by Olivia Wild
“I told you if you don’t start treating me better, I was going to leave,” I say to AC quietly when we make it out into the hallway. I press the elevator button repeatedly, then eye the nearby staircase, not a bad jog only 10 stories up.
AC is flummoxed, as he stares into my face, wondering why his usual tactic of flowers and apologies and food isn’t working on me this time to bring about instant forgiveness.
At that exact moment, the doorway to the stairwell flies open, and Adam comes barreling out, paperwork in hand, walking with a steady and assured step leading back toward the reception area away from us.
Adam sees me and smiles, but upon sight of AC, his countenance falls and his gait slows.
“Hey Adam,” I wave and smile nervously, trying to sound oh-so-nonchalant, as if I’m greeting any other normal coworker. “You remember my husband, AC.”
“Oh yeah,” Adam says, turning slowly to approach us.
I almost shake my head as if to tell Adam to go away, run away, to go anywhere else but near this crazy, jealous man by my side. It’s an odd feeling, because I’m usually doing anything I can to get closer to Adam, not away from him.
The elevator door opens, but AC and I stand stock still as Adam comes closer. I can feel AC staring at my grinning and fearful reaction to Adam’s presence, and when my crush nearly reaches us, AC whispers close to my face, “I ought to kick your motherfucking ass.”
Boom!
There is a loud and deafening noise from way above our heads, as if a plane has passed, leaving a sonic boom in its wake. The building shakes with a continued reverberation that makes us feel as though we are trying to steady ourselves within a major earthquake’s epicenter.
Screams begin to bellow from every orifice of individual corner offices to cubicles. People start running and walking dazed-like into the area from parts of other companies that I’ve never visited.
“What happened?” I ask out loud to no one panicked person in particular. “What was that noise?”
“Sounded like gun shots,” AC says, trying to appear brave, but the exact etchings of terror paint his visage clearly.
“That was some kind of explosion,” Adam counters, still clutching his paperwork tightly in his hands.
AC scowls at him, hating to be corrected, always needing to be right and the smartest one in the room.
“A plane hit the building!” a woman screams, running past us. Suddenly, the overhead sprinklers begin jetting out streams of water that start soaking us and the floor with wetness.
“Come on, let’s get out of here!” AC yells, dropping the flowers to the ground and grabbing my arm, trying to pull me onto the open elevator.
“Not the elevator!” Adam screams, as he holds the door he’d just come out of open for a line of people to run through. I break from AC’s grip and run with a line of people down the stairwell, with AC following close behind.
I hesitate to glance up longingly at Adam, who is still shuffling people – from hefty older coworkers to younger, sprier ones, down and through the door.
“Come on, dummy,” AC pulls at my hand as I pause to look to Adam. I know I am holding up the flow of foot traffic, but I want to be near Adam instead of AC.
“You go, I’ll be down there,” Adam says, waving me down with his right hand while still using his body to hold open the heavy door for others. AC gives me a slight push that makes me nearly fall over on the slippery expanse.
“Stop it!” I whine.
When we make it to the lobby, huffing and puffing from the exertion of suddenly running down 10 flights of stairs, the true horror of the melee reveals itself through the glass doors that surround the building’s lobby.
The generally calm scene of a bustling Chicago loop street rife with cabs and pedestrians has turned into something right out of an action movie – only this is no movie that I can shield my eyes from beneath splayed fingers across my lids.
“Let’s get out of the building!” AC says, still out of breath, his lung capacity taken up by the pack-a-day Newport habit that he always claimed help relax him, and even helped him poop.
“Oh, God,” I whisper, staring outside at Clark Street, which is now replete with the carnage of falling steel fuselage, still in flames, and bloody body parts all over the place.
The sickening thud of bodies falling from high above makes me jump when I hear them, as does the sight of people who instinctively run out onto the street, their faces covered in cuts and soot and blood, who are then leveled to the ground from falling debris.
“This building’s going down,” AC screams. “We gotta get out of here!”
The strangest of sights suddenly begin appearing in front of my eyes. Some of the people who fall straight to the ground land with a splat – at least their physical bodies do so. Beyond that, I see quick flashes of something continuing to fall straight through the ground beneath the street level.
Their flesh and bones may have landed, ripped apart onto the concrete, but below the street’s surface, I start seeing a harried and screaming terrified version of some of the people as they remain alive, hollering blood-curdling sounds as they flail their intact arms and legs about before they disappear beneath the surface into the dark ether.
Other bodies, however, seem to almost waft away – at least a glowing version of the falling forms, that is – before ever hitting the ground. All the bodies fall in horrible thuds and with such power that they sound like intermittent dropping bombs or bricks or heavy cars or something, falling from such a great height. But I only see some of the dark forms continue to fall.
I am rational. I am sane. I am the kind of person who holds down a complex job and pays her bills on time (mostly) – but I have never witnessed this otherworldly scene that I’m viewing now. I pretend that I don’t see what I’m seeing, because other people apparently don’t see the same things I do right now.
