“Sorry, buddy. You can’t go down there.”
“Look! Look what they did!” Jerry points with a trembling hand to where flames still burn in the night, down at the far end of a dust-coated thoroughfare lined with shattered storefronts and burned-out cars, the ground littered with paper and debris. “Look at that.”
The cop says nothing, just stands there, a sentry at the fiery gates of Hades.
“I was already down there,” Jerry tells him, “earlier today. There were a lot of firemen. But I’m not a fireman.”
“Oh, no?”
“No. I always wanted to be one, but a lot of firemen died so I’m glad I’m not one, because I don’t want to die.”
“No one does, kid.”
The cop’s eyes look red and swollen, Jerry notices.
Maybe it’s the smoke in the air, or maybe he’s been crying.
On television, they said that it wasn’t just the firemen who died when the towers fell. A lot of policemen did, too. And all those people on the planes, and the people who worked in the World Trade Center . . .
“Listen, kid, you can’t go down there, so—”
“But why not?”
“Restricted zone. Go on, turn around.”
Jerry turns around and walks away. A few yards from the cop, he turns to take one last look at the massive destruction down the street, and rage builds within him.
Look what they did.
Look what they did.
Lying in bed five blocks north of the smoldering tomb, Kristina can hear the usual wee-hour sirens . . . but not the usual intermittent sirens. These are constant.
Conspicuously absent tonight is the occasional drone of planes that have just taken off from LaGuardia or JFK or Newark. Every airport in the metropolitan area—every airport in the entire country—is closed.
But every so often—just often enough to keep Kristina’s nerves on high alert—comes the shattering roar of an aircraft flying low enough to rattle the tall loft windows.
Fighter jets.
Fighter jets over New York City.
Surreal.
Please make it stop. Please make it all go away.
She lies flat on her back with the quilt pulled taut beneath her wide-open eyes, as if to protect her from anything that might drop out of the sky. Planes . . . bombs . . . debris . . .
People.
She saw them this morning—scores of human torches falling or jumping from the burning towers; grotesque, limb-flailing freefalls branded into her brain.
Like so many of them, Kristina greeted the day with an early alarm clock, coffee, the New York Post, a crowded subway ride, a short, sunny stroll to her job in an iconic Manhattan skyscraper. The city, scrubbed clean in last night’s rain, was spectacular. Now, part of it lies buried beneath a heap of debris and toxic dust.
What if the Chrysler building had been hit instead of the World Trade Center?
But it wasn’t. You’re alive.
When the second plane hit the second tower, she fled her office on the fifty-fourth floor of the Chrysler Building, not waiting for evacuation orders.
“Hey, where are you going?” one of the secretaries asked as Kristina raced past on her way to the elevators.
“Home.”
“You can’t just leave!”
She didn’t bother to respond. As far as she was concerned, she was running for her life.
She took the subway downtown and emerged to find her neighborhood blanketed in smoke. She doesn’t really remember making a conscious decision to walk all those blocks south to see what was going on; she simply fell in with other gawkers swimming against the sea of frightened tower refugees.
But after a few minutes of watching it unfold in front of her—a few minutes of seeing those desperate jumpers, hearing bystanders’ screams as they came down and the staccato death explosions when they hit the ground—Kristina was overcome. She turned abruptly and ran home, arriving right before the first tower fell, most likely engulfing the very spot where she’d stood watching.
She was one of the lucky ones. She’ll live to greet another day in a world that will never be the same. The city feels foreign to her now, her city—the city she loves because, as she so often says, anything at all can happen here.
I’ll never say that again. Never. Never!
She keeps thinking of Mack. He works in midtown. She hasn’t seen him all day or night. She went down and knocked on his door a few times, but no one was home.
Still, he must be okay; he has to be okay, but . . .
Carrie. Mack’s wife.
Kristina knows she worked someplace down in the financial district. Carrie might have been hurt today, or killed.
Kristina can’t bear to let her mind go there. Every time it starts to, shame sweeps over her and she shoves aside the notion of Mack, widowed and suddenly, truly, available.
She didn’t want Carrie to die. Jesus. She didn’t conjure today’s nightmare like some crazy voodoo curse.
Of course she didn’t.
And this isn’t about her. This is a global catastrophe. This was, as President Bush said in his televised speech earlier, an act of war.
War. Here. In New York.
Kristina keeps thinking of her mother, in London during the blitz sixty years ago. Mum used to talk about lying terrified in the dark basement shelter as planes buzzed the skyline; about pulling her blanket over her mouth and nose to help blot the smell of burning rubble.
Did it work for you, Mum? Because it isn’t working for me. The windows are closed, and so are the vents; the fire is a mile away and the wind is blowing south, but I can still smell it.
Kristina’s mother died of lung cancer. Never smoked a cigarette in her life.
But all those nights in London during the air raids, lying awake, breathing toxic fumes . . . maybe, in the end, the enemy bombs got her after all.
