Doxology

by Nell Zink

  The city had lost all its cheapness. The finest burgers no longer cost five dollars but twelve. All the dollar-egg-and-cheese-on-a-roll snack bars had been turned into Au Bon Pains. Lunch at Aureole had broken the twenty-dollar mark. The rich were richer, and poverty had become impracticable. All over Manhattan the middle-aged middle class was standing in the wreckage of its defined-contribution retirement plan, waiting to lose its position in middle management. The economy kept on tightening, and with every turn of the capstan, more people dropped out, like undersized fish in a net. Daniel’s temp assignments no longer served the exclusive purpose of saving executives the stigma of vacant desks outside their offices. He was performing identifiable tasks as outsourced labor. He didn’t like it.

  He turned toward Pam one Saturday morning in bed and said, “I know this is a personal question, but how much money do you have, anyway? Did you lose anything in the crash?”

  Yuval didn’t offer himself or his employees 401(k) retirement accounts, because he was not the kind to defer gratification. But even without tax-exempt matching grants, Pam had been saving upward of a thousand dollars a month since moving in with Daniel. In the crash, she had lost precisely nothing. She replied, “That’s so cute. You’ve never read one of my bank statements?”

  “I don’t read other people’s mail!”

  “I have maybe a hundred K. I’m not sure.”

  “Thousand? It’s high time we got a bathtub in here, like one of those freestanding ones with claw-and-ball feet.”

  She said she didn’t think the floor would take the weight and that it was her retirement money. She provided a synopsis of the Katharine Hepburn movie Holiday. “I’m not putting off quitting until I’m a little old lady in tennis shoes,” she summed up.

  “I prefer the 1930 version with Mary Astor,” he replied, “where Edward Everett Horton gets more screen time.”

  “The problem is this town,” she said. “Who knows what rents are going to be like when we’re fifty? But if I put my money into a down payment to buy something, what do we live on?”

  “You’re forgetting two things. One, that you’re married to an economic powerhouse, and two, that anybody can make a fortune in real estate with no money down.”

  “Nope. If you don’t have money to play with, don’t invest it. It’s like going to the racetrack. You only take as much as you can afford to lose. How much do you have saved?”

  “Six hundred, maybe? I mean dollars, not thousands. Maybe I should be putting in for an allowance from you. Almost everything I make goes to rent, groceries, and paying Joe.”

  “You still pay Joe?!”

  “He takes care of my kid. Why would I not pay him?”

  THEY DIDN’T INVEST IN REAL ESTATE. THEY CLOSED DANIEL’S BANK ACCOUNT AND MADE him joint owner of Pam’s money.

  She had never found a reason not to trust him. The marriage might end sometime—it was only realistic to think that—but it wouldn’t be because her husband lied, cheated, stole, dissembled, or misled. He was as transparent and honest as a machine. His output was as good as his input. With regular maintenance, he might last forever.

  Sharing, however, had chopped her savings in half, and she considered getting depressed. She kept sleeping through boom-and-bust cycles, making nothing beyond her salary. RIACD was Yuval’s sole proprietorship. It turned a profit, but not in the new postmodern way, with extra zeroes behind every number. It still billed by the day. It churned steadily through the bowels of finance, tinkering with system-critical infrastructure, independent of happenings on the surface. As a regret minimization framework for a boom, it was deficient.

  Over the years, many employees had left to join startups, where some were paid in worthless shares, some in worthless options, and some in nothing at all. It was hard for Pam to get excited about startup odds while working on sure bets like life insurance. Still, the office was regularly abuzz with tales of IPOs cashing out on fantasy products—sucker VCs funding AI image recognition software that couldn’t tell a cat from a washing machine, that sort of thing—and although the tales made everybody sad, no one could crack the code of how other people made money for nothing.

  A client at a university library where she maintained RFID antitheft software invited her to a party at a startup in Williamsburg. The client said she wasn’t sure what the guys did (she’d been dating one of them for two months), but they were definitely making excellent money, even after the dot-com crash.

