The 15:17 to Paris

by Anthony Sadler

  FOR HIS PART, Anthony chose to do his first big interview with Lester Holt. Not just because Holt anchored the highest-rated evening news broadcast, reaching almost ten million people every night. Anthony chose him because Holt was a Sacramento State alum, and he went to high school down the street from where Anthony grew up. The more globally known Anthony became, the more those local connections began to mean. It was funny, then, that though they grew up spitting distance from one another, Anthony had to go all the way to New York to meet him. Farther even, all the way to France to win the invitation.

  But this was Anthony’s first time in New York City, and he was without the other two. He hadn’t talked to Spencer much, hardly at all except for the one call, when Spencer told him about the girl and the body shot, and the kid who made him cry.

  He taped his interview in a big open room that seemed to be a swanky, modernist, minimalist loft, like the whole floor was that one room and all it had in it was a table and two glasses of water. And Lester.

  By that point he’d gotten pretty good at telling the story, but there was one part that he still hadn’t accepted. A question he was dodging, whenever it came up, without even realizing that’s what he was doing.

  “You must have played in your mind,” Holt said, after they’d dispensed with pleasantries and a few minutes of small talk, “how easily this could have gone the other way.”

  Anthony responded by using Holt’s own words as a life raft. “I’ve kind of laid down and thought, just how easily things could have gone . . . ” but he wasn’t actually thinking of how it all could have gone the other way. He was thinking about that tiny world he and Spencer and Alek had inhabited, that single train car. “He did fire at Spencer,” Anthony said, “but it never went off.”

  When he thought about things turning out differently, he was only thinking about what could have happened to the people on the car he was on. Those memories were so powerful he hadn’t yet lifted up, zoomed around the train, counted up all the souls on board. It felt like they’d saved Mark’s life, and saved themselves, and that was it, and that was enough.

  It turned out he was in the right place for the whole entire size of it to hit him.

  41.

  LEE ADLER WAS a forty-eight year-old programmer, a man with a mind that could generate ideas for computer programs without working them out on paper first. They came to him like songs came to some songwriters, already arranged in his head. It helped that he was a brilliant scientist, a PhD in nuclear chemistry, but he came across more as a teddy bear than a nerd. He coached his daughter’s sports teams, spoiled his wife and his pets, gave people gifts on his birthday, and spent his days working high above Lower Manhattan at eSpeed, a division of the trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald.

  Across the floor, a well-built thirty-three-year-old man with dark wavy hair named Anthony Perez also worked as a computer specialist for Cantor Fitzgerald. Perez had done a stint as a stockbroker that didn’t go so well, so he moved to computers, and took his new passion home, building high-performing PCs for his children out of spare parts.

  Other than working on computers, working for Cantor Fitzgerald, and working on the same floor of the same building, the other thing these two men had in common was that both were at work by a quarter to nine on the crystal-clear September morning when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. The plane struck three floors below where both men sat. Neither made it out.

  Years later, when a memorial for the victims of the 9/11 attacks was being developed, planners decided to place the names of those who died in the north tower on a series of plaques surrounding a reflecting pool, and those who died in the south tower around another, and to enter their names into a specially designed algorithm that also processed requests for names to be placed together. Names of people who knew each other, or who had tried to help one another escape, or who had died together. The program told planners which names to put on which plaque, and in what order, and it told them to place two names in particular, one just above the other, on plaque N-37 on the north-facing side of the north pool.

  During his brief visit to New York that day, Anthony Sadler approached the memorial from uptown, so the first panel he saw when he walked up to the pool was N-37. His eyes flitted across the bronze, scanning the names. All the letters danced and clouded together; the name ANTHONY PEREZ crossed in his vision with the name LEE ADLER, and for just an instant, a small fraction of a second, it looked like ANTHONY SADLER was inscribed on the memorial, along with all the victims.

  He felt unsteady. His own name among thousands dead. For the first time he felt the weight of it, more than just him and Spencer and Alek and a few other people in a single train car.

  Now he felt part of something much bigger.

  Now he no longer just knew that all these coincidences had stopped something awful; he could feel it. He could feel how close he was. He felt what could have happened if their fates had resolved themselves just a little differently, if prayers had been heard or ignored or interpreted differently by whomever was up there processing prayers. He felt it as an instant of fission, static on a TV screen briefly resolving to show a different picture on the wrong channel, a glimpse of a different future.

  He felt how insignificant he was. How much dumb luck, or coincidence, or God, or whatever, had conspired to keep him alive. And when he lifted his eyes, what struck him next was what he knew struck everybody who visited: just how massive it all was. The size of it bowled him over. How much physical space had changed in an instant. How much matter was removed, two huge structures gone, along with all the people occupying them. Giant skyscrapers reaching up all around, and despite the quiet, he could almost hear, and he could certainly feel, the chaos from two buildings coming down in the middle of this crowded city, the souls reaching up from the black of the reflecting pools. It was no longer something foreign that had happened across the country, a tragedy suffered by other people, running, terror-stricken people for whom he felt terrible but who could have just as easily been running from a radioactive monster in 1950s Tokyo. Now it was real. Now it was something he could understand and feel. He was tiny compared to this giant, gaping absence.

