by Julia Glass
Michael seemed gentler. He could not get enough of holding his daughters either. He still spoke on his phone pretty often, but he kept the conversations short. During many of these conversations, as he paced the far wall of a room talking numbers and money trends, his eyes, warm and adoring, stayed fixed on those babies.
When Saga mentioned his softened manner to Frida, as they washed dishes together after that first dinner, Frida laughed harshly. “I think what you’re seeing is the effect of losing sleep. But don’t be fooled. He hasn’t changed his plans.” Saga said nothing; she’d been careful not to take sides, and thank goodness no one had asked her to do so. Well, what power did she have?
Later that night, thinking that the others had all gone to bed, Saga had walked out to the front porch, wanting only to sit by herself and gaze at the sky. But there was Uncle Marsden, on the swing beside Denise. They rocked together; Denise, humming faintly, held one of the babies on her lap. The adults looked at Saga and motioned silence, fingers raised to their lips in unison.
It was an odd picture: this young pretty mother in her short white gown, its thin summer fabric almost see-through across her swollen breasts, both she and her baby watched closely by this much, much older man. He leaned toward them with an accidental kind of…not lust, thought Saga…lechery? No. But it was clear that Uncle Marsden was thrilled at the intimacy. Memory, thought Saga with all the longing and pain contained in that single word. He was in thrall to his memories, that must be it, of sitting on this porch with his own wife and his own babies so long ago. He was in love again, in love with the way he’d been shuttled back in time, in love with the people who’d sent him to that happy place.
Saga waved her understanding, went back indoors and up to her room.
SHE SCRAPED HER HAND AS SHE UNFASTENED the three locks on Stan’s back door. But finally she yanked it open and stepped out, careful to close it right behind her. She found herself in a silent storm not of snow but of paper: torn, shredded, singed, at times nearly powdered paper. It brushed her face and hands as it continued to drift to the ground, settling with a festive leisure.
How could paper fall from the sky? Saga looked straight up. The sky was perfectly blue. She looked at her feet. At first she was fearful of touching the paper. Silly, she told herself.
She reached for a sheet that looked almost whole. It was part of a menu from a Chinese restaurant. Some of the names of the dishes were red, others green. Two delight chickens. Gold phenix prawns. Double happiness. House ginger chicken with dry-greened beans. The red ones were starred: spicy, that’s right, she remembered. Uncle Marsden didn’t like Chinese food, but she’d had takeout at the bookshop—and with Stan. Was the menu from Stan’s kitchen? He’d shown her where he kept the menus, but she had forgotten. She looked at the window, as if the kitchen might have an answer. The spaniel and the German shepherd had jumped up and were watching her, panting with excitement, licking the glass. Most dogs loved snow; could they see this wasn’t snow? Of course, they could smell that it wasn’t snow.
The next several papers she picked up—all whole, barely creased—were covered with numbers. Rows and columns, with dashes and spaces: numbers that, without being able to read them, she knew stood for sums of money. They looked like the pages of numbers in the newspaper business section.
She waded farther out, up to her ankles. She kicked at the paper. She thought of confetti, of weddings.
Numbers lay everywhere about her, layer upon layer, shred upon shred. This could have been a joke of a nightmare for Saga: a blizzard of the very thing she had lost touch with most permanently, designed to drive her mad. But of course it wasn’t a nightmare. It had to be some kind of comic mishap. She bent over and pushed away layers of numbers with her hands, searching for more words. Another menu; anything. She came up with a page from a magazine: movie reviews on one side, on the other an advertisement for a hand cream that promised to kill germs while making your skin soft.
Now the paper had stopped falling. There it lay, in shallow drifts about her. It did not melt or disappear or flutter about. She looked up. High overhead, she saw what might have been more paper, floating by in the sun—or perhaps the wheeling shapes were birds, pale pigeons or seagulls.
Squatting down, she found memos to people she had never heard of, a piece of the directions on how to use a copy machine, a photograph of a group of people posed in front of a boat. They wore matching pink T-shirts with white palm trees. There were pinholes where the photo had been tacked to a board or a wall.
