The Whole World Over (62 page)

"I have my own life, Pansy. There and here, I do," said Saga. Did she?
She was shaking, and she longed to hang up, but that's what Pansy
surely wanted. "Can I please just talk to Uncle Marsden for one minute?
One minute, Pansy?"

Pansy ignored the request. "You don't have a life. You're just jealous
of other people's lives. You think Denise doesn't see the way you look
at her with those babies? It gives her the creeps. Everybody knows
how you—"

Saga heard Frida shout, "Jesus, Pansy!" Frida took over the phone.
"Saga, I'm sorry." She covered the mouthpiece and said something to
Pansy, then, to Saga, "Everybody's insane here."

Saga asked, yet again, if she could talk to Uncle Marsden.

"No one can," said Frida. "He's shut himself up with his mosses and
says he won't come out till we hear something, one way or the other. I'm
trying to make him eat a little dinner." She paused. "Meals! How trite, I
suppose."

Saga asked if there was anything she could do, there in the city. Frida
seemed to think for a long while. "If you're near a hospital," she said
slowly, "you could see if he's there. But not really. I can't think of anything,
really. I wish I could. I wish I could think of anything constructive
right now." After a pause, Frida asked if Saga had a place to stay.
Saga told her that she did.

The sound of a radio rose in the background. Pansy must have raised
the volume, to make her sister hang up. "Frida," said Saga, "I know you
need the phone to stay free, but can I ask you a weird, selfish question?"

"Why not?" Frida might have meant to be sarcastic, but sadness
made her sound earnest. "The truth is, Michael would call Denise
before he'd call us."

"Frida, was there something people didn't tell me about the accident?
Mine, I mean."

A chaos of shouting came over the radio. Frida sighed loudly. "This is
so not the time, Saga. Just try to get back here as soon as you can."

Saga noticed that she did not say
get home.
"I will," she said. "But
please just tell me. Michael was the one who told me to ask."

"Well then," said Frida. "Well then, on a day like today, what choice
do I have?" She shouted at Pansy to close the goddamn kitchen door.

"WHO'S THAT MAN?"

"He's someone they think may have ordered those men to fly
the planes into the towers."

"Who thinks it?"

"The president. The people who run the United States."
The spies,
he
did not say.
The idiotic spies who bungled it all so badly, who could
have foreseen this and stopped it if they hadn't believed us so high and
fucking mighty.

"Will they catch him?"

"Well, he's very good at hiding," said Alan.

"When they find where he's hiding and they catch him, will they turn
him into a good guy?"

"Oh George, if they could do that, that would be something."

"Something great, you mean."

"Yes."

"But people are dead because of him? Aren't people dead?" George's
tone was so straightforward, so ingenuous that Alan could only nod and
place a hand on his head.

Ten minutes ago, the news artists had placed a picture of Osama bin
Laden's face—a face that Alan now realized would look bizarre and
striking even to a child raised in a city of freely eccentric people—in the
upper left corner of the television screen. It resembled a postcard tucked
in the frame of a mirror—for across the rest of the screen burned the
World Trade Center, or the rubble that remained, pathetically diminished
yet inconceivably, appallingly massive. What a ghastly mirror it was.

"Don't stand so close," Alan said gently. "Sit here, beside me. Please."

"Have you seed my toy planes, Daddy?"

"Seen," said Alan. "No, sweetie, I have not seen them in ages. But
let's go out now. Treehorn needs a walk." He turned off the TV.

George frowned. "How will we know if they catch him?"

Alan hesitated. "We don't need to worry. He's not in New York. He's
very far away from here, in fact."

"But he ordered the men to crash the planes
here.
"

"Yes. That might be true," said Alan. "But it's over. The damage is
done." Though of course it wasn't. The many, many kinds of damage
yet to be inflicted were utterly unpredictable. The damage had only
begun.

George looked skeptical. "Daddy, who knows where Osaddam is
hiding?"

How strange, and in a way how canny, that George, absorbing the
news for those few hours, had already conflated the names of the two
villains about whom there was voluble speculation.

"Everyone's trying very hard to find out," said Alan. "Now where
did we put the leash? Is it in your room?"

Greenie would not be happy that Alan had left the television on all
afternoon. In retrospect, Alan wasn't happy about it, either. He had
not realized how events would unfold (who could have?), in what directions
they might take George's imagination. But George had seen the
towers on fire, right there against his very own sky, when Alan brought
him home from school, so what was there to hide? In Tulsa or Boston,
you might shelter a five-year-old from news like this—though even in
distant places they would soon hear all about it. Still, as father and son
left the apartment with their dog, Alan knew that he must take them due
west, avoid even a glimpse of the hospital. There would be hundreds of
ambulances—dozens, at least—filling every lane of the avenue, carrying
people burned and crushed.

