Chapter 2 – Alice

“I am so dead!” Alice yanked off the sheet and swung her feet toward the ground. By the time she reached her dresser, the tee-shirt she’d been sleeping in was a crumbled afterthought in the corner. She wriggled into clean clothes, squeezed a blob of toothpaste onto a finger, and shot an angry look at her traitorous alarm clock which stared back, dark and blank.

Her wristwatch flashed 7:37 AM, giving her exactly 23 minutes to get out of the apartment, catch the subway, travel the four stops to Columbia, and high-tail it across campus. First biology quiz of the year, and she was not about to jeopardize a perfect GPA over an electronic malfunction. She flung her backpack onto her shoulder and slammed the apartment door behind her.

In her rush, she didn’t even have time to panic.

Okay, maybe if the train is just pulling into the station as I get there and if there are no delays and if I can run through College Walk … She was muttering to herself in the dim hallway like a crazy woman while one angry finger jabbed at an unresponsive elevator button. “Ugh! This is not happening!” She huffed toward the stairs, bracing to charge down seven flights. 

She yanked open the stairwell door, nearly dislocating her shoulder in the process. A rush of cool, earthy air pushed stray hairs into her eyes, and she paused in the doorframe, gathering her brown tangles into a ponytail as her vision adjusted to the weird lighting. The battery-powered emergency lights in the upper reaches of each landing were aglow, and grumbling tenants were hurtling down the stairs guided by glowing strips of tape.

“Morning, Alice.”

Alice followed the familiar gruff voice with her eyes. A tall man, broad-shouldered with a hint of a paunch, passed her on the landing and started down the next flight. She recognized him by his dark suit and dangling briefcase. 

“Morning, Jonathan. What’s going on?” She fell in step behind.

“Power’s out in the building and all along West End Avenue from what I could tell. No internet, either. Where’s your mom?”

The shift was abrupt, but it made Alice smile. Since moving back to New York the prior year to live with her mom, she’d suspected that the middle-aged banker had a case of the hotties for Dr. Deb, as her mom was affectionately known in the building.

“Left on assignment last Friday, three months in the Samoan Islands.” Dr. Deb worked for a health organization that traveled to remote parts of the world, sharing Western expertise with struggling nations. It was how she’d reinvented herself after the divorce from Alice’s dad.

“So, you’re on your own.” Jonathan stated the fact in a gloomy tone, and Alice couldn’t tell if it was on her behalf or his own. 

“I’ll be fine.”

They had reached the bottom of the stairs, and Jonathan held the stairwell door open for Alice. “Let me know if you need anything.”

“Yeah, thanks, but I’ll be fine,” Alice repeated. She smiled, meaning it, but then everything shifted. Fast, no warning. That’s how it always went for her. Things would be sunshine and roses until an ominous shadow crept across the blue skies of her mind. Then, she’d get trapped in that shadow, swallowed by darkness. Her brain started spinning. Did she have candles upstairs? What about batteries? Would the power still be out after dark? 

“Wait.” She stopped spinning to ask a logical question. “Doesn’t the building have a generator?”

“Indeed, it does, my young friend. So, the question is: Where the hell is the power? At least, that’s the question on my mind right now. And there,” he pointed across the lobby, “is the man we should ask.” Alice followed his finger to Ernie, the building super, standing half in and half out of his small office off the lobby, shouting into a walkie-talkie. 

“As much as I’d like to stay and talk, I have to find a way to get to work right now.” Jonathan jutted his chin toward the propped-open front door. 

Alice was confused. “But,” she said, “we’re having a blackout.” 

Jonathan smiled, and Alice suspected she’d said something naive and childish. “I work at the Goldman building. Power might be out everywhere else, but there’s always power at Goldman.” He gave a wave and turned toward the door. 

Alice watched him leave and stared for a moment at the scene outside the doors. Her head became a little fuzzy. She turned back to Ernie, but he had his hands up in a halt gesture, trying to hold back people who were piled three deep to talk to him. Later, Alice thought to herself. She figured he had enough on his plate at the moment and enough people to answer to. He didn’t need her in the pile-on.

