The Fool of New York City

by Michael O'Brien

  “The human mind projects,” he explained. “We exteriorize a shapeless inner sense of dread by giving it visual form. No matter how fanciful a phantasm may seem, it functions as a focal point for the rational mind to process the irrational irruption. It’s basically chemistry, Billy. If you like, I could ask a physician to prescribe medication to help you with it.”

  I thanked him and said I would go for a swim instead. Swimming always made me feel better. So I swam forty lengths, and I tromped up and down the ten staircases, and felt better for it. I napped in the afternoon, but woke abruptly from another nightmare. It was the same as the first, with the addition of two jets and falling bodies. Moreover, as I came fully awake I heard a voice say, Forty days more and the towers will fall.

  On August 3 I returned to the World Trade Center plaza. I entered the south tower and tried to arrange an appointment with the building’s manager or security department. Again I was escorted from the premises. A guard at the entrance to the north tower wouldn’t even let me in, and told me he would call the police if I returned. Discouraged, I sat down on a bench by the fountain, wondering what to do. I must have remained there without moving for hours, watching hundreds, then thousands, of people entering and leaving the towers. How many of them would die?

  Every day that week I returned, sitting and watching. At times I strode around the entire complex, looking for exits, safety measures, anything that might be of help when the blow fell. If only I could enter the buildings and reconnoiter the elevators and emergency staircases. I knew what it was like to climb ten floors, but I had no idea if I could climb a hundred and more. And what about these people, most of whom were less fit than I was? Of course, they would be trying to come down the stairs, but it was still a long way to descend with a fire raging above your head. And what about smoke?

  During the following week, I tried to engage people entering and leaving the buildings. No one would listen. A few thought I was a carnival act. Others were sure I was a mentally ill street person. Guards began watching from the doorways. Two city policemen stopped and questioned me, read my card, and told me to go back to the institute. They were friendly but firm. Day after day, I kept trying, but now many of the people who worked in the buildings swerved to avoid me as they arrived in the morning or left for the night. I could still engage visitors, but I knew they might not even be here on the day of calamity.

  On August 15, the staff and patients at the institute surprised me with a birthday party. It was my twentieth. There was a cake with candles, party hats and balloons, and everyone sang “Happy Birthday” to me. Giacomo was scheduled to be discharged the next day and was in good humor because of it. He handed me an envelope containing a stack of ten-dollar bills—two hundred dollars’ worth—and told me to “get a life when you get sprung.” He also exacted a promise that I would call him as soon as I was a free man. I gave him my word. He had a proposition to make, he said. He needed a caretaker for a building he owned on West Forty-Fifth Street. He lived on the ground floor and needed someone with “muscle” to keep things in line; the other tenants were “fly-by-nights and yahoos”. I could live there rent free if I checked the boiler, took out the garbage, and kept “druggies and squatters” from moving in.

  “Do we gotta deal?” he asked.

  “It sounds like a very good deal, sir.”

  “Stop calling me sir!”

  The next morning I rode the elevator with him down to the ground floor, where he was met by a chauffeur and limousine, which drove him away, cigar in mouth and waving a hearty good-bye. Immediately I set forth with his gift in my hip pocket. Along the route I purchased a large backpack, and then stopped in at a photocopy store. I handed an employee a sheet of paper on which I had written:

  If you are employed here, please arrange

  to be absent from work

  from September 10th through the 12th!

  YOUR LIFE MAY DEPEND ON IT!

  Please feel free to make copies of this warning

  and pass them on to as many people as possible.

  THIS IS NOT A HOAX!

  I ordered five thousand copies and waited while they were printed. When the job was done, I loaded the stacks of paper into my backpack and hurried onward to the plaza. There I began to distribute the warning.

  “Twenty-six more days and these towers will fall!” I declared to anyone who would accept one.

  From time to time, people asked if they could have their photo taken with me. I always agreed. It was my size that interested them, I suppose, though the warning probably added a little flavor to the stories they would tell about the characters you meet on the streets of New York City. I wasn’t the only odd person in the plaza and surrounding area. There were people with political causes to promote, others who were advertising theatrical performances or products for sale, and even a few with personal grievances, such as the lady whose husband owned a corporation headquartered in one of the towers. She was handing out sheets of paper describing how her husband was reneging on his alimony payments. I asked her what alimony was, and she explained. She asked me what I meant by the towers falling. She didn’t look convinced by my account of what had happened to me, the dream and the vision and the voice, but she did keep one of my papers and promised to make her own copies to distribute. She told me her name, and I told her mine.

  “I can assure you, Billy,” she said, “there’s one tower here that’s definitely going to fall!”

  Throngs of Japanese tourists came every day, following their guides, who spoke through mobile microphones and led their flocks under red umbrellas. Invariably, they swarmed me for group photos, and not one declined to take my warning paper as a souvenir.

