"So we"ll all just wait for Mommy," he announced, trying to be, until Emily arrived, the leader of this defenseless, isolated trio. "I know!" he exclaimed. "Let"s make Doughboy cookies for Mommy when she comes home! She"ll be hungry!" And he leaned over and poked Vicky in the tummy, as if she were the Doughboy in the television commercials.
But she didn"t laugh or even smile. Her eyes beneath her bangs and serious straight brows were feverishly bright. She was burning to know what new and forbidden thing was happening on the other side of the window shade. And so was Lucille, but she denied herself turning on television, and Dan denied himself another visit to the terrace, to verify his desolating cosmic intuition.
Emily was home in an hour, safe and aghast and sweating with the unaccustomed exercise of marching down the East Side and across the Manhattan Bridge in a mob of others fleeing the island. Dan"s daughter at thirty-seven was slim and hard and professional, a trim soldier-woman a far cry from her indolent, fleshy mother. She turned on the little kitchen TV right away and was not pleased by the smell of fresh-baked cookies. "We"re trying to train Victoria away from sweets," she told her father, and when he explained how he and Lucille had sought to distract the child, commanded, "Let her watch a little. This is history. This is huge. There"s no hiding it." In the Heights, she told them, auto traffic had ceased, and men with briefcases, their dark suits dusted with ash, were stalking up the middle of Henry Street. She hid the warm cookies on an out-of-reach shelf; she sent Lucille off to pick up Victoria"s older sister, Hilary, at her day school; she gave a supermarket shopping list to her father while she went to the bank to withdraw plenty of cash, just in case society broke down totally. Vicky went with her.
Dan found early lunch hour in progress on Montague Street. Voices tw.a.n.ged over the outdoor tables much as usual, though self-consciously, somehow, as if unseen television cameras were grinding away. The street scene seemed enacted; even the boys loafing outside of the supermarket appeared to be conscious of a new weight of attention bearing upon them-the importance, in the thickened air, of survivors. The air smelled caustic and snowed flurrying motes of ash. Sensory impressions. .h.i.t Dan harder than usual, because G.o.d had been wiped from his brain. In his previous life, commonsense atheism had not been ingenious enough for him, nor had it seemed sufficiently gracious toward the universe. Now he had been shown how little the universe cared for his good will.
He entered the supermarket and pushed his cart along. The place was not crowded with panic shoppers, but rather empty instead, and darker than usual, sickly and crepuscular, like one of those pre-Christian afterlives, Hades or Sheol. A few people moved through the aisles, past the bins of bagels and shelves of high-priced gourmet snacks, as if for the first time, haltingly; they scanned one another"s faces for a recognition that was almost there, a greeting on the tips of their tongues. Incredulity edged toward acceptance. They were coping, they were not panicking, they were demonstrating calm to the enemy.
Dan returned to the apartment laden with plastic bags, two on each hand; the handles, stretched thin by the weight of oranges and milk and cranberry juice, had dug into his palms. Emily had come back with plenty of cash and several plans. Already, signs advertising communal events were going up on lampposts: there were blood donations up at the Marriott, near Borough Hall, and a special service at Grace Church at six. In the subdued camaraderie of the crowd at the Marriott, the father and daughter filled out laborious forms side by side and were told, by bullhorn, to go home, the blood bank was overflowing: "There is no more need for the present, but if any develops we have your names." The fact had dawned that there were almost no mere injuries; the bodies were all minced in the two vast buildings" wreckage.
At the church, where he and the four females he escorted found room in a back pew, Dan marvelled at the human animal: like dogs, we creep back to lick the hand of a G.o.d Who, if He exists, has just given us a vicious kick. The harder He kicks, the more fervently we cringe and creep forward to lick His hand. The great old church, a relic of postCivil War ecclesiastical prosperity, was for this special occasion full, and the minister, a stocky young woman wearing a bell of glossy, short-cut hair, announced in a clarion voice that at the moment several members of this congregation were still among the missing. She read their names. "Let us pray for their safety, and for the souls of all who perished today, and for the fate of this great nation." With a rustle that rose into the murk of the stony vaults above them, all bowed their heads.
Dan felt detached, like a visiting Martian. His sense of alienation persisted in the weeks that followed, as flags sprang from every Ohio porch bracket and G.o.d Bless America G.o.d Bless America was written in shaving cream on every shop window. Back in Cincinnati, having returned, two days later than planned, by bus, he looked across a river not to smoking towers but to Kentucky, where each pickup truck sprouted a soon-tattered banner of national pride and defiance. Heartland religiosity, though its fundamentalism and bombastic puritanism had often made him wince, was something Dan had been comfortable with; now it seemed barbaric. On television, the President clumsily grasped the rhetoric of war, then got used to it, then got good at it. The nightly news showed how, in New York City, impromptu shrines had sprung up on sidewalks and outside of fire stations across the city. Candles guttered under color Xeroxes of the forever missing, memorial flowers wilted in their paper cones and plastic sheaths. Dan found himself aggrieved by the grotesque and pitiable sight of a great modern nation attempting to heal itself through this tired old magic of flags and candles-the human spirit stubbornly spilling its colorful vain gestures into the void. was written in shaving cream on every shop window. Back in Cincinnati, having returned, two days later than planned, by bus, he looked across a river not to smoking towers but to Kentucky, where each pickup truck sprouted a soon-tattered banner of national pride and defiance. Heartland religiosity, though its fundamentalism and bombastic puritanism had often made him wince, was something Dan had been comfortable with; now it seemed barbaric. On television, the President clumsily grasped the rhetoric of war, then got used to it, then got good at it. The nightly news showed how, in New York City, impromptu shrines had sprung up on sidewalks and outside of fire stations across the city. Candles guttered under color Xeroxes of the forever missing, memorial flowers wilted in their paper cones and plastic sheaths. Dan found himself aggrieved by the grotesque and pitiable sight of a great modern nation attempting to heal itself through this tired old magic of flags and candles-the human spirit stubbornly spilling its colorful vain gestures into the void.
