A Letdown Squid

“Sure Things Falling”

Here is the short story I read tonight at Coker College’s 9/11 commemoration event. 

Erica Zuckerman catches the train into Manhattan, gets off at Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall and cuts through the park, heading west.   She is on her way to see Andrew.  She asked him to meet her at Taj Tribeca on Murray, probably the most ambitious Punjabi restaurant in the Financial District.  Though Erica and Andrew are fans of the atmosphere and well-stocked buffet, Taj Tribeca holds a greater significance.  Major moments of their life together seem to revolve around its golden linens and paper dining mats.  It is where they met, him on a drunk takeout run for his fellow associates at Harris Beach, her on a blind date with a Junior Vice President from Fiduciary Trust whose dinner conversation included the words portfolio, big account and mutual funds.  Andrew stepped up to their booth with his hands behind his back, tapping the floor with the tips of his shoe, pretending to be shy like a little boy. He excused himself, slid his card across the table to Erica, and told her to phone him if things didn’t work out.  Appalled by his arrogance, it was weeks before she called but when she did she never regretted it.  Andrew reminded her that being unmarried at thirty-one didn’t mean she was a failure; she was waiting to be rescued from the prospects of settling. When he proposed to her in that same booth four years later over a chicken chettinad she knew she had been saved.  And now she is on her way to tell Andrew that after months of trying, after their first pregnancy had ended in a still-birth, they are getting a second chance at being parents, news that Erica feels is worthy of Taj Tribeca’s minty cornish hen hariyali.

She was propelled out of the apartment by the promise of the little pink positive sign and now she is too early.  She decides to stop in the public library and browse the stacks.  As Erica runs her fingers along the spines of books she will never have the time to read, she imagines a new life, the life inside of her, a little girl as precocious as Andrew or a little boy as practical as herself.

There is a boomcrunchpop comparable to thunder, a sound like doom.  The city takes a pause. There is something sinister in the milliseconds of silence that come next.  She can feel the floor shaking as people run to the windows.  Her heart skips a beat, or two, or three.  It sinks in her chest and rests on her stomach.  She is caught in the wave of people rushing down the stairs and out on to the street.  Back outside her eyes have to readjust to the sunlight.  The day is bright, clear except for a single thick cloud ripping through the sky like some airborne toxic event.  Everyone is craning their neck to stare up at the dark cumulus creeping towards City Hall. There are screams coming from windows above her. The air is beginning to taste like gasoline.  It isn’t a cloud it is a column of smoke.

The buildings are hemorrhaging; people are pouring out of their offices and apartments to trail the smoke back to its source.  Erica follows the crowds west past Taj Tribeca, her spirit chained to the collective.  Some instinctual switch has been flipped and suddenly she subscribes to safety in numbers.  When she gets to the corner of Murray and Church it is too terrible, smoke is bellowing out of the World Trade towers like a cigarette. She can see tiny dots raining from the building and it takes her brain a moment to recognize them as people, jumping head first to escape the flames, their bodies bursting on cars and atriums, crushing others trying to evacuate the plaza.  It is too terrible. She closes her eyes and counts back from five, like Andrew taught her whenever she was afraid or angry. FIVE. She feels the energy under her feet, the concrete is electric.   The smell of burning metal is wafting down from the tower and it hugs everything. FOUR. THREE. Somewhere a hundred taxis are blowing their horns all at once; men in expensive suits are choking on sobs.  TWO. In Hebrew there are many words for faith, aman, batah, mibtah.  Erica has always prided herself on her beliefs, for keeping the faith, not just when it is easy. ONE. And when she opens her eyes just in time to catch Flight 175 diving towards Andrew’s office all she can think to do is pray.