  As I said, I wasn’t the only odd person in the plaza, but I was surely the most visible. Which meant that, from time to time, I would be stopped by a policeman and questioned, and told to leave the plaza. I would then circle the streets surrounding the World Trade Center complex, handing out my warning to any who would take one. I was saddened by some of the rude things people said, but occasionally moved by individuals who would stop and carefully read what I wrote. A child gave me a candy in a cellophane wrapper. A beggar offered me half of his sandwich. A lovely young woman who worked as a secretary in one of the towers surprised me by buying me my first espresso, giving it with a smile and an apology that it might be too strong for my liking. One old lady embraced me and cried. An old man kissed my cheeks and cried. For the most part, people swerved to avoid me.

  And sometimes, if the truth be told, I sat down on the benches by the fountain and cried too. I’m not sure why exactly. Maybe it was because I felt such awful sorrow over what was going to happen. Or maybe it was because it struck me that nothing whatsoever would happen and that I was, in fact, a genuinely crazy person. Of the two possibilities, I felt that the latter was preferable by far. Still, to be crazy—to be deranged and delusional, to spread false alarm and strike unnecessary fear into hearts—that was a sad ending to the hope-filled journey that had begun in Iowa only two years before.

  On September 5 I was arrested in the plaza as I was handing out papers to people leaving work for the day. The police held me overnight in a cell. In the morning, my psychologist arrived and had me released. He brought me by taxi back to the institute, and there I was given a new room on the ninth floor in a locked ward. Later in the day, staff brought me my photographs and I spent an hour or two taping them to the walls. During the next few days, the seventh to the tenth of the month, I grew increasingly frantic, for I knew that with every passing hour opportunities to warn people were lost.

  My psychiatrist prescribed a medication that would make me tranquil, but I hid the pills under my tongue and spit them into the toilet when no one was looking.

  The night of the tenth was the worst. I did not sleep at all. I was allowed to sit in the patients’ common room, which, like the one in the open ward, faced south toward the towers. I stood and gazed at its lights for hours, agitated and weeping.r />
  As dawn crept over the city, I dressed myself and waited in my room for an opportunity to escape the ward. Shortly before 8 A.M., the night staff prepared to depart as the day shift began to arrive. A cleaning man made a last swab of the floor in front of the emergency exit, and unlocked the door to the stairwell. He pushed his rolling bucket through and propped the door open for a few seconds while he made a final squeeze of his mop in the janitor’s closet beside it. In an instant I was out and galloping down the back staircase three steps at a time. I was two floors below when I heard the sound of his carefree whistling while he methodically mopped the ninth-floor landing and the steps behind me. Within a minute or so I was at the bottom, pushing my way out the exit door and into an alleyway. A bell started ringing as I jogged onto the street. I turned south and began to run.

  The clock on the wall of a passing bank told me it was now 8:15. I did not know when the catastrophe would happen, but my every instinct told me it was near. I arrived in the plaza completely winded, and stopped to catch my breath beside the golden globe. A minute later the passenger jet hit the north tower, and debris began to fall. A chunk of building material landed on the globe, denting its top. Flames and smoke poured out of the tower. Gasping, I ran toward its ground-floor entrance, without a thought in my mind, driven by the certainty that I must do whatever I could to help. But the way into the building was blocked as people began streaming out of it. Many of them looked stunned, or irritated, or simply confused. Everyone was asking questions, looking up at the tower above them because at this point few if any of them knew what had happened.

  I stood in their path, yelling, “Run! Run! Get as far away from here as you can!”

  More and more people stumbled out of the tower. I heard the distant sirens of fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars.

  “The elevators aren’t working!” someone screamed.

  “There’s fire inside!”

  “Explosions!”

  “Run!” I yelled above the tumult of voices, but no one listened, no one seemed to see me, though they continued to pass around me as a river divides around an island.

  Then the second jet hit the south tower.

  Women screamed and sobbed, men cried out and swore, stumbling backward, staring upward, walking, running, or frozen immobile in horror. People shouted into cell phones, wept into cell phones, tapped numbers on their cell phones. Others held each other tightly and simply watched. Glass rained down, and bits of burning flesh, and bound documents and electronic instruments and briefcases and wristwatches. Myriads of small objects floated about in the air, black and white ash, foam coffee cups and fluttering credit cards, while a hail of heavier wallets and shoes continued to thump onto the ground.

  Now an army of firefighters and police had arrived, hoses snaking toward the buildings. I tried to go with them, but they pushed me away.

  Back on the plaza, I resumed my yelling, but nothing could be heard in the din of sirens and cries. Human shapes were dropping out of the upper stories, sometimes alone, or holding hands.

  “Run!” I yelled again. “The towers are going to come down!” And I was still yelling when rescue workers herded me and everyone else out of the plaza. I was a block away, still trying to find a way in but held back by a barrier, when the south tower boomed and slowly collapsed downward onto its very roots in the earth. A storm cloud of ash and smoke rolled our way, and now everyone ran from it. Old and young tripped and fell. I picked them up and hurried them on, carried some of them to the safety of alleys and recessed storefronts. When the cloud hit us, we all fell down and ash covered us. Something hit my head.

  I lost consciousness, maybe for no more than a few minutes. I was struggling to my feet when the second tower went down and another wave hit us. A single sock blew past my eyes—light green with a red stripe and a hole in the heel—a child’s sock. Confused and dizzy, I picked it up, pushed it into my pocket, thinking that I would try to find the child and return it to him.

