They finished John’s trial almost a year to the date after the attacks. I returned to New York for a few days afterward. Out of habit I went to the diner where I’d been on the morning of the attacks – it was one of my favorites, with red tile floors and laminated menus and decorative glass tabletops. Seated at the counter, I ordered fried eggs and a glass of whole milk. The place was busy with older people who lived in the apartment complex across the street. My food came but I didn’t touch it. I had ordered out of nostalgia, not appetite.
During a lull in activity the waitress leaned on the counter and asked if I was a tourist. I told her yes. Fire stations wore purple-and-black bunting now. People on the street had a habit of looking up more often. This was not the city where I had once lived and worked. I could see how both it and I had changed.
The waitress tapped at her teeth with a pencil. Someone at a table was waving for her. She looked all too happy to put them off a few more seconds by lingering at the counter with me.
“So,” she said, “are you headed down there?”
“Down to where?”
“Down to the site. Down to Ground Zero.”
I shrugged and pushed my plate aside. “I probably should,” I said.
The waitress looked down her face at me, as if she’d tricked me into revealing just what kind of person I was. “I’d never go down there myself. I’ll never go down there again.”
The train ride to the Financial District was faster than I remembered. I’d done this commute for ten years but after six months of hiatus already it felt foreign to me. Less than fifteen minutes after I left the diner, I was walking up the steps of the Chambers Street station. There were subway stations nearer to the Trade Center, but I wanted to walk the last few blocks, something I’d done often when I worked at McGrath & Swinburne. As the sky opened over me, I regretted the decision. Everything was the same, but everything was changed. I wandered in confusion through streets that I knew but did not recognize. I found a fence where the plaza had been. There was a pit where the fountain belonged.
A steady current of people were headed in the same direction as me. I followed the tourists just to feel like I was a part of a meaningful ritual. The site was as solemn and barren as I’d expected. I was surprised by the sheer numbers of people dressed for work who stood in silence near the fence that surrounded the site. On the other side of the fence, deep in a pit, men in hard hats swarmed around a dump truck. They used more machines to load wreckage into the truck – clearing away what remained.
I saw another line for the observation decks, but I did not join the queue. I didn’t need to see devastation from a better vantage. I cut across Broadway and headed east, away from this steel and bone graveyard and back to where the buildings were whole and held me close, soothed me. The storefronts were a familiar comfort for me – Golf World, Sleepy’s, NYC Check Cashers, a podiatrist, a lawyer.
I walked Wall Street, watching men in pinstripe suits head into their buildings. I saw one woman wearing a surgical mask, but otherwise people looked the same as ever. I followed commuters down Pearl and past the flat small diner where I once met John for breakfast. I peered in the windows of Captain’s Ketch, the place where I had my first all-liquor lunch. I was like an old hound dog whose favorite scent is nostalgia: I moved with head down in a zigzag pattern that only made sense to me.
I was on Fulton Street before I noticed the 9/11 vendors. Before the attacks, street vendors in the Financial District were always selling pirated DVDs, cheap knockoff watches, or fake leather purses. Now a new breed had joined them: on flat narrow tables there were plastic replicas of the destroyed towers, and small t-shirts with a silk-screened image of the ruined buildings, framed cameos of the former skyline, and pencils with miniature Twin Towers mounted on the eraser end.
A Filipino man in a red windbreaker walked up to me. He wore wool trousers and a tattered pair of Reebok sneakers. He held out a wallet-sized photo flipbook for me to see. He turned the pages with a thumb and a practiced flick of his wrist. Each plastic sleeve was filled with artless four-by-six inch photos of the World Trade Center rubble; firefighters stepping through the ruins; President Bush stepping over a spire of shredded metal; a sooty policeman with his arm around a weeping man in a torn suit.
I pushed him aside. I stumbled blindly in the direction of the subway.
My office, the cubes that I’d wandered through, the slim black fountain pen that I liked to use when signing contracts, the right-hand desk drawer that always stuck, the window that never seemed to let in enough sunlight to keep a plant alive, the ornate faucet handles in the men’s room that were meant to show off our good taste – gone, all of it. But I couldn’t mourn it, couldn’t weep over it. It had vanished so suddenly that I believed it must still exist somewhere. Perhaps this was what it would have felt like if I’d been laid off instead of John. This is what it’s like to be sent in exile from the gates of your paradise. I carry a sense of dull anger that I am not still there now.