Some days before Dan"s revelation, a stocky thirty-three-year-old Muslim called, like millions of his co-religionists around the world, Mohamed, briefly hesitated before ordering a fourth Scotch-on-the-rocks in a dark unholy place, a one-story roadside strip joint on an unfashionable stretch of Florida"s east coast. His companion, a younger, thinner man named Zaeed, lifted his slender hand from the table as if to protest, then let it weightlessly fall back. Their training regimen had inculcated the importance of blending in, and getting drunk was a sure method of merging with America, this unclean society disfigured by an appalling laxity of laws and an electronic delirium of supposed opportunities and pleasures. The very air, icily air-conditioned, tasted of falsity. The whiskey burned in Mohamed"s throat like a fire against which he must repeatedly test his courage, his resolve. It is G.o.d"s kindled fire, which shall mount above the hearts of the d.a.m.ned. It is G.o.d"s kindled fire, which shall mount above the hearts of the d.a.m.ned.
On the shallow stage, ignored by most of the customers scattered at small tables and only now and then brushed by his own glance, a young woman, naked save for strategic patches of tinsel and a dusting of artificial glitter on her face, writhed around a bra.s.s pole to an irritating mutter of tuneless music. She was as lean as a starveling boy but for the protuberances of fat that distinguish women; these, Mohamed knew, had been swollen by injection to seem tautly round and perfectly doll-like. The wh.o.r.e was entwining herself upside down around her pole, and scissoring open her legs so that a tinsel thong battered back at the light. Her long hair hung in a heavy platinum sheet to the stage floor, which was imbued with filth by her sisters" feet. There were three dancers: a Negress who performed barefoot, flashing soles and palms the color of silver polish; a henna-haired s.l.u.t who wore gla.s.s high heels and kept fluttering her tongue between her lips and even mimed licking the bra.s.s pole; and this blonde, who danced least persuasively, with motions mechanically repeated while her eyes, their doll-like blue outlined in thick black as in an Egyptian wall-painting, stared into the darkness without making eye contact.
She did not see him, nor did Mohamed in his soul see her. Zaeed-with whom Mohamed was rehearsing once again the details of their enterprise, its many finely interlocked and synchronized parts, down to the last-minute cell-phone calls that would give the final go-ahead-had been drinking sweet drinks called Daiquiris. Suddenly he excused himself and hurried to the bathroom. Zaeed was young and resident in this land of infidels less than two months; its liquor was still poison to him, and its licentious women were fascinating. He had not grown Mohamed"s impervious sh.e.l.l, and his English was exceedingly poor. The wh.o.r.e"s globular b.r.e.a.s.t.s hung down parallel to her lowered sheet of hair while her shaved or plucked crotch twinkled and flashed.
Through half-shut eyes and the shifting transparencies of whiskey, Mohamed could see a semblance to the ignorant fellahin"s conception of Paradise, where sloe-eyed virgins wait, on silken couches, among flowing rivers, to serve the martyrs delicious fruit. But they are manifestations, these houris, of the highest level of purity, white in their flesh and gracious in their submission. They are radiant negatives of these underfed s.l.u.ts who for paltry dollars mechanically writhed on this filthy stage.
Another s.l.u.t, the middle-aged waitress, wrinkled and thickened-a pot of curdled lewdness, of soured American opportunities-was waving a slip of paper at him. "Going off-duty... finish up my tables... forty-eight dollars." Her tw.a.n.ging "cracker" accent was difficult to penetrate, and from her agitation he gathered that this was not the first time this evening that he had offended her.
He did not see why he should hurry to pay. Zaeed was still in the bathroom, and the sandwiches they had ordered were still on the table, uneaten. That was it: she had offered some time ago-an hour? ten minutes?-to clear the table and he told her he was not done, though in truth the food disgusted him. It was, like everything in this devilish country, excessive and wasteful-an open hot roast-beef sandwich, not rare but gray, now cold and limp on its bread, dead meat scattered beneath his hands, as far beneath them as if under the wings of an airplane. The disgusting sandwich had been served with French fries and coleslaw, garbage not fit for a street dog. Yet he kept thinking he would turn to it, to m.u.f.fle the burning of the whiskey while he spoke to Zaeed, hardening the younger man"s sh.e.l.l for the great deed that had been laid out like a precision drawing in a German engineering cla.s.s. Mohamed had studied engineering among the unbelievers, absorbing the mathematics they had stolen centuries ago from the Arabs.
He must eat. The day, the fateful morning, of culmination was approaching, and he must be strong, his hands and nerves steady, his will relentless, his body vital and pure, shaven of its hair. The greatness of the deed that was held within him pressed upward like a species of nausea, straining his throat with a desire to cry out-to proclaim, as had done his prophetic namesake the Messenger, the magnificence, beyond all virtues and qualities imaginable on earth, of G.o.d and His fiery justice. For the unbelievers We have prepared fetters and chains, and a blazing Fire. Flames of fire shall be lashed at you, and melted bra.s.s. For the unbelievers We have prepared fetters and chains, and a blazing Fire. Flames of fire shall be lashed at you, and melted bra.s.s.
