“Time eternal
Tunnel
Fallopian underground railroad
Hot water clock
Dickory,
Dickory
Blue prayer
Hardware
Sun flare
Un
Nun
Done.
Run.
Herr DeMille in a miner’s hat
Bulb to his brain
He has the light
I am the camera
The cord is the outlet.
Auteur,
Auteur
Vater,
Vater
Not a drop to drink.
Will you burn the stigmata
From the rose?
The burning thirst
Of your hypodermic nose.
Where I go, you grow.
Oh, Daddy, press that block
Press that block back in the book.
It fell off in the dark
With the club of your foot.
Herr Loom.
I, the bride
Daddy, the groom
We had our ceremony
In the thunder room.
We will have another soon.”
He turned from the light, raising his hand in farewell. The audience started hissing and pounding the floorboards. They screamed out that if he lived a hundred years, he would never be the poet his wife had been.
He walked briskly into the storage room, past the Oriental girl who was standing there steeping in her own spite and the two policemen, one of whom was looking at his watch incredulously. He started running. Down the peeling, fetid corridor, through the back door, and out into the night, where the rain now hung stationary like the beads in a cobweb. He was halfway across the commons before he realized that no one was chasing him. There was someone looking at him, though. Way off to the left. That kid in the buckskin who had said that he wanted to talk to him. The kid waved. Ted waved back.
12.
Robert
It’s the North Tower. The one with the space needle antenna. The plane, a large commercial airliner, has been impacted into the upper part of its structure. We are six or so blocks from the towers. The concrete ground between there and here knouts like a whip. The tide leaps behind Isaac and me, its white tongue roaring up the strip of shore and lathering the stones. In the recoil we see an emulsive flash in the sky. For one horrifying moment, the red corsair’s flag balloons a mile in the sky, spheroid and craggy as an asteroid. The fireball blooms to the mass of a thundercloud. It deflates and instantly it is reborn as a massive nebula of buttermilk-colored smoke that stretches out and obscures the head of the northern building’s sister, and then rains down computer paper and burning debris upon all the rooftops in a four- or five-block radius. We’re scuttling now across the West Side Highway, enabled by the disbelief of rubbernecking morning commuters who slow to a school-zone pace, indulging their curiosity in advance of their instincts for self-preservation. They are honking their horns and hollering responses that are lost in the sustained aftershock and the crescendo of all that vertical glass shattering. We see that the computer paper loosed by the storm is not catching fire, but rather is whipping around in whirlwind patterns. Chunks of concrete with powdery tails fall like streamers to the blacktop. They land with the dull thud of dead shells. Plates of glass a story or so in size. Great shards of steel. Modernistic metal works twisted into weird angles.
We cross over onto Murray Street, where the marquee of the strip club New York Dolls advertises SPECTACULAR TOPLESS ENTERTAINMENT NO COVER. Tribeca is largely a bedroom rather than a business community, and its streets are deserted at a quarter to nine in the morning, although the emergency sirens have gone off, and a convoy of fire, police, and rescue vehicles can be seen rolling down Varick Street. Residents are hanging out their windows and standing on their rooftops in their night-clothes. Kitchen workers in doorways, their puffed hats on their heads and their aprons already stained with this morning’s mise-en-place. A runtish prep guy has been surprised at the task of butchering. He is speaking in Spanish to someone behind him. He points his knife at the sky.
On the corner of West and Vesey, an undercover cop or else an indomitable construction worker is directing traffic. He wears only a white T-shirt, bib overalls, and a hard hat decaled with the cartoon of the Tasmanian Devil. He has a two-way radio in his hand. He is shepherding the oncoming cars to the east and to the west, shaking his head sadly at the prospect of any vehicles entering the World Trade Center complex. The onrushing sea parts before him. A single heavyset uniformed policeman is handling the pedestrian flow. He makes arrows of his index fingers and thrusts them overhand into the air like a cheerleader. The outlook for putting in a day’s work in the towers today is tolerably iffy to say the least, but these people have coworkers, spouses, and family members inside the buildings. At the moment, all considerations of their own personal safety are an affront to them. They want only immediate condition reports and the chance to do something heroic. The heavyset cop, young, broad-shouldered, and irate, has had his professional patience stretched to the snapping place.
