In Spirit

by Pat Forde

  New York City, an empty sidewalk.

  Raed dropped onto the walk as it appeared before him, caught his balance, steadied himself on his feet, and looked around. He was not in Manhattan, not in any of the busier parts of the city. And he was finally outdoors! No walls to hold him back, no mounds of rubble to block his progress. Free to go where he pleased.

  Raed started up the quiet side-street he was on, heading for a larger cross-street so he could figure out where he was. He passed the steep steps of a row of four-story walkups. One of the boroughs, for sure. This was the New York he remembered, glad to have an image of it to replace the desolation of Ground Zero.... Blue skies above, a breeze rippling the leaves of a haggard tree on the corner. An autumn morning, for sure. Back in that morning once more? Before the attacks occurred? After?

  The signs at the end of the street told him he was back in Brooklyn, on a corner several miles from where he'd lived; a vaguely familiar corner. Raed spun around, orienting himself. The East River had to be just behind the row-houses that were blocking his view of the World Trade Center. He couldn't see whether the Twin Towers were still standing—but if they were, he could walk around the block and head down to the riverside, maybe just in time to watch the planes striking their targets.

  Was that what the projection operators wanted Raed to do?

  Surely it would do him no good whatsoever to witness the destruction of the towers all over again. He'd seen those images a hundred times on TV, along with everyone else. Surely it would be senseless to waste this precious chance to walk the world he'd lost by going down to the river to gawk. The Twin Towers were not his victims anyway—they were the West's victims, America's victims.... Raed started walking west, keeping the Trade Center's location behind his back. His eyes kept turning to the perfectly clear skies, searching for low-flying passenger jets. He prayed he wouldn't see any. Stopping at another cross-street to let a yellow taxi roll by, he felt certain he knew this neighborhood. Only a few people were out on the streets, and those that were hurried along as though late for work. The Sun looked too high to be early in the morning. What time was it? What day was it?

  A New York Post box coming up on his left. When he reached it, Raed hunkered down on his haunches, and saw something on the cover page about “Ban on Cell-Phone Use While Driving."

  But the date on the newspaper was 9/11, all right.

  He walked on, hurrying now, spying a tiny park across the street not much farther ahead. Not much more than a grotto, really, but Raed began jogging toward it, feeling sure the visually stunning simulation of a New York morning he was moving through was about to change. All he wanted was a few moments of peace sitting beneath those trees before this blissful reality was yanked out from under him.

  And then it hit him: he was near Basma's Islamic daycare and prayer school, a small building at the other end of the little grotto park. No wonder all this looked so familiar.

  Basma.

  Raed broke into a run, remembering the promise made to him—that he might get to see his daughter again. Was this what the rehab programmers meant? Then they'd tricked him—they'd known perfectly well he'd hoped to see Basma all grown up. Raed ran for the school all the same, wanting to see his little daughter in this all-too-perfect recreation, suddenly wanting it very badly. Wanting to know once and for all.

  As he ran up the block, something happened to the sky. A cloud of confetti appeared from over the four-story walkups on his left. Snowflake-sized particles were fluttering down onto the sidewalk ahead of him, some larger pieces of paper floating down too.... Documents! Memos and letters and receipts from all the way across the East River, fallout from Twin Tower offices. The paper cloud began to litter the tops of trees in the grotto-park as he passed it.

  Just ahead loomed the Islamic prayer preschool, all the toddler-students dressed in their jackets and milling about on a fenced-in patch of tarmac alongside the school's front steps. Half of them were roped together.

  What was going on?

  Raed reached the wrought-iron fence, and found the school's entrance-gate closed. He struggled to get over the tall black bars but kept slipping down, unable to get any purchase with his shoes. There was no room for him on the crowded tarmac beyond anyway, so he strode impatiently around the fence, hearing the chaos of chattering and squealing, trying to spot Basma among the children. In the midst of the preschoolers stood a teenage girl dressed in salwar and kameez, gaping up at the sky in astonishment; a more resourceful Muslim girl was untying the rope tethering several kids together. Of course! The young teachers had been caught preparing the children for their eleven o'clock walk through the park. No TV was allowed inside the conservative classrooms, so neither the children nor the adults looking after them had any idea what was going on yet.

