The Secret Runners of New York Read online

  I found myself recalling Red’s tale.

  In it, Bo had said that when he climbed up the well shaft, he’d come out of the well behind the Swedish Cottage, not far from the Transverse.

  I bit my lip in thought.

  Why not?

  And so despite my reservations about my brother’s sanity and possibly reckless drug use, I took a little detour: I crossed over the Transverse and headed toward the Swedish Cottage.

  It is a truly whacky building: an eerie dark-brown storybook house, the kind usually inhabited by wicked witches. It was also located in a somewhat secluded spot, set back from the regular thoroughfares of the park, which meant that, at this hour, there was nobody around: no cyclists or joggers or regular walkers like me.

  Stepping around the wooden cottage, I found a dense tangle of bushes, vines and shrubs behind it, separated from the structure by a sturdy wooden fence.

  Taking a quick look around me to make sure no-one was watching, I swung myself over the fence and ventured into the undergrowth.

  It was no easy task.

  Thorns nicked me. Branches smacked my face. Vines tripped me up more than once.

  It looked like no-one had come through here since the park had been built back in the mid-1800s. Certainly no gardeners or groundskeepers had. The dense tangle was unkempt and ugly, and had clearly kept out any would-be explorers for at least a century.

  Fifteen yards into the thicket, I swore aloud. ‘Damn you, Red, making me think I might—’

  I cut myself off.

  There on the ground in front of me, overgrown with weeds, hidden deep within the thicket, its faded grey brickwork encased in creeping vines, was an old low well.

  THE WELL

  I examined the well for a good ten minutes. This was worth being late for school.

  The many vines that covered the well’s circular mouth lay over it so thickly that I could probably have stood on them and not fallen through.

  Peering through a small gap in this layer of vines, I looked down into the well and saw only darkness.

  I called, ‘Hellooo!’ and my voice bounced back to me as if from a great distance. This was no simple well. Maybe there was a tunnel down there.

  What exactly had Red done on Saturday night?

  I covered the well with a few extra branches and then retraced my steps through the surrounding scrub, making sure no-one saw me emerge from it near the Swedish Cottage.

  (I would show the well to Red the next day and when he saw it he smiled with vindication and exclaimed, ‘I told you!’)

  As I made my way to school, I thought more about his story, about his ‘run’.

  It sounded intriguing, but sadly, unless I penetrated the inner sanctum of the cool crowd like Red had managed to do and got invited to go on one of their runs, I wouldn’t be able to investigate it any further.

  THE NEW YEAR IN NEW YORK

  Red’s popularity with the in-crowd continued through December.

  He actually asked me once if I was okay with it and I was. Over the years, we had always had mutual friends and separate friends; these kids were definitely his friends.

  Mind you, I did start to seriously contemplate the state of my social life when, that New Year’s Eve, Red was invited to an inner-circle-only party at Dane’s apartment on the East Side and my mom and Todd were invited to a soiree at the Majestic and I was faced with the prospect of spending New Year’s Eve alone in our apartment. I came to the sad conclusion that I needed to work harder on social matters. Even my mom had a better nightlife than I did.

  And then, two days before New Year’s Eve, Jenny called.

  ‘Hiya, Skye. Last Minute needs one more waitress for a gig on New Year’s. Want to do it? They’re offering seventy bucks an hour for maybe four hours’ work.’

  Last Minute Staff and Events was the name of the company she worked for, the one that provided extra waitstaff at the eleventh hour.

  Lacking anything else to do—and happy to bolster my own coffers with some quick cash—I said sure, why not.

  Dressed in black pants and a waistcoat, it was actually fun working with Jenny. At a vast suite in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in the Time Warner Center filled with cheerful Canadian businesspeople and their partners, I carried a tray loaded up with champagne for almost four hours and walked out of there at 1:00 a.m. with two hundred and eighty bucks in cash.

  Jenny’s manager said I’d done well and asked if I wanted to go on their roster for future functions. I shrugged and said sure.

