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Smite, Armageddon, Ladies’ Underwear

Gimbels¹ was dead. Once a grand stalwart of Herald Square, second only to Macy’s—sold, resold, gutted, and by century’s end, ghouled into a mall and office block. It was no surprise, as the fate of the department store was settled a decade earlier by the coming of enclosed shopping malls that pimpled America’s landscape. After all, who wanted to queue with Otis in the slow ribbons of one store’s denim, when you could stroll from store to store, eat a corndog, and do some people watching at the same time?

Meanwhile, Manhattan had once again descended into abject destitution. On the surface: Alphabet City reclaimed from rubble, Rockefeller Center sanitized, the Flatiron District recast as hipster paradise. You had to look closer—and then, like rats in a dark alley, once spied, couldn’t be unseen—The Garment District². It was crowded, gray, even on sunny days, immune to glitz. The people who worked in its buildings were gray too—real working-class, dyed-in-the-wool ham and eggers, pinching out an existence in worn herringbone and stained trench coats. To the west, the markets of flesh groaned beneath their own abominations. To the north, towers of light blazed false idols in ten thousand watts. The city bore witness to its own corruption.

Knocking down the building would have been the noble way out. Instead excavators ripped, jack hammers gouged. The developers—unknowingly stirring the bones of things that shouldn’t be stirred.

By the time I arrived in 2014, an ad agency had taken over three floors on the perimeter of its ‘atrium’—an opening big enough to shame a Macy’s parade balloon. The mall rested in the belly of the once proud building. Its fluorescent sprawl drawing blinking tourists and dead-eyed shoplifters alike.

Beneath it ran the Gimbels Passageway, once a bustling artery from Penn Station to Herald Square, now cracked, clouded with neglect. Alien sociologists might have called the commuters what they were: pulses of shiny krill, tunneling soot-stained toward their hatcheries around the city.

I was one of them. Let him who is without sin…

I worked on the fifth floor—the middle earth of all activities. Stripped of majesty, the building resembled an abandoned erector set with serial drop-ceilings. Each level had a perimeter hallway—eight laps to a mile. I’d circle the floor, looking past the impersonal glass-walled offices, thinking of all the merchandise once announced by the elevators: ‘Fifth floor—women’s fashions, furs, and notions. Going up.’

The agency installed a free coffee bar on seven, but the perk quickly got old—the way it does when you work at an ice cream or a burger joint. Venti mermaid cups littered the area. In the fall, the odor of pumpkin lattes filled the void. The space was eerily quiet, despite its massive square footage. I’m not saying it was haunted, but it did have a feeling of dread, like something bad was just about to happen.

Like the building, the breakroom microwave oven was tired. God knows how long it sat there—probably a leftover from the store’s days of glory. The sounds that came from it sealed the deal—its groaning turntable, stopping only when the mechanical dial ran its course. Like an egg timer. The insides were no better—with burnt Manwich tendrils and Egg Beater skid marks a permanent part of its shell. Everything took twice as long to heat up, due to all the detritus built-up on its insides. No one ever held up a radiation leakage meter to it, but I’m sure it was ‘hot.’

To this day, no one knows who did it. But someone put something toxic in the oven and set the timer to stun. The odor was familiar at first, like sitting near the kitchen while the chef seared an expired catch-of-the-day. Then it grew—an off-smell, like a digestion-defying late-night dinner escape that no one would own up to. Wrinkled noses. Denials in pantomime.

If that were the end of it, the scene would have been relegated to a Christmas party joke.

But it wasn’t the end. The odor began to change—from something less necro-pescatarian to something older, rawer, with us the subjects of its misting thrall.

The noisome thing sprouted arms, dragged itself through the hallways, and clamped onto every nostril in reach. Fish. Bad fish. Cooked, bad fish.

Something had awakened.

A swell of Frankensteined Galilee Sardine bloomed through the vents and tile cracks. Atomized Skull and crossbones rose over the atrium.

