by James Phelan
Up and down, the street looked virginal, hardly a vehicle to be seen, a blanket of white snow over most of everything. For a moment, I thought we could have been anywhere, anytime. Was I becoming used to life in New York after all? Would it eventually start to seem like home?
Caleb started the BMW up again and we rode south. At Hester Street he turned right and pulled up at the corner of Mulberry.
Fire had ripped through here, maybe on the first day. Charred buildings all around. We stood and I passed him the shotgun, which I’d had slung across my back during the ride.
“Wait here,” he said, and before I could protest, he headed down Mulberry on foot, disappearing into a building a few doors down on the left.
I walked away from the bike. Looked in some windows, most of which were broken. I saw rats, dogs, and not much else. In a parked car I found a briefcase that had a laptop, an iPad and a mobile phone, all with flat batteries.
This person had been to McDonald’s—the massive drink container in the cup holder had slowly disintegrated out the bottom, leaving a sticky dark mess everywhere. A bag of food on the passenger seat stunk, but the burgers looked like they’d been made yesterday.
“Come on,” Caleb called. He walked fast. From what I read on his face, I couldn’t ask him what he’d found in his old apartment.
After a silent journey, we pulled up under the awning of a large brick building. Caleb kicked out the bike’s stand and we got off.
“What are we doing?” I asked. We were still several blocks from the 9/11 site.
“I just want to see in here,” he said. He entered the lobby of the Tribeca Grand Hotel.
Without stopping to see who might be watching I followed him through the doors. Inside the building was light, illuminated by a glass-roofed area.
Caleb walked behind the bar. Looked around. Then he rattled through some bottles and poured himself a drink. He sipped, drank, then poured another. He stared at it a while, I wasn’t sure whether to look away or walk away, and then he looked straight at me. I walked over and took a seat on a stool, just the high bar separating us. Close up I could see that he’d been crying.
“I’ll take a Coke,” I said, giving him a chance to recover. “What are you drinking?”
“Nothing special. Not my favorite drink,” he said. “That would be the Goombay Smash. Amber rum, coconut rum, apricot brandy, orange juice, and pineapple juice. And then the way they do it is with a little Meyer’s floater on top.”
“Why that drink?”
He smiled. “Memories.”
My head did still hurt a bit, and I felt sweaty and my heart was racing, but that wasn’t why I felt so weird. It was more that I didn’t know how to feel about Caleb. I didn’t entirely get him anymore. Was he always just messing around, or was it something else? Maybe there was more than the Peter Pan, fun and games side to him. Maybe I hadn’t taken him seriously enough. I’d definitely seen a different side to Caleb today. Sure, he was still the carefree, good-time Charlie, but maybe all that was changing.
“Memories?”
“Yeah,” he said, looking out at the big empty lounge over my shoulder. “Staying with friends on summer holiday of our final year of high school, up in Massachusetts. We went to this bar—The Beachcomber at Cape Cod. Everybody’s happy there.”
He smiled, lost for a while in thoughts that were so happy it was contagious. I felt the summer warmth of that day.
“It’s in a desolate place, at the end of a long road on these giant dunes, but once you get down there, it’s buzzing. A live band. A sea breeze blowing through the screen doors to the terraced balcony on a sweltering day. An afternoon of laughing with friends. Mates, you’d call them, yeah?”
“Yeah.” I thought again of my mates back home. “Your friend, back in Little Italy—he was there with you, at this bar, on that holiday?”
It was painful for him to remember, that much was clear. Maybe he couldn’t muster the courage needed to venture into the apartment and see it—to feel it—to get answers. Was his friend in there, dead? Did Caleb assume his friend was now a Chaser, living the kind of life—if it could be called living—that he himself said he could not bear?
Finally, he nodded.
“He loved it, he even worked there one summer. It’s the kind of place where you’re not going to run into door guys who are dicks. So much laughing, everybody’s so laid-back. Didn’t much care that we were underage. We’d watch the sunset. Bonfires on the beach every night. It was beautiful.”
