The Same City

by Luisgé Martín

  The bag contained a makeup pouch, a pair of prescription glasses, a missal, a cell phone, some papers, and nearly two hundred dollars, hidden in an inside pocket. Moy kept the money and threw the rest of the contents into a dumpster, making sure the bag was well buried among the trash so that nobody would find it by chance. Then he looked for a quiet, well-lit place and started to think through what he needed. He had to buy some jeans, some sort of garment to keep him warm, and at least two shirts, so that he could alternate them. Underwear, which was out of sight, could wait until times were better. On the other hand, he should get a hold of several pairs of socks without delay, because he found having dirty feet particularly intolerable. The shoes he was wearing were too fancy and only went well with a suit or elegant clothing, but he could manage with them until he saved enough to buy some sneakers.

  In addition to the clothes, there were other, equally pressing needs. First of all, he had to find a cheap room that would provide him with a permanent place to sleep. Hotels and motels were too costly, so he had to look in the classifieds for a private house in which rooms were being let short term. And if he made himself look more presentable, he was sure that he could convince someone to trust him for a few days until he got together a month’s rent with his tips. It was not necessary to consider food expenses; during this time of austerity and abstinence, he could survive on what he ate at the coffee shop and even keep the leftovers as a supply in the event of there being even harder times ahead.

  But the biggest outlay Moy would have to make over the following days had nothing to do with household expenses, it was instead of a more murky, thorny nature—he had to obtain false identity documents as soon as possible in the name of Albert Tracy. Along with fictitious information from police movies and newspaper articles about fraud and identity theft, Moy had come across the real stories of those criminal networks through some of the law firm’s clients, who on several occasions had been conned with false identity documents. He didn’t fully understand the process of falsification, nor did he know the cost, but he knew that he could easily get in touch online with small-time crooks who made passports, driver’s licenses, and Social Security cards for cheap. That same afternoon, he went into an internet café in downtown Boston and searched for a clue that would enable him to reach those networks, or their perimeters. Surfing page by page, carefully scanning forums and chat rooms, he obtained two email addresses he could write to. He opened a Hotmail account with false personal details, and from it he wrote to those addresses, asking for information as though it were a job application or an administrative request.

  On leaving the internet café, he stole one of the newspapers that was on the counter for clients to read and looked for room rentals in the classifieds. Then, by chance, something happened that changed the course of events. Moy saw the personal ads, which came after the real estate section, and started to glance through them. Almost all of them were from gay men or men seeking relationships with women, but there were three written by older women hoping to find gentlemen with whom they could share their lives, or with whom they could at least share some of its pleasures. Moy read them carefully several times and chose one he found suggestive. A fifty-year-old woman who claimed she was in perfect shape, with a youthful body, was searching for an ardent man—that’s the word she used, ardent—who could assuage the sorrows of growing older. Moy, who had never felt any particular attraction toward older women, found himself aroused by this ad, which was so frank and so direct and completely avoided getting sidetracked with ambiguities or taking refuge in false hopes. He felt compassion for this woman and imagined himself in her bed as if instead of being a lover, he were a philanthropist, bringing her pleasure to assuage her sorrow and showing her erotic secrets to help her forget the adversities of the world. He called her immediately and was talking to her for almost an hour. Moy lied about everything—he told her that he had just gone through a divorce, that he had moved from Pittsburgh a few days ago and wanted to start a new life in Boston, far away from the tribulations of the past. They discovered that they were both fans of Ella Fitzgerald and both liked salads and Enid Blyton novels, which Moy had read as a child. Both of them enjoyed driving and getting up early. She was called Daisy, and she wanted to learn how to dance and how to plant flowers in her garden, but the idea of doing those things alone did not appeal to her. She was shy, and when Moy began to get more intimate, making insinuations about sexual matters, she fell silent, breathing uneasily on the other end of the line. He had the notion that Daisy might invite him to go and sleep over at her house that very night but immediately realized that given how he looked, unwashed and badly dressed, it would have been a disaster. They arranged a date for the following day at a café downtown, near the place where he was going to start work, and they said goodbye with a courtesy that was almost trite, old-fashioned, and made Moy imagine that Daisy was one of those women who felt flattered when given flowers or when someone pulled out the chair in a restaurant so that they could sit down.

  In a discount store near the internet café, he bought the clothes he needed. Then he went into a dry cleaner’s and asked the clerk to clean his suit using the cheapest method available, even if it didn’t look immaculate afterward. He begged her with more lies to have it ready for him the next day without adding an extra charge for the rush, and the assistant, either because she was touched or irritated, promised to do it. Finally, when it was dark, Moy looked for a hotel where he could sleep. He spent seventy dollars on a comfortable room. Before going to bed, he had a very hot bath and watched how the grime accumulated over the last several days sloughed off his body; it was like a baptism that not only stripped away the dirt and the encrusted sweat but also the iniquity of his escape.

