“Yes?” I said, even though I knew what was coming now.
“Like the story so far?” he said, still smiling. Repeating the first words the writer had scrawled to me.
“You,” I said. “You’ve been leaving it for me.”
“Thas right, dawg.”
“Who?”
“Who what? ”
“Who’s giving the chapters to you?”
“You sayin’ I ain’t the writer?”
“Yes. I’m saying you didn’t write it.”
“Fuckin’ right. I didn’t read none of it either.”
“Who?”
“You know who, dawg.”
Yes.
“He wants to see you now, ’kay?”
He wants to see you now.
“All right,” I said as calmly as I could.
But as I gathered the papers on my desk, I noticed my hand was trembling. The papers were clearly fluttering right there in full view of Malik, and even though I willed my hand to stop shaking, I couldn’t get it to listen.
“Next week,” Malik said. “All right?”
I said yes. Next week was fine.
But I have to get back to the story now.
I have to explain what happened.
FORTY-TWO
When I brought the gun out from under the bed, the world collapsed. It ended.
There was a flash of light, a blast of heat, and then the earth imploded and went black.
Then I woke up.
I opened my eyes and thought: I'm dead.
Vasquez has killed me. I am dead. I am in heaven.
Only I couldn’t have been in heaven.
Because I was in hell.
Pick up Dante's Inferno and go right to the sixth circle. The black sulfurous fumes. The inferno of boiling oil. The screams of agony. I opened my eyes and couldn’t see. It was still morning, but it was night.
This much was clear. The eighth floor of the Fairfax Hotel had somehow become the basement. The seventh floor down had become a grave.
The room itself was half standing. It was spring, but it was snowing (plaster powder, I discovered when I tasted it on my tongue). An entire air-conditioning unit was lying on top of my left leg.
This is what I know now, but not then. What I pieced together from newspapers and TV and my own limited observations.
That women’s health center next door to the Fairfax Hotel provided federally subsidized abortions, which meant that to certain people out there it wasn’t a women’s health center as much as an abortion center.
That man in the University of Oklahoma jacket whom I met in the elevator the day I checked in and then later saw in the lobby, complaining about having no Bibles in his room? He was one of those people out there. A muscular Christian, a devout right-to-lifer, but one with an aggrieved sense of injustice and a fascination with explosives.
It turned out he wasn’t spending his time playing three-card monte and buying fake Rolexes on the street. He was spending his time up in his room, painstakingly putting together a bomb made out of fertilizer and acetates. When it was done, he strapped it carefully to his body.
He took the elevator down to the lobby of the Fairfax Hotel with the intention of walking into the women’s health center next door and blowing it and himself up.
Let me explain the volatility of this kind of bomb. According to later reports in the papers, it is not your most stable kind of explosive. Not like dynamite, for instance, or plastic explosives. It’s extremely volatile, very transmutable.
He never made it out of the elevator. Something happened. The elevator stopped short. Or he was jostled. Or he pressed the detonator by mistake. Something.
The bomb exploded at the very epicenter of the building. If you were trying to take down the Fairfax Hotel and not the abortion center next door, and you were smart about blast ratios and shock indexes and structural weaknesses, this is where you would do it.
In the elevator directly between floors five and six.
And the Fairfax Hotel was a structural weakness waiting to be put out of its misery.
Its bones were cracked and creaky and brittle. Peeling asbestos made it a model firetrap. It had several leaks in its gas heating system, or so it was later determined. In short, it was a disaster waiting to happen.
Steel beams. Sections of roof. Plaster wall. Plate glass. People. All hurtling up in the air and then, true to Newtonian physics, down. On top of what was left of the Fairfax Hotel. Flattening it like a crushed wedding cake.
One hundred and forty-three people died that morning in the Fairfax Hotel and four surrounding buildings.
One hundred and forty-three and, eventually, one more.
I heard a voice.
“Anyone alive down there? Anyone?”
“Yes,” I said. If I hear myself, I thought, then maybe I’m alive.
“Yes,” I said, and heard it.
Arms grasped my arms. Lifted me out of the rubble and carnage and blackness, and I was suddenly alive and breathing.
This is what I know now, but not then.
Two rooms had remained intact — or mostly intact. Who knows why? When someone decides to strap a bomb to his body and obliterate himself, rhyme and reason take a holiday. Some people that morning went to the left and survived. Some people went right and didn’t. One person lay this close to death on a hotel floor and made it out alive.
And pretty much unscathed.
They brought me out of the rubble and laid me down on a stretcher at the side of the street, and they went in and brought out anyone else they could find. Including Vasquez and Lucinda and Dexter and Sam. Of the four, three of them were dead and the other one almost. Dexter and Sam and Lucinda had blankets pulled up over their faces. Vasquez was unconscious and bloody and barely breathing.
They laid him next to me on the sidewalk, and a fireman took his pulse and shook his head. When someone with a red cross on his arm came running over, the fireman said, “Take care of the old woman over there,” and pointed at a woman whose clothes were smoldering.
“He’s not going to make it.”
Eventually I decided to get up and leave. To just walk away.