“There was a girl?” I asked.
“Yep. My first love, my first . . . you know. She was beautiful.”
“What was her name?”
He shook his head. Something else lost or that he didn’t want to share. I got that. I wasn’t ready to tell him about Anna, maybe never would be: he wasn’t that guy. I could be protective too.
“Caleb,” I said, looking around the room. “Why are we here?” Why was I here?
“I miss all this. Look around. I used to come here. My friend’s girlfriend worked at this bar, so it was easy, we’d kick things off here. The ambience, the life of the bar—that’s the buzz. The chance that something unpredictable might happen, which wouldn’t happen in your own home. That’s why you go, right? Just because something may happen. The ‘what-if.’ Meeting someone. Being with someone. That’s what I’ll miss. No more names to learn, anymore, you know that? Do us no good to remember them much either.”
30
Clean. Pristine. The 9/11 Memorial was like another world. We stood on an upper floor and looked out a window. The sun broke through a hole in the clouds—a gap of clear sky to the horizon that might make for a nice sunset, still a good couple of hours off. Caleb’s eyes met mine: they were wet and searching.
“When 9/11 happened, I just sat there stunned,” he said. “I think I was in shock those first couple of days, then bewildered . . .” He shone a flashlight on an image of the World Trade Center, just before the first tower fell. “It took a while for it to sink in that everything had changed.”
All around us in here were the snapshots of the attack of 9/11, thousands of scenes of tenderness, images of loss and sacrifice, bookended by a wall-sized reproduction of a French newspaper’s headline proclaiming: We Are All Americans. We all share in similar responses to this. Caleb was either angry or sad or probably both and then some.
“All the men on my dad’s side of the family have served in the Israeli army. All except me,” Caleb said. I tilted my head, saw him sitting there. He looked like he was about to cry. “I never wanted to do that.”
I simply nodded, as we looked at a picture of a fire crew.
“What have we done? What have I given? Nothing. Nothing but being one of the lucky ones to have survived.”
“Are we even lucky?” I asked. I regretted my question for a moment, but Caleb looked at me as if he understood. “I think I know how you feel.”
He looked out at the view, and said quietly, “What I feel is sick.” His hands flexed into fists and out again, they were battered and beaten, kind of like how I imagined a boxer’s to look after a big fight. “Or angry,” he said. “That’s a better word. I’ve been angry.”
I could understand that kind of sick, if it were a sickness. I felt it too, felt it run through my every fiber.
“When I met you, and up until now, you haven’t seemed angry.”
“Yeah, well, you don’t know me otherwise, do you?” He looked at a picture of someone waving a bath towel from the top floor of the North Tower, illuminated now by our flashlights, there and gone again. He began to cry. I put a hand on his shoulder.
Caleb looked at me after a moment. “I am proud to be American, and I know . . . I know, I understand, that freedom is never free, yeah? It’s earned. But I never thought it would be like this.”
“I think everyone feels that way.”
“It’s different for me, though,” he said. “After this 9/11 shit, when most Americans struggled to find some
thing useful to do, some knew what was needed and they did it. Not me. I had nothing but fear, which got worse as we were plunged into war.”
“And since then?”
“And since then our life has returned to normal—or, rather, some new version of normal. Gone are the days when aviation travel could be considered an adventure. There are long lines at ever more vigilant and intrusive security checkpoints and passengers looking at fellow travelers with distrust. Who’s got a bomb in their shoe? Who’s carrying a box-cutter? Who’s what religion? I’d been afraid. I didn’t want to go on to university or do work experience at a newspaper because I didn’t want to know.”
“Yeah, I think we’re all like that to some extent,” I said. “I think it’s a self-defense thing.”
“You agree with me?”
“Sure. Our generation has lost any real honest connection or commitment with our true feelings. We’re rooting for ball teams, but we’re not getting in there to play. Glued to the news, not caring. We’re all so busy putting up walls around us—”
“Were so busy.”
