“Look out the window, Mr. Johnson.”
“Who the hell is this?” But he went to the window anyway. His Brooklyn Heights condo faced straight across the East River near the Brooklyn Bridge, and there he saw what everyone saw that morning. World Trade Tower One was burning, and there came another plane. At first he couldn’t grasp what he was seeing. “Who the hell is this?” Then, “What the . . . ?” into the phone, having no idea who he was talking to, and not caring as he watched the second jetliner from a mile away sail silently into the side of Tower Two. A gleaming missile sailing purposefully into a building, almost floating on its irrevocable glide path to hell. “What the . . . ? What?” he kept on saying, until it came back to him that he was still on the phone with the mystery caller. “Who the hell is this?”
“We met last night.” A vague memory began to surface in his brain: Yeah, the voice with the sober gray eyes. But that meant nothing. Not now.
He hung up, tossing the telephone onto the couch, transfixed by the shimmering towers—so otherworldly even on a normal day, now with plumes of smoke pouring into the unbelievable blue of that September sky.
Then he remembered yet another nagging thought—his life a long, haphazard habit of forgetting and regretting. Giselle. She worked at Salomon Smith Barney right beside the towers. The ice pick under his eye went from crappy hangover to mortal wound, slid sideways, and then dipped toward his heart. Fear. He dialed her cell. No signal. Work number? In his Blackberry. Where was his Blackberry?
And then the plume of smoke across the river widened and began to spread downward, and the whole building cascaded toward the ground in a grainy gray umbrella of smithereens, and nothing was left but a lighter colored smoke, air and empty space. The Tower was gone. Gone?
Where was Giselle?
The coffee pot was plugged in, the way Giselle always left it for him when she went to work. Where the hell was the damn Blackberry? He got down on his knees and tore at the sagging cushions of the couch. The stupid thing was lodged down a crack. He searched for G and dialed the work number. Busy signal. Bizzy-bizzy-bizzy.
He didn’t know what to do.
One last hope. Maybe she didn’t go to work today. Maybe she was still in bed. He stumbled to her room. Of course, he let her live with him. What father wouldn’t? Monstrous New York rents, taxes, food, taxis—besides loving to see her every day. He yanked her bedroom door open, desperate to see the lump in bed, the tousled head. He almost shouted, Giselle! But the G died on his lips.
An empty unmade bed, no Giselle. In his frightful state he pawed the covers. No Giselle. He knocked on the bathroom door, no answer, then yanked it open. The empty tub and toilet sneered at him.
Out the apartment window the Single Tower was barely visible through the smoke and seemed to be beginning to tilt. The hallway quiet and still, but the chaos across the river ran riot in his mind, the screams, the sirens, the sinister patter of falling debris. He started to weep. Tears of pure bourbon coming, the whole of last night running from his head. Nostrils, eyes, from his slobbering mouth. He threw the phone on the couch, disconnecting it. He’d have to go find her. Walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. Now. He clutched his slept-in suit jacket, stared down at his boxers. Find your pants. Your pants.
The sound of the key in the door made his heart stop, and for a brief moment he didn’t grasp its significance. The door opened, and relief flooded through him. Giselle padded into the room in her pajamas, carrying a laundry basket with a Vogue magazine stuffed under her arm: “I didn’t feel well, but couldn’t sleep. I was downstairs in the laundry room. I’m going back to bed.” She passed her hand across her tummy clearly uncomfortable. Her hair matted in a sleepy-head rat’s nest. “Can you call Mitch at the office for me?” She was in her poodle jammies, elegant women walking high-nosed poodles. They always made him laugh. Now it made him cry again.
“Dad, what’s wrong?”
He led her to the window, to the terrible sight. They stood there, and she clung to his shoulder, and he let her cling. Then wrapped his arms about her and desperately pressed her to him with every fiber of his being. The second Tower collapsed into itself, and a great plume stood in its stead, reaching to the sky.
“I don’t understand.” Giselle said.
Johnson’s relief gave way to horror again. Johnson realized there might not be an office to telephone anymore. And something worse. No more Mitch. God, he’d never even met the man. Just heard the gracious timbre of his voice, the occasional work-related call, asking kindly for Giselle. He really seemed to like his daughter. What else did he know about him? Lived in Jersey. Married. Wife with early signs of Parkinson’s.
