I was always ending up in all the wrong places: Bed-Stuy, the Wall Street Journal, the make-believe province of telephonic copulation. In order not to feel satisfied with life in the wake of my brother’s death—in order to prove to myself that I had loved him—I’d denied myself contentment in all its forms, as if pleasure were anathema to my holy grief. In an orderly world I’d have had no business working across the street from those towers, a pig farmer’s son from Minnesota, graduate of the University of Montana, a country boy in every way that mattered, though I’d tried to pretend otherwise. I had no business at all living in New York City, a place I’d judged hostile to most of what was beautiful about life on earth when I first encountered it. An arts page copy editor, I certainly had no business staring into the center of the biggest story in the world on a late summer day, rubbing my eyes, snapping pictures with a digital camera, inhaling pulverized asbestos, burning plastic, burning metal, burning paper, burning fuel, burning flesh. The images I encountered that day were ghastly, a scene of destruction on a scale unimaginable even as I stood on the edge of it, but it was the smell that stayed with me, remains with me to this day: the smell of an airplane made into a bullet.
By an accident of fate I finally got my wish. I paid witness in the flesh to the scene of a suicide—countless suicides. There was nothing else to do. The office was empty when I got there. The whole building was empty, evacuated hours before. I climbed the fire stairs and walked around the newsroom, amazed to find myself alone at lunchtime on a weekday, in a workplace typically restless with several hundred people living in the perpetual now of gathering news. When it finally sank in that I was useless, I went back outside and stood on the edge of the smoking rubble, trying and failing to understand what had happened, a spectator minus the distancing screen. Paper blanketed the ash that blanketed the streets. Firefighters sat stunned, covered in dust, their heads in their hands. There was nowhere to look and not find evidence of ruin. I joined a group of five reporters at the southwest edge of the pile. Two of them scribbled in notebooks. One fiddled with a tape recorder. One snapped pictures, one held a video camera. No one said a word that was printable in a family newspaper.
When the smoke made my lungs clench with intimations of an asthma attack, I walked north until I found a city bus. I sat down next to a man who told me he’d evacuated the north tower, and on his way down he’d walked past dozens of firefighters headed up. They’re gone, he said. They have to be, every one of them. I remember the faces. I don’t think I’ll ever forget.
I got off the bus at McHale’s, dusted in ash to the knees, but the usual discretion ruled. On me, the barkeep said, as she poured my first drink. No one asked me where I’d been. No one needed to. All eyes were on the television; I watched for a while and then I caught a taxi home.
The next day’s Wall Street Journal was produced that night in New Jersey and carried a six-column headline in type nearly as large as the masthead, the fourth banner headline in the paper’s history:
Terrorists Destroy World Trade Center,
Hit Pentagon in Raid with Hijacked Jets
I bought it and a copy of the Times at my corner newsstand early on the morning of September 12. I read all the front page stories and most of the inside of both papers, but one simple photo on page A7 of the Times stopped me cold. Taken by an Associated Press photographer, it showed a man in midflight. His head was down, his torso parallel to the vertical ribbing of the two towers behind him, several stories of them that filled the frame to the edge. He appeared to be falling along the demarcation line between them. One leg was straight, the other bent at ninety degrees. Together they formed a little triangle. One of his boots stood out, starkly black. His pants were black, his shirt white. His arms appeared relaxed. He looked almost peaceful, like a man suspended on a string, even as he hurtled with accelerating speed. His was the emblematic image of the terror of that day, though afterward it was not much seen again in the world of American journalism. We airbrushed him from the record. Readers excoriated the papers that published the photo, and the papers scrubbed it from their Web sites. We couldn’t bear to think of the panic of his final moments, his awful need for flight. We wanted pictures of heroism, patriotism—firemen or flags, or better yet firemen holding flags—and he did not fit the bill. He was the incarnation of our last taboo, the avatar of our worst private nightmare, a human being captured in the act of a self-willed death.
