The Real Michael Swann

by Bryan Reardon

  Her head swiveled. Julia looked up and down the street. No one looked at her. No one noticed. They moved like ghosts, like shadows made by someone or something else she couldn’t even see. Everything suddenly felt so alien. She felt so alone. Staring at all the flyers, thinking about all the people who had hung them, she felt surrounded yet alone.

  Julia slammed a flyer on a window, affixing it atop two others. She swung around and hurried to the end of the block. There, she stopped, her eyes wide and her face going pale. She smelled it first, though. Her nose turned her head and she looked up 8th Avenue. And she saw the line of smoke rising up from Madison Square Garden. It rose into the shockingly blue sky, like the finger of God pointing in judgment of us all.

  Others stopped and stared with her. Julia sat down on the sidewalk. As people stutter-stepped around her, most not even taking note, she just stared at the smoke. She didn’t cry or shake. She just sat and stared.

  24

  I don’t know when I stopped running. But I know why. Eventually, I fell onto a bench in a small park, one more paved than natural. As cars passed me on all sides, I struggled to find my breath. My chest heaved and I coughed. My head wouldn’t stop bleeding. I needed to clean it up. I could feel people watching me. It felt like a net surrounded me and someone in the shadows was pulling it tighter and tighter.

  I lifted the case and placed it on my lap. I held it there for a moment.

  Michael Swann.

  There was still nothing. I remembered nothing. It wasn’t like I didn’t believe this was my name. I just felt like maybe it was my name from a prior life. Maybe I died in the explosion, for I’d heard people on the street talking about what happened. Maybe I was reincarnated. I knew that made no sense at all.

  As I’d run through the city, things at once became more and less clear. I knew where I was going. I can’t explain that, either. None of the sights around me looked particularly familiar. Yet I seemed to know where I was nonetheless. As I sat on the bench, this new realization was at odds with how my self remained such an utter blank.

  Eventually, when the two people on the bench across from me finally walked away, I opened the case. I dug through the contents. The more I shuffled things around, the more frantic I felt. I couldn’t find the sticker. I must have left it behind. It might be hard to understand how this made me feel. That sticker was my lifeline. It connected me to my life. It was the only thing. And it was gone.

  Without the sticker, I was no one. That realization felt like a current carrying me further and further away. For the first time, I felt exhausted, spent. I lost all will to move, even to breathe. For just a second, I wanted more than anything to blink out, cease to exist.

  And that is when my finger brushed against something small, smooth, and cool. I grabbed it, lifting it out from under a stack of papers, and my eyes widened. I held a money clip in my hand. It was my money clip. My money, my credit card, and . . . my driver’s license. I pulled that out and held it in my hand. A surge of energy filled me. I vibrated as I read the words on that tiny piece of plastic.

  Name: Michael Swann

  Height: 6 feet 1 inch

  Weight: 200 pounds

  Eyes: Blue

  Hair: Blond

  Address: 443 Glen Meadow Drive, West Chester, PA 19380

  Then I looked at the picture. A stranger’s eyes seemed to peer back at me. My head tilted. Who’s that? I thought. He was an utter stranger. Or I was.

  Dropping the license, I tore through the rest of the contents of the case. The words I read registered like familiar roots in a foreign language. Singularly I understood, but taken as full sentences, as ideas, those same words merged into a senseless jumble of nonsense.

  Eventually, I stopped on a crisp sheet of paper. My name, Michael Swann, blazed across the top in large, blunt print. My eyes ran over words like Education and Employment. I saw Office of the Governor and Axis Sales. Although I had no idea it was a résumé I read, my résumé, I had the sense that these words, taken together, told my story.

  My eyes closed and my head throbbed. I felt like I might pass out. Seeing that picture, those words, it all tore away the last shred of hope I had. My being, my self, had been ripped away. I’d lost everything. Yet somehow, through the crushing weight of that moment, a much smaller sensation rose up. I felt the slight press of the case on my lap. My lap. My case. The license had come from my case. It was mine.

  I find revisiting that particular moment to be the most painful. It wasn’t like I suddenly wanted to live again. It was somehow more, and less, than that. In some Cartesian way, it was like I burst out of the darkness, into the searing and brutal light. I was reborn. An instant before, I had been nothing. And then I was Michael Swann.

  25

  Chaos surrounded her. It happened so suddenly. One block seemed almost normal. The next, like a tragic war zone. Julia walked among it, her eyes wide and her nostrils flared. A noxious smell seemed to violate every breath she took, like a slow and deadly poison. She cleared her throat over and over again, and her eyes perpetually teared up.

  Emergency workers appeared at every corner. They searched the crowd for people in need of help. At first, Julia didn’t understand. But then she saw the first survivor. The woman leaned against a building, her hands shaking. White dust covered most of her body, except for the lines of her tears as they ran down her face. Her left arm hung limp at her side and her eyes were closed. People had already stopped to help her, but she wouldn’t talk. The good Samaritans looked around, as if they could not figure out where she had come from.

