‘WAIT.’
Adam grinds to a halt reluctantly, panting into her armpit. She feels woozy. The skyscraper looming over their window glints at her in the morning sun; it is as shiny as a freshly minted coin. She wonders how they can keep such a vast expanse of glass clean, and also whether the office workers sitting up there can see them. They should have pulled the curtains really, but they were too mesmerized by the neon lights of Manhattan last night, the way they made their skin move through hues of red and blue and green as though they were in a scene in a movie. Everything in New York feels like a scene in a movie. Adam pushes surreptitiously.
‘Two minutes. Sorry. I just need a quick pause.’
‘Pff …’
He lets himself bear down on her fully as he settles into the wait, throbbing impatiently. She can’t really breathe properly any more, but she likes to feel the mass of him like this – it is comforting, or tender, or something. Eva is looking forward, after this, to having a bubble bath in the decadently huge tub, and then – this will be the best part – donning one of those crisp, white bathrobes. For these alone, it was worth splashing out on a night in a luxury hotel. They are thick and soft and clean, as if they had only just come into existence; it is impossible to imagine how they could have been worn already by other hotel guests, been put through the mundane indignity of a washing machine. They seem so new and innocent. Perhaps this is the real privilege of wealth: the illusion that you are living in a virginal world.
‘Two minutes up.’
‘Have you actually been timing us?’
The expensive white – everything is white in here, white without a speck or a stain on it – the expensive white alarm clock on the bedside table winks a new minute at them.
Eva strokes Adam’s back, then lets her hand run further, over the thick, luxurious cotton of their bed sheet. Underneath it, the mattress is exquisitely firm. It is all so – comfortable. She shudders internally at the memory of the youth hostel bunk beds they have been laying their bodies on for the past two weeks, springs pushing through rough material, digging into your shoulder blades. If only they could afford to stay in places like this all the time.
They went to visit the Federal Reserve yesterday, down, down, down into the vault to catch a glimpse of gold, lines and lines and stacks and stacks so heavy they had to dig right to the very bedrock of Manhattan Island to lay the stuff to rest. And then you came back out on to Wall Street, passers-by in suits worth more than your annual salary. She wonders what the bankers made of them, scruffy young tourists agape at their mythical city. Whether they noticed them at all.
‘Three, now!’
‘But I’m so tired …’
‘I’ll soon wake you up.’
It comes out wrong. There is a hardness in Adam’s voice that she knows was not intended, makes him sound like a rapist rather than a seducer. She squints over at him. He looks abashed.
‘Will you now?’
She grinds against him, and Adam jack-rabbits into action, withdrawing briefly to flip her over and pull her half off the bed, so that now she is draped over it, belly resting in the (white) duck-down duvet, knees on the floor. The (white) carpet, it turns out, is not as soft as it looks – or at least not when you have someone thrusting into you and making your knees scrub into it. She feels a twinge in her tibia where she broke it as a child. It would seem uncharitable to interrupt things now they have just got going again, though – besides which, knees and tibia aside, this feels pretty goo—
The room shudders, as though King Kong has just jumped on to the top of the building, or as though – as though, God, as though there has just been an earthquake, or a bomb has just exploded, or war was declared during their sleep and the first air strike has just begun. She is aware, but in a distant sort of way, because mainly she is just terrified, that the opportunity for a crack about Adam’s earth-shattering performance is being lost here. They have somehow both ended up on the floor, in a tangle of limbs and duvet. Adam leaps up and rushes to the window. Eva leaps up, clutches a pillow to her bare breasts, and rushes to the window too.
‘Wow.’
‘Fuck me.’
