Dying as the Wind Blows
This is an excerpt from my novel, Crossroads Blues.
Trigger Warning: This story relates events that take place in New York City on the day of 9/11/2001, after the Twin Towers collapsed.
When the first tower fell, nobody knew quite what to do. After the initial outburst of terror, the angel’s cry, there is silence about the space of heaven. Was it real? Did I see what I thought I saw? Did one of the permanent markers of man’s majesty, a structure as grand and immaculate as a mountain, a city reaching into the sky, really turn to so many grains of dust? Please, God, don’t let that happen to the other tower. Leave us with something, a reminder of our world before today, please…
When the second tower falls, the entire island of Manhattan shakes. The ground beneath your feet rumbles as the earth swallows the glass and steel and paper and hair and flesh. It might be purely psychological. It could be real. With a second joined gasp, a multitudinous cry, the monument to man’s magnificence has given way to a memorial to his madness. The World Trade Center is gone, charmed, by ancient spells, into a great miasma carrying once important faxes and memos, monogrammed notepads and family photographs, rising and drifting across Lower Manhattan, the East River, Brooklyn. The elder god has been displaced by its children. Its body cut up and fed into the sky, creating a new world, a new topography at the tip of that tiny island.
On Fifth Avenue, a woman standing next to Charlie collapses to her knees, reaches to embrace the sky, and cries out to God to save us, save us, please. But heaven stays silent and blue. No army of avenging archangels appears. The host of bodies beyond the clouds of dust pouring down the financial district’s streets might be safe, but their souls are lost, stolen by fleet, fleeing thieves arising and descending back into the dust before they can be seen. Looking to his right and left, Charlie sees zombies with trembling lips, shaking limbs, wiping their wide, staring eyes, clutching at one another in shock, in horror, in anguish and pain. He’s one of them, and he doesn’t even realize it.
A black zombie beside him, his face contorted in agony, his eyes open and glazed, cries out to him, “Why are they doing this to us?” He has a Caribbean accent. “Why are they doing this to New York? We’re not even from here. We are from everywhere…”
Charlie shakes his head. Like so many others at this moment, he doesn’t know. He stumbles backwards, turns around, and starts walking back to Madison Avenue. There’s a bar across the street from his office. That seems like the right place to be.
The past is a mirage. How many temps did he have in those buildings? How many temps had he placed permanently at the top of one of those towers? The reality makes him sick to his stomach. So many thousands of people, living and dreaming a moment ago, dead, disintegrated, incinerated now. He feels as if he might vomit. Maybe a beer will help him to relax a little bit, put all of this into some sort of perspective because from out here it’s nothing but horrendous.
He’s going to have to start calling people’s homes, find out who was late for work, who was able to rush down the smoke-filled stairs in time. How many clients is he going to lose (his bank account dissolves into the same cloud as the World Trade Center)? How many deaths is he responsible for? You can’t think like that.
Even though it’s a little early to be drinking (most of the people in here would never before have found themselves sitting in front of a beer at this hour of the morning), the bar is as full as Fifth Avenue. It’s as wall to wall packed with people as an East Village dive on Friday night, but a solemnity has replaced the expected frivolity. A subliminal, subconscious mass, the same specter that Andrew met on the subway, has infiltrated the stale atmosphere. Very few people have anything to say. Those who do are speaking in whispers that echo. The rest are leaning against the walls, shaking their heads, propped against stools, arms draped over the bar, holding undrunk bottles, tickling their lips, their eyes glued to the TVs on CNN at either end of the bar. On the TVs, the planes crash into the towers again and again and again. The World Trade Center crumbles again and again and again. Downtown, a crowd of people run, screaming, clutching handkerchiefs to their mouths, away from a surging, consuming cloud of debris again and again and again. With each replay, a collective, almost imperceptible, wince circulates through the bar. One or two people groan, shake their heads, appear ill. By each patron, the horror and agony and frustration is experienced again and again and again. It’s overwhelming, destabilizing, jarring, psychotic.