  Julia stopped and watched, caught up in the surreal reality. One of the people called out. A minute later, a paramedic appeared. He cleared the others away and sat the woman on the pavement. Another emergency worker arrived. She asked everyone to make space, to keep moving. So Julia did, or at least a part of her did. Another part of her would stay at that corner for years to come.

  * * *

  —

  For hours, it seemed, Julia wandered around the periphery of the attack. She handed the last of her flyers to a passing woman dressed for work. The woman took it but did not make eye contact. Julia watched her walk away and reluctantly dropped the used accordion file into a trash can.

  Once her hands were free, the exhaustion hit her. She stopped again, looking around. She stood half a block from 9th Avenue now, three blocks away from Penn Station. It drew her back, the finger of smoke. She walked to the corner and stared at it.

  She was not alone. The living, breathing pulse of the city had changed that morning. Briskness was replaced by caution. Suspicion and concern became twin emotions. People looked for villains to blame and for victims to save. Although a number of people moved toward some usual destination, the office, breakfast, even coffee, their journey suddenly felt off, like they’d taken a wrong turn. Everyone else hung up the charade of normalcy and openly stared at that smoke, unsure of what it meant, wishing it was all some mass dream.

  Eventually, she turned away. She had nowhere else to go. Yet she couldn’t leave. The guilt crept back and she called home. Her mother answered.

  “Any news?” Kate asked.

  “No . . . There’s so many,” Julia said.

  “What do you mean?”

  She shook her head, staring at all the flyers that hung over everything like an infinite patchwork quilt. “Nothing. Are the kids awake?”

  “Thomas is. Evelyn took him to her house to play. Evan’s still asleep.”

  “Is anyone else there?”

  “No. Tara just left. She went home earlier and came back with breakfast.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “No. Your friends are amazing, Julia. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  They paused. Julia was afraid to ask, yet she did.

  “Does Thomas know
?”

  Her mother sighed. “I don’t know, really. He didn’t say anything. But when he saw me and Evelyn sitting here, I think . . . I didn’t make him talk, though. Is that okay?”

  A part of Julia wished her mother had. It was a selfish part that turned her stomach. For a second, she dreamed of others shouldering that burden. Others having to watch her younger son’s reaction. As the minutes ticked by since the news, hope had slipped away. Practicality replaced it, a pinprick in the loss she felt. Utter dread followed fleeting images of her sitting the kids down and telling them. Or holding them while they sat in a church pew listening to people tell stories about their father, who none of them would see again.

  “What are you going to do?” her mom asked.

  Julia said nothing. She stood alone on the crowded streets of New York City as the last shards of hope lifted away like the finger of smoke. She felt empty, exhausted. For the first time, she felt like a widow.

  “I don’t know,” she finally said. “I—”

  A sharp buzz from the phone interrupted her midsentence. Then nothing.

  “Mom? Mom, are you there?”

  Julia lowered the phone and looked at the screen, realizing she had lost the call. She hesitated, deciding if she needed to try her back or not. Just as she started to redial her home number, the phone vibrated in her hand. Without noticing whom the call was from, she answered.

  “Sorry, Mom. We got—”

  “Is this Julia Swann?” a stranger’s voice asked.

  Julia lowered the phone, quickly looking at the number. It was a New York City extension. A ball of energy rose up and through her. Her head tingled. All her previous thoughts evaporated.

  “Yes,” she said, holding her breath.

  “Um . . . I think I just saw your husband.”

  26

  Carefully, I checked and rechecked to make sure nothing fell out of the case this time. The sticker still haunted me. I had to fight the urge to go back for it. I couldn’t. Somehow I knew that. But it called to me like some siren’s song, begging me back to that apartment building.

  Up ahead, I saw a police officer. He stood in the street, the rising sun behind him like a glowing halo. I stared for a moment. I even thought about walking up to him, asking for help. But something stopped me. It wasn’t a thought. It was something more instinctual, something that rose up from my gut. The longer I looked at the man, the more agitated I grew. Instead of moving toward him, I hurried away.

  I moved west, away from the sunrise. Yet with each block I passed, more and more emergency workers appeared. They waved and shouted. Nervous, I moved into the crowd, melding with the masses. We shuffled down the street like zombies. When I saw the school bus, of all things, nothing made sense anymore. I felt like I was inching through some endless and pointless dream, one where people and places and things mix in haphazard pairings.

  Someone called out, maybe a paramedic, maybe a firefighter, I don’t really know. In the type of voice that wore authority like an indelible right, he moved us, ushering us forward, toward the bus that sat unmoving in the middle of what should have been a busy intersection.

  At first, I felt penned in again. I needed to run, to get away. My head swiveled, and I looked for a chance to break from the crowd. That’s when I really looked and saw the other people around me. They were bloodied, covered in dust. They looked lost, confused, overwhelmed. They coughed and stared forward through glazed, wide eyes.

  And the fight left me. Maybe that sight reminded my body just how injured it was. I felt at once connected to these lost souls and haunted by them. They had me, and I was powerless to resist. So my feet moved. My thoughts quieted. And I let myself be led into that school bus like a cow to slaughter.