Smoke is billowing out from the side of the World Trade Center. It rises in a dark-grey fug which contrasts grimly with the smooth, pale grey of the building. Between the two greys, the angry orange-red of a fire; above them, the clarity of a calm blue sky. The white, the grey, the red, the blue – though the blue will not stay for long – will be the colour scheme by which Eva remembers this day. She watches, riveted, as the fire rages, and in her memory this is when she sees them, though she cannot be sure her chronology isn’t a little off, because everything seems to happen so fast, and yet also to last an eternity, on this day. This, as she remembers it, is when: a man and a woman, holding hands, two small black impressionistic blobs of human being plummeting down along the pale-grey tower. The moment goes on for ever – long enough for them to think about the asphalt that awaits them, long enough for them to scream a final ‘I love you’ at each other. And then they are hidden from view by one of the lower skyscrapers.
Adam, meanwhile, a truly modern man, has turned on the television. This means that he does not see the suicidal couple, which will be a bone of contention later, as he will accuse Eva of having made it up, of not really having witnessed the scene directly – she must have watched them on the TV and turned it into memory, because he didn’t see them, and however much she will point out to him that there were those split seconds when he had his back turned to the window, she will never be able to make him admit defeat on this one.
But Eva knows she has seen them and wonders: were they married, a husband and wife who worked in the same office, perhaps even had met in that office, the whole span of their married life framed by the Twin Towers, like bookends? Or were they colleagues who had been too shy to declare their love for one another throughout years of corporate drudgery but who now, in their final moment, had plucked up the courage to come together at last? Can you concentrate on a love story when you are about to die? Perhaps, even, they were total strangers, had never met until this moment when, with the drop outside the only alternative to the fire that was already blistering their skin, they opted for death in the fresh air, and for companionship in that death, their warm palms and interlocked fingers bringing them closer, perhaps, than they had ever been to anybody else, as close as two people could possibly be. After all, we usually die alone.
It will, at any rate, be a source of considerable irritation for Adam to later deny that Eva has witnessed this terrible, beautiful moment.
But she does not know that now.
For now, she watches the smoke rise while Adam switches on the television, and a news reporter, stumbling over his words in a mixture of shock and excitement, blares his commentary into the room. Eva turns towards him and sees, in visual stereo, on the screen before her and, out of the corner of her eye, in the world outside, the second plane. The room shudders again. Or maybe she shudders. Adam is wrapped around her, trembling, protective. On the television, a man in a suit in the bottom left-hand corner of the frame is saying over and over again:
‘Holy shit. Holy shit.’
‘We need to get out of here.’
They are only a couple of blocks away from the World Trade Center. They are on the thirty-fifth floor of a high-rise building. It is hard to know what is the best thing to do.
‘Wait.’
She tries to process something, anything. They are high up. Planes are falling out of the sky. Planes are crashing into tall buildings. There is no shelter in the street. The news reporter talks of terrorism. The news shows people streaming out on to the street. A plane could fall on to the street – couldn’t it? Which is safer, street or room? The news reporter says the president is in a school in Florida. What is he doing in a school in Florida?
Nowhere is safe.
‘Eva, listen to me. We need to get out of here.’
Perhaps Adam’s brain is
working, because he seems to know what they should do. Their naked skins are warm against each other, cool where the expensive air of the hotel room caresses them.
Nowhere is safe, but this feels safe.
‘Yes, let’s go.’
They slide off each other, as synchronous as ballet dancers, and bend down to pick up their clothes, which are strewn across the floor in eloquent disarray. A trained detective could reconstitute the scene, from their walking fully clothed into the room to lying naked under the bedcovers, based on the location of Adam’s left sock by the bedside table, the angle at which Eva’s jeans have crumpled on to the floor. They swoop up pieces of clothing indiscriminately, then Adam hands Eva her knickers, which, inexplicably, he has had to retrieve from quite far under the bed, in exchange for the boxer shorts that she has found intertwined with her bra. He helps her put the bra on; then they are tenderly, silently dressing each other, slipping T-shirts over heads and buttons into buttonholes with the care of a mother dressing a toddler for its first day at school, while, outside of their silence, far, far away from it, the television drones speculations which cannot touch them. Fully clothed now, they hold each other again, Adam whispering in Eva’s ear.