Only Connect
After the attacks we commuted to the cornfields of New Jersey, a trip that took me two hours one way. We put the paper together in a makeshift newsroom in the training wing of Dow Jones corporate headquarters near Princeton. Almost all the stories in the paper concerned terrorism: its practitioners, finances, backers, tactics, goals. It felt, for a time, a little embarrassing to edit pieces about the Cave of Altamira or an Ansel Adams show.
When anthrax turned up in the offices of other media companies, all of our mail underwent a heat-steam treatment. The mailroom workers sorted it with masks on their faces and rubber gloves on their hands. They looked like lab technicians working with a deadly poison. When opened, the envelopes crackled like dead leaves, and the ink on the letters was often illegible.
On the editorial page the imprint of Bob Bartley lingered, his obsessions trotted out for endless encores: the beneficence of tax cuts, the imperative of a missile defense system, the need for military spending on hardware and troops for vast overseas mobilization. Saddam Hussein became an urgent addition to the repertoire; Osama bin Laden appeared as an afterthought. I started keeping a folder of clippings, called FULL BLOWN INSANITY ON THE WSJ EDITORIAL PAGE.
On September 12 the lead editorial stated: “We are entitled to presume that this is the work of the usual suspects—Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, the Iranian mullahs and other dictators who invoke Muslim fundamentalism to justify their fundamentally illegitimate power.” There was no mention of what made the authorial we entitled to such a wide-ranging presumption, nor was there mention of the man who turned out to be the mastermind of the attacks. The next day his name snuck into print alongside the primary suspect: “We would not be surprised if this week’s atrocity was the work of Saddam or bin Laden or both.” This contention was driven home by the pull quote in the adjacent opinion piece: “Can Osama bin Laden sow terror alone? Not likely. His group has had help from Saddam Hussein, and from Sudan.”
The next day the lead editorial called for hastening deployment of a missile-defense shield—“missile defense is as much a defense against hijacked airliners as it is against missiles,” it stated bizarrely—an effort that seemed to me like a man lifting an umbrella over his head while being pelted in the groin by snowballs.
On September 19, an unsigned editorial argued that the first and most important steps in combatting terrorism ought to include capital-gains tax cuts and immediate drilling for oil in Alaska. The same editorial stated: “Throughout history the periods of greatest military innovation have been wars. Now is the time to push for next-generation weaponry and electronics that will keep the U.S. ahead of not just terrorists but all adversaries. Democracies are reluctant to spend money on defense in peacetime, but in a war they will give the military whatever it needs.” It would seem that war was needed, because a massive military buildup was needed, because nineteen men with box cutters had flown passenger jets into three iconic buildings on American soil. I couldn’t follow the logic but I knew they wouldn’t stop clamoring until they got themselves an honest-to-god, maim-and-kill war.
Reading the paper became an exercise in cognitive dissonance. One day the news section would report that “U.S. Officials Discount Any Role by Iraq in Terrorist Attacks,” quoting intelligence officials who noted that bin Laden disliked Saddam and the two had nothing in common but a hatred for America; the next day the editorial page would write that “reports are swirling that Saddam Hussein was also behind last week’s attacks. . . . Deposing Saddam has to be considered another war aim.”
&
nbsp; In this rank potpourri of erroneous speculation, dubious reasoning, and calculated propaganda, about the only thing in the back pages of the A section that felt true was Seidel’s monthly poem. All the opinion columns calling for “total war,” targeted assassinations, the bombing of madrassas, and the American occupation of countries as diverse as Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Iran, and Syria—“The Answer to Terrorism? Colonialism,” a headline proposed a month after the attacks—all of it seemed unhinged and delusional next to eight stanzas of Seidel’s verse, which, by adopting a voice as twisted and chilling as that of Osama bin Laden, seemed to get much closer to the heart of the matter.
I like the color of the smell. I like the odor of spoiled meat.
I like how gangrene transubstantiates warm firm flesh into rotten sleet.
When the blue blackens and they amputate, I fly.
I am flying a Concorde of modern passengers to gangrene in the sky.
Needless to say, some of the paper’s more sensitive readers were not impressed; several wrote letters to the editor calling for Seidel to cease and desist.
Post-attacks, I heard a noticeable increase in traffic on the talk line. I called often with the hope I’d get lucky.