  Brandon Moy had an inscrutable, complicated personality, and there was a moment when I began to think he was crazy and that all the things he had told me were delusions or figments of his imagination. Perhaps before the attack on the towers, in his routine life in New York, he had been an ordinary man who thought in a logical, orderly manner. On the other hand, when I spoke to him, his speech was neither methodical nor coherent. The links between his memories and the facts kept changing as his mood altered or as some coincidental association of ideas derailed his memory’s train of thought. The first time he spoke to me about that day in Boston, that seventy-dollar hotel where he had washed away the filth and his sins in boiling water, he explained to me that when he went to bed afterward, he felt an extraordinary happiness, like that which one only experiences during childhood. He’d thought that at last he was living the life he was meant to live and that those trials—the dirt, the poverty, and not even having a book to read before going to sleep—were simply manifestations of the fulfillment he was pursuing. He had no assurances about what would happen to him the following day, and that fact, which for so long had seemed threatening to him, now struck him as fortunate. Several months later, however, he described those days following September 11 to me again, but this time he didn’t mention that they had been happy and fruitful, he didn’t speak to me of the euphoria or the joy he had felt, that night in the mid-range hotel in Boston, when thinking about the freedom he would have from that moment on to sleep with strangers or experience extreme emotions. On the contrary, he assured me that he had been awake the whole night, crying with a panicky, stifling unease, and that several times he had been on the point of calling Adriana from his room and asking her to pick him up. He admitted to me that he had begun to think about suicide, about buying sleeping pills, or jumping off the top of a building. He had even gone so far as leaning out of the hotel window in the middle of the night, but the room was on the second floor, and the grotesque scene of an unsuccessful suicide frightened him. The two versions of the story, the sublime and the dramatic, that of joy and that of desperation, were full of specific details, of tangible minutiae that gave the impression the memories were genuine. The scissors he had asked for in reception to cut his nails
, the outdated pattern on the wallpaper, the flimsiness of the pillows, the bluish color of the bedside lamps, the warnings penciled in the margins of the Bible in the drawer of the nightstand, and the shouting coming from one of the neighboring rooms gave a very real feel to his description of his moods, from joyful to depressed, and he passed them off as true. It’s possible that that night, Moy felt great vulnerability and wonderful hope at the same time, as if they were two sides of the same coin. There is no doubt that he felt lonely, and exposed, and terrified by the future, but at the same time, he must have imagined, as he had done outside that restaurant in New York after talking to Albert Fergus, extraordinary thrills ahead of him—naked women, success, adventures, and superhuman experiences. Over time, troubled by the contradiction, he would have dissociated these antagonistic images to the point of turning that one night into two different nights, one pleasurable and the other dismal. It’s what we all almost always do, for example, when remembering our adolescent years.

  Whether he slept deeply or spent the night awake, Moy got up on time the following morning, washed again, put on his new clothes, and left the hotel. Before going to the coffee shop at the time he had agreed on with the owner, he called various people who were advertising rooms for rent in the Boston Globe and arranged to meet with two of them that afternoon. Then he found an internet café and checked his email—nobody had replied to him. At midmorning, right on time, he went into the coffee shop and started work. There weren’t many customers, but he managed to collect almost seventy dollars in tips. He realized with surprise that all trades have their problems and stumbling blocks. Despite his inexperience with all the trays and orders, he took great pains to make a good job of the service and quickly learn the necessary tricks. He was friendly and hardworking. He obeyed everything the manager told him and tried to pay attention to his frowns and gesticulations in order to work out in advance the opinion he would have of him. At the end of the day, at shift handover, he ate the leftovers of cakes and sandwiches and then said goodbye, exhausted by all the effort. The manager congratulated him.

  When he checked his email account again, he had received a reply from one of the forgers he had written to the day before. Using cautious language full of tacit statements, the forger explained that what he was looking for could be obtained in ten days without any difficulties or risk, but the price was five thousand dollars, half of which had to be paid in advance. He offered him the opportunity to handle it all by mail, as if it were a regular administrative procedure, or to have a face-to-face appointment if he preferred. In either case, he only needed to hand over some passport-size photos, as well, of course, as the money.

  Moy felt reassured that there had been a reply; it was the final confirmation that turning into someone else was a bureaucratically simple process. The price, however, alarmed him. A few days before, in New York, he would have thought it was cheap—just five thousand dollars, the price of one month’s rent for an apartment like the one he had, to turn into a different man, a person whose past is a blank or transparent slate on which everything can be rewritten. He thought, pompously, that a new life cost less than most cars, than a trip to Europe, or even a designer coat. At that moment, however, five thousand dollars was an unattainable fortune for him. There was almost one hundred times that amount in his checking account and his securities portfolio, but only Brandon Moy could access it, and he had died in September in the attack on the Twin Towers.

