Martin digested this information before he spoke.
“So there are more?”
“I don’t know—there could be,” said the esquire, who worked on the forty-fourth floor of a building on Fifth Avenue where Martin had been any number of times. “I’m getting out of here, though.”
After he hung up, Martin pictured what was going on just outside his door—and, he reckoned, in every other building in Manhattan—as his coworkers fled for their lives. It was not difficult to imagine them rushing through the halls, carrying picture frames, documents, laptop computers, bananas, bottled water, and bagels as they flooded toward the hated elevator banks. He wondered if the elevators were even working, or if they had been shut off due to planes flying into the World Trade Center.
He stared at his phone, and it rang. “Marty—thank god I got through—have you seen this?” It was his sister, Suzie, calling from Massachusetts.
To hear her voice made his chest collapse, as for the first time he pictured real people on the planes and in the burning towers. “Yeah, Suze,” he said hoarsely. He cleared his throat and tried to sound more cavalier, which at that moment seemed to be the only option short of breaking down. “Front-row seat.”
“What are you doing there?”
“I don’t know,” Martin admitted. “Everyone’s leaving, but I can’t face the elevator right now.”
“What?” She barely paused before responding. “Martin, you’re in shock. Listen to me: leave now, okay?” Her tone softened. “Seriously, big brother—do you want to get hurt on your birthday?”
Martin shook his head “No, I don’t—I’m leaving—don’t worry, I’ll be fine.”
“Okay, good,” she said. “Call me when you get home.”
“I will,” he promised and gently hung up the phone.
MARTIN KNEW THAT his sister was at least partially right, and it now seemed unreasonable just to sit in his office during an apocalypse. “I should go,” he resolved and again picked up his briefcase and took a step toward the door. But the word evacuation reeled through his mind, and he resented the idea of being forced to go anywhere on someone else’s schedule, particularly that of some dumb terrorists, wherever they were from. He mentally apologized to his sister and vowed not to succumb.
He went back to his desk, where from a lower drawer he extracted a bottle of whiskey, the depleted contents of which he noted with remorse before he realized that a second one behind it was completely full. As he poured himself a shot, a chill went through him that was not exactly unfamiliar but that he had not felt in many years, namely since those horrible months before he tested positive for HIV. He had not been particularly sick at the time, much less bedridden—to the contrary, he was working more than ever—but had nevertheless been unable to shake a vague but unsettling cold and frailty, as though his bones were already deteriorating in his body. Yet he could barely acknowledge the symptoms, much less the idea that his life might be ending, even after the doctor informed him of the verdict.
It was not until much later—when the death sentence had been effectively commuted by his “cocktail” of meds—that he felt more capable of describing the chill in terms of something he had gone through as a child, i.e., the “temperature inversions” he used to experience on summer vacation, those odd days at the beach when a ghostly fog would drift in from the sea and leave your skin damp and raw no matter what you were wearing. He realized that the terror he experienced as an adult was a sense not only that something was seriously wrong—which, of course, it was—but also that it was simply a matter of time before the tide came in and swept him out forever. As Martin considered the scene in front of him, there was something similarly indescribable and terrifying about it, but by the same token, his earlier confrontation with mortality—and his continuing familiarity with it, in the form of the pills he took every day, each one a rock in the temporary jetty—explained his reluctance to cave in to his fear. What he saw outside hovered so much more distantly than what he had already endured, and still did, even if the virus was suppressed. Rather than flee death, he felt obliged to confront it, to stare it down, to meditate on it and even to mock it, all in the attempt to gain some kind of power or control.
He poured himself a new drink and proposed a toast, as much to his reflection as to what lay beyond it: “To the shittiest birthday ever,” he saluted, glass raised, “and even worse, one I will never forget.”
THE WHISKEY NULLIFIED Martin’s thoughts for a few seconds as a slight tingling spread from his stomach to his fingertips. Though he was not about to leave—despite the chills that continued periodically to pass through him—it occurred to him that he might find some solace in one of his LPs. It was only when listening to music that he had ever been able to grieve, to cry real tears of anger and remorse as he pictured his life ending at such an absurd and unanticipated juncture, and how hard it was to tell the younger version of himself—with whom he inevitably associated such songs—the sad news.
He weighed his options carefully; far from wanting to denigrate or belittle the moment, he wanted to reflect its gravity in a mournful and perhaps even resigned way that acknowledged a sense of aching fear, of melancholy and impotence. Almost of its own accord, his hand reached over to his shelves and extracted A Gift from a Flower to a Garden, a double LP by Donovan, a work Martin had always associated with the kind of pathos displayed by a precocious child on the verge of madness. On the cover, Donovan could be seen in a lavender-filtered photograph dressed in an Indian caftan and appearing to offer the listener a tufted poppy. It might have come across as a caricature of hippie idealism—the musical ghetto where Donovan was so often pigeonholed—were it not for what appeared to be dark rings around his eyes, an effect of the saturated exposure of the shot and his barely tinted sunglasses, as if he were already haunted by the manic dreams he offered.