  Pam went to the party and took Yuval along. It was immediately obvious that they weren’t making excellent money. Seven developers were sharing a two-up, two-down row house. Bunk beds were involved. There was nothing to drink but beer. They were creating software that would enable the anonymous transfer of large sums of money across international borders. Their backers were in Manhattan, in the financial industry. If the project succeeded, it would be illegal. Federal law required that sums over $10,000 change hands under surveillance.

  When Yuval pointed this out to one of them—that they were taking their investors for a ride and exposing prospective customers to criminal liability—he denied it. He said it was like when an armaments startup develops a new gun. The product could be used in the commission of a crime or as a paperweight. The patent and SEC filings would say it was a paperweight. Besides, until they scaled it up, it was a paperweight, so it didn’t matter.

  Yuval said that his consultancy had a deep bench for issues of scalability and database recalcitrance. There was no answer. Pam remarked that Windows NT, clearly identifiable by its screensavers, was an odd choice of development environment for banking software. The developer said he had meant scaling up from the PowerPoint presentation to a video with music. They would start making the fund-raising video as soon as they were done designing the graphic interface.

  A deliveryman arrived with pizza. The party guests held out bouquets of one-dollar bills to defray costs. “Let’s scale up,” Yuval said. They decamped to Peter Luger for steaks and bourbon. That was Pam’s sum total firsthand experience of startups.

  IX.

  In the presidential race that crowned the millennium with ignominy, Daniel supported Ralph Nader of the Green Party USA. He had known the name since childhood. Nader’s organization, Common Cause, had coined his favorite slogan, “Unsafe at Any Speed.” It served him as a kind of tacit personal motto, complementing Pam’s motto, “Fast, Cheap & Out of Control,” which she had taken from the title of a movie, coincidentally also having to do with cars. As a basis of affection for a political candidate, it was eccentric, but not unusual.

  He fatigued his friends with his defense of third parties and his newfound interest in parliamentary democracy. Pam assured him he was wasting his time, because New York always goes Democratic. It was the Empire State’s machinelike reliability that gave her the right to be apolitical, and she felt he was doing her a disservice by working to disrupt it. But even Joe could tell there was something wrong about supporting a third party in a two-party system.

  The only friend Daniel had who was innocent enough to support Nader was Flora. He took her along canvassing on two successive Saturdays. For him, it was a sacrifice, but she loved canvassing. The difference was one of elevation. While he looked into strangers’ eyes and begged them to vote Green, she met their pets.

  Sometimes at home or on the street they played campaign rally, clapping and chanting “Unsafe! Unsafe! Unsafe at any speed!”

  In the voting booth on November 7, he summoned his inner Democrat and pulled the lever for Gore.

  The outcome of the nonelection, decreed in mid-December by majority vote of the Supreme Court in favor of George W. Bush, upset him greatly. It shook the foundations of Pam’s anarchism and outraged Ginger’s idealism. Even Edgar struggled to suppress his unease at the way the Supreme Court—of all people—had undermined the rule of law.

  In the months that followed, with his exaggerated post-evangelical interest in the state of Israel, Daniel couldn’t help but notice that t
here was a second intifada going on. The new president was taking a hard line with the Palestinians, blaming them for everything that went on in the Middle East. Daniel went around saying, “This can’t end well. It’s going to be Armageddon.”

  That helped prepare him for what came next.

  WHEN IT STARTED—WHEN HE HEARD FROM VICTOR, WHILE PASSING THROUGH THE shop on his way back from taking Flora to school, that an airplane had flown into the World Trade Center—his first thought was: This is World War III. He ran back to the school and brought her home.

  DOWN ON JOHN STREET, YUVAL STEPPED INTO PAM’S OFFICE TO SAY, “MY COUSIN AT THE World Trade Center just called me saying a plane hit the North Tower. They’re evacuating. She says it looks incredible. I’m going over to take pictures.”

  “That’s freaky,” Pam said, thinking reflexively of Flora.

  “So are you coming along or not?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “It’s a safe bet they’ll roadblock everything but emergency services. You won’t even get close.” She thought of Flora again, with greater urgency. “You know what? If you’re blowing out of here, so am I, because we both know their next move is going to be shutting down the subway.”

