by Gwen Cooper
I remembered how, as a six-year-old child visiting New York at Thanksgiving with my parents for the first time, cold air—cold air outside—had been a revelation to me. I’d read books, of course, where characters lived in places like New York or Chicago or London and had to bundle up beneath coats and scarves when they went outdoors. But I’d had no physical sense of what that would feel like. Cold, in my own experience, was something that lived inside refrigerators, or that was pumped mechanically into your home through air-conditioning units. Going to Macy’s with my mother, the vastness of the floor that sold winter jackets and coats—with its overpowering smell of leather; I had never smelled so much leather in one place—reduced me almost to the point of awe. So many people must live in New York! And, naturally, all of them would need heavy coats. Because it was cold here. Cold outside.
Scarlett, Vashti, and Homer didn’t have even the theoretical knowledge of cold to prepare themselves with. The cold weather dried the air out, and their fur was always full of static electricity. Scarlett and Vashti took this in stride, but Homer found it terribly disconcerting. He would walk across the throw rug on the floor to jump into my lap, eagerly pressing his nose against mine, only to find that the contact produced a small electric shock. He would turn his face to me reproachfully, as if to say, Hey! What’d you do that for?
My apartment had a heater, but it was on the fritz and would periodically emit a sharp buzz followed by a resounding CLANK! CLONK CLANK! The heater soon became Homer’s sworn enemy. No matter how soundly asleep Homer was, he leapt to attention when he heard its racket. He had become very protective of me since the break-in and would jump to stand in front of me, his back fully arched, and growl in the heater’s direction. After a minute he would creep cautiously toward it, rake at it furiously with his claws a few times, and then—confident he’d shown that heater a thing or two—slink over to curl warily in my lap. But within an hour, the heater would clank and clonk once again.
My building super eventually replaced the heater with one that didn’t bang around quite as much but, even when it was operating at full force, my apartment was never what one might call balmy. My cats and I became very close that first winter in New York, huddling together for warmth. The smallness of my new apartment, which had caused so much initial consternation, soon came to feel like a blessing. Even Scarlett became a cuddler. This might have been good news for Homer—who, much as he disliked having less room to play in, was overjoyed that the four of us were together all the time—if only Scarlett had been gracious about sharing.
At first, in her usual peremptory fashion, she tried to keep Vashti and Homer from getting too close to me. Scarlett may have discovered the joys of near-constant snuggling with Mommy, but she always hated more physical contact with the other two cats than was strictly necessary. She would bat angrily at Homer’s and Vashti’s heads if she was in my lap and one of them tried to curl up beside me. Homer, who was always somewhere close to me and who had clearly come to regard himself as mature enough not to have to submit to Scarlett’s thralldom anymore, would slap right back at her. You’re not the boss of me! Occasionally, they got into downright fights that I had to break up by physically separating them. But eventually Scarlett learned to respect Homer’s space, albeit grudgingly. Homer was nearly five years old now and wedded enough to his habits, more so than even the most habit-centered cat, that he wasn’t about to be displaced just because Scarlett had had a come-to-Jesus moment in her philosophy of physical affection.
Vashti, however—who was neither as aggressive as Scarlett nor as persistent as Homer—found herself crowded out. I had to make a concerted point of ensuring that she got her fair share of lap-time. Still, Vashti wasn’t as happy as she’d been in Miami, and I felt guilty at times, worried that she was becoming the classic neglected middle child.
It was the first snowfall that brought Vashti around. Scarlett was captivated as it blew against the windows. She threw her upper body at the glass and did everything she could to catch the white stuff in her paws through the panes. She didn’t know what snow was—she didn’t realize that snow was cold. All she knew was that little flakes of things danced tantalizingly in front of her from the other side of the window glass, begging to be caught and played with.
