Bezalel Stern
The first person to fall had been living in the City for almost ten years. She was a pillar of the community. So, when she told us she was leaving for the suburbs we weren't just surprised. We were anguished.
"Who will host our Friday night get-togethers?" we asked. "Who will remember that Shana likes red wines and Brian likes whites?"
What we did not ask, but implicitly wondered, was: Why? Why would you leave all this beauty? All this wonder? For the stifling dread of the suburbs? For the endless white picket fences, the cookie-cutter homes, the sameness, the sameness, the lack of an edge? Why would she want to give up the everything we all shared for the obliviating sameness of the burbs?
She didn't have an answer. Smiling, face flushed, uncharacteristically chipper in a newly purchased pink jumper, its plasticity painful to our harsh, Citified eyes, she only chirped. "Suburbs!" she said.
We thought she had lost it. But, important as she was to our community, she was only one. That made it all the more poignant when Daniel announced, via group iChat, that he, too, was moving. "Only thirty-minutes away, by car!" He was so happy. "Just a bus and a subway hop away!" Daniel, who had dropped out of his physics PhD and moved to the heart of the City to bartend, to be part of something. Daniel was leaving us as well?
We all knew something was coming, something was different, but when Shana (she of the red wines, the downtown goddess, the much perfumed and much lusted after member of our community), suddenly announced, via email (bcc'd email! as if we were strangers! as if we were not lovers and friends and bohemians!) that she would be abandoning our home in the heart of the City for not just a suburb but an exurb—a full forty-five minutes without traffic from the heart of the City she had loved—we realized something was wrong. This was not a trend. This was an affliction.
We went to Shana's apartment. We knocked on her door. We remembered the nights we had spent, smoking bummed cigarettes in this hall, laughing at dreams we had, by now, long forgotten. Throwing our coats on her bed, grabbing them sorrowfully at one or two or three in the morning, wishing we'd be spending the night. We longed to see her at least once again before she abandoned us to the emptiness beyond the City limits. Some of us (okay, all of us) secretly still lusted after her, even now, now that we were on the far side of our twenties and into our thirties and maybe even heading further north, now that our days of escapades had largely escaped us and we commuted (by bike, by foot, by subway, not by car, never by car), to our places of business largely unencumbered by such longings, or urges, or orgies. Even now we longed to see Shana, to be reminded of our youthful imbroglios, of the nights we spent in dive bars, drinking three dollar Coronas, heckling the local bands who soon became our friends, or our lovers, or at least our acquaintances, of the times we had done this or that thing that we always pretended we would forget but secretly cherished, like the time when we were young, when the City was grittier and meaner and we promised each other and ourselves we would never leave.
She wasn't there. Nobody answered our knock. Our spare keys didn't turn in the lock. We noticed, of a sudden—as if we had been blinded and the scales suddenly, regrettably had fallen from our eyes—a pink laced doily, gracing Shana's door. "Gone fishin!" it said. "See you on the flip side!" Below that, it said: "Thinking of you!" Our friend—our friend who wrote discursive, didactic sonnets on themes of love and evolution and the end of everything, after coming home from her office on a high floor where she worked as a legal secretary—our friend had laced the doily with a truly unexceptional pink heart, pasted on with glue which made the paper around it sticky to the touch.
The next person to surrender was Gerald. Gerald, it should be said, was not much of a surprise. He was a bit of a hanger-on. He showed up on the periphery a decade ago. He had never paired off, never married, never had a lover even, to our knowledge. Gerald would sit, as often as not alone, on the rusting fire escape outside of the rooms where the parties we were constantly having were held. Gerald would mutter about this being the time, the place, the all. We would smile to ourselves, tell ourselves "that's Gerald," as if he truly was one of us. Still and all, none of us were all that disappointed—or even all that surprised—when Gerald, who had never really fit in to our urban scene, announced he was leaving. "It's a quick twenty-five minute commute, on a Sunday!" he said. And that's what got us. Gerald seemed so happy. Gerald had never been happy. For Gerald to leave was one thing. For Gerald to leave for the suburbs was fine. But for Gerald to be happy about it? About this?
It was at about that time that I suggested there was a disease. It was at about that time that I suggested we inoculate ourselves.
Evelyn had just called each and every one of us (Evelyn, who wrote micro-novels at the café downtown, who had not left the City in seven years, except once to visit her father, when her mother died), to tell us she had discovered a lovely little exurb just down the road and we should all come visit, but not until everything was settled. It was the same line to each. The very same line. As if she was reading a script.
At this point there were four of us left. Me, my wife, Brian, and Nancy. The four of us were scared. We knew the end was near. We knew that unless there was a cure, the end was near. We feared there was no cure.
We went to the hospital downtown, the place I had gone when I had taken the shroom that wasn't a shroom, the place that had saved my life. We went to the emergency room. The emergency room was empty. The doctors, the nurses, the janitors had abandoned the hospital. Stray supplies littered the floor. "GONE FISHIN!" the sign said on the door. "GONE FISHIN!" the banner said at the supermarket on our way home. "GONE FISHIN!" the sign said on the entrance of the subway that no longer ran.
It was late. We were tired. The restaurants were closed. The owner of the biryani place had "GONE FISHIN!" The Tiki Taco joint was shut. Even the 24-hour McDonald's was closed. Even the people who slept in the McDonald's were gone.
We went home. Brian (he of the white wine) was beginning to look, to act, strange. "Brian," my wife asked, terrified, "is something wrong?" "I hear," he replied, "you can get so much more for your money out there." We didn't need to ask where.
How did this happen? We were together the whole time. Brian was already talking about selling his studio on First Avenue, which, he said, he never liked anyway. It was too small. Too close to everything. With the money he got from it he could buy a four-bedroom only fifty miles away. Think of the square footage, he said. Think of the bedrooms. A separate bathroom to follow every meal.
It was too much. We ran. We fled from Brian. We fled from Nancy. We ran so far, we soon reached the City limits. We kept running. We ran until we came to a beautiful suburb. The commute is not too bad, and that is where we live now.