They weren’t asking for permission, but you had to give it anyway. “Permission granted,” my husband said, and unlocked the locks, and three men and a tall, lean, wedge-faced dog entered our unit. The biggest of the men remained in the doorway, pointing his gun at us, and we stood against the far wall facing him, our hands raised and elbows bent at right angles, while the other two men opened our closets and searched our bathroom and bedroom. These events were meant to be quiet, but I could hear the men in the bedroom lifting first one mattress and then the next, and the mattresses falling back onto the bed frames with a thud, and although the man in the doorway was large, I could still see other police units behind him, one entering the apartment to the left and the other running up the stairs.
Then they were done, and the two men and the dog came out of the bedroom and one of the men said “Clear” to the man in the door and “Signature” to us and we both applied our right thumbprints to the screen he held out and spoke our names and identity numbers into the scanner’s microphone and then they left and we locked the door behind them.
Searches always made a mess, and all of our clothes and shoes had been yanked out of the closet, and the mattresses were askew in their frames, and the window had been opened when the officers had checked to see if there was anyone dangling from the windowsill or hiding in the trees, as had apparently happened a year ago. My husband made sure the folding iron gate outside the window was secure and locked, and then he closed the window and drew the black curtain across it and helped me straighten first my mattress and then his. I was going to start organizing at least a little of the closet, but he stopped me. “Leave it,” he said. “It’ll still be there tomorrow.” And then he got into his bed and I got into mine, and he turned off the lamp and it was dark again.
Then it was quiet and yet not quite quiet. We could hear the officers moving around in the apartment above us—something heavy fell, and we could hear the light fixture in our ceiling rattle. There were muffled shouts, and the sound of a dog barking. And then we heard the units’ footsteps descending again, and then the all-clear, announced over the speakers mounted atop one of the police vans: “Zone Eight; Thirteen Washington Square North; eight units plus basement; all units checked.” After that, we heard the whup-whup-whup of the police helicopter’s blades, and then it really was quiet again, so quiet we could hear the sound of someone crying, a woman, from either above or next to us. But then that too stopped, and there was a period of real silence, and I lay and watched my husband’s back as the strobe light moved across it and up the wall and disappeared again out the window. The curtains were supposed to block the strobe, but they didn’t entirely, though after a while you forgot it was happening.
Suddenly I was scared, and I scooted down the bed until my head was below the pillows and pulled the blanket over myself, the way I had as a child. I had still been living with Grandfather when I experienced my first search, and that night I had been so frightened afterward that I had started moaning, moaning and rocking, and Grandfather had had to hold me so I didn’t hurt myself. “It’ll be fine, it’ll be fine,” he repeated, again and again, and the next morning, when I woke, I was still scared, but less so, and he had told me that it was normal to be scared, and that I would get used to the searches with time, and that I was a good person and a brave person and that I shouldn’t forget that.
But—like talking to my husband—it hadn’t ever gotten easier, though in the years since the first search, I had learned how to make myself feel better afterward, had learned how, if I covered myself so that the air I breathed in was the same air I breathed out, so that, soon, the entire space I made for myself was filled with my hot, familiar breath, I would eventually be able to convince myself that I was someplace else, in a plastic pod tumbling through space.
That night, though, I couldn’t make the plastic pod feel real. I realized then I wanted something to hold, something warm and dense and full of its own breath, but I couldn’t think of what that might be. I tried to think of what Grandfather might say if he were here, but I couldn’t imagine what that might be, either. So instead I did my math sums in my head, whispering into the sheets, and eventually I was able to calm myself and fall asleep.
* * *
The morning after the search, I woke later than usual, but I still wasn’t going to be late: I typically get up in time to see my husband off to work, but today I missed him.
My husband’s shuttle leaves earlier than mine, because he works in a higher-security location than I do, and every employee has to be scanned and examined before entering the site. Every day before he goes, he makes us both breakfast, and today, he had left mine in the oven: a stone bowl of oatmeal, with what I knew were the last of the almonds, toasted in a pan and crushed on top. As I ate my breakfast, I looked out the window in our main room through the metal grate. To the right you could see the remains of what had been a wooden deck attached to a unit in the building next to ours. I had liked looking at that deck, watching its pots of herbs and tomatoes grow taller and thicker and greener, and after it became illegal to grow food privately, the people in the unit had decorated the patio with fake plants made of plastic and paper they’d somehow painted green, and it had reminded me of Grandfather, how, even after things got bad, he had found paper to cut into shapes for us—flowers, snowflakes, animals he had seen when he was a child—and had stuck them to our window with a blob of porridge. The people in the building next door had eventually covered their plants with a piece of blue tarp they’d gotten somewhere, and as I ate breakfast, I would stand at the window and look at the tarp and imagine the fake plants and feel calm.
But then there had been a raid, and the people next door were found guilty of harboring an enemy, and the deck had been destroyed the same night they had been taken away. That had been the last search, five months ago. I never did know who they were.
My husband had begun putting things back in the closet before he left, but I was only able to do a little more cleaning before it was time for me to catch the 08:30 shuttle for work. Our shuttle stop was on Sixth Avenue and Ninth Street, just three blocks away. There were eight shuttles leaving every morning from Zone Eight, one every half hour from 06:00. The shuttles made four stops in Zone Eight and three in Zone Nine before stopping in Zone Ten, where my husband works, Zone Fifteen, where I work, and Zone Sixteen. Then, every evening beginning at 16:00 and until 20:00, it went in reverse, from Zone Sixteen to Zone Fifteen to Zone Ten, and then back to Zones Nine and Eight before cutting east to Zone Seventeen.
When I began taking the shuttle, I had liked to look at the other passengers and guess what they did and where they would disembark: The tall man, thin and long-legged like my husband, I imagined was an ichthyologist and worked in the Pond in Zone Ten; the mean-looking woman with small, dark, seedlike eyes was an epidemiologist who worked in Zone Fifteen. I knew they were all scientists or techs, but beyond that, I would never know anything more.
There was never anything new to see on the ride to work, but I always took a window seat anyway, because I liked to look outside. When I was young, we had had a cat, and the cat had liked car rides—he would stand between my legs and put his front paws on the bottom of the window and look outside, and I would look outside with him, and Grandfather, who sometimes sat in the front seat with the driver when I wanted extra room, would look back at us and laugh. “My two little cats,” he would say, “watching the world go by. What do you see, little cats?” And I would tell him—a car, a person, a tree—and Grandfather would ask me, “Where do you think the car is going? What do you think that person had for breakfast this morning? What do you think those flowers on the tree would taste like, if you could eat them?,” because he was always helping me make up stories, which I knew from my teachers was something I didn’t do very well. Sometimes, on my ride to work, I would tell Grandfather in my head the things I saw: a brown brick building with a fourth-floor window over which two strips of black tape had been stuck in an X, and in the cleft of which a small boy’s small face had briefly appeared, like a wink; a black police wagon, one of its back doors partially opened, from which I could see a long white foot emerge; a group of twenty children in their dark-blue uniforms, each holding on to a knot tied into a long piece of gray rope, queuing at the checkpoint at Twenty-third Street so they could cross into Zone Nine, where the elite schools were. And then I would think of Grandfather, and I would wish I had more to tell him, but the truth was that very little changed in Zone Eight, which was one of the reasons we were so lucky to live there. In other zones there was more to see, but we never saw those things in Zone Eight, which was another reason why we were lucky.