The Whole World Over (60 page)

Reams.
A golden word, smooth and slippery. Or was that because it
made her think of
beams
? Not rafters but rays of sun.

People filled the streets in a way that was physically aimless yet emotionally
urgent. As Saga walked away from Stan's, at first aimless herself,
she heard an audible ebb and flow of
Oh my God oh my God oh
my God.

Something enormous was on fire, but from Stan's neighborhood,
from the ground, you couldn't see what.

"What's happened?" she asked a young man who stood in a patch of
sun, as if he'd found a spot of safety and did not intend to give it up.

"The second one just collapsed." He looked plaintively at Saga. The
tears in his eyes were so startling that she couldn't bring herself to ask,
The second what?

She walked in the direction of the smoke, curiosity stronger than fear.
The fire had to be in Manhattan, she could guess that much, and there
was water between that place and this.

People everywhere spoke rapidly on cell phones and stared at the
sky—not just at the smoke but all around at the sky. She couldn't be
sure, but when she did the same, she thought something might be
missing
from the sky.

Fenno. Saga would call Fenno, because it was a local call. But at the
first pay phone she came to, she found a long line of people; and at
the next one, and the one after that. The buildings were low in this neighborhood,
but still she could not see the source of the great, widening
geyser of smoke. It must be coming from a very tall building. On she
walked, the sun peculiarly pleasant, straight toward the unseen disaster.

She walked until she came to a modest, homely park by the river,
where all of a sudden she could see that the smoke—and she gasped at
how broad and thick it was, how furious and dense, a vertical roiling
river
of smoke—came right out of Wall Street. The park was filled with
people exclaiming, weeping, pointing, shouting into phones.
Oh my
God oh my God oh my God
from every direction, like the sound in a
movie theater.

Saga stood beside a woman in sweat clothes who had a dog on a
leash. The woman watched silently; the dog sniffed Saga's legs. Saga
bent to pet the dog—a wiry beige creature, part basenji perhaps—and
then the woman spoke to her. "I knew something like this had to happen
one day," she said, nearly whispering. "We were all just too damn
pleased with ourselves."

Saga said, "I'm sorry, but can you please tell me what happened?
From the start? I don't know what happened."

The woman's eyebrows rose. "Oh, I wish you could stay that way,"
she said. "Not knowing."

"Tell me," said Saga.

"Two planes flew into the towers there, the trade towers, and just like
that, in an hour, they're gone. They
fell right down.
"

"Why? The planes, I mean," said Saga.

"Oh terrorists." The woman made it sound like an Irish name,
O'Terrorists.
"Goddamn fucking towelhead terrorists. Arabs. You really
have to ask?"

The woman's rage sent Saga spiraling back down into her uncertain
self. She waited till the woman was staring again at the smoke before
slipping away, out of the park. She stopped on a crumbling sidewalk
beside a huge brick building whose windows were boarded over. Saga
had no idea where she was. She had never been to this spot before—or if
she had, it hadn't stayed with her.

She felt as if she might start crying, but not because of the tragedy.
She was lost. She needed to call someone. She would find another phone
and wait in line, no matter how long it took. Maybe Sonya could come
pick her up, if Saga found her way to one of the bridges along the river.
She could see the Manhattan Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge not too far
away. And now she saw, despite the smoke, just how empty the sky
looked there, behind the bridges. "Oh my God," she said.

The first pay phone she found was broken. After that, she walked
several blocks without seeing another. This was an old warehouse
neighborhood, not one of the places rich people had claimed for gigantic
apartments but a real urban ghost town. Grass grew between some
of the slabs on the sidewalks. Except for the effect of the brilliant sunshine,
she might have been afraid.

The air had begun to smell oppressive and rubbery—like a fire in a
stove, not in a fireplace—but you couldn't see the smoke from these
canyonlike streets. Where would she go?

Fenno,
she thought for the third time that day, with even greater longing.
Having left Stan's neighborhood, she had no idea where she might
find a subway stop. She would simply have to walk. She knew she could
cross the Brooklyn Bridge; people talked about the walkway down the
middle. She had always wanted to walk a dog across it, but she was
never in the right place to do it. From there, she could figure out the
right direction, or she could ask her way to Bank Street.

