Chapter 14 – Going To The Zoo

This chapter explains a lot. Or at least, it sets up where the explanations are going. Be sure you read chapters 1 - 13 first (available on the previous post to download). Even so, the first three paragraphs printed below won't spoil anything.

One might be getting the idea by now that our hero has some issues.


Chapter 14 – Going To The Zoo

Traffic on the George Washington Bridge had been heavy, but kept moving. Jim hated driving over bridges. He especially hated the GWB, which his father for some unknown reason had always called “the Georgie d'Wash.” Hey, Jimmy, we're going over the Georgie d'Wash – do you want to go up top or underneath? Neither option appealed to Jim. Driving on the upper level was especially nerve wracking. The open gray sky above was divided by cables that looked too thin to support the narrow lanes of concrete carrying massive streams of cars and trucks, all of which seemed bent on forcing Jim to drive faster than he liked, closer to the car in front than he preferred, and far too near the guard rails separating his own non-buoyant conveyance from the cold black water below. Cars were not meant to fly, they weren't meant to float, and he had an uneasy feeling that at any time his could do one and then attempt the other. On windy days the bridge swayed noticeably, more so on the top level where the towers provided a handy fixed reference. Passing under the great suspension towers gave him the willies as well – each time was like crossing the gates of hell.

The lower level was slightly better, in that the sky was blocked from view by the same strips of steel and concrete, a comforting boundary that he could not even accidentally cross. If he stayed in the center lane, the river was so far away it might have been a part of another landscape. But the lower level was dark and noisy and narrow, and with no trucks to throttle the traffic that zipped along at an uncomfortable speed when it was not stopped altogether.

He could have taken one of the tunnels, of course. The Holland had been his favorite route into New York – long and cool and smooth with neatly tiled walls that hardly every dripped and halogen lighting that never varied. He had not taken the Holland since the Towers came down. The skyline looked forever wrong without the twins in their place. Traveling there was like visiting a friend with a freshly amputated limb; however hard he tried to look elsewhere, his attention was always drawn to the stump. The raw empty space was so unnatural it made him physically ill. He'd only driven into lower Manhattan once since the attacks, when thick black columns of poisonous smoke were still fouling the air, and he had gone out of his way to avoid it ever since. In fact, he rarely drove into the city at all; or anywhere else for that matter. But Maya owned a car and didn't like driving there herself – too chaotic, she said – and hauling a toddler around on trains, buses and subways is even less fun than it sounds.