She took a deep breath and headed outside. Yellow cabs and arguing pedestrians filled the street in front of the building, although Alice couldn’t figure out the point. Why hail a cab when the cabs weren’t moving? The sound of angry horns vibrated in her sternum and made her head ache. No signals to guide traffic meant tight, inescapable gridlock. She saw Jonathan’s back receding down a sidewalk and guessed he’d given up on trying to get a cab.

Alice took a deep breath to steady her nerves. Control, she silently admonished herself. Stay in control. 

The sound of a siren made her flinch as a giant man pushed past her, clearing a view of grey smoke plumes rising from manhole covers. Firefighters jumped from a truck that now blocked the street while men in yellow hardhats ran to and fro, cordoning off access and pushing back crowds. A woman came running in Alice’s direction, holding one hand over her mouth and dragging a small boy away from the scene.

“What’s happening?” Alice shouted. 

“Transformer fire.” Alice couldn’t tell who answered. “Blown transformers all over the city.”

“Oh,” Alice said. “What does that mean?” She yelled the question into the swarm of bodies, but her words just dissolved into the shouts and honks on the street. She was a piece of driftwood, struggling to stay afloat. 

Another deep breath. She squared her shoulders and squeezed herself through the crowd to a place where the air didn’t smell quite so bad. She began a familiar, soothing ritual of fastening and unfastening her ponytail. Once, twice, again. Her eyes followed pedestrians navigating tightly packed spaces between cars. People normally underground on their way to work at this hour were trying to figure out how to get from point A to B by foot. It looked like some were fated to get crushed between bumpers today. 

Alice didn’t want to watch. This wasn’t what she’d signed up for when she’d come back to New York City for college. This was a violation of the contract. Controlled chaos was one thing, but this … this was chaotic chaos, and it was simply not part of the agreement. She dug into her bag for her phone, that reliable gap-bridger, self-soother, transitional object. Crutch. A quick call to her brother or her best friend – a familiar voice on the line, even just for a moment – could be extremely calming. But today, her grasp came up empty. 

She’d left her phone charging on the kitchen counter. 

By now, her breathing was becoming shallow, and her fingers were tingling. It was time for her to resort to her last resort. She looked both ways along the sidewalk and flattened her back against the wall of a building, making herself as inconspicuous as possible. She reached into a small pocket on the outside of her bag, shook two tablets onto her tongue, and waited for the calm.

***

Alice loved the way the Ativan put her in a little bubble. Everything happening around her still happened, but it gave her the ability to observe with a comfortable disconnect. A siren here, a smoke plume there, no worries. Street vendors shouting “Ten dollah!” for packs of generic C batteries, cool. Impatient crowds and angry swear words registered but left her pulse and breathing rate alone. Her brain still worked, though. It wasn’t like she was stoned or drunk, quite the opposite. Once the anxiety faded into the background, she could better focus her attention and think clearly. 

And, as Alice meandered her way uptown, a few things became very clear. One, everything was pretty messed up. It seemed that no one had been prepared for this blackout, and it covered a large area – how far she was not yet certain, but she hadn’t found the edge of it yet. Two, there was no sense in continuing up to the college because there was no way classes would be going on, and, in the off chance they were going on, no one could hold it against a student who didn’t make it in. Three – and this one was the best yet – coffee carts had portable generators. She stopped to buy some breakfast. 

While deliberating between a bagel or cheese Danish, her ears zeroed in on the sound of scratchy wheels on concrete approaching from the south. She turned her head and spotted the skateboard. It halted about two feet away. 

“Hey, Alice, what’s up?” 

Alice held up a hand in greeting but stopped mid-gesture when a woman leaned in and cursed the rider for running over her foot. “Sorry, ma’am,” the sixteen-year-old responded. He flipped his skateboard into a vertical position and stowed it under one arm. The woman ’tsk’ed” and moved on. The boy grinned at Alice with reddened cheeks. 

“Hi, Leo,” Alice said. “Brave riding a board on a crowded street like this.”