Over 200 miles south in a suburb of Washington D.C., I am sitting in third period, a social science class called Problems of the Twentieth Century.  The lights are off and we are about to watch a movie. Our teacher, Mr. Schwartz, has a thing for economics.  Every public issue we address is always traced back to money.  He says that an uncertain economy creates uncertainty in people.  I don’t know.  He’s waving around a video cassette, a documentary about the negative impact of a car company on a town in Michigan by a fat guy in a baseball cap who spends way too much time in front the camera to be objective.   I am writing a note to pass to Beth in the hall between classes. This semester our schedules have us heading in opposite directions.  We’ve been living through our letters, though they never really say anything.   They are pointless and meandering but it is nice having someone to write to. This particular letter has sort of escaped me.  It is two pages, back and front, explaining in detail all the things I’d rather have done to me than hear  Mr. Schwartz go on about the correlation between a floundering economy and deteriorating race relations.  I could care less about that stuff, unlike Beth, she cares about everything.  She says being Palestinian makes her more in-tuned with other people’s suffering.  I don’t know. Beth’s deep.  She once told me “Churches are people, gospels in motion; walking cathedrals.” She is as ambitious as a politician but as sober as a priest; she only smiles when she’s with me.  I’m trying a lot harder this year, trying to make up for nearly flunking out my freshmen year, hoping that maybe Beth and I could go to college together next fall.

Mr. Schwartz turns around to push the tape into the VCR and my seventh period history teacher, Mr. Torrez, enters the classroom from across the hall.  He looks severe.  He tells Mr. Schwartz that some nut just flew into the World Trade Center.   One of them hits the menu button and two shiny metal towers fade into focus, thick smoke rolling out past the gleam of broken windowpanes, a gap so large it looks as if Godzilla has taken a bite out of it. I drop my pen and lean closer, squinting at the flicker of flames behind the dark clouds.  Flight 175 slams into the South Tower like light and magic, one-hundred-eighty-thousand pounds of steal vanishing into a wall of glass. I’m close enough to hear Mr. Schwartz say, Bob, I don’t think this is an accident.

After class ends the halls are deafening.  Everyone is speaking without commas or periods.  People are shouting and looking for their friends to review what we all have seen, Cable in the Classroom, terror via satellite.  I am trying to follow the usual flow of traffic because that’s what I think Beth would do.  She is assiduous and reliable.  She will take the same route she always takes.  She will know that freaking out about this like the kids bouncing from one locker to the next, congesting the corridors, is not going to help anything.    Rumors float past my ears, tidbits of information that can’t be true.  There are more planes, someone says.  The nation is under attack, says someone else.

I try to think of other things but that leads to thinking about other people, people I think I can’t stand to live without.  Their faces flip behind my eyes like a rolodex, eventually settling on Beth.  I would have seen her in the hall by now.  Perhaps she decided to go straight to her AP English Class. Maybe this isn’t the quickest route. Maybe she is trying to avoid the crowds on the first floor, going up and over and taking the E-Hall stairway down. I turn around and head for her classroom.  I’ll be late, but I want to get her opinion on all this. We’ve got plans to go to see a movie tonight. We’ve got to settle who picks. 

I reach Beth’s classroom and poke my head in.  Everyone is already seated, even the teacher, eyes fused to the television. Something new has happened.  A few students are weeping. The television is positioned in a way that prevents me from seeing the screen.  I scan the room, once, twice, three times. Beth isn’t there. I wait outside of the door until the bell rings, but she never shows up.  I headed to gym class. Tiptoeing through the doors of the men’s locker room, I am surprised to find no one has changed into their workout clothes.  All the boys are huddled around the doorway to Coach Reynolds’ office, glaring at the small 13 inch sitting on his desk.  The television volume is low as if out of respect for the dead.  I push my way through to see what has happened.  On the screen there is a fuming crater in one of the sides of the Pentagon.  The talking heads whisper to me in closed caption, a commercial airliner has hit another confirmed target.  Everyone stands there for the rest of the period, watching in silence while in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, southeast of Pittsburg, United Airlines Flight 93 is crashing into an open field.

