Forever

by Pete Hamill

  This one is wilder, denser, angrier than the first cloud. It rises over the buildings, extending a thousand arms, rumbling up Murray Street and Warren Street toward City Hall, recombining on Broadway, engulfing every puny human before it, rising high when it hits an obstacle, a parked police car, a hot dog vendor’s cart, a park bench, then, filled with the screams of dead souls, rolls on its furious path until it settles on the southern border of the Five Points. At the vanished ridge of the Collect. At the hanging ground. On the graves of the Irish and the Africans.

  In the shocked stillness, a flock of birds, confused and stunned, races across the sky from Park Row toward the Hudson, then turns back toward Brooklyn. Away from the whiteness. Away from doom.

  And now people are running again, dozens of them, then hundreds. They abandon the pay phones. They burst out of the shops where they’ve found shelter. They run in a chaotic wave up Broadway past the federal buildings, past the police cars and the ambulances, racing toward Canal Street and the city beyond. There’s no emotion on their whitened faces. Cormac sees no blood. But they run. Everything else can wait.

  He hurries down Duane Street, hoping Delfina will be waiting at his door.

  She isn’t.

  Even here, seven blocks from the North Tower, the walls are white with dust and ash and death.

  * * *

  There are five calls on the answering machine. The first is from Delfina. “Hey, it’s me. Call me back at work.” Cheer in her voice. A call made before the airplanes. Before the horror. He skips past the voices of Healey and Elizabeth. Each has called twice. There is no other call from Delfina.

  He peels off his clothes and steps into the shower, rinsing his eyes, scrubbing away the white powder, shampooing his hair. He can hear the screams now, but his ears feel stuffed and muffled. He dries himself and pulls on a bathrobe that smells vaguely of Delfina. He plays the answering machine again.

  Delfina’s last tape. Then Healey (grave and straight): “Hey, you got the TV set on? Put it on, man.” Then Elizabeth. “Call me.” Followed by a click. Then Healey, very gently: “Hey, man, you okay? Call me at 310-265-1000.” Then Elizabeth, hysterical: “Cormac, he was there, in the goddamned tower, in that Windows on the World place. Willie was there! And the fire was below him, and the building just went down! Oh, my God.”

  Cormac turns on CNN, which is full of pictures of the burning towers, and running people, and the collapse. He switches back and forth, from network to network, to New York 1. While reports flood in, he calls Healey, gets a machine in his hotel room, leaves a message that he’s okay. He doesn’t call Elizabeth. But he feels a surge of pity for Willie Warren. Cormac thinks: The world is truly nuts. Last night, I wanted to murder him and didn’t. I walked away from his house thinking he would live for decades. Long after any possible crossing into the Otherworld. And here on a bright Tuesday morning in September, a dozen hours later, he’s probably dead. There is no family vow that can now be fulfilled on this island.

  He tries Delfina. The machine at home. Nothing on the cell phone.

  A grave television reporter is saying that nobody yet knows the numbers of the dead but they could be in the many thousands. Talking heads take turns offering theories, while the screen splits, showing the towers falling, showing people in the streets. He studies each image, looking for Delfina, while the talking heads talk. Surely it was terrorists. Surely it was Osama bin Laden. A terrible day for America. More casualties than Pearl Harbor, more than D Day, more than the Titanic. Now on the screen: the mayor, with his commissioners, their faces masked by inhalators, all of them grave and restrained. Cormac switches to MSNBC and then New York 1 again, to each of the networks. The same. More and more of the same. Talk of survivors. Talk of the loss of hundreds of firemen. And details about the Pentagon being hit, with hundreds dead, and another plane down in the fields of Pennsylvania, after a possible fight by passengers against hijackers. A canned piece on Bin Laden. Much about terrorists and the attack on the Trade Center in 1993, and the embassies in Africa, and the U.S.S. Cole, and the trails that lead to Afghanistan. Clearly it’s terrorists. Clearly it’s an act of war. All played against the astonishing images: the black planes, the tendrils of smoke, the collapse of each tower, and the Cloud that followed each, as if hunting down the survivors. He studies the crowd scenes. Looking for one face.