  But where was his Basma?

  The thickening confetti-rain was making it harder to see who was who. Unleashed four-year-olds danced through the downfall, turned their tiny faces upward, and grabbed at papers.... At last Raed spotted a child smaller than the rest, squatting with tiny hands on knees in a familiar blue raincoat, her head turned to the ground, looking curiously at the scraps of paper lying there.

  Heart in mouth, Raed knelt outside the bars, as close to her as he could—but the girl scrambled away into the center of the crowd, vanished for a moment, and reappeared duck-walking toward him with an ever-so-Haifa-like look of concentration, creased brow, mouth drawn tight, sucking her teeth exactly as Basma so often did during the three years he'd been father to her.

  God and the Prophet within, what am I seeing?

  The child stopped just a few feet from him, crouched just as before, reaching now for a big file-folder that had just landed, its edge smoldering.

  “Don't!” he cried out. But the Basma before him did not pause, did not hear him, could not see him. Raed thrust an arm through the bars, and tried to snatch her tiny fingers away—too late: she'd grasped the burning edge and immediately let go. She began to cry, lower lip shooting out exactly as it had on the day Raed was taken away from her forever. He had not seen Basma since his trial, not until this very moment....

  For Raed knew in his heart of hearts he was actually seeing his daughter now.

  His mind reeling, the world whirling, Basma blurring as she drew back, plopped onto her bottom—

  “Please,” he gasped into the microphone of the breather-mask, “I believe, don't bring me back....” But it was only his own tears blurring things. Raed was still there, still clutching the iron fence in September of 2001, inches from his real daughter.

  Another teacher burst through the school's side-door, teary-eyed herself, shouting something to the teenage girls standing among the children—something about parents coming early to take their children back, the city under attack!

  Basma's wailing finally drew one of the teens to her side. The girl scooped his daughter up, and Raed leapt to his feet, reached as far he could over the fence, Basma sobbing over the young teacher's shoulder right in front of his eyes, his hand almost touching her hurt little fingers, almost....

  “We put a bandage on that?” the teacher asked, and little Basma nodded through her sobs.

  Raed watched the pair disappear through the school's side-entrance while the other two teens rounded the rest of the children back inside, out of the paper rain. “I believe,” he moaned again, tugging his arm from between the bars, sinking to the paper-littered ground. “Now I believe.” Raed had not allowed any cameras in his house during those last paranoid years of freedom; he'd certainly forbidden any video footage to be recorded of himself or his family in those years. And the Islamic daycare and prayer school could not afford any video equipment ... so no one could possibly simulate the Basma he'd just seen.

  Raed knew he was actually kneeling outside her school.

  “Be merciful—let me stay,” he prayed aloud, hoping the projection operators would hear his words in the future. “Let me wait here and see her again.” But the wrought-iron ba
rs of the fence were already sliding out of his hands. The school building was beginning to swirl into the confetti-sky, and he was starting to tunnel back—

  To the present.

  Hanging in midair in the yellow cage, his breath still hitching with emotion. Had Basma's hand been bandaged when Raed picked her up from the pre-school that day? He couldn't recall, and he doubted he would have noticed. That day Raed had been too busy worrying about being tracked down, accused, arrested. He'd spent the entire day wondering how to ensure he didn't end up getting burned by the backlash to the World Trade Center attacks to notice whether Basma had already been burnt or not.

  Not his victims?

  Surely little Basma was his victim, if anyone was—and a couple of bandaged fingers was of little consequence compared to the inevitable consequence of losing her father....

  “Here.” The veiled psychologist was standing in the cage below him again, holding a cup of water up to Raed. “Drink this,” she said.