Alan had yet to speak with Greenie. At noon, when it occurred to him
that he had not heard from anyone outside the city, he called his mother
and found her mad with worry. ("All morning long, I've dialed and
dialed and dialed!") After reassuring her that he and George were safe
(no, there was no human way they could get to New Jersey), he called
the kitchen at the Governor's Mansion. It rang a long time before someone
answered: Maria, who'd cooked for Alan and George and Greenie
the night they ate dinner with Ray.

"She is not here, she is gone," said Maria.

"She's at home?"

"No, no, she is gone to you. Half an hour."

"To me? What do you mean?"

"She tries to call you, but she did not get through. She is driven by
George."

You had to wonder if the terrorists had messed not just with buildings
and planes and people's lives but with the minds of everyone everywhere.
Well, in fact they had. If no one could think straight today,
would that be so strange?

"Ray's driver?"

"Yes. Tall George. He will drive her to New York."

"Here? All the way here?"

"That's it,
sí,
yes. All the way to you," said Maria.

Alan asked if there was any way to reach her, to reach Tall George;
she did not know. He started to ask if he could speak with Ray or Mary
Bliss, but really, who was he, now, to get through to either of them?
"Never mind, Maria. Thank you. If she calls there, would you tell her
we're all right? We're fine?"

ALAN HAD BEEN IN HIS OFFICE WITH STEPHEN
, looking over the
brochures and documents Stephen had brought along. Alan had told
Stephen that his sister was adopting, too, through a different country
with different rules. He confessed that beyond what he'd learned about
this process from Stephen and Joya, he knew nothing. "That's completely
okay," Stephen had told him. "You're like my second set of eyes,
my second set of shoulders. Sometimes it feels like I'm lifting a Dumpster
to do this thing." Alan was touched.

That morning Stephen told him about a dream in which he had discovered
that in order to adopt a child he had to move to a medieval
building in Brooklyn that looked a lot like a monastery. In the dream,
this seemed fine—the monastery had views of New York Harbor and
the Statue of Liberty—until Stephen found out that Gordie would also
be living there.

"I guess the Statue of Liberty would have to represent my freedom
from my anger at Gordie. What do you think?" said Stephen. "And it's
right beside Ellis Island, so that seems like a good omen for the adoption,
maybe."

"But you have to live in a monastery?" asked Alan. He smiled.
"Stephen, have you been seeing anyone?"

"
Seeing
anyone? Other than nosy matrons and paper pushers?
Dream on."

They had talked about Stephen's hunch that he would be adopting a
daughter, how his fantasy was tied up with his goddaughter, Skye. They
had talked about Stephen's vision of caring for a baby. Alan felt almost
fatherly toward him now; he wanted to make Stephen feel welcome to
the world of impending parenthood, to understand that it both did and
did not merit any sort of fanfare. Once Stephen had the child he yearned
for, too many people would give him grief or shut him out, and Alan
wanted to inoculate him, however modestly, with approval and a sense
of inclusion.

After the session had ended, Alan left his building with Stephen,
knowing that they would part ways on the sidewalk. As soon as they
stepped outside, Stephen said, "Good grief, will you listen to that?" He
was referring to the sirens, which wailed insistently from every direction.

A few blocks to the east, where Bank Street met Greenwich Avenue,
Alan saw a throng of milling people. It was just before nine, and though
people would still be heading to work, there were never crowds of commuters,
not the hordes you'd see farther uptown. A man walked swiftly
toward them, a brooding look on his face.

"Has something happened?" Alan asked him.

"A jetliner's flown right into the World Trade Center. Right
into
it.
Like six floors of it. A terrible, terrible accident," said the man. "Terrible."
He looked as if he wanted to discuss it with someone, but neither
Alan nor Stephen knew what to say. The stranger continued on his way.

Alan had meant to go west, to a stationery store on Hudson, but now
he walked with Stephen, toward the crowd. When they emerged onto
the avenue, they looked south. They heard a muffled roar, like the muttering
of gathered birds—but it was human, the sound of far-reaching,
inarticulate amazement. They saw a second plume of smoke breach the
horizon of rooftops.

Along with the crowd of which they were now a part, they made
wordless noises of incomprehension.

Across the avenue, on the stretch of sidewalk in front of the hospital,
a line began to form. Out of the hospital, from the emergency room,
from around both corners, emerged figures in green and white: doctors
and nurses, all fully suited in scrubs the color of Caribbean water, their
heads covered, nunlike, with crisp white bonnets. At their throats they
wore cloth masks, ready for the worst. They stood in rows spanning the
entire block. As they stepped from the shadowed margin of the building
and into the sun, their white pants and headcoverings gleamed. Shading
their eyes, they stared in the direction of the smoke.

