The Metropolis (16 page)

NEW YORK CITY, 2001. Martin got off the elevator and—already thinking about his conference call—sauntered through the glass doors at the entrance to his firm. He turned left into reception, where he was confronted by the unprecedented sight of at least a dozen secretaries and one or two attorneys—like him, most of the attorneys rarely arrived before ten unless they had some business reason for doing so—running into and out of the conference room on the southwest corner of the building.

“What is this?” he asked no one in particular as he stood in the hallway outside.

“We’re being attacked!” cried Darla Rodriguez, a nineteen-year-old from Riverdale who worked for one of the senior partners.

“Attacked?” Martin stuttered.

She nodded and brushed away tears from her cheeks. As best as he could gather from her halting explanation, someone had flown a plane into the World Trade Center.

“Holy shit—are you serious?” Martin replied as a few others rushed by and confirmed that something along these lines was indeed
happening. A new series of shouts erupted; apparently there had been another hit.

“Oh my god!” Darla cried, looking up at him with eyes watery and trembling.

“It’s all right, Darla,” he offered, despite feeling that it was anything but. “Feel free to—uh, leave, okay? Go home.” He could not, he realized, bring himself to say “evacuate.” “Don’t worry about Karen,” he added, referring to her boss. “I’ll—I’ll talk to her tomorrow or something.”

She nodded and rushed away, at which point he descended a flight of stairs to his office, where a quick glance out his window confirmed that both towers had been hit by something. Stunned, he sat down at his desk, where he spent a few seconds staring at the walls. A few years earlier, he had painted them—or technically, had them painted—in thin, tremulous strips of green, ranging from a very flat, grayish hue to a bright lime, on which he had stenciled in a barely detectable cursive font the words
Pseudoreality prevails
. At the time, his intent was to pay sly tribute to Musil and the goings-on in his office at any given time, but as he now considered the prognostic impact of these words, he felt slightly nauseated, as if he were the one who had caused the disaster outside.

“Pseudoreality prevails,” he said heavily as he turned to again confront the scene, which the hard and artificial blue of the sky made seem less real, as if he really were just watching a movie.

H
E SAT PARALYZED
for a minute or so, until the logical part of his mind began to function. “I bet it’s a terrorist attack,” he muttered and could not resist a premonition about the political ramifications of some idiots flying planes into the Twin Towers, a thought followed by a thin hope that whoever had engineered this fiasco was an American. Then again, he reconsidered, did it really matter who had
done it? He remembered the many times he had attempted to temper Jay’s pervasive pessimism in their political discussions with Hegelian dialectic, but how could he ever again argue that progress and evolution—in any kind of moral or political sense—was anything but a phantasm of propaganda meant to deceive stupid people everywhere?

Like me for forty-one years, he thought, with less bitterness than wonder, which for the first time led him to consider—given his location in a Manhattan skyscraper—his own safety. He jumped up, closed his briefcase, and was about to run back to reception when he paused, deterred by the thought of all those crowded elevators; no, more than deterred—the idea of being crammed into a small space like a member of a herd of petrified cows made him feel sick.

Short of breath, he collapsed back into his chair, where he picked up the phone and listened for the dial tone. Reassured by this—a fact that both amazed and annoyed him—he decided to call one of the other attorneys scheduled for his 9:15 conference call.

“Oh yeah, it’s off,” his fellow doctor of jurisprudence confirmed after Martin reached him on his third attempt.

“So what’s going on? Have you heard anything?”

“As far as I know, someone hijacked a fleet of commercial jets and flew at least two of them into the towers.”

Martin digested this information before he spoke.

“So there are more?”

“I don’t know—there could be,” said the esquire, who worked on the forty-fourth floor of a building on Fifth Avenue where Martin had been any number of times. “I’m getting out of here, though.”

After he hung up, Martin pictured what was going on just outside his door—and, he reckoned, in every other building in Manhattan—as his coworkers fled for their lives. It was not difficult to imagine them rushing through the halls, carrying picture frames, documents,
laptop computers, bananas, bottled water, and bagels as they flooded toward the hated elevator banks. He wondered if the elevators were even working, or if they had been shut off due to planes flying into the World Trade Center.

