The Whole World Over

by Julia Glass

  The sound of a radio rose in the background. Pansy must have raised the volume, to make her sister hang up. “Frida,” said Saga, “I know you need the phone to stay free, but can I ask you a weird, selfish question?”

  “Why not?” Frida might have meant to be sarcastic, but sadness made her sound earnest. “The truth is, Michael would call Denise before he’d call us.”

  “Frida, was there something people didn’t tell me about the accident? Mine, I mean.”

  A chaos of shouting came over the radio. Frida sighed loudly. “This is so not the time, Saga. Just try to get back here as soon as you can.”

  Saga noticed that she did not say get home. “I will,” she said. “But please just tell me. Michael was the one who told me to ask.”

  “Well then,” said Frida. “Well then, on a day like today, what choice do I have?” She shouted at Pansy to close the goddamn kitchen door.

  TWENTY-ONE

  “WHO’S THAT MAN?”

  “He’s someone they think may have ordered those men to fly the planes into the towers.”

  “Who thinks it?”

  “The president. The people who run the United States.” The spies, he did not say. The idiotic spies who bungled it all so badly, who could have foreseen this and stopped it if they hadn’t believed us so high and fucking mighty.

  “Will they catch him?”

  “Well, he’s very good at hiding,” said Alan.

  “When they find where he’s hiding and they catch him, will they turn him into a good guy?”

  “Oh George, if they could do that, that would be something.”

  “Something great, you mean.”

  “Yes.”

  “But people are dead because of him? Aren’t people dead?” George’s tone was so straightforward, so ingenuous that Alan could only nod and place a hand on his head.

  Ten minutes ago, the news artists had placed a picture of Osama bin Laden’s face—a face that Alan now realized would look bizarre and striking even to a child raised in a city of freely eccentric people—in the upper left corner of the television screen. It resembled a postcard tucked in the frame of a mirror—for across the rest of the screen burned the World Trade Center, or the rubble that remained, pathetically diminished yet inconceivably, appallingly massive. What a ghastly mirror it was.

  “Don’t stand so close,” Alan said gently. “Sit here, beside me. Please.”

  “Have you seed my toy planes, Daddy?”

  “Seen,” said Alan. “No, sweetie, I have not seen them in ages. But let’s go out now. Treehorn needs a walk.” He turned off the TV.

  George frowned. “How will we know if they catch him?”

  Alan hesitated. “We don’t need to worry. He’s not in New York. He’s very far away from here, in fact.”

  “But he ordered the men to crash the planes here.”

  “Yes. That might be true,” said Alan. “But it’s over. The damage is done.” Though of course it wasn’t. The many, many kinds of damage yet to be inflicted were utterly unpredictable. The damage had only begun.

  George looked skeptical. “Daddy, who knows where Osaddam is hiding?”

  How strange, and in a way how canny, that George, absorbing the news for those few hours, had already conflated the names of the two villains about whom there was voluble speculation.

  “Everyone’s trying very hard to find out,” said Alan. “Now where did we put the leash? Is it in your room?”

  Greenie would not be happy that Alan had left the television on all afternoon. In retrospect, Alan wasn’t happy about it, either. He had not realized how events would unfold (who could have?), in what directions they might take George’s imagination. But George had seen the towers on fire, right there against his very own sky, when Alan brought him home from school, so what was there to hide? In Tulsa or Boston, you might shelter a five-year-old from news like this—though even in distant places they would soon hear all about it. Still, as father and son left the apartment with their dog, Alan knew that he must take them due west, avoid even a glimpse of the hospital. There would be hundreds of ambulances—dozens, at least—filling every lane of the avenue, carrying people burned and crushed.

  Alan had yet to speak with Greenie. At noon, when it occurred to him that he had not heard from anyone outside the city, he called his mother and found her mad with worry. (“All morning long, I’ve dialed and dialed and dialed!”) After reassuring her that he and George were safe (no, there was no human way they could get to New Jersey), he called the kitchen at the Governor’s Mansion. It rang a long time before someone answered: Maria, who’d cooked for Alan and George and Greenie the night they ate dinner with Ray.

