Apocalypse in Brooklyn
I am living in the heart of Brooklyn with my colored wife and her two or three children. The wife is now at work, the kids at school. I have come to Brooklyn Heights for the day to work. Specifically, I am at a corner building and have opened the garage door entrance that is both my storage unit and place of business, and today will be moving some things from this location to some other.
I am on the phone with my African friend (Matthew? Walter?), someone I knew at CBC who is now living in Minnesota. He doesn’t know that I am no longer a Christian. We bring one another up to date. I mention that Joe Gambino and I just visited Bill Galus. He expresses delighted surprise, but then I remember that the three of us had recently called Matthew/Walter while we were together and that this is not really a news item. Still, my polite friend has taken it as news. I am trying to think of a way to end the phone call so I can get back to work. And we are disconnected.
A fog is coming over the city.
I lie down on my back on the concrete loading dock and look up at this dramatic weather. There’s an unusual optical property to the fog that makes it almost like looking into a body of water suspended overhead. There’s the suggestion of a lake floor a little distance up in the fog — pebbles and mud, at one moment clear and magnified, the next, murky and blurred. Then there is an illusion of a motorboat speeding overhead — apparently on the surface of this upside-down body of water. I realize I can’t be seeing shapes and shadows up there that are accidentally suggestive of real things, that I must be seeing a reflection of real things.
I tell myself: Aha! The fog is somehow transmitting a reflection of the harbor a mile or so away.
The fog becomes more dense, more like a cloud, with the definite boundaries that clouds appear to have when seen from a distance. Some boys who have been playing and jabbering nearby are becoming excited by this sky. People have been hurrying past me from the start, but now the flow is in the opposite direction — an air of people rushing home to avoid the coming storm.
I am the only one who notices just how near and un-cloudlike the cloud has become. Besides taking on a sharply detailed underside, the cloud is now edged not with wispy vapors but with clumps in the pattern of gravel.
I throw a chunk of asphalt towards it to get a rough measure of its height. My throwing arm is so out of use that my chunk doesn’t reach it, even though I judge the cloud to be no more than 40 feet above me.
Then it seems only 20 feet above. But I still can’t throw a chunk high enough to touch it. My impressive throwing ability could finally be useful, and it’s not in working order.
Then the cloud has come so close there is no need to plumb the distance physically. I can see enough particular detail in its churning vapors to know it is only slightly above me. I pull a clump of dried grass out of the crack where the sidewalk and the building meet and stretch with it towards the cloud, like you might stretch with a whisk broom to get at some cobwegs. I am able to reach the cloud this way. The grass pokes into it without resistance, and I stir the fog a little before pulling the grass out to examine it.
The grass is smoldering and smoking. I call to the boys, “Look, it set the grass on fire.” I see that where the fog has encircled a vertical iron post nearby, a purple, fizzing corrosion is taking place.
“A giant tidal wave is coming,” says a voice.
In the fog I now see the form of an old man. He is wearing the robes and proprietary hat of a Catholic priest of one of the higher ranks — I take him to be a cardinal or something of that degree. He is white and foggy, but definite.
“When is it coming?” I ask him.
“Tomorrow.”
“What time tomorrow?”
“He didn’t say exactly.”
“How deep will it be?”
“Oh, about this deep.”
I will puzzle over that statement for quite awhile afterwards, as I begin to wake up from the dream and wonder, with a regrettable hopefulness, if it’s been a vision — if perhaps others in the New York area have had this same vision, if reports of it would be hitting the internet by the time I was having breakfast. If there would be a flow of refugees northward. If I needed to get the house cleaned up in a hurry for Rob and Celia to take refuge here. I conclude that the coming flood will be about 10 feet deep in Brooklyn Heights — because that was the approximate elevation of the fog when I reached it with the grass from a perch on the loading dock.
At the moment, though, I am concerned with getting useful information from this ghostly messenger. He seems to be there for that purpose. He is remaining in one spot and seems willing to answer questions.
“Should I get my wife and kids out of town today?”
“Oh, let them come home from school and play.”
“Should we leave early in the morning?”
“Oh, no, no,” says the cardinal. His manner is unworried and pleasant, almost a doddering kind of pleasantness, and I’m not liking it. I’m wanting specific, practical answers. I’m trying to respect the fact that God apparently wants to keep things prophetically vague, and trying not to ask this emissary too many questions that he can’t answer — I’m trying to be polite — but I’m getting aggravated, and scared.
That’s when I begin waking up.
I’m asking myself, why would this prophet of doom have such a “no need to rush” attitude. Why the comforting tones rather than hard information and urgency? And I finally piece it together.
It’s because he knows there’s no hope. That already there is no time to escape.
He has talked to me the way a kind person talks to the dying.
I backtrack and figure out what the images were that I initially saw in the fog overhead. I wasn’t seeing a reflection of the harbor, I was seeing the future. It was an overhead-mirror view of the spot I was standing on as it would look sometime the next day — a street submerged under 10 feet of water, with a rescue boat shooting by.
* * *
As I often am with dreams, I am amazed that the answer to the riddles were apparently known by one part of my mind while another part was puzzling them out.