  I walked home with Jenny, and as we parted at her building, the famous Dakota, I thanked her for the opportunity.

  ‘Hey, anytime,’ she said. ‘It’s nice to hang with someone who’s not too proud to work.’

  I arrived home long before anyone else in my family and fell into bed.

  I heard Red return shortly after dawn, and when he finally came down to breakfast the next morning, I noticed a newly added black line on his wrist.

  Oddly, he didn’t talk to me at all about this run. I wondered if Misty and the others had reminded him that runs were not to be discussed outside their circle and thus Red was not going to elaborate on what he had already told me.

  I let it go. Good for him, I thought. And good for me. The New Year in New York had been okay.

  The coming of the New Year brought with it something else: renewed interest in the end of the world.

  March 17 was suddenly only two-and-a-half months away and the media was back on the case. The papers and TV news were filled with animated graphics of the Earth moving around the sun, its elliptical orbit carrying it inexorably toward a billowing cloud of gamma-radiation particles. In most of the animations, the Earth smashed through the cloud, causing many of its particles to cling to our planet like a zillion magnetic insects while others were scattered into space.

  But now that the Earth was so close to the cloud, a new feature of humanity’s final day was presented to us.

  As the world penetrated the gamma cloud it would, of course, be spinning.

  This meant that one hemisphere of the Earth would plunge into the gamma cloud first and experience its effects. This would give the other side of the planet a six- to twelve-hour glimpse of what was to come.

  New computer models showed that Australia, Asia, India and the Middle East would hit the cloud first. Then as the Earth rotated, Africa, Europe and North and South America would be affected.

  Jimmy Kimmel said, ‘Expect last-minute ticket sales on Virgin Galactic to go through the roof during those six to twelve hours.’

  It was interesting to see people’s opinions on the gamma cloud. Politicians, for example, sat resolutely on the fence since if the world didn’t end, none of them wanted to be mocked forever after as Chicken Little. They called for calm and for people to go about their lives.

  Scientists from MIT, Princeton, Caltech and Oxford weighed in, but when all was said and done, the prevailing wisdom was still split fifty-fifty.

  Or as one of the experts put it: ‘In evolutionary terms, the human brain is not wired to deal with threats like this: existential threats that it has not encountered before. We know to run from lions and tigers because we know from experience that they could kill us. We have no experience with a cloud of gamma radiation, so we just shrug and say, “Oh, well, let’s see what happens. Till then, I’ll just go about my life.”’

  This was the view of our fellow San Remo resident, Manny Wannemaker, the right-wing radio host.

  He said to his millions of listeners: ‘This gamma cloud stuff is all nonsense. It’s just more scare tactics from the Left. Climate change didn’t work, so this is another grand attempt by the socialist-progressive-liberal elite to redistribute the wealth. Trust me, folks, it’ll all turn out to be a whole lot of nothing.’

  (Manny famously spoke into a solid-gold microphone. With
the mike, his expensive overcoat with the purple sleeves and his apartment in the San Remo, he was not a fan of redistributing anything.)

  The usual whackos built hermetically-sealed bunkers in their backyards. Others stocked up on canned tuna and bottled water.

  And, of course, the crazies with their placards still gathered outside tourist sites like the Met and the Natural History Museum. I couldn’t say there were more of them, but passers-by definitely seemed to take more notice of them now.

  Disturbingly, there had been a spike in hate crimes around the world: members of one religion killing members of another, or in the case of Islam, Shiites killing Sunnis, one blaming the other for the coming end of all things.

  And then, somewhere around mid-January, came the first hate crime against the rich.

  A gang of thugs raided the Westchester mansion of a well-known billionaire whose wine cellar had featured in an article in Forbes. They killed the billionaire and his family . . . and then put their feet up and drank his wine while streaming the whole thing live on Periscope.