On the morning of the attacks, I left the diner after the first tower fell, and I stood on Broadway looking south in disbelief at the vision of the South tower standing alone in the haze and smoke. The two towers had stood together for all of my tenure in the city and I could not fathom a world where one stood alone. Certainly they could have been built that way, once upon a time; but after all this, one single tower was ridiculous and wrong. And I knew, as I think we all did, that the other tower would fall within the day, if not within the hour. Because how could it go on alone?
Part of me, a foolish part, believes that the past will come back somehow, despite all that has happened; and by that I mean not just the Towers, but also my friendship with John. Because he was my friend, my closest friend, and regardless of what he did, I am now left to abide on my own in the world that remains; for a while we stood together, but we fall apart alone. Sometimes I think, at the essence, this is the wisdom behind what my Uncle Horace told me ages ago when he said I had to remember to relate to people on their level. We are all separate in the end; the time together, on the same level, face-to-face, is precious and short and must be held close.
▪ ▪ ▪
How much more needs to be said?
At first, it looked like John would get off with just a fine or a few days in prison. Harrington was working behind the scenes on that, despite my objections. There was a difficult period in the weeks afterward when John was held in custody and many people I worked with in our new Midtown offices—most especially Jordanne—did their best to come up with reasons why John should be shown leniency: His mother had not actually filed a death claim; he had not done anything more serious than pretend to be dead.
Then a reporter somewhere learned about the case and wrote a short article in the New York Post. The District Attorney started to get phone calls. Harrington had to pull back. And then a piece ran in the news and in the Times—and from there, the tidal surge began. John was a symbol of greed, avarice, moral turpitude, you name it. Quickly the people at McGrath & Swinburne pivoted in their opinion of him. Smoky began to deny John had ever worked here. And Jordanne quit talking to me—and shortly thereafter quit her job. She took a big new position as an analyst at Goldman Sachs.
The D.A. came to me asking for help and after some deliberation I agreed to help on the condition that he mount a case that did not require me to testify and that they dropped the idea of prosecuting Mina. The first condition was agreed to almost at once; the second one took some work.
They couldn’t directly use the confession that I’d taped, but it would prove useful, they said, in getting John to cooperate in general in the case they were building against him – he had trampled on the sacred ground of 9/11. With a little bit of legal prestidigitation, they made a plausible case for acts of conspiracy, fraud, aggravated assault.
The D.A. made clear that he did not like me but that he thought I had atoned for my role in the ramp up to John’s scheme. I realized, as he told me this in his book-lined and dark wood-paneled office one afternoon, that he had the potent power of forgiveness, and he could wield it as he saw fit. How had he attained this ability? What qualified him to make such rulings, to issue such absolution? People voted for him. He had the trust of the majority of citizens. That, apparently, is all that it takes: popularity.
I was tempted to remark on this, but he was telling me that I was free to go, and I knew better than to question the generosity. That very afternoon I tendered my resignation at McGrath & Swinburne and then called my landlord and told him I was breaking my lease.
I wanted to see Jordanne one last time before leaving town, and I left her messages and even sent email to her swanky new white-shoe email address. But she never responded. It’s funny how close the two of us came to making something—and how abruptly it all ended. After she called to tell me that John had died, something changed; maybe it was me, maybe I pulled back because I knew what she believed was false. Or maybe she pulled back when she saw how completely I turned against John in the days to follow. But what choice did I have? Sure, he didn’t actually file a claim—yes, he did not actually profit from the deaths of all those blameless people. But he could have. He would have. I know it. I can’t prove it but I know that he would have swindled his mother, too. I believe that. I have to.
As a young man I had an idea of how all of life fit together, and I tried to live life according to that model; but as I grew older I learned that life didn’t work the way that I thought, didn’t ever follow a predictable path. There will be a chance in the future, I’m sure, for me to try again, to start over, but for now I’m in a place somewhere in between the two, somewhere between one life and another in the garden of a thousand sighs.
So I’m left then with just the recollection of what was. And I guess that’s the place to end this story, lost in a memory of a better time, one of the times that made me never want to leave the world that we had, even though it wasn’t perfect. It was the world that we had, and the one that we made our own.
