In Spirit

by Pat Forde

  Raed felt like coughing too, even though he wasn't breathing any dust in. Most of it was falling right through him, only the largest paper-flakes hovering on his clothes for a few seconds before slipping off. The “masslessness” of the falling dust made it easy for Raed to avoid and quickly out-pace the real downtown-refugees he encountered—because they were forced to slosh slowly through the paper and ash pooling on the street, which was already several inches deep. Raed hurried on, undeterred by the debris build-up, always drawn in the brightest direction, even though the sources of brightness turned out to be shops and services with their doors thrown open. Each open doorway offered a consoling peek into an interior of clarity and detail—a reminder that the New York Raed had seen for a few seconds at the very start of this projection still existed, hidden behind all the hazy detritus.

  In the beaming entrance to a footwear store, he saw a man handing out free running shoes to women wandering by in stocking feet, unable to walk through miles of fallout in their high heels.

  In the rear door of a restaurant-supply firm, he saw a teenage boy passing out wet towels to everyone who stepped up for one, so people had better air-filters to breath through.

  In the arched portal of an old church, he saw women pouring cups of water and lemonade for passers-by. The church was getting crowded because the people coming up for drinks were stepping inside it, kneeling down in pews, bowing their heads. Raed paused across the street from this softly-glowing scene, watching the parade of dust-whitened ghosts gratefully downing lemonade and water, and reaching up to his own throat. He'd felt thirsty from the first moment the debris-cloud enveloped him, and his thirst had grown worse with every passing block. It wasn't just the exertion of a long walk. It was the look of ash-laden air all around him, the sight of coughing, choking civilians stumbling through the streets. The psychological dryness was getting to him.

  But what was really getting to him was the fact that he was actually experiencing what it had been like to make an escape from lower Manhattan the morning of 9/11. Because he was actually here, witnessing all this just as it had happened—or rather, as it was happening. A cement-mixing truck rolled slowly by, a dozen dust-coated Wall Street suits clinging to its sides. Raed followed it for a bit, then turned onto an empty side street he thought might take him in the direction of the Brooklyn Bridge.

  That's when he spotted the strange pair of New Yorkers sitting on the stone steps.

  What was strange about them grew more and more obvious as Raed walked toward them: one was a man so thickly coated in dust and ash he resembled a statue huddled against the railing of the steps—he was clearly in serious trouble, gasping for air, mouth hanging wide open and taking in more dust. The other was a woman who'd clearly just come out of the building the steps led up to—she had only a bit of dust on her, and she was holding the dying man, her head tucked onto his shoulder as though he was an old friend she'd found collapsed outside her door.

  The strange thing was she wasn't helping him inside.

  “Get him off the street,” Raed suggested as he passed the pair, knowing he wouldn't be heard. But he thought he saw the woman's eyes move up from her companion. He thought he saw her eyes following him up the narrow street.

  Raed halted. Turned back. It was hard to see—he had to squint into the driving dust. Was she really looking over at him?

  He approached the steps cautiously, still unwilling to be touched by these people, but getting close enough to see the dying man's eyes were rimmed completely red, bloody coals in his ash-whitened face. And he was close enough to see the woman's NYU sweatshirt, a red ribbon pinned to her collar. She had her eyes closed now, head tucked back on her companion's shoulder again.

  He must have been seeing things. “Don't you know your friend is dying?” Raed muttered, surprised to find himself thinking another death would be needless.... The woman shielded her eyes against the falling dust, and peered up at Raed.

  He lurched back in shock. “You can see me, can't you?"

  But just then an accumulation of dust slid off the ledge above the steps, engulfing the pair in a swirl of white that transformed into a blurred tunnel, pulling Raed back to—

  The yellow projection cage.

  Raed peered out through the bars at the two Lew guards in one corner, the two cage-operators behind their consoles, the medic looking over the operators’ shoulders ... and the Muslim psychologist slipping in through the bars to speak with him, again bringing him a cup of water.