  There were three programmers watching cable news in the conference room, gasping, moaning, and speculating as though the event were a combination emoting competition and podium discussion. Pam looked in as she passed and saw the burning building on screen. She glanced out the window behind the programmers and saw sheets of paper drifting like confetti through the morning air over John Street. “You guys coming along?” she asked. “Me and Yuval are out of here.” Nobody moved. She added, “You sure? They’re going to seal the perimeter any second.”

  Yuval said, “Yalla, khevre. The office is closing.”

  “I’m not missing this,” one of the men said, pointing at the TV. “This changes everything.”

  Pam and Yuval shared an elevator. She walked east to Water Street to hail a taxi, and he walked west, staring at the thick gray smudge from the burning skyscraper. A short time later, he photographed the second plane crash, and soon after that, he fainted, having seen something no person should ever see. He was raised up by passersby and dragged to a waiting ambulance, which drove uptown, so that later he could joke about saving its crew’s lives.

  Another passerby picked up the expensive digital camera he lost and continued taking pictures of horrible things—people on fire, people smashed—until it was too late.

  GETTING A TAXI AT NINE FIFTEEN WAS A BREEZE. THE STREETS GOT EMPTIER AS PAM rolled north. Everyone was inside watching TV, gathered in stores and the few bars that were open in the morning. Her thoughts were even more cerebral than usual. She was in the throes of her first-ever vicarious out-of-body experience. She felt concern for the structural integrity of the towers, both of them full of people she was suddenly sure she’d never met. She didn’t worry about Flora, Daniel, Joe, or even Yuval. She passed a shop owner who was nailing boards across his doorway. It reminded her of the second day after the Rodney King verdict, when office workers all over Manhattan called each other to get confirmation that an armed horde of black people was following Al Sharpton over the Brooklyn Bridge. It seemed to her like that kind of unjustified paranoia.

  In the shop, Margie was rocking back and forth in front of the TV, as though reliving some kind of war trauma. Pam hugged her and said everything would be fine. Victor was taking all the bottled water off the shelves to hoard it in the basement. Upstairs she found Daniel and Flora packed as if for an excursion, with day packs and picnic supplies. Her day pack was also ready to go. Daniel had thought of everything, even toiletries.

  “Daddy came and got me from school,” Flora said.

  “Do you know what just happened?” he asked. He had his portable radio in his T-shirt pocket and one earbud in. He motioned with his palm down for quiet. Pam shook her head, and he looked at Flora.

  “Airplanes flew in the World Trade Center,” Flora said.

  “More than one?” Pam said.

  “They’re on fire and spewing asbestos in all directions. I couldn’t get through on your cell. But I knew you’d be home by now, because you’re the world’s smartest woman. The Pentagon too. All hell’s breaking loose. Nothing’s running. It’s Armageddon, and this town is a deer in the headlights.”

  “Holy cow,” Pam said. “So what’s our plan?”

  “Go to your parents’ place. If this is World War Three, nowhere is safer than Washington. Even if it’s under attack. Especially then. It’s a symbolic place where nothing important happens. Plus it’ll stop them from worrying about us.”

  “True enough. There’s nothing vital in D.C. Even the Pentagon’s somewhere else. But it’s weird they haven’t called.”

  “The cell network’s down. But right before everything went to hell, I found a rental car, right on the other side of the Manhattan Bridge. All we have to do is walk across, so let’s get moving.”

  “Wait a second,” Pam said. “Let me try my corporate account.”

  She fished a business card out of her wallet and went downstairs to the store. Victor offered her a half gallon of water as a present. She called RIACD’s travel agent from the store’s landline. The agent said she had a Hertz car for her on West Houston and that she was lucky she wasn’t trying to get a car at the airport, because air travel was a madhouse—completely shut down.

  She booked the car.

  The little family left home and walked in a long zigzag toward the northwest. All the empty cabs were headed south, to pick people up. Crowds were gathered at every major intersection, looking south, but never for long. Sirens screeched over the roaring background noise like giant seagulls over giant surf. They were crossing Lafayette on Houston when the South Tower fell. For a few moments they stood still, right in the middle of Lafayette. Pam held Flora’s face to her abdomen, as though she wanted to put her back inside. But Daniel tugged them onward toward the rental car, which was looking to him like the best idea he ever had. He felt as proud as a frontiersman.