The blonde wh.o.r.e flicked away the sparkling thong and with spread legs waddled about the pole showing her shaved slit, an awkward, ugly maneuver that won scattered cheers from the jaded tables in the darkness. Zaeed returned, looking paler. He had been sick, he confessed. Mohamed abruptly felt a great love for his brother in conspiracy, the younger brother he had never had. Mohamed had been raised in a flowery Cairo suburb with a pair of sisters; it was to keep them from ending as s.l.u.ts that he had dedicated himself to the holy jihad. They were too light-headed to know that the temptations twittering at them from television and radio were from Satan, designed to lure them into eternal flame. Their parents, in their European clothes, their third-rate prosperity measured out in imitation-Western goods, were blind to the evil they wrought upon their children. h.o.a.rding their comforts in their heavily curtained, servant-run house in Giza, they were like eyeless cave creatures, blind to the grandeur of the One Who will wrathfully reduce this flimsy world and its distractions to a desert. Mohamed carried that sublime desert, its night sky clamorous with stars, within him. When the sky is rent asunder; when the stars are scattered and the oceans roll together; when the graves tumble in ruin; each soul shall know what it has done and what it has failed to do. When the sky is rent asunder; when the stars are scattered and the oceans roll together; when the graves tumble in ruin; each soul shall know what it has done and what it has failed to do.
The waitress had returned accompanied by a man, a hireling, the bald bartender in a yellow T-shirt advertising something in three-dimensional speeding letters, a beer or perhaps a sports team, Mohamed could not quite bring it into focus. Zaeed looked worried; he exuded the sickly sweat of fear, and his movements betrayed a desire to leave this unholy place. Mohamed quenched the boy"s alarm with a touch on his forearm and stood to confront the hireling in the speeding T-shirt. Standing so quickly dizzied him but did not weaken his wits or dull his awareness of the movements around him. A fresh female on the stage, the abdah abdah with bare feet again, dressed in filmy scarves that would soon come off, altered the light of the place, diluting its darkness as the spotlight played upon her. Pale faces, natives of this forsaken coast, turned to witness Mohamed"s quarrel with the hirelings. Within him his great secret felt an eggsh.e.l.l"s thickness from bursting forth. More than once, small mishaps and moments of friction-a traffic ticket, an INS summons, a hasty slip of the tongue with an inquisitive neighbor seeking, in that doglike American way, to be friendly-had threatened to expose the whole elaborate, thoroughly meditated structure; but the All-Merciful had extended His protecting hand. The Great Satan had been rendered stupid and sluggish; its sugary diet of freedom had softened its mechanically straightened teeth. with bare feet again, dressed in filmy scarves that would soon come off, altered the light of the place, diluting its darkness as the spotlight played upon her. Pale faces, natives of this forsaken coast, turned to witness Mohamed"s quarrel with the hirelings. Within him his great secret felt an eggsh.e.l.l"s thickness from bursting forth. More than once, small mishaps and moments of friction-a traffic ticket, an INS summons, a hasty slip of the tongue with an inquisitive neighbor seeking, in that doglike American way, to be friendly-had threatened to expose the whole elaborate, thoroughly meditated structure; but the All-Merciful had extended His protecting hand. The Great Satan had been rendered stupid and sluggish; its sugary diet of freedom had softened its mechanically straightened teeth.
Mohamed felt himself mighty in his power to restrain his tongue, that muscle which summons armies and moves mountains. He produced his wallet and opened it to display the thickness of twenties and fifties and even hundreds, depicting in dry green engraving the dead heroes of this Jew-dominated government. "Plenty to pay your f.u.c.king bill," he told the threatening man in the yellow T-shirt. "And look, my good man, look here-" Not content with the cash as a demonstration of his potency, Mohamed showed, too swiftly for a close examination, the card registering him in flying school and another, forged in Germany, stating him to be a licensed pilot. "I am a pilot."
Impressed and mollified, his antagonist asked, in the languid accents of a tongue long steeped in drugs, "Hey, cool. What airline?"
Mohamed said, "American." It was an inspired utterance that, in the utterance, became blazingly true, as the suras of his namesake, the Prophet, became true when they blazed from the Messenger"s mouth, promising salvation for believers and for the others the luminous boiling Fire. He had been not some ridiculous crucified G.o.d but the perfect person, insan-i-kamil insan-i-kamil. Mohamed"s a.s.sertion sounded so just, so prophetic, he repeated it, challenging his bald, drugged enemy to contradict him: "American Airlines."
From where Jim Finch sat in his cubicle, about a third of the way into the vast floor-a full acre-populated by bond traders and their computer monitors, the building"s windows held a view of mostly sky, cloudless today. If he stood up, he could see New Jersey"s low sh.o.r.e beyond the Statue of Liberty. From this height, even the Statue, which was facing the other way, looked small, like the souvenir statuettes for sale in every Wall Street tourist trap. Jim lived in Jersey-three children and four bedrooms on an eighth of an acre in Irvington-and from where he lived he could see, picking his spots between the asphalt rooftops and leafy trees, where he worked. To impress the kids he tried to locate his exact floor, counting down from the top, though in truth it was hard from that distance to be certain; the skysc.r.a.per was built of vertical ribs that ran individual floors and windows together. Steel tubes, like a row of drinking straws, held it up, and that made the windows narrower than you felt they should be, so the view from his cubicle was more up and down than sideways. Today the windows were a row of smooth blue panels, except that curling gusts of smoke and flickering pieces of paper strangely invaded the blue from below. Some minutes ago, deep underneath him, while he had been talking to a client on the phone, there had been a thump, distant like a truck hatch being slammed down on West Street, and yet communicating a shudder to his desk.