  He tugged down his breather-mask, a little embarrassed as he wiped back his tears, recalling how the fireman at Ground Zero had looked when he'd pulled off his goggles to wipe away tears. Raed had been there—he'd actually been to Ground Zero!

  And now, like that fireman, he just wanted to get out of the harness and throw himself down on the ground. “I wanted to stay,” he complained to the psychologist, more than a little embarrassed by his earlier profession of disbelief to her. “Why'd you have to bring me back so soon?"

  “Because you've more to see tonight, more to do. Here,” she said again, “you've got to be thirsty—"

  He knocked her hand and the cup aside. “I don't need water, I just need to go back—” He broke off, seeing her reaction, the flash of intensity in her wide-set black eyes. Because Raed's fingers had briefly brushed hers?

  “You'll feel thirsty, where you're going next,” she warned him. Picking up the cup, she slipped out through the bars.

  And Raed slumped back in the harness, acceptance sweeping through him. For the first time tonight he did not want to be here, where he was middle-aged in a spherical cage. Better to be a ghost lurking in that past again.

  Outside the yellow bars the psychologist—a grown Muslim woman whose hand he'd reached out and touched, just in case—watched him watching her, then she tapped something into her slate and turned away, slid away, vanished around an impossible bend in space that opened into—

  A deep canyonlike street.

  Downtown Manhattan, on the same bright sunny morning he'd ghosted to the last time—only this time Raed could hear an unearthly rumbling and he could see people running away from him, fleeing for their lives before his eyes. He whirled. High in the sky above him were the Twin Towers. The South Tower, only a block away, was erupting from the top down.

  Raed staggered backwards, gaping at the giant cloud of dust and debris surging forth from the building his cousins had crashed into, like a storm being injected into the blue sky at tremendous speed. He swung around, and a man sprinting by bumped against him—

  TERROR-ADRENALINE-ANIMAL URGE TO RUN!

  Raed obeyed the fiery emotions transmitted by the man's touch, hurtling himself across the street and around the corner of a nearby building. At the end of the road he'd turned onto, people were throwing themselves over the railings into the Hudson River—hoping for safety in the water? Raed veered in another direction, down a narrow lane and out onto a broader side street, the rumbling behind him swelling along with his fear. To his amazement, he saw a crowd of people standing in the distance, all their faces turned up like sunflowers in the instant before they, too, began to run.

  And then, all at once, everything Raed could see vanished—the distant crowd, the canyon-walls of the high rises and the street itself, all swallowed in dust and darkness that felt like the end of the world.

  This time he'd ghosted back to the world he'd lost at the very moment it was lost!

  It was so dark on the street he could only make out shapes a few feet in front of him. It seemed impossible that just seconds ago it had been a clear blue-skied morning.... Fumbling his way along a building-front in the direction he thought he'd been heading, hearing a tinkling sound—glass shards falling out of the sky? Windowpanes shattering in the storefronts around him? Either way, the sound had to be much louder and closer than it seemed. He caught glimpses of big debris-chunks crashing onto the pavement to his left, and burnt paper and concrete dust swirled thick as sleet.

  The darkness began to yield to a wintry dimness—like a strangely dry snow squall in Manhattan—and Raed reached the next cross-street corner just in time to witness a hail of burning shrapnel striking a car-filled parking lot across the street. Cars began bursting into flame.

  He dove under a parapet protecting a building front-door, reminding himself the projection-team claimed he couldn't be harmed. But Raed knew he could feel forces in this past, and he didn't want the force of any of that shrapnel striking him. So he sat under the parapet watching cars ignite, one after another. Incredible! As though missiles were being launched from the burning windows of the surrounding high-rises.... Suddenly a large oblong shape loomed out of the dust-mist hanging over the street—a fire truck loaded with men who leapt off, rushed into the parking lot, fighting back shadows and smoke as they searched for people trapped in burning vehicles. Those firemen were crazy to charge in there!