“Cuh-leer the fucking area!” he bellows. “Who wants to get shredded by the glass? Who wants to get blown up by a bomb? Cuh-leer the motherfucking area, now!”
By a bomb?
The only immediate condition report available is imprinted on the faces of the bystanders. In New York City, it is common to wear an expression of complete focus and invulnerability. This isn’t because the city is any more dangerous than your average urban burg; it is because New York is possibly the most expeditious town on earth. People here assiduously gauge their own temperaments, constantly watching themselves watch where they are going and at what rate of motion. They hasten, often, to be purposefully late. Vulnerability is only a gratuitous come-on here. Panhandlers and baby-doll prostitutes allow themselves to appear defenseless. Now to suddenly see so many eyes wide with panic and horror, so many lower lips being sucked like lozenges, is to question that gritty communal invulnerability that has given the city its character. Somewhere, someone has called our bluff.
Glowing bits of concrete are falling through the air. Sections of the airplane’s steel siding lie there on the ground, reflecting the smoke. The rescue helicopters have arrived. I can’t see them for the haze, but I can hear their intimidating stammer. They reprise the sound track to Vietnam, dormant in memory and misappropriated by the movies. I catch one of the descending sheets of paper in my hand. I read it by flickering cherry light. The heading states, A MESSAGE TO THE WORLD FROM PANGAEA WIRELESS. The illustration is of all of the continents of the northern and southern hemispheres reconnected. Their landmass is composed of the pointillist mesh of an electrical circuitry grid. Beneath the map of the New Old World is another heading in only slightly smaller letters. It says, STAY IN TOUCH.
Blind Isaac speeds past the cop in his hovercraft. He is steering with his left hand; his right is balled into a fist. He is shaking it at the top of the burning tower. His hairless skull is ashed over and bleeding. Glass is shining on top of his head. He is screaming something in Yiddish. His wheelchair serves to extend him blanket victim status, although the only serious injuries that he is suffering from are the cumulative effects of his eighty-odd years upon the planet and his resulting inability to walk. The heavyset cop bares his teeth at me.
“I’ll get my father,” I assure him, running past.
“You get your father the fuck outta here!” he calls behind me.
The firemen wear striped rubber bumblebee jackets and rain hats that resemble the crowns of hydrants. Their pillow-sized rubber boots leave moonprints upon the overlying ash on the ground. Their hoses are already busy with the collateral fires of the disaster, crisscrossing and snaking through the slag, pouring white water across the concrete. Prayerful voices recite codes and coordinates over their radios. The men stand looking up, shielding their eyes with their arms. The ones not fighting the auxiliary fires are
awaiting their dash toward the bank of glass doors. Half of these doors are kept clear for the firemen, who will trudge the galaxy of inner stairs with their work packs and their personal fireplugs braced upon their backs. The other half are outlets for the evacuees in their business attire. They are streaming into the plaza, hustled out by the bullhorns of the emergency personnel. The refugees walk with their shoulders hunched, looking neither up nor down, many of them holding their handkerchiefs, or their scarves, or only their sleeves over their mouths. They are dripping wet, presumably from the building’s sprinkler system. Some of them are coughing and some are gashed and bleeding. The injured ones fall in with the herd, wanting to draw no attention to themselves. Something aflame has struck one of the fire engines. The crew turns its jet toward the truck, but the incendiaries in the very air seem to fuel the rate of combustion. Within seconds the flames reach the diesel engine, and the truck explodes into projectile fragments. The wind stirred by the blast blows several of the men in the hosing crew to the ground. I follow the watercourse of the white current into the air. I can see that a Solomon’s seal of glass is missing from the window of an atrium high up on the North Tower. The strange pentagram seems to be expanding and reshaping. I squint and I can make out a crowd of office workers, frantic men and women. They are kicking at the window with their shoes, or else bashing it in with iron chairs. This action completed, they link hands, ten or more of them in a line. As regimented as a drill team, they step over the ledge and into thin air. They fall through the atmosphere, gingerbread cutouts spilling from out of an oven.