The attack on the Department of Defense confirms worst fears.  Real panic sets in as everyone realizes the penalty of proximity; the whole metropolitan area has a bulls-eye on its back. Beth’s father is an analyst at the Pentagon. Many of the students have parents that work for Washington, they form horseshoes around rich preppy kids lending out their cell phones, but her face isn’t among them.  The halls are filled with speculation.  Pathological mean girls who would usually be starved for catastrophe have found the best in themselves relaying messages and reporting on the tragedy.  Margaret Bowen says there are still seventeen planes in the sky unaccounted for.  Yesterday, she was a liar, inventing the kind of rumors that landed other girls names on bathroom stalls. Today she is as reputable and up-to-date as the news ticker scrolling across the bottom of our TV screens. Tomorrow is unimaginable.  For Margaret Bowen and the hundreds of other kids whose names have been eclipsed by the images of skyscrapers collapsing into plumes of tar-colored smoke, tomorrow feels less and less like a sure thing. 

But the bells keep things together.  They offer some sense of normalcy.  They remind us that there is still order and intention.  The bells are faithful constants, and each chime carries the promise of forward motion. Even though every hour has been more horrifying than the last, we all are silent optimists, hoping for a time where this is the past.

I shuffle into my next class without thinking, my body on some kind of autopilot.  There are kids everywhere, 60 instead of the usual 30, lining the walls, gathered at the front, sitting Indian-style around Ms. Thackston’s desk.  Some teachers have abandoned their classes, forcing others to take in stray students. Standing at the back near my desk is a girl who has third period with Beth.  Her name is Alicia I think.  I move to my seat as Ms. Thackston asks everyone to be considerate of others and make do.  She invites any boy with a chair to offer it up to a girl. I offer my desk to Alicia but she shakes her head to decline.  Her eyelids are puffy and red from crying. Ms. Thackston makes her way over to her corner of the room, stepping over the kids sprawled out on the floor and sits on the edge of her desk.  She grabs a remote off a stack of papers and raises the volume of the TV.  Though there is no interrupting the headline news, I feel the need to whisper to Alicia.  I ask her quietly if she has seen Beth.  She says yes, this morning before school, but she never came to class.  I thank her and turn to look out the window. 

I’m on the third floor, now I can hear and see the military helicopters and fighter jets tearing the sky. It would have been a beautiful day.  Beth says everything is temporal.  I reach into my pocket and pull out the note I had written earlier. It is fold like a paper football, a triangle that makes it easier to slap into Beth’s palm as we pass.  I poke the tips of my fingers with its pointed edges. 

There is a collective gasp and the horrorstruck pop of hands covering mouths. Something is happening on the wall mounted television at the corner of room.  I see my fear mirrored back to me in the eyes of a woman, grayed from the dust of the debris. It is Erica Zuckerman, but I don’t know that yet.  I won’t know it is Erica until I see the same painful green eyes nearly ten years later in a book of grieving faces or a commemorative DVD.  She is being dragged by a policeman away from the wreckage, clawing at his forearm to try to get free.  She’s screaming to go back but the newscaster is talking over her.  Her speechlessness echoes from the screen.  There is someone she’s leaving behind, someone that’s saved her the way Beth has saved me.  The officer starts to cough violently. He falls to his knees and as his hands shoot up around his throat Erica runs back towards the fallen towers.  Her clay face streaked with tears. Her lips and teeth forming a word that looks like Andrew. The camera doesn’t follow her.  Erica is lost in the ashes enveloping south Manhattan.  She is lost to the uncertainty of chaos. Lost like me.

I don’t realize I have left my desk until Ms. Thackston calls after me.   I’m speeding through the halls, my feet squeaking against linoleum. I’m zigzagging from door to door, peaking in each classroom for Beth.  I almost fall to the ground sliding onto B-Hall but I regain my balance and pick up the pace. We’ve started running, full speed, Erica and I, together but separate.  We’ve got plans and we shout their names through the empty halls and streets. We have to find them. He needs to know he’s going to be a father.  She needs to read this note.  We all break the same, Erica.  At this very moment there is an Us everywhere, there is a You and a ME, a HIM and a HER, a Beth or an Andrew, and without them we fall.  The rubble of my life will be identical to yours, indistinguishable from one brick to the next.

11 September 2011 · Comments

• Tags
• lit
• creative writing
• 9/11
• September 11th
• 2001