  He leaves the volume on, very loud, while he dresses in jeans and denim shirt and boots. He keeps flexing his jaw, trying to open his cottony ears. Then an announcer gets excited, as another building goes down. Live. Just behind the post office. Number 7 World Trade, where the mayor had his crisis center. A smaller building this time, and a smaller cloud, like chamber music pitted against a symphony. More shots of people running from the Cloud, this time up Greenwich Street. Cormac squints at the new images, looking for Delfina. She’s not there either.

  Then the TV goes abruptly black, the sound ends in midsentence. The lights go off. Power gone. He pockets the cell phone, slips a portable radio into his shirt pocket, tuned to an all-news station, takes a thousand dollars in fifties and twenties from a wall safe, locks up, and goes down to the street.

  She’s out here somewhere. He’s sure of that. He has to find her.

  122.

  In his search for her, Cormac tries to be methodical and careful. If she is under the twisted steel and rubble, there is no hope. But before the power failed, the television news was encouraging. The airliner had crashed into the ninety-first floor, destroying the stairwells (or so the anchormen theorized), setting off the fire, almost certainly dooming everybody above the flames. From those floors, Cormac had seen men and women jumping into eternity. But several thousand people below the flames in the North Tower had made it down the many flights of stairs to the street. Delfina’s office was on the eighty-fourth floor. There was footage of these people bursting out of the building, gasping for air, and of police and firemen urging them to run. Cormac saw some of them. He knows now that he must act on faith: She ran out with them.

  As he moves through emptied streets, starting as close to the burning stumps as possible, moving first east, then west, combing the grid for signs of her, he assaults himself with questions. If that boy lives in her, would she have accepted easy death? Never. She’d have killed to live. How would he have behaved if he’d been on that eighty-fourth floor? Would he have chosen death from roaring flames or the emptiness of the air? Perhaps, for the jumpers, the final leap wasn’t even a choice. It was driven by the flames. And for Cormac? For decades, death has been his goal. Not death by his own hand. Not death through the violence of others. The sweet, consoling death that completes life. If there had been time, how would he have chosen?

  He walks the white darkness of John Street, smelling the river on whose shore he arrived long ago, plus a new odor, rising from the ruined towers: burning steel and desks and carpets and paint and food and files and human flesh. Sheets of paper still drift through the sky like giant snowflakes. He sees the orange glow and remembers Diamond screaming as he was charred on the Common. The odor of Diamond’s roasted flesh was a stench he never smelled again, not even during the fires that came later. Now it has returned, multiplied by many thousands.

  He imagines himself now in the North Tower above the flames, holding Delfina’s hand. She wants to dive into the sky. And she calls on Oshun, goddess of river waters. “Save us,” she calls to the emptiness. “Save us both and save the boy.” They jump. And the river goddess sends zephyrs of cool air, lifting them together above the fire, beyond the smoke, beyond the circling helicopters, beyond all harm. Why could that not have happened? After all, I am a man once saved by the river gods. Bumped through a black night while the tides took the Earl of Warren. In the grainy black air above the burning city, Delfina might have found confirmation of all she believed. Or learned a terrible lesson about the whimsy of the gods. Thinking this, imagining it, he hears a cynical New York ensemble from the streets below, a piano tinkling in a slow honky-tonk s
tyle, Bill Tweed leading the chorus:

  He flies through the air

  Wit’ da greatest of ease…

  And laughs grimly at himself.

  He is, after all, here on the ground, alive on his own streets, not performing on the perilous stages of the Bowery Theater. At Murray Street, where all is white from powder, he sees a lone Chinese teenager pedaling a bicycle, a kid in a Stuyvesant High School jacket. He waves him down and buys the bike for three hundred dollars, including the chain and padlock. The kid takes the money and runs, as they used to say, like a thief. Cormac needs the bike if he is to make any time. Delfina, show me your face. Show me your golden skin. Protect that boy who is not yet here. The subways are shut down. There are no buses running below Fourteenth Street. Blue police barriers are being erected everywhere against cars and taxis. The tunnels are sealed. On the transistor, CBS reports hundreds of survivors walking across bridges to Brooklyn and Queens or trudging many miles uptown. Like refugees walking away from napalm in Vietnam, from killers in Armenia and Macedonia, from bombs in Kosovo and Cambodia and a thousand other places Cormac has never seen.