Why are they making us watch this? Charlie thinks. It’s portentous of our own demise. He wipes his forehead. He isn’t sweating. He notices that he’s shaking a little bit. His stomach is a strand of rope, stretched taut, looped around itself, tied into a torturous knot. His nerves are buzzing, jumping, popping so suddenly that he twitches and starts. Constantly glancing at the street, he realizes that he’s not quite himself. He wonders if he ever will be again. Am I going to die today?
It takes forever to draw the bartender’s attention away from the television, but Charlie’s in no hurry. Today isn’t a day when he feels like getting on the bartender’s case. Regardless of what the images might be doing to his now fragile psyche, he’s as consumed as everybody else is by the destruction. Drawn by the spectacle, the power, the force, they have no choice but to watch, to keep watching whether they want to or not.
Another plane crashed somewhere in Pennsylvania. Charlie hadn’t heard about that one yet. CNN is showing maps, pinpointing the PA crash area right now…
Finally, the bartender notices Charlie standing by the bar.
“Heineken,” Charlie orders.
The bartender nods. He doesn’t say anything. He looks tired. His passion drained, he moves mechanically.
With his beer in hand, Charlie retreats back a short way, towards one of the tables by the wall. A young man is standing there, his eyes wide and bloodshot. He’s loosened his tie from around his neck. He’s Charlie’s age or younger, probably twenty-one or twenty-two. His hand trembles as he lifts a beer to his lips. As Charlie approaches him, he says, “Think about it, man… Think about what might have been on those planes…”
“What do you mean?”
“Diseases, plagues hidden in the baggage compartment, released by the fire… We could all be sucking in some sort of sickness right now, dying as the wind blows, and we don’t even know it.” The young man nods knowingly and takes a sip of beer. He’s driving himself insane. We’re always dying as the wind blows.
The thought chills Charlie. He hadn’t considered that possibility.
The young man goes on, “What do you think’s going to happen next?”
“I have no idea.”
“They could open fire on the streets, start shooting from sniper’s nests on top of buildings. The police are all downtown. They’re not gonna be able to do anything. They could start picking us off, one by one. There could be bombs planted all over the city. They could just be waiting for all of the news networks to have their cameras on New York before the nuke goes off, and we all disappear, in a flash.” He snaps his fingers. “Just like that. It’s all over. The rest of America watches white noise on their TV screens. I’ll tell you one thing. I’m not stepping outside of this bar until the whole thing’s over. Think of how close we are to the Empire State, to Grand Central, to Times Square. There’s still a shitload of planes they can’t find. I wish I could get in touch with my mom.” He pulls a cell phone out of his pocket. His fingers are rattling horribly. “But this damn thing isn’t working.”
Without saying goodbye, Charlie walks away from him, picks his way through the crowd towards the back. The young man doesn’t seem to notice that Charlie’s disappeared. He’s still rambling almost incoherently.
Is anybody listening? Charlie thinks. Does it even matter?
In the back, a man and a woman are talking. The man says, “I was on the 7 train when I saw it hit. The first tower was already on fire. We were all pressed up against the windows, trying to figure out what was going on. The plane circled around the building. It disappeared for a moment. We were all watching it, trying to figure out what it was doing. It was like a hawk, some sort of huge bird-of-prey, searching the skyline for a mouse, and suddenly it slammed into the other tower. This woman beside me screamed. I went deaf.” His gaze is distant and glassed, his lips curled in an aspect of self-loathing, despising himself for what he has witnessed. Speechless at his memories, he shakes his head and sips his drink. His features are so hideously deformed, his eyes so filled with incomprehension that Charlie wonders what he would have looked like if they had encountered one another on the way to the subway that morning. The man would have been bright and full, impressive in a suit as he carried his briefcase and nodded his smiling greeting, rather than a twisted shade of a human being, an inward malefactor guilty of crimes of omission.
The woman glances at him with an air of compassion. She wants to embrace him, to let him melt into her arms, to be the comfort that her womb desires. She’s never even met him before. She nods at Charlie as he sets his beer on the table they’re sharing. The man doesn’t notice him. He’s staring at his hands, reading his future. It’s empty. The woman says, “My name’s Hillary.”
“Charlie,” Charlie says, and they shake hands.
