Ghost Town

by Patrick Mcgrath

  He slowly turned his head and stared at her.

  She said all this in a low, quiet voice, her arms wrapped tightly round her knees but with no other obvious signs of distress. She hammered at the window and ran back down the subway car—

  Dan asked her if she was sure it was him.

  She looked straight at him then, and her eyes, he said, seemed for a second or two to flare up as though they were about to burst into flame. Then they died once more into guardedness and opacity. Oh, she was sure. She had seen him quite clearly in that brief instant before the train went into the tunnel. She said she would never forget the expression on his face. What was the expression on his face? Grief. Grief and pain. Grief and pain and sorrow and loss and anger. A terrible quiet sad anger, and it was directed not at the men who had murdered him, but at her.

  Poor Danny. Again in deep waters. A brief rueful grin as he rubbed his skull and I gazed at him, thinking, this poor damaged man who loses himself in the problems of others so as to forget his own, and now what has he done? What has he gotten himself into now?

  —Go on, I said.

  She told him she spent several days in Grand Central after that, looking for him, and it was not difficult for me to imagine this distressed creature moving among the crowds of commuters, peering intently into the faces of hurrying men, accosting total strangers, showing them a photograph. In the immediate wake of the attacks there were many in the city who refused to give up hope, and continued to search for their lost loved ones despite overwhelming evidence that their loved ones were gone. Dan knew this, and he asked her what she thought the guy—Jay—would have said to her, if she’d found him in Grand Central. She’d leaned toward him, he said, a hand spread on the pillow and the bed-sheet slipping from her breasts—and it broke his heart, he said, her reply.

  —I don’t know. But he hates me now.

  She saw the plane go into the tower and she didn’t do anything to save him. What could she have done? Nothing, of course, but what aroused Dan’s pity was that she felt responsible for his death. And he understood that the dead man, or her projection of him, rather, this—what?—ghost?—did not merely materialize on the periphery of her consciousness, but that he was capable of states of feeling which directly affected her. He had agency.

  I have been in clinical practice in New York for many years, and I have encountered this before. In fact it is not uncommon, the conviction that one is being reproached by a loved one who has recently died. It is a function of unresolved guilt, and in acute cases there may be features of psychosis, as apparently there were here. I could have tidied her up in a couple of sessions, no great problem there, routine psychiatry; but as regards Danny, who was, after all, my primary concern, the situation was a little more complicated. He had observed the suffering of a woman he had hired for sex, and been affected by it—by her distress, I mean, at having seen what she took to be the ghost of her dead lover in a subway station in midtown Manhattan. He had been asked for sympathy and he had given it; he had been able to help a creature more vulnerable and needy than himself, and this was the source of the “rapport.” This is what gave him the feeling of connection. It was a flimsy foundation upon which to build.

  —Dan, did she “work” while she was seeing this man?

  —I don’t know. Does it matter?

  Does it matter. I said nothing. We sat there in silence. I made a note of this last interchange; it told me much. I was then struck by the idea of Dan hiring an escort for an hour, then having to employ his psychiatrist for a further hour to help him make sense of the experience; he was nothing if not mediated! He then told me he awoke on the Monday morning profoundly depressed. That would be September 17. He had been thinking about her all weekend. Another of those clear cloudless days, the sky deep blue, and a fierce Atlantic light seemed to bleach to utter naked clarity every building and every face he saw on the street. He walked to his law office, which was on Broadway just below Canal. In midtown it was all bustle and jostle, traffic snorting and fuming, a seemingly normal day in New York: people going to work, getting on with their lives, emphatically not prostrate with shock and grief; we New Yorkers are a tough breed, resilient, but the further south he got the more unreal the city became. There were soldiers in the streets, and cops everywhere. National Guardsmen. Emergency vehicles, road blocks, searches. Smoke was rising from the fallen towers and the air smelled very bad. Many people were wearing face masks, which compounded the air of surreality.