“Have you seen a crippled man in a wheelchair?” I ask a cop who is engaged in waving pedestrians north.
“I see a guy who’s gonna be in a wheelchair,” he says, barely looking at me. “Or in the dirt.”
People are slipping and falling on the slick concrete. A great drum comes crashing down from the tower. It takes me a matter of moments to realize that it is a circular conference table. Leapers are now following the path of the table. They come down with the posture of trampoliners, their backs ramrod straight as though there is just that hint of a chance that they may land upon their feet and walk away in their Florsheims, none the worse for the effort. A heedless policeman, speaking into his radio and eyeing the western horizon, walks into the path of the jumpers. A falling man lands directly on top of him, crushing his skull. The policeman’s body becomes a corpse. The leaper’s body becomes a puddle.
The cop I just spoke to looks at me. Did you see that? his eyes ask.
“Don’t look up!” the cop now screams at the evacuees. “Don’t look back and don’t look up!”
The policeman sees me still standing there. Plus I’m looking up. He lashes out his hand and catches me hard just under the heart, knocking the wind out of me. Long ago, another cop had struck me in the exact same manner.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he shouts. “Get outta here before you get killed!”
I’m just past Trinity Plaza. Media trucks, with their retractable sound booms like cherry pickers, have infiltrated the emergency caravan. Helicopters, some of them appearing to be assault craft, hang low over the buildings. I hear conversations in the crowd. It’s said that they are pushing people toward City Hall, where they can organize a command post and information center. A hospital, I’ve forgotten the name, is nearby. Others say that they expect the downtown area to be cleared entirely. The Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges are only blocks away. The Williams-burg Bridge is within walking distance. A man says that he was in the Trade Center when its underground parking facility was bombed in 1993. He feels bad for the victims, but a great deal of confusion could be avoided if everyone would just remain calm.
“In ’93, the market was open the day after they bombed,” the gentleman recalls. “And the Dow was up.”
Another commercial jet comes flying low directly overhead. A dazzled panel of strip art appears instantly in the street. Thousands stand frozen in their tracks, looking up. Once again the topmost of the tower of oceanic rampart steel is purled into fiery, aerosol mist and the corsair’s flag blooms and snuffs itself out in a matter of seconds. But this time I am too close. The flash of heat is searing. People all around me are screaming. It’s like someone dropped a match into the center of an anthill. The natural inclination would be to run away from the flame, but the rational compass has been rendered inoperative in the hysteria.
To my amazement, the area at the front of the towers is considerably more orderly than the scene on the adjacent block. The firemen are proceeding into both buildings and the civilians are proceeding out. But the air is difficult to breathe and I can see that several of the outlying buildings, as well as many transport vehicles, have caught fire. The news media, with their prophet’s purchase on reality and their presumed immunity from its consequences, are trying to set up camp in the ruined courtyard with their camera and sound trucks, and their portable movie set hardware. Ordinarily, the police would circle their wagons and string out their yellow crime tape, but things are much too tumultuous for that. The cops have to run down each individual media vehicle trying to enter the area. Nightsticks are swinging in the air. Cameramen point their handhelds out the windows of their trucks, the drivers winding figure-eights in the plaza, veering through the pedestrians and the debris, to elude the eviction orders.