His cell phone rang. Jim"s motion of s.n.a.t.c.hing it off his belt was habitual and instant, like a snake"s strike. But instead of business it was Marcy, back in New Jersey. "Jim, honey," she said, "don"t hate me, I forgot to say, you went out the door so fast, when you pick up the cleaning on the way home could you swing by the Pathmark and pick up a half-gallon of whole milk and maybe check out their cantaloupes."
"O.K., sure."
"The ones last week went straight from green to punky, but they said there"d be better ones in on Monday. There should be a little give to the skins but your thumb shouldn"t leave a dent." He watched a piece of charred insulation foam rise into view and then float away. "For the milk there"s plenty of skimmed for ourselves but Frankie and Kristen, the way they"re growing, they just wolf the whole kind down; she"s as bad as he is. Honest, I meant to pick some up but the cart was already so full. Sor Sorry, hon."
"Hey, Marcy-"
"Any dessert you"d like for yourself, buy it. And maybe-be sure to check the sell-by date-a half-dozen eggs, the large large size, not the size, not the extra extra-large. But don"t forget Annie has that event at the church hall tonight, six-thirty, the beginning of indoor soccer, she"s very very nervous and wants us both there." nervous and wants us both there."
"Honey-"
"The new young a.s.sistant minister scares her. She says he"s uptight-he wants too much to win."
"Hey, Marcy, could you please for Chrissake shut up?"
There was a hurt silence, then her voice tiptoed back. "What is it, Jim? You sound strange."
"Something strange happened a couple minutes ago, I don"t know what. There was this thump underneath us; I thought it was on the street. But everything shook, and now there"s smoke you can see out the windows. Hold on." Cy Walsh, the man in the cubicle across from his, was signalling for his attention, and tersely told him some things that Jim relayed to Marcy. "The interior phone lines seem to be all out. People have come back saying the elevators aren"t working and the stairs are full of smoke."
"Oh my G.o.d, Jim."
"n.o.body"s panicking, I mean almost n.o.body. I"m sure it"ll work out. I mean, how bad can it be?"
"Oh my G.o.d."
"Honey, stop saying that. It doesn"t help. They"ll figure it out. I can"t keep talking, they got to start moving us somewhere. Hey. Marcy. You won"t believe this, but the floor"s warm. Actually f.u.c.king warm. warm."
"Oh, Jimmy, do do something! Hang up whenever you have to. I"ve always hated those flimsy-looking buildings, and you being up so high." something! Hang up whenever you have to. I"ve always hated those flimsy-looking buildings, and you being up so high."
"Listen, Marcy. What phone are you on? The upstairs portable?"
"Yes." Her voice trembled, putting extra syllables into the word, ye-ess, ye-ess, like a child scared she has done wrong and will be punished. Across the miles between them they shared the sensation of being scolded children-a rubbed, watery feeling in their abdomens. like a child scared she has done wrong and will be punished. Across the miles between them they shared the sensation of being scolded children-a rubbed, watery feeling in their abdomens.
He asked her, "Go into Annie"s room and look out the window. Tell me what you see."
While he waited, there was human movement among the desks, herd movement with b.u.mps and shouts, but he didn"t feel it had a direction he should join. A rising smell, a tarry industrial smell, oily and sickening-sweet, reminded him of airport runways and the vibrations you see around the engines while waiting to take off.
"Jim?"
"Still here. What can you see from Annie"s window?"
"Oh G.o.d, I can see smoke smoke! From sort of near the top; it"s the tower on the left, the one you work in. Jim, I"m scared. There"s a kind of black ink running down between the grooves. What can it be? Remember that missile that maybe brought down that plane off Long Island?"
"Honey, don"t be dumb. Some kind of malfunction, it must be, within the building. There"s enough wiring in the walls to fry China if there"s a short. Don"t worry, they"ll figure it out. They have guys paid a fortune to sit around and plan how to handle contingencies. Still, I must say-"
"What, Jimmy? What must you say?"
"I was starting to say it"s getting hard to breathe in here. Somebody just smashed a window. Jesus. They"re chucking chairs right through the windows. Hey, Marcy?"
"Yes? Yes? Yes?"
"I don"t know, but maybe this isn"t so good."
"The smoke is coming from a floor somewhere under yours," she offered hopefully, shakily. "I can"t count how many."
"Don"t try." Her voice was a connection to the world but it was entangling him, holding him back. "Listen. In case I don"t make it. I love you."
"Oh my G.o.d! Don"t say it! Just be normal!"
"I can"t be normal. This isn"t normal."
"Can"t you get up to a higher floor and wait on the roof?"
"I think people are trying it. Can you tell the kids how much I love them?"
"Ye-ess." Breathlessly. She wasn"t arguing, it wasn"t like her; her giving up like this frightened him. It made him realize how serious this was, how unthinkably serious.
