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One Disaster, Two Worlds
The border between normal and the apocalypse is sharper than you think.
After we spent the afternoon helping clean up the Rockaways in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy — joining the hundreds of volunteers, not to mention enough National Guard troops to retake Baghdad — my friend Olivia said she’d give me a ride back to my apartment in Park Slope.
Her car was a rattling deathtrap of a Toyota but clean inside, with a Hello Kitty sticker plastered on the dashboard and a pair of fuzzy dice swinging from the rearview mirror. “Like the testicles of some mythical beast,” I said, poking the furry balls.
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing. That’s the exhaustion talking.”
“Okay then.”
We motored over the bridge that connected the Rockaways with Broad Channel, the only inhabited island in Jamaica Bay. The main road was sprinkled with bits of broken glass and bright trash, the sidewalks piled with soaked mattresses and sand-crusted furniture. City inspectors went door-to-door, eyeing shredded walls and broken doors, the parked cars already rusting around the hubcaps from saltwater. Traffic was slow and after a few blocks we saw the reason: a gleaming white sailboat upright in the left lane, its mast snapped clean off. Olivia whistled as she steered…