  When I could stand again, blood was streaking me from a wound on my forehead, and all around me other survivors were bleeding too, trying to rise, red on gray and white, all of us ghosts in a city of ghosts, hacking and spewing ash from our throats and lungs. Together we staggered toward a hint of light in the distance, for it was like night under the cloud.

  People helped each other. I remember that. Yes, people helped each other.

  I know there were selfish individuals among the survivors. I saw things they did. But they were few in number. Many turned their hearts to the needs of others. The strong helped the weak.

  On that day we were revealed to ourselves. We had thought we were indifferent, and we learned it was not so—most of us, I should say. Most of us remembered who we were. We saw that we had forgotten important things, that we had lived as if great things were small and small things were great. We had been asleep, or forgetful of the state of man and his vulnerability. We awoke for a moment, an hour, a day, and knew ourselves as better than we thought we were, knew for a brief burning instant that we might yet become what we truly are.

  But why did we fall back into unremembering, Max? Why did we resume our older ways? I do not know. And now I wonder if I will ever know.

  Billy opens his eyes and raises his head to look at the window in my room of hidden memories. Morning light shines through the translucent glass.

  “I have to go feed the girls,” he says.

  “I’ll collect the eggs,” I say.

  Up on the roof we stand side by side, straining our eyes southward to the tip of Manhattan, where the sun is glinting on the new tower, nearly completed.

  “We could go down there together,” he says. “We could go down there and remember.”

  “Yes,” I answer. I am afraid, but, strangely, no longer very afraid.

  He is making coffee and frying an omelet for our breakfast.

  “You did your best,” I tell him. “You gave everything.”

  “It wasn’t enough, Max.”

  “I know. It’s never enough. And even if we could give more than everything, even then it wouldn’t be enough.”

  He nods in agreement, focusing his eyes on his cooking.

  “There’s no explanation,” I say. “No explanation for why some people die and some are rescued.”

  “None that would fit into our little minds, Max. But we can choose to do what we can.”

  “And we can choose to remember them.”

  “Which is a way of loving them. So that nothing is lost, nothing is wasted, and the goodness they left behind is still alive in the hearts of others.”

  “We can’t know them all, Billy. We can’t know their stories, why some were there that day and some were not.”

  “We can know them in another way. There are hints scattered about the earth, I think. Little things, very little, but pointing to a bigger story.”

  “Like the things in your hidden room of the mind, Billy?”

  “Uh-huh,” he says with a nod, and flips the omelet, still absorbed. “Fingerprints, unspoken words, traces left everywhere, seen and unseen. They’re waiting to tell their story, if we stop awhile and listen.”

  I tell him about Puck on the morning of September 11, how my little brother had been so afraid that day, without reason, and how I had reassured him that there was nothing to fear, that all would be well.

  Wordlessly, Billy goes into his hidden room of the mind and retrieves the sock he had saved. He gives it to me.

  The following day we go to the site of the World Trade Center. There is a museum now, and other memorials. Colossal new buildings. Many tourists. Busloads full of school children for whom this place is ancient history. For me, for Billy, it was yesterday.

  We stand silently side by side, trying to absorb the reality: Yes, this was the place. For me, the site of my parents’ and brother’s deaths. I feel disturbed, with a confusion of emotions, but I am unable to cry.

  When we leave and head back uptown, I am different. I cannot s
ay for certain how I am changed, but I am.

  I return to live in my apartment—the apartment of Max Davies—and spend a week cleaning it and reacquainting myself with myself. I put my photos from the room of my hidden memories back on the shelves and walls. The two little yellow racing cars have a prominent place.

  I visit Billy’s apartment most evenings. He is often out on his night errands around the city. I now understand that this is his role—the rescuer.

  We share a supper together once during that week, doted upon by our Chinese friends. We share an afternoon coffee at Dina’s.

  I notice that her elephant tattoo is entirely gone.

  “I see you’ve had the Greek-Indian elephant tattoo removed from your arm,” I say, having a momentary relapse.

  “Whaaat!” she loudly exclaims. “You lose your marbles, Frankie? I ain’t got no tattoo. Never did have one.” She shrugs. “ ’Course, my dad was Greek and my mum was from Bangalore. That’s in India. But there wasn’t no elephant in the mix.”

  “How old are you?” I ask her.

  “Thirty-seven, kiddo. Hey, don’t you ever learn your lessons?”

  “Sorry. I would have placed you in your mid- to late twenties.”

  “Yeah, right. So, you guys want the special or your usual?”

  “The special,” we say in unison.

  “Comin’ right up, boys.”

  Alone, I visit the Metropolitan Museum to see Boy in Red, Portrait of Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuhiga by Francisco de Goya. The jackdaw is still pecking the piece of paper, but the image on it is something indecipherable. It is not the skyline of New York City. The scratchings beneath it are not numbers, not even remotely 09-11-2001.

  Each day brings small leaves of memory floating to the surface. I am coming to see how complex my former life was.

  “I’ve been away,” I tell the curator-owner of the gallery where I exhibited.

  “I’m not canceling your next show, Max. So go ahead and sue me.”