A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (3 page)
Read A Disorder Peculiar to the Country Online
Authors: Ken Kalfus
Something spectacular happened in front of them, involving something the size of a car. Marshall covered his face and the blast, its fire and noise infernal, passed right through him. He dodged to the right, shoving Lloyd, who was sliding out of Marshall’s grip. Marshall squeezed his sleeve hard and felt the fabric start to give way.
“We’re almost there,” but he saw that Lloyd wasn’t listening, that half his head—Marshall couldn’t tell which half—had been ripped away.
Lloyd’s attaché fell and ejected its suddenly irrelevant contents, papers, reports, and a sandwich wrapped in Saran. Marshall knew what he had to do then. He had to lay the man in the ash, gently but swiftly. He had to try not to look at his head and he would have to will himself to forget whatever he saw. Smoke lifted from the man’s body as Marshall pulled away.
HE DESCENDED
from the plaza into a street of abandoned cars, some of them on fire. Men and women were running between them. By now none of this seemed unusual; for all he knew, all over the world men and women were in flight from their own local cataclysms.
The kids
—he couldn’t complete the thought. At Chambers Street he heard an explosive crack and then a long crashing sound behind him: one of the towers was falling. The mob responded with a collective gasp and then a cascade of screams. Cops up the block waved them on, wind-milling their arms. The falling building’s roar was like the break of the surf and it seemed to lift him from the street. Debris rained down on his back and chalky dust filled his mouth and nose. He sprinted without strain or fatigue, weightless now, his
briefcase banging against his side. When he finally slowed and looked back down Church, men and women like seraphs and nymphs were emerging from the huge gray-white cloud that on this still-dazzling late summer unnumbered day obscured the whole of lower Manhattan.
Marshall had to get back to Brooklyn, to the preschool, but for now he joined the great march north, its legions mostly speechless. Around Canal an EMS worker came into the middle of the street, tenderly took his arm, and led him to a triage station next to a parked ambulance, where his forehead was cleaned and bandaged. The medics had a small radio tuned to the news. The radio reported that two hijacked jetliners flying from Boston had struck each tower of the World Trade Center—shocked, Marshall jerked his head and looked downtown for confirmation—and added that the Pentagon had been attacked as well.
Marshall didn’t know Lloyd’s last name or the name of the firm that had employed him. At this moment the absence of the man from his future was like an enormous hole in the sky, yet he had somehow forgotten the name of Lloyd’s little girl. The sentiment that had embraced him in the plaza and which had promised him so much now vanished, leaving him with a not-unfamiliar despair. The extent of the tragedy was becoming evident. Real people lay under the rubble, men and women he had worked with or ridden elevators with nearly every weekday for years.
When the north tower collapsed, the evacuees began running again and Marshall was sent off. With many others he tried to head for one of the East River bridges, but Kevlar-wrapped police officers at the main intersections shouted at them to move uptown, warning of bombs and asbestos dust. His cell was dead and long lines snaked from the pay phones. He worked his way down side streets. After a while, fatigued and confused, he stopped outside a Chinatown pastry shop that
was taken up by a crowd watching a television hung from the ceiling above the cash register.
The audience spilled from the shop, conveying news into the street. Air traffic in the U.S. had been grounded, but some planes were still flying and more attacks were expected. At least one other jetliner had crashed, somewhere in Pennsylvania. The president was being taken to a secret location.
Marshall turned to a young man wearing a CNN T-shirt. “Are we at war or something? Did they say a plane hit the Pentagon?”
The young man couldn’t see the TV either, but he spoke with authority. “Destroyed half the building. American Flight 77, out of Dulles. And the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania left from Newark. No one knows what they were aiming for. Hey, you’re some sight. Were you there?” He gestured in the former direction of the towers.
Marshall said, “Tell me something: the Newark plane, where was it flying to? Do they have the flight number?”
The fellow shrugged, but he asked the people standing in front of him and the request was passed into the pastry shop. It took some time to echo back. Meanwhile Marshall sat on the curb and opened his briefcase, which was now encrusted with history like an antique portfolio. He rooted inside for his workbook. He flipped through it until he found the page with the notes he had been studying the night before when the phone rang.
