“What, along with five thousand other people?” he snapped. “You don’t think they have enough to worry about already?”
“I’m sorry,” she said again, with obvious regret. “I know it’s a difficult time.”
But then he went into their office, along with Marina, just before five, and the only woman there was not the receptionist but someone more senior, a small potato-nosed person in her fifties in a smart red suit. Julius recognized her.
“Everyone’s gone,” she said. “I think you’d better come back on Monday. We should have a full staff in then, finally. Some people have been out all week.” She sighed.
“But it can’t wait till Monday,” Marina said. “I’m very sorry, but it can’t.”
The woman listened to their story, and nodded, and looked closely at Julius. “Sure,” she said, “I’ve worked with you. I remember the name. It’s an unusual first name. Fidelity, Fidelity, right? You’re supposed to start next Thursday. Three months. You’re always highly recommended.” She paused. “That’s a nasty cut you’ve got.”
He shrugged, sorrowfully. She might think it was from the tragedy.
In the end, she agreed to look for them. And yes, Frederick Tubb had been placed right after Labor Day, starting the Tuesday, a two-week placement, a financial firm on Cedar Street. His hours were the usual, nine to five, five days. “There’s a note in the file,” she said. “And you know, now I remember Mary talking about him. He came in last Friday with his time sheet and he wanted to be paid right away. She said he was really desperate, and she felt so bad for him that she wrote him a check out of the petty cash account, which is completely against company policy. I could’ve let her go for that. But she was honest, at least, and we had a talk about it, and now I think she understands how important it is. He said he wouldn’t be able to eat for the week, or pay his Metrocard. Nothing. A young kid, she said. Serious seeming.”
“Oh dear,” Marina said.
“Did the company, did someone call and say he hadn’t shown up, or anything?”
“This week, you mean? I don’t think they’re even open. Do you know where Cedar Street is?”
“Not exactly.”
She got up to show them on a map of Manhattan that was pinned to the wall near the reception desk. “It’s only a few blocks away,” she said. “I’m sure all their windows were blown out, toxic dust everywhere. No power, probably no water, even. Nobody’s working there right now.” As they were leaving she gave them a sad smile. “Good luck,” she said. “We all need it, these days.”
“Even if he was going to an office two blocks away, there’s no reason for him to have been at Ground Zero,” Julius said, as soon as they were in the elevator. “It isn’t his subway stop. And what, the first tower was at, like, ten of nine, right? So that means unless he was weirdly early, he would only have been in the neighborhood once it had already happened. They were telling people to get out of there. He would’ve gotten out, walked uptown, or back to Brooklyn. Lots of people walked back to Brooklyn that day.”
“So what, you think he was trampled by the mob on the Brooklyn Bridge?”
“You laugh, but he could be in the hospital with a broken leg or something. Easily.”
“What am I going to tell my dad? What are we going to tell Aunt Judy?”
“It’s not the end of the world, you know. He’s going to turn up somewhere. That’s how life is.”
“It’s how it was. I don’t know how anything is, anymore.”
“No,” he said, touching his cheek. “Scarred for life, and we don’t know how it will turn out.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
Clarion Call
On Friday afternoon, Bootie had his first bath in days, in the plastic bathtub of his room in the Clarion half a mile from the Miami bus station. He ran it fairly cool, because it was hot out, and he was hot. The bathroom had no window, either, and seemed to hoard the heat. He’d been sticky for days, and filthy, because he had only what he’d been wearing on Tuesday morning, his striped dress shirt from Brooks Brothers, and his chinos, now blotted with ketchup and grease, and the same pair of black socks, so clammy and sweat-soaked they felt they’d never again be dry. On the bus, as his beard grew and his hair stuck limply to his head, he’d been aware that he stank, as if every hair on his body were coated in stink and were quietly emanating that odor, of him, out into the air, among the seats. In a funny way it had made him feel alive, more present than he’d felt in weeks, as though every other passenger would have to admit that Bootie Tubb was, because of his smell; and when an old man, a small, wiry black man with a felt hat on his head, had sat beside him for a time, out of necessity, and had wrinkled his shiny nose and put his fingers preventatively to his nostrils, Bootie had felt at the same time ashamed and proud. He had never before been so conscious of making an impression.
