A World Without: After City

by Elliot Alpern

3 A.M.

Join us on this journey through our very own twilight; witness the life that persists among this turning planet. Come, behold the original splendor of our earth mother, this week, on

A World Without:

After City

Day. Sun. Light is not born in this fracture-scape of angles, and yet, with the morning break — light flourishes. Light blazes off buckled steel and rebar, pinging ricochets of day through the old subterraneans. It billows down the used-to-be-streets in rainbow plumes of glass dust. And with this new dawn comes the heat, swift and vicious, twisting the light to a soft roil. 

Down beneath the cracked remains of sidewalks and hot-tar slurry, there exists a different, cooler world. In this tiled cavern system — once referred to as “Penn Station” by the peoples settled above — the sunlight stands as sporadic pillars, sentinels against the pitch-black. Yet, they are not the only watchers of these corridors.



Quiet.



If you listen, very carefully, you can hear… the faint, rhythmic, rapping patter upon tile. Around the clusters of old food stalls, which once offered ancient delicacies such as “Five-dollar footlongs” and “Cinnastix” — there thrives, a budding family home. We’ve not yet been invited in for supper, but let’s take a closer look, shall we? 

These white-tailed deer — odocoileus virgianus, otherwise referred to as “Virginia deer” — have long clung to patches of these islands, despite the overgrowth of concrete and tarmac. Yet only in the decades since natural reclamation have they dared venture into this peninsula itself, a habitat devastated for centuries by the eradicated homo sapiens.  

A female white-tail, a wizened doe, has taken this chance to sun herself in a spot of day. Her right ear twitches in pleasure at the sudden heat; the left has been lost. She is the eldest, the innate matriarch; it is not unlikely she lost the ear in the first voyage of white-tails to this area. 

It is unknown if the main migration occurred by bridge, from nearer pockets of white-tail population — or soon after New York Bay cradled the last bridge to fall. 

Her children forage nearby, for cellophane bags to pop beneath hooves. Virginia deer are not, perhaps, the most “intelligent” of creatures, but they have adjusted rapidly to a life of scavenging in these halls. Our mother deer is content to sunbath and listen, even with just the one ear, twirling constantly. She can sense the staccato of hoof upon tile; that is a close-enough approximation. The risk is, admittedly, low. Her natural predators; indeed most natural predators, cannot tolerate the arid upper-lands, and find too few prey in the dark spaces. Even the rats, once sizable enough to swarm and devour larger mammals, have dwindled since humanity went extinct, as so much else. 

In this place, the deer are no longer prey. 

It is unlikely that these halls will offer enough leftover sustenance to support further deer populations; they may not suffice even this family for much longer. Soon our one-eared deermother will gather her progeny, and guide them toward any one of the tunnels that spider deeper into the earth. 



Far below the echoes of hoof on tile, deeper than these deer might ever plumb, thrives a far larger family — or at least, a family more numerous. 

Undisturbed by the vibrations of old machines, the greater population of periplaneta americana — the American cockroach — have congregated here, in a massive limestone hollow. This great meeting has never been witnessed; indeed, it has never been performed. Instinctually embedded in each and every American cockroach, this delicate behavior is immediately interfered with, disrupted by the slightest hum of machinery. 

No longer a bother. 



This, is the symphony of the water bug. 



The American cockroaches have arranged themselves in measured, interlocking circles, legs clutching one another’s, wings upraised. They wait for the command of their conductor, the matriarch of this hive, who has just now arrived, and readies herself for performance. 



If all conditions are perfect, and the matriarch is diligent in her directions, it is possible that they may produce the ideal resonance, the natural frequency of the earth itself. Rather tricky business, of course, but this is important work. 



They must achieve utter harmony to sing the planet apart.