Even though I must have been suffering from some sort of shock, I felt terrifyingly lucid.
Visibility was almost zero. But I could see Lucinda’s body not five feet from me. I could touch Vasquez. Firemen and policemen were running back and forth in a choking maelstrom of black smoke.
I got up. I began walking. I vanished in that maelstrom.
I walked quite a while. I was wondering if Deanna had been right all along, that things happened for a reason. I wasn’t sure now. People stared at me as if I’d just landed from another planet. But no one stopped me — no one asked me if I was hurt or needed a doctor or an ambulance. Maybe they were immune to this kind of thing now. I walked straight down Broadway. I thought my hair was singed — when I ran my hands through it, it crackled like static. I ended up hailing a taxicab somewhere near Central Park.
I went back to my apartment in Forest Hills. The taxi driver had the radio on. Someone was talking about the explosion. Possibly a gas leak, a woman was saying — she was interviewing a fire captain. It would be a while before they’d find evidence to the contrary. The taxi driver asked me if I was all right.
“Yes,” I said. “Couldn’t be better.”
When we got to Forest Hills, the street I lived on was deserted. Maybe everyone was glued to the news. No one saw me enter the building, go into my apartment, fall into a stupor.
I slept an entire day.
When I woke the next morning, I went into the bathroom and didn’t recognize myself. I was in blackface — I belonged in a minstrel show.
I turned on the news. Three talking heads were debating figures. What figures, exactly? It took me a while to figure it out. The number of dead — that’s what they were talking about. Somewhere around 100 was the consensus. On another channel they claimed it was 96, 150 on another. The hotel dea
d and the peripheral casualties in the four surrounding buildings. But who knew how many died, really? That’s what the talking heads said. The bodies were burned up, crushed, incinerated. It was impossible to tell, one man said, they might never know. If someone who was in the hotel showed up, they were alive — he said. If they didn’t they were dead. People had already begun scouring hospitals and Red Cross shelters, putting up pictures on walls and fences and street lamps — a hollow-eyed and desperate army of bereaved.
I watched for an entire day without moving.
I didn’t call anyone — I didn’t speak to anyone. I was more or less paralyzed. All that horror. I couldn’t move — I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t speak.
The illusion of invulnerability I used to carry around like a birthright — the one Vasquez and Lucinda had stripped me of — had now been taken from 143 others. No one was safe anymore. No one.
The rubble from the explosion was taken by truck to the city dump. To the dump in Staten Island. To the place you can get to by following the stench straight down Western Avenue.
To make room for the tons of debris, they first had to move other tons of debris. Move those piles of debris from one place to another. And amid the pile of twisted steel, crushed cardboard, tin cans, broken bones, rotten food, cracked brick, and human waste — they found a wasted human.
They finally found Winston.
This was all the police had been waiting for. A body. They had me on tape telling Winston what I wanted him to do, but they didn’t have Winston.
Now they did.
I discovered this when I finally called Deanna three days after I stumbled away from the blown-up buildings. From what looked like downtown Beirut. She was happy to hear from me.
“Thank God, Charles,” she said. “I thought you were dead. ”
FORTY-THREE
That’s when it first occurred to me.
When Deanna got on the phone and said, I thought you were dead.
Or maybe it wasn’t exactly then. Maybe it was later, after I’d told Deanna what I’d been up to — what had happened to me in the Fairfax Hotel — and she gasped and went silent and then told me the police had come to the house with a warrant for my arrest. Because they’d found Winston’s body in the Staten Island dump.
Or it might’ve been later that day, when a somber and pale-looking city spokeswoman read a list of the dead on a news program. The confirmed dead and the presumed dead — otherwise known as the still missing.
My name was on it.
It was kind of surreal, listening to myself be declared officially missing. It was like attending my own funeral — my very own memorial service. The city spokeswoman said this list was carefully compiled from the hotel’s computer hard drive, recovered in the rubble — people who were known to have been registered guests at the time of the explosion. And from belongings found here and there, scattered around the blast site and stored in the hotel safe. Briefcases, PalmPilots, engraved watches, and jewelry. My watch, for example, was missing. “To Charles Schine with all my love,” it said on the back. The spokeswoman explained they’d matched this list to the people who’d made it to emergency rooms and hospital beds.
I was picking up the phone to call someone — anyone — and explain that I wasn’t dead after all, that I was still here. I was getting dressed at the same time, because maybe a phone call wouldn’t be enough, it was possible I would have to show up and produce myself in the flesh. I was rummaging through my sock drawer, and I came across Winston’s wallet.
Which is when the idea really occurred to me.
When it changed from the ridiculous to the possible. From a wishful notion to an actual plan. I’d buried Winston’s wallet in my sock drawer and forgotten about it. But I remembered something Winston told me now.
The easiest thing to get—new identities, he'd said.
His wallet, for instance, had four of them. Driver’s licenses.
A Jonathan Thomas. A Brian McDermott. A Steven Aimett.
And a Lawrence Widdoes. The only one of the four who looked even remotely like me — younger, of course, but the same basic coloring.
I thought you were dead, Deanna said.