One of the watching dogs had begun to bark.
Saga knew suddenly that something terrible had happened. For one thing, there were signs of burning on some of the papers. Was the building next door on fire? How would she take all the animals to safety? Alarmed, she looked up the brick wall to her left: no smoke, no sign of panic. Could someone have tossed all this paper off the roof of the building?
She let herself into Stan’s house, pushing the dogs gently back, and refastened each lock. She went to the living room and pulled aside a curtain. There was paper in the street as well, drifting along the ground.
Saga returned to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water. The problem with things that did not make sense was that they might seem worrisome or absurd only to Saga. The senselessness might come from inside herself. She could never be quite sure. She focused on the notion of paper falling from the sky and whether there was a plausible, ordinary cause she had forgotten. As usual, exerting her mind, trying to use it like a muscle, got her nowhere.
She found her notebook and called Sonya’s cell phone. She got the recording and hung up. What would she say? Next, she tried Uncle Marsden. She got his answering machine and left the message that she was just checking in (though Uncle Marsden seemed far less concerned with her whereabouts these days). “Hope you’re getting lots done in the garden,” she added, knowing that’s where he’d be on a day this fine. Unless something hugely terrible had happened. She thought about calling Fenno but did not want to make a fool of herself. She could call Stan in Washington on his cell, but if she told him his yard was full of somebody’s trash, what could he do? It would probably ruin his day.
She had fed all the animals early that morning and taken the dogs, two at a time, for walks around the block. She had changed the litter boxes. She had changed the chameleon’s water, shuddering when the long tongue snapped out and nearly touched her hand. “Buster,” she had scolded the lizard, “I hope you can see that I am not a fly.” She’d been sitting at the kitchen table looking at a big photography book about dogs when the flurries outside the window had caught her attention.
Now, looking around at the animals, most of them busy in their own quiet forms of letting time pass till the next outing or meal—grooming, sleeping, sniffing, pacing—Saga was gripped by a sense of panicked isolation. She must leave the house and go somewhere, even if she failed to solve the mystery of the falling paper. She had to know that this weird thing was happening to someone other than her. Rushing, as if fearful of an impending threat, she filled all the water bowls, put out cat chow and teething bones. She took food and water to the closed room upstairs, where the kittens were clustered against their mother in a large cardboard box.
She grabbed up her book, her knapsack, and the keys to the house. Out on the street, she saw a confusion of people walking here and there, looking dazed or angry. Some cried. People stood on nearly every roof, all facing the same way. Where they faced, often pointing, a billow of smoke rose from behind the shabby row of stores on the avenue. The height of the smoke was shocking; something hugely terrible had happened. Was it happening still? Birds fluttered everywhere—or once again, it could have been paper, literal reams of paper.
Reams. A golden word, smooth and slippery. Or was that because it made her think of beams? Not rafters but rays of sun.
People filled the streets in a way that was physically aimless yet emotionally urgent. As Saga walked away from Stan’s, at first
aimless herself, she heard an audible ebb and flow of Oh my God oh my God oh my God.
Something enormous was on fire, but from Stan’s neighborhood, from the ground, you couldn’t see what.
“What’s happened?” she asked a young man who stood in a patch of sun, as if he’d found a spot of safety and did not intend to give it up.
“The second one just collapsed.” He looked plaintively at Saga. The tears in his eyes were so startling that she couldn’t bring herself to ask, The second what?
She walked in the direction of the smoke, curiosity stronger than fear. The fire had to be in Manhattan, she could guess that much, and there was water between that place and this.
People everywhere spoke rapidly on cell phones and stared at the sky—not just at the smoke but all around at the sky. She couldn’t be sure, but when she did the same, she thought something might be missing from the sky.
Fenno. Saga would call Fenno, because it was a local call. But at the first pay phone she came to, she found a long line of people; and at the next one, and the one after that. The buildings were low in this neighborhood, but still she could not see the source of the great, widening geyser of smoke. It must be coming from a very tall building. On she walked, the sun peculiarly pleasant, straight toward the unseen disaster.