  This time Raed accepted the cup, lifted it to lips that felt parched, his throat dry as bone. After gulping the water down, he told the psychologist, “Someone saw me that time.” Then he described the woman he'd seen sitting on the steps.

  “Sure she wasn't looking up at the ledge-dust about to drop on her friend?” The psychologist removed her slate from a pocket, tapped in something about Raed's claim.

  “Are you sure people can't see me in the past?"

  “I studied the same materials you did,” she replied. “Light only has ‘one-way transdimensionality,’ so it only flows out of the past into an N-space fold, but—"

  “Doesn't flow back out of the fold, yes, yes,” he said, wondering if he'd been mistaken about where the woman in the NYU shirt was actually looking. It had been pretty hazy back there. And pretty scary at moments.

  “There are two-way interactions,” the psychologist added, pocketing her slate again. “But all are mass-related, I think. And light doesn't have much mass...."

  That reminded Raed: those big chunks of mass falling from the sky at him. “And no volunteer has been injured by two-way forces—not even gravity?"

  “Two-way interactions are ‘weak-strong,’ so I'm told. Weak from you onto the past—"

  “And strong from the past onto me,” Raed finished, raising his eyebrows at her. That's precisely what bothered him. He handed back the cup, accidentally touching the psychologist's fingers again—and wishing he could receive some contact-discharge from her so he'd understand what she was feeling. She was, after all, about his daughter's age.

  “Strong or weak,” the psychologist told him, “the worst any projected force can do is render you unconscious, which will immediately pop you back here. So there's nothing to fear. Keep that in mind,” she advised him, “your next ghosting's going to be a lot more challenging."

  Again he said, “Send me where you must,” trying to sound dismissive to hide how apprehensive he was. But after the psychologist exited the cage, Raed took a deep breath, wondering what part of 9/11 he was about to experience now, watching the yellow bars blur as the fold formed about him, and N-space wrapped him back to—

  A darkened stairwell strewn with chunks of drywall and concrete, a smoky haze in the air.

  Raed lost his footing as he dropped onto the steps, slid down onto a landing, and ended up sprawled before a steel door in the landing's opposite wall. The red glare of emergency bulbs illuminated words printed across the door:

  WTC

  BUILDING 2

  FLOOR 82

  Raed was high up in the South Tower some time after Flight 175 had crashed into it!

  The door to Floor 82 burst open. Two men shoved through, forcing Raed to scramble back to avoid being bowled over. The men hurried onto the shadowy flight of steps leading below. And Raed fell in behind them, wondering how much time was left before this building came down. He was fairly sure it had collapsed about an hour after the crash ... which meant he had less than an hour to get down eighty floors.

  But he kept falling in the stairwell. Where the masslessness of paper and dust had played in his favor on the streets, here the low friction of his shoes on the darkened steps and the more tangible clutter of concrete shards made it difficult to stay on his feet. Raed had a hard time catching up to the two men, and only managed to keep them in sight at all by hanging onto the railing, sliding himself along walls that were crawling with a chilly tingly pressure. The pressure grew worse and worse, the air of the stairwell
swimming with a tingling cold-fire as Raed reached Floor 78. He was afraid that floor's fire-door might melt as he ran by it.

  But he had to be passing the floors Flight 175 had actually crashed into—and the fact that the fire hadn't yet spread into the stairwell suggested it couldn't be too long after the crash. He might have as much as fifty minutes to get down and out.

  He'd been told he'd come to no harm. Did that mean the projection team intended to extract him from the building before it collapsed? Raed had been in danger from the hail of burning shrapnel during the last ghosting, and his team seemed to expect him to rescue himself ... It's up to you what you do back in the past, the psychologist told him.

  Perhaps it was up to Raed to find a way out before the forces in this world crushed him.