The clean white toilet in his bathroom beckoned him, and he offered up his guts to the holy sewers of New York. But nothing came, a poor offering, just retching and a little blood.
After a while he caught his breath, and the bathroom mirror gazed at him. That magnificent specimen of British-American manhood: the sodden eyes, the belly pouch, the stringy legs of a fifty-year-old who sat on his ass too long, the rumpled but expensive Brooks Brothers’ suit jacket and once-starched white shirt. He wiped his mouth on the sleeve. Let the dry cleaners have it. Then he remembered: he used the same one as Giselle, Fleur de Lys French Dry Cleaners on Liberty Street right by Tower Two.
He should really take a shower and get dressed—get it together. People would be trying to reach him. When he emptied his pockets and tossed his apartment keys on the washbasin shelf, a business card came out with them. Ah, yes, the Boy Scout with the sober gray eyes:
Banquo & Duncan
Robert Wallets, Vice President
30 Rockefeller Plaza
After the shower, a shave, and three aspirin, he came out of the bathroom in his robe and slippers. The TV droned. Giselle was standing at the window looking at the blotted city. Without turning she spoke to the window.
“Why did they do this? Why?”
He didn’t trust himself to speak out loud. The answer too ugly for words. Then they did what so many other people did that day. They watched it up close. They watched it on the news.
The rest of the day proceeded in a blur. The best thing about it—besides Giselle feeling under the weather—the hangover vanished before noon. Jo von H, chipper and crystalline as always, finally reached him. The woman’s voice dripped honey.
“I want 750 words from you for the website. ‘Why We Are So Hate-able. ’ ”
“All right. Tell me again, Jo. Why are we so hate-able?”
“Peter,” she replied with a touch of impatience in her voice. He knew that tone from way back, as though speaking to a simpleton. “The rampant commercialism. Santa Claus before Halloween. The arrogance and self-delusional imperialism. Teeth-whitening for the middle class. Disposable diapers manufactured on the burnt ruins of rain forests. The parasitic hegemony masked as do-goodism. You’ve written it a hundred times, and the chickens have come home to roost. We practically learned it from you,” her voice rising, angry at the end.
He felt very quiet inside. Everything had changed. Couldn’t she see that? God, if she’d only ask him to write something new. Fat chance.
“Don’t go all flag-wavy on me, Peter,” she continued. “And listen carefully . . . I want this piece from you. And I want it posted before the day is out.”
He paused and thought, what Jo von H wants, Jo von H gets. . . .
“I’m on it.”
His practiced fingers found the laptop keys; while a knot grew in his stomach, growing worse all day as he watched replays of people flinging themselves out of buildings on TV. Soon he’d be watching firefighters pulling body parts, a leg, a femur out of dusty rubble. Still, he typed on, what Jo von H wants . . .
Evening came, and the glow outside the window cast light inside the apartment; an island of smoke drifted over Brooklyn. Giselle and he hadn’t moved from the couch all day. They’d ordered Indian takeout, but for some reason everything tasted sandy, bitter. The Styrofoam platters la
y on the coffee table, lamb vindaloo growing cold. Johnson felt claustrophobic and went to the window and with a sudden impulse opened it; ugly streaks lashed the glass. He wanted to feel what the air was like.
“Dad, don’t open it,” Giselle warned him. “I can smell the outside from here already.”
And indeed, it did smell, a sour reek. The odor of gas and metals and chemicals and probably something worse.
What people smelled like when you cooked them. Mutton.
He was going to close the window as Giselle wanted—when he stopped. The sill, the outside sill. He looked closer and closer and closer, leaning over. It looked like a piece of . . . He didn’t know what it looked like. And then it hit him—it was a finger. A woman’s finger with a manicured fingernail and a wedding ring attached. How? Fallen from the sky?
Without thinking he flicked the thing from the sill with a jerk of his hand, and it fell off into invisible depths. No! That was the absolute wrong thing to do. He should have taken it. He should have gotten a plastic ziplock baggie from the kitchen. My God, somebody would want to know! He grabbed the phone again, dialed 911 to tell them there was a finger on my sill, on the sidewalk, below the window, a finger in the bushes on Hicks Street between Montague and Fuck Me Street! A finger. But of course 911 was busy-busy-busy, and who was going to rush out for a reported finger? Was he crazy?