“Ninety-three,” the young man announced. “They say it was United, to San Francisco.”
Marshall nodded grimly and closed the workbook. He returned it to his briefcase and stood. As if his pants weren’t already ruined, he unhurriedly brushed them off. He touched the bandage on his scalp. It had become moist. The medics had said he would need stitches. On the street the curbs could barely contain the flood of refugees: filthy, dazed, grieved,
bereft. Many still masked their mouths and noses. Women limped in bare feet. A few people supported each other. Many wept, but most of their faces had gone as blank as the indifferent sky. Marshall went among them and headed for the bridge, nearly skipping.
J
OYCE HAD ALWAYS
known that New York cops and firemen were more attractive than those employed by other municipalities: it was their sharp haircuts, their exotic ethnicities, their well-spokenness, their vivacity. But now they had taken on the graces of classical heroes, clear-eyed and broad-chested, manly and kind, applauded as they strode down the avenues and into delis, tragedy etched on their faces. Even now those faces were innocent and beautiful. The firemen, especially, presided over the city’s September 11 sorrows. They spoke softly. They admitted to insomnia and loss of appetite. They visibly scorned that autumn’s unnaturally prolonged run of transparent skies. Each of them in the five boroughs had lost at least one “brother” from his firehouse or a friend from another; quite a few mourned actual brothers, fathers, and sons. Now at any moment anywhere in the city a fireman might appear and civilians would stand back as he passed among them, his big-boy body beneath his protective black denim overalls moving like the parts of an antique engine. Every step in his rubber waders was profoundly deliberate.
Two of the young women in Joyce’s office worked nights at a volunteer kitchen near Ground Zero, feeding the rescue work
ers when they came off their shifts. Dora and Alicia would arrive at the office late, weary and drained, yet also with the kind of glow usually associated with pregnancy. They’d talk about Ground Zero the rest of the day to whatever small congregations assembled around their cubicles. No one saw the point to their jobs right now. Alicia had been escorted into the excavation pit early this morning wearing a hard hat and a bright yellow fireman’s slicker that was much too big for her—under the two-thousand-watt halide lamps she must have been impossibly fetching. She was seeing one of the firemen, an Italian guy from Bay Ridge, half his company lost in Tower Two, a married guy, and she spoke of his pain and brokenness, and she herself had assumed some of his suffering. The descent into the pit had somehow brought her closer to all the men at the site; also, closer to her real self, she said. And making love to her fireman was like nothing she had ever known before: “He’s so strong and he needs me so much. I don’t know where this is going. But right now, at this moment, I have to be with him.
I
need
him
.”
Joyce’s coworkers, many of whom were unmarried and younger than Joyce, knew exactly what Alicia meant. The awfulness of the terrorist attacks had kindled desperation in every life; either the stakes had been raised or they had been made irrelevant. Last week Dora found herself necking furiously with a casual friend she had known for years. In a quiet voice, so that the men in the office wouldn’t hear, she spoke of another friend’s string of one-night stands. The sex had been unprotected; her partners had been guys she met in bars and in one case on the subway steps at Spring Street. Dora’s friend had never done anything like this before. She had come up out of the station, Dora said, and had absentmindedly looked for the towers to orient herself, but they weren’t there and the man was and he understood her confusion at once. The other women nodded grimly. They called it terror sex. Everyone needed
something now, some release or payback or just acknowledgment that their lives had been changed. Joyce turned away from the conversation and gazed absently from the window looking south at the mutilated skyline. She had narrowly escaped destruction and had seen the towers come down, but so far she hadn’t had any terror sex, just terror Cherry Garcia.
Joyce hadn’t made love once in the past two years, approximately: she couldn’t pinpoint the actual date of her final sexual relations with Marshall. On the last several occasions on which they had attempted sex, or something like sex, something physical and almost tender that might possibly have gone some small way toward restoring their intimacy, they had only deepened their anger with each other—anger about the sex, but also anger about the laundry and the squalling babies and the AmEx bill and the spilled milk. Pointlessly they had wrestled across the sheets. These struggles usually ended with tears and slammed doors and before any penetration could be accomplished. Joyce couldn’t recall the ultimate half- or quarter-hearted attempt that had preceded their determination, a consensus reached without words, that lovemaking was no longer worth the effort. So it had been at least two years. She was thirty-five. After Alicia and Dora told their stories, Joyce realized that she wanted something too: she wanted one of these men they spoke about to throw her onto a bed and fuck her as if there would be no tomorrow. She wanted some terror sex. After everything that had happened, to her city and to her marriage, she deserved it.