As Martin listened to the crack and hiss of the needle against the vinyl, followed by Donovan’s whispered lyrics, he looked out the window and was newly astonished by the amount of smoke that continued to pour forth from the towers. More unbelievably, the north tower began to vibrate like a corrugated sheet of metal before it buckled and collapsed, as if a bomb had been detonated underneath it. As a mushroom cloud erupted from the site, Martin remembered a passage in which Thoreau described the deafening groan of the last of a stand of majestic white pines being felled by two woodmen with a crosscut saw. Though he could hear nothing except Donovan’s soft voice and an acoustic guitar, the destruction at hand seemed no less egregious, although the remorse he felt was as much for the building and those he imagined inside it as for himself, as if just by being alive he was in some way responsible for this monstrous act.
MARTIN’S HEAD POUNDED slowly and even dogmatically to such an extent that he was reminded of a tolling church bell. Determined to finish what he had started, he poured himself another shot and flipped over the record; as he swiveled back to face the window, beads of sweat rolled down the sides of his face before falling onto his shirt, where they were absorbed into his body like long-forgotten aspirations. Though his eyes remained fixed in front of him, he realized that he was no longer watching the smoke and fire of a random act of destruction but viewing a memory that exerted a far more personal form of terror.
His thoughts turned to his graduation from high school, which seemed as bucolic and naïve—and lost—as a Donovan song. If his experience at boarding school had generally allowed him to appreciate his parents from afar, on this morning, with them present, Jane’s pronouncements on art and aesthetics had frustrated him almost as much as Hank’s crude pragmatism. Also bothersome were Jane’s false sighs of commiseration about his breakup with Amanda—whose appeal she had never grasped—while for his part, Hank could not stop bleating a stream of trivia and advice about Martin’s upcoming year. College hockey, Hank recalled more than once, had been the best experience of his life, not to mention the route by which he met—nudge, nudge—the best woman in his life.
Hank brushed her off. “It’s just a few little clouds,” he scoffed. “We’re only a couple hours away.”
Martin, still impatient with his parents, had basically ignored this conversation and instead amused himself by reaching around his sister’s back to tap her on the shoulder, the way he had done years earlier, until Jane looked at her children. “You two all right?”
“Uh—yeah, sure—quite all right.” Martin saw himself answer coolly and robotically, the way he used to talk to his mother to disguise his true feelings, which back then he would have characterized as annoyance or irritation but which he now understood to be something closer to fear, not of the storm but of Jane’s ability to glean information about him that he was just beginning to understand himself.
None of this was mentioned at the time; instead Suzie entered the scene, just as he expected her to, because as often as Martin tried to forget all of this, it was engrained in his memory like the lyrics of an odious pop song from an otherwise forgotten era of his youth. “No offense, Dad, but I’m sticking with Martin,” she informed them.
Nor could Martin forget how, in response, Hank stuck out his tongue and trotted back to his car.
Nor how a few seconds later, Martin was in his old car, the make, model, and year of which he noted with aching precision, along with the garish cranberry hue of the upholstery and even the chrome buttons of the tape deck and radio, which like any stereo worth hearing at the time was “customized.”
They were back on the highway, and as usual—because Hank had a heavy foot—Martin was following. He saw the blur of the first heavy, thick drops of rain hitting the windshield and could feel Suzie beside him as she watched the side of a truck roar past about six inches from her window. “Check it out, big brother,” she said, putting her palm against the glass. “The water’s coming right through—it’s a miracle.”
“It’s called condensation, Sherlock,” Martin corrected her, “but I’m glad it makes you happy.”
Martin whispered the word happy at the same moment he heard it now. In his memory it was like a gunshot instantly followed by his sister’s scream, which reverberated across these many years, joined not only by the vulture screech of the brakes but by Martin’s own involuntary cry, as if he were reacting for the first time. It happened fast—two seconds at most, maybe three—and he pounded the arms of his chair, an involuntary echo of his chest slamming against the steering wheel, constrained only by the seat belt as he skidded to a stop and—hands shaking—threw open the door.
Numb with panic, he stumbled forward a few steps but then caught his balance and sprinted toward a blurry heap, which as he approached became increasingly focused but also mangled and—with a truck behind it, on its side like a fallen horse—incongruous; somehow the car had been flipped, but there was also something—a piece of steel, an I beam—sticking through it, so that it lay on its back at a strange angle, like a spinning top that was no longer spinning.
Frantically Martin ran around it; one side of the car was crushed, while the other—the passenger side—was slightly more elevated, and here he dropped to his knees; through the cracked window, he could see his mother—she was still in her seat but upside down—and his father beyond her, but it was raining so hard that he could not tell if they were hurt or could speak or even move. The smell of gasoline was thick, and he knew he would have to get them out before anything caught fire. He had already checked the doors, and none would open, but he noticed that a back window was cracked a few inches, and after brushing the water away from his face, he crawled over and called in to his mother and father, to let them know that he was there and that they shouldn’t worry because they were going to be fine and help was already here—and as he said this, he could hear the wail of sirens and see the flashing lights reflecting off the wet pavement, so he knew it was true—and he twisted his ear down to the gap and tried to listen, and he seemed to detect a low moan, which gave him hope. He sat up and put his hands on the window and pulled, so that the whole thing just fell out and crumbled like a sheet of ice.
