by Greg Smith
Pedestrians were not permitted below Chambers Street. A police barricade at Broadway forced him to head west on Chambers. By luck – or divine intervention he would think later – he stumbled upon PS #234.
PS #234 was an abandoned public school building at Greenwich and Chambers that had been set up as a full-scale support facility. In contrast to the surrounding area, the place was a hive of activity. He watched as groups of firemen and construction workers arrived from Ground Zero, disappeared inside the complex. Streams of volunteers also left the school, fully rested, fed, equipped, to return to the WTC site. Vehicles arrived regularly to drop off supplies. The movement was constant.
Security was lax enough for him to slip through the gate, enter the schoolyard. Which was functioning as a supply depot. He grabbed a hard hat from a bin, put it on. It wasn’t difficult to find work boots. Finding size fourteen proved to be the challenge. He settled on a pair of thirteens. Despite the snug fit. He also secured a fluorescent green vest, a backpack, a ventilator.
The amount of supplies at the school was staggering. Coveralls. Work boots. Hard hats. Ponchos. Rain gear. Work gloves. Kneepads. Respirators. Anti-bacterial wipes. Eye wash. Waterless soap and cleansers. Bottled water and Gatorade. Flashlights. Batteries. Duct tape. Metal-cutting saw blades. Rebar cutting tools. Tool chargers. Portable generators. Fuel and fuel cans. All donated and amassed in the few hours since the Towers had collapsed.
Eye-wash stations had been set up everywhere.
A young man in a Red Cross t-shirt appeared to be in charge. Volunteers approached him with a myriad of questions. Which he answered with much pointing and gesturing. Though incredibly animated, he appeared to be on the fringe of exhaustion. Somehow, he persevered. Organizing the immense mass of supplies. Prioritizing tasks. Ordering the setup of areas for triage, hot meals, sleeping cots, chiropractic care, water supplies, rest rooms and more.
Every square foot of the school complex was being utilized. The cafeteria had been set up as a feeding center. The gym was a medical center. The upper floors were being used for sleeping zones. The hallways were lined with supply bins. There were also several chiropractic and massage stations.
Once outfitted, the jogger grabbed a five-gallon bucket and a small shovel. He knew he’d need an ID to get through the checkpoints, so he stayed alert for the opportunity to “borrow” one. It wasn’t long before he noticed a weary volunteer stop to take advantage of a chiropractic station. The man slipped his coat off, along with his lanyard, set them on a chair before draping himself over the drop table for a spinal adjustment. The jogger deftly lifted the man’s ID, slipped it around his own neck. He fell in with a group of volunteers, headed out.
The trip into Ground Zero was easier than he’d anticipated. At each checkpoint, he simply held up the stolen ID, strolled past. He was never questioned.
Ground Zero was overwhelming in both size and scope. Sixteen city blocks. Forty acres. Two one-hundred-and-ten-story structures compressed into a five-story heap of jagged concrete, metal and wire.
The Pile.
Several crushed, blackened buildings, huddled like curious onlookers, formed the perimeter of the site. Their glass windows blown out, their facades stared blindly at the wreckage splayed before them. Many of these witnesses to the horror had been pierced by giant steel-girder arrows. The peril of their front-row vantage point.
Adding to the debris from the Towers and other buildings were dozens of destroyed police and emergency vehicles.
The number of people scurrying about was immeasurable. Their activity frenzied, though purposeful. In addition to police, firefighters, EMTs and medical staffers, there were National guardsmen, marines and other military personnel. Ironworkers, heavy equipment operators, steelworkers and a host of other tradesmen swarmed over The Pile like insects. Bulldozers, cranes, front-end loaders, dump trucks, and excavators lined the perimeter. Along with fire trucks, police cruisers and ambulances. The noise and commotion was constant, chaotic, clamorous.