  The landing of Floor 70 had working lights, and so did the stairs below it. A brighter passage and clearer air helped Raed move right down behind the two men he was following, close enough to hear their conversation as he looked for an opportunity to pass them. The injured man was Garth, and he kept thanking Peter for pulling him to safety after the explosion. How long ago, Raed wanted to know, wishing the men would walk single file instead of one gripping the other. Peter kept insisting he'd done nothing special, switching back to his worries about coworkers who'd headed up to the roof instead of trying to get below the fire.

  “Your coworkers are lost,” Raed snapped in frustration, “and you'll be lost too, if you don't move faster!” These men were too calm—he had to get past them. At the next landing, he tried to shove himself between them—

  HORROR-HURT-DESPERATION-CONFUSION

  Raed crumpled to the floor, unable to withstand the tremendous emotional discharge. Peter and Garth weren't calm at all! They were barely keeping their fear in check. What had they seen before entering this stairwell?

  By the time he got back to his feet and caught up to them, Raed saw that more people were blocking the stairwell below Peter and Garth. There was some kind of pile-up on the next landing down, a crowd gathered round a burn victim. The delay was far more frightening for Raed than for the people surrounding him—because he knew the building was going to collapse soon. Was this projection meant as punishment for his foreknowledge of the Flight 175 crash?

  The Muslim psychologist back in 2033 suggested it was up to Raed whether the projection was punishment or—what?

  What was he supposed to do here?

  He passed more burn victims outside the door to Floor 67; men with most of their clothes burned away, their skin turned gray or even black, patches of flesh peeling from their limbs. The people staying to look after them had torn off shirts to make tourniquets. Others were cloaking the shivering gray figures in suit jackets. The next landing held another group huddled about badly injured people, and so did the next, and the next, forcing Garth, then Peter, and then Raed to file slowly past. Only Raed knew those groups were all doomed, but it wouldn't have made much of a difference if he could have communicated that knowledge, at least not to the burn victims—they didn't look as though they'd live long enough to make it to a hospital.

  It was the people staying behind to console them—it was all the comforters that bothered Raed. There was so many of them! Why didn't some of them just head down to safety?

  Because they weren't aware of the imminent collapse, as Raed was.

  “Come on, move on!” he growled at Garth and Peter. Winding down through the suffering was taking too long, leaving too much time for Raed to wonder what all this was for. Surely there was more to his rehab than sharing in the harrowing experiences of 9/11 victims. There had to be more to it. But what more could he do in this past?

  You really want to find out?

  The psychologist's question nagged at him, and Raed tried to recall the theory they'd given him. Strong-weak two-way interactions ... the past cannot be changed ... because projection volunteers had always been part of the moments they time-traveled back to ... so Raed had always been here—was here now—following down behind Peter, who had his arm wrapped round Garth's shoulder, guiding the injured man down.

  But did—or would—Peter and Garth get out before the building fell?

  No way for Raed to get past them now—there were too many people crowding the stairwell directly below the pair. Others were coming down behind Raed, sandwiching him in the stairwell, occasionally forcing him to bump into Peter or Garth—and to suffer another shock of PITY-ANXIETY-DREAD-DISTRESS, emotions that almost knocked him down. The discharges astounded him. I can actually sense how these two men are feeling! He remembered the black-and-white movie about the two angels in Berlin who could hear what people were saying, but whenever they listened to peoples’ thoughts, the soundtrack reverted to German, leaving Raed only with a sense of the emotional-tone underlying thoughts....

  By the time they reached Floor 60, Raed was in a panic. Peter and Garth had to do a lot better than a floor a minute to get out in time—and to let Raed get out in time! This was a lot more nerve-wracking than the last projection.

  But it seemed most of the injured had been already been passed, and below Floor 60, the stream of escapees began moving much faster. Peter and Garth slipped by slower people who were resting on the steps, and waving everyone coming down from above on past. Raed began to count off his own breaths, timing the pace between floors. He thought they navigated three flights in about a minute, timed it again and got the same result for the next three. They might just make it!

