I happen to know you’ve already not kept quiet, George said.
Oh yeah, Nate said.
Anna worried that Nate didn’t like her. He’d turned fourteen at the beginning of the year; boys that age, she hadn’t dealt with them since she was fourteen.
George said, He happens to like you very much.
How can you tell? Anna said.
He told me.
He seems alienated when I’m around.
He’s always alienated, George said. Or no. He always seems alienated. It’s a kind of pose. He’s very skeptical and detests enthusiasm of all kinds. He’s what we used to call a sourpuss. But he definitely likes you. He wants you to move in with your cat.
For me or the cat? Anna said.
Thirty percent you, George said. Seventy percent cat.
* * *
THEY TALKED ABOUT a future together. Or he did, when she let him. She had her heels dug in spiritually, she wanted to move slowly, slowly. Talk about vulnerable, she said. You had a lasting relationship. You had a child. For me, every single attempt has been a disaster. She noted that his job was becoming easier but hers was getting more difficult, more demanding. Some days, openly hysterical. Morgan was looking for new avenues of profit after the tech bubble. The regulatory maze was not one maze but a catalogue of mazes and she had access to a library of maps that were supposed to work if you found the right one. Morgan’s strategy, a compliance nightmare, was to create, almost weekly, new kinds of financial instruments and throw them out on the market to see what or who would bite. The prospectuses were like those impossible British crosswords. All the large firms were doing the same, copying and revising one another’s Byzantine inventions. It would take the feds years to catch up to it all, so let’s all worry about that later. She tried gently to remind her legal colleagues who were actually in Morgan’s employ that this might be a shortsighted attitude, that the future didn’t merely hold the fed but actual consequences. I don’t pay lawyers to tell me what I can’t do…
George knew she liked her professional identity, she liked having a staff and standing and she even liked the bigger money, but she hated her actual job, what she had to do, the people and the values she had to accommodate. And over all the nights they stayed together, mostly at his place after she’d fed the cat, but sometimes at hers, with him turning woozy on Benadryl to fight his allergy to the feline, he kept hinting to her that she could, if she wished, quit; and he would quit, and they would travel together, and the world would be new and beautiful. He suspected she couldn’t quite take it in, the idea that they could live to be a hundred and not spend more than a fraction of what he was worth. She couldn’t see it: freedom of that radical kind. He managed to dislodge her for ten days, finally, and they flew to Mexico, with Nate in DC for his spring break. They stayed for almost a week in Quintana Roo with its astonishing beachfronts edging the rain forest; and then down for a couple of days on the opposite coast, in Chiapas, with a day trip inland to visit the Habermans. Then Oaxaca and on to Mexico City to fly home. He knew she had once had some feeling for Mexico, akin to his own great affection for the place and he could see it being rekindled. But she was eager to get back to work as well. He could feel it, in the day or two before they caught their flight home.
Back in New York, he told her he loved her.
I know, she said, her head on his chest. I know. I’m going to get there soon.
* * *
8:12 ON A Tuesday. September 11, 2001. Anna had taken to coming in early, by 7:30 usually, clearing things away, this allowed her to leave when she felt like it, knowing she would clean up in the morning. It gave her a start on the day; she’d found coming in to a clean desk left her not remembering what exactly was the next thing.
8:35, she thought of calling a realtor. She was practically living with George now; she was ready to bring the cat but she had not yet been able to accept the idea of selling her apartment. What in the world, where in the world, would be hers? But it was a note on her desk: three realtors to call, recommendations from colleagues and friends. Things had gotten easier. The sex had gotten better: whatever he’d been scared of he didn’t seem to be scared of anymore. And she really liked Nate; she even liked Marina when Marina was up in New York. Marina seemed happy for them. Marina mainly was busy. Everything this family said to one another had an edge, what might seem like meanness but really was their own form of intimacy, insulated by humor. She felt more alert than she had in a long time. She even had moments, looking at George, most of the time when she was looking at his enormous uncomplicated back, like a bricklayer’s—she had moments when a near-tears feeling of love for him came up in her throat and hurt her eyes. She’d force it down again. She wouldn’t say it yet. She wanted things on the lowest burner possible.