  His waiting room was crowded with unhappy people. Dan and his partner were working pro bono for downtown residents needing help with legal problems arising from the attacks. The first to come into his office was a woman who lived in Battery Park and wanted to make funeral arrangements for the husband she’d lost. She wanted closure, she said, for her children and for herself. But how could she have a funeral when she didn’t have a body? Then she wept, she wept uncontrollably, and Dan had to come round from the other side of the desk and comfort her. He worked without a break and by eight that evening he was exhausted. He had eaten nothing but a bagel all day. He thought he was done. He had already poured himself a second glass of wine, and put his feet up on the desk, when there came a tap on the door. Wearily he crossed the room and opened the door. It was her. The prostitute.

  She was as surprised as he was. They stood uncertainly in the doorway for a moment, then he brought her into the office and closed the door. She lifted her hands to his face and he was at once strongly aroused. At the same time he wanted to tell her that he would have to refer her to his partner, but her touch was like an electric current, he said, and certain structures of inhibition in him had been weakened by fatigue, by stress, by the wine he had drunk, and now with the woman’s fingers on his face he knew what was about to happen and did nothing to prevent it happening but accepted the inevitability of its happening and relinquished all responsibility. There was nothing clinical about it this time, rather the swift certain passion of two adults eager for physical penetration without delay. That is how it happened, as he described it to me, there on the couch in his office, her with her skirt hauled up to her hips, and him with his trousers at his knees, and tenderness played no part in it at all. But this time, he said, it wasn’t cold.

  He gave me his slightly canine expression here, wary and tentative but at the same time pleased with himself. Sexual guilt and sexual evasion had done much to exacerbate his problems with his mother. Encouraging him to talk frankly about his sex life seemed to help.

  —Go on, I said.

  When it was over she sat up on the couch and, with her back to him, straightened her skirt. Then without a word she crossed the floor and disappeared into his bathroom.

  Later they opened another bottle of wine. Not wise for a man with an empty stomach and no real head for alcohol, and I said this to him. I said I was concerned now. He seemed to have launched himself on a reckless trajectory with this woman, and he admitted that was true. Then there was the ethical side of the thing, and this troubled him considerably. They did talk about her legal difficulties, he said, all the ash and dust in her loft, the expense of living in a hotel and the landlord demanding full payment of rent even though she couldn’t get back into the building, all of which he said he could help her with.

  —You were trying to move the relationship onto a professional footing, I said.

  Dan looked sheepish. Not exactly. They went back to his apartment and he persuaded her to stay the night. He thought he was falling in love. He thought it was a kind of breakthrough for him.

  I let this pass in silence. They did sleep for a few hours. In the morning—another of those beautiful clear days which seemed to mock us that fall, when obscurity, fogs, rainstorms even, would have given the city some relief from the hard edges of an unbearable physical reality—she wrapped herself in his robe and went out onto the balcony where he had stood watching the towers burn. He heard her cry out.

  —What is it? he shouted.

  He leape
d from the bed and found her staring down at the street. She turned to him, her fingers spread across her mouth.

  —He must have been down there all night, she whispered.

  —Who?

  —Him. Jay.

  And then, said Dan, he felt as though he had crashed to earth. All at once he became leaden and weary and bored. He could see only the empty street, and the empty sky where the towers ought to have been. It depressed him horribly, that empty sky.

  —Nothing there, he said, in what she later told him was a tone of indifference.

  —Oh Dan, I murmured.

  I had heard this story, or variations on it, from him before. It was the old terror. He had not changed. It was how he drove them all away in the end. He had been unable to suppress the spurt of bad faith—quelled in an instant, but a real event, nonetheless—and the woman had recognized it even as she turned away in distress from whatever it was she had seen in the street below. He’d watched the door close behind her and the self-disgust had compounded inside him—

  Now he sat in my living room as the night came on, and his big shoulders heaved in the shadows. I stopped him here. I had only one question for him.