Will the same thing happen to me?
Another fighter plane roars over Manhattan.
Please make it stop.
Please let me fall asleep.
Sleep, she knows, is the only way to escape this nightmarish world.
But sleep won’t claim her, not when her thoughts won’t stop and her mind’s eye keeps replaying unbearable images and her entire body is clenched: her jaw, her fists, the muscles of her legs . . .
A spasm seizes her right calf and she squeezes her eyes shut, flexing her toes.
Please make it go away.
When at last it subsides, she opens her eyes to a sight more horrific than anything she’s seen in the last eighteen hours.
Jarring as a plume of toxic smoke in a clear blue September sky, a long human shadow has fallen on the wall beside her bed.
She’s home alone; she lives alone, and yet . . .
She’s not alone.
And she was wrong. Sleep isn’t the only way to escape this world. Before she can escape it, though, the worst moments of her young life are yet to come.
The water runs red with blood, spiraling into the drain.
Blood in water.
Blood . . . everywhere.
Blood on Jamie’s hands, and the white sheets of Kristina’s bed, and the wall beside it.
Blood in the streets of Manhattan . . .
Blood everywhere. So much blood.
I still can’t believe it.
Right before Jamie’s eyes, on a beautiful September morning, the very images that had been pure fantasy for so long blazed to life—although “life” seems to be the wrong term. The polar opposite, really—it was death that was all around.
Disembodied limbs, a head whose eyes were fixed in horror, a stranger’s severed torso spilling entrails . . .
Or was that Kristina Haines?
Jamie can’t remember, exactly, what happened out
side during the day and what happened later, much later, in the middle of the night in Kristina’s apartment.
Bloody guts on the streets . . . or bloody guts on the sheets?
Grinning broadly, Jamie repeats the thought aloud, in a singsong whisper, like a recitation from a Seuss-gone-wrong children’s picture book.
“Bloody guts on the streets . . . bloody guts on the sheets . . . I do not like them, Sam I am.” Grinning, Jamie looks up into the mirror above the sink. “Oh, but I do. I do like them, Sam . . . I . . . am . . . not.”
Funny how you manage to forget; how you can look in the mirror and be caught off guard by your own reflection.
But this is me. Jamie turns off the tap and reaches for a towel. This is me, for the time being.
The sink has to be wiped down. When it’s dry and clean, not a trace of blood, Jamie checks to make sure that nice little souvenir is still safely wrapped in a plastic bag. Yes. Good. No one would ever know it was there: no visible back pocket bumps, no telltale stains oozing through the fabric.
It’s time to leave the bathroom; time to rest. It’s been such a long day that it’s hard to remember what it was like before everything went crazy . . .
Before fantasy melded with reality; before the grisly chaos so long pent up inside Jamie’s head exploded in the real world, before the exhilarating realization that it was okay to finally act on another long-forbidden urge.
It was okay, though. Punishing Kristina was the right thing to do.
But it’s not just that. Maybe it started out that way—teaching her a lesson because she was mean to Jerry—but it was more than that.
On this particular day . . . night . . . morning . . . the old rules don’t matter anymore.
Nothing matters anymore.
I want to do it again.
I want to make the choice again.
I want to watch someone else die.
I want to feel someone die.
I want to make someone die.
Yes. It can happen again.
It can happen—it will happen—whenever, wherever, to whomever Jamie chooses.
But right now, it’s time to rest.
With a deep sigh, Jerry sinks his aching head back against the pillow.
There have been many long, terrible days in his life, but this was by far the longest, and the most terrible.
He’s lived in New York City all his life. This is his home. And now . . .
Look what they did.
He closes his eyes, squeezing hard, but he can’t shut out the terrible scenes he encountered today. Smoke, and fire, and firemen dying, and all those people jumping out the windows, falling through the sky . . .
Fallin’.
The song, his song, still echoes through his head.
It was playing in the background just a little while ago when at last, at last, Kristina said the words he’s been waiting so long to hear.
Not the part about being sorry for saying no when he asked her out. That was nice to know, of course—that she hadn’t meant to hurt him.
But it was the rest of what she said that resonated with him.
He could hear the heartfelt passion in her voice; passion that made her words quaver and her pitch much higher than usual.
“Jerry, I love you!” she told him. “I’ve always loved you, and . . . and . . . and I always will. I just wanted you to know that. Okay? Okay? Oh God . . .”
She was crying, he realized. Was it because she was upset that she had hurt him when she’d turned down their date? Or because of all that had gone on today in the city, their city, the city where they’d fallen in love?
Or was she simply so overwhelmed by her feelings for him that she was sobbing with joy?
He doesn’t know. It doesn’t matter.
“I love you, too,” he told Kristina, over and over, until Jamie said it was time to say good-bye.
But maybe that wasn’t a good idea. Maybe he shouldn’t have listened to Jamie.
Maybe he should go see if Kristina’s okay. Because the more he thinks about it, the more certain he is that she’s not.