“You mean ‘stupid,’ right?” He used his free hand to push a mop of shaggy brown hair out of his big, puppy-dog eyes.

Alice smiled without answering. She handed Leo an iced coffee, and the two started strolling southward. “Where you headed?” 

“Since there’s no school today, I’m gonna head over to the park and look for my friends.” 

“Cool.” Alice nibbled on her bagel. “So, what do you know about this blackout?” Leo’s dad was NYPD and usually knew at least something about everything. “Is it a Con-Ed thing?” she asked, referring to the city’s behemoth power supplier. 

“Uh-uh,” Leo answered. “It’s much bigger than that. Internet’s down, too, and anyone who had a phone or computer plugged in got totally hosed.”

“Wait. What?!” Alice stopped in her tracks and looked at Leo. 

Leo’s eyes roamed over Alice, from her empty hands to the bag slung over her shoulder. “Where’s your phone?”

“Plugged in at home. I forgot to grab it on my way out this morning.” 

Leo shook his head. “If you were charging, it’s gonna be fried.”

“Fried?”

“Yeah, there was a big power surge or something. Everything plugged in got fried.”

“Shit,” Alice mumbled.

“At least you have your Apple Watch,” Leo said, pointing toward her wrist. 

“It’s actually not an Apple Watch,” Alice said, holding it up for him to see, “even though it looks like one. It’s a custom watch my father had made for me as a graduation gift from high school. It does most of the same stuff, though,” she said, pivoting her wrist to glance at its face. “But it doesn’t seem to be doing much now. I guess all the cell towers are down, also.”

“Nah, cell towers have generators. The lines are probably just jammed with incoming calls,” Leo said casually.

“Oh, aren’t you smart?” Alice teased, grinning at Leo.

Leo dropped his head shyly, a large flop of hair completely covering his face, and then asked, “Why’d your dad make you a special watch?”

Alice shrugged. “Wacky scientist,” she answered, only half-joking. Just last night, before she’d gone to bed, she’d seen an email from her dad – something totally out of context about visiting the old high school in Arizona and taking a walk through memory lane. A little weird, but she’d dismissed it without much thought since she was studying for bio at the time. “He and his lab partners each had one made for their kids.”

“But why didn’t he just get you an Apple Watch?”

“I have no idea. That’s what we all wondered, to be honest.” She dropped her arm back to her side. “Anyway, I’m going to head home now and see if you’re right about the phone.”

“TV, too,” Leo said, tossing his empty cup into a trash can and hopping back on the board. “Gaming system, tablet, toaster, coffee pot, …” His list continued as he rode off.

***

Hours later, Alice sat perched on the couch in the lobby of her building, sweaty legs sticking to soft leather. Leo, back from the park, sat beside her, wilted like a plant without water, elbows on knees, facing the floor and rolling the skateboard under his feet. 

“Why is it so hot in here?”

“Well, I’m sorry for the inconvenience, Alice,” the super, Ernie, said. He was bent over a crate he had dragged from his office, inspecting the label. “Generator power doesn’t mean full power, so I’m afraid we can’t blast the AC.”

Alice harrumphed and fanned herself with a discarded magazine. She knew that when she’d moved back to New York last year, her mom had “the little talk” with Ernie in which she’d explained about Alice’s anxiety issues and told him to go easy on her in case she asked him a thousand questions. Alice learned this after she had, in fact, asked Ernie a thousand questions in those early weeks (things like “How often do the exterminators come?” or “Is it normal for the elevator chain to make a groaning sound when it’s moving?”) and he’d finally sat her down one afternoon, handed her a cold Coke, and listened to her jabber on for a straight hour, filling him in on her friends out west, her reservations about moving back east, and, ultimately, her insecurities about surviving an Ivy League school. By the end of the hour, she was flat out of questions and filled with the inklings of peace. Ernie became her friend, and, now, she only fired questions at him when she wanted to bust his chops.

“Why wasn’t the generator on this morning?”