Johnson slowly slid the window shut.
He was going to scream, not a human word, but some primal howl without any conscious thought. Yes, he was going to scream right now, but he could feel the finger that belonged to that poor woman, the burnt finger going down his throat, going down his throat making him gag and bring up vindaloo.
Azadi Grand Hotel, Tehran.
Nothing grand about it. A cramped couple of rooms with a view.
The call of the dawn muezzin out the slightly open window drifted across the city. Somewhere in this country someone was always praying. He should have closed the stupid thing and let the air conditioning do its work. He had fallen asleep with his clothes on again, his clothes damp from his sweat. A soft knock came to the suite door. Room service. Breakfast. The usual, surely. Yogurt, fresh figs. Black coffee. Even sober, the thought of eating anything right now wasn’t enticing. Maybe if he closed the window, took a shower, let the air-conditioning do its work, he might get his appetite back.
The near-empty bottle on the table looked like he’d made a significant dent in the Tanqueray, but he knew the truth. If they thought he’d drunk himself stupid, all the better. The soft, insistent knock came again. Johnson knew he’d have to clean up good today. It was back with Jazril the Jazz Man and maybe even the Big Mullah—maybe this time the Big Mullah would deign to speak to him directly. The Jazz Man, the Sheik, the Big Mullah, and finally Dr. Proton. The object of all his desire.
“Hold on. Be right there.”
CHAPTER FIVE
The Irreducible Facts of Life
Robert Wallets of Banquo & Duncan found him again in late 2002, over a year after the towers fell, after the invasion of Afghanistan but before the invasion of Iraq. Johnson was sitting on a panel at NYU law school devoted to the unpleasantness in Afghanistan and the unpleasantness still to come in Mesopotamia. It was called “Preemptive War: Crime Against Humanity or Legitimate National Interest? ” Talking to a room with about a hundred snot-nosed kids. The panelists: himself as Lefty Writer, Eli Pariser as Executive Director of MoveOn.org from the Lefty netroots, Lance Evers of the Society Against War/USA as Lefty Peacenik, facing off against Bruce Meyer from The Patriot Project (simply Pee-Pee to its detractors) as Fascist Neo-Con Journalist. A three-to-one advantage constituted fair-and-balanced NYU Law-style. Whenever Meyer talked, a kid stood up and shouted some asinine question, “Can you prove there weren’t controlled explosions in the Second Tower?” prompting derisive cheers and hisses aimed at Meyer, until the moderator settled things down enough for the discussion to keep going. Meyer was getting hot, too hot for his own good, and sputtering, “Look, where you people live. They want to kill you. If they didn’t already kill you or someone you love, it wasn’t for lack of trying. And they’re going to try again, don’t you get it?” Unbidden, Giselle standing in the hallway in her pajamas at the door that morning came back to Johnson, and he felt a twinge of horror, then the relief all over again. “I forgot to text Mitch at the office. Can you call?” Correction, Mitch’s widow. Showing signs of Parkinson’s.
Boos from the audience: “Fuck yoo! ” “Shut up!” “Nazi!” And Johnson felt that surge headed up his throat again as he had on the night of Jo von H’s party listening to the two pointy-headed profs nattering on about the Jews. “The numbers . . . 5 million Jews—yet we dance along to their every whim.” And here were three more pointy-heads—himself included—dancing along to the ugly faces in the crowd slathering spittle toward the stage. He found himself staring at his hands, then at his clean manicured fingernails. Fingers . . . that did it.
He stood up and addressed the room without the mike, his voice shaking, “Please, please just sit down and listen. Listen. Mr. Meyer has come here, and he has a right to be heard. Surely you understand this?” He stumbled for a moment, uncharacteristically. Then noticed the faces in the crowd. No, they didn’t think Mr. Fascist Neo-Con Journalist had a right to be heard. The faces thought the only right he possessed was to take a good thrashing. Take it and like it. But Johnson wouldn’t stop. “Look, you don’t have to be a fan of this administration or The Patriot Project to acknowledge there are Muslim fanatics, millions of them, both in foreign countries and here in the West, who want you dead. I’d have thought a couple of buildings burned off the face of the earth not too far from here would have made this point to any honest person’s satisfaction. And if you can’t acknowledge this simple fact, then you are an intellectual coward of the first order.” With that he sat down, feeling the flush on his face.
