Moving Them Out

They walked north.

There was no other way. There were no cars that could move and no taxis that would stop and the subway, at half past five, was going only one way, and it was not the way they were going; so they walked, the two of them, in their uniforms, white and grey and red, up Church Street and across to Broadway and up Broadway, north, with the whole of the bottom of the island.

Everybody was walking north.

He had never seen it. Nobody had. He thought that nobody had seen it since the island was an island, and he did not know how to think about it, so he did not; he walked in it. The whole of lower Manhattan was walking up its own avenues away from the harbour, on the pavements and in the roads between the stopped cars, thousands, tens of thousands, a slow tide of people going north in the long light of the evening, in their office clothes, with their jackets over their arms and their bags on their shoulders and their shoes in their hands, some of them, the women who had walked from the Battery in heels, barefoot now on the warm pavement, and nobody was hurrying, and nobody was pushing, and nobody was talking.

That was the thing. He could not hear them, so he could not have known; but he knew. He could see their mouths, and their mouths were shut. Ten thousand people walking up Broadway in the evening sun with their mouths shut. Now and then somebody said something to the person beside them, a word, short, and the person beside them nodded, and they walked on. Nobody was on a telephone. Nobody’s telephone worked.

---

At Canal Street there were the orange jackets.

They were at the top of the subway stairs, at the entrance on the corner, three of them, men and a woman in the transit authority’s orange high-visibility jackets over their uniforms, with lamps in their hands although it was still light, and they were standing at the top of the stairs on either side and waving the people down.

Down, and in. The trains were running. He had not known that. The man on the national service had said at a quarter to twelve that the underground railway was stopped across the island, and it had been, and now it was not; somebody had started it again, some of it, and the people in the orange jackets were standing at the top of the stairs at Canal Street waving people down into it, one hand pointing down the stairs and one hand holding the lamp up, the way a man on the deck of a ship would wave people down a gangway in the dark, and the people were going down. Not running. In a line. Down the stairs into the station, and he could see, past the woman in the orange jacket, down the stairs, the platform, full, and a train, standing, with its doors open, full, and people still getting on.

There was a sign. Somebody had written it on a sheet of cardboard in felt-tip and taped it to the railing at the top of the stairs.

NORTH ONLY. UPTOWN, BRONX, QUEENS. NO FARES. KEEP MOVING.

He stood at the top of the stairs for a moment, at the edge of the line going down, and looked at it.

The woman in the orange jacket looked at him. She was big and grey-haired, with a lanyard and a whistle round her neck and the transit authority’s badge on her jacket, and her face was the colour of the dust too, under the orange; she had been somewhere today. She looked at his uniform and his bandages and the label on his pocket, and she said something to him, and he pointed at his ears.

She nodded. She did not write anything. She pointed down the stairs, at the train, and then north, up, with her thumb, and raised her eyebrows. You want to go?

He shook his head, and pointed north, along Broadway, and then made walking with two fingers on the palm of his bandaged hand.

She looked at him for a second. Then she nodded, and turned back to the line, and held up her lamp, and waved the next ones down.

---

There were buses on Broadway at Houston.

City buses, the blue and white ones, a line of them, coming up Broadway from the south in a slow procession between the stopped cars, which had been pushed somehow, by somebody, to the sides, to make a lane down the middle; and every bus was full, standing, faces at every window, and every bus had a card in the window where the route number went, written in felt-tip, the same as the sign at Canal Street.

NORTH. NO FARES.

They went past him slowly, one after another. He looked at the drivers.

The third one was a man of about forty in a T-shirt. Not a uniform. A T-shirt, a blue one, with something printed on the front of it in white that he could read when the bus was level with him, because the bus was going so slowly: the name of the transport workers’ union, and under it QUEENS COLUMN, and under that the date, today’s, and a picture of a bus with a fist coming out of the top of it.

There was blood on the T-shirt. A lot of it, down the front, dried, brown. Not his, Tom thought; he was driving. Somebody else’s.

The man was driving the bus with both hands on the wheel and his face set, looking straight ahead up Broadway through the windscreen, and the bus was full to the doors, and he had been marching at twelve o’clock with the Queens column on his day off, and he had been two streets from the junction or one street or in it, and he had carried somebody, Tom could see that from the T-shirt, and then he had walked to a depot somewhere, or been fetched, and been given a bus that was not his and a card in felt-tip that said NORTH, and he was driving it.

He did not look at Tom. He drove past.

---

At Bleecker Street, on the corner, outside a bar with its door open and its television on and people standing in its doorway watching, a man was talking.

He was standing on the kerb, a big man in a suit with his tie pulled down, with a drink in his hand, a glass from the bar, and he was talking to the people walking past, loudly; Tom could see it was loudly, from his mouth and his face and the cords in his neck and the way the people nearest him leaned away as they went by. He was saying the same thing over and over, to anybody, pointing with the glass.

Tom read it. It was not hard. It was one word, mostly, and it was a short one, and the man said it so many times, with his mouth so wide, that you could not have missed it.

Russians.

It’s the Russians. It’s the fucking Russians. Who else. Who else has got. It’s the Russians.

The people going past him did not answer. They walked on, with their mouths shut, north.

A man stopped.

He was small and old, seventy, in a cardigan, with a newspaper under his arm, the morning’s paper, Tom could see the photograph of the march across the top of it, THEY MARCH AGAIN. He stopped on the pavement in front of the big man in the suit and looked up at him.