8:46. Her coffee flew off the desk at her, scalded her arm, she flew then, the coffee fell all over some papers, the papers danced to the floor: all facts that she took in a split second before she’d aurally processed the noise, the enormous crash. Her first quick thought was earthquake: such a huge earthquake to happen in New York. But then no. After that things got murky. The lights went out, emergency lights came on. A piercing alarm. Behind which there was a lot of screaming. Announcements were made that couldn’t be distinguished from the other noise. After the alarms cut out they heard they should stay at their desks awaiting further instructions. This was bullshit, they all knew it was bullshit. For one thing, the smoke, it was already crawling in from every available opening in the skin of their suite of offices. For a second the heat: the building was getting hotter. With co-workers, people hugged, touched, people said we’re going to be all right, people said my phone has no service, and together they made their way to the stairs—sixty-two flights, hard to contemplate.
And moving down them, one flight, two, five: a vapor of uncaring: like a gas seeping into the air she breathed. She could feel it, an anaesthetic slowing her down, slowing her down, slowing her down. Something different from the smoke, which was acrid beyond acrid, like burnt plastic knife blades in the bronchi and lungs, a serious poison that made you think if you made it out you’d die of this shit anyway. People choking and sobbing on the stairs. But still moving. The ones who stopped stayed against the walls on the landings. Some she saw entering the floors they’d reached: she wondered what they thought they’d find there. She continued to descend with others, no one spoke, just made noises of despair, weeping some of them, she looked at them as if from another time and place, already historical. And by the time they were down fifteen flights or so, every half minute a firefighter shoved past them all, then her, then the next one, going up, men become mute aliens with tanks and monstrous masks, Otto Dix’s stormtroopers advancing in the poison air, the charred air, which she breathed. She was getting sicker from it but she paid as little attention to that as possible—or rather it mattered to her less than she’d have found conceivable before today—all she cared about was going down down down. She had descended so many flights: dropdropdropdropdropdropdrop turn dropdropdropdropdropdrop turn—over and over spinning down down down in a circle. She would have taken off her heels but for the heat and the broken glass. Suddenly she knew what the people were doing who were entering the other floors, suspending their escape. They wanted out. They must be breaking open the sheath of glass that ran up between each decorative beam along the skin of the building, they must be jumping. Of course. The air alone would be a relief. She couldn’t see the numbers on the doors, the emergency lights were too dim and the smoke was too thick; she tried to keep track of the flights, but she lost the count. She’d descended twenty, maybe twenty-five flights. Which would put her where? Fortieth floor? Thirty-fifth? Possibly she was underestimating, perhaps she was only twenty or twenty-five now from the lobby. It was hot—it was getting hotter. The firefighters up and everyone else down, no one speaking, people crying but no screaming, at least she thought not, or if there was it was almost undetectable because the other thing was so present, an ambient roar,
so it was like an enormous roaring silence—this is what hell would be, perhaps, the roar of flames, sound as torment, at the same time human speechlessness, the ultimate silence—like a meat of silence, a raw substance, the people in front of her and behind her: all exit in silence. She wanted to stop, it was time to stop. She felt the building was trembling now, she stopped on the next landing and stepped out of the way, she could feel it swinging and lurching, just a few inches back and forth, caught between wind and flame and the unmeasurable forces of concrete and steel and human horror. Quaking. A deep ongoing rumbling like an earthquake rumble. But the uncaring was like a drug: all was alive, but shrinking down, tunneling down, and she knew that there was nothing left to care about, to worry about, to fear: an all-enfolding mercy: freedom. Freedom and mercy were the same thing, the inside of the moment, once you were allowed to step into you were forgiven. She was overwhelmed. She was glad, suddenly, sickeningly, that she had never had a child. No child. But of course. Because if she’d had a child it would now be orphaned. This was how she confronted her own death: if she’d had a child she would be leaving it. She was breathing in little sputters, she was about to break. But then there was a child, present in her mind: a moment of confusion and then clarity: it was herself