A hush fell over the room. Then the rumbles from the crowd began again. Eli Pariser of MoveOn leaned toward him and whispered in Johnson’s ear, brow knit and lips curling downward, “Whose side are you on, Peter?”
Meyer leaned over at another point, looking puzzled, “Thanks, but why don’t you ever write that?” Johnson just shrugged; it was the best he could do.
At the end, everyone avoided him. Usually he was mobbed after such events, but not this time. He felt embarrassed and so eager to get out of there, he didn’t even bother to chat up the cute brunette with the shiny coal-black eyes in the second row. He walked down the stairs, avoiding the crowded elevator—no point in talking to these students—and failed to notice the guy from Jo von H’s party at his elbow. The man who had given him his business card that fateful September 10.
Fact was—that fellow Meyer had a point—why didn’t he write that way? Was he afraid of losing his perch at The Crusader? That his ex-wife boss would dump him again? That he’d lose his audience? He’d chosen his tin drum, beating it morning, noon, and night—finally reaching the point where he could write or say anything he wanted.
At the NYU building entrance, Meyer caught up with him, then invited Johnson for a drink, and they headed to a neighborhood Irish dive. “I’ve been following your stuff,” Meyer told him.
He should have felt flattered, but he didn’t.
He’d been writing his pickled little heart out, in fluid 80-proof prose. Damning himself at every click of the keys. He knew what The Crusader needed to feed the beast: “Why They Hate Us”; “Why They Hate Us More”; “Why There’s Nothing Else to Do but Hate Us”; “If You Don’t Hate Us, What’s Wrong with You?”—anything Jo von H wanted. She had rewarded him handsomely, giving him the use of one of her cars and drivers. Not that he needed much more positive reinforcement. The TV shows kept lapping it up. Dan Rather over at CBS offered him a guest commentator spot, but he decided to keep his independence—better to be able to provoke on any network, any time. He’d bypassed The Crusader ’s little publishing imprint, left his agent of eighteen years, found a new ag
ent, and taken $500,000 for a two-book deal with a big house. So hell yeah, he took the first half of his advance, spent the whole wad, and hadn’t written line one. Seizing every opportunity to rail against the sins of his adopted hateful country for the price of a drink at any party, in any apartment overlooking Central Park with floor-to-ceiling windows.
In the dark, empty, sticky-floored bar, he and Meyer fell into a deep discussion of the war, ignoring a bar-top video game flickering luridly at the end of the bar—the game, Poke’ Her, your hand of cards dealt by a cute showgirl in a black brassiere and not much else. A finely crafted stained-glass FDNY 9/11 commemoration sat on a shelf by the hard liquor. Poker, girls, booze, and dead firemen.
Right, We’ll Never Forget. Sure.
Johnson watched the barmaid make each of his black-and-tans, pouring the Guinness over an upside-down spoon—so thick, so milky, and seemingly miraculously floating on top of the Bass Pale Ale. He couldn’t help drawing doodles with his pinky in the top of the Guinness foam, a habit of his for as long as he’d been drinking them.
They talked point by point and pint by pint: about the veil, the Saudis, the death of Arab pan-nationalism, Taliban teenage head-choppers, the insane cult of suicide bombings in Palestine. By 2 AM, they couldn’t agree on much, except this: that the Islamo-Nazis belonged on the short list of Johnson’s honest-to-God enemies.
Not a radical thought, but one Johnson had never let climb entirely to the surface of his mind. So obvious. So undeniable. Maybe he’d never wanted to deal with the regret over everything he’d done through the years to turn attention away from these honest-to-God bastards. Men who would do anything. Cut off people’s heads on video. Blow up a chunk of Manhattan, scattering human remains into neighborhoods miles away. Johnson left the Irish dive sensing how much he had given away to his companion. An intellectual fault line had shifted underground somewhere in his mental world, and he headed home feeling he had committed some ill-defined indiscretion. A single honest thought that hurt.
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