One night I did.
Her greeting was ambiguous, almost shy: Hi, this is Christine. Just looking for something interesting. . . . Her voice had a quality of innocence unlike the moaners, the nasty talkers, the men in their girlfriends’ lacy underwear.
I pressed two and recorded my Clark Kent Calling from a Phone Booth routine—professional journalist, late twenties, looking for a smart, sexy woman to share bedroom superheroics.
She responded. She laughed and said she liked my voice. She was a photographer and was intrigued by writers, especially writers with superhero powers. She wondered where I was calling from, where I was from originally. I didn’t sound like a native New Yorker. She couldn’t place the voice, but it wasn’t New York.
We traded polite messages for a few minutes—I lived in Queens, she lived in Manhattan. I was from the Midwest, she was from the South. I was twenty-nine and single, she was thirty-seven and separated from her husband. We shared a taste in music: blues, jazz, country, gospel.
Finally I made the move. I pressed three and recorded my pitch: Hey, listen, you sound really cool and I was hoping you might want to talk directly. I hope so. . . .
Your connection will be arranged shortly. Please hold. . . .
Please hold for a live connection. . . .
We’re about to connect you one-on-one with another talk line caller. If you hear a chime, that means another caller has sent you a message. To disconnect from your live chat, just press the star key. Now, prepare to speak to caller number 32.
For a moment I was speechless. I had no idea what she was after, but there was a seductive quality to her voice that made me want to figure it out and give it to her, whatever it might be. Mercifully, she untied my tongue with humor. She teasingly called me Clark and wondered why I wasn’t out in the city, saving damsels in distress. She speculated that I was recovering from an encounter with Kryptonite, and when I confessed that, like most superheroes, I was taciturn, not at all a smooth talker, she had great fun with the irony—a not-so-smooth talker on a talk line. Our laughter led to candor, and soon we were exchanging confessions of embarrassment: two urban professionals, not repulsive in any obvious way, reduced to seeking sexual gratification through a telephone line. Maybe my faux-humility charmed her, but all of a sudden she said, Listen, Superman, do you want to come over?
I stammered in reply—Uh, you mean, uh, now? Tonight?—and my hesitation must have made her wonder what I’d failed to disclose. The wife? The felony rap? The prosthetic hook for a hand? Because she began to backtrack, saying she’d never done this before, it was crazy, she didn’t know me at all, I could be a stalker, some sadistic weirdo.
I suppose I could be, I said. But I’m being honest when I tell you I’m not. I’m a shy boy from a little house on the prairie. I make my bed every morning. I pay my bills on time.
We went around and around like that. Having extended the invitation, she felt a need to explore every single reason it was a bad idea. But I wasn’t going to let it slide. I had a hunch I could convince her.
Eventually, I did.
We don’t have to do anything, she said. If we don’t find each other attractive we can just, I don’t know. Talk. Or do nothing. Walk away.
Okay.
Just one thing. What’s your real name?
Phil. Is yours Christine?
No. It’s Molly.
Molly. I’ll see you soon, Molly.
When I came up the stairs she was leaning half out of her doorway, hoping to see me before I saw her. We looked at each other and smiled, a wave of mutual relief—thank goodness he/she isn’t hideous!—washing over us.
I can’t believe I’m doing this, she said.
She wore a white blouse and blue jeans. Her hair was long and curly, the color of cinnamon. Her lips were darkened with fresh lipstick. She looked younger than thirty-seven. Her jeans clung tightly—but not too tightly—to her hips. She’d obviously spent some time—but not too much time—primping for a visitor.
I guess you should come in, she said.
We sat at the kitchen table. A stick of incense smoked in an ashtray. The place looked dramatically uncluttered for a Manhattan apartment. Then I remembered her husband had just moved out, him and all his things.
She set two beers on the table, lit herself a cigarette, offered the pack to me. I wondered how long we would pretend this was a date.