  “She is not here, she is gone,” said Maria.

  “She’s at home?”

  “No, no, she is gone to you. Half an hour.”

  “To me? What do you mean?”

  “She tries to call you, but she did not get through. She is driven by George.”

  You had to wonder if the terrorists had messed not just with buildings and planes and people’s lives but with the minds of everyone everywhere. Well, in fact they had. If no one could think straight today, would that be so strange?

  “Ray’s driver?”

  “Yes. Tall George. He will drive her to New York.”

  “Here? All the way here?”

  “That’s it, sí, yes. All the way to you,” said Maria.

  Alan asked if there was any way to reach her, to reach Tall George; she did not know. He started to ask if he could speak with Ray or Mary Bliss, but really, who was he, now, to get through to either of them? “Never mind, Maria. Thank you. If she calls there, would you tell her we’re all right? We’re fine?”

  ALAN HAD BEEN IN HIS OFFICE WITH STEPHEN, looking over the brochures and documents Stephen had brought along. Alan had told Stephen that his sister was adopting, too, through a different country with different rules. He confessed that beyond what he’d learned about this process from Stephen and Joya, he knew nothing. “That’s completely okay,” Stephen had told him. “You’re like my second set of eyes, my second set of shoulders. Sometimes it feels like I’m lifting a Dumpster to do this thing.” Alan was touched.

  That morning Stephen told him about a dream in which he had discovered that in order to adopt a child he had to move to a medieval building in Brooklyn that looked a lot like a monastery. In the dream, this seemed fine—the monastery had views of New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty—until Stephen found out that Gordie would also be living there.

  “I guess the Statue of Liberty would have to represent my freedom from my anger at Gordie. What do you think?” said Stephen. “And it’s right beside Ellis Island, so that seems like a good omen for the adoption, maybe.”

  “But you have to live in a monastery?” asked Alan. He smiled. “Stephen, have you been seeing anyone?”

  “Seeing anyone? Other than nosy matrons and paper pushers? Dream on.”

  They had talked about Stephen’s hunch that he would be adopting a daughter, how his fantasy was tied up with his goddaughter, Skye. They had talked about Stephen’s vision of caring for a baby. Alan felt almost fatherly toward him now; he wanted to make Stephen feel welcome to the world of impending parenthood, to understand that it both did and did not merit any sort of fanfare. Once Stephen had the child he yearned for, too many people would give him grief or shut him out, and Alan wanted to inoculate him, however modestly, with approval and a sense of inclusion.

  After the session had ended, Alan left his building with Stephen, knowing that they would part ways on the sidewalk. As soon as they stepped outside, Stephen said, “Good grief, will you listen to that?” He was referring to the sirens, which wailed insistently from every direction.

  A few blocks to the east, where Bank Street met Greenwich Avenue, Alan saw a throng of milling people. It was just before nine, and though people would still be heading to work, there were never crowds of commuters, not the hordes you’d see farther uptown.
A man walked swiftly toward them, a brooding look on his face.

  “Has something happened?” Alan asked him.

  “A jetliner’s flown right into the World Trade Center. Right into it. Like six floors of it. A terrible, terrible accident,” said the man. “Terrible.” He looked as if he wanted to discuss it with someone, but neither Alan nor Stephen knew what to say. The stranger continued on his way.

  Alan had meant to go west, to a stationery store on Hudson, but now he walked with Stephen, toward the crowd. When they emerged onto the avenue, they looked south. They heard a muffled roar, like the muttering of gathered birds—but it was human, the sound of far-reaching, inarticulate amazement. They saw a second plume of smoke breach the horizon of rooftops.

  Along with the crowd of which they were now a part, they made wordless noises of incomprehension.