He said something. Tom could not read it all. He saw the end of it.

…shut your mouth. The Prime Minister says nobody knows. The King says don’t look at your neighbours. You don’t know. Shut your mouth.

The big man looked down at him. His face went red. He opened his mouth.

The old man did not wait to see what came out of it. He turned away and walked on, north, with his newspaper under his arm, at the same speed as everybody else, and the big man stood on the kerb with his glass and his mouth open, and the people walked past him on both sides, and none of them looked at him, and after a moment he went back into the bar.

Teresa had seen it too. She looked at Tom. She did not write anything.

---

At Fourteenth Street they turned east.

The avenues were the same. Second Avenue was the same as Broadway. The tide of people, going north, slowly, with their mouths shut. A church with its doors open, wide, both of them, and candles going inside it that he could see from the street, a lot of them, and people going in, and people sitting on its steps. A shop with its shutter half up and a man in an apron inside it handing out bottles of water over the counter to anybody who put out a hand, not taking money, and a queue of people, not long, putting out their hands. A fire station with its doors up and its appliances gone, and on the pavement in front of it, on the concrete, a row of candles in jam jars and some flowers already, and a photograph, and nobody near them.

Outside a laundromat on Second Avenue at Twenty-First Street his telephone buzzed.

He felt it against his chest, in his shirt pocket, behind the label and the two forms from the clerk and the glove packet with the doctor’s writing on it. He stopped on the pavement and took it out.

One bar.

The little bars at the top of the screen, which had been nothing since the tunnel under the river at a quarter past six that morning, had one bar. One. It flickered. He stood very still on the pavement outside the laundromat so as not to lose it, with the people going past him on both sides, north, and Teresa stopped beside him and looked at the telephone and did not say anything.

There was nothing on it. No messages. Nothing from his mother. Nothing from the house. Nothing from Frank.

There was only the photograph. The banner on the hall floor on Atlantic Avenue at twenty to six that morning, under the strip lights, the old dark red silk and the gold fringe, the painted man on his beam, the boots round the edges, the hand on the pole. And underneath it, where he had typed it in the kitchen in Sunnyside with his coat on and not sent, and carried it in his pocket all day, through all of it, the reply.

Mum’s stitches.

He looked at it.

He did not change it. He thought about changing it. He thought about all the things there were to put instead, where are you, are you all right, ring me, ring Mum, I’m going to Bellevue, all the things you would put to a man who was a question mark on a list in a room on Church Street; and he did not put any of them. It was what he had meant at twenty to six. It was what he had meant to say at lunch. It was what he had said to Frank at the steward line, with the band playing behind them, when Frank asked him what he had had written. It was the right thing. It had been the right thing all day.

He pressed send.

He watched the little wheel go round on the screen, with the one bar flickering above it. It went round for a long time. He stood on the pavement outside the laundromat at Twenty-First Street with the people going past him, north, and Teresa beside him, and watched it go round.

Then it stopped, and the screen said Sent.

The bar went out.

He looked at the word for a moment. Then he put the telephone back in his shirt pocket, behind the label, and buttoned it, and they walked on.

---

They walked six more blocks, and turned east again, and there it was.

Bellevue.

The long brick front of it along First Avenue, the old part and the new part, the tower going up behind, and the river behind that, very wide and very bright in the evening light, with the sun low behind them over the island and shining on the windows of the hospital so that they were all gold, every one, hundreds of them, as if the whole building were on fire with light.

He had been here a hundred times. He had been here at nine with his eyebrow; he had been here at fourteen on a Saturday to take his mother her lunch, because she had forgotten it, and been taken round the ward by her and shown to every patient in it, this is my eldest; he had been here at twenty-one when his father’s back went the first time, really went, and they kept him four days. He knew the front of it the way he knew the concourse. He knew the doors.

He had never seen it like this.

There were ambulances on First Avenue in a line from the emergency entrance to the corner and round it, twenty or thirty, with their back doors open and their lights going round, and buses, city buses, with NORTH in the window, crossed out, and BELLEVUE written under it, and the people being helped down off them. There were people on the pavement in front of the hospital, on the steps, on the grass, sitting, lying, standing, waiting, hundreds of them, families, he could see that they were families, by the way they stood, together, close, holding each other’s arms, looking at the doors.

Teresa stopped at the corner.

She took her pocketbook out and wrote, and held it up.

I’M GOING TO FIND A BOAT. THEY’RE RUNNING FROM THE PIER AT THE FOOT OF WALL ST, MIKE SAYS, IT’S IN HIS MESSAGE. EDDIE’S ON ONE.

He read it. He nodded.

She wrote again.

GO IN. FIND YOUR MOTHER. SHE’LL KNOW. NURSES KNOW EVERYTHING.

He nodded again.

She looked at him, for a long time, at the corner of First Avenue and Twenty-Seventh Street in the gold light, with the hospital behind him and the ambulances in their line. Then she put her hands up and took his face between them again, the way she had in the junction, cold, both sides, and held it still, and he saw her mouth make one word, very clearly, so that he could not mistake it.

Keane.

Then she let go, and turned, and went back along Twenty-Seventh Street the way they had come, west, towards the avenue, against the tide, the only person in the street going south, and he watched her go until he could not see her any more.

Then he crossed First Avenue between the ambulances and went in.