AND PERHAPS
there would be no tomorrow. On her way back from the ladies’ room, Joyce was crossing the central open area of the office where the clerks and junior associates were installed when one of the temps, a middle-aged woman named Anne-Marie, began to shriek. She held in her hands a white
legal-sized envelope that had been torn open. Even before they had seen what had fallen onto her desk, everyone in the office knew what the shriek was about, what it had to be.
In the last few days similar envelopes dosed with fatally poisonous anthrax bacteria had been arriving up and down the East Coast. First there had been a mysterious death at the offices of the
National Enquirer
in Florida, and then the bacteria—the deadliest known to science—was found at the U.S. Senate and the headquarters of several news organizations in New York. Several people had died, including people who were not in these offices, apparently people who had contact only with mail that might have had contact with other mail that might have had contact with anthrax. The mail had become another kind of unsafe sex. Everyone was trying to get a prescription for Cipro. A welfare-to-work trainee, Anne-Marie was opening mail today because the person whose job it was had abruptly taken her personal days this week, all of them, for this year and the next. Anne-Marie wore rubber gloves and a surgical mask, but she knew they were useless against the uncountable number of malevolent white grains that had just spilled from the tear in the envelope. The grains had already gone airborne. She and everyone around her had been exposed.
Joyce turned, went down the elevator, and immediately left the building, leaving her things in her office. She had two children to raise. Living in New York and trying to get a divorce: she had taken too many chances with her kids’ welfare already. She held her breath until she reached the street. She kept walking, uptown, away from her office and the concatenation of evil forces that had met at Ground Zero in September and continued to possess it and haunt the city. She felt ridiculous. It was ten-thirty in the morning, she was about to receive a crucial phone call from a client, and she was wearing four-inch Dolce & Gabbana slingbacks in which she could barely stand. They had been an impulse purchase. And right now the fatal microorgan
ism was possibly boring into her lungs. A fleet of police cars screamed past her.
She had gone about four blocks before she realized that she wasn’t carrying money, not even a MetroCard, and that the keys to her apartment were back in the office in her bag. So what was she supposed to do? How would she get home? Why was it that her entire life had become totally impossible? Was she supposed to call
Marshall
? She hadn’t even tried to call him last month when there was a distinct possibility that a 600,000-ton building had fallen on top of him. He had arrived home that afternoon with stitches in his scalp and his suit shredded, and she had said, “So you made it out?” He had looked away, into the air, and replied, “So you weren’t on the plane?” He added, his voice leaden, “We’re such fortunate people.” Now she stood on the corner of Charles Street, unable to walk farther or make a single decision about anything. This was her life today: frozen-solid, shut-down, dead. Pedestrians walked around her as if she were an inconveniently placed newspaper box. There was nothing she could do but return for her pocketbook.
By the time she walked back the entire building was nearly evacuated. The entrance was being cleared by the police, and spectators massed across the street. Joyce noted with grave dissatisfaction that the others in her office had remembered to take their bags and jackets. Except for Anne-Marie, who was bawling without respite and was being lifted into an ambulance, her colleagues remained calm. They spoke among themselves and smoked cigarettes. Police were coming in and out of the building and none of them had masks. Joyce’s flight had been overly hasty. She stood apart, watching. She needed her bag. She couldn’t do anything without her bag. Breathing shallowly, she followed one of the officers inside the building and into the elevator. The cop didn’t look at her twice, but when they exited at the fourth floor she was stopped by another policeman.
“Turn around, lady,” he said. He was young and dark, a handsome kid with a bobbing Adam’s apple. He barely looked at her. “We’ve got a call about a suspicious package here.”
“It wasn’t a package,” she snapped. “It was an envelope. I work here. I need my pocketbook.” Joyce’s speech was clipped and strained by her effort to minimize the amount of contaminated air she inhaled.
