Ambient 06 - Going, Going, Gone

along a narrow ramp running across the river and then onto a much bigger expressway, one that vaguely resembled the Cross-Bronx except that it had eight lanes, not eighteen, and ran across what must have been Manhattan. Bright green signs proclaimed it to be the Morrie Feldman Transitory.
    I asked, of course. »Unknown. Major Deegan, JoeDiMaggio. Who knows.«
    »Who?« I asked, but her mind was on what lay ahead. Transitory, so-called; seemed more like a parking lot than a highway. For over a half hour we rolled slowly along, surrounded by six or seven thousand other cars the same size. There were also what looked like trucks, but they were twice as big as the ones I was used to; nearly as big as locomotive engines. Everybody tried to steer clear of those beasts; it’d be like a rowboat getting in the way of the Queen Alexandra if you changed lanes at the wrong moment.
    The real breath-stopper, though, were the buses. From where we were I could count fifteen to twenty at any given moment. They were half the size of the trucks, but the people hanging onto the sides, and lying on the roof, sort of fattened them up. As we crept past them I could see that there were hand-holds and foot-ledges stuck all over the sides of the buses. The commuters must have been used to travelling this way; a lot of them were looking at tiny little movie players they wore strapped to their chests. As we crept up the ramp leading to the GW bridge – the bridge looked the same here as it did in my New York, except that here it was painted Army green – I saw one of the passengers on a bus some fifty feet ahead of us lose his footing, and tumble down into the traffic.
    »Eulie,« I said, trying to see if he’d landed on a hood or something, but spotting neither hair nor hide, »didn’t you see that? He fell off. Shouldn’t we stop?«
    »Why?« she asked, genuinely puzzled. Four lanes to our right, I saw another commuter slip down between the lanes. As we continued across the bridge – moving a little faster by that point, maybe ten miles an hour – others came loose, here and there, from other buses, and I realized that this must be one of this place’s drawbacks of commuting. Never saw one of them get up, once they fell. After a half hour more we reached the Jersey side, and by the time we passed under the Fort Lee exit sign I’d stopped counting.
    »These people work in the city?«
    »Workers and drones unhiving,« she said.
    »What do they do? Office work?«
    »Whatever’s essentialled.«
    She turned onto a six-lane highway that wasn’t as crowded as the bridge had been; then, pulling onto another ramp, steered us onto the New Jersey Turnpike. This almost looked like home – fourteen big lanes, plenty of space, and everyone speeding along – except our turnpike wasn’t walled off on either side by tall green and grey glass buildings. None of these buildings had any signs; none of them had any windows – the walls were glass, but you couldn’t see in, and I felt safe in assuming that no one could see out.
    »Where do you live?« I asked.
    »Maplewood,«
    »Wouldn’t the tunnel have been closer?«
    A blink, a stare: recognition. »Tunnel’s flooded.«
    I looked over to my left. There weren’t quite as many buildings along the road in this stretch, and I could catch glimpses of New York’s taller buildings – the Empire State, notably, and several other taller, boxier towers. »How’s that possible?«
    »Rising water table necessitated the shift north. Before my birthing.«
    »Manhattan’s flooded?«
    »Here.«
    »Eulie,« I said. »It was my fault Chlojo was killed. If I hadn’t –«
    »If she didn’t guard me,« she said. »Six, half dozen, twelve either way.«
    That was the last she said of her big friend; I supposed that it wasn’t so much different from falling off a bus in the long run. The farther we got from New York the more there was to see, to a point, even though the sun – that is, the light that shone through the clouds – was going down. Most of it, however, looked about the same here as it did there – power lines, buildings, bits and pieces of what was left of the Meadowlands. If I didn’t look too closely it almost seemed as if I was back where I came from, heading out to visit Newark or Jersey City. By now I’d been up close to thirty-odd hours, and I felt Morpheus starting to get the upper hand. Somewhere around the time Eulie made a right onto a new highway, I let him put me in a full