I was not at my desk in the North Tower when the first plane hit. Quite a few of my colleagues and friends were there, however; the work day at McGrath & Swinburne always started around 7:30 am. But my hatred of mornings—and my habit of oversleeping—kept me out of harm’s way. It’s funny how a bad habit can bring about good luck.
Imagine if my Uncle Horace had succeeded as a teenager to cure me of my morning slowness. On school days I’d set two alarm clocks, one near my bed and one across the room in order to force myself to get out of bed, to get moving. On weekend I’d just snooze till noon. Horace, when he visited my mother’s house on Saturdays for lunch, would charge into my bedroom and turn on all the lights and tell me to wake up and live in the sunlit world for a change.
Perhaps then it was something far more quotidian than an act of fate that put me in a café in Chelsea, eating a late breakfast and mulling over the newspaper, rather than downtown on the morning of the attacks that September. I can recall even now, years later, the taste of the egg in my mouth – a runny taste, seasoned with dill, and pepper – when I looked up and saw the picture on the television mounted on the wall. On the screen, black smoke poured from a hole at the top of One World Trade.
At first, I stared at the live video feed with no clear understanding. A practiced skeptic, I rejected the image at first, dismissed it as a cheap, off-color illusion, or a trick done with smoke and enormous mirrors. But someone at the lunch counter yelled for the waitress to turn up the volume; and then the voice of Peter Jennings filled the room, the man who’d delivered all the news worth believing when I was a kid, and here he was, sounding earnest and nervous and entirely credible about the disaster footage spooling out in real time while we watched.
Enough time has passed that I can’t tell you just what I thought during those first few minutes. I remember that I turned to someone standing next to me at the counter and I said, stupidly, “That’s the building where I work,” as if I were a child and could see catastrophe only in terms that related to myself.
I didn’t carry a mobile phone at the time – it was my last hold out against admitting I was yuppie scum, I guess – and so while some people fumbled after phones in their pockets, I ducked behind the counter, picked up the house phone, and dialed all the office numbers I could remember. All I got was a fast-busy signal when I called Smoky’s line. Same thing when I dialed Jordanne Orleans. I dialed until a waitress tapped on my shoulder and pointed to two people behind me, waiting for their turn.
Later, I made more frantic calls from my place. Luckily, someone finally answered their cell phone: Smoky’s tireless assistant Lauren, a Staten Island native and a jolly, matronly type who used to write fake emails from the boss as a joke sometimes. She told me that after the first plane hit, she’d rounded up all the people she could find in the office; she went down all fifty flights of stairs in a pack of people, including Jordanne, who’d been clear-headed enough to take roll at the fire door, and Smoky, who went the whole way with three dozen manila folders clutched to his chest.
“Everyone’s accounted for, Ace,” she told me, and I almost collapsed with relief.
You know how the rest of the day turned out. I watched the towers crumble on television, and afterward I sat in an armchair in the center of my dim living room waiting for another landmark building to shudder in the wake of yet another suicide attack. Hours later the television was still on, but the announcers were quieter, as the time for awe and bombast had passed.
Sometime after noon, I began to get phone calls – mostly people from back home, my parents, uncles and aunts, cousins that I hadn’t spoken with in ages. Everyone wanted to know if I was all right. I had no idea that so many of them were fully aware of where I worked. In retrospect now, I am ashamed of how aware they were of me, while I had so easily and selfishly forgotten about all of their lives.
I also realized that day how few friends I had made in New York; and of the friends I had, I was struck by how only one or two thought to call and ask how I was doing. Later, this would be just one more reason to rent that Ford Taurus and load it up with my possessions and leave town.
John’s call came around ten at night, and I almost didn’t answer it. I didn’t recognize the caller ID – just a generic 718 number. Later, I’d figure out that the caller info showed up like that because he’d used a pay phone on Montague Street a few blocks away from his apartment.
“Can you believe this shit?”
I didn’t have to ask who it was. John breathed into the phone as if he was winded from a day of running. He asked how I was, asked if everyone else from the office was accounted for. He seemed out of breath but calm, not at all out of his wits; if anything perhaps he seemed a shade too rational, considering the events of the day.
“Listen, chief,” he said, “I need to see you.”
“I don’t know, maybe tomorrow,” I said.
“No, I need to see you tonight. Can you come down here?”
“Are you serious?”
“I can’t talk long, Ace.”
