by Don DeLillo
The stink was fuel and he recognized it now, oozing down from floors above. He got to Rumsey’s office at the end of the hall. He had to climb in. He climbed over chairs and strewn books and a filing cabinet on its side. He saw bare framework, truss bars, where the ceiling had been. Rumsey’s coffee mug was shattered in his hand. He still held a fragment of the mug, his finger through the ring.
Only it didn’t look like Rumsey. He sat in his chair, head to one side. He’d been hit by something large and hard when the ceiling caved or even before, in the first spasm. His face was pressed into his shoulder, some blood, not much.
Keith talked to him.
He squatted alongside and took his arm and looked at the man, talking to him. Something came trickling from the corner of Rumsey’s mouth, like bile. What’s bile look like? He saw the mark on his head, an indentation, a gouge mark, deep, exposing raw tissue and nerve.
The office was small and makeshift, a cubicle wedged into a corner, with a limited view of morning sky. He felt the dead nearby. He sensed this, in the hanging dust.
He watched the man breathe. He was breathing. He looked like someone paralyzed for life, born this way, head twisted into his shoulder, living in a chair day and night.
There was fire up there somewhere, fuel burning, smoke blowing out of a ventilation duct, then smoke outside the window, crawling down the surface of the building.
He unbent Rumsey’s index finger and removed the broken mug.
He got to his feet and looked at him. He talked to him. He told him he could not wheel him out in the chair, wheels or not, because debris everywhere, he talked quickly, debris blocking door and hall, talking quickly to get himself to think in like manner.
Things began to fall, one thing and then another, things singly at first, coming down out of the gap in the ceiling, and he tried lifting Rumsey out of the chair. Then something outside, going past the window. Something went past the window, then he saw it. First it went and was gone and then he saw it and had to stand a moment staring out at nothing, holding Rumsey under the arms.
He could not stop seeing it, twenty feet away, an instant of something sideways, going past the window, white shirt, hand up, falling before he saw it. Debris in clusters came down now. There were echoes sounding down the floors and wires snapping at his face and white powder everywhere. He stood through it, holding Rumsey. The glass partition shattered. Something came down and there was a noise and then the glass shivered and broke and then the wall gave way behind him.
It took some time to push himself up and out. His face felt like a hundred pinpoint fires and it was hard to breathe. He found Rumsey in the smoke and dust, facedown in the rubble and bleeding badly. He tried to lift him and turn him and found he couldn’t use his left hand but was able to turn him partly.
He wanted to raise him onto his shoulder, using his left forearm to help guide the upper body while he grabbed the belt with his right hand and tried to snatch and lift.
He began to lift, his face warm with the blood on Rumsey’s shirt, blood and dust. The man jumped in his grip. There was a noise in his throat, abrupt, a half second, half gasp, and then blood from somewhere, floating, and Keith turned away, hand still clutching the man’s belt. He waited, trying to breathe. He looked at Rumsey, who’d fallen away from him, upper body lax, face barely belonging. The whole business of being Rumsey was in shambles now. Keith held tight to the belt buckle. He stood and looked at him and the man opened his eyes and died.
This is when he wondered what was happening here.
Paper was flying down the hallway, rattling in a wind that seemed to wash down from above.
There were dead, faintly seen, in offices to either side.
He climbed out over a fallen wall and made his way slowly toward the voices.
In the stairwell, in near dark, a woman carried a small tricycle tight to her chest, a thing for a three-year-old, handlebars framing her ribs.
They walked down, thousands, and he was in there with them. He walked in a long sleep, one step and then the next.
There was water running somewhere and voices in an odd distance, coming from another stairwell or an elevator bank, out in the dark somewhere.
It was hot and crowded and the pain in his face seemed to shrink his head. He thought his eyes and mouth were sinking into his skin.
Things came back to him in hazy visions, like half an eye staring. These were moments he’d lost as they were happening and he had to stop walking in order to stop seeing them. He stood looking into nothing. The woman with the tricycle, alongside, spoke to him, going past.