  —Do you want me to see her, Daniel? Don’t answer now. Think about it.

  The big man got up out of his chair and I walked him to the elevator. As the doors closed his eyes were on me, and his face was full of questions. I nodded, I smiled, I wanted to reassure him. But I was not at all happy about this relationship. He thought he was falling in love, and he may have been right, but he was falling in love with a prostitute. This was not appropriate for a man who, in emotional terms, was only just beginning to learn to walk. I needed to see her.

  Later that evening I wrote up my notes of the session. I wrote that so destructive had been the impact of the terror attacks on Dan’s psyche, they had in effect pushed him back to a more primitive stage of libidinal organization. Not only was he buying sex, he was buying a kind of spurious emotional intimacy with a woman who was more damaged than himself, and mistaking the comfort it gave him for love—a woman, in addition, who lived so close to the Trade Center she had seen the people falling, and been traumatized by the experience. I had not yet visited Ground Zero, but it seemed I could postpone it no longer.

  I went down that night, late, not wishing to be among a crowd of ghouls. I had the cab driver take Seventh Avenue to Varick. We were stopped at Canal by a soldier who questioned me before allowing us to proceed. For several blocks the streets were dark and empty. I got out at Worth and at once smelled an acrid, smoky odor, the source of which had been apparent for the last few minutes I’d been riding in the cab. To the south the night was lit with powerful artificial light, a pale, milky blue in color and framed by high buildings which boxed it in and gave the impression of a film set on a night shoot. Smoke was billowing up through this weird light, and I could see cranes moving about.

  I went south on West Broadway, which was deserted. All at once a group of men in hardhats emerged from out of the smoke, steamfitters or welders, or engineers perhaps, tramping up out of the smoking horror covered in dust and ash. They looked exhausted. I walked east on Chambers then, badly shaken, but determined to get as close as I could. I saw the circling lights of emergency vehicles, I heard sirens and also the steady background hum of heavy generators. There was another sound too, a steady rumbling and clanking and rattling, the sound of demolition and clearance, giant back-hoes and diesel excavators with huge shovels and hydraulic arms grappling debris and loading it into trucks: the big diggers.

  I reached Broadway and headed south toward the site. Across from City Hall the phone company was digging up the street. A sanitation truck went by, its yellow lights blinking, spraying water to keep down the dust. More barriers, the familiar NYPD trestles, painted blue, stencilled, familiar from a thousand street closures of one kind or another. Cops manned the barriers and talked to what few visitors were still about at this late hour. Not far from the Brooklyn Bridge I came level with the ruins. All that had once been familiar was strange to me now, and it was not easy to know what I was looking at. Down a side street—was it Fulton, or John?—I saw a high building torn open, its innards sheared off and spilling out, twisted beyond recognition and starkly illuminated by that unearthly blue light; at the sight of it I was viscerally awoken to the magnitude of the violence that had occurred here. When the towers came down, corkscrewing as they collapsed on themselves, they spewed out steel girders which tore open the walls of adjacent structures, and what I saw now was physical evidence of forces of an almost unimaginable destructive power.

  At Liberty Street, sick to my soul, I could go no further. I stood behind a police barrier among a small silent crowd and stared at what remained of the south tower. I saw in the glare of the floodlights fretted sections of the tower thrusting up from mountainous piles of smoking rubble, skewed from the true like tombstones in the nearby graveyard of Trinity Church. These monumental shards of the towers’ aluminum-faced columns with their slender gothic arches were all that remained standing, and I felt as though I were gazing at the wreckage of some vast modernist cathedral. The destruction reeked of hatred and evil, and it reeked, too, quite literally, of death. I am a psychiatrist. I do not believe in evil, I believe all human experience can be traced to the impress of prior events upon the mind—

  But this. As I began to walk back uptown I attempted to find a few sticks of thought with which to build a structure that might explain why those men had done what they had to us. To us. But I could not, and all at once I felt what was, for me, a most rare emotion, I felt rage—the sort of blind primitive destructive rage which I imagine drove those men to attack us as they did.