“Maybe.”
“No maybes,” he said, walking, not mad at me but frustrated by it all. “Look around us, Jesse. This place in here, this memorial—what it symbolizes—and look at it! It’s pristine! Not even a scratch. How’s that happen? Irony?”
“Maybe this place was designed that way, to withstand—”
“It’s more than that, and you know it.” He stood by a window and looked out at the two big square pools that marked the footprints of the Twin Towers. “We’re a generation of spectators, no doubt about that.”
We watched Chasers, the docile, weak kind, down by the water. Thirty, maybe forty, of them. I had been wary yet respectful of them before, but now Caleb had me scared, as if I were Scout and maybe he was Jem and the Chasers were a bunch of Boo Radleys. I smiled at that. Would they all prove friendly, in the end? Would I realize that I just feared what I didn’t know, and feared what fear itself conjured up in my mind—always the worst? It drove me crazy to think about it.
“Were,” I said. “Were a generation of spectators.”
Caleb grinned.
“When we met,” I said, suddenly remembering the moment with clarity, “you made that point about not killing them, the Chasers.”
“They’re people.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, my mind flooding with jumbled images. “But . . . what if you had to? Could you kill one?”
“I don’t know.” He rested his forehead against the window. “Can I ask you something, then, as my last friend around here?”
“Of course.”
He looked out at the Chasers. Some were on the ground, dead or dying, but then they were all dying pretty fast, with little hope but the immediate, of keeping at sipping away their thirst.
“If I turn out like one of them,” Caleb said, “I’d rather be dead. I’d rather be dead than a Chaser, or anything like them. Understand?”
I couldn’t answer, so I didn’t say anything. I watched the reflection of his face in that gray light of the gloomy day.
“You gotta. It’s all I ask,” he said.
“I don’t. I can’t.”
“You do,” he looked at me. “It’s the contract you signed when you became a survivor on this new earth. The stakes are raised now, buddy. The time comes, you gotta step up to the plate, no matter what. No more spectating.”
31
Back at the bookstore, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, leaning on the basin. There was a dim shaft of light filtering in through the window. It reminded me of the light in the subway tunnel, when I’d come to after the crash and emerged into that Manhattan street; the scene that proved my life had changed forever. I looked at my reflection, my face cast in shadows that highlighted my sunken cheeks. My breath steamed in the cold. I used some wet paper towel to clean my face, washed the dried blood on my forehead from when I’d collapsed earlier.
Seeing a bottle of pills on the shelf, I remembered the medicine I’d taken. It must have been strong to have such long-lasting effects. I called out to Caleb, “What were those pills you gave me?”
“Pain and sleeping pills—you were delirious,” he called back. “You okay now?”
“Yeah. I guess so. Did I say anything, before I hit my head?”
“You’d just run here, you were out of breath.”
“Yeah, I remember that . . .”
My ears were ringing, but a new sound cut through—I could hear Caleb starting up the generator.
Generator!
“Caleb!” I yelled, bashing through the door into the storeroom where he’d set up the generators. He wasn’t there, but the engine was running and the exhaust jerry-rigged up through a makeshift pipe into the ceiling cavity. I raced out to the café and slipped over in my socked feet on the tiles.
“You really gotta start slowing down before you get yourself—”
“Caleb,” I said, getting up, “we gotta go!”
“Where’s the fire?”
“The zoo! We have to get there!” I told him about the wounded snow leopard, how Rachel needed a generator, how that was the reason I’d raced to the store.
“That was yesterday!” I said. “They needed it yesterday!”
Caleb looked at me, weighing up the pros and cons of my proposition. Things seemed to bother him less; he was able to deal with all that had happened to his city. He’d been as alone as me since the moment of the attack, yet looking at him now he seemed the stronger, the more capable of the two of us. Whatever Caleb’s decision, I suddenly knew with certainty that my idea of him had changed forever—he saw this city for what it was.