He hadn’t woken up that morning, of course, with any intention of going anywhere but the offices of Reading and Lockwood, where he’d already spent the better part of a week checking the sums of endless columns of figures using an addictive little adding machine that printed everything out on a roll of tape as he went along. His job, once he’d checked the sums, was to attach the appropriate segment of tape to the document at hand and return it to his boss, a leathered woman with wispy blond hair who smelled powerfully of perfume and cigarettes. It was not taxing work, but finicky and quickly dull, and the office—he’d never spent time in an office before, not like this—struck him as unhealthy, everyone breathing recirculated air high above the ground. The first few days, he was very prompt, but it became clear that his boss, Maureen, didn’t care when he arrived, so long as by the end of the day he’d moved all the papers from the in-box to the out-box, with their tapes tidily appended. His fingers, though thick, grew nimble at the adding machine, and he was able to complete the work more quickly than she knew, which left him time. He read Musil during his lunch hour, hunched at his desk, with a bag of Doritos. He bought the largest size at the deli down the block, to save money, along with the two-liter size of Coke, and he kept these two items stowed beneath his feet. The Coke was always warm, then, and progressively flatter, so that eventually it became like some toxic juice, pressed, perhaps, from sugar-coated tires, or from some unnameable deadly plant in the Amazon. He read Musil, and he came late to the office, late because the subway he so loathed was marginally less crowded when the nine a.m. cut-off was past.
On that morning, he’d been very late. He’d had to get off two consecutive trains after only one stop because they were too tightly packed, and had set his heart pounding and closed his throat. It had taken great effort to get onto the third train, and even so, he’d been able to stand it only until they were across the water (he hated going under the water at all, felt he could feel the weight of it pushing down upon the tunnel, the car, himself), had been able to stand it only because he knew he absolutely had to, and had got off at Whitehall Street, sweating and panting as he rose to ground level, to walk, then, the rest of the way. It was a shame, he’d not been this late before, it was 9:10 already, but he’d be there by 9:25 or 9:30 at the latest, and Maureen would just have gone for her first cigarette break down on the street, so if she didn’t actually spot him, then she’d never know how late he’d been.
Something was wrong, above ground. The air. The smoke. The sun, the bright sky, was eclipsed by smoke, an ocean of black smoke, high up but still all-enveloping. People were shouting and pointing, and he turned and could see, above all the other buildings, the tips of the towers, and flames, and he could smell it. He couldn’t get his breath because he’d been wheezing anyway; but this, what was this? He couldn’t make sense of it. The end of the world. A sign from God.
He asked a man in a suit, with expensive black shoes, not unlike his own dress shoes left at home, but of better leather, and shinier—he found himself looking mostly at the shoes—and the man told him about the planes, not one but two, and the second one, well, people right here had see
n it—hadn’t Bootie heard it? He’d been underground? Well. A better place to be, the man said, because this is like Armageddon. There were people trapped up there, he said, who couldn’t get down. People surely dying from the smoke. And another man came up to them, his tie loosened, his eyes wild, a man in his fifties with a tidy white tonsure, and said, “They’re jumping. I’ve heard that they’re jumping.”
And the first man said, “Who wouldn’t. My God, my God. Wouldn’t you?”
That was when Bootie started walking. He had Musil in a plastic bag, his fingers slick upon the handles, and he had fog, or dust, or something on his glasses, but he loosened his tie and undid the top button and he walked, uptown.
