formerly Bronx Grit Chamber

The television only showed cartoons with a running caption: Stay inside. The telephone was dead. The networks were all down. We watched from the window, fog on the streets, blue skies ahead. The fog lasted for days. Fog in the rain. Fog in the sunshine. Every quarter hour, the same monotone recording,heartless and insistent: Stay inside. We watched cartoons. We ate our frozen food. Eventually we were just drinking water from the tap. We had no food to eat. My wife knocked on our neighbor’s doors; she said she heard a stir, but no answer. From my window in the distance I heard a staccato crack.

While the fog continued, I grew impatient. After what felt like a week, I stepped onto to my balcony despite the warnings to stay inside. The fog rose higher than our building, but I could still make out the sun and wisps of sky. When I looked down all I saw was grey. By now, my wife could not get out of bed and my daughter would not stop crying. The fog was not a poison, or if it was, I was at least not dead. The apparent benignity of the fog convinced me, or I convinced myself, to escape my home and find food for my family.

I stepped quickly as I opened the glass door to exit my building. On my walk down the flights of stairs I encountered no one. At the doorway the fog was thicker. With neither odor nor ill effect I took a chance to venture to the nearby grocery store. Even from outside, I could hear my daughter wail. Indeed, from outside I could hear the faint roar of thousands of hungry children from throughout the neighborhood. My first step out of the building, I almost fell on my face. The concrete step I could not see through the fog and my foot missed it in my haste. I caught myself on a banister. Hunger had not banished my reflexes though it dulled my muscle’s memory. In the distance the sound trucks blared the same message: Stay Inside.

I had a short conversation with my wife before I left the house. She had been fearful of the increasingly constant bursts of percussion accompanied by sharp echoes. Sometimes a single crack, sometimes three or four, sometimes from multiple sources in a discordant rhythm. She said anyone knows that sound. No matter who you are. You know what that sound is. She said We are all going to die. I told her I would never let anyone hurt her. She said I could do nothing. She stared with red eyes and dried tears at the cat and mouse dancing on the television screen. I watched the caption scroll: Stay Inside.

As I walked further from my building, I felt gloom and deep worry. What if I get lost and cannot get home? I had left the house with only an outline of a plan:

Go to the store.

Buy food.

If there is no one in the store, steal food.

Go home.

I had all of our cash in my wallet, enough for a week’s worth of food under normal conditions. We would make this last a month if we had to. I would buy cans of tuna, cans of vegetables, cans of chicken, pasta, anything I could get, I would buy. Now I worried, what use is this money if I can’t find my way there and my way back. I crouched to the ground. I would feel my way there, using the memories of streets, trees and bushes. After a few minutes I was practically crawling. I could trace with my hands the contours of the street. I would go north on this path and find main street by feeling for the larger street light posts on the broader avenues. Every intersection I stopped and listened for traffic. Neither the crunch of tires nor the padding of footsteps. The well insulated homes betrayed not a sound.

I crouched and crawled my way through what had always been a brisk brief walk. Alone in my thoughts, I let my mind wander. The last few months had been a time of great conflict. The politicians were accusing each other of disloyalty or dictatorship. The media had been at a fever pitch of vitriol, airing every allegation rival outlets exposing disturbing facts: theft, lies and violence. In the streets the game looked rather different. Most folk had been out of work. Some folk had been out of work for years. It did not look like jobs were coming back. It did not take long for it stop being a news story. After two years, the statistics were no longer reported. Instead it shifted to the question, what to do with the sad sacks, the malingerers and the dimwitted. Some wanted them sent to labor camps up north, some suggested retraining in “the arts”. In the end they mostly survived by various poorly executed government schemes and their wits, agricultural subsidy cards, ration cards, credit cards and payday loans. I imagine there some as charity and I imagine others as by crime. Somehow they all mostly survived. Or almost survived. I could not tell. I worked a technical branch of the communications system. My job was important enough. I never experienced any poverty.

There were periodic flare ups of agitation on the popular message boards and communication portals on the network. Conspiracy theories and xenophobia made up most of the content. There was so much of it that the network generally retained these threads for weeks. There was also talk of a strategy of tension, a cleansing, and a renewal and on the other side, a people’s war and foci of struggle. I avoided politics entirely in conversation, but I paid close attention to the furious debate occurring on the network. I noted the contrast between the general consensus in the media and the fiery and heady conflict on the network. 

The tension had been relatively little bearing on my life until the occupation of the financial district by disgruntled students at the end of the summer. Some politicians had immediately advocated a military assault. Indeed the students were initially subject to sniper fire. The local authorities brokered a stalemate and the situation appeared to be peaceful. The network was abuzz with chatter, the occupied building would be firebombed, and the occupation was spreading and taking hold. Ordinary folk were unimpressed with the occupiers. I thought of them as foolish, naïve but I admired their bravery. I did not think they would last much longer than a week, but the stalemate dragged on.

When the media started to report on the occupation, the politicians began to grow more combative. They competed to be heard to attack the occupation. Regardless of the earlier party affiliations, they functionally broke into two camps: The extermists, who wanted to eliminate the occupation by lethal force and the constitutionalists who sought a political solution. The media seemed to prefer the extermists, since they were more confident and spoke in tones of common sense. The constitutionalists seemed to be focused on legal aspects and were quite boring on television. On the streets the occupation grew. The unemployed started to recognize each other. Large open meetings were held throughout the city. More and more folks joined these meetings. In the warm fall nights, beers and guitars would accompany the tales of woe. Folks were bitter and they were not alone.

As it started to get cold, the politicians had turned to personal attacks, the constitutionalists defending their positions by exposing the crimes of the extermists. The constitutionalists were not without sin. Soon the media was saturated. It was around this time that the network had come to a consensus, “ain't none of them you can trust.” It was also at this time that the network, and the public meetings and the low whispers began to hum: “general strike.”

It was in this context that we were struck by fog. Without any facts, my wife understood the danger. The fog, the cartoons and crack-crack-crack all told her the same thing. For me, I was not one for theories but I agreed that someone was in trouble.

In my distraction, I had grabbed what appeared to be an ankle. I reached up and felt a calf and a knee. I was quickly struck with what I now know was a rifle butt. I heard the familiar crack and with the echo, I felt a burning sensation in my side. I gasped a “wait…” but the first shot was followed by others. I never even heard their report. And I never had a chance to think that I failed. That my wife was alone without food and I could not bring her any. I did not get a chance to even think the feeling of regret. I never even saw it coming.