  There was no panic in the stairwell, and no more injuries to pass until Floor 44, where a security guard and some others were trying to assist a man whose head was bleeding profusely. The people comforting the man looked up as Peter, Garth and Raed reached the floor; one of them asked Peter if he would send help from below. Peter agreed without slowing, guiding Garth on down the next flight with Raed right on their heels.

  On Floor 40, they eased by a man in a foot cast being carried down by four coworkers who switched him between pairs at the landing, sharing the exhausting load. A compassionate act indeed. But would any of them make it out of the South Tower alive?

  On Floor 33, there was an even more miraculous sight. People carrying a woman and her wheelchair down! The acts of selflessness Raed was witnessing inside the building he helped to destroy were wearing him down. He wanted to scream at everyone to drop their burdens and run—run so he could run too, down to the bottom and out onto the street before it was too late. Because it was impossible to believe he was not in the danger they were in, no matter how many assurances he'd been given that no projection volunteer had ever come to harm before. How could the force of the South Tower falling not harm him?

  Garth and Peter finally got past the wheelchair crew, only to find the stairwell below the Floor 31 landing completely clogged with firefighters. At least a dozen of them were hoisting themselves up the steps in their heavy gear, blocking the route down—doomed men, the most doomed of all that Raed had seen ... because they were trying to climb up.

  As people bunched onto the landing—and Raed crushed himself into a corner to avoid unbearable contact-discharges—Peter moved over to the fire-door leading into the floor itself, and opened it.

  “Let's try for the elevators,” he said to Garth.

  And Raed didn't hesitate, knowing there was no time to lose waiting on this landing. He followed the pair through the door, which closed behind him. Moments later he stood close behind Peter as the man tried the elevator buttons.

  “Not working."

  Try another stairwell, Raed prayed, realizing he was now trapped on this floor—invisible or not, he couldn't walk back out through a steel door or wall.

  “Hey, there's some phones in here,” Garth said, peering into a room off the hall they were in. “I want to call home."

  No!

  But both men were stepping through into the room, and the door was almost closed....

  Raed dove through just as it shut, afraid of getting stranded in the hall if there was another way o
ut of that room. Sure enough, a door in the opposite wall of the conference room they'd entered had a stairwell exit-sign above it.

  Peter and Garth sat on the edge of the room's long central table, dialing up loved ones on the phones.

  “No time! There's no time,” Raed shouted at them, “we've got thirty more floors to go!"

  It was no use. Raed stood close enough to the receiver Peter was holding to hear the anxious tones of the man's wife—but Peter couldn't hear Raed screaming right in his ear. “Put the phone down and go! Please go!” He pounded a fist on the phone-unit sitting on the table, trying to hang the damn thing up, when Peter suddenly hung up himself. But then the man began dialing another number, telling Garth he was calling in the EMS request he'd promised for the injured man up on Floor 44.

  Peter was on hold with EMS for several minutes that had Raed howling around the conference room, both hands wrapped around the ripcord on his belt that was supposed to instantly return him to the projection-cage, eyes focused on the ceiling that might come down at any second....

  If Raed ripcorded back now, he'd be out of the program, his fear would have won and he'd live out the next fifty years in Lew Cell #1, knowing he'd been unable to face what these two men had faced.

  But they had no idea what was about to happen!

  Finally Peter got through, made his EMS request, and got off the phone. Raed ran to the door with the stairwell sign as the two men started toward it, opened it, then stepped through, leaving Raed just enough room to follow. The stairwell beyond was empty, and the only thing that slowed them as they hurried down was a pipe that spontaneously burst from the wall. A sign the collapse was about to happen? How many seconds left?

  Water from other exploded pipes and from sprinkler-systems on the higher floors seemed to be collecting in this stairwell, making it difficult once more for Raed to keep up to Peter and Garth....

  And then, before he knew it, all three of them were at the bottom, hurrying through an underground plaza toward an outside street. A cop halted the two men before they crossed the street, warning about debris dropping from above—