All of this took only a few seconds, and Martin heard a familiar voice in his head—his goalie voice—telling him to be calm, be calm, be calm. His hands and knees were cut—badly—but now he was able to crawl at least partway in through the window to the back. Inside, he still couldn’t see much of Hank, who was on the other side of the beam, but Jane was pinned to her seat—somehow he knew that she was broken; there was nothing in here that wasn’t—but still alive; she seemed to be breathing, and he ignored the blood running down her twisted arm. He asked if she could hear him, and there was a response—low and garbled, but it was there—which drew him farther in, so that by turning over he could see the side of her face. And even though one of her cheeks had a gash across it and her forehead was already swollen and misshapen, at least her eyes were open and he knew she recognized him because her lips were moving and her eyes were searching and her fingers reached for him. He wanted to reassure her, to tell her that all of this mangled steel and broken glass and blood was just a bad dream, that it wasn’t as bad as it looked, that it was going to be all right as soon as he got them out, but when he tried to speak, he realized that he was already talking, that he hadn’t stopped—“Mom, it’s going to be all right,” he kept saying over and over—and he believed it, and for a second he even paused to think about what he should do next, because he knew he had to get out but he couldn’t leave, either.
He felt something pulling at his legs, and it was hard and rough so that he grabbed at the edge of the seat to hang on but his hands were filled with shards of glass so he couldn’t really hold on to anything, and just a blink later he was back out in the rain being pulled across the pavement and he screamed at the men holding him that she was alive, that his mother was alive, and he strained against them to get back, he clawed at the asphalt looking for something to hang on to so that he could shake them off, and even after the blast, they had to sit on him as he pounded the unforgiving ground with his blood-soaked hands and feet.
IT WAS NOT something he ever wanted to remember—or so he had told himself for years—although that had never stopped him from getting to this point, where as he did now he braced himself for the inevitable, breathtaking pain of knowing, and the desire to detach himself, to skirt away and imagine his parents already flying. Except this time, as much he wanted to, he did not—could not—wander off but rather felt his mind slow to survey the scene, not all at once but in bits and pieces, interrupted by short gaps of breathless, almost instinctual determination. Soon he was awash in forgotten details: the oddly muted sound of the explosion—really more of a pop than a bang—that ignited a small inferno; the heat of the asphalt under his palms, the evil hiss of a burning wreck in the downpour, his sister’s wet shirt and the convulsing sobs that shook her as she sat beside him hugging her knees while the EMTs and bystanders raced around yelling and screaming, the bloodred tint of his vision; and most horrible of all, the motionless silhouettes in the burning wreckage in front of him.
Yet even as all of this seemed to compound the shock and grief, his mind kept turning over the image of the rain, the way all the drops seemed to bounce off the pavement in an infinite number of perfect little explosions. It tugged at him, so that he could feel the drawers of his mind slamming open and shut as he desperately looked through them for an explanation; then, miraculously, he found what he was looking for: again he was at the beach with his family, this time literally in the ocean, in a churning surf that crashed over him with furious insistence as the rain smacked down hard around him, each drop bouncing off the roiling sheen of the salt water, almost as reflective as
an asphalt highway. In this memory, Martin was not sobbing but yelling with a hoarse, adolescent glee; it was a hurricane day at the beach—not to the point of evacuation but one of those days when you weren’t supposed to go in the water—but he and Hank didn’t care; they went in anyway, and Martin loved every second because, even if it was macho and stupid, it was wild and uninhibited and violent, and he knew how to handle the rough surf.
He knew why this memory had come back to him, and why it allowed him to confront the scenes of the accident as never before; it was as if, he realized, rather than escape—detach himself—he had dived under the turbulence, where for a few seconds he could surrender to the larger currents—i.e., of life and death—before resurfacing to confront the aftermath; and though he was flailing as he was pulled and thrown by forces so much larger and more powerful than himself, to swim through like this, however feebly, gave him a flicker of hope and strength, so that when he looked down at his fingers, he was almost surprised to find they had not been stained with the color of these new tears.
HE REACHED AROUND to turn up the volume on his stereo, where Donovan sang as seductively as he had on the radio more than twenty years earlier; the song was the last thing Martin heard before leaving the car, moments after Suzie had found it on the radio and declared it worth listening to. He knew that, just as it had done outside, a tower had given way in his soul; it had been there for him to behold but then shuddered and collapsed and now was gone, leaving an empty space marked by an intense but purposeful sorrow and a vague longing for something that he still couldn’t quite see but that nevertheless resonated with a beauty he could only describe as defiant. Far from disturbing him, the diagnosis of this condition—this gap, this void, this chasm, this HIV of the psyche that without exception afflicted everyone—made him strangely optimistic. He felt a rush of understanding as he stared simultaneously at his reflection and at the dusty cloud in the distance beyond it.
The Metropolis Case Page 13