way,” she commanded, driving Mike back and using the distance between them like a force field. Tommy stood and began to yell, hand still clutched over his face.
“Fine, if it’s like that, then fuck it! Yeah, like Battery Park! This motherfucker,” – Tommy pointed at Mike – “makes me drive him all the way down there five days a week so he can sit there and stare at the water. It’s a shit drive, too. You guys been down through Tribeca since everything went down? It’s dead. Everything. Half the storefronts are boarded up, the other half are burnt down. Up here they have food deliveries, and a few people trading extra food out of grocery stores and shit, down there I saw a dude licking a dumpster. Like, licking it. Oh, and there’s fuckin’ cars scattered everywhere, worse than up here. You try navigating that in a bus, Mike. You’re lucky we haven’t gotten stuck down there.”
Mike stared at the ground, not blinking. He readied his fists again and began to think of ways to dodge around Victoria.
“It’s something about his wife,” Tommy continued. “He thinks she’ll go there if she comes back to New York, I guess she was out on a business trip or something when the outbreak came, so now she’s stuck some place, and he thinks if he goes there every day like it’s a movie, one day she’ll just be there and everything’ll go back to how it was. And Mike, I’m sorry, if that’s what you think, like, honestly, that’s what you think, I have bad fuckin’ news.”
Mike felt eyes shifting towards him, the looks of pity taking shape, and he started at Tommy. Victoria blocked him, forcing him between two DIY taxis on the curb. His phone moved, and he scrambled to pull it out.
Nothing.
He raised his arm and launched the phone at the ground. Glass erupted from the screen. Mike scrunched up his hat over his forehead with both hands and bent over. He was certain he was going to throw up. But nothing came, so he lurched upright and began to walk away.
Rage blurred the city around him. He couldn’t care less. He hated this city. This wasn’t New York. New York had tortured him for years, with unexpected rent increases, with well-deserved promotions snatched from his grasp, with people on the subway forcing him to bury his curiosity. Never had New York brought him to smashing his phone. Never, in forty years, had New York made him hit someone. This wasn’t his city, with its makeshift taxis and desert sidewalks and buses in storefronts, with the eerie ride through Tribeca and the walks through Battery Park next to a stagnant harbor. This wasn’t his city. This wasn’t his life.
He stopped at 14th Street, unsure of where to go. The phone was gone. All the batteries and chargers he’d traded for, rendered worthless by a rash decision. Surely, the moment after it shattered, the exhausted hospital worker in Seattle tried to call back. “Your wife’s okay, sir. She’s here with us, she’s been busy helping.” That would have been like her. Or: “Delia Roth, you said? I have bad news, she’s been admitted.” At least he would have known.
Tommy was right. He was dreaming, thinking she’d show up in Manhattan one day, that they’d have their lives back. At the very least, that day was far away.
Victoria caught up with him. “You should sit,” she said. He started to walk away, then decided against it. Nowhere to go. He leaned against the nearest car. She perched herself on the hood of the car next to it.
“Is that all true?”
He stared at his shoes. She was just being polite.
“Is she still alive? Your wife?”
“I don’t know. She’s in Seattle. Or Tacoma, maybe. I don’t know. I’ve been calling and calling. It’s all I ever do. I started with her, but she wasn’t picking up, so then I started calling her boss, and her colleagues, people that were with her in Seattle, but none of them knew either, most of them didn’t answer, and then I was calling hospitals, and trading things for phone batteries, or portable chargers. She’s not in the hospital though. Which means she’s either fine, or she’s gone and nobody knows that she’s gone.
“But”—he swallowed—“I was thinking that if she’s fine, and she finds a way back here, she’d be at The Battery. I know she would.”
“How come? Is there something down there?”
“We… when we first came here, and we were new to the city, and we were new to our jobs, we had this shitty little place and it was still being cleaned the day we got there to move in. So that afternoon, we had literally nothing to do, and so Delia and I walked to the very edge of Manhattan, as far out as we could, and we said that when we were older, and we both retired and we were rich and had the rest of our lives ahead of us again, we’d come out here to celebrate it.”