as a child, standing and waiting for something. Oh god how she suddenly loved that child: tears came. So vulnerable. Children were so vulnerable. Look at the people, so frightened, moving through the smoke and ash. All children. What do we do to them? And then the rumble grew louder, fast, and then an immense roar, a second only, a sound like no sound that had occurred ever before, so huge it transformed physical reality, so loud it took possession of everything, so large she began to feel herself escaping, sliding out from her own body to evade it: the air was fumes and dust and smoke and the noise was a force that lifted her and she was in the air: oh god this was it. She opened her mouth, she was forced forward and everything was being let out, everything in her and right there the building just broke around her and split and she saw a flash of the sparkling sky, just a flash and then—time is a supple thing, it expands outward at a push—before the darkness she thought of her parents, she thought of George oh George if I’d just had a half hour more I might have made it out but now she was inside the end of time flaring outward like a musket—and then then: she was smashed. She had an enormous eighth-of-a-second’s self-knowledge of being snapped, crushed, a monumental assault, a disposal of her, too fast for pain, though somehow encompassing the pain, then nothing but darkness and blinding light… And here was everything and here was nothing: in the midst of everything, nothing, and in the midst of nothing, everything. Oh the sound, the light. Then no more light. Then silence. True silence. She loved the silence. And darkness. She loved the darkness. Here was the child. It was waiting for her. She knew this child. It was her. It was her but not her; it loved her. It was love itself. The soft weight of the child, the soft darkness of the silence, and the simple will to disappear into that. All was soft, soft. The child, silence, darkness. Pinpricks of light. Love. She hadn’t known—oh but yes, she had—she had known and she knew. Always. It was always there, just outside the mind’s grasp. This. The silent love of a silent child silent in darkness. Love—not merely from without but from within—the love had been her love and her love had been the same as all the other love.
All that love. All that darkness.
It took her.
* * *
AND WHAT WAS it? Consciousness lingered after the body went. A half second or a second in regular time, containing infinities, telescoping parentheses, an unimaginable refinement, a half second you stepped inside of and disappeared… She did not miss the sand or waves of oceanside or the slats of sunlight angling in the woods. The sharp air of autumn. The faces of children. The urgency of love, the rush of ecstasy. Not eros, hunger, pain, relief; not the taste of coffee or fresh lime or late-summer tomatoes, the little strawberries in Rome in June; nor the myriad colors, they were all inside her now, seen in a perfect light—she did not have to miss anything at all because everything was present. Everything resided inside the shell of a moment and the moment never ended and here was the same as there and everywhere else. A thousand years, a single day… She still felt every touch of desire, without need. Was it true that no one had sufficiently loved her? It was not true, manifestly not true—look how plain it was, that she had been loved with love both infinite and specific and these were expressions of the same love just as any two words in the language are expressive of that one language. She had been loved from before the beginning of time and she had been loved in time. She saw her brother—oh how broken. He loved her. He thought of her daily—of course he had and he still did. Some southwestern city in midday’s merciless light, broken by shame and pointless sense of failure. Pointless because what was there to succeed at, after all, that could touch or change all this? She saw George, who loved her, who had finally said it and clumsily showed it—he had never in fact stopped loving her—he was wandering there in the smoke and ash. She saw his longing and his grief. The longing, the longing one carried around hour to hour, day to day, the grief, the sense of loss and hopeless need, she could see his, could see her brother’s, who was so broken, could see that of her blind, willfully clueless parents—but her longing was no more. In this present, nothing was missed, everything was known, nothing was longed for, everything was, here, now, always: a condition of complete simplicity. This moment would never give way to some predicted next moment—and so longing was not even possible. She could see it, the world’s longing, like a ribbon of stars, like a widening band of debris on the dancing surface of the sea, a widening crescent of suffering racing away toward an indefinable horizon: endless human longing, endlessly fulfilled, if only they knew it. But they could not.