Firefighters shot water onto the smoldering heap from trucks with ladders fully extended. Cranes carried rescuers in cages up and over The Pile, swung them along slowly as they sought survivors. Ironworkers cut through steel girders. Grabbers – bulldozers equipped with pincers – pulled at the mess of steel, loading fragments onto flat-bed semis for hauling away to Battery Park and, eventually, to a holding area on Staten Island. Firemen garbed in hardhats, respirators, heavy work jackets and turnout pants searched the rubble for voids. Frequently disappearing then reappearing moments later. Rescue dogs sniffed for signs of life, occasionally barking frenziedly, digging into the debris to find only human remains. Not a single living being. There was no one to rescue.
The Pile stingily surrendered no survivors. And only begrudgingly relinquished its dead.
On every available surface along the edges of the rubble – wherever they could find a suitable place– exhausted, dust-covered men sprawled to grab whatever reprieve they could steal. Before slogging once again back to the unrelenting struggle.
It was especially disturbing to see the looks of utter loss and hopelessness on the strained, tired faces of the workers. Who were predominantly male. Usually brave and stoic in the face of disaster, many had streaks running from their red-rimmed eyes to their jawline. Where tears had blazed trails of sorrow through the grit and the dust.
In the midst of it all, the jogger felt miniscule. A single, microscopic pixel in the colossal portrait of the aftermath of catastrophe. His mental camera zoomed out to visualize the area from above. The illusory image resembling a toddler’s sandbox diorama gone schizoid. He zoomed back to actuality. To the chaos and disorder that were the remains of the collapsed Towers.
Somewhere in all that mess and muddle was Binyak. Dead. Lifeless.
Gone.
Volunteers had formed dozens of bucket brigades. The jogger randomly selected one, stepped into a spot. For the next several hours, he helped pass five-gallon buckets of debris from The Pile down the line to sifters, who searched for evidence and human remains. He spent the entire day working on The Pile. Taking only an occasional break. He accepted water from other volunteers when offered, but made no conversation. He kept his respirator on. Both to diminish the stench and to keep from breathing the dust and ash. The cremains of the dead.
Of Binyak.
He worked like an automaton. Silent. Thoughtless. Numbed by the sheer enormity of the devastation. While he tried not to think about the human casualties, he couldn’t stop the thoughts completely. Especially the single, pervasive thought that somewhere in all that rubble, amid all that fusion of brick and mortar and concrete and steel and…and…human remains – of flesh and bone – was Binyak. Disintegrated. Pulverized. Shredded.
He could be in any one of these buckets. Parts of him anyway.
The tall man retched suddenly, had to step away to vomit onto a concrete slab. Adding his own DNA to the wreckage.
“It’s okay, brother,” a fireman called out to him. “It hits us all. Take a break, man Get it out.”
The jogger rinsed his mouth, drank some water, took his place back in line. As he handed the next bucket off to the next link in the human chain, he fell into a state of numb, unemotional detachment. He blocked out all thoughts of Binyak. Of Connie. Of other victims. Passing off bucket after bucket of debris took no cognitive skill. No intellectual energy. He simply worked without thinking about what he was doing.
He found himself focusing on a chunk of concrete rubble. A section with a shaft of rebar passing through it. He wondered how that jagged piece had fit into the disassembled jigsaw puzzle that had been the World Trade Center complex.
He noticed a fragment of steel. Speculated it could have once been a metal stud in a wall of an office. A length of wire cable may have fed electricity to a light in the mezzanine. And so on. And so on. Slowly, the jogger pieced the Towers together again, reversing the collapse of each structure.
If only it were that simple. Rev
erse it. A do-over.
But, all the king’s horses, and all the king’s men, couldn’t put…
He hoped he wouldn’t see any parts of Humpty.
He eventually stopped thinking about anything at all. Hours passed. Darkness arrived. Creeping in like a silent army of ninjas. Bringing with it sheer exhaustion. Hunger. Mental fatigue. The Pile was illuminated for around-the-clock work. The jogger, however, had reached his limit. He wandered back to PS #234, collapsed onto a cot.
No memories of his altercation with Binyak interrupted his sleep that night.
The jogger returned to work the bucket brigade the following morning. The Pile had not perceivably diminished overnight. Despite continuous excavation. It was no less imposing. No less intimidating. He fell immediately into his routine. His body unconsciously going through the mechanized motions of reaching for a bucket, passing it to the next volunteer, reaching for the next bucket. Just one segment of a human conveyor belt. The work was tedious. Thankless.