He tried to think practically. "All the stuff you need should be in the filing cabinet beside my desk, the middle drawer. Lenny Palotta can help you, he has the mutual-fund data, and the insurance policies."
"G.o.d, don"t, don"t, darling. Don"t think that way. Just get out, can"t you?" darling. Don"t think that way. Just get out, can"t you?"
"Sure, probably." People were moving toward the windows, it was the coolest place, the place to breathe, at the height of an airplane tucking its wheels back with that little concussion and snap that worries inexperienced pa.s.sengers. "But, just in case, you do whatever you want."
"What do you mean, Jim, do whatever I want? You"re not making sense."
"s.h.i.t, Marcy. I mean, you know, live your life. Do what looks best for yourself and the kids. Don"t let anything cramp your style. Tell Annie in case I miss it that I wanted to be there tonight." Of all things, this made him want to cry, the image of his plump little solemn daughter in soccer shorts, scared and pink in the face. The smoke was blinding him, a.s.saulting his eyes.
"Cramp my style?"
"My blessing, for Chrissake, Marcy. I"m giving a blessing on anything you decide to do. It"s all right. Feel free."
"Oh, Jim, no. No. No. How can this be How can this be hap happening?"
He couldn"t talk more; the smoke, the heat, the jet-fuel stink were chasing him to the windows, where silhouettes were climbing up into the blue panels, to get some air. Cy Walsh was already there, in the crowd. Jim Finch replaced the phone on his belt deftly; he instinctively grabbed his suit coat and sprinted, crouching, across the hot floor to his co-workers cl.u.s.tered at the windows. They were family, they had been his nine-to-five family for years. They were problem-solvers and would show him what to do. Like an airplane seizing alt.i.tude in its wings, he left gravity behind. Connections were breaking, obligations falling away. He felt for these seconds as light as a newborn.
The nice young man beside her told her he was in sales management, on his way to a telecom convention in San Francisco, but he played rugby on weekends in Van Cortlandt Park, in the Bronx. It surprised Carolyn that there were any rugby games in the United States. Ages ago in her long life, after the war, she had spent a year in England and been taken to a rugby game, in Cambridge, and remembered heavy-thighed men in shorts and striped shirts struggling in the mud, under the low, damp, chilly clouds, pushing at each other-there was a word they had used she couldn"t remember-and for spurts carrying the slippery oval ball in a two-handed, sashaying way that looked comically girlish to a woman accustomed to the military precision and frontal collisions of American football. To those same eyes it seemed curious that they played nearly naked, in short shorts, and yet no one, at least that day, got hurt.
The introductory courtesies came early in the flight, out of Newark. The plane had sat stalled on the runway for half an hour but then had pushed into the air and climbed and banked so that the huge wing with its skinny little aerial on the tip threatened, it seemed to her elderly sense of balance, to spill them back onto the sun-streaked flat Earth of streets and housetops and highways below. It was a remarkably clear day. Carolyn had flown a great deal in her life, more than she had ever expected to as a child, when flying was something heroes did, test pilots and Lindbergh, and the whole family would rush out into the yard to see a blimp float overhead. Her first flights had been to college, in Ohio, into the old Cleveland-Hopkins Airport, in b.u.mpy two-engine prop planes, early Douglas all-metals. Daddy, a great man for progress, flew the family for a week"s spring vacation to Bermuda from New York on a British Air four-engine flying boat, and then put her on a Pan Am Boeing Clipper to London for her post-graduate year abroad: there had been a fuelling stop in Greenland, and actual beds where you could stretch out, and meals, with real silver, that people were too nauseated and anxious to eat. After marriage to Robert, she flew to the Caribbean and Arizona and Paris on vacations, and on some of his lecture trips as he became distinguished, and on three-day visits to her children when they married and scattered to places like Minneapolis and Dallas, and on matriarchal viewings of new grandchildren-to all the ceremonies that her descendants generated as they grew and aged. After Robert died, she had given herself an around-the-world tour, a widow"s self-indulgence in her grief that no one could begrudge her, though her children, with their inheritance in mind, did raise their eyebrows. They couldn"t understand the need, after sharing a life with a person for all these years, to get away from everything familiar.
All in all she couldn"t begin to count how many hundreds of thousands of miles she had flown, but she had never really liked it-the plane"s panicky run into lift-off, like some cartoon animal churning its legs and gritting its teeth, and the abrupt sudden banking, tilting and leaning on invisible air, and the changes in the sound of the engines n.o.body in the c.o.c.kpit explained, and the sudden mysterious sharp jiggling over the ocean, your coffee swinging wildly in your cup, your heart in your throat. The planes had gotten bigger and smoother, to be sure. Some of those early flights, looking back, were little better than the rides in amus.e.m.e.nt parks designed to be terrifying-those little silver turboprops that bounced over the Appalachians with the tiny rivers below catching the sun, the stubby island-hoppers out of San Juan where you walked up the steep aisle and the lovely black stewardesses gave you candy to suck for pressure in your ears. People used to dress up as if for a formal tea, even-could it be?-with hats and white gloves. Now these big broad jets were like buses, people wore any old disgusting thing and never looked up from their laptops and acted personally injured if they didn"t land on time to the minute, as if they were riding solid iron railroad tracks in the sky.