“Come on, then,” he said, and I could have cried with relief as he stood. “Let’s go.”
I looked down the slippery stairs. My legs were shaking from the strain of having pulled the generator along the road from Caleb’s. We’d used ropes tied through the tubular steel frame, and some laminated book posters as a makeshift sled. Every few paces it would catch on debris; it was heavy work.
We turned the generator around, pushing it to the top of the stairs so that it balanced at the edge. For it to slide down out of control, for it to tumble down and smash just didn’t bear thinking about. I made sure it was in no danger of slipping away of its own accord while Caleb went back to the street, cleared out the gutter with the heel of his shoes and hands, the snow and dust and debris in mounds at the side.
“I’ll anchor it and play out the ropes, you guide from there,” he said.
I stood by the generator, looked across the sidewalk to the cleared groove several paces away.
“Yeah, that should work,” I said out loud.
The generator teetered at the edge on its makeshift slider. The ropes tightened as Caleb backed across the sidewalk and sat down on Fifth, my own legs straight out towards the gutter in a brace. Slowly, he let out the tension and so did I, and the generator started to move. Caleb gave the ropes a flick as if they were the reins of a horse—and the generator was off, fast, the friction burning my gloved hands until we took control again to slow its descent and finally the rope was slack.
At the top of the stairs I stood and shone the flashlight beam down; the generator had arrived safe and sound. Caleb bumped in close next to me. We had made it, hopefully in time. Slowly, we, too, made our way down; my legs wobbly, my head throbbing, my hands aching, my heart fluttering with a whole bunch of “What ifs?”
32
As soon as the generator was connected up, the three of us helped Rachel move the sedated snow leopard onto the X-ray bed. It took about an hour and by the end of it Rachel had splinted and bandaged the animal’s hind leg, and we put it into the recovery room before making our way back inside the arsenal building.
After that, it was time to talk. As with any group, we sized each other up, formed and withdrew prejudices. Of course, I didn’t know exactly what everyone thought of each other. Maybe that wasn’t necessary; everyone was being f
orced to act differently from their normal selves, anyway. What would they have made of me if we’d met at the UN camp before all this happened? I’d even thought Anna, Dave, Mini and I would get cabin fever and tire of each other—would that have happened? Would my new friends and I still be on good terms throughout the days, maybe weeks, it would take to reach safety? If I made it back to Australia, how would my old friends treat me? Would we get along like we had before, when everything had changed?
These were big questions—too big. For the moment, I was happy to feel a sense of pride that I had managed to bring everyone together. But what if it didn’t last? If I doubted Caleb, how much could I expect the others to trust me? Would a natural leader emerge once we got going? Did my friends feel as responsible for me as I did for them? I remembered feeling the strain of that before—how it eats into you and makes you doubt yourself. But more than ever, uncertainty was the last thing we needed.
I listened carefully to the conversation, not just for the soothing spirit of togetherness, but listening out for where we agreed and where we didn’t.
“Remember what happened in New Orleans after Katrina hit?” Rachel was saying. “How long it took for help to properly arrive there? For law and order to be restored? This is bigger than that, maybe this will take even longer . . .”
“That could be what that soldier meant, Jesse,” Felicity said, “when he said it was worse elsewhere, that things here weren’t that bad, not yet.”
I watched her face as she spoke.
“But we all agree that things are worse since then,” I said. “The Chasers are—”
“Getting a hell of a lot smarter and better at what they do,” Caleb finished.
“Might be worse everywhere,” Rachel said. “If a neighbor-against-neighbor kind of thing is going on in the warmer areas, I don’t want to see it firsthand.”
Felicity and I shared a look and she gave me that smile of hers; it would still take some persuading to get Rachel to leave. Rachel hadn’t thanked us, hadn’t made a big deal about us bringing the generator or even about our late arrival, yet there was a shared, unspoken feeling of having achieved something good, a sense of better late than never.