It choked the entire building, taking on a new life in clothing, conference chairs, even the fake fig trees. We were witnessing an ichthys scrawled not in sand but in sulfur. People tried to flee: running without purpose—disrobing, tearing at their hair, scraping the unseen horror off themselves. Cubicles turned into confessionals—elevators seized, stairways clogged—some on lower levels threw themselves over the railings, speaking in tongues. Humanity stumbling like poisoned fish.

They poured into the streets like Fruity Pebbles, observed from a twentieth-story window. They scattered west, past the statue of Horace Greeley³ and toward the Sichuan restaurants on Thirty-Eighth Street—their pungent aromas swallowed by the spreading doom.

They pounded on the doors of the Millinery Synagogue⁴ . Locked.

The hazmat unit arrived, clad in suits that made them look like a legion of the Sardaukar⁵. The whole building was declared a Class I Disaster Area. The team fought their way into the doors, some getting trampled by employees and tourists in exodus.

Once the area was contained, and the microwave cordoned off like a crime scene, they threw a colossal plastic shroud over it, shrink-wrapping the ten-story block in protective sheeting. It looked absurdly festive—like Christo⁶ wrapped a department store. A final bit of irony over a building that once held the city as its oyster.

‘Is it somebody’s present?’

A kid asked behind a gas mask.

I walked through abandoned streets, towards the ferry.

Predictably, Wall Street wasn’t affected at all. The air itself was deferential, cleaving around the towers as if sparing the architects of ruin. They floated skyward in parachutes and jet packs, spared by the very storm they created.

The stench began to fade by the time I got to Jersey City, although the water remained a neon orange. I wasn’t dreaming, but I wasn’t awake either as I turned the key to my front door.

Something was missing.

I looked up and saw pestilent nimbus clouds where the great Lady of the Harbor⁷ normally guarded the channel.

She had abandoned her post and was spotted swimming toward Connecticut.

1. Gimbels — Macy’s forgotten rival on Herald Square. Opened 1910, closed 1986, gutted into offices and a mall no one asked for. Immortalized in Miracle on 34th Street (1947), where Macy’s and Gimbels briefly join hands in holiday capitalism — ‘goodwill toward men, and profits for everyone.’

2. Garment District — Thirty-Fourth to Forty-Second, Fifth to Ninth: once the thumping heart of American fashion, now a gray husk of bolts, zippers, and sweatshop ghosts.

3. Horace Greeley — Editor, reformer, presidential loser. His statue slumps in Herald Square as if still muttering his advice: ‘Go West, young man’ — which the panicked crowd obligingly does, only not the way he meant it.

4. Millinery Synagogue — Congregation B’nai Israel Chaim, founded 1934 by hat-makers. Worshippers of G-d by night, ribbon and felt by day. Tucked into West 38th, right where the trades lived and died.

5. Sardaukar — Emperor’s shock troops from Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965). Bred on the hell-planet Salusa Secundus, they were ruthless, fanatical, and supposedly unbeatable — until a band of desert outcasts smoked them in the sand. If hazmat crews in midtown looked like anyone, it was them.

6. Christo and Jeanne-Claude — With Jeanne-Claude, the duo who shrink-wrapped the world’s landmarks in fabric. They once covered bridges and islands in drapery; here, they’d have claimed the department store shroud as a commission, because fame, money, no matter what.

7. Lady of the Harbor — Bartholdi’s green goddess of welcome since 1886. Symbol of immigrants, freedom, postcards, snow globes. And apparently a good swimmer.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Patrick Carella writes fiction and creative nonfiction about family, memory, advertising, obsession, and the strange dignity of American life. He is an MFA candidate at the University of Texas at El Paso. His work has appeared in Wicked Shadow Press, CafeLit, Gorko Gazette, and is forthcoming in BULL, Hobart, The Eunoia Review, and The Hooghly Review. He lives in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, with his wife and their pit bulls, who remain unimpressed by literary publication.