The nice young man, once the pilot"s drawl had given permission to move about and use electrical devices, had asked her if she would mind, since there were so many empty seats, if he moved to another and gave them both more room. She thought his asking was dear, it showed a good old-fashioned upbringing. She watched him set up a little office for himself in two seats across the aisle, and then she studied the terrain five miles below, familiar to her from those first nervous, bouncy flights of hers, to Ohio so many years and miles ago. She recognized the Delaware, and then the Susquehanna, and while waiting for the stewardess with her rattling breakfast cart to reach the mid-section of the plane Carolyn must have dozed, because she awoke as if rudely shaken; the airplane was jiggling and bucking. She looked at her watch: 9:28. Hours to go.
She seemed to hear, far in the front, some shouting over the roar of the engines, and the plane dropped so that her stomach lurched. Yet the faces around her showed no alarm, and the heads she could see above the seatbacks were still. The plane stopped falling, and a voice came on the sound system that said, as best as she could understand, to remain seated. The pilot"s voice sounded changed-tense and foreign. Where did the drawl go? He said, as best as Carolyn could hear, "Ladies and gentlemen: Here the captain. Please sit down, keep remaining sitting. We have bomb on board. So-sit."
Then a young man was standing in front of the first-cla.s.s curtain. He was slender, and touchingly graceful and hesitant in the way he used his hands; he appeared to have no weapon, yet had gained everyone"s attention, and the clumsy change in the way the plane was being handled connected somehow to him. He had an aura of nervous excitement; his eyes showed too much white. His eyes were all that showed; a large red bandana-a thick checked cloth, almost a scarf-concealed the lower half of his face and m.u.f.fled his voice. Then another young man, plumper, came out from behind the curtains wearing another bandana and a comic apparatus around his chest; he held high one hand with a wire leading to it. He shook this hand and cried the word "Bomb! Bomb!" and then some other words in his own musical language, not trusting any other. People screamed. "Back! Back!" the thinner boy shouted, gesturing for everybody to move to the back of the plane.
Carolyn realized that these boys knew hardly any English, so the men in front trying to argue and question them were wasting their breath. Some of the men were standing; they had been made to leave first cla.s.s. Then all of them began obediently to move back down the aisle, hunched over, Carolyn thought, like animals being whipped. The strawberry blonde seated two rows in front of her-the top of her head like spun sugar, tipped toward that of the boy next to her, her husband possibly, though couples weren"t necessarily married now, her own grandchildren demonstrated that-reached out in pa.s.sing and touched Carolyn on the shoulder. "You don"t have to move," she said softly. She was already far enough back, she meant.
"Thank you, my dear," Carolyn responded, sounding old and foolish in her own ears.
They-the pa.s.sengers, with three female flight attendants, though there had been four-settled around her, in stricken, fearful silence at first. But when the boy with the bomb and the boy without one didn"t move back with them, staying instead in front of the first-cla.s.s curtain, as if themselves paralyzed by fright, the noise of conversation among the pa.s.sengers rose, like that at a c.o.c.ktail party as the alcohol took hold, or in a rainy-day cla.s.sroom when discipline washes away. Here and there people were talking into their cell phones, including the rugby player across the aisle, who had disbanded his little office on the lunch trays. His hand as it held the little gadget to his ear looked ma.s.sive, with its red knuckles and broad wedding ring. His shirt had French cuffs with square gold links; French cuffs meant something, her son-in-law had tried to explain to her, in terms of corporate hierarchy. You could only wear them after a certain position in the firm had been attained.
The engines spasmodically wheezed, and a sudden tilt brought Carolyn"s heart up into her throat; the plane was turning. The great wing next to her window leaned far over above the gray-green earth. The land below looked like Ohio now, flatter than the Alleghenies, and there was a smoky city that could be Akron or Youngstown. A wide piece of water, Lake Erie it must be, shone in the distance, betraying Earth"s curvature. The sun had shifted to her side of the plane, coming in at an angle that bothered her eyes. A cataract operation two years ago had restored childhood"s bright colors and sharp edges but left Carolyn"s corneas sensitive to sunlight. The plane must be heading southeast, back to Pennsylvania. She tried to think it through, to picture the plane"s exact direction, yet was unable to think. Her own fatigue dawned on her. The flight had been scheduled to leave at eight, and that had meant setting the alarm in Princeton at five. The older she became the earlier she awoke but still it was strange to go out into the dark and start the car.
Her skin had broken out into sweat. Her body was terrified before her mind had caught up. What was foremost in her mind was the simple wish, fervent enough to be a prayer, that the plane be taken, like an easily damaged toy, out of those invisible hands that were giving it such a jerky, panicky, incompetent ride.
Carolyn wondered why the boys up front, hijackers evidently, were letting so many pa.s.sengers talk on their telephones; perhaps they thought it was a way to keep them calm. The one without the bomb came down the aisle a little way, then retreated; in warning he held up something metallic, a small knife of some sort, the kind with a cruel curved point that slides open to cut boxes, but what showed of his face, the eyes, seemed either frightened or furious, pools of ardent dark gelatin hard to decipher without the rest of the face. His mind seemed elsewhere, somewhere beyond, all that eye-white showing. He wore black jeans and a long-sleeved red-checked shirt that could have been that of a young computer whiz on his way to Silicon Valley. She had two grandsons in dot-coms; they dressed like farmhands, like hippies decades ago, when young people decided that they loved the earth when what they loved most was annoying their parents. But this boy had no pencils or pens in his shirt pocket, the way her grandsons did. He had that baby knife and eyebrows that nearly met in the middle, above his distracted, glittering gaze. Why wouldn"t he look anybody in the face? He was shy. shy. He must be a very nice boy, at home, among people he could speak to intelligibly, in his own language, without cloth across his mouth. He must be a very nice boy, at home, among people he could speak to intelligibly, in his own language, without cloth across his mouth.