But Vashti had been bred for snow—with her long white fur, her luxurious plume of a tail like that of an arctic fox, and her miniature snowshoes in the form of the little tufts of white fur that grew lush between the pads of her feet. She seemed to have an inborn memory of what snow was and what it would feel like. Perhaps that was why she’d always been so fascinated with water. As the snow piled up on our balcony, Vashti stood before the balcony door and pleaded mutely with her eyes for me to let her out into it. I did a few times, and she hurled herself into the middle of the deepest drifts. Her pupils were wide and wild and the only sign of darkness in the white-on-white landscape she created as she gamboled around and all but buried herself. It was only when a large gust of wind would come along that I could coax her back inside. Vashti may have loved snow, but wind terrified her and always drove her indoors.
It was around the time of the first snowfall that Homer discovered the magical world of under-the-covers. In Miami, he’d been content to cuddle with me on top of the blankets. But he was smaller than Scarlett and Vashti, and lying with me on top of the covers didn’t keep him nearly warm enough now. He would burrow as far beneath the covers as he could, purring from between my feet and generating as much warmth as a tiny space heater. Scarlett and Vashti, not always realizing he was under there, would jump up to join me and frequently landed directly on his head. Homer hadn’t landed inadvertently on another cat since he was a kitten. It was now his turn to wonder why the other two cats couldn’t tell where he was—how come everybody knew where he was most of the time, but sometimes it was like they didn’t know he was there at all? Homer would leap to his feet indignantly beneath the blankets, squawking a complaint.
I don’t know if he couldn’t tell when I wasn’t lying beneath blankets, or if he simply refused to accept that they weren’t there, but if I happened to be lying on the couch without a blanket over me, Homer would claw in frustration at my clothes. If I wore a baggy-enough sweatshirt, he would worm his way beneath it, poking his head out of the neck of my shirt and resting it on my shoulder, the rest of his body purring with loud contentment against my chest. I’d read aloud to him from whatever book I was in the middle of, and he would nuzzle happily against my neck until he fell into such a deep sleep that even his purring stopped. All that was left was the sound of his breath whistling past my ear, and the sound of the snow falling against the windows.
Spring came eventually, as spring is apt to do, and if there’s anything more gorgeous than Manhattan in springtime, I’ve never seen it. I had grown up in a city of flowers (Florida is actually Spanish for land of flowers), but the blooms that sprang riotously from trees and bushes and flower beds in New York City dazzled me, seeming to tumble unexpectedly in the profusion of a single day. The air grew less dry, Homer’s coat lost its static electricity, and Scarlett, almost cheerfully, made room for him beside me on the couch. Only Vashti sat longingly before the windows, her eyes scanning the horizon and the clear, sundrenched view of the streets below.
What? she seemed to ask. No more snow?
19 • A Hole in the Sky
We wept and lifted up our hands to heaven on seeing such a horrid sight, for we did not know what to do.
—HOMER, The Odyssey
THERE ARE EARLY-FALL DAYS IN NEW YORK SO STAGGERINGLY BEAUTIFUL, so laden with the promise of fall beauty still to come, that to experience them is, you tell yourself, worth all the money and hassle, all the striving and frenzy, that it takes simply to live in Manhattan. The leaves are still green and the air hasn’t turned cool yet, but it isn’t hot anymore, either. There’s a crispness to it that siphons off the brown industrial haze that hovers over the skyline during the humid days of July and August, leaving t
he air as clear and crystalline as God ever intended.
It was on the morning of one such day, at around eight fifteen, when I found myself facing an empty cat food bowl, an emptier cupboard, and a dilemma. I typically fed the cats a premium dry food (Vashti had developed food allergies, and the only brands that didn’t trigger them were, naturally, the most expensive) supplemented by a can of moist food made by the same manufacturers (I had also learned that the more expensive the moist food, the less likely it was to make Homer gassy). Occasionally I fed them a can of the cheapest cat food out there, because my cats loved the cheap stuff with all the ardor of a child who’d much rather eat McDonald’s than her mother’s healthier home-cooked meals. But I had nothing on hand at the moment, not even a can of tuna that could substitute as a festive, hasty meal in a pinch.