She told me her husband had left two months ago. He’d given no precise reason. He felt them drifting apart, he needed some space, a bunch of vague clichés. At first she was devastated. She hadn’t seen it coming. Then he left, and that was it. She was alone. She told herself she’d better get used to it. On September 11, he’d come back and spent the night—the world is ending, at least we have each other—but it felt wrong. She indulged him for forty-eight hours because she was fearful too. Then she told him to get out. He said he was ready to try again, but she wasn’t. It hurt, goddamn it hurt, but she had to do it. You don’t just walk out on a marriage and walk back in when the world makes you scared to be alone. It couldn’t be the same, not after what he’d done. He now held all the power—I want to go, I want to stay, I want I want I want. She couldn’t let him have that. She couldn’t let him have that and still respect herself. She knew that if she let him back in she’d live in constant fear of the next departure, the final departure, and she knew the fear would disfigure her, make her crazy with dread.
Seventeen years! she said, shaking her head. Gone. Just like that.
After we stubbed our cigarettes, I reached across the table and brushed my thumb across the tan line where her wedding ring used to be. Our fingers interlocked, and I slid my chair closer to hers across the kitchen linoleum. We kissed very softly on the lips.
I haven’t been with another man since I was a teenager, she said. I feel like a teenager.
Me too, I lied.
With our clothes off, we chose to make what we were doing count. There was no need to be bashful. She told me what she wanted, mouth here, hands there, and I did as she said. The erotic geometries aligned very nicely. Seen from above and behind, her body had the elegance of a double helix—arms thrust forward and crossed, back in the shape of an hourglass, her spine a dotted line. She wanted it rough and loud, as if to shatter all memory of her husband, so we wrestled with the ferocity of quarreling lovers overcoming the quarrel, then we rested and did it again, more tenderly this time.
We smoked a cigarette in bed, and the talk turned to our families, as I’d felt sure it would—her mother dead of cancer far too young, my brother dead of a bullet in the brain even younger. I didn’t belabor the point, and neither did she. We mentioned these facts only briefly, in passing, as if the specifics weren’t required because we both already knew them, had known them al
l along. She rose and straddled me. She seemed to know what I wanted without my even saying it. She wanted to taste me, she said, she wanted to taste herself on me, and I offered her everything.
Don’t go, she said. Sleep here. Just a few hours. I have to be up for work at six. We can get coffee from the deli on the corner.
Once in the night she rolled over, and amid the gauzy confusion of half sleep I remembered I was lying next to a stranger, an attractive stranger, and I smelled her hair and the smell of sex. I moved on top of her, and she woke and moaned and arched her back.
At six her alarm went off. While she showered, I dressed and went for coffee. We shared a cigarette at the kitchen table, exhausted and guarded, unsure of how to say goodbye.
We kissed in her doorway, and she watched me leave, leaning out into the hallway just as she had when I’d arrived. Outside, the predawn streets were nearly empty. The light was cold and lunar, the sky the color of a daguerreotype. I bought a newspaper for the subway ride home, but when the train came I couldn’t read. I stared out the window at the darkness of the passing tunnel.
Each time I called the talk line, I hoped to hear Molly’s voice; every time I was disappointed. I had her cell phone number, she had my home number, but neither of us made the move. Something about the way we’d met made a friendly call—unmediated by four menu prompts and the perky-bimbo voice—too intimate, too presumptuous.
One night I connected with a woman named Ashley seeking a horny young stud from my particular neighborhood. She was bossy, and her bossiness turned me on. She ordered me to take off my clothes, and I did. She ordered me to put on a pair of running shorts, and I did. She told me she wanted me to go to a certain street corner in Queens, pretend I’d been out for a run when I realized I’d locked myself out of my apartment, and ask her boyfriend, who would be waiting there smoking a cigarette, to use his telephone, and, once inside the boyfriend’s apartment, first make a pretend call to a friend with a set of spare keys and then, profoundly grateful for the use of the telephone, submit to the boyfriend’s wish to get down on his knees and go to work with his mouth. Then she repeated her instructions, beginning to end. I confessed I was only interested in meeting her. She said that would come later: first, the boyfriend. She wanted to hear all about my cock from her boyfriend. When I told her no, she became petulant, and I noticed a slight burr in her voice.
All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found Page 13