Allison was at the Liz Lange fashion show when it all began to unfold this morning. Someone said that a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center, and a buzz of confusion rippled through the Bryant Park tent, but the show went on as planned.
As gorgeous pregnant models strutted the catwalk in designer outfits, Allison put the plane crash out of her head and focused on the task at hand.
Afterward, alarmed by the smoke rising in the blue sky over lower Manhattan, she tried to call the office from her cell and couldn’t get through.
“Don’t bother,” a scurrying stylist called to her. “The phones are down!”
Unsettled by the growing sense of panic on the street around her, she made her way back to her office as fast as she could walk in a pair of pointy Christian Louboutin stilettos.
The lobby security post, usually manned by a joyful Rastafarian named Henry, was eerily deserted.
Upstairs, she found everyone in her department glued to a conference room television, where the alarming truth was made clear at last.
“How many people were in there?” she asked Luis, a production editor and her closest friend at work.
“Tens of thousands.”
“How many died?”
Luis shook his head. She saw that he was holding an orange plastic prescription bottle, tapping it like a maraca against the open palm of his other hand.
Seeing her looking at it, he passed it to her, a silent offering.
“What is it?” She was already twisting off the white safety cap, noticing—and not caring—that the label bore an unfamiliar name.
“Xanax. My sister’s shrink prescribes it for her but she doesn’t take it that often so she gives it to me.”
“You carry it around with you every day?”
“I keep it in my desk drawer. I thought this job was stressful but—” Luis’s brown eyes flicked to the television screen, with its doomsday images. He murmured something in Spanish, then said, “Go ahead—take it, Allison. It’ll calm you down.”
She knew, only too well, what Xanax does. She knew because it was one of the many drugs her mother used to take back in the grim old days in Centerfield.
Centerfield—if she were there right now, she wondered, would she feel safe?
Was there anyplace in the world where she would ever be able to feel safe again?
Allison—who grew up seeing what drugs, even prescription drugs, can do to a person, and swore she’d never touch them—swallowed two Xanax.
That made it better, but she still wasn’t insulated from the horror—not by any means.
Trapped in her midtown office building—well aware that any one of the landmarks around her could be a target—she could only watch the ruins burn, on TV and out the window. The subways weren’t running, the bridges and tunnels were closed. Manhattan island was truly cut off from the rest of the world.
Someone told Allison that Helene, the magazine’s formidable art director, had earlier received a hysterical phone call from her sister, trapped on a high floor of one of the towers. Allison couldn’t wrap her fuzzy head around the fact that sophisticated, intimidating Helene had reportedly lost her composure when the tower collapsed, sobbing openly before her husband showed up to escort her off to wherever the families of the victims were gathering.
It seemed everyone in the company was connected, by varying degrees, to someone who worked in the twin towers or for the FDNY or NYPD. Everyone but Allison.
She wasn’t from this area; she didn’t have a firefighter uncle or a cousin in food service at Windows on the World or a high school boyfriend who worked at a trading desk.
While she had lived in the city long enough to have made a network of friends, those relat
ionships weren’t close enough—or meaningful enough—or maybe it was just the Xanax—for her to be frantic over their whereabouts today. Operating under the assumption that none of them would have reason, in the course of a Tuesday morning, to have been down at the World Trade Center, she was pretty sure they were all safe.
And if she was wrong about that . . .
I don’t want to know was her initial reaction. Not yet. Not today.
The phones were down, but e-mail was working, and she found several worried inquiries in her in-box. There were repeated e-mails from her brother, a few from friends, and even one from Justin, her ex. As she typed out reassuring replies, she thought about all the people whose queries to loved ones in New York would remain forever unanswered.
When, mid-afternoon, word came that the commuter trains were running again out of Grand Central and Penn Station, some of Allison’s suburban colleagues left the office. Presumably, they made it home to their leafy bedroom communities in Westchester and Long Island, Connecticut and New Jersey, away from the death and the danger.
Allison stayed on, huddled in the conference room with Luis and a couple of others who lived in lower Manhattan and beyond.
No one spoke of trying to get home until well after the sun had gone down, and even then, it took a long time for anyone to actually venture out there.
“Are you leaving?” people would ask Allison, who at some point that evening had swallowed a couple more Xanax tablets to maintain the numbness.
“I’m going to wait a little longer,” she told her coworkers as, one by one, they slipped away into the strange, terrible night.
She was going to wait . . . for what? She had no idea. For another attack? For some kind of all-clear? For daybreak?
Only when everyone else had gone did Allison realize that she had no desire to spend the night alone in a strange place. The news was reporting that there were pockets of downtown neighborhoods where the power had been restored. Hers was reportedly one of them. She forced herself to go.
Out on the street, she immediately spotted a cluster of camouflage-clad, machine gun–carrying National Guard soldiers. That was when it hit her: no matter where she spent this dreadful night—in her office or in her apartment—she would be alone in a strange place.
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