▪ ▪ ▪
In the last summer that John worked at McGrath & Swinburne, the department had a tradition on clear, windless Thursday nights: we’d knock off work at six o’clock and head for the marina. Our preferred roost was a set of patio chairs outside Moran’s, a bar near the pier. Cocktails in hand, we’d puff up our chests and talk tough about the future, about how someday we’d quit our thankless jobs, join a dot-com, and ride the stock market to a million dollar finish line.
One night a group of stockbrokers tried to encroach on our space by stacking their empty pint glasses on our table. We stole their chairs in retaliation, and when that didn’t deter them, I jumped on the table, squawked like a six-foot rooster, and said that this quote unquote henhouse belonged to me. (I’d had a touch too much Tanqueray and tonic.) Most people laughed, but I also caught a few chastening looks from co-workers. I decided to call it a night while I could still feel my pride.
I paid up, but before I could leave John caught my elbow. He insisted that I stick around – Don’t get bent out of shape, chief, he said. No one will remember this in five minutes. Don’t be so damn self-conscious. John was not one to talk about nuanced feelings or reassure a friend, and I was suspicious of his intentions – especially after Jordanne Orleans showed up. She wiggled her fingertips at me and, in that sweet peach Georgia accent that gave me the shivers, she said:
“Just wanted to check out Ace’s hen house.”
At the time, the torch I carried for Jordanne was just a size smaller than Lady Liberty’s. During the working hours I’d demand that John edit the bejesus out of her market write-ups. Each day she’d end up in my office, waving red-inked pages in the air, demanding that I call off the hounds.
Sunglasses set on top of her head, Jordanne did little more than kiss the rim of an amaretto sour before announcing her plans to head uptown. I tried to delay her with scintillating small talk about Smoky’s lousy taste in ties. Mercifully, a girl at another table called Jordanne over. But John, ever the watchful urchin, had other ideas in mind. He clanked two Corona bottles together and everyone went quiet. He nodded to me as if I’d asked for him to cede the floor.
“Go on, Ace,” he said. “Tell us again about the boat.”
For much of that evening, I’d watched as party guests came and went from a forty-foot yacht tied up on the pier not far from our table. The guests were dressed up, women in heels and short skirts, men in linen suits and open-neck shirts. The girls looked old enough to vote, but their eyes shone like lost stars, and the whole affair had an atmosphere of the illicit that irritated me. At one point, I’d told most of the people present that the boat was probably owned by a cokehead. He was so drugged-out, I’d said, that if you wanted, you could walk up the gangplank and join the fun and no one would notice.
“The boats are all fine,” I muttered. “Forget the boats.”
John’s forehead wrinkled in feigned confusion. He made defiant theatrical gestures for all to see. He made a show of his support. “Let’s go prove your point, chief,” he said. “Or were you just blowing smoke?”
Jordanne adjusted the sunglasses on her head and flashed a pitying smile at me. “The two of you,” she said, “would never make it three minutes on a boat like that. You’re not what they call the proper yachting type.”
This cinched it for me. I set my beer bottle on the table as if it were the deciding piece in a chess match that I’d been expected to lose. “All right,” I said. “We’ll be back in three minutes. Come on, John. You can be the witness when the people on board greet me with open arms.”
John and I hopped the rail and headed for the yacht at the end of the pier. From a distance, the boat looked voluptuous and powerful; up close, it was immense, a two-level monstrosity with a radar tower and a helipad. Our footfalls rang like hammers on the metal gangplank.
“I’ll do all the talking,” I said.
“That’s a great idea,” John said, “if we want to get killed.”
Getting onto the boat was deceptively easy. No sentries stood watch, and we strode right on deck and into a wood-paneled room with white-leather sofettes. The party, as predicted, took no note of our arrival. Young women held martini glasses like goblets and chattered on. There were, oddly, no men to speak of, but I didn’t care to know why.
The yacht owner appeared before the clock ran out. He had a sunburned face, and an unlit cigarette hung sourly from his mouth. He made shooing gestures, as if we were garbage gulls roosting on his boat. Wait, I said, we just want to ask a favor. But he shoved me in the chest before I could finish. He pushed me again and I grabbed at a metal railing to keep from falling. John didn’t wait for a third push: he stepped forward and hit the boat owner hard enough to knock the cigarette out of his mouth. The owner wobbled in place and then spat out a shard of what looked like a tooth.