  Looking for a safe escape route, Raed noticed a lane leading from his parapet-covered patch of sidewalk back into a plaza behind him. He ducked through, rounded another corner, and felt his way along the lee of another wall. A set of double doors just ahead of him burst open, the light from inside the doors revealing men in overcoats stepping forth, rifles at the ready. The armed men—not police, possibly FBI—formed a ring outside the open doors and peered into the murk, as though looking for whoever was to blame. Looking for Raed, who was holding his breath, flattened against a window-well just feet from them. You already caught me, he thought. I've already served thirty years.

  Now more people were piling out through the doors into the armed cordon. Older officials wearing suits, fire hats, air-filters—not chiefs, possibly fire commissioners—all of them lucky to be alive in a command post this close to the Twin Towers. And all of them alternately shouting into hand-held radios, then listening for a response, shouting, then listening, throwing off waves of voices Raed could hear without making out individual words. In the light streaming through the open doors, he saw the despair contorting their faces. The commissioners weren't getting any responses from the fire crews in the collapsed South Tower.

  Then a familiar long-faced man in wire-rim glasses strode into the crowd of stunned city officials, issuing commands, arguing with the armed detectives who seemed to want the cordon to stay put. But the long-faced man sent the party off across the dust-clouded plaza in the direction, Raed suspected, of the Trade Center.

  Raed suddenly knew exactly who that man was.

  The Mayor of New York City.

  Heading to Ground Zero only minutes after that nightmarish zone had formed? Or steered to safety by his armed protectors? Raed took off in the opposite direction, rounded another corner, found his path blocked by a steaming shape taking up the sidewalk and half the road in front of an abandoned fast-food outlet: a jet-engine turbine.

  From Flight 175? From Nazir and Sayf's plane?

  The turbine was so dust-whitened it looked like the engine of some ghost-plane. Tingling waves of cold heat were coming off it, so Raed gave it a wide berth and hurried on, only to be slowed by more dust-and-ash-cloaked obstacles as he fled out of the south end of Manhattan. Twisted stick-shapes that had to be melted office chairs, an overturned desk in the middle of a sidewalk, a huge tire, all made visible by the fires sprouting in nearby buildings, offering Raed a weird torch-light to light his way.... Incredible. He'd seen TV images of Manhattan after 9/11, but they failed to capture the scope of the devastation. In his wildest dreams, Raed never thought his cousins could cause
so much damage to the city.

  And in his wildest dreams he'd never imagined he might “time travel” back to see it with his own eyes! This time he'd ghosted back to before his visit to Basma's school. Perhaps as much as an hour before, if he remembered correctly. Somewhere in the unseen sky high above him, a file folder from the South Tower was being carried by air currents over the East River, drifting down toward the little prayer school tarmac. Basma hadn't burnt her fingers yet. She wasn't a victim yet.

  But Raed was stepping over victims wherever he went, shrouded forms that seemed to be sleeping in the middle of the streets—forms he didn't want to think about. Nazir's victims, Sayf's victims. Not his victims.

  After almost falling onto one of those shrouded figures, Raed scrambled up an embankment onto a higher boulevard. Disoriented, he tramped along the boulevard in a direction that seemed a little less dusty. But within minutes, smoke from the spreading fires behind him descended on the boulevard, thickening the dust-haze. Raed passed an EMS triage team working on a wounded woman already partly buried beneath the paper-ash fallout; the rescue workers were trying to revive the woman and keep themselves from passing out at the same time, handing a single oxygen mask back and forth.

  He gave the team as wide a berth as he'd given the jet engine, wanting to avoid more physical-contact discharges from distraught New Yorkers. It was traumatic enough just trying to escape the shrapnel-fires.... He wasn't the only one trying to escape, of course. After hopping out of the way of a beaconless ambulance—its roof littered with paper and its wipers rapidly swishing—Raed noticed a few other ghost-shapes trudging along through the haze. People with grime-covered faces, holding pieces torn from their own clothing over their mouths, coughing soundlessly.