  And his tiny role, stepping in front of something like this. “You stopped our 9/11.” Hadn’t someone in Paris said that?

  He hadn’t thought much of it when he was in Paris. But now he was forced to understand and see what “this could have gone the other way” really meant. What “you stopped our 9/11” actually felt like.

  Before him was what uninterrupted terrorists leave behind. The 9/11 memorial at the World Trade Center changed how Anthony felt about what they’d done. It was no longer “How cool is it that we just stopped a terrorist!” It was no longer champagne and hotel robes in the ambassador’s residence. Now there was a gravity that pulled him down so hard it almost paralyzed him. He began to feel what would have happened if they hadn’t been there. If this had gone the other way. Not just for him and his friends, but for a whole train; a city. It became something huge and crushing. Anthony put his hands on the panel and lowered his head.

  For a time he was still, listening to the low babble of water disappearing down into the pools, and leaning on the bronze panels, just thinking . . . thinking, listening to the rush of wind.

  * * *

  THE RUSH OF WIND past the train grows quieter; Anthony realizes this only as they finish tying up the terrorist. He notices the train is slowing only now that it’s almost stopped. It’s a machine that runs so smoothly that moving and not moving feel almost the same. He’s too busy to pay attention to extraneous senses, his sight locked in a tangle of limbs and dead weight, because even though the terrorist is no longer conscious he still seems to be resisting. How heavy a man is, Anthony thinks, even a skinny man like this. He’s hard to move, hard to manipulate, like he has lead in his bones.

  “Going to go check the other cars.” Anthony doesn’t know exactly what Alek is doin
g, but he’s taken the gun with him. Alek’s expression has not changed. It’s just Alek.

  The space is tight and awkward. They do not have the right supplies, they do not have handcuffs or rope, so they are binding him up with someone’s necktie. Anthony doesn’t know whose necktie. Certainly not his. And it also can’t be Spencer’s or Alek’s because the three of them are wearing shorts and T-shirts.

  Anthony tests the knots; they seem secure. The terrorist is restrained; he will not be able to move. Anthony turns to see what’s going on elsewhere in the train car.

  How did he not see? Just feet away, almost close enough to reach out and touch, a man is sitting in a seat and bleeding profusely. Where did he come from? When did he get there? Anthony’s vision is so tightly focused on what’s in front of him that he has jettisoned his ability to recognize distractions, and some system in his brain placed disabling a gunman on a hierarchy above addressing possible victims. Now it’s as if with one task accomplished, he’s ratcheted on to the next and it has materialized in front of him like a hologram. A man two seats away, dying of blood loss.

  Only “blood loss” does not do it justice: the man is geysering blood, a ridiculous amount of blood; his shirt is soaked through and the blood is spurting across the aisle like a fire hose—how can a person produce that much blood? Anthony thinks this man has been stabbed, because the blood is gushing from a hole in the man’s neck like in a horror movie, and Anthony does not know that in fact he’s been shot, but he locks eyes with him just long enough to see the man’s pupils spin up and disappear into his head and his body collapse forward out of the seat. He tumbles over his arm so that when he lands, it sticks out from under his body at a grotesque angle like it belongs to someone else, and acts as a shiv, propping his torso up just enough that Anthony can now see the pool of blood spreading in the aisle like it has intent, like the blood is trying to get out of the body and escape the train.

  Deep red blood, and Anthony knows from a class four months ago that this is arterial blood, so the man is actually in even worse trouble than he looks. This man is about to die.

  Anthony doesn’t say anything, there is no time for conversation; if the man is not dead already he has just seconds left. How could there be any blood left in him? Anthony needs something to compress the wound with and he needs it now. He is thinking about a towel. He is not precisely sure why that’s what he needs, but he knows from a TV show or class or perhaps just common sense that when there is blood loss you press the wound to stop it.

  Anthony is running. He’s weaving past the seats and keeping his balance like he’s carving up a zone defense, he reaches a hand out to knock the handle down so the door hisses open and he barely has to slow down, he turns sideways and squeezes through the opening door without breaking stride, and explodes into the next train car, where passengers are still huddled.

  “Does anybody speak English?”

  “Yeah,” “Me,” “I speak some.”

  “Does anybody have a towel?”

  Silence; nobody says a word, they don’t know what’s going on, did he say it too loudly? Did he not say it at all? Did they not understand? They are all panicked. He can see the fear etched onto their faces, and they are looking at him dumbly; he thinks these people have no idea what’s going on and at just that moment their confusion fuses with his own and he thinks, What am I going to do with a towel? A towel is not going to stop it.

  Now he is running back to the pile of limbs, he will not be able to communicate what he needs to strangers, what he needs are his friends, he has the powerful intuition that one of his friends can help him save this dying man, he is not thinking exactly that Spencer is an EMT, he is not thinking of why Spencer might know what to do, it is not such a clear thought, it is just a powerful sense that the only way he can prevent this man from dying is with the help of his friends, and when he crashes back into the car Alek is gone, but Spencer is there, still on his hands and knees over the terrorist. “Spencer, we’ve got to do something.”