‘How do you feel?’
‘Fucking terrified.’
‘Yeah. Me too.’
‘I love you.’
‘Yeah. Me too.’
They leave the room with the television and lights still on, their toothbrushes still in a glass on the sink, their suitcases still in the wardrobe, for this is how refugees have always left their rooms: still half alive, abandoned possessions waiting obediently for a return that will never come.
They pad along tastefully lit corridors, as peaceful and thickly carpeted as though mayhem had not just broken out in the world outside. Ironic that, on the one occasion they decide to be extravagant and splash out on a room they can’t really afford for one night, they should be interrupted by a freakish cataclysm. Though perhaps this means they won’t have to pay the bill? Eva steers unthinkingly towards the lifts, but Adam ushers her away – ‘No, no, what if something happens?’ – and guides her to the stairs.
Thirty-five floors. They patter down, feet echoing on concrete, their breath urgent now, while from the bottom of the stairwell, a long, long way down, a dim clamour speaks of disaster and historic events. The designers of the hotel haven’t made such an effort on the stairs, which are pale grey and neon-lit, as though the need to evacuate in an emergency were not worthy of the truly wealthy. A word from her childhood pops into Eva’s head: Flüchtlinge. Her mother’s language is so much more eloquent on this subject: Flüchtlinge, ‘flightlings’, captures the hurriedness of flight far better than the huddled, head-scarved ‘refugees’ of English. Her mother, the flightling, fighting her way across an inky sea, washing up on a foreign shore with empty pockets, building a new life in a strange land, with nothing to pass on to her daughter from her home but the sounds of her mother tongue. And now, Eva and Adam, flightlings scurrying down a concrete stairwell while the sky falls on to the city.
When they reach the twenty-eighth floor, the fire alarm goes off. Adam and Eva quicken their pace, running down the stairs now, while other shell-shocked guests trickle in and, seeing them, also break into a jog, so that gradually they form a long line like adolescents hurrying to their break down an interminable staircase, sticking in close, diffident clusters for safety. The shriek of the alarm yields to the dull clamour from below as they near the exit, until suddenly they are out on the street, and the alarm inside has become the background noise, the persistent echo of a past life. Frantic hotel staff, the sweat on their faces a sticky contrast to the elegance of their maroon uniforms, run around with clipboards, collaring the guests as they come out. ‘It’s an evacuation. We have to make sure everyone is accounted for.’
Adam gives their names to a gangly attendant, who solemnly ticks them off the list. Eva remembers him from when they checked in yesterday afternoon: he was clearly as much of a newcomer to this luxury world as they were, the acne scars on his face barely starting to heal, and treated them with a deference none of the other staff had bothered to muster, their more experienced eyes having immediately singled out Adam and Eva as one-night cowboys, with their wide eyes and carefully collected discount coupons. They had liked the guy, and chatted briefly with him about this and that; but now his eyes pass blankly over them, as though their descent down the long, grey stairwell has robbed them of all individuality. ‘OK, you’re going to have to move on, please. We’ll be contacting you as soon as possible if you’ve left any possessions in your rooms.’ Then louder, to the crowd, his American accent reminiscent of thrillers and action movies: ‘Move along, please!’
They make their way through the mêlée of the side street and on to the avenue. The place is awash with people. West Broadway swoops right down to the World Trade Center, like a red carpet to a Hollywood star, and so office workers, street sweepers, Starbucks vendors, have all congregated on the sidewalk to gaze at the dark smoke against the clear blue sky. Fire engines stream past them. Perhaps this is a fabricated memory, born of hindsight, Eva will be prepared to accept this, but she will still clearly remember the faces of the boys and men hanging on to the fire engines, handsome, intent, noble, set on the destination that will bring death to so many of them. Dotted in between the large red trucks, smaller vans bearing satellite dishes and the logos of prestigious news corporations scuttle towards the scene. On the pavements, a trickle of people pick their way through the crowd of onlookers, turning their backs on the show. They have hunted looks on their faces, and, true children of the melting pot, they are of all colours, ages and creeds. They have been here before, thinks Eva. Flüchtlinge. Rwandans, Bosnians, Kurds, Armenians, Liberians, Jews: they have survived because they knew when to run.