Alan saw cops pushing barricades against the curbs, the way they
did for big parades. Almost abruptly, there was no traffic; the avenue
was utterly empty. It was empty because it was expected to fill, at any
moment, with ambulances.

Alan turned to Stephen, whose astonished presence he had forgotten
for several minutes. "I'm going to my son's school," he said. "I have to
go." As if they'd been headed somewhere together.

Stephen looked shaken. "Yes. Go there now."

"You should go home, I think," said Alan.

"Yes," said Stephen, but after Alan had crossed the avenue, he looked
back and saw Stephen, fixed to the spot, looking south.

Alan had dropped George off by eight, for breakfast in the school
cafeteria. He did this on Tuesdays and Thursdays, in order to meet with
Stephen. Alan saw four patients now, restricting their appointments to
the margins of his days.

He joined a crowd of distressed parents in the cafeteria, just in time
to see the principal climb up on a chair. She waved her arms, trying to
silence the uproar. She was a small rotund woman—Madam Cog she was
called by the parents who found her policies too cold, too unionized—
and though she seemed for once
admirably
cool, she looked like a hen
on a precarious roost. Most of the parents swarming about her were
mothers, several of them the same mothers who spoke so warmly, so
unctuously to Alan on other mornings, looking him over as a prospect
for their lonely friends: the ultimate prize, a single dad. Here and now,
these women had no time or courtesy for Alan, elbowing around
him, blind to anyone but the authority figure who held their children
hostage.

"Parents! Parents! Parents, listen to me!" the principal called out over
their heads. Finally, there was a begrudging semblance of quiet. "Parents,
school is the safest place for your children," she intoned, her voice
as ceremoniously condescending as ever. "I advise you to leave them
here until further notice, to maintain as much normalcy as possible. But
if you must take them home—if you feel you must—then proceed to
my office and follow the usual procedures. Please. That much I must
require."

She had more to say, but her words were lost in the sound of feet running
toward her office. Alan ran with them and took his place in a long,
long line. If the city were to be bombed right then, he wanted to be
under the same roof as George. Let me be with him now,
now,
he
thought as he waited for his turn at the attendance ledger, where children
could be signed out like library books or prescription drugs.

What would you do, he had thought, if at that moment you'd had
two children, or more, all in different places? How could you decide
where to go first? What parent, honestly, would
go home
and wait out
the day?

Yet now, as Alan detached his reluctant son from the television
screen, he understood what Madam Cog had meant. In the classroom
where he had picked up George, the teacher had been conducting first-grade
business as usual. The children had been sitting on a brown rug,
at "meeting time," discussing the seasonal changes of autumn, what
those changes meant about the earth and its relationship to the sun. The
teacher had smiled as, one by one, parents took their bewildered children's
hands and led them out toward the bedlam beyond the classroom
walls. "Take care!" the teacher had called after each departure, her
voice light as a billowing scarf.

When they left their building, Alan paused at the top of the stoop,
holding Treehorn back, and looked in every direction, even up at the
sky. At a glance, their neighborhood looked as it always did in the long,
lovely shadows of late afternoon; but today people stood in tight, animated
groups on every corner of Bank Street, to east and west alike.
Alan led George and Treehorn through these knots of people, hearing
excerpts of their outrage and grief.
But we are the safe ones, the spared
ones,
he wanted to say—till he realized that this might be only fleetingly
true. When they reached the playground, George stopped. A surprising
number of children were swinging, climbing, digging in the sun-warmed
sand. One of George's playmates came to the fence.

"Can we go in?" George asked his father.

Alan shook his head. "You know Treehorn can't go into the playground."

The friend's mother, who had followed her son to the fence, looked
intently at Alan; they both understood that though they wanted desperately
to share the horror they felt, to find out what details the other one
knew, there was little they could say in front of the children.

"Everyone in your family all right?" asked Alan.

"Yes," she said. "Yours, too, I hope."

"Yes," he said. At least Greenie, he thought in a flash, was not a chef
at Windows on the World. He wondered if, in what she had always
described as a very small cosmos, she knew anyone who worked there.
Who had worked there.

"Can we come back later?" asked George. "Please?"

"Let's give Treehorn a good walk, and then we'll see," said Alan. But
he wanted to get home quickly. He hoped Greenie was trying to call. At
some point, the telephone lines had to clear. "Come on, George. I'm
sorry."