Staying as close to the river as possible, she aimed for the bridge.
Already you could see that it was filled with people walking—all walking
away from Manhattan. But she would go against the tide. That
never bothered Saga.

WALKING ACROSS THE BRIDGE TOOK FOREVER
, and it was terrifying.
No one questioned her going the wrong way (along with a few
other brave souls), the way toward the fire. Some people spoke to one
another, but most of them looked stunned, alone in their minds and not
happily so. There was no rushing, no panic. No one seemed to fear a fire
at their heels. Several people looked as if they'd been dipped in chalk. Or
was it the papery snow? Some of the women, the ones all dressed up, the
ones with mascara and lipstick, looked clownish—slovenly, smudged,
their faces streaked. Some walked in bare feet.

"Where are you going? You're out of your mind," said one woman
shouldering past her. The woman's tone was exhausted, not angry.

O'Terrorists, o'terrorists,
Saga kept thinking. Once upon a time,
when she lived with David, she read the paper nearly every day. They
had talked about Israel and Bosnia and unions and civil rights and
Romanian orphans. Now she avoided the paper, along with radio and
TV. Too much busy noise. Sometimes a swatch of current events from
another time dropped into her consciousness like a comet—that's how
she knew now that once she'd known about Bosnia and Romanian
orphans.
Herzegovina:
there, a sudden shaft from nowhere. The word a
deep blue lavender, the color of Uncle Marsden's favorite hyacinths.

So she had to wonder: were terrorists in the headlines these days?
Had they made threats that only she, Saga, did not know about? Had
conversations spun around her that she had forgotten—or, in her narrow
life, simply never heard? She remembered a terrible news story
from long ago, a man in a wheelchair on a cruise ship executed, tossed
overboard.

She stopped near the center of the bridge. Were these terrorists still at
large, right here? She checked people's faces again. They did not look
like they worried that they would be chased, even though many were
crying.

Planes,
she kept hearing. War planes? Terrorists in war planes?

Her thoughts, however worrisome, unspooled in a way that calmed
her. She made her way into Chinatown. Since the accident, she had been
to Chinatown only a few times (always with Stan), but despite its disorienting
smells and crowded sidewalks, she had liked it better than ever.
She loved seeing language everywhere that
no one
could read—or no
one she knew. Ordinary people could have a taste of what she had felt
when, for a time, so many known things became
un
known.

And it was the closest she'd come in a long time to anything like the
exotic travel she'd planned to make her living. She loved all the red
everywhere. She loved the pagodas. Pagodas on phone booths, pagodas
on banks, pagodas on public schools. Restaurants were not stylish—
restaurants here were the opposite of pretty—but they had tanks of
bizarre, fascinating fish or murals in curious colors.

Streets going toward the fire were thick with policemen; some were
blocked off. Saga tried to fix in her mind a map of the city, imagining
how she would get where she needed to go. She paid attention to shadows,
which kept her heading vaguely north until she could go west
again. Yet she felt a separate conviction, as if, like a dog, she could now
find her way by intuition alone, no matter how roundabout the route
she must take. Maybe the company of all those dogs at Stan's, for days
on end, had immersed her just enough in their dogness.

She stopped again. How would she get
back
to Stan's? She would
have to reach Sonya. Already, she began to sense that the city was closing
down, sealing up at the edges like a wound. From the crowds on
foot, filling sidewalks, spilling onto streets, it was clear there were no
buses, no taxis, perhaps no subways. She walked on. Now half the people
were walking her way, too, which made her progress easier, faster.
Now she had company, fellow travelers.

Everyone moved as if in predetermined paths, though Saga understood
that the steady, docile movement, the peeling off of smaller groups
onto each side street they passed, was more a sign of shock than true
direction. Yet she found herself remembering the poster in the bathroom
at the bookshop: the migration of birds. She remembered how, the first
time she'd seen it, she had imagined all those dependable pathways
embracing the world, flocks of birds binding it together like ribbon.
The
whole world over,
she remembered thinking;
birds fly the whole world
over but always, no matter what, find their way back home.