He felt a pull to go over and look at the buildings from up close; but they frightened him, so much death frightened him, more powerfully than it lured him, and the smoke frightened him most of all. Not to be able to breathe. He stuck to Nassau Street, and then Lafayette. There were many people in the streets, the whole way, and eventually he kept his head down, his eyes upon his own feet, his white-coated shoes, one foot in front of the other. People milled all in the same direction, like film extras crammed in the streets, brushing up against one another but not frantically so, oddly like a massive cortege, like a slow river, in which individuals, like boulders, stopped and stood for a time and let the water, the other walkers, break quietly around them. He didn’t want to know. He was at Canal when the first tower fell. As everyone shouted and gasped, he stopped, turned, looked: the smoke and the dust took over the world. He looked away, down at the ground.
Because he wasn’t with anyone, didn’t speak to anyone, but watched alone from behind his eyes, it felt as though this might not actually be happening, as though this were some waking dream from which, if he only tried hard enough, he could escape. In the throng, he felt absolutely alone, more so than he had before. He felt no connection to the faces, the voices, that came to him as if from far away. He was a man in an unknown country, he thought, and sometimes the cries sounded not like words but just like noise, the sound and the fury of it. A tale told to an idiot. Head down, he pushed through the standing crowds, the river around him frozen while he, perversely, walked on.
In the pocket of his pants, he had all his money, the remaining cash from the check the kind woman at the agency had illicitly given him. As he made his way northward, beneath the clear and bright sky, in a stunned semblance of normality—the farther he got, the more the streets had a holiday feel, subdued but rather extraordinary, as if a beloved king’s death had just been announced and the citizens, albeit mournful, were baffled by their liberation from routine—he was assailed by thoughts. As if the roar in his head were subsiding for the first time in weeks, a switch flicked in his brain, he couldn’t keep them from coming. He’d been immersed in some madness to think Marina could ever love him, would ever love him. She’d made her choice, the poxy kangaroo, and the issue was settled: her kindnesses had never been significant, that is to say, they had never signified. From the first trip downtown—she’d asked him along, doubtless to appease her mother’s notions of politesse—to the Monitor commission—pushed, in fact, by the mysteriously kindly Danielle, whose moral turpitude somehow muddied a very good soul—there had been no Marina in her actions. Because Marina—anyone could see it—was always all about her father. Even when she turned against him, or purported to. As were they all, around him, the women without exception but the men no less so. Even Ludovic Seeley was always, unwittingly, in his thrall. And surely this was where the man’s greatness lay. How could Bootie have failed to understand? Because, of course, it guaranteed, it predetermined his own failure; and there had been too much at stake for him in that. Until now: this, the end of the world as he knew it, had known it, changed everything. The Tower of Babel tumbling. An end to false idols. And Murray, whose greatness lay not in his words or his actions but simply in his capacity to convince people of that greatness, starting, naturally, with himself, Murray who was emperor in this place of pretense, a land that stretched from Oswego to the heart of Manhattan and beyond—surely even Murray, above all Murray, would be toppled by this.
But Bootie didn’t want to be crushed by the falling idol any more than he had wanted to be felled by the volcanic debris downtown. His instincts for survival were much stronger, thank God, than his voyeuristic impulses. He could witness it all from anywhere.
From anywhere: where once he had feared that this immense city would set him adrift, a spinning atom in the ether, and where once he had seen in this the ultimate terror of insignificance, he now, and suddenly, and so clearly, saw that his fate had led him here. His fate had taken him off two trains this morning, had raised him to the surface at Whitehall Street, had shown him the spinning atoms, unraveling, the end of life, all of them people tethered by love, and habit, and work, and meaning, tied into a meaning suddenly exploded, because contrary to all he had imagined, being tied, being known, did not keep you safe. Quite the opposite: this, surely, was the meaning of Emerson, which he had so willfully and for so long misunderstood: great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Even their cousins know nothing about them. He had never been known rightly—how could he be, in the carapace of his ill-fitting names—but had thought that this imperfect knowledge was to be worked upon, bettered. But of course: mutability, precisely the capacity to spin like an atom, untethered, this thrill of absolute unknownness was not something to be feared. It was the point of it all. To be absolutely unrelated. Without context. To be truly and in every way self-reliant. At last.