  When a SWAT team eventually raided the house, the TV cameras and helicopters caught it all, in particular, the bandana-clad youth who called from the upstairs window: ‘We’re all gonna die anyway, so we might as well live large!’

  And then, live on TV, he drew a gun and shot himself in the head.

  Naturally, this incident captured the attention of those souls who till then had not shown the slightest interest at all in gamma clouds, electrical currents in the human brain, science and the end of humanity. In short, people like my mother.

  Now she was all ears.

  Late one night, I heard her whispering to my stepfather.

  ‘Todd,’ she said. ‘Is there anything we can do? Surely we’re not going to die with everybody else.’

  My stepfather answered in his detached, measured way. ‘It’ll be okay, Deidre. I think the whole thing is just a big scare.’

  ‘But what if it isn’t? What if—’

  ‘I got it covered, honey,’ he said, assured as always. ‘I’ll make sure we’re safe.’

  I had wondered what he’d meant by that. How could anybody make sure they survived the Earth’s passage through the gamma cloud?

  The answer came in scattered whispers and hushed comments I heard in the schoolyard, in the common room and from my mother on the telephone to her girlfriends.

  Four whispered words: The Plum Island Retreat.

  ‘—Have you heard about Plum Island?’

  ‘—They’re just calling it the Retreat. It’s an old high-security animal disease facility, with airlock doors and biohazard-level air seals. They think it can withstand the gamma cloud. It’s also an island, which makes it secure—’

  ‘—It was set up by a few Goldman Sachs guys who knew all about this gamma shit ages ago. They found out about it when they were investing in some biotech thing. They bought the whole island from the government five years back and have been kitting it out for habitation ever since. The plan is to stay there till the gamma radiation passes—’

  ‘—My dad’s paid for our family to go to the Retreat, just in case—’

  ‘—Starley Collins was telling me it can only hold sixty people, that’s it. Once they hit that number, the doors will be closed.’

  ‘—What’s the buy-in?’

  ‘—Seventeen mil. Per person. In cash. And you gotta know the right people. It’s all very hush-hush. They haven’t even told those who are in when they’ll move there.’

  ‘—That’s a lot of cash to gamble on a never-before-seen cosmic event. What if it all blows over and nothing happens? Everyone who goes there will look like a fool.’

  ‘—And if everybody dies and they survive, what do they do then anyway? Live in an empty world?’

  Naturally, my mother heard these things, too, and when she discovered that Todd’s cool and measured solution had been to buy four places for us at the Plum Island Retreat—at $17 million each—my mom had rewarded him just like she had on their first date.

  When he informed her that he had offset the cost of the Retreat by shorting a selection of specific stocks—meaning that if the world did not end as predicted, he stood to make about $200 million—she rewarded him again. Go Todd.

  Red’s view of it all was typical Red. ‘If it really is the end of everything’—he shrugged—‘there’s nothing I can do about it, so I might as well have fun in the meantime. And that way, if the end comes, I can say I enjoyed the last few months.’ My brother was never going to win any philosophy prizes, but in its own way, his logic was hard to fault.

  And so, while Red partied, at the end of January I flew down to Memphis to see our dad.

  ‘Have you been eating your sardines?’ he asked me as soon as I walked into the ward. ‘Taking your phosphorus supplements?’

  ‘Yes, Dad.’ I had been, actually. Truth be told, my mind had actually felt sharper for doing so.

  ‘And no sodas?’

  ‘Not a drop.’ I didn’t add that my stomach looked the best it ever had: no bloating from the carbonated fizz. My dad’s end-of-the-world diet was awesome.

  ‘How’s your mother?’ he asked.

  ‘She’s still Mom.’

  He smiled sadly. Their marriage had always been doomed. He’d been the brilliant but bookish doctor from a high-standing Memphis family; she had been the local beauty queen determined to marry into wealth and society.

  But when the wealth-management company managing my father’s family trust ran off with the money and it was suddenly revealed that my father no longer had any fortune, my mother was out of there.

  My father—sweet, smart yet totally naive—had been devastated.