Now the cops are running. Expansive shoulders. Beef-fed faces. Red and stoic to the rescue. Red and stoic to their own slaughter. I think that the bombs are about to drop. It’s the air strike espoused by thousands of Emergency Broadcast System test intervals over the years. The Soviets have been playing international possum over the course of the last decade. It turns out that the Iron Curtain is a magician’s veil and that the supposedly dead hand is quicker and shrewder than the eavesdropping surveillance eyes. They’ve tricked us into letting our deterrent down.
I’m running alongside the policemen. I hear a bullhorn behind me. “The building’s coming down!”
It is not the building, but rather the planet. Gravity has given in and the earth is screaming through bottomless space. The air pressure caused by the rapid descent of the South Tower opens up craters that penetrate even to the earth’s core. The petrified innards of the earth, chalky as lime pits, come gushing out. Great scuds of rubble collide and explode in midair. Police cars are flipped over onto their backs. Crossbeams crash into the crowd. Moments ago, there were the structures of the lesser WTC buildings to seek the shelter of, but now the air has grown dark and strangely cold, the temperature dropping a perceivable twenty degrees with the wintry coating of white dust. It seems that there is nothing in the distance now except for the spotty infernos that burn in shades of orange and blue. Ground glass pours down the throat and the nasal canals, stopping off the air, damming the dike. Then the rumbling of the settling Two Tower subsides, and I can hear the screams of agony coming from divergent points in the darkness. I would like to scream, too, so that the survivors, if there are to be survivors, will know where to look for my body.
There’s an angel in a shepherd’s costume standing over me. The dust in the air is shifting. I can almost make out the orb of the morning sun over the shepherd’s right shoulder. He reaches down and prods me with his staff.
“Get up,” Blind Isaac, covered in limestone, says, “you are a caterpillar of strength.”
I have not seen him out of his wheelchair in at least two years. He seems unhurt and has no trouble breathing or speaking through the white soot.
“Are you all right?” I ask through my sleeve, as I am using the handle of his cane as a leverage to gain my feet.
He says, “You who are asking me if I am all right?”
“Where is your chair?”
“You who are asking me where my chair is?”
“How do we get out of here?” I ask him.
13.
Ted
The boy in buckskin was waving through the web of the rain. Ted was waving back. The night posed a demented mirror. His
younger ghost, out for an ambush in a coat of rough suede, was beckoning or else waving goodbye. Ted turned on his heel and walked ahead. He could pick out the kid’s footsteps coming up behind him, and he could hear the rope of his long braid swinging like the whip of a mare’s tail. He was the native assassin, splattered with endogenous war paint, in one of those period westerns that had packed them in on weekend midnights in London after the war. He had slipped into the prairie town with a sick, unresolved, and hateful heart, and was on the hunt for the marshal who had once ridden with the cavalry raiders with a string of scalps dangling from his saddlebag. Throughout the picture, he would alternately stalk the marshal and retreat to the saloon to gulp firewater, and stand pouting into the bar’s glass, stirring his troubled guts and refraining from looking himself in the eye.
“Mr. Hughes?” the killer called.
Ted walked, unrecognized, through the crowded campus and onto Broadway. The headlights on Broadway performed the cakewalk of a cardiogram. The rain beads burst against the pavement. Fire engines rolled by in a procession. Their song sheared off the top of his skull.
He had one last appointment to keep this evening, and he was severely late for it.
The fire engines kept coming, one after another. He looked to the sky, expecting to see flames or a column of smoke. The Milky Way had compressed into a single voluted helix. The heavens were a scroll closing. The wax of the rain burned in his eyes.
He turned around. The buckskin boy was coming up hard. His face was reddening. His mouth was half open. He appeared ready to burst into song. Ted planted his feet and dipped his shoulder. The kid kept coming, waving both hands. He did a little skip step and then leaped the last yard between the crease of the concrete and the truss of Ted’s shoulder, the acquiescent kamikaze. Ted caught him with an elbow in the abdomen. The kid deflated and lay like a rolled carpet across his shoulder. Ted pawed him for a dagger. He didn’t find anything and was not surprised. A weaker vessel had killed him bare-handed once before.
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