“Go on,” John said to me. “Captain Asshole here won’t interrupt again.”
The boat owner sank to the floor; blood trickled between his knuckles as he held his mouth. One girl started to weep. The others just stared. I didn’t understand how I had come to this place where these people looked at me with blank terror, waiting to see what I’d do next. John kept nodding and smiling, as if he knew this was what the world came to, and now maybe I’d understand, too.
In a trembling but clear voice I explained that we just wanted to win a bet. I insisted that John hadn’t meant to hit the man so hard. I said John had been a delinquent youth, and he’d just reacted on instinct, as if violence were a tic, a meaningless lapse of control – I sounded ridiculous even to myself, but I kept talking. Someone had to fill the air. I was relieved when the security guards appeared and hustled us outside. In the dusky light, John thankfully looked like himself again.
I expected handcuffs, a handover to the NYPD, trespassing and assault charges, who knew what else. Yet the boat owner, an icepack clapped to his face, refused to cooperate with the security guards. He wouldn’t admit how he’d been hurt. He just wanted us gone, thrown out of the marina. I think he wanted to impress the girls with his munificence – he was playing the role of the gentleman who won’t condescend to petty violence.
A wiry black man in a Port Authority coat led us from the marina. He marched us through the Winter Garden, up the tiered marble steps, and over the West Street pedestrian bridge. He told us to get lost when we reached the other side. He had a slight lisp and a Caribbean accent; his tough-guy talk came out stilted and folksy. “Don’t be comin back,” he said. “I be watchin for you.”
After the surreal experience of storming the boat, this guard just struck me as funny – inflated, trying too hard, out of place. I didn’t want to mock him, but I couldn’t resist pointing to the North Tower looming above us. I said that we’d keep an eye out for him, too, assuming he was still recognizable from our seats on the fifty-third floor where we worked. The guard put a hand on his belt. At first I thought he was looking for his gun. Rather than upsetting him, something that I’d said had caused him to stop and take a long serious look at both of us. He asked if we really worked on the fifty-third floor.
“My wife,” the guard said, “she work there, too.”
The receptionist at our firm was a Jamaican woman who kept track of birthdays and logged attendance. The guard’s entire demeanor changed when I mentioned her name. I think he never expected me to know her. He had assumed we were the type of jerks who had no time for the people who manned phones, fixed elevators, or wired telephones. But we weren’t like the boat owners, I said; we were just like him. At once he began to apologize for what had happened. He said he was sorry to usher us out. He said he had to do whatever the pricks in their boats wanted.
We parted after handshakes all around. John and I still had to leave, but our departure was easier now. No hard feelings either way. We were all part of the same caste, the people who worked in the pockets and shadows of these giant buildings, the ones who paid dues and to whom this area really belonged. The others – the brokers, the bankers with their yachts, the posh girls in their short skirts and jangling bracelets – they were lucky if the least we ever did was crash their parties.
For months, John re-told the story of that night to our co-workers. He loved the fact that the security guard apologized to us. We never talked about John knocking out the yacht owner’s tooth. No one needed to know about that. During the re-telling, which of course was usually done outside Moran’s in the evenings, I always sat silently, sipped my Corona, and watched John gesture in the half-light. I wondered just what he was capable of, just how much of himself he kept in reserve, still impish, and volatile. But each time, all of my fears and concerns would evaporate like this: the girls laugh, and John laughs, and everyone looks at me and nods, and John gives me the thumbs up, and I feel like I belong here, seated beside the water, the restaurant bustling, behind us the towers rising up like two cathedral spires; and I’m certain, certain in the way sometimes you just know, that we’ll all live forever, not just John, and not just me, but all the people around us, the whole marina, the whole world: we all seem too bright with life to ever die.
FINIS
##
Stand Together, Fall Apart was written from 2004-2006 and revised extensively c. 2010-2011. This is my second novel. My first novel, originally an MFA thesis, is a family saga set in small town America. I have nearly completed a novel about mixed -race marriages in the age of terrorism.
If you missed earlier installments, you can start the novel from the beginning.
