The Battery is the southern waterfront endpoint of Ish’s journey through New York City. Looking out across the lower bay toward the ocean, he recognizes it as the end of the road: a place where his passage through the deserted city meets both the limits of his search and the long historical arc of his family’s arrival in America.

The southern end of the journey

After walking down Broadway and passing Wall Street, Ish drives the remaining distance south to The Battery. From there he gazes across the lower bay toward the ocean. The view gives a physical boundary to his eastward journey: other survivor communities might remain in Europe, South America, or on islands, but he cannot go to discover them. The Battery is therefore not merely a point on his route; it marks the end of what he can reach and know.

The waterfront also belongs to a city whose infrastructure and public order have fallen away. In the surrounding New York scenes, Ish sees the consequences of human absence in flooded streets and deteriorating systems; elsewhere, the lights persist for a time before the unattended power network begins to fail. These details establish the wider condition against which The Battery’s still-open view of the bay acquires its force: the city remains physically present, but the networks that once made it function are no longer reliably maintained.

A return to the point of arrival

At The Battery, Ish thinks of his Dutch ancestor, who had come ashore there roughly three centuries earlier. That recollection makes his own arrival at the waterfront feel like a circle completed. His ancestor had entered a place that would become part of a vast human settlement; Ish stands there after that civilization has disappeared, unable to continue outward in search of other survivors. The same shore thus holds two radically different beginnings: the founding arrival remembered through family history and the solitary limit of Ish’s post-disaster travels.

Liberty and the ruined harbor

The Statue of Liberty is visible from the waterfront, and Ish responds to it ironically. With the society that gave the statue its public meaning gone, liberty has become something he possesses in a stark, diminished sense: freedom from other people, but also separation from them. The emblem remains standing while the collective life it represented has vanished, turning the view into a contrast between inherited national ideals and Ish’s actual solitude.

A large liner lies beached near Governor’s Island, tilted at a strange angle above the low-tide water. Ish imagines that it had been infected before leaving Europe, that passengers and crew died as it approached, and that it made for a port which had already stopped sending signals. His account of the ship’s final approach is conjectural, but its stranded hull gives visible form to the broken connection between continents: no tugs come out, and the harbor no longer answers. He imagines the vessel gradually covered by mud and becoming the rusted center of a small, tree-covered island. In this image, The Battery’s ocean-facing horizon offers no route onward so much as a view of human structures being absorbed into the landscape.