|| PART THREE || far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
26
God gave them a day of supreme beauty in which to lose their city. The sky was a depth of blue, pellucid, pure, that could occur only by special dispensation, with not a cloud visible, not a hint; nor would there be clouds for days. That morning, shortly before the first plane hit the North Tower, George had stepped out of his building’s doorway to go downtown and everything visible before him on the street stood out in this special light; the visible world was giving full expression to its three dimensions; every object, every person, every stone cornice and metal grate and human gesture, almost every breath (as if he were tripping and could see human breath in the air) insisted on its own place in eternity and he couldn’t doubt the reality of anything, including, when he learned of it, destruction at the scale capitalism had finally made both possible and, through the numbing violence of its entertainments, eerily familiar. This was what people said when they saw it on television, that it looked like a movie they had all seen before; but the people who saw it from nearby didn’t say that. From where he watched on the corner of 23rd and Fifth (the Seventh Avenue train had finally given up at the 23rd Street station), by the entrance to Madison Square Park, he could make out every ridge and detail of the towers’ silver exteriors and every jagged edge around the enormous lusterless black holes from which flames danced and gray-black smoke hurled, lower on the South Tower than on the North. The North’s was much larger—the entry wound. A super-matte black, absent light—totally without radiance—to such a degree as no one, he believed, had ever before seen in the natural world. An absolute black, an unimaginable flat lightlessness. With flames licking out: these were the gates of hell. He was looking at the South Tower. She was in that tower. He knew it. Since a little after nine, when he’d first heard the news he had been trying to reach her on her mobile and at her desk, at first busy signals—who got a busy signal anymore?—now there was simply no service. People stood around him dazed; a woman wept. People kept trying their phones, putting them away. He wondered if all of them were trying to reach someone they believed might be inside the building, as he had been.
And then it fell. People screamed.
The muted roar of it reached them a second or two after the fall itself. All around him screams, shouts, as in near–slow motion the building sank massively—but massively hardly did justice to what he was seeing, they were all seeing, the size of it, the gigantic collapse—and disappeared in a monumental burst of dust and debris. A man to George’s left kept saying, Oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god. George felt a blanket of horror and beneath it a shattering of the nothing, the no-feeling, that had resided all his life where grief should have been. Like a low flame of agony had been lit and was finding its fuel. His stomach did a flip, he thought he would vomit but he didn’t; he was too paralyzed to vomit. Oh my god oh my god oh my god, the man continued to say. Finally: There must be five thousand people in there! He was shouting, the man, he was momentarily unhinged. As were they all, but almost all were silent, except this fellow. Five thousand people!
The dust rose as if from a bomb. He thought, couldn’t not think it, that we’d been doing as bad as this to people around the world, virtually weekly, for decades. The debris flew up and outward into the sky like a flock of millions of birds taking off in panic and determination—and the birds, the pigeons and gulls and starlings typical in such light, where were they? All gone. Replaced by paper—terror origami—white pages diaphanous and brilliant, confidential memos, reports, the mountains of accumulated unnecessary bullshit on 20-pound 92-rated bright white photocopy stock—floated out over the harbor; they would be gathered up that day and the next and for a week or more thereafter from the streets of Brooklyn across the harbor. We from the streets of Brooklyn and you know we good-lookin’.
* * *
LATER, ARTHUR TOLD George it had all felt to him at first like a wartime catastrophe scene, working downtown that morning—cops, roadblocks, fire and emergency services, ambulances on the backs of which sat people getting oxygen. Debris. People wandering. Lights flashing. This was all in the pictures. Arthur had been forced to duck the cops—the last thing they wanted to see was him and his camera. Then it changed: everywhere and toxic, like something in the desert, a sandstorm during a gas attack, he saw the dust rise and begin to roll up Broadway, he tried to protect his Nikon beneath his sweatshirt and he started running north. Arthur was a big man, stocky with a gut, but he’d lost weight from a decade earlier: he looked as if with enough impetus he could move with dispatch. Before the wave overcame him he ducked inside a Chase Bank. The bank ATM foyer as sanctuary from the bombers, that was a twenty-first-century American construct. The House of Morgan. Darkness—the power was out. Pale red light with little reach coming from the emergency lights, two on the front wall over the doors, one on each side going back. Bless the manager, he hadn’t locked the place up yet. People just standing, some sitting on the floor up against the tellers’ banquette. It would come to mind many times later, after the fever of militarism and policing and security and the wealthy getting wealthier at the direct expense of everyone else, he would remember that day in the Chase Bank on lower Broadway, that there were no cops, no visible guard that he could remember though there must have been; all that money and nobody gave a shit.
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