I glanced at the television. “Giuliani says the entire lower half of Manhattan is closed. All the bridges and tunnels are closed. The subway’s turned off. I don’t think I can get to Brooklyn, no matter how important you say it is, John.”
A pause. I could almost hear John thinking. “Fine,” he said. “Come tomorrow night. If you can’t come tomorrow night, then come the day after. I’ll be home. And one other thing, Ace? We didn’t talk, all right? No matter what happens, you didn’t hear from me right now. Promise me.”
“I promise,” I said without a pause. I was too tired to play a game of guess-the-motive with John. I didn’t understand what he had in mind and I didn’t really care. The world had much larger problems than whatever was happening with John Marion.
▪ ▪ ▪
Late on Friday evening three days later I finally ascended the steps of Borough Hall station and breathed in the Brooklyn air. In the span of a few days I had taken up a new habit of often pausing and scanning the city streets, as if to record the view. I’m sure anyone else in the city at the time did this, too. You felt like a miniature camera capturing everything you saw, not sure which things were important and might be at risk and which were unimportant and would likely last.
At the entrance to his building I shouted up to John, but no one leaned out of his window. I noticed no lights in his place, either. I picked my way into the apartment building, climbed up the stairs and knocked on the door, which was locked. I put an ear to the wood and listened but heard nothing from inside.
I waited for a long time on the landing. I could hear someone running a vacuum cleaner two floors down. I heard a woman talking loudly and weepingly on the telephone. But on the other side of the door in front of me: silence. I considered that perhaps I had imagined the call from John on Tuesday. I seriously began to wonder – despite the easier assumption that perhaps he’d just stepped out for dinner – if maybe he had somehow been caught up in the calamity on Tuesday. Maybe I’d spoken to some kind of ghost. Normally I don’t traffic in paranormal beliefs. But this week had turned on end just about everything that I thought or felt.
My head began to hurt, and I retreated to the landing in a disoriented fog. Then I heard the soft gasp of a lock sliding open. He’d fooled me yet again. I turned back, expecting to see John in the door, but the door was still closed. But now when I tried the knob, it gave under my touch.
Inside, John’s apartment was lit only by streetlight. Once again, the place looked deserted, like no one was here. After my eyes adjusted, I saw a figure sitting in the window frame. In the darkness I could not see John’s face, although I believed it was him. I called out to him but he did not respond. Instead, he beckoned for me to follow and then slid silently out of the window and onto the ledge.
The climb to the roof of John’s apartment was not dangerous, but it wasn’t without perils. Outside the window, there was a fire escape that heads downward. If you planted one foot on the fire escape rail and steadied yourself on the wall, you could clamber onto a narrow ledge behind a piece of masonry. The ledge had a two-foot wall on its outer edge, and a crawlspace between the ledge and the window. Standing up, the masonry ended at your waist, and to your right was the rooftop, to your left the precipitous drop to the street. Because there was no general access to the roof, one could enjoy in solitude how the city lay in patterns of decorative glass.
Up here in the clearer light, at last I could see. John was seated on the metal duct of an exhaust fan. He looked tired and worn, as if he hadn’t slept in days. His hair was stringy and he was wearing a rumpled white sweatshirt. He waved a hand toward the vast purple and black panorama of the city.
“The view sure ain’t what it used to be,” he said.
In the distance, the Brooklyn Bridge spanned the black river flow. Beyond that we both stared at the empty space in the lighted skyline where the two tall spires of the Trade Center belonged but were not present.
Rather than stare at what was missing, I sat on the ledge of the wall and looked down at the fire escape that led back into John’s apartment, staring at a deserted side street. We could have been alone in the world, for all the quiet up here, and the sterility of the view.
“I haven’t been out since Monday night,” John said.
“Listen,” I said, “I don’t know why you’re sitting in the dark and all—well, no, I can guess why. I’ve sat in the dark a lot the last few days, too. But why don’t we climb down and go get a bite to eat.”
“Come on, chief,” John said. “Let’s not play the game anymore.”
John slid from his seat and began to pace along the edge of the rooftop. I could hear the tarred surface sucking at his shoes as he walked. He clasped his hands behind his back like a professor. And then he began to talk about war. He called the acts of this week acts of war, although I wasn’t sure this was quite what war felt like because there was no clear enemy. He had been watching the news the last few days, too. He told me that everything was about to change, that nothing would be the same, the world was about to rip itself into pieces.