She walked until she came to a modest, homely park by the river, where all of a sudden she could see that the smoke—and she gasped at how broad and thick it was, how furious and dense, a vertical roiling river of smoke—came right out of Wall Street. The park was filled with people exclaiming, weeping, pointing, shouting into phones. Oh my God oh my God oh my God from every direction, like the sound in a movie theater.
Saga stood beside a woman in sweat clothes who had a dog on a leash. The woman watched silently; the dog sniffed Saga’s legs. Saga bent to pet the dog—a wiry beige creature, part basenji perhaps—and then the woman spoke to her. “I knew something like this had to happen one day,” she said, nearly whispering. “We were all just too damn pleased with ourselves.”
Saga said, “I’m sorry, but can you please tell me what happened? From the start? I don’t know what happened.”
The woman’s eyebrows rose. “Oh, I wish you could stay that way,” she said. “Not knowing.”
“Tell me,” said Saga.
“Two planes flew into the towers there, the trade towers, and just like that, in an hour, they’re gone. They fell right down.”
“Why? The planes, I mean,” said Saga.
“Oh terrorists.” The woman made it sound like an Irish name, O’Terrorists. “Goddamn fucking towelhead terrorists. Arabs. You really have to ask?”
The woman’s rage sent Saga spiraling back down into her uncertain self. She waited till the woman was staring again at the smoke before slipping away, out of the park. She stopped on a crumbling sidewalk beside a huge brick building whose windows were boarded over. Saga had no idea where she was. She had never been to this spot before—or if she had, it hadn’t stayed with her.
She felt as if she might start crying, but not because of the tragedy. She was lost. She needed to call someone. She would find another phone and wait in line, no matter how long it took. Maybe Sonya could come pick her up, if Saga found her way to one of the bridges along the river. She could see the Manhattan Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge not too far away. And now she saw, despite the smoke, just how empty the sky looked there, behind the bridges. “Oh my God,” she said.
The first pay phone she found was broken. After that, she walked several blocks without seeing another. This was an old warehouse neighborhood, not one of the places rich people had claimed for gigantic apartments but a real urban ghost town. Grass grew between some of the slabs on the sidewalks. Except for the effect of the brilliant sunshine, she might have been afraid.
The air had begun to smell oppressive and rubbery—like a fire in a stove, not in a fireplace—but you couldn’t see the smoke from these canyonlike streets. Where would she go?
Fenno, she thought for the third time that day, with even greater longing. Having left Stan’s neighborhood, she had no idea where she might find a subway stop. She would simply have to walk. She knew she could cross the Brooklyn Bridge; people talked about the walkway down the middle. She had always wanted to walk a dog across it, but she was never in the right place to do it. From there, she could figure out the right direction, or she could ask her way to Bank Street.
Staying as close to the river as possible, she aimed for the bridge. Already you could see that it was filled with people walking—all walking away from Manhattan. But she would go against the tide. That never bothered Saga.
WALKING ACROSS THE BRIDGE TOOK FOREVER, and it was terrifying. No one questioned her going the wrong way (along with a few other brave souls), the way toward the fire. Some people spoke to one another, but most of them looked stunned, alone in their minds and not happily so. There was no rushing, no panic. No one seemed to fear a fire at their heels. Several people looked as if they’d been dipped in chalk. Or was it the papery snow? Some of the women, the ones all dressed up, the ones with mascara and lipstick, looked clownish—slovenly, smudged, their faces streaked. Some walked in bare feet.
“Where are you going? You’re out of your mind,” said one woman shouldering past her. The woman’s tone was exhausted, not angry.