  The boy will live in safety. He will read ten thousand books. He will play basketball in playgrounds. He will live in this city, in its plural streets, in its magic. He will gaze at the Woolworth Building. He will dance with many women. He will never trudge to a refugee camp. He will not shoot guns at strangers.

  Cormac moves more quickly on the bicycle, slowed only by the slippery fine powder on the streets. A policeman, grungy with ash, tells him that NYU Downtown is closed. “They’re taking the hurt people to Stuyvesant, or Saint Vincent’s. You know where they are?” Yes, Cormac says, I know where they are, and thanks, man. “Be careful,” the cop says. “Who knows what’s next?”

  He makes it across the pedestrian bridge at Chambers Street to the new building of Stuyvesant High School. This place will still be new when the boy is fourteen. Looking downtown, he sees flames rising angrily from the Marriott Hotel, and an immense column of smoke blowing now toward Brooklyn. Ambulances scream down the West Side Highway in one lane, and north again in another. The entire eastern side of the highway is starting to fill with heavy trucks, with emergency generators and lamps, with earthmovers, all aimed at the burning site, which the radio is now calling Ground Zero. Cormac locks the bicycle to a fence and hurries into Stuyvesant. The students are all gone, of course, the lobby now filling with doctors and nurses. Volunteers are unfolding cots. Technicians set up rigs for blood transfusions. But so far, a nurse says, the only patients are firemen with damaged eyes or blistered hands. Not a single civilian is there. She says these words in a mournful voice. She is saying that there are no survivors.

  “If they come, we’re ready,” the nurse says. “But they’re not coming.”

  Delfina isn’t at St. Vincent’s either. “Hey, man, she could be anywhere,” a black EMS driver tells Cormac. “ ‘East Side, West Side, all around the town…’ ” Then Cormac wheels back downtown, in and out of streets. Delfina’s nowhere that he looks. Cormac circles home, and she isn’t on his doorstep either. God damn it: I should have given her a key. She should have moved in with me when she returned from the Dominican Republic. I should have loved her more. God damn it all to Hell.

  Now he has two bicycles but no lights. I’ll save one for the boy. The radio tells him that power is out from Worth Street to the Battery, from Broadway to the Hudson. Battery Park City is being evacuated. The boy will read all this in a history book, but I must tell Delfina to save all the newspapers. He was short of breath. I must tell Delfina how much I love her. Police are knocking on doors all over Downtown, afraid of fires, afraid of exploding gas mains. Come here, Delfina. Join me here, bring your inhabited body here as I close these drapes against the dust and the sirens and burn these logs in the fireplace. As we did in Ireland one terrible winter. The hearth will give us light and heat, and even food. As each hearth did before electricity surged in these streets.

  Every muscle in his body now feels pulled and extended beyond all limit. He sleeps for two dreamless hours, and then goes out again. This time with a backpack slung on his shoulders, filled with a towel, a roll of bandages, a flashlight, a bottle of Evian water, and the box containing his mother’s earrings. They are for you, Delfina. When I find you, you will wear them. You will wear them when I’m gone.

  This time too he takes his own bicycle, pedaling all the way to East Harlem. He locks the bicycle to a fence and buzzes his way into Delfina’s building. Look who’s here. El irlandés. El amigo de Delfina from the four’ floor… Here are Elba and Rosa and Marisol. All out in the hall, their doors open, their faces blank with shock and horror and the repeated images of towers flaming, smoking, collapsing. Here is Pancho the Mexican from the second floor. No, nobody had seen La Guapa Dominicana, La Soltera, from the fourth floor, the one that threw the party the other night. Cormac explains that she worked in the North Tower. There are sobs, tears, wailing. Que pesadilla… Elba from the third floor starts praying at the kitchen table, facing the Virgen de Altagracia, others come in and pray too, while the news from channel 41 plays in another room, the voices of announcers filled with urgency. Cormac glimpses images of the burning towers. A shot of one of the airplanes, black and small and low, aiming at the South Tower. They try to get Cormac to eat chicken and rice and then accept his refusal, spoken in his clumsy Spanish. A time like this who can eat? They give him a beer. They say it’s crazy Arabs, they say they hijack four planes, one of them hit the Pentagon. Pancho offers him a Pall Mall, which he smokes. Then Elba puts her arms around Cormac and begins to weep. They go with him in a procession to the fourth floor and he scribbles a note and slips it under Delfina’s door. Come to my house. I love you. C.