The emotional component of his identity soon ceased to function. He allowed himself to feel nothing. No empathy. No sorrow. It was his way of persevering through the overwhelming circumstances. Of dealing with the disturbing fact that the catastrophe of 9/11 had taken place. That the inconceivable had, in fact, been conceived. Incubated. Hatched. It was his way of coping with the unconscionable death of Binyak.
He dealt with it by not dealing with it at all. By simply removing himself from time and space. Like a victim of abuse creating multiple personalities. Except he had no multitude of personalities to draw upon. He had only The Automaton. The worker robot.
The Automaton worked long into the evening of that second day. Until fatigue forced him to quit, head back to PS #234. To once again eat, shower, rest.
He had no idea the twin brother he thought he’d killed was just blocks away. In the care of a kind-hearted Romanian woman named Nadia and her “Uncle” Griggor. Sleeping, after sustaining the head injury the jogger had inflicted upon him.
• • • • •
CHAPTER 11
On the day the stranger entered her life, Nadia Nicolescu was forty-three years old, a widow and childless. She was the sole owner of Nadia’s, a restaurant in New York City’s Greenwich Village that featured Romanian, Hungarian and other Eastern European cuisine.
A Romanian immigrant, she’d been raised by her bunica – her grandmother – in the city of Brasov, Transylvania. Until the age of fourteen, when Magda Tchaikova decided Romania was no place to raise her granddaughter. They’d emigrated to New York City, where Magda had a family connection. A cousin who’d emigrated years earlier. The cousin had contacts who helped Magda short-circuit the path to naturalized citizenship. He also bankrolled Madam Magda’s, a restaurant specializing in Romanian cuisine. The restaurant took up the lower level of a three-story brownstone, the second floor accommodated a small two-bedroom apartment where Magda and Nadia lived. The third level accommodated a variety of interesting characters over the years. Had been empty since Magda’s death. Nadia just hadn’t wanted to be bothered letting it out.
Magda’s cousin was twenty years younger than she. Only thirty-nine years old, he was prematurely grey, looked older than his years. He was slightly built and of average height. He was a soft-spoken man with a sordid background. Magda, and Magda alone, called him by his birth name. Dragos. To everyone else, he was Grigore (Gri • GORE • ee) or Griggor. He would become a frequent visitor to the restaurant. A permanent fixture in the lives of Magda and her granddaughter. To whom he quickly became a father-figure.
As a side business to her bistro, Magda Tchaikova conducted psychic readings in the guise of Madam Magda, a fortune-telling gypsy she’d created and monetized while living in Romania. Magda was an exotic brunette with long, wild hair. Dressed in flowered skirt, low-cut, billowy white blouse, vest, sash, scarf and a glut of “gold” jewelry, she was the ideal personification of a gypsy fortune teller. That she naturally had one green eye and one brown eye only accentuated her psychic persona.
Magda Tchaikova was convinced she actually did possess psychic powers. That she could connect with the dead. Many females in her family had the ability to read a person’s fate by touching them or an object belonging to them. They called their gift Cea Legatura. The Touch. Her mother, aunt and grandmother had all had the ability to channel the spirit world in this way. They’d inspired Magda to cultivate her power.
Magda had recognized The Touch in young Nadia. Had encouraged her granddaughter to accept her gift. To keep an open mind. To try to channel whatever messages the spirits were sending. If she could help her bunica make a dollar or two as well, so much the better.
Nadia had been confused by what her bunica called “a gift.” To the young girl, seeing spirits and hearing dead people talk felt more like a peculiar eccentricity than a godsend. Her friends made fun of her. Her schoolmates shunned her. No one understood her. No one but her bunica.
The young girl always felt as though she was perceiving her visions through a haze, if, in fact, she actually was receiving messages from the spirit world. Nadia blamed it on her lack of skill with her supernatural gift. After all, The Touch hadn’t come with an instruction manual. The only direction Nadia received was from her bunica. Who merely guided her young grandchild to acknowledge her gift. To be patient with it. As Nadia grew older, learned to accept her special talent, Magda explained, the messages would grow stronger, clearer.