He stared at his phone, and it rang. “Marty—thank god I got through—have you seen this?” It was his sister, Suzie, calling from Massachusetts.

To hear her voice made his chest collapse, as for the first time he pictured real people on the planes and in the burning towers. “Yeah, Suze,” he said hoarsely. He cleared his throat and tried to sound more cavalier, which at that moment seemed to be the only option short of breaking down. “Front-row seat.”

“What are you doing there?”

“I don’t know,” Martin admitted. “Everyone’s leaving, but I can’t face the elevator right now.”

“What?” She barely paused before responding. “Martin, you’re in shock. Listen to me: leave now, okay?” Her tone softened. “Seriously, big brother—do you want to get hurt on your birthday?”

Martin shook his head “No, I don’t—I’m leaving—don’t worry, I’ll be fine.”

“Okay, good,” she said. “Call me when you get home.”

“I will,” he promised and gently hung up the phone.

M
ARTIN KNEW THAT
his sister was at least partially right, and it now seemed unreasonable just to sit in his office during an apocalypse. “I should go,” he resolved and again picked up his briefcase and took a step toward the door. But the word
evacuation
reeled through his mind, and he resented the idea of being forced to go anywhere on someone else’s schedule, particularly that of some dumb terrorists, wherever they were from. He mentally apologized to his sister and vowed not to succumb.

He went back to his desk, where from a lower drawer he extracted a bottle of whiskey, the depleted contents of which he noted with remorse before he realized that a second one behind it was completely full. As he poured himself a shot, a chill went through him that was not exactly unfamiliar but that he had not felt in many years, namely since those horrible months before he tested positive for HIV. He had not been particularly sick at the time, much less bedridden—to the contrary, he was working more than ever—but had nevertheless been unable to shake a vague but unsettling cold and frailty, as though his bones were already deteriorating in his body. Yet he could barely acknowledge the symptoms, much less the idea that his life might be ending, even after the doctor informed him of the verdict.

It was not until much later—when the death sentence had been effectively commuted by his “cocktail” of meds—that he felt more capable of describing the chill in terms of something he had gone through as a child, i.e., the “temperature inversions” he used to experience on summer vacation, those odd days at the beach when a ghostly fog would drift in from the sea and leave your skin damp and raw no matter what you were wearing. He realized that the terror he experienced as an adult was a sense not only that something was seriously wrong—which, of course, it was—but also that it was simply a matter of time before the tide came in and swept him out forever. As Martin considered the scene in front of him, there was something similarly indescribable and terrifying about it, but by the same token, his earlier confrontation with mortality—and his continuing familiarity with it, in the form of the pills he took every day, each one a rock in the temporary jetty—explained his reluctance to cave in to his fear. What he saw outside hovered so much more distantly than what he had already endured, and still did, even if the virus was suppressed. Rather than flee death, he felt obliged to confront it, to stare
it down, to meditate on it and even to mock it, all in the attempt to gain some kind of power or control.

He poured himself a new drink and proposed a toast, as much to his reflection as to what lay beyond it: “To the shittiest birthday ever,” he saluted, glass raised, “and even worse, one I will never forget.”

T
HE WHISKEY NULLIFIED
Martin’s thoughts for a few seconds as a slight tingling spread from his stomach to his fingertips. Though he was not about to leave—despite the chills that continued periodically to pass through him—it occurred to him that he might find some solace in one of his LPs. It was only when listening to music that he had ever been able to grieve, to cry real tears of anger and remorse as he pictured his life ending at such an absurd and unanticipated juncture, and how hard it was to tell the younger version of himself—with whom he inevitably associated such songs—the sad news.