  They were the last customers before the clerk knocked off work to watch TV for a week. The storefront was ghostly quiet. Solemnity was in the air.

  Daniel took the driver’s seat, and Pam sat in the back with Flora, who asked where Joe was and why he wasn’t coming.

  “He lives on Nineteenth Street,” Pam explained. “He’s so far uptown, he missed the whole thing. We’ll call him as soon as we get to Grandma and Grandpa’s.”

  “He was going to maybe go to this party at NYU,” Daniel said. “But he might be out of town.”

  TRAFFIC WAS NOT GOOD. THE WEST SIDE HIGHWAY HAD CLOSED, AND A LOT OF INCOMING commuters were turning around and unsure where to go. When they got to the George Washington Bridge, it had been closed for half an hour. They had to take the Tappan Zee Bridge to the Garden State Parkway, because Interstate 95 was also closed.

  Looking south as they crossed the Tappan Zee, they could see that something was wrong. They could almost see how wrong it was. There was a dark cloud roiling in the sky. There were F-14 fighter jets zooming around. The radio gave conflicting reports.

  Daniel wondered aloud why more people weren’t leaving town, but mostly to show off how proud he was that he had left. “This car was too cheap,” Pam replied. “I’m getting this idea for a demand-surge repricing algorithm. It’s just basic calculus.”

  “We’re not seeing anything on TV!” Flora complained.

  “The TV people don’t know the story yet,” Daniel reassured her. “They’ll be looking at pictures and saying all kinds of crazy stuff, like with the Challenger disaster. We’ll watch the highlight reel when we get to Washington, and tomorrow we’ll watch TV all day, I promise.”

  “No school?” Flora bounced in joyful anticipation of no school.

  JOE WOKE UP TOWARD NOON IN GWEN’S STUDIO IN SOHO, WHERE HE’D CRASHED AFTER attending a student theater premiere, and got the news from a Bloomberg alert on his BlackBerry. Im
mediately he worried about her. He couldn’t reach her on the phone, so he caught a cab to her place on Fifty-Fourth Street.

  She was devastated. “I have so many friends who work downtown,” she said, “and I can’t get through to any of them!” Fortunately for her, she meant people who worked in bars, clubs, and restaurants, none of them likely to be anywhere near work at nine o’clock on a Tuesday. Residential development downtown was mostly confined to Battery Park City, and her friends were much too creative to buy in a place like that. They lived in Tribeca, Soho, the East Village, and, in one case (an older woman who gave Gwen individual instruction in yoga and could be relied on as a source of natural hallucinogens such as Hawaiian baby woodrose), Park Slope.

  “That’s voracious!” Joe said, misusing a word he’d only seen in print and took to be the opposite of “bodacious.”

  “It sucks ass,” she said.

  “Oh, it’s universally in violation, like tapeworms squared,” he agreed. “Is there anything righteous I can do for you? Maybe some grocery shopping?”

  That question reminded her that she had needs—strong emotional needs that were probably going to be extra intense on this special day. She told Joe she didn’t need anything. He suggested pizza. She agreed to eat some pizza.

  While he was out getting them each one slice of pepperoni from a place on Fifty-First, she called her dealer Kenneth to ask if he had works. She wanted to inject heroin for a change, instead of just snorting it. She would combat the stress by spoiling herself, the way another person might observe a special occasion such as a divorce or the death of a parent by booking a week in a wellness spa.

  Kenneth was still there when Joe returned. He had just hit Gwen’s arm vein and offered to do Joe. “It’s so good,” she said to encourage him. “Oh, my. Mm-mm good.”

  “It makes you sleepy. How is that fun?”

  “It’s relaxing, and if you inject it you don’t get addicted,” she said. She meant in her particular case, because she didn’t have the nerve to inject herself and always had to call for help. She couldn’t do it with addictive frequency unless her dealer was also her boyfriend. “With all the shit that’s going down out there, we need something like this to keep from getting freaked out,” she added.