O’Terrorists, o’terrorists, Saga kept thinking. Once upon a time, when she lived with David, she read the paper nearly every day. They had talked about Israel and Bosnia and unions and civil rights and Romanian orphans. Now she avoided the paper, along with radio and TV. Too much busy noise. Sometimes a swatch of current events from another time dropped into her consciousness like a comet—that’s how she knew now that once she’d known about Bosnia and Romanian orphans. Herzegovina: there, a sudden shaft from nowhere. The word a deep blue lavender, the color of Uncle Marsden’s favorite hyacinths.
So she had to wonder: were terrorists in the headlines these days? Had they made threats that only she, Saga, did not know about? Had conversations spun around her that she had forgotten—or, in her narrow life, simply never heard? She remembered a terrible news story from long ago, a man in a wheelchair on a cruise ship executed, tossed overboard.
She stopped near the center of the bridge. Were these terrorists still at large, right here? She checked people’s faces again. They did not look like they worried that they would be chased, even though many were crying.
Planes, she kept hearing. War planes? Terrorists in war planes?
Her thoughts, however worrisome, unspooled in a way that calmed her. She made her way into Chinatown. Since the accident, she had been to Chinatown only a few times (always with Stan), but despite its disorienting smells and crowded sidewalks, she had liked it better than ever. She loved seeing language everywhere that no one could read—or no one she knew. Ordinary people could have a taste of what she had felt when, for a time, so many known things became unknown.
And it was the closest she’d come in a long time to anything like the exotic travel she’d planned to make her living. She loved all the red everywhere. She loved the pagodas. Pagodas on phone booths, pagodas on banks, pagodas on public schools. Restaurants were not stylish—restaurants here were the opposite of pretty—but they had tanks of bizarre, fascinating fish or murals in curious colors.
Streets going toward the fire were thick with policemen; some were blocked off. Saga tried to fix in her mind a map of the city, imagining how she would get where she needed to go. She paid attention to shadows, which kept her heading vaguely north until she could go west again. Yet she felt a separate conviction, as if, like a dog, she could now find her way by intuition alone, no matter how roundabout the route she must take. Maybe the company of all those dogs at Stan’s, for days on end, had immersed her just enough in their dogness.
She stopped again. How would she get back to Stan’s? She would have to reach Sonya. Already, she began to sense that the city was closing down, sealing up at the edges like a wo
und. From the crowds on foot, filling sidewalks, spilling onto streets, it was clear there were no buses, no taxis, perhaps no subways. She walked on. Now half the people were walking her way, too, which made her progress easier, faster. Now she had company, fellow travelers.
Everyone moved as if in predetermined paths, though Saga understood that the steady, docile movement, the peeling off of smaller groups onto each side street they passed, was more a sign of shock than true direction. Yet she found herself remembering the poster in the bathroom at the bookshop: the migration of birds. She remembered how, the first time she’d seen it, she had imagined all those dependable pathways embracing the world, flocks of birds binding it together like ribbon. The whole world over, she remembered thinking; birds fly the whole world over but always, no matter what, find their way back home.
A song came to her. “Marching to Pretoria.” Where was Pretoria? Was it a real place? But she wasted no effort on yet another riddle. She turned a corner and saw the arch in Washington Square. She knew her way from there.
SHE WOULD TELL NO ONE THIS, but she had begun to picture herself in the Cute House with Uncle Marsden, how they would live their lives. He could take over the dining room for his collection of mosses. They could have a dining table in the kitchen or on the sun porch. He would have the largest bedroom, but one of the others had a prettier view, to a neighboring yard with a great elm tree, a rare survivor. From its branches hung a long, old-fashioned swing. On the expedition to see the house, Saga had lingered alone in the room to watch a little girl swinging on the swing. Maybe Saga would get to know that girl. She wondered if the girl had any pets.
There was a chimney smack in the middle of the house. Upstairs, the floors all slanted downhill from that chimney, as if the entire floor were a tutu flaring from the waist of a stout ballerina. When Saga realized that the house had a personality, she knew it would become, if she were patient, a fine place to live. Maybe she could get a bird. She’d have to find out if Uncle Marsden was allergic to birds. She could borrow a parakeet from Stan’s menagerie.