But the Americans are not running; they watch in shock, clutching forgotten paper coffee cups, shaking their heads, tears in their eyes. And their stillness is reassuring: perhaps no more planes will fall out of the sky after all.
And in the midst of this horror, this chaos, Eva senses, in a dim, instinctive way, the need to bear witness, made more urgent by the stream of refugees, which is swelling with dirty, bloody, bewildered office workers from the Towers themselves, who are gazed at by the onlookers lining the avenue before being pounced on by a glossily coiffed reporter and her camera crew. As the flow of people increases, those standing still and watching snap out of their daze and join them, swelling their numbers into an anxious, hurrying human river.
Eva turns to Adam.
‘Adam.’
‘Jesus. I can’t believe how many people are jumping from up there.’
‘I know. It’s awful.’
‘They must just not be able to get down. Jesus.’
‘I know.’
‘Fuck.’
‘Adam. I want to go there.’
‘Fuck. What?’
‘I think we should go down there.’
‘What? Why?’
‘I don’t know. I need to see.’
‘Really?’
Adam searches her face without a word. He has slight astigmatism, which focuses his eyes into something just short of a squint whenever he is looking at anything intently, and makes him seem inaccessible somehow, as though a thin veil is separating him from the outside world. Eva can see them, his blue eyes, straining to understand her, to get behind her own eyes into what she is thinking. Windows to the soul, they say – but if they are, they are the tinted windows of a black Mercedes, giving only a misleading impression of translucence. And Eva’s deep-black eyes, she knows, are more like tinted windows than most. She has no words to explain why she wants to get closer to the Towers.
She looks into Adam’s eyes, willing her own to open up to him, hoping that maybe he can read in her what she cannot understand about herself. She wonders what he sees now; what the person he has found in her is really like. She thinks of the people who, still now, are jumping from t
he tops of the Towers, and the people they hold within them: lovers, parents, siblings, children. It is not just themselves that they are obliterating as they hit the ground, it is those other people as well, the parts of them that no one else knows about, the beauty only they see in them, the jokes only they share, the sins only they have forgiven. With every broken body on the tarmac lie dozens of phantom bodies, splinters of other identities that their owners may not yet even know they have lost.
There is an Adam only she knows: the one that whispers in his sleep when he dreams of teeth and gargoyles and guinea pigs, of soaring waves and tumbles through undergrowth, dreams that make no sense and which he has explained to her, to her only. The Adam who, one day when they were walking down the street, suddenly jumped out in front of a car to push a child out of its way, with no thought for the fact that he was putting himself in the path of several hundred kilos of hurtling metal. Eva can hear them now, the screeching brakes, and her heart in her mouth, and then Adam lying in the gutter propped up on one elbow, his arm wrapped protectively around the quivering boy. He has a genuine, instinctive altruism in him which he would never recognize – just as he would never recognize how judgemental he is, he who likes to think of himself as a fair, open-minded sort of guy, when Eva can clearly see in him the same quickness to jump to conclusions that he abhors in others. What can Adam see in her, she wonders – what darkness she would rather not acknowledge?
‘All right.’
He turns and strides off down the avenue, so suddenly that Eva thinks he must be angry with her. When she catches up with him, though, she realizes that she has misinterpreted his brusqueness. Adam is afraid – and, seeing his fear, Eva grows afraid too. She passes her arm through his. ‘We’ll be fine,’ she says, although she’s not sure she believes it now.
How I Lose You Page 3