  The nervous breakdown had come soon after.

  I liked to remember him as the man I knew as a ten-year-old kid: the one who would take us on sailing vacations to Martha’s Vineyard and Rhode Island and, most of all, to the lighthouses near them that he admired so much.

  ‘Those damn lighthouses,’ my mother would say. She didn’t like those trips at all because they messed up her hair. But my father came alive on them. His eyes lit up as he gazed at his beloved lighthouses.

  His favourite one was Race Rock Light, a storybook cottage built precariously on a tiny island not far from Rhode Island. It looked so incongruous, so out of place, this dainty little cottage perched on a rock above the pounding waves. My father called it his ideal beach house because it had no neighbours.

  Eventually Mom stopped going on those trips altogether and Dad, Red and I had an even better time.

  Thanks to some grand-uncle I never met, Dad was an associate member of the New York Yacht Club’s Rhode Island clubhouse. (‘This is a very famous club,’ he told us. ‘In 1983, its yacht, Liberty, lost the America’s Cup for the first time in 132 years.’) It was from the New York Yacht Club on Newport, Rhode Island, that we would take out a loaner yacht for a week or so.

  We’d lie on the deck of that yacht, anchored at sunset in some bay or near some lighthouse, listening to vinyl records of Dad’s favourite sixties bands: The Doors, The Kinks, The Who and, my favourite, Eric Burdon and the Animals.

  (It was Dad who gave me my prized 1968 vintage poster of ‘Eric Burdon and The Animals at Whisky a Go Go’ in all its pink psychedelic glory. I still played their greatest hits—‘House of the Rising Sun’, ‘We Gotta Get Out of This Place’, ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’—constantly on my phone.)

  They were the best of times.

  But that was a long time ago. Another life.

  ‘So, Dad,’ I said. ‘Do you think it’s really going to happen? Do you think the world’s going to end on March 17?’

  He looked at me and smiled kindly with his milky honest eyes. ‘The world will go on, Blue. It survived the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. It’s survived ice ages and heatwaves. It’s hum
anity as we know it that’s going to end.’

  BOYS

  I returned to New York from Memphis feeling oddly ambivalent about the fate of the world.

  That TV expert had been right: despite everything I had heard and read, I couldn’t bring myself to fear some nebulous cloud of gas up in space. My brain just couldn’t compute it as a threat.

  On my return, I glimpsed two more marks on Red’s inner wrist, making a total of four now.

  I also went back to school and the familiar routine.

  Trudges across the park—passing Misty, Hattie and Oz on the sidewalk as they waited for their ride to school—classes—essays—return trudges across the park on my own. I teased Red for abandoning me, told him that if an axe murderer killed me on the way home from school, it’d be his fault.

  A highlight from that time was an invitation from Jenny to attend a function—not as staff, but as a guest—at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: the announcement of this year’s exhibit on the Cantor Roof Garden.

  It was an awesome affair.

  The Cantor Roof Garden is possibly the best entertaining space in New York: a gigantic patio, it sits on the roof of the Met above the tree line of Central Park and boasts unobstructed views of the park and the city skyline.

  At dusk, it is spectacular. Every year in the summer the roof garden plays host to a single-artist exhibition: previous artists have included Jeff Koons, Sol LeWitt and Cai Guo-Qiang (his bizarre pair of crocodiles were particularly memorable; trust me, Google them).

  I stood by the edge of the roof with Jenny, nibbling on some finger food and looking out over the railing. The sloping glass side of the Met fell away beneath us at an angle of about sixty degrees. I found myself wondering if you could slide down it safely when Jenny’s father joined us.

  He smiled broadly when he saw me. ‘So this is the famous Skye Rogers! It’s nice to finally put a face to the name. Jenny speaks so highly of you.’

  I nodded graciously. ‘Thank you, Mr Johnson.’

  ‘Please,’ he said, ‘call me Ken. Now, go and enjoy the evening.’