“Move it,” AC yells. “Come on!”
There’s no way I’m telling “AC the Atheist” the things my eyes have actually just witnessed. Not figments of my imagination, not some brain synapses reaction to trauma. I know beyond a doubt what I have seen.
“There’s too much falling from the sky on this street,” I scream back. “There must be a safer exit.”
AC huffs as I look around, back toward the staircase, hoping for some kind of solution.
“We don’t have time to look for your little boyfriend now,” AC yells.
I ignore him and run toward the staircase. “The pedway!” I scream out behind me.
“What?” he asks. “Where are you going, fool!”
“The pedway!” I scream again, pushing past the people who are exiting out of the stairwell onto the ground floor. “The underground tunnels can help us get over to safer buildings before this one falls!”
Some people stop along the staircase to consider what I’m shouting. Others rush right past. AC stands at the top of the stairs and then follows me to the subterranean level beneath the city streets.
“This is not smart,” he says.
Down in the pedestrian walkways, there are smatterings of people running in every direction. I’ve had no time to map out my plan like I usually do when I decide to take these somewhat scary and fascinating underground tunnels to different buildings – or even stop in the food courts underground to have lunch with friends – in order not to get lost. The tragedy of the terror attack has happened so quickly, I can barely remember which way leads toward the Chicago River, and which path leads to other buildings that might be safer to inhabit at the moment.
“Adam!” I scream out, when I see him standing with Regina, Joseph, Rod and a group of other coworkers at a crossroads, debating which way to go. I run over to the group with AC closely on my heels, still huffing with each breath of exertion.
“Where should we go? How can we get to safety?” I ask Adam, who seems relieved to see me, despite the abject terror on the faces of all of us.
“Why are you asking him?” AC
says, making the whole group shoot a weird glance at him.
I want to tell him to shut up, but I’ve got no time to get into a physical fight with my husband underground.
“We’re going this way,” Adam says, pointing a straight hand down the long hallway, which has gathered with ankle-high sloshing water. “That’ll take us far away from this building and over to Millennium Park.”
“But what about that dip in where the stairwell goes lower?” I ask, thinking about the history lesson I learned about when these underground tunnels were built, and the two disparate boring holes that were supposed to come together and meet ended up being several feet apart, so the engineers built a staircase to join the two. “What if that’s flooded out?”
“If we hurry, we can try and get through,” Adam says, turning and beckoning me to follow the crowd following him.
“Come on, Olivia,” Regina urges, turning and walking after Adam.
“Oh, there are more stairs to go down?” AC asks. “That part is definitely flooded then,” he says.
I stand for a moment, watching AC watch the crowd walk away, then I turn to consider the other direction, which seems so right.
“They are going down such a narrow part,” I say aloud. “This way will be so much broader, and will take up right up the 202 North LaSalle building.”
“Yeah, the narrow path is already flooded out because of all this water,” AC reckons, and as much as I hate to agree with him – as much as I want to be nowhere near him right now – I feel like he’s making sense.
“I don’t know,” I hesitate, looking after Adam and the small crowd wading towards a disappearing bend in the tunnel.
“Let’s go your way,” AC says, suddenly nicer, pretending to play good cop as he puts on the calm and protective stance.
Most of the men who’ve claimed to want to protect me so fiercely are usually the ones I’ve ended up needing protection from, I think to myself.
“We’ll be ahead of the game,” AC pleads. “They’ll have to turn around and catch up with us.”
I remember AC’s military training, and those alleged Special Forces skills he always bragged about so much. Perhaps they really could be of use right now.
“Okay,” I say reluctantly, heading off in the direction that seems right to me, north, towards the Chicago River.
The flow is immense when it reaches us. At first AC and I were sloshing along in calf-level water, looking for the signs that would lead us out of and through the State of Illinois Center northward toward our destination.
But this water has come rushing from beyond with a force that is making us both fall down with the powerful undercurrents.
“How do we get out of here?” AC yells.
“I don’t know – I’m all turned around,” I say, a feat easy to believe, seeing as though it is so abnormally dark down here in these tunnels, which are usually a lot more well-lit than the darkened catacombs they’ve become.
“I thought you knew your way out of here,” he screams.
More water comes rushing, pushing and pulling us with the ebb and flow of the underground waves.
“I should’ve followed Adam!” I yell back, no longer caring if AC gets mad at my true heart on display. I’ve got nothing left to lose, having followed my stupid AC down this treacherous path that I thought was the right way to go.
“Yeah, follow him and die,” AC hollers.
“I could die down here with you!” I yell back, swimming and panicking and fighting with all my force against the water to return and make headway in the opposite direction.
“Where are you going now?” AC asks, but my only answer is the wide-eyed reaction of my widened eyes as I see the horror beyond him: A mighty throng of rushing water begins roaring from behind AC’s blackish silhouette, a wave that appears like the white-tinged rumblings of a constant beach surf rolling in on a full moon night – only this one appears to steadily roll forward with force, with no ebbing to pull back bodies in the wake.