This, now, then, was his mutability canto. He thought this as he turned westward at Fortieth Street. He had been given—his fate—the precious opportunity to be again, not to be as he had been. Because as far as anyone knew, he wasn’t. It had been true for ten days, of course, but he hadn’t realized it, as an animal loosed from his cage, not having known freedom, doesn’t at first run. He hadn’t understood until now. He had overheard, as he walked, in spite of himself. They said maybe tens of thousands. People in the towers, on the planes, but some, too, in the crowds, in the streets down below and nearby, where he ought to have been, had destiny not stayed him. But for anyone who went looking (would the beautiful Marina go looking, perhaps? Or only his disconsolate mother?), it would be as if he had been there, in the lee of the towers, vanished, pulverized, the loathed Bootie Tubb meeting his unspeakable fate.
Port Authority was closed, when he arrived, with no announced plans to reopen. The crowds were dense outside, as people arriving, trying to get home to New Jersey or upstate, encountered those already disappointed. Bootie, detached from the worry—he had no home to go to; he had nowhere to be; he had, after all, in some strange way just ceased to exist—watched serenely. One woman near him, lank-haired, swarthy, her peacock blue suit wilted, her sneakers, beneath her stockings, a neon white, opened her mouth like a pelican and started to cry.
Another woman, older, stout, grayed, who reminded Bootie of his mother, put her arm around the weeper’s shoulder. “It’s all right,” she cooed. “There, there. Don’t worry. We’re all in the same boat. But your kids are safe and you’re safe and that’s what counts. We’ll all get there in time.”
In the end, he spent Tuesday night in Central Park. He wasn’t alone. It hadn’t felt frightening (he remembered again his mother’s dire warnings of years before: a body under every bridge), but rather like a storybook adventure, or like something out of the sci-fi novels he read at thirteen, only tamer. He had with him a corned beef on rye, after all, and a large bottle of Coke, and a mini-pack of Oreos to help keep his spirits up; and in spite of the situation, the man at the deli had remembered to put in a dill pickle, which, as Bootie chewed it noisily at dusk beneath a tree at the edge of Sheep’s Meadow, surely implied that this strange new world was, at least to a degree, contiguous with the old. Not, then, a fully postapocalyptic scenario. He was cold in the night—he had only his blazer and no blankets at all: he hadn’t expected to be much out of doors
that day—and slept fitfully. Although it was expensive, he treated himself to a diner omelet the next morning, and to eight refills of coffee, staying huddled in his blue booth, reading Musil, slowly, sleepily, until the last vestigial shudders had ceased and he no longer felt the chill. By then it was lunchtime, and he ordered soup. The television in the diner was on the whole time, and confused with his imaginary impressions of Vienna and plans for the Kaiser’s party were grainy images of a man named Mohammed Atta and a young associate—handsome, happy-looking—at an ATM, just the night before last. Only on Monday night, they’d still been planning, and it had all been in their heads, then, and not yet unleashed upon the world. It was an awesome, a fearful thought: you could make something inside your head, as huge and devastating as this, and spill it out into reality, make it really happen. You could—for evil, but if for evil, then why not for good, too?—change the world. How petty Uncle Murray appeared, next to this; how petty their family squabbles; how petty the life he, Bootie, had been leading.
The second night he’d spent at Port Authority, because there was word, there, that it would soon reopen. He didn’t sleep—aside from a couple of hours dozing on his haunches, but still, and vitally, given the police, appearing patiently to read his book—knowing that once on the bus he would have all his time. An older man in a windbreaker, an athlete gone to seed in middle age—still sandy-haired but too ruddy, and thick, thick in his fingers, his neck, his broad chest—twice offered Bootie a smoke, and Bootie wondered, the second time, whether the man had forgotten or whether he was, however discreetly, propositioning.
“Good book?” the man asked, the second time, but Bootie kept his eyes on the page as he nodded, and did not look up again for a long while.
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