“I figure I should know everybody’s name just in case you’re the last person I ever see,” she laughs.
Charlie doesn’t think it’s very funny, but he manages to smile. It’s nice to be near a woman. Her femininity provides a comfort. To lie in bed with her and have her hold him… He wants to be sick, as if he’s already had too much to drink and needs the pressure relieved, but no amount of vomiting could alleviate the illness in his guts. He wipes his hand down his face.
“Sorry, I guess I shouldn’t say things like that at a time like this,” Hillary says. She smiles consolingly. “Humor’s just the way I deal with things.”
“It’s okay,” Charlie says even though it isn’t really.
“I’m here on business,” she goes on. “I was here on business the last time they hit the World Trade Center, too, but this is nothing like that. I guess I’m bad luck for New York. I don’t think I’ll ever come here again. I was staying at a hotel above Grand Central, and I figured that it wasn’t a very safe place to be so I decided to come down here instead, but how safe is any place in Manhattan today? If I could get on a train, I’d get as far away from here as I could, but it looks like we’re all stuck together, at least until they open the island back up.”
“You didn’t make it very far from Grand Central,” Charlie notices.
“Far enough. Far enough from Grand Central, still far enough from the Empire State, a little ways from Times Square, right in the middle of everything,” she laughs again.
At the front of the bar, a man shouts, “A car bomb just went off in Battery Park. Did the TV say anything about it? I heard about it on the radio. We gotta get off the island. The whole place is wired…”
Somebody tells him to shut up. A frenzied panic ruffles the patrons, but nobody goes anywhere.
“Do you think that’s true?” Hillary asks Charlie.
“Who cares,” the man beside her says. “We’re stuck here. There’s nothing we can do but wait.”
Charlie shrugs. He wonders if she’ll invite him back to her hotel room. She’s not gorgeous, but she has a nice body. He hates himself for thinking that. “Who knows,” he says.
“I wish I’d taken a train as soon as the first plane hit,” she says. “Gone out to anywhere. Somewhere in Connecticut or New Jersey. I don’t know. Any place that was still connected to the United States, where I could still get home.”
Charlie nods. His whole life – his job, his apartment, his friends, everything except his family – exists in New York City, on Manhattan Island.
At the front of the bar, somebody yells, “Fuck you!”
Yasser Arafat is on TV. His complexion and mannerisms appear exceedingly foreign. A reporter is interviewing him. One patron throws a coaster at the set. The coaster ricochets off the screen’s glass, off Arafat’s trembling face and petrified eyes. The bartender laughs uneasily. With nervous glances, shaking hands, and unsure nods, Yasser Arafat sends his condolences to New York City and the people of the United States. The entire exchange is surreal, an episode in the annals of science fiction. The future has shifted radically into the past.
“Bull shit!” somebody shouts.
“Maybe he knows what we’re going through,” Hillary whispers. “Look at him. He’s as scared as we are.”
“He knows he’s in deep shit,” Charlie says. “Any hope for Mideast peace or a Palestinian State disappeared at the same moment the Trade Towers did.”
“The only thing that would make me happy right now is to bomb the fuck out of his country. We should turn the entire Middle East into a goddamn parking lot. The bastards,” the man sitting with them says.
A crash echoes through the room. A screaming stampede, a blur of colors beyond the windows, a triple exposed photograph, tramples along the sidewalk outside the door, bangs across the metal grates.
“God, what was that?” Charlie gasps. Unsure of whether or not he’s still alive, he grabs his beer and along with everybody else rushes for the exit. The entire bar empties into a tangled mélange of running, petrified zombies: Mardi Gras, the day of the dead.
“What’s going on? What the hell happened?” Charlie asks everybody as he walks back and forth along the sidewalk next to the honking, stalled traffic, searching for smoke, bumping into the fleeing dead, adrenalin rushing through his mind, fear clawing at his intestines. He’s lost Hillary and the man who was with them.
“A bomb went off in Grand Central,” he hears.
“What? What?” he keeps asking, wandering like the homeless insane, like the elderly with dementia, clutching his beer between white knuckles. “A bomb? A bomb, where?”