How humiliating, this sweating she was doing into her underwear. She would smell when she got off the plane, under the wool dress she had put on thinking it was always cool in Tiburon, where her daughter lived, however hot it was in Princeton. The redwoods, the Bay breezes: she realized she might not reach them today. They would land at some obscure airport and a long standoff of negotiations would begin. When they began to release hostages, however, an old lady would be among the first.
The captain came on the loudspeaker again: "There is bomb on board and we go back to the airport, and to have our demands-" She lost the next words in his guttural accent. "Remain quiet, please," the pilot concluded. Her watch said 9:40. Despite the captain"s request, eddies of communication moved through the crowded back of the plane: hand signals, eye motions, conversations increasingly blatant and emphatic as the nervous young hijacker"s obliviousness dawned on everyone. The stewardesses began to talk as if still in charge. People in first cla.s.s had glimpsed something in the cabin; word of whatever it was spread back, skipping around Carolyn inaudibly yet chilling her damp skin. Others were learning things through their cell phones that they urgently had to share. The young businessmen in their white shirts held conferences, talking to each other across the heads and laps of women and the elderly. Growing impatient, some of them stood, making a huddle, right near her, around the seat of that nice rugby player. Not a huddle, a scrum scrum-that was the word they had used in England.
She tried to eavesdrop, and heard nothing but pa.s.sionate muttering, rising to the near-shout of men energized by a decision. The distinct word "Yes" was repeated in several men"s voices. They had voted. The plumper of the two hijackers, having lowered his bandana to his throat so a pathetic small mustache showed, moved down the aisle, gesturing for people to be silent and sit down, while the apparatus he had strapped himself into looked more and more absurd and rickety. The plane was still rocking in those unseen hands, jerking and tilting, but the rugby player stood up with the others-he was taller than she had realized, in scale with that huge wrist jutting from his French cuff-and they faced forward. She accidentally caught his eye; he smiled and gave her a thumbs-up. She heard a voice, another young man"s, say, "You guys ready? Let"s do do it." it."
Some seats behind her, a woman began to sob. Carolyn guessed it was the young woman who had touched her arm some minutes ago, but her instinct was to tell her to shut up, the plane was bouncing so, she just wanted to adhere to her seat and close her eyes and beg for the motion, the demented speed, to stop. The roaring engines made the hubbub within the plane hard to sort out. The plump young man with the bomb disappeared behind the broad shoulders and white shirts of the stampeding American men. The other one, with his little hooked knife, also sank under the scrum, his silly towel of a veil torn away to reveal a red-lipped mouth open in protest. First fists and then feet in shoes silenced his ugly yells. Crush him, Crush him, Carolyn thought. Carolyn thought. Kill him. Kill him.
The white shirts pushed through the blue first-cla.s.s curtain. The engines did not drown out the thumping, crashing sounds from behind the curtain, the unexpected clatter of the serving cart, and a male voice shouting "Roll it!" while a fearful gabble from the pa.s.sengers still in their seats arose around her.
The airplane lurched more violently than ever before, rocking and dipping as if to shake something loose, and Carolyn felt, as sharply as if the wires and levers controlling the great mechanism were her own sinews and bones, that control had been lost, something crucial had been severed. From the wing came a high grinding noise; through her porthole she saw the flaps strain erect, exposing their valves. The vast tapering wing, with its stencilled aluminum segments and its little aerial at the very tip, seemed to stand on end; the entire stiff intricate ent.i.ty bearing her and all these others was heeling beyond any angle of possible recovery. The terrible largeness of everything, the plane and the planet and the transparent miles between them, amazed her much as the shocking unclouded colors of the world had amazed her after her cataract operation. Her body was hanging sideways in the seat belt, so heavily her ribs ached. Through the scratched plastic window the earth in its rural detail-a few houses and outbuildings, a green blob of woods, a fenced field, a lonely road-swung across her vision while her ears popped, and she realized that, nightmarish though it was, this was real, the reality beneath everything, this surge into the maw of gravity. Her brain was flung into wordlessness; she was upside down, and the tortured engine near her ears was making everything shake. She was meeting the truth that her parents and husband and all the protectors of her long protected life had implied: the path of safety is narrow, it is possible to fall from it. Mercy, Mercy, Carolyn managed to cry distinctly inside her pounding head. Carolyn managed to cry distinctly inside her pounding head. Dear, Lord, have mercy. Dear, Lord, have mercy.
Dan stood outside his daughter"s apartment, on the sooty tiled terrace from which he had seen the first tower collapse. In the six months since then, news events had tended to corroborate his revelation. A demented woman in Texas was being tried for systematically drowning her five children. Catholic priests were revealed to have molested their immature charges in numbers larger than ever imagined or confessed. Almost every week, somewhere in the United States, angry or despairing or berserk fathers murdered their wives or ex-wives and their children and then, in inadequate atonement, killed themselves. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, war had been proclaimed and pursued, with its usual toll of inane deaths-colliding helicopters, stray bombs, false intelligence, fatal muddle unmitigated by any Biblical dignity of vengeance or self-sacrifice. The masterminds of evil remained at large; the surrendered enemies appeared exhausted and confused-pathetic small fry. They complained about the climate of Cuba and their captors" failure to provide them with sympathetic mullahs. They claimed, and others stridently claimed for them, their international legal rights. Religious slaughters occurred in India and Israel, fires and floods and plagues elsewhere. The world tumbled on, spewing out death and sparks of pain like an engine off the tracks.