  “What?”

  “We gotta do something. This guy is gonna die.”

  “Where’s he at?”

  “Right there, he’s right behind you. I don’t know. I don’t know what to fucking do.”

  Spencer doesn’t even stand up. He turns around on all fours and crawls over to the dying man. He says, “I’m going to try and find where he’s bleeding from.” Spencer wipes blood from his own face, and puts his fingers into the man’s neck. He feels around, then presses down hard. The bleeding stops immediately. Anthony can’t believe how quickly it works. Spencer is magic.

  “Don’t move,” Spencer is saying to the man, “or I’ll lose the hole.”

  Anthony finds a first-aid kit in his hands, but can’t remember how it got there. Is he so powerful he’s summoning things to himself just by thinking about them? He dumps the kit out on the floor next to Spencer and begins rummaging through the pile, explaining to Spencer what’s inside, holding things up one at a time in front of Spencer, to see if Spencer thinks any of it can help.

  “Tape?”

  “It won’t help.”

  “Gauze.”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Neosporin?”

  “No.”

  “Peroxide?”

  “I’m not worried about infection right now.”

  “This looks like an ACE bandage.”

  “No.”

  “Scissors?”

  “No. Wait—yeah, give me the scissors.”

  Alek takes the scissors. Alek is back from wherever Alek went. Alek is still the same monotone Alek. “I’ll do a blood sweep.”

  He cuts the back of the man’s shirt and feels around his body. Alek must have known from Afghanistan how to do that.

  The man complains, “My arm, guys, guys, my arm hurts. You’ve got to get my arm out from underneath me.”

  Anthony stands watch, in case Spencer needs anything. “We’re not worried about your arm right now,” Spencer tells the man.”

  “My arm hurts. Can we move just a little?”

  Why is he even thinking about his arm? Does he not feel the hole in his neck?

  He groans. He complains. For ten minutes he keeps complaining about his arm being stuck, as if there was no wound in neck.

  Spencer is angry now. The situation below Anthony is tenuous; he doesn’t know how Spencer stopped the bleeding but however he did it, Anthony doesn’t think he can count on the man on the floor surviving much longer without some kind of equipment. This man needs a hospital.

  Spencer is cursing. “Why is the fucking train not moving?”

  Anthony tells him that it’s stopped, probably they stopped it when the attack started. Someone hears the message, their confusion is communicated, and somehow the train starts again, it picks up speed; soon it’s whirring along smoothly, and Anthony is again astounded by how amazingly quiet it is. How strangely calm everyone is. The train moves on, toward some unknown station. In this train car, this strange chamber, Anthony and his friends control what they can. Other people, other forces, have decided what their destination is.

  Anthony doesn’t know where they’re going. He just senses that bizarre calm. Did that just happen? It feels like a dream, or like being on a drug.

  * * *

  42.

  JIMMY FALLON’S DRESSING ROOM was trippy. It was some kind of forest theme, maybe an inside joke, or a bad high. The walls looked like bark, a little fox statue stood in one corner, a mushroom-shaped stool in another. It seemed to be a room designed by people who liked to get high. Or for them. It was stocked with snacks and gifts for the guests, but those were weird too. All organic everything. Organic chocolates, organic nuts, organic this, organic that. The more organic, the more acutely Anthony’s gag reflex activated. For a guy like him who didn’t like soda in Europe because it didn’t have enough artificial sweetener, the food in Fallon’s dressing room was inedible.

  Who liked this kind of stuff? The whole room felt like it w
as designed for some kind of tree-dwelling troll hippy with an aversion to corn syrup. And the gift was a pair of UGG slippers. If Anthony went back to where he was from wearing UGGs . . . Fallon’s sense of humor clearly didn’t stop on the stage.

  From the dressing room, Anthony watched Fallon tape interviews with earlier guests; he heard someone approach outside the dressing room and turned from the TV to see the no-bullshit Irish-American Hollywood fixer Ray Donovan.

  Or not Ray Donovan, but the man who plays the character on the Showtime series, the actor Liev Schreiber. He introduced himself. A funny thing about famous people: they have to at least pretend you don’t already know who they are.

  “That’s crazy, what you guys did,” Schreiber said.

  “Man, it’s crazy that I’m meeting you! I was literally just watching Ray Donovan before I left for the trip.”

  “Oh, thanks, that’s nice to hear.” Schreiber’s voice was quiet, gravelly. “But what you guys did just took balls.”

  It suddenly occurred to Anthony that even though he was having a conversation with a movie star, a man who’d literally played a Marvel hero on screen, it actually didn’t feel unnatural. Which itself felt weird. It was somehow natural and weird at the same time; weird that it was natural. It was like he was on autopilot. He just knew what to do. He’d always planned on being famous, practicing his autograph with a star for the A, but always figured he’d have to get over nerves when he went out to speak in public, which he knew was a thing you had to do every once in a while if you got famous.