Ernie eased himself upright and looked in her direction. He shouted something in Spanish at Leo, and the skateboard stopped moving. “Problem with the automatic transfer switch,” Ernie answered. “Apparently, the co-op board voted to upgrade the generator after Hurricane Sandy but never got around to it.” 

He walked back into his office and came out with a crowbar. There was something comforting to Alice in watching him go on with business as usual. Outside was chaos, but in here, Ernie exuded his usual quiet control. He was young for a super – at least that’s what Alice thought, only about thirty-five years old – and nothing like the other guy who used to be here before Alice’s parents got divorced. He had had prickly white stubble all over his chin and moved with a permanent stoop in a manner that warned people off of asking him any questions at all. 

“What about the elevators?” she continued. 

“Elevator A is working.”

“That’s it?” Leo asked, sounding aghast.

“That’s it,” he said. “But the stairs are working just fine.” Alice caught a smile on the side of his face as he used his crowbar to pry open a crate of fire extinguishers. 

“What about water? Should I fill up my tub or something?” Alice again.

“No, Alice,” he replied, examining one of the fire extinguishers. “There won’t be any problem with water. The water tower is on the top of the building. Gravity,” he said, pointing a finger upward, like that somehow explained everything.

“But don’t you need electricity to pump the water up into the tower?”

“There’s enough water in the tank to last for weeks, don’t you worry.”

That was like telling a kangaroo not to bounce, and they both knew it.

“Okay, listen up, Jorg,” Ernie said, turning from his inquisitors and addressing the doorman at the concierge table, the wide-shouldered, short-necked, muscled one that Alice and her mom secretly referred to as The Human Tank. “Tell people as they come in tonight that the generator is on, but they may still need flashlights and candles. And remind everyone to be candle-smart. We don’t need a fire here tonight.”

“I don’t think FDNY could spare a truck,” Jorg said.

“Me, neither,” Alice agreed. “I saw a big fire just a few blocks from here this morning.”

“That so?” Ernie used his legs to slide the crate behind the concierge desk. “I haven’t strayed far from the building all day. How bad is it out there?” 

“Pretty bad,” Jorg answered. “Between the fires and the diesel fumes, it smells worse than a gym locker. Half the city is running amok in the streets, and the other half is sprawled out in Central Park, catching rays like it’s a day at the beach.”

“Yeah, I saw Daisy there,” Leo said. “She was leading an open-air yoga class.”

“Ah, so that’s where she is today!” Ernie said. “It might’ve been nice if my sister could’ve hung around here and helped out a bit.” Daisy shared Ernie’s heavily subsidized first-floor super’s apartment.

“She’s a free spirit,” Jorg said with a grin.

“No, she just likes living rent-free,” Ernie grumbled.

“Maybe I should go find her,” Alice said. “Outdoor yoga sounds good to me about now.”

“Forget it,” Ernie said. “Better you head upstairs before it gets too late.”

Alice thought of protesting but quickly decided against it. His advice was sound. Her mother would approve. “I guess you’re right. At least there’s no line for elevator A yet,” she said. She winked at Leo as she rose.

“Be careful tonight,” Ernie urged. He handed her a fire extinguisher. “Just in case.” 

***

Up in her apartment that night, Alice practiced her own yoga routine by candlelight. She felt suffocated within the confines of her apartment, which was eerily dark without the usual array of city lights shining through the window and much too quiet.

Something was wrong, and it wasn’t just the power. There had been a barely perceptible shifting, something just scratching at the edge of her consciousness. It was like being at one of those carnival machines, using a mechanical claw to close in on a prize that kept slipping through its grasp at the last second. Real, but elusive. 

She moved to the window, pushing it open as far as it would go to breathe in some fresh air. It was hard to see more than a sliver of sky, but she was quite certain that there was a strange illumination up above, gleaming lights shimmering in the dark sky. She saw some buildings that still had what appeared to be full lights, probably the work of expensive generators, and recalled her conversation earlier that morning with Jonathan, who worked at Goldman. But there weren’t many. A dark Manhattan skyscape was not something that Alice was used to, and it contributed to her tension. She was alone and vulnerable, unable to see what might be moving in the dark.