He weighed his options carefully; far from wanting to denigrate or belittle the moment, he wanted to reflect its gravity in a mournful and perhaps even resigned way that acknowledged a sense of aching fear, of melancholy and impotence. Almost of its own accord, his hand reached over to his shelves and extracted
A Gift from a Flower to a Garden
, a double LP by Donovan, a work Martin had always associated with the kind of pathos displayed by a precocious child on the verge of madness. On the cover, Donovan could be seen in a lavender-filtered photograph dressed in an Indian caftan and appearing to offer the listener a tufted poppy. It might have come across as a caricature of hippie idealism—the musical ghetto where Donovan was so often pigeonholed—were it not for what appeared to be dark rings around his eyes, an effect of the saturated exposure of the shot and his barely tinted sunglasses, as if he were already haunted by the manic dreams he offered.

As Martin listened to the crack and hiss of the needle against the
vinyl, followed by Donovan’s whispered lyrics, he looked out the window and was newly astonished by the amount of smoke that continued to pour forth from the towers. More unbelievably, the north tower began to vibrate like a corrugated sheet of metal before it buckled and collapsed, as if a bomb had been detonated underneath it. As a mushroom cloud erupted from the site, Martin remembered a passage in which Thoreau described the deafening groan of the last of a stand of majestic white pines being felled by two woodmen with a crosscut saw. Though he could hear nothing except Donovan’s soft voice and an acoustic guitar, the destruction at hand seemed no less egregious, although the remorse he felt was as much for the building and those he imagined inside it as for himself, as if just by being alive he was in some way responsible for this monstrous act.

M
ARTIN’S HEAD POUNDED
slowly and even dogmatically to such an extent that he was reminded of a tolling church bell. Determined to finish what he had started, he poured himself another shot and flipped over the record; as he swiveled back to face the window, beads of sweat rolled down the sides of his face before falling onto his shirt, where they were absorbed into his body like long-forgotten aspirations. Though his eyes remained fixed in front of him, he realized that he was no longer watching the smoke and fire of a random act of destruction but viewing a memory that exerted a far more personal form of terror.

His thoughts turned to his graduation from high school, which seemed as bucolic and naïve—and lost—as a Donovan song. If his experience at boarding school had generally allowed him to appreciate his parents from afar, on this morning, with them present, Jane’s pronouncements on art and aesthetics had frustrated him almost as much as Hank’s crude pragmatism. Also bothersome were Jane’s false sighs of commiseration about his breakup with
Amanda—whose appeal she had never grasped—while for his part, Hank could not stop bleating a stream of trivia and advice about Martin’s upcoming year. College hockey, Hank recalled more than once, had been the best experience of his life, not to mention the route by which he met—nudge, nudge—the best woman in his life.

When the ceremony was over, good-byes issued, and everything packed, Martin was relieved to be driving home in his own car, where he and Suzie surfed for radio stations and made fun of their parents. They even laughed at Jane when the family stopped at a rest area in Ohio and—because she had always hated thunderstorms—she suggested they get a hotel.

Hank brushed her off. “It’s just a few little clouds,” he scoffed. “We’re only a couple hours away.”

Martin, still impatient with his parents, had basically ignored this conversation and instead amused himself by reaching around his sister’s back to tap her on the shoulder, the way he had done years earlier, until Jane looked at her children. “You two all right?”

“Uh—yeah, sure—quite all right.” Martin saw himself answer coolly and robotically, the way he used to talk to his mother to disguise his true feelings, which back then he would have characterized as annoyance or irritation but which he now understood to be something closer to fear, not of the storm but of Jane’s ability to glean information about him that he was just beginning to understand himself.

None of this was mentioned at the time; instead Suzie entered the scene, just as he expected her to, because as often as Martin tried to forget all of this, it was engrained in his memory like the lyrics of an odious pop song from an otherwise forgotten era of his youth. “No offense, Dad, but I’m sticking with Martin,” she informed them.

Nor could Martin forget how, in response, Hank stuck out his tongue and trotted back to his car.

Nor how a few seconds later, Martin was in his old car, the make, model, and year of which he noted with aching precision, along with the garish cranberry hue of the upholstery and even the chrome buttons of the tape deck and radio, which like any stereo worth hearing at the time was “customized.”