  Dan and I met again four days later, on October 3. It had not been easy for any of us. There had been no more terror attacks, but New York’s suffering was now compounded with the fear of biological assault. It seemed our water supply was susceptible to deliberate contamination, in fact there were rumors that it had already been poisoned, with the result that many people in the city, myself included, were drinking only bottled water now. The Bush people claimed they were working to strengthen our “biodefenses,” and smallpox vaccine was being stockpiled, some forty million doses of it. Who would be the lucky forty million, one wondered. We were not reassured to learn that our doctors were not trained to recognize the symptoms of smallpox, botulism, or bubonic plague, although they were getting better at identifying anthrax, as we now had at least two confirmed cases in Florida, one fatal. So to the various psychic afflictions that had come in the wake of the attacks, by which I mean feelings of dread and anxiety, nightmares, flashbacks, sleep disturbances—catastrophe sex and delusions of love—were now added paranoia and terror. And we were at war. There were troops on the ground in Afghanistan.

  We talked about all this. Dan mentioned the feeling of raw incredulity that would often take him by surprise, these strange days of late September and early October—can this be reality? reality in America?—as though, he said, glimpsing suddenly through the window of a spacecraft a world utterly alien, utterly different from the world he had come from; but then found his thoughts returning, unable to concentrate on what his city and his country had become, to the equally bewildering state of his own heart: the fact that he was falling in love with a woman he didn’t begin to understand.

  —No, I said, that’s what you need me for.

  In the flush and flood of his newfound happiness he gave me one of his rare grins, his face splitting open in a ramshackle fashion such that half of it was squeezed and creased by the side of his mouth that went upwards, the other half pulled taut by the side that went down. It was comical and endearing, and I thought: he is, at this moment, a child. At this moment he has regained the childish aspect of his nature. As though he had never been scarred and calloused and hardened, not at the deeper levels. But I knew that this flood of shallow feeling was only masking his damage, and that what he was experiencing was just the brief elati
on of a false liberation from phobic structures very securely embedded by his mother.

  But I said nothing of this. I asked him to tell me what happened next. After he’d driven her away with his indifference.

  He called her hotel several times, he said. He always left a message but she never returned his calls. When he finally went to the hotel, to wait for her there, all night if necessary, he was told she had gone home. He told the receptionist he was her attorney and produced his card. He said he had to reach her urgently, so she gave out the address.

  —You were prepared to sit there all night? I said.

  —Yes.

  —What if she’d been working?

  —I didn’t care. I had to see her.

  This I had never known in Dan before. He had never tried to find his way back to a woman, once he’d felt the impulse to flee. The next day he left his office at six and walked west across Tribeca to Duane Square. The dull roar of heavy machinery clanked and rattled from Ground Zero. A truck rolled by with buckled sections of steel girder lashed to it. He found her building and pushed the buzzer. It took what seemed a very long time for her to respond.

  —Who is it?

  —It’s me. Dan.

  —I’m coming down.

  There was a loud click and he pushed open the heavy industrial door. A bleak hallway with walls painted gray, a rack of mailboxes. To his left the rusty metal gate of a freight elevator. Dan could hear it slowly descending, the oddly terrible sounds of shivering metal and screaming cables. Then she was hauling open the heavy gate and he stepped in. The operating lever was made of brass and seemed to have come straight out of a Hudson River tugboat. As they clanked back up to the top of the building the woman stood stony-faced in the big dusty cage and Dan said nothing, thinking: at least I am in. Her T-shirt and jeans were smeared with ash. Her hair was tied up in a red scarf, and the sweat was streaming down her face. A smudged face mask hung round her neck on a thin elastic band. She was filthy, and—because of it, he said—more desirable to him than ever. After a silent eternity the elevator shuddered to a halt and she hauled the gate open and went through into the loft.