“It?”
“The hard part being over.”
She nodded. “Did you retire? It’s weird but I actually have no idea how old you are.”
“I did. She didn’t. We were both scheduled to retire in June, but the law firm needed her for an extra month… some guy quit and they asked her to cover for him. She said they only needed her for a month, so she was willing to do it, and so she took this last business trip to Seattle, and then Seattle had an outbreak, and she got stuck, and I was thinking maybe I should drive out there, and then New York got hit and I couldn’t leave. I mean, you remember what happened on the freeways when this all started.”
Victoria nodded. “My roommate called me from somewhere on I-87 when she got the headache.” She swallowed. “She made me stay on the phone with her until she died.”
“The whole time?” Mike glanced at her and she nodded. “Why’d you do it?” he asked.
“I don’t know. She’s my friend, I… she’d have done it for me. I would’ve wanted the same thing. I wouldn’t have wanted to be alone for that.”
He nodded. “What was it like?”
Victoria grimaced. “I don’t want to remember it. It was hard enough to forget once.” She let out a small laugh. “I was just saying you were smart not to leave.”
Mike shook his head. “Didn’t feel like it at the time. I guess sometimes it still doesn’t. But either way I was stuck here and I got to thinking where she’d be, and when we all started taking the bus again, I had to tell Tommy so he’d give me a ride down there.” He itched his chin and gave a short puff of laughter. “Stupid of me, but I had to make sure. If she’d be anywhere…. I mean, that was what we were working up to, right? That meeting in Battery Park, and all the shit we were putting up with over the years was going to be worth it, because we had one another, and we were… free or something, I don’t know. We were going to Spain – I always wanted to go there, I had a study abroad trip get cancelled just before I was supposed to go – and we were going to Napa, Delia had been out to California so many times and she’d still never been, and we were going to see her family out in Vermont, they have this countryside house up there and horses and her mom grows peaches, and.” He stopped suddenly and rubbed his forehead. She knew where the sentence ended, and there was nothing left to say.
They sat, listening to the silence of the streets.
“It’s not fair,” Victoria said after a while. “It’s not.”
“I know.”
“It’s not fair.”
He knew. The overlooked promotions, the cancelled study abroads, the sudden deaths of siblings far too soon, the expected but agonizing deaths of pets. And now this. Life had never been fair, not for him, not for Delia, and he knew. And here he sat, in spite of the years, believing that maybe eventually there was a chance it would be.
He looked to his right and noticed tears on Victoria’s cheeks. His heart sank deep into him. Uncertain if he had caused it, he fumbled for something to say. “Sorry if… sorry.”
“It’s not you. It’s just everything, you know?” She wiped her nose, her hand still wrapped in KT tape. “I’ll be okay.”
After a moment she added, “Are you? Gonna be okay, I mean?”
“I’ll be as okay as everyone else is,” he said. “I figure everybody has a story like that.”
The silence between them felt different somehow, and it didn’t make him angry. The air whistled, dull but loud, the faraway roar of wind. Fall was coming. He tilted his head back at the sky and watched the clouds passing overhead. The roar began to grow louder. It sounded like—
He jolted to his feet. A black “T” gliding through the mid-morning sky. An airplane.
That was not normal.
“You see that too, right?” Victoria said, lying face-up on the car hood. Mike nodded. His heart pounded. He looked into the car he had been leaning against. The keys glimmered on the dashboard. He glanced up at the plane, which had almost vanished behind the skyscrapers.
“Which airport is it heading to? Can you tell?”
Victoria scrunched her nose as she studied it. “I can’t really tell. JFK, I think. What, are you trying to meet it there? You think… you think it’s her? Mike, I don’t know if –”
He slid into the car and started the engine. Maybe it was a bad idea, but he had no intention of waiting at Battery Park any longer. She would never meet him there, but she would meet him eventually. He knew it.