  Across the avenue, on the stretch of sidewalk in front of the hospital, a line began to form. Out of the hospital, from the emergency room, from around both corners, emerged figures in green and white: doctors and nurses, all fully suited in scrubs the color of Caribbean water, their heads covered, nunlike, with crisp white bonnets. At their throats they wore cloth masks, ready for the worst. They stood in rows spanning the entire block. As they stepped from the shadowed margin of the building and into the sun, their white pants and headcoverings gleamed. Shading their eyes, they stared in the direction of the smoke.

  Alan saw cops pushing barricades against the curbs, the way they did for big parades. Almost abruptly, there was no traffic; the avenue was utterly empty. It was empty because it was expected to fill, at any moment, with ambulances.

  Alan turned to Stephen, whose astonished presence he had forgotten for several minutes. “I’m going to my son’s school,” he said. “I have to go.” As if they’d been headed somewhere together.

  Stephen looked shaken. “Yes. Go there now.”

  “You should go home, I think,” said Alan.

  “Yes,” said Stephen, but after Alan had crossed the avenue, he looked back and saw Stephen, fixed to the spot, looking south.

  Alan had dropped George off by eight, for breakfast in the school cafeteria. He did this on Tuesdays and Thursdays, in order to meet with Stephen. Alan saw four patients now, restricting their appointments to the margins of his days.

  He joined a crowd of distressed parents in the cafeteria, just in time to see the principal climb up on a chair. She waved her arms, trying to silence the uproar. She was a small rotund woman—Madam Cog she was called by the parents who found her policies too cold, too unionized—and though she seemed for once admirably cool, she looked like a hen on a precarious roost. Most of the parents swarming about her were mothers, several of them the same mothers who spoke so warmly, so unctuously to Alan on other mornings, looking him over as a prospect for their lonely friends: the ultimate prize, a single dad. Here and now, these women had no time or courtesy for Alan, elbowing around him, blind to anyone but the authority figure who held their children hostage.

  “Parents! Parents! Parents, listen to me!” the principal called out over their heads. Finally, there was a begrudging semblance of quiet. “Parents, school is the safest place for your children,” she intoned, her voice as ceremoniously condescending as ever. “I advise you to leave them here until further notice, to maintain as much normalcy as possible. But if you must take them home—if you feel you must—then proceed to my office and follow the usual procedures. Please. That much I must require.”

  She had more to say, but her words were lost in the sound of feet running toward her office. Alan ran with them and took his place in a long, long line. If the city were to be bombed right then, he wanted to be under the same roof as George. Let me be with him now, now, he thought as he waited for his turn at the attendance ledger, where children could be signed out like library books or prescription drugs.

  What would you do, he had thought, if at that moment you’d had two children, or more, all in different places? How could you decide where to go first? What parent, honestly, would go home and wait out the day?

  Yet now, as Alan detached his reluctant son from the television screen, he understood what Madam Cog had meant. In the classroom where he had picked up George, the teacher had been conducting first-grade business as usual. The children had been sitting on a brown rug, at “meeting time,” discussing the seasonal changes of autumn, what those changes meant about the earth and its relationship to the sun. The teacher had smiled as, one by one, parents took their bewildered children’s hands and led them out toward the bedlam beyond the classroom walls. “Take care!” the teacher had called after each departure, her voice light as a billowing scarf.

  When they left their building, Alan paused at the top of the stoop, holding Treehorn back, and looked in every direction, even up at the sky. At a glance, their neighborhood looked as it always did in the long, lovely shadows of late afternoon; but today people stood in tight, animated groups on every corner of Bank Street, to east and west alike. Alan led George and Treehorn through these knots of people, hearing excerpts of their outrage and grief. But we are the safe ones, the spared ones, he wanted to say—till he realized that this might be only fleetingly true. When they reached the playground, George stopped. A surprising number of children were swinging, climbing, digging in the sun-warmed sand. One of George’s playmates came to the fence.

  “Can we go in?” George asked his father.

  Alan shook his head. “You know Treehorn can’t go into the playground.”