His younger granddaughter, his fellow witness to the most publicized of recent disasters, solemnly informed Dan that all the dogs of New York City had bleeding paws, from looking through wreckage for dead people.
Emily, the tough-minded survivor of divorce, had not prevented the child from gathering what she could from the newspapers and television: "It"s turned her into a real news hawk," she dryly explained. "Hilary, on the other hand," she went on, "has refused from Day One to have anything to do with it. It wasn"t ladylike, she decided, and disdained it all. She says such things aren"t appropriate for children. She can actually p.r.o.nounce "appropriate." But for Vicky, it would have been unhealthy, really, Daddy, to try to shelter her from what everybody knew, what all her schoolmates would be talking about. After all, compared to children in Bosnia and Afghanistan she"s still pretty well off."
"Not all all the dogs, Victoria," Dan rea.s.sured his granddaughter, "just a few trained for a certain special job, and wearing little leather booties that nice people made for them. Most people are very nice," he promised her. the dogs, Victoria," Dan rea.s.sured his granddaughter, "just a few trained for a certain special job, and wearing little leather booties that nice people made for them. Most people are very nice," he promised her.
The child stared up at him pugnaciously, a bit doubtful but wanting to agree. In six months, she had grown; her eyes, a translucent pale blue beneath level bangs, entertained more subtle expressions. At moments, especially when she was thinking to herself, he could see, in the childishly fine perfection of her face, the seeds of feminine mystery and of her mature beauty.
Lucille, within earshot, said, so the child would overhear, "Vicky, she so interested in all all the developments. She know how that terrible mess almost cleaned up now, and the two blue floodlights there as a monument, we see them every night." the developments. She know how that terrible mess almost cleaned up now, and the two blue floodlights there as a monument, we see them every night."
Victoria explained to her grandfather, "They mean all the people in there have gone up to Heaven."
By daylight, from the terrace, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were simply not there. Their stark form, like that of two cubes projected skyward by some computer command, had registered but delicately above the old-fashioned brick thicket of lower Manhattan. Rectangular clouds of gla.s.s and aluminum, they had been wiped from the city"s silhouette. They were not there, but Dan was here, and G.o.d with him; his conversion to atheism had not lasted. His church pledge needed to be delivered in its weekly envelopes; a minor committee (Property Maintenance and Improvement) of which he was a member continued to meet. The Episcopal church, high in Cincinnati but not evangelical, presented a stream of Cranmer"s words in which the mind could lose itself. Dan would have missed the mild-mannered fellowship-the handshakes under the vaulted ceiling, the awkward pa.s.sing of the peace. Why punish with his non-attendance, in protest of something G.o.d and not they had done, a flock of potential probate clients for whom periodically chorusing the Nicene Creed was part, and not the very least part, of getting along, of doing their best, of being decent citizens? He would miss the Sunday-morning congregation, the smell of waxed pews and musty kneeling cushions, the radiators that knocked on winter Sunday mornings after a week of cool disuse, the taste of the tasteless wafer in his mouth.
While he stood there ten stories above the Brooklyn alley (where the two attendants, in the mild March air, again sat joshing at the entrance to their parking garage), the towers" distant absence seemed a light throwing a shadow behind him, a weak shadow, but inextricable from his presence-the price, it could be said, of his being alive. He was alive, and a shadowy G.o.d with him, behind him. Human consciousness had curious properties. However big things were, it could encompa.s.s them, as if it were even bigger. And it kept insisting on making a narrative of Dan"s life, however nonsensically truncated the lives of others-crushed in an instant, or snapped off on the birthing-bed-had been.
Emily and Victoria, his progeny, his tickets to genetic perpetuation, ventured out gingerly onto the terrace, to be with him in the open air. "Amazing," his daughter said, seeking to read his thoughts, "how the not-thereness remains so haunting. Sometimes you still see the towers in old ads, where the admen haven"t noticed or taken the trouble to airbrush them out of the background. It feels illicit. A lot of these yuppie movies and TV serials have a shot of them, from SoHo or the Staten Island Ferry or wherever, and I hear they"ve been collected on tape, like the kisses in Cinema Paradiso. Cinema Paradiso. They"ve become a kind of cult." They"ve become a kind of cult."
Victoria eagerly volunteered, "Some day, when all the bad men are killed, they"ll put them back, back, just ex just exactly the way they were." She gestured appropriately wide and high, standing on tiptoe.
Dan tended to discourage other people"s illusions, though he was cherishing of his own. "I don"t think that would be very sensible," he stated to the child. "Or very American."
"Why not American?" Emily asked, with an oppositional, possibly aggrieved edge. If her parents hadn"t divorced, her marriage might have held together; a bad precedent had been set.
"We move on, don"t we?" Dan tactfully answered. "As a nation. We try to learn from our mistakes. Those towers were taller than they needed to be. The Arabs weren"t wrong to feel them as a boast."
Hilary, barefoot, peeked out from one of the penthouse doors, but did not venture out onto the sooty tiles. She admonished them, "Children shouldn"t see what you"re all looking at. It"s scary."
"Don"t be scared," her younger sister told her, and then half to Dan: "My teacher at school says the lights are like the rainbow. They mean it won"t happen again."