A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (27 page)

“Come on, Marshall-man, give it to me straight. I don’t do nuance.”

Eduardo had joined the company shortly after it had been reorganized, and he had taken on responsibilities vital to getting it back on track. There had been setbacks. He still wore his hair long and affected a laid-back disposition, but the strain showed in his face and in occasional outbursts of testiness. Also, he was breaking up with his wife.

Marshall said, “It doesn’t work. At least not now, not in the current config.”

“They had a demo for the board last month. I was there. It worked fine.”

“In a very controlled environment, and even then only sixty-three percent of the time. The lab thinks we should hold off—”

“Nah, nah, nah,” Eduardo said vehemently. “It’s too late for that. The board’s seen it, the banks have seen it. We have an equity deal in two weeks. If we don’t recapitalize now, the company’s finished.”

“But if it doesn’t work—”

“It’ll work. Have faith, Marshall.”

Marshall nodded in agreement, but perhaps not as vigorously as he could have. Eduardo tightened his lips and stared at him for a moment.

“Marshall, have faith. Have faith in the people who sweat blood every day to keep this company alive. They come in weekends, they come in nights, they don’t take vacations. They don’t do this for me or for the shareholders. They do it for their
families, to put bread on the table. And they do it because they’re optimists. They believe we can overcome these challenges. They’re people who believe in the future. We need people like that. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, of course,” Marshall said, now fully earnest. He put the papers back in his briefcase, trying to dismiss their ill tidings. As if toward the nurturing warm light of the sun, both he and Eduardo turned back to the TV, where MSNBC had just gone to Tehran. The Iranians had rushed into the streets to cheer the news from Syria. Some of the women were flinging off their chadors.

THAT SPRING
no one wanted to turn away from his television set. The handsome Wharton-trained freedom fighter who had captured Saddam took leadership of a provisional Iraqi government that won broad support from Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. At Wharton he had dated Jewish girls. Nearly all the coalition troops left Iraq, seen off by cheering flag-waving Iraqis who lined the thoroughfares to Baghdad Airport. The Israelis and the PLO reached a territorial settlement and an agreement to share sovereignty in Jerusalem. And then, just as summer was about to begin, Osama bin Laden was found huddled on a filthy rug in a cave located in the lawless, mountainous tribal lands on the Iraqi-Afghan border.

“They got him!” Eduardo’s secretary shrieked, running out into the cubicle area where most of the division’s employees worked. She stood in the center of the room, pumping her fists above her head, and shouted again, “They got him!”

Everyone knew who she meant. Marshall and his colleagues rushed to the windows, crying gleefully. Across the way in other offices people cheered and raised their arms too. Shouts rose from the street ten stories below, and cars and taxis sounded their horns all at once.

In Marshall’s office his co-workers were hugging and slapping high fives, with grins on every face. A young woman in a light summer dress embraced Marshall and kissed him. She knew he had been at the twin towers. “You must be thrilled,” she said, leaving the imprint of her body on his as she pulled away. It was the first time in years that he had been kissed by a woman who was not, say, his mother.

Abandoning their briefcases, his colleagues left the office in a hurry. Marshall followed them out, and once they encountered congestion in the elevator lobby, they went down the stairs. The stairwell was jammed too, everyone patient while they congratulated each other and shook hands. They filed out onto Broadway. Already the crowds had spilled into the street. Marshall knew exactly where they were going.

This time they headed downtown, this time with their shoes on their feet. Broadway had been cleared of traffic except for a line of fire trucks, the firemen blowing kisses to women and men. Some of the firemen wept as they waved placarded pictures of their fallen comrades. People in the street pounded the sides of the vehicles, cheering, and reached up to squeeze the firemen’s hands and forearms. An American flag flew from nearly every operable window of every office tower. Just-shredded confetti fell in a multicolored blizzard. The mob kicked it up again.

They passed City Hall, slowing as the streets around Ground Zero filled with people coming from every direction, up from the Battery and along Park Row, overflowing into City Hall Park. At Vesey they pushed toward the construction site, shuffling down the block to Church Street, stopping at the intersection to gaze at the infinite vacancy that rose to the heavens from the pit that went down to bedrock. Humanity rebounded against him and gradually spread out around the sixteen acres’ perimeter, flush against the chain-link fence.

News helicopters sliced the air overhead. Air horns tooted
while American anthems were sung by men and women who had come to New York from every country of the world. Marshall sang too, “God Bless America” and “O Beautiful for Spacious Skies” and “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” squeezed between a young sari-wrapped woman and a tall man in dreads. All around him schoolchildren bumped each other with their backpacks, giggling. They sang and so did these suited businessmen and this gaggle of big-haired young women in heels and an old guy in a bomber jacket and another guy and another guy and an elderly woman who had come out with a walker. Marshall felt a huge emotion surging within him: it was relief at bin Laden’s capture, of course, but also sudden love for his country, at that moment an honest, unalloyed, uncompromised white-hot passion. He hadn’t realized that he knew so many words to so many patriotic songs. His face was wet, soaked.

“Daddy!”

It was Victor, just a few feet away. He broke out of Joyce’s grip and rushed to embrace his father at the knees. Joyce had both kids with her, both of them wearing their “Death to Terrorists!” shirts. They held chocolate ice cream cones. Surprised and embarrassed, Joyce nearly stumbled; Marshall nearly reached out to catch her. “Hi,” he said. They eyed each other without actually making eye contact.

She replied, “Hi.”

Victor said, “They captured Osama bin Laden.”

“I know, honey, that’s wonderful.”

Viola offered him a bite of her ice cream cone. The crowd was halted now, too packed for anyone to move farther, too packed for Marshall and Joyce to separate. He felt her body against his, warmed by the sentiments of the day. New Yorkers occupied the streets in all directions as far as the eye could see, faces and bodies scintillating blocks away like the skin of a snake, leaves in a windblown tree, ticker tape. Their songs
thundered against the high walls of the boulevards. Strangers embraced. Others patted backs and squeezed shoulders. Someone drummed on bongos. In the distance: the report of firecrackers. Marshall bit into the ice cream. The late-afternoon light was golden, molten now, pouring across the glass and stone buildings arrayed around the site, every surface incandescent. Before him the vastness of the emptiness of the hole in the city was inflamed with human noise and aspiration. An arrow’s point of sparrows lifted from a nearby roof and wheeled into the deepening blue unopposed. The moment would last forever, or until everything contained within it was completely destroyed.

K
EN
K
ALFUS
is the author of a novel,
The Commissariat of Enlightenment
, and the short-story collections
Thirst
and
Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies
, all of which were named
New York Times
Notable Books. His writing has appeared in the
New York Review of Books, Harper’s
,
Tin House
, and
Bomb.
He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and daughter.

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