So did a few other people.
I’d checked into the Fairfax Hotel, but I’d never checked out. Or maybe I had, but only in the vernacular sense of the term. As in, Did you hear what happened to Charley? He, well, checked out. He died.
Which reminded me of one other popular saying.
I’d be better off dead. Yes, we’ve all heard that one, too. An expression we use in times of crisis, when things are absolutely hopeless and there seems to be no way out.
Unless there is. Unless you think that you’re good and trapped, but there is a way out after all.
Being dead.
Maybe that was the way out.
If I showed up, I’d be alive.
But what if I didn't?
FORTY-FOUR
I was standing on the corner of Crescent and Thirtieth Avenue.
In front of a place called the Crystal Night Club. It didn’t look like a nightclub. It was just an ex-VFW lodge — the pale imprint of “VFW Lodge 54” still lingered on the brick facing. But it was past midnight, and I could hear music inside. A Latin-looking man was throwing up on the sidewalk.
When I walked in, I was immediately aware that I wasn’t exactly in my element.
Remember that scene from Star Wars where the hero strolls into that alien bar? I felt like that. Only these aliens were of the terrestrial variety — the kind you see on the evening news when the INS conducts its periodic roundups on the border. The kind you see on any lawn crew on Long Island. If I hopped a plane to Santo Domingo and stepped off onto the runway and into the nearest bar, it might look like this.
I was pretty sure I was the only white American in the place. Possibly the only legal American, too.
Salsa music was blaring from two enormous speakers. Spanish was flowing freely around the room.
Everyone seemed coupled up, but they were oddly paired. The women were dressed up — short flashy skirts and high heels. The men wore dirty jeans and T-shirts. It took me a while to understand what was going on.
The women were hostesses. That’s the way one of them introduced herself—first in Spanish, huéspeda . Then in English, when I looked perplexed and she got a good look at me and realized I wasn’t her usual clientele.
For a moment she hesitated, as if she expected me to realize my mistake and leave. But when I stood there and waited politely for her to continue, she did.
“I’m Rosa,” she said. “Want a hostess?”
“Yes,” I said. “Fine.”
Return for a minute to that moment I was taken out of the hole in the ground that had once been the Fairfax Hotel.
I was laid on the sidewalk as they waited for the ambulances and doctors to arrive. They came out with other bodies; they placed a dying Vasquez next to me on the ground.
The fireman who laid him there was covered in soot. His eyes were like white ash on burning charcoal. He asked me if I was okay.
I said yes. I could hear the faint wail of a rushing ambulance. I knew I had just a few minutes.
When the fireman went back in for more bodies, I leaned over Vasquez as if I were comforting him. Seeing if he was all right. I put my hands into his pockets. First the front pockets, then the back.
In his front pockets was some change. A vial with white powder in it. Some matches.
His back pocket was bulging with his wallet. I quickly removed it and put it in my pocket.
I got up and left.
In the taxi to Forest Hills I rifled through it, returning the favor Vasquez has done for me in the Fairfax Hotel.
In this wallet: a phony police badge; a suspicious-looking driver’s license; more white powder wrapped in aluminum foil; two hundred dollars; a business card for something called the Crystal Night Club. Proprietor listed as Raul Vasquez.
On the back was some Spanish writ
ing. Veinte-y-dos . . . derecho, treinta-y-siete izquierdo, doce . . . derecho.
The next morning, the morning I woke in blackface, I looked it up on-line. Google.com — Spanish Dictionary.
Once I translated the first word, I knew they were numbers.
Twenty-two right.
Thirty-seven left.
Twelve right.
I was pretty sure it wasn’t a football play.
This is the way it worked in the Crystal Night Club.
You ordered overpriced drinks, and Rosa talked to you.
That’s what the other men were doing.
Rosa explained it to me, as something to talk about.
“You ain’t no wetback,” she said. “That’s what we get in here. Usually,” she added, not wanting to offend me.
“Where do you come from?” I asked her.
“America,” she said, "where do you think?”
“No. I meant where do you live?”
“The Bronx,” she said. “All of us do. We get bused in.”
“Oh.”
“These guys” — she pointed around the room with evident disdain — “they live on crews. You know . . . like six to a room.”
“And they come here to drink.”
“Right,” she said with a little smile, as if I’d said something funny, “to drink. Want another?” she asked me, reminding me that that’s exactly what I was doing. Drinking.
I’d barely touched my ten-dollar tequila sunrise, but I said sure.
“They’re lonely,” she added after making a hand signal to the man behind the bar. He had a thick neck festooned with tattooed crosses. “They come here to like . . . you know, bullshit. They got no one to talk to. No one female, ” she said. “They like, fall in love with us, you know. They blow all their dinero. ” And she laughed and rubbed her fingers together.
“Yeah,” I said. “I understand.”
“Oh yeah . . . you understand. So what’s your story?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I don’t have one. I just wandered in.”
“Yeah, well, that’s cool.”
Rosa was thick hipped and fleshy — most of the hostesses were. I was picturing Lucinda. I was wondering if she’d worked here, too; I took a gamble.
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