He smelled something dismal and understood it was him, things sticking to his skin, dust particles, smoke, some kind of oily grit on his face and hands mixing with the body slop, paste-like, with the blood and saliva and cold sweat, and it was himself he smelled, and Rumsey.
The size of it, the sheer physical dimensions, and he saw himself in it, the mass and scale, and the way the thing swayed, the slow and ghostly lean.
Someone took his arm and led him forward for a few steps and then he walked on his own, in his sleep, and for an instant he saw it again, going past the window, and this time he thought it was Rumsey. He confused it with Rumsey, the man falling sideways, arm out and up, like pointed up, like why am I here instead of there.
They had to wait at times, long stalled moments, and he looked straight ahead. When the line moved again he took a step down and then another. They talked to him several times, different people, and when this happened he closed his eyes, maybe because it meant he didn’t have to reply.
There was a man on the landing ahead, old man, smallish, sitting in shadow, knees up, resting. Some people spoke and he nodded his head okay, he waved them on nodding.
There was a woman’s shoe nearby, upside down. There was a briefcase on its side and the man had to lean to reach it. He extended a hand and pushed it with some effort toward the advancing line.
He said, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this. She fell and left it.”
People didn’t hear this or retain it or want to and they moved past, Keith moved past, the line beginning to wind down toward an area of some light.
It did not seem forever to him, the passage down. He had no sense of pace or rate. There was a glow stripe on the stairs that he hadn’t seen before and someone praying back in the line somewhere, in Spanish.
A man came up, moving quickly, in a hard hat, and they cleared a space, and then there were firemen, in full bulk, and they cleared a space.
Rumsey was the one in the chair. He understood that now. He had set him back down in the chair and they would find him and bring him down, and others.
There were voices up behind him, back on the stairs, one and then another in near echo, fugue voices, song voices in the rhythms of natural speech.
This goes down.
This goes down.
Pass it down.
He stopped again, second time or third, and people pushed around him and looked at him and told him to move. A woman took his arm to help and he didn’t move and she went on.
Pass it down.
This goes down.
This goes down.
The briefcase came down and around the stairwell, hand to hand, somebody left this, somebody lost this, this goes down, and he stood looking straight ahead and when the briefcase came to him, he reached his right hand across his body to take it, blankly, and then started down the stairs again.
There were long waits and others not so long and in time they were led down to the concourse level, beneath the plaza, and they moved past empty shops, locked shops, and they were running now, some of them, with water pouring in from somewhere. They came out onto the street, looking back, both towers burning, and soon they heard a high drumming rumble and saw smoke rolling down from the top of one tower, billowing out and down, methodically, floor to floor, and the tower falling, the south tower diving into the smoke, and they were running again.
The windblast sent people to the ground. A thunderhead of smoke and ash came moving toward them. The light drained dead away, bright day gone. They ran and fell and tried to get up, men with toweled heads, a woman blinded by debris, a woman calling someone’s name. The only light was vestigial now, the light of what comes after, carried in the residue of smashed matter, in the ash ruins of what was various and human, hovering in the air above.
He took one step and then the next, smoke blowing over him. He felt rubble underfoot and there was motion everywhere, people running, things flying past. He walked by the Easy Park sign, the Breakfast Special and Three Suits Cheap, and they went running past, losing shoes and money. He saw a woman with her hand in the air, like running to catch a bus.
He went past a line of fire trucks and they stood empty now, headlights flashing. He could not find himself in the things he saw and heard. Two men ran by with a stretcher, someone facedown, smoke seeping out of his hair and clothes. He watched them move into the stunned distance. That’s where everything was, all around him, falling away, street signs, people, things he could not name.
Then he saw a shirt come down out of the sky. He walked and saw it fall, arms waving like nothing in this life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DON DELILLO, the author of fourteen novels, including White Noise and Libra, has won many honors in this country and abroad, including the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his novel Underworld. He has also written three plays.