  He went to his date with Daisy wearing the suit he had just freshened up and with the rest of his clothes in a large bag. He bought her a rose, which as he had predicted, delighted her. Daisy was a slightly built woman. Despite her age she was still pretty, but the heavy makeup she wore, combining shades of fuchsia and dark blue, gave her appearance a kitsch, unsophisticated look. Her hair was badly dyed, and she had long nails decorated with arabesques.

  Moy realized immediately that if he acted shrewdly, he could get whatever he wanted from her. He told her the story of his divorce again and, feigning embarrassment at the disgrace, admitted that he was broke.

  “I’m not a good catch,” he said without looking at her, as though the shame were smothering him.

  Daisy tried to console him. They talked about movies, the life of Ella Fitzgerald, and the trips one can take from Boston—Green Mountain National Forest, Cape Cod, the New England coast, and further afield, Montreal and the southern region of Canada. Moy enthusiastically explained to her that he thoroughly enjoyed traveling but that he hadn’t gotten the chance to do it with his wife. When Daisy suggested they go to her house for dinner, bragging about what an excellent cook she was, Moy was certain this woman could be the lifeline he needed.

  It had never been his wish to hurt her or take advantage of her kindness, although the line between that and deception was very fine. Moy found sleeping with Daisy pleasurable, so he never came to think of his behavior as being like that of a gigolo, or that the financial benefit he got out of it was tainted by disloyalty. Moved to pity by the misfortunes he told her about, Daisy suggested straightaway that he come to live at her place, and she helped him to get his life in order. She gave him some clothes that had belonged to her dead husband, in large sizes and loud colors, and she lent him the five thousand dollars he asked her for under the pretext of paying off an old debt.

  “Do you believe in God?” she asked him on one of their first days together, as they finished dinner. “In the true God, I mean.”

  Moy looked at her affectionately. That trusting naïveté made her seem so fragile and airy.

  “Which is the true God?”

  She blushed and looked away. Her lips were painted with glossy, jarring lipstick that the drumming of her fingertips on her mouth had also transferred to her cheeks.

  “The true God,” she repeated without looking at him. “The God of men who don’t kill.”

  Moy had tried to steer clear of the news about the terrorist attacks, to avoid his own pangs of conscience, but it was impossible to do so completely. He didn’t read the newspapers, except for the classifieds, and he tried to keep away from the television, but the customers at the coffee shop, the preachers who sounded off at the top of their voices in the streets, and the huge posters everywhere bearing apocalyptic messages prevented him from being able to forget the New York tragedy. He knew George W. Bush’s administration was searching for the al-Qaeda terrorists who had survived and that the entire country was on the hunt for Islamic fundamentalists. The men who believed in a God that was not the true one.

  “I don’t know whether I believe in God,” replied Moy sweetly,“but if I did believe in one, it would definitely be the true one.”

  Moy had not been able to elude the memories of his colleagues at Robertson & Millyander or prevent himself from conjuring up scenes of their deaths. He wondered if they had jumped out one of the windows, as he had seen many of those who were trapped in the building do, if they’d been burnt to a crisp by the flames, or if they were sucked down, still alive, with the tower as it collapsed. He thought about Bob, who had joined the team a month ago and was still awestruck at working in the World Trade Center; every morning, when he got to the office, he would be glued to the windows, gazing at the high-rise skyline as he drank his cup of coffee. He wasn’t yet thirty, and he dreamed of climbing even higher. Perhaps he had seen the planes arrive. Moy also remembered Nancy, his secretary, with whom he had shared dilemmas and the daily hustle and bustle for seven years. And Martin, who had just been diagnosed with a disease from which he would now never recover.

  But what tormented Moy more than all the memories of other people and the phantasmagoric imaginings with which he concocted their deaths was imagining how he would have acted if he had been in the building, in his office on the ninety-sixth floor of the North Tower, like on any other morning. He tried to envisage the horror of that image, as though it were a penance. Would he have started to weep and have hysterical convulsions as
he had done when he had been stuck in an elevator as a child? Would he have tried to escape, casting dignity aside and pushing the weak to the ground in order to step over them? Would he have felt panic, or serenity, on sensing his impending death? Basically, he told himself mockingly, none of the fascinating adventures that Albert Fergus had experienced or that he himself was hoping to have from this moment on were comparable in size, depth, or merit to that of being trapped in a building that had been ripped open by the impact of a plane and having an inexorable and brutal sense of the fading pulse of time and the fragility of the things that are closest to you. What kinds of feelings grip the heart of a man who has thrown himself out of one of the top floors of a hundred-story building? What does he think during those ten seconds it takes before he smashes into the ground? What does he think in the final second, when he can see the outline of his shadow on the sidewalk? Does he remember someone, imagine death, or, as in hallucinations, see spiraling, intertwining colors swirling in the irises of his eyes? Nobody can know. It is an experience that cannot be recounted.