The cop shook his head and turned away. He was speaking to the policeman who had come up in the elevator with her about why they couldn’t seal the outer offices with masking tape—the tape they had brought with them wasn’t wide enough to cover the doorframes. The elevator door remained open, uncharacteristically patient as it waited for Joyce to return. Her eyes stung. She was going to cry. She was appalled by the prospect: only last week, at the end of another bellowing, kid-terrifying, tear-filled, completely humiliating argument with Marshall (about
what
? she couldn’t remember), she had vowed that she would never cry in front of a man again.
“I need my keys!” she insisted. “I have to go home! I have kids!” And here came the tears. No, not yet, she was fighting them, the tears were gushing
to
her tear ducts but not from them yet. Meanwhile she was trying not to breathe. She must have had a very peculiar expression on her face, because the policemen had interrupted their conversation to look at her. But she wouldn’t cry.
The young cop said, “Look, lady, we don’t know what we have here. Maybe it’s anthrax, maybe it’s baby powder. But you’re being evacuated, that’s orders.” The other cop, aware now that he had been careless to allow her into the elevator with him, glared menace at her.
“Officers!” Now someone else was angry, a squat guy in a suit, hurriedly coming down the hall. “What’s this, a tea party? We have to clear the building.”
“We told her,” the second cop said sullenly.
Not even looking at Joyce, the new man took her elbow and pulled her toward the elevator. The motion sloshed the tears swelling in her eyes and they nearly spilled over. She jerked her arm away.
“Who are you?”
“FBI.”
He said it almost mournfully—indeed, his tone was entirely mournful. For good reason. His agency had been disgraced. It had ignored evidence that terrorists were planning the September 11 attacks. It had been warned about specific individuals entering the country and about followers of Osama bin Laden attending American flight schools. It had lost track of thousands of Muslim fundamentalists who had violated their immigration visas. Now the FBI was being derided for its response to the anthrax crisis, its personnel rushing from site to site without the proper equipment or consistent procedures. The bureau had been at first slow to identify the anthrax, and its warnings to the public had been vague and contradictory. And this bureau representative hardly inspired confidence. He was short and out of shape, jowly and heavy-browed, and he was perspiring heavily even though the building was cool. The air-conditioning was still running, dispersing the bacteria. No one had a mask yet.
The agent added, an unattractive pleading element in his voice, “Please cooperate. You can be arrested if you don’t.”
“I need my keys!” she repeated. “You’re going to close us down for the day, maybe for the rest of the month! I have to pick up my kids. How am I going to bring them home if I don’t have keys?”
“Doesn’t your husband have keys?”
“We’re separated,” she said. The agent gazed at her with his jaw set hard, his eyes cold. He was listening, judging her words as carefully as he would have appraised the words of a suspected terrorist. Something seemed to pass across her body,
similar to what she imagined she felt when she went through a metal detector. She observed that the agent’s hair was thin, but he had a great haircut that mitigated the deficiency. In New York even the middle-aged FBI schlepps had great haircuts. She qualified her testimony in a rush: “We’re getting divorced, but actually we’re not technically separated according to state law since he insists on living in the apartment, but we have lawyers and a court date. I’ve filed a suit demanding that he leave. He’s contesting. I never know where he is at any given moment, I just know that I have to pick up the kids from day care today. The main thing is that I can’t ask him for a favor.”
The cops exchanged skeptical pouts. She felt herself blushing and the tears gathering again like a thundercloud, and also that she was taking suicidally full breaths. Even this explanation wasn’t fully accurate: certain details, caveats, extenuations, and implications had been left unexpressed. The agent made no immediate response. He was thinking over her words. She wished she had brought her lipstick with her when she had gone to the ladies’ room, but then of course she would have had her bag.
His mournfulness didn’t dissipate when, finally, he said, “Where are the keys?”
“In my pocketbook,” she blurted. “In my office, the third on the left. My nameplate’s next to the door. Joyce Harriman. The bag’s right on the windowsill.”
The agent muttered to the cops, “It’s not like the place is sealed off. They can’t even bring the right goddamn masking tape.” He said to Joyce, “Wait here.”