35 Hudson Yards

He was the last man in the building. Or maybe the world. He couldn’t be sure yet.

He stepped to the window, by his mother’s side. They watched the red sky deepen: their last sunset together, in all likelihood.

“Have I told you that this was once the tallest building people ever lived in?” she asked.

She had, of course. Many times. Such was the mind of a dying woman. “Maybe,” he answered. She’d taught him not to lie, ever since he was a little boy, and he always did his best to live up to that training.

“A hundred years ago, I think?” she wondered aloud. “The elite of the elite came here to live. And then they complained that it rocked and groaned like a ship.” She coughed a laugh. “That’s what you get, when you try to touch the sky. It’s why we picked this place when we crossed the river, the twelve of us . . . ”

She went silent. Asleep, perhaps.

And so he sat. His eyes could cry no more. His raw nose couldn’t bear another sob. The sun dropped toward the horizon, beyond the swift water of the Hudson. He pressed his brow to the glass and looked down six floors to the ground. Shadows were claiming the wild young forest below; the new jungle that was taking over the old concrete one.

After a bit he shook her shoulder gently, and she awoke. She would not want to miss this last time. “I’m scared, Mom.”

“I know. That’s okay. Be excited, too.” The sun’s bottom edge touched some hazy clouds, and it all started to go red and blurry. “Maybe I shouldn’t have kept you in here. I should have sent you out more. But I was scared for you, and I was selfish, especially after your dad . . . Mothers have always had that struggle, I suppose. Keep your child near, and safe? Or let him face that?” She gestured toward the window, and everything that was beyond it. “Because, eventually, he will face it. And now you have to do it on your own.” She reached up a pale hand and gripped his forearm, so very weakly. “But you need to. I don’t know what will happen to you out there. I can’t bear to think about it, to be honest. But you can’t stay here alone. In this giant tomb of bones. No. Whatever is out there . . .”

She slipped into sleep again.

The sun had broken like an egg now, and was slowly seeping sideways into the horizon. Their reflections began to take shape in the darkening window: a dying skeleton of a woman in her chair, and a strapping young man by her side. This was really the only view of the outside he’d ever known: a hundred feet above a world that died a century ago. Three gaunt dogs and a horse roamed in the dusk down there. But he hadn’t seen anything on two legs for many years.

He took a bundle from her lap, something tied up in an old blouse, and carefully unwrapped the contents: there were two rectangular bills sealed in plastic, and an old, worn little black book.

Everything he knew he’d learned from his parents, and later from the history books they’d found in this abandoned tower. So many books, shelved and housed with such care, filled with lessons people kept failing to learn.

He understood what money was. He knew that his broken world had once revolved around this thing in his hand, but that fact was little more than a sterile concept to him. Like a plot from the worn sci-fi paperbacks his father used to read by the firelight. He studied the two bills, sealed away inside clear plastic plates; peered at the faded fronts and backs. Their green color had mostly surrendered to gray. A picture of a balding, stern-looking man whose name was apparently “Chase” glared out from the center. There was a date—1934, nearly two hundred years ago—and along the bottom a bold statement: “TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS IN GOLD Payable To Bearer On Demand As Authorized By Law.”

When he’d been a child growing up in this tower (back when there had still been a few others here trying to stay alive, and breed, and not go mad) his mother and father had played an old game with him. Something they’d found under a dead girl’s bed. It had dice, and a silver car he’d pushed around a board, and lots of brightly colored sheets of play money. What he held in his hands seemed like the exact same thing: no more and no less.

He laid the bills aside and opened the little black book. The pages were yellowed and cracked; one fell out and drifted lazily to his feet. Whatever had been written in them decades ago was little more than faint scribbles and smudges now.

Except for one page, near the middle. Someone had drawn a heart, over and over and over. There might have once been a name written inside it - Sara? Sophie? - but he couldn’t say for sure. Now this, this felt like something: the book’s soft leather sliding over his fingertips, the same leather that had once caressed someone else’s hands too, as they’d written in it excitedly, scribbling down numbers and plans for a bright future. And then they’d closed it with a satisfying slap and slipped it into a coat pocket, or perhaps a purse, for safekeeping.

“We found those here, when we first came.” She had woken again and was admiring her son in the dim light. Her voice just kept getting fainter. “I think I want you to take them with you.”

“Why?”

She smiled, then winced. Every little movement hurt her now. “A hundred years ago, if you had just those two things in your pockets, you could have owned the world. For a night at least. Twenty thousand dollars in one pocket, a little black book in the other . . . you would have stayed out until dawn. Making deals and friends. And maybe enemies. And the girls, how they would have been after you.”

He said nothing, in part because it sounded so absurd. She was lost in a memory of a time she’d never known. Before all those bombs had set the world on fire, and everything had gone dark, and cold, and then finally woken up again. Only to have new awful plagues tear through almost anything that breathed.

Back when there had been far too many people, and not far too few.

“I wish we could have been here, then. When things were so . . . stable, that you could just hand somebody a little slip of paper with numbers on it for a bottle of wine or a nice coat, and then go off to your warm home without a care. And you wouldn’t even question whether you’d be able to do the same tomorrow, or whether your son would be able to grow up and give someone a whole stack of paper one day and get a house in return, and fill it with children. Because that’s just how things worked, and always would.” She paused and coughed. “It’s not a bad thing to know what was. What might be again. For you, and whoever’s still here.”

He nodded. He had a giant backpack, filled with items to keep him alive out “there.” These keepsakes could fit in it as well. Maybe he’d make it, find someone, tell them about his mother and her hazy thoughts before she died. Maybe he’d get back to where his parents journeyed from, and the settlement would still be there, and he could tell his cousins not to try what their aunts and uncles had.

Beyond the window, dusk was giving way to night. Everything was melting together into black ink. This place, this city, which had defied the night with billions of watts for so many years, now went as dark as any forest, or desert, or valley on the planet when the sun slipped away. Inside, behind the glass, the world beyond gradually left, and he had only their reflections. He added some wood to the fire—a giant bookend carved in the shape of a lion, a heavy table leg, an ornate cane—and stared at the picture over the hearth. There were twelve people in it, standing around a thriving garden by the front of this building, 35 Hudson Yard. His father had painted it the year after they’d arrived from the edge of the Catskills, twelve hardy, optimistic “settlers” who’d been going to re-found New York City.

He’d been born two years later.

That original group found only the odd half-mad survivor here in this desolate place. Twenty years ago, the twelve of them had come. Ten years ago, at the height of their colonial success, there’d been nineteen humans in the tower.

Today, there were two.

He returned to her side. He looked at his reflection: a tall terrified young man dressed in the clothes of someone who’d died a hundred years before. He’d spent his life here, outgrowing clothes, moving from one dead child’s wardrobe to another. He’d watched other people leave the building: through death, like his father after his final fever-spiked hours, or through desperation, like his only friend, the little pale girl. Her parents had tired of this place years ago and ventured off with her one gorgeous spring morning, never to return. Everyone had gone. And now it was his turn.

“I won’t make it through the night,” she muttered.

He didn’t respond. She had said this before. But now she had a sharp blade by her side. Whatever was eating her up inside, it seemed the pain was now simply too much. No one else in the tower had made it out of their thirties.

She was forty-two.

“Come morning, you must leave,” she added.

“I will.”

“No matter what.”

He nodded and whispered, “I will.”

“I wish I had more to give you than my love and some old money.” She might have winked in the darkness. “Don’t spend it all in one place.”

His heart caught in his throat. He tried to smile. “Okay.”

“Good. Now just sit with me, one last time, and let’s listen to the fire. My dear, dear boy . . .”