A song came to her. "Marching to Pretoria." Where was Pretoria?
Was it a real place? But she wasted no effort on yet another riddle. She
turned a corner and saw the arch in Washington Square. She knew her
way from there.

SHE WOULD TELL NO ONE THIS
, but she had begun to picture herself
in the Cute House with Uncle Marsden, how they would live their lives.
He could take over the dining room for his collection of mosses. They
could have a dining table in the kitchen or on the sun porch. He would
have the largest bedroom, but one of the others had a prettier view,
to a neighboring yard with a great elm tree, a rare survivor. From its
branches hung a long, old-fashioned swing. On the expedition to see the
house, Saga had lingered alone in the room to watch a little girl swinging
on the swing. Maybe Saga would get to know that girl. She wondered
if the girl had any pets.

There was a chimney smack in the middle of the house. Upstairs, the
floors all slanted downhill from that chimney, as if the entire floor were
a tutu flaring from the waist of a stout ballerina. When Saga realized
that the house had a personality, she knew it would become, if she were
patient, a fine place to live. Maybe she could get a bird. She'd have to
find out if Uncle Marsden was allergic to birds. She could borrow a
parakeet from Stan's menagerie.

SHE WALKED INTO THE BOOKSTORE
like a child returning home after
a long, long trip. Yet the minute she looked around, she knew that relief
was a feeling no one shared. Fenno looked calm enough, but next to him,
crying in loud, disturbing sobs, was the man who ran the restaurant—
Walter, the one with the bulldog. She looked around but did not see The
Bruce. Two other men stood together by the garden door. They were listening
to a radio, which stood on the glass case containing binoculars
and telescopes for people who liked to spy on birds. Felicity sat on
her perch by the window. She bobbed up and down, side to side, like a
boxer; she watched the sobbing man as if he might be her opponent
across the ring.

There was no one else in the store; who would be shopping for books
on a day like this?

Fenno nodded at Saga and waved her in. "Oh lass, I'm glad to see you
safe and sound."

Walter glanced at her, then quickly away. "Oh God, oh God, I am so
ashamed," he said. He was facing a bookcase, clutching an upper shelf
with both hands, as if he might otherwise slip to the floor. Fenno continued
to stand beside him.

"You're not the least bit sure, you mustn't panic," Fenno said gently.
"There are scores upon scores of airplanes which we know have landed
safely—or never left the ground to begin with."

"I know it, I know it, I just
know it,
" cried Walter. "He told me
Newark, he was planning to leave from
Newark.
"

"I'm sure he's fine," said Fenno. "Stranded somewhere, unable to
phone, but he'll show up. The Bruce will show up, too. He may be
overly coddled by his Bronx grannies, but he'll be fine as well."

Walter cried more loudly. "Oh God, for once in my wretched life it's
not the dog I care about!"

Saga saw Fenno touch Walter's back, lightly, nervously, then pull his
hand away. "I wish I could make you sit down and take a drink," he
said. "I can fetch something good and strong from my flat."

"I would pass out," said Walter, shaking his head. "Oblivion is a
blessing I do not deserve." His large strong back moved in spasms
beneath his shirt.

The two men by the radio moved toward Walter. "He's right," said
the one with black curly hair (she'd seen him at the restaurant, at the
lovely party). "Sit down, Walter." He reached up and grasped one of
Walter's wrists, pulling him away from the bookcase.

The second man who'd been listening to the radio was round and
bald, dressed all in white—a cook's uniform. He put an arm around
Walter's back and helped the curly-haired man coax Walter toward the
armchair beside Fenno's desk.

Saga realized she was staring. She went over to Felicity, who calmed
down once Walter was seated. She squawked at Saga, who held out her
arm. Felicity jumped on and sidestepped up to her shoulder. Saga leaned
her cheek into the bird's warm, fragrant scarlet feathers.
The realm of
you,
thought Saga. She glanced at Fenno—would she always be a little
in love with him?—and saw him, beside Walter's chair, looking unusually
helpless. Embarrassed, she looked away.