“There will be retaliation,” I agreed. “There has to be.”
At this, John stopped. Then he came nearer to me. He seemed to be very interested in the expression on my face. “Let me ask you something, chief,” he said. “Do you think that everything happens for a reason?”
“Of course not. That’s all just a fairy tale you tell kids.”
“Really, chief? You don’t believe in a bigger purpose? I would think an optimist like you would have a lot more faith.”
“I stopped believing in a larger purpose in the world a long time ago. The proof’s just too overwhelming. Earthquakes, floods, and disasters like this — there’s no upside to the people whose lives are wiped out. I mean think about the people in the towers that – that didn’t get lucky, like you and me.”
I almost caught myself, at the end, but the words slipped out too fast. John hadn’t worked at McGrath & Swinburne for six months by then, but the habits were deeply ingrained. For what it matters, he didn’t seem to notice, but I still felt improper. “Let me tell you what I do believe,” I added. “I do think that everything can be used for good.”
John smiled. “Well then,” he said. “I wouldn’t call you a believer. But there’s hope for you yet.”
His beatific smile made me think I’d somehow confirmed some suspicion that he’d long held.
“This is a time for starting over, for resetting,” John said. “And I’ve decided that it’s the perfect opportunity for me to do just that. You get it, right? That’s what you’ve always wanted me to do. I’m going to leave the city. Leave all this behind. I’d leave right now, except for one thing. I’m worried about Mina. She needs some help.”
I did not really want him to leave New York, but for years I had favored the idea of a fresh start for him. Because he had lived here all his life it only made sense that in order to make a new life he would need to go somewhere different. I offered to check in on Mina if doing so would help him get free from all the entanglements of life here in the city.
“I’m sure you would check on her, chief. I appreciate that, really, I do. But I’ve got a plan. I can make sure she’s provided for. I can change her luck for good. It all came together for me a few days ago. It’s as simple as me disappearing. Except for one thing. One little thing.”
I stiffened at this. The dark apartment below, his mysterious phone call, his haggard appearance: it all was taking shape in my mind as the signs of a plan that I didn’t want to hear. He sensed this, as John could sense the tension in people.
He touched my shoulder once solicitously and then gestured toward the edge of the roof. As if to suggest the two of us might now consider leaping up and flying away from our troubles. “Come here,” he said. “Let me show you something.”
The building dropped precipitously from where we stood facing Montague Street, the main street of affluent Brooklyn Heights. Despite the terrible events of the week, life was busy with living. The streets were not full, but there were more than a few people: outside an art gallery, on the steps of a realtor’s quaint office, waiting for a table under the awning at a Greek restaurant. Seen from up above, they were all small enough that I could cover each one up with no more than a fingernail.
“Do you think any of them had to skip breakfast to save money?”
“How should I know that?”
“Come on, Ace. Play along with me. This will be fun.”
He turned around and we walked to the reverse side of the building, the one that faced deeper into Brooklyn, and into Boerum Hill. John waved a hand from left to right, taking in the low ruined buildings, the rooftops with broken bricks, and the dark spaces where storefronts had been closed.
“Now,” John said. “If I told you that I could take a few dollars from each of those people, just a few bucks, maybe whatever they spend on dinner tonight, and gather all the money all together into one big chunk” – and here he swept his arm in a dramatic gesture from Brooklyn Heights toward the shabby buildings of Boerum Hill to the east – “and use it to make a life-altering difference for one person over here, just one, would it be worth doing?”
This all sounded very altruistic, but I doubted that his idea would remain that way.
“The world’s not a fair place,” I said. “You and I both know that.”
John came back near to me and away from the building’s edge, and I breathed a little more easily. Something about being up here with John made me nervous: either for him, as if he might jump, or for me, because he was acting so strangely. We’d been up here a dozen times before. But he was different now.
“You know, my mother’s had her apartment broken into fifteen times in the last five years. Fifteen. Happened most recently when she got up and a guy was in her apartment, emptying the bathroom vanity, looking for prescription meds. All the hoods hit her cause the rumor is she’s still got some drugs. I don’t know, maybe she still does. So anyway, this guy’s in her bathroom while she calls the cops. She gets an operator on the phone, says there’s a robbery in progress, says she’s watching it happen, and please send a squad car right away. You know how long it takes the cops to get there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Me either. She’s still waiting for someone to show.”