A female zombie grabs him by the shoulder. “No bomb, a bus crash, everybody panicked.”
“Are you sure?”
“I saw it. Everything’s all right. You’re not going to die. Not yet…”
For a moment, Charlie wonders if it’s really okay for him to be standing out on the street with an open beer in his hand. Amid all the tumult, all the madness of the day, would anybody really care?
It started out as an interesting show. When Michael Lourdes’s roommate woke him up that morning to tell him to come up to the rooftop, to see the World Trade Center burning in the distance, it was another one of those many momentous occasions of living in the city, a chance to see something, to be a part of something, that the rest of the world was only going to read about in the papers. He didn’t even think about the fact that there were people in those buildings.
Now, it’s something different entirely. Michael’s roommate is gone, frantically trying to locate a girlfriend who lives on the Lower East Side and works in the World Financial Center. The devil’s midsection has been reached. The entire world has flipped upside down. Pacing in circles atop his roof, Michael walks alone among neighbors crying with their arms around one another, men consoling women, women consoling men. One group asks another if they’re okay. A girl of nineteen or twenty wants to know if Michael needs a hug. He says he does. The girl says she’s glad because she needs one too.
She wraps her arms around him, pulls him into the soft fleshiness of her breasts, rubs her cheek against his chest. Her body radiates heat. Her hair smells of comfort. Her tiny shoulders tremble. Beyond their embrace, smoke is disgorged from Manhattan’s ruined body. Mt. Vesuvius burns their shadows into Pompey’s cement. “It’s gonna be okay,” she whispers between sniffles. “It’s all gonna be okay.”
“Yeah,” Michael says. They let each other go.
“Thanks,” she says, her young, sparrow eyes wounded and questioning. She melts. Her skeleton remains.
“Yeah,” Michael says. None of this is right. There has to be something he can do. He can’t stay on his rooftop. He leaves the girl and his neighbors.
On the streets in the East Village, a silent compassion, like that of Simon for Jesus, pervades the usually frantic atmosphere. A parade of people, some covered in dust, ashen as death, in burial suits, make their way up and down First Avenue. One woman, coated from head to foot, the body of Ash Wednesday’s cross, has stopped. She’s turning circles in the middle of the avenue, going nowhere, a demagnetized compass, lost in once familiar territory. The living hold doors open for one another. They greet and help and gaze at one another in ways that New Yorkers on their impersonal streets usually never would. The shields that separate one from the other have melted imperceptibly into the atmosphere of the city, sheltering the inhabitants, the victims, from those outside.
At Houston Street, Michael turns right and walks past a million risen Lazaruses stumbling toward the bridges, waiting and hoping for their opportunity to escape the terrorized island of the damned. Hell has opened its dungeons, released its prisoners. Somewhere, Lucifer gazes with compassion upon his fallen compatriots. Free at last, shocked from millenniums of imprisonment, he roams along at the edge of every human’s senses.
A police-manned barricade finally stops Michael’s meandering. Rowing Charon’s boat themselves, the silent terrified exit. Michael tries slipping past the guards, back into the dungeon that everybody else is in such a panic to leave.
“Where you think you’re going?” a tee-shirted cadet, one of the heads of Cerberus, asks.
“I want to get downtown,” he says.
“You can’t go any farther,” the cadet responds.
“I want to get down there and help clear out the debris, try to find people.” The world echoes, like a bomb has been detonating continually, unceasingly since the moment the Towers fell.
“You a doctor?”
“No.”
“You with one of the unions?”
“No.”
“Then, you can’t. There’s plenty of people down there helping already.”
“I need to get down there. I need to help.”
“You wanna help? Go give blood.” Discouraged, Michael nods. He only has his body to give: a scant sacrifice for the souls already crucified. He turns around and starts walking back to the hospital. He doesn’t realize yet that people in pieces don’t need his blood.
To read more of Crossroads Blues, click here.
Photo by Life Of Pix on Pexels.com
![[image error]Pexels.com](https://pandebare.files.wordpress.com/2024/04/pexels-photo-2570216.jpeg){kind=link}