  The friend’s mother, who had followed her son to the fence, looked intently at Alan; they both understood that though they wanted desperately to share the horror they felt, to find out what details the other one knew, there was little they could say in front of the children.

  “Everyone in your family all right?” asked Alan.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yours, too, I hope.”

  “Yes,” he said. At least Greenie, he thought in a flash, was not a chef at Windows on the World. He wondered if, in what she had always described as a very small cosmos, she knew anyone who worked there. Who had worked there.

  “Can we come back later?” asked George. “Please?”

  “Let’s give Treehorn a good walk, and then we’ll see,” said Alan. But he wanted to get home quickly. He hoped Greenie was trying to call. At some point, the telephone lines had to clear. “Come on, George. I’m sorry.”

  At first, George wouldn’t move. He whined in protest. Alan held out his free hand until George surrendered and took it. They walked toward the river, where the sky had begun to turn from blue to a buttery yellow. The open water seemed to amplify the sirens as they rose and fell, some prolonged and moaning, others staccato, ululating, pleading. At times their collective noise became nearly symphonic.

  WITHIN A WEEK OF RETURNING from New Mexico with George, Alan had accepted his mother’s offer of her aging Toyota, and he had phoned Jerry again. “I think I need to work with crazier people than I do,” he said. “Is that a terrible thing to say?” Jerry had laughed. “Not in the slightest. Let’s get you up and running with the wolves.”

  Alan did these two things to keep himself from curling up in a corner and mourning the death of his marriage. Not that George, with his emotional resilience and energy, would have let his father curl up for so much as a catnap. Alan enrolled him in a simple summer camp, run by his old nursery school teachers (this was to make Alan feel secure), but every weekend they got in the car and left the city. They went to New Jersey, where George’s grandmother was happy to see so much of him, where the boy could run and dig and splash on the beach; to friends’ country houses; to trails that wound along cliffs in the Catskills. One weekend they stayed in a lighthouse on the Hudson River. They bought food to cook in the decrepit kitchen, inviting the keeper (a former dot-com boy wonder in a Deadhead T-shirt) to join them. Warily, George ate lobster for the first time.

  Perhaps Alan had made the mistake, for too long, of expecting Greenie to broaden h
is horizons. Now he would do it for himself, and for George. In time, he suspected, he would have to give George back to Greenie, but for now he would make the most of having him close. He took George to the Intrepid, to the Cloisters, to a Yankees game where they sat near the very top and—Alan having forgotten the sunscreen—felt their noses turn pleasantly pink. A fine layer of gratification began to form, like a dusting of snow, in Alan’s psyche. Yet George alone could not have brought his father this much peace.

  Marion had called the day she received Alan’s letter—also less than a week after he had returned. She began with an apology. She had been much too cruel; she had held against him the petty sin of silence. How was he to have guessed that she had become pregnant (to her own surprise, she insisted), that she hadn’t really meant to make their good-bye in that parking lot so final? She’d been trying to be tougher than she was—tougher and less attached to her past. “I was furious when my parents told me they were selling that house. Never mind that I’d grown up to see it as tacky, as so New Jersey.” She laughed. “I mean, it’s the only place I grew up, right? I went to that reunion knowing it was the last time I’d be there. My house.”

  She had called late at night. Alan had sat on his bed and listened to her talk. Just her voice, all the tension and resentment of their last meeting fallen away, gave him enormous pleasure. He enjoyed the sound of her voice so much that he felt no urgency to speak.

  “Little brother, are you still there?” she said after a long pause. “Were you listening to everything I said?”

  “I’ve always been here. It’s you who went underground,” he said, but affectionately.

  “Will you forgive me?”

  “Of course. But please don’t call me little brother.”

  “I’m sorry.” Another long silence, and then she told him, “Now here comes the hard part.” This was the part where she acknowledged that Jacob was his son as well as hers (“Yes, yours, no more mincing words”) but that she could not imagine complicating what the boy knew about his universe already. He knew that Lewis wasn’t his “original” father, but he’d stopped asking who that father might be.