I could rush out now to the little gourmet grocery store across the street and refill their food before leaving for work. While they didn’t sell the specific brand I liked, I could buy a small box of a good-enough brand that would be gentle on Vashti’s sensitive system and hold us over for a day or two.
Or I could wait a few hours until lunchtime, walk over to the pet store that was closer to Broadway, buy the better food, and dart back to my apartment to feed them then. My office was only a block away from my apartment, and only three blocks from the pet store, and I had made this round trip often enough. Living so close to my office, I hated the idea of being even five minutes late to work—feeling that I had no excuse not to walk in punctually at the dot of nine every morning. So it was usually during lunch that I made these midweek pet food runs. Besides, I liked to visit my cats midday. It was about the only free luxury my life in New York offered, and the cats—particularly Homer—always treated these spontaneous midday appearances like a holiday.
In the end, it was the complete emptiness of their food bowl that convinced me. I had sometimes gone to work leaving them with only a little food, but never leaving them without anything. Vashti sat next to the bowl and squeaked at me in a beseeching, yet pointed, way. No food at all? she seemed to ask. You’d really leave us with no food at all? Sighing at my own lack of foresight for not having stocked up on supplies over the weekend (I was running dangerously low on kitty litter as well), I grabbed my purse and headed out.
The street in front of my Financial District apartment was one of the oldest in New York, and so narrow that I could cross it in fewer than five steps. The line at the grocery store’s cash register was long, as it always was in the mornings when nine-to-fivers grasped for their coffee as if it were a draught of sweet life itself. But the queue moved efficiently, and barely fifteen minutes had passed before I was once again in my apartment.
I had just emptied the entire box of food into their bowl, with all three cats seated in an eager semi-circle around me, when there was an enormous, muffled BOOM! It was more felt than heard, like the vibrations caused by a speaker with the bass turned all the way up. My apartment building shook slightly, and a few kernels of food spilled from the bowl onto the floor. Scarlett and Vashti darted under the bed so fast, it was as if a chain had been yanked that jerked them under. Homer leapt to stand in front of me, all his hackles raised, his nose sniffing the air as his ears moved from side to side. He growled a warning to whatever this invisible menace was. Stay back, the growl said. Stay away from us …
“It’s okay, little boy,” I said, stroking his back. “It was just a car backfiring. There’s nothing you have to protect Mommy from.”
Homer didn’t like it. For no reason at all that I could discern, he didn’t like it. He ran from corner to corner of the apartment, hackles and ears still at full attention, a sentry securing a perimeter. Every so often, he would come to stand in front of me, continuing his growl. Scarlett and Vashti were equally unnerved, refusing to put so much as a whisker out from under the bed. By the time I lured them out, it was a minute or two past nine o’clock. It looked as if, for the first time since I had started my job in New York, I was going to be a few minutes late after all.
I had slung my purse over my shoulder when the second BOOM! came, shaking our building once again. This time, the cats couldn’t be comforted. My apartment was a corner unit, with windows facing north and east, and Homer leapt to the sill of the westernmost of the northern-facing windows, hissing wildly.
There was snarled traffic and endless construction work around my building all the time, and the very narrowness of the streets—surrounded like a canyon with buildings that stretched thirty, forty, fifty stories high—echoed and magnified random sounds beyond their actual volume, even all the way up where I lived on the thirty-first floor. So I truly wasn’t worried about anything at that point beyond how upset the cats were. I hated to leave them in that state, but what could I do? I certainly couldn’t call my boss and tell him I was taking the morning off because my cats were upset.
So I left them, Homer still hissing at the window, Vashti and Scarlett huddled up beneath the bed.
The lobby of my building was serene as I dropped three pairs of pants with the on-site dry cleaner and crossed toward the front door. Tom, my doorman, usually waved a cheerful goodbye to me, but today he was on the phone, speaking in a hushed, anxious murmur. His expression was pained, and I remember feeling a fleeting sympathy for him as I passed. Tom was a good man; I hoped that whoever he was talking to wasn’t delivering bad news.