  He pedals downtown along Lexington Avenue, whispering the lyrics of “Give My Regards to Broadway” as if the old tune were a dirge. He thinks that if Delfina tried to walk home and then fell, because she was somehow hurt and didn’t know it, stunned, in shock, if she fell like that, then she might be here in some doorway. Anywhere. Even up here. She wasn’t. The radio is now loud with the cause of the calamity. Islamic terrorists. Four different hijacked airplanes. Teams of hijackers armed with box cutters. A brilliantly simple plan, flawlessly executed. He tries to imagine those final seconds, tries to imagine himself at the controls as he soars toward the tower at six hundred miles an hour, tries to imagine himself shouting “Allah Akhbar,” and understands that the moment of obliteration might also have been a moment of consuming ecstasy.

  “Tell all the gang at Forty-second Street that I will soon be there.” Nothing approaches ecstasy in P.J. Clarke’s on Third Avenue. Four men, each in a pool of solitude, stare at Peter Jennings on the TV set. The bartender seems to know that Jennings understands the Middle East better than most because he spent years there as a reporter, and so he does not flick from channel to channel. Jennings talks about a nation at war. On the jukebox Sinatra sings about Nancy with the laughing face and how summer could take some lessons from her. Cormac remembers when the song was first played on the radio, during another kind of war. Jennings is smooth and effortless as he moves from one piece of the story to another, but anger is very close to his urbane surface. On tape, the towers fall once more. On tape, the Cloud once more comes rushing between buildings or over their rooftops. On tape, men and women run north. The firemen run into the smoke. Over and over and over again. He peers at televised faces. He does not see Delfina.

  Cormac orders a hamburger at the bar, remembering glad nights here in the 1950s, with Lady Day and Sinatra on the juke, and sometimes Sinatra himself at a table in the back room with Jimmy Cannon or Jilly Rizzo or William B. Williams, and dancers and stars coming in after the shows and the night stretching out forever. Fragments of songs move through him, and now on the juke Billie Holiday is singing “I’m a Fool to Want You.” The voice ruined, her ravaged face before him in a flash, alongside her beautiful face when she first arrived in 1936. None of the music
sounds sharp, and he realizes that his ears are still plugged from the roar of the collapse. Cormac finishes the burger. Delfina is more beautiful than all those beautiful women of the 1950s. Summer could take some lessons from her, all right. And still the television tells the story of death and horror. Cormac forces himself to remember the Great Fire and the seven hundred ruined buildings and how a year later all were replaced. But that was when houses were three stories high and there were no airplanes, no gasoline, no God-sick lunatics prepared to kill thousands, including themselves. This is disaster nostalgia, he tells himself, a new category among all the New York nostalgias. He smokes a cigarette. Sinatra dead, Jilly dead, Cannon dead, Billie dead, William B. dead. The dancers are grandmothers. I’m alive, he thinks. Delfina is alive too. And so is the boy. I can feel it in my bones.

  He pays the check and goes past the out-of-order cigarette machine through the side door into Fifty-fifth Street. The bike is where he left it. Even the thieves are home watching the calamity on television. And all the way up here, so many miles from Ground Zero, the air is dirty with the odor.

  * * *

  Back at home, he lights three candles. He wishes he could wrap himself in a coat of many colors. He tries the cell phone again and hears only the void. Where is Kongo? he thinks. Where the fuck is Kongo? And where are you, Delfina?

  In the morning, his ears are unplugged, but his body aches. Lying there, nothing about Tuesday seems real. Was this another act of New York theater, a working of the mad imagination? He hears the roof door banging, left unlocked when he ran to the street to find Delfina. He goes upstairs in a bathrobe. The skylight is sprayed with ash. Ash and powder have entered the loft from the open door, to gather in drifts an inch deep, and when he gazes out across the rooftop, his heart trips. The towers are gone. He saw them falling, but now he sees how completely they have disappeared. From the place they once occupied, a long black pennant of smoke drifts toward Brooklyn. And the air is heavy with the odor.