Adding to the Romanian girl’s confusion and frustration was the fact that the spirits she longed to hear from most were eerily silent. Her parents had died during the communist rule of Nicolae Ceausescu when Nadia was only five years old. Her psychic ability had manifested itself when she was nine. During those four years in between, memories of her parents had begun to fade. Rekindled from time to time by the few photographs and stories her bunica could share with her.
Nadia wanted desperately to hear from her parents. To know they were at peace. What good was her gift, she reasoned, if she couldn’t connect with the spirits of those she’d loved and cherished most? If her ability truly was genuine, wouldn’t those dearest to her step forward to console her? To help her deal with their loss?
Not even her bunica had been able to answer those nagging questions. Magda, herself, had been unable to communicate with the spirits of her deceased daughter and son-in-law. Or the spirits of her own parents. Or her husband. In Nadia’s mind, those shortcomings shed doubt about the legitimacy of their alleged clairvoyant gift.
The move to America wasn’t the exciting adventure for Nadia that it was for her bunica. While Magda reveled in the eclectic atmosphere that was New York City, young Nadia had a hard time fitting in, making new friends. She had a thick accent. Wore the wrong clothes. Had no street smarts. She was especially intimidated by negri. Black girls bullied her. Black boys leered at her. She spent her first year crying every day after school, her pleas to return to Romania falling on deaf ears.
The slow process of assimilation became easier during Nadia’s second year in America. She became more comfortable in her adopted land. She met an older boy. Romanian by name, but American-born. Leonid Nicolescu became her steady companion. Her protector. She no longer feared going to school. In time, Leo would become her lover. Not long afterward, her husband.
Magda hadn’t liked the skinny Leo and his sparse mustache from the moment she met him. She felt the boy was untrustworthy, dishonest. A phony. He certainly wasn’t the right boy for her granddaughter. The more Magda spoke out, however, the closer the teens’ relationship grew. The more time they spent together. Nadia soon moved out of the brownstone, in with Leo. The day she turned sixteen, they married. Before the year ran out, she was a widow.
Nadia believed Leo worked third shift at a warehouse in the Bowery, frequently driving and delivering during the wee hours of the morning. She never doubted her husband if he called to say he was working a double shift. Never admonished him when he stumbled
home in the late afternoon, immediately crashed on the sofa or bed.
Magda had been right not to trust the street-wise Leo. The boy had been less than truthful.
The truth about Leonid Nicolescu wasn’t complicated. He’d begun dealing weed at the age of fourteen. At first, to support his daily habit, cover the cost of his use. Then, to support himself after he’d dropped out of school, left home at the age of sixteen. Eventually, he’d had to support his growing speed addiction, as well. He’d begun dealing pills and cocaine. Ludes. Speed. Uppers. Downers. LSD. Leo had done, and sold, them all.
By the time he was seventeen, he was also dealing heroine.
The truth about Leonid Nicolescu was simple. He was a high-school drop-out with no future. A drug addict who made his money peddling powder and pills.
The young newlyweds enjoyed a lavish lifestyle. They dined out often. Went to movies. Frequented nightclubs. Nadia had money to buy fancy dresses, plenty of nice shoes. Leo could afford a respectable apartment. Had paid cash for his cherished Camaro Z28.
Leo Nicolescu was all about living in the moment. His life was a series of fun-filled events, strung together like firecrackers. Each one forgotten as soon as it burst. Leo wasn’t worried about the inherent dangers of dealing drugs. About getting busted. Going to prison. Winding up dead. He thought he was smarter than other dealers.
Of course, Leonid Nicolescu was wrong. Dead wrong.
Less than a year after Nadia Tchaikova moved out of her bunica’s apartment to become Mrs. Leonid Nicolescu, her husband was found sitting in his beloved Camaro Z28. Parked behind an uninhabited tenement building in the Bowery. He was dressed in his usual white t-shirt and jeans. His black hair was long. His moustache lay like a crushed centipede across his upper lip. A dust bunny of a beard had attached itself to his chin. His unseeing dark-brown eyes stared straight ahead. Beyond the windshield. At a whole universe of nothingness.