The street in front of my building was as crowded as it had been earlier, when I’d darted out to get the cat food. There were people everywhere. They stood on sidewalks, in doorways, and in the middle of the street itself. But now, the street wasn’t the buzzing hive of rush-hour activity it had been less than an hour ago. These people standing here now were completely frozen. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. It was as if wax figures from a museum had come to life, wandered out into the streets, and then simply decided to stop and resume their waxy poses where they stood. The only noise I could hear was what sounded like the sirens of a thousand fire trucks, spilling over one another and competing to be the first to blare their panic into the early-fall air.
The silence and stillness of that Manhattan street, in the heart of the Financial District, at the height of rush hour, was the first time that day when—still not knowing why—I felt a creeping fear. Everybody was looking in the same direction—due west. Of course I turned, to see what they were all looking at.
The World Trade Center was on fire.
The towers were etched against the perfect blue of the morning sky, and they were on fire. They loomed over everything, appearing to be five feet from me rather than the five blocks they actually were. Black smoke billowed up, and shards of glass and debris fluttered down, as gracefully as the fall leaves that were only a few weeks away. Then I saw what couldn’t be, it couldn’t possibly be—and yet it was, it was—a man on fire, falling from one of the highest floors. He didn’t fall in the elegant spiral of the debris, but in a straight-down plummet.
My stomach contracted into a painful dry heave and I retched, suddenly grateful that I hadn’t eaten breakfast.
The people around me had seen it, too, and many of them turned to clutch the arms or bury their faces in the shoulders of those standing closest to them. From the stiff, automatic way in which these gestures were received, I guessed that some of those grabbed were strangers to the people who’d grabbed them.
I didn’t want to touch anybody, and I didn’t want anybody to touch me. There would be an indisputable reality in human contact, like when you say to somebody, Pinch me, so that you know you’re not dreaming. Holding myself as carefully stiff as something carved from wood, I walked the block to my office.
The message light on my phone was already blinking, and the phone itself rang incessantly. My co-workers were speaking quietly, clustered in groups of two and three around the windows in our office that faced onto the World Trade Center. A plane hit it. A small plane. But how could a pilot not see … got disoriented … an accident … a horrible accident …
The windows from my own desk looked directly onto the World Trade Center. The black smoke still gushed upward. I saw helicopters weave through the smoke, circling … circling. Helicopters have always been the paranoiac’s symbol of government omnipotence, gliding with sleek menace through movies about evil federal conspiracies or dystopic futuristic societies. Now I thought that I had never seen anything as helpless-looking as those helicopters, small hatchlings continually repulsed from their nest. There’s no way they can land, I thought. How will they get those people out?
The first call I made was to my mother. I felt an absurd need to announce to somebody that I was okay—even though, obviously, I was okay. This was something that was happening to other people, to the ones in the World Trade Center. Not to me.
Once I heard my mother’s voice on the phone, I felt comforted. “Don’t look at it,” she instructed. Obediently, I drew down the shade over my window.
My next phone call was to Tony in Miami, who was watching the story unfold on the local news. “They’re saying it was terrorists,” Tony said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I replied immediately—and it wasn’t denial. I really meant it. Terrorists! Who could believe such an absurdity? The people putting forth this theory were of the same ilk as the ones who believed the government was hiding little green men in the deserts of New Mexico. “Of course it wasn’t terrorists. It was an accident.”
“Gwen, they flew two huge passenger jets into those buildings on purpose,” Tony insisted. “I’m watching the film footage on the news right now.”
The PA system in my office building, the one that informed us of fire drills or elevator outages, began to spit and crackle. The Jamaican-accented voice of the security guard downstairs came on, only it didn’t have the jovial resonance of the voice that greeted me every morning with a “Hello! Good morning, miss!” This voice sounded strained and awful. Our building was being evacuated, the voice said, and would not reopen that day. We were to proceed calmly to the emergency stairs and exit the building as quickly as possible.