  27

  The malaise that hung over the people filling the sidewalk changed in that instant. In the time it took Julia to register what had just happened, the muddled, disjointed movements became obstacles, nothing more. Her phone still clutched under white knuckles, she lurched forward. Other pedestrians barely noticed as she bumped and brushed her way past. More accurately, Julia never noticed anything behind her. She just ran.

  The blocks flew by. She was not an expert at navigating New York City. She had only been into the city three times in the last twelve years, and Michael had always led the way. That day, something guided her. She never once thought about directions or wrong turns. It was as if the caller had cast out a line and was reeling her to the apartment building.

  When she turned the final corner, her eyes met the woman’s immediately. Somehow, Julia was sure this was the person who called her. She stood on the sidewalk beside the entrance to an apartment building. The woman was tall, maybe over six feet, but could not weigh much more than a hundred pounds. Her clothes, the type of outfit that Julia would notice but never fathom putting together herself, hung loose, and she tugged at a frayed edge of her sleeve.

  Julia slowed, suddenly and overwhelmingly nervous. She put up a hand and the woman did the same. One step at a time, Julia approached.

  “Did you just call me?” she asked.

  “Uh, yeah,” the woman said. “Look, I messed up. I didn’t really see him.”

  It felt as if she had been struck. Julia took a step back and pressed a hand to her stomach. She looked into the stranger’s eyes and saw something different, not a madness but close. She thought about the fact that she had just plastered her cell phone number all over the city. Anyone could call her, mess with her, like this woman had obviously done. Something in Julia snapped. She lashed out.

  “You think that’s funny?”

  The woman’s eyes widened. She held out a hand. A small white square of shiny paper dangled between two fingers.

  “No . . . wait. I found this.”

  Julia stared at that paper. She saw, between those bone-thin fingers, two letters—two n’s. Her heart thumped and then missed a beat. Her legs felt numb and weak. She wouldn’t reach for that paper. She couldn’t. Not for a second. And then it hit her. Her hand snaked out and snatched it from the woman’s tentative grip. She knew what it was, immediately. Michael’s name tag from his interview.

  “Where’d you get this?”

  “I found it on the floor,” the woman said, pointing back at the door. “In the lobby.”

  The tears welled in her eyes. “He was here?”

  The woman’s nod exploded inside Julia. It opened up the first real hope she’d felt since her call with Michael had gone dead.

  “When?”

  “Half an hour ago.”

  “Was he . . . okay?”

  The woman paused. “I don’t know. Gino, this guy that lives down the hall, he says that the guy . . . your husband? He attacked him, for no reason. I came down just after. I saw Gino on the ground, and . . . your husband running. He had blood on his hand. And I think his head. That’s what Gino told the police.”

  “The police?”

  “Yeah . . . I called them. Then I found that. And when I went outside, I saw your flyer. And recognized the name. Was he . . . ?”

  Julia nodded. “Which way did he go?”

  She pointed north. Julia looked out across the sea of people walking up the sidewalk. But that new hope would not be doused. Michael had been in that apartment building. He’d been there less than an hour before. As she thought about it, the flood of relief followed. All her fears, all her dread, vanished. It would be okay. She’d find him and it would be okay. But why hadn’t he called? Why run?

  “Blood on his head?” Julia asked.

  The woman nodded.

  “Are the police still here?”

  She shook her head.

  “If you see him again, will you call?”

  “Definitely.”

  Without another word, Julia turned north. Her pace quickened into a run as she dodged around people in her way. After a bloc
k, she noticed the name tag still in her hand. Stuffing it into a pocket, she picked up her speed.

  “Michael!” she called out.

  Those around her startled, giving her a wide berth as she passed. Julia, however, didn’t care. She called for him over and over again, but no one answered.

  “Michael . . . Michael!”

  The words, his name, echoed back to her, hinting that her husband was close. The very city seemed to shrink around her as she pictured him just around the corner, alone and injured, waiting for her, needing her. So Julia ran, her legs carrying her faster than she could have ever dreamed possible. She raced to find her husband.

  28

  The school bus rattled along 42nd Street, heading toward the river. I stared out the window, watching the faces as they passed by outside. Somehow, I could feel their fear like it was my own. It radiated off them like a sharp smell. It hung over everything. No matter where I looked.

  I had no idea where I was, or where I was going. Worse, I had no idea why I had stepped into the bus in the first place. I felt myself slipping again, inching back toward the nothingness, so I pulled out the license, running a finger along the smooth surface to make sure it was real.

  Michael Swann, Michael Swann, Michael Swann.

  I read the name over and over again. It helped, a little. Yet the second I slipped the money clip back in my pocket, the confusion returned. And when the bus squealed to a stop, I could barely remember having boarded it in the first place.

  The others stood up and filed into the aisle. I remained sitting and looked out the window again. We were parked along the Hudson River beside a low glass-faced building. Outside, a line of people stood on a patch of stark concrete.