AC turns to survey the coming water that has struck my face with fear. “The water main pipes must’ve burst!”
“Or the river breached or something. Swim back!” I scream, turning around to allow my heavy leg wading to turn into a full out swim as the water meets us, knocks us over and pushes us down the tunnel toward the direction we’d first come as it rises scarily to the top, threatening to usurp any air pockets with each growing second.
I begin to stroke hard along with the current as it moves me effortlessly down the tunnel, as if I’m in the biggest swimming challenge in my life. It is at that moment that I realize why seeing AC’s awkward body fluttering and reaching and grabbing in the water next to me seems such an odd pairing. AC can’t swim.
All those arguments we’ve had about not taking beach vacations or scuba-diving lessons and snorkeling retreats have come back to me in a flash as I hold my head above the surface of the rumbling water, trying to see how much closer we are to the point at which the tunnels break – a juncture where I hope some of this water can flow out to larger spaces and subside.
It’s got to be a few hundred yards away, I think quickly to myself, reasoning that the force of the water will push us both beyond this suddenly dangerous place an into a safer place.
I don’t take the time to kick off my shoes or strip off my clothes the way my high school gym teacher taught us to do when she had us jump into the deep end of the pool, fully clothed with running shoes on, just to show us how quickly wet and heavy clothes can make one sink.
There’s no time to practice the tricky maneuvers of taking off our jeans and tying them at the legs, zipping them up and flipping them over our heads several times to gather air within them so we can use them as a floatation device. No, all of those lessons are not what is needed right now, with AC’s wild reaction freaking out beside me.
“It’ll be okay,” I try to yell over to him, but water smacks me in the mouth, and I decide to let him see that before long, the waters should calm when we meet the cross-juncture of hallways in a few yards.
One glimpse into his terrorized face, and I begin kicking hard away from him, because another one of my swimming teacher’s lessons and advice promptly comes to mind from years ago.
“Drowning people can take you down with them,” she’d said, showing us a special spot on their upper shoulder where we could try and give them a hard karate chop to temporarily disable them enough to calm them down and deliver them to safety.
There’s no way I’m practicing that life-saving skill now, I realize. It was hard enough trying to accomplish the task of putting someone’s body atop ours in the water as us rescuers backstroked across a calm and tepid swimming pool in swim class, let alone trying to attempt something like that with AC right now.
First of all, he’s flailing all over the place, panicked as all get out – and he’s a lot more muscular than any one of those skinny high school classmates I tried to “save” during my swim class.
Secondly, there’s no way I’m going to try and perform some hard karate chop punch near AC’s weak shoulder point either. He wouldn’t recognize it as a safety maneuver, as all the rest of my attempted rescues for his tortured soul, even when we weren’t in circumstances as dire as these dirty waters that surround us at the present.
I’m tired of fighting AC. It may sound cold, but he’s had plenty of time to rescue himself, and learn to swim, and get his life on track – no matter what bad stuff he went through as a kid.
Let him drown, if that’s what’s meant to be. I’m done with him. If I get out of this alive, I am filing those divorce papers, come hell or – well, the high water is already here.
As if AC could somehow intuit the waterway definite decision I’d made within my own mind at that split second, I feel his hands grip my ankle, although I’ve tried to kick with all my might past him down the tunnel. We are both still flowing forward with the water, but his death grip is tight on my wiggling leg, to the point where he gets ahold of my
other ankle, and won’t let go of either.
He is pulling me down, and I only can stick my head above the water once more to spy the cross point of the pedway halls about a half a city block ahead before AC pulls me completely beneath the water, gripping and grabbing like a man trying to mount a life raft that won’t float.
I flash back to the time when a short cute boy in our high school swim class got so competitive with our game of water polo that when I nearly grabbed the ball, he lunged forward and used his free hand to hold my head underwater, just so he could win the game.
My panic of the possibility of drowning made me forget the game at that moment. He’d held me down for so many seconds, I feared he wouldn’t let me up.
That’s how I feel now with AC, who is thinking of saving his own self so much – with his own ineptitude at swimming and pending fear of drowning increasing in measures, that he’s not thinking rationally or kindly.
How could he try and drown me? Idiot!
The edict I’d heard long ago, one so powerful that it stayed with me to this day, also flashed to my psyche:
n “Drowning people sometimes die, fighting their rescuers.”
How apropos for this moment, both metaphorically and literally. If AC would relax more – in spite of a situation that seems to call for chaotic feelings – he’d have a hell of a lot more of chance of survival than grabbing me selfishly in an attempt to hold onto someone who can swim like a fish but take us both down together.
The crossways seems to take forever to come, especially once I’m fully submerged beneath the water in AC’s death grip. For a split second I think of giving up, of considering that other weird quote I’d heard before, when a person on TV or in a book recounted that if you relax, “it’s actually a pleasant feeling to have your lungs fill with water.”
That always sounded a bit odd and suspect to me. After all, who would know such a thing? Only a person who had drowned – quite calmly, I suspected – and then been rescued and revived.