“That’s just one time,” I said weakly.
“Even cops admit that the system is cooked. Harrington, the cop who lived next door for years, he told me once that the whole Compstat program is fixed. They say Fulton Houses is getting safer each year, and you can pull up numbers on the web to prove it. Well, what’s a number prove? The superintendent for the Chelsea district was suspended last year, you know why? Because he was taking all the complaints – all the calls for robberies or murders or rapes – and making them into minor theft cases, or disturbances of the peace. He was cooking the goddamn books, Ace. How do you fight that? You don’t fight it by living there, but where else is my mother gonna go? She can’t afford anywhere else. She’s stuck there unless someone changes her financial situation in a big way. And the easiest way to do that is for me to pretend that I died on Tuesday.”
He let these last words hang like fat cumulus clouds in the air.
“John,” I began, “you can’t be serious.”
He had heard on the news this morning that there was already a bill put forth in Congress to establish a fund for the families of the victims of the World Trade Center’s collapse.
“Imagine if I could get Mina a big payday,” he said. “She could move to a nicer place. She could change her life. All I have to do is disappear under the right circumstances. Cash rains from heaven.”
By this time I had deduced precisely what he had planned. He was about to propose an insurance scam like you’d see in old noir like Double Indemnity, a roughneck ruse from some minor Hitchcock flick. Later I would wonder: had one of those movies – which I’d loved and shared with him – in some way contributed to this idea?
“I don’t even know where to begin,” I said. “John, this is just wrong.”
“There’s no morality here, chief. Think about all the reports you read at McCrap & Swindle. Think about how the government gets money, Ace. It funds awards by issuing bonds, and it will offset the cost of those bonds by selling more debt than it needs and re-investing a portion of the proceeds in equity investments that earn more than the original bond. In effect, they’ll take advantage of the timid souls who bought the bonds in the first place, because—”
I waved my hands in the air like a man about to miss the last bus out of town. I did not know yet how this would all connect up with me, but I didn’t want to hear it. Because I knew that somehow it would connect up with me.
All of John’s plots and schemes depended on me, if not for support than as cover – because for years I would tell anyone who listened that he had gone straight, all because of the lip service he paid to the cheap ideals that I offered. I had had my faith weakened after the matchbook theft, and I’d had it hobbled after my talk with Petey; this then was the death stroke, seeing and hearing that he was just voracious enough to believe that no action – even that of profiting from catastrophe – was too outrageous to consider.
He swore that all the money would go straight to Mina; but I knew just how tempting it would be, this large hunk of money that she would receive – and wouldn’t be a shame, he would think one day, if he didn’t take just a little bit for himself, after all, it was his own life that he’d traded in for this cash, right?
“No one’s seen or heard from me all week. I just need someone to steer her. I don’t actually want her to know. She’s not a good actor. She needs to really believe that I’m gone, or else she’ll never get her lines right. She’s not a good enough liar. She never could hide it when she was using. She gets shifty. She loses her charm.”
“John—I won’t do this.”
He studied me, judging the weak places that I had. I knew John well enough to know that he was deciding where precisely to strike next. He found the right place, certainly.
“You owe me,” he said.
“We’re even now. I helped you out with the matchbook.”
“That was nothing. Not compared to this.”
“Compared to this, John, nothing is anything at all!”
I became preternaturally aware of where we were: standing alone on a roof in the middle of the most populous borough of New York, not two miles from the site of the largest disaster that I’d ever seen, a disaster area that was still sending a plume of smoke five miles up into the sky like a marker for all those lives that had been ended there.
“I’m sorry John, but I can’t. This is too far.”
I did not wait to hear what he would say next. I moved back to the fire escape, the ladders to the room below, the route that I had come. I kept waiting, with each step, to feel his hand on my shoulder – I was waiting for him to stop me, to try once more to convince me. But I was also sure that I had crossed a line and he had something worse planned for me as punishment if I refused.
I did not doubt the story Petey had told me, not any longer. And now, with a huge sum of money dangling within his reach, I believed him capable of any violence or betrayal. And I did not want to be part of it. As I slid into the dark apartment, I glanced back and saw a blank window and no human shapes behind me. He didn’t follow, didn’t call after me, didn’t do anything at all to stop me from passing out the front door and back into the world. And somehow that scared me more than anything else he’d done or said.
##
You can also start the novel from the beginning.
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