He started down the avenue. Trinity Church, the planned site of the wedding ceremony, was in the vicinity of the World Trade Center. Yesterday, he had seen the towers from the window as the train neared the city, and seeing the two structures looming above everything, gleaming with reflected sunlight, he thought of being inside, high up, looking out.
Remembering this made him momentarily short of breath. He went to the curb, intending to flag down a cab. But none of the cabs were stopping. Most of them were coming from the opposite direction.
It occurred to him then that he was in fact headed to where the calamity was taking place. There would be no wedding today. He stopped. The entire morning remained. He had been wandering south. His headache had returned; his mouth was dry. The street now seemed nearly deserted. He saw some people sitting in a sandwich shop with a phone booth at the back. No one seemed to notice him. They were all talking quietly, huddled together, or simply staring with dread out at the sunlight and the buildings opposite. A woman sat crying while two others attempted to calm her.
In the phone booth he was absurdly elated to find that there was a dial tone and that the phone was working when he touched the numbers. He called the downtown Marriott, and to his surprise someone picked up, a woman, who sounded hurried but nothing like someone in the grip of panic. He asked for Theo Ruhm, and she immediately clicked off. He heard a buzzing, and Ruhm answered. “Hello.” It was nearly a shout.
Faulk said, “This is Michael.”
“It’s awful,” Theo Ruhm moaned. “Total confusion. Nobody can get ahold of anybody. But the wedding’s off. They’re setting up to do triage at the church. Triage, for Christ’s sake. Oh, God — I saw it. I went over there and saw everything. It’s awful. We’re headed out. Back to the house. Can you get here?”
“I’m almost to Penn Station,” Faulk said. “I’m going down to D.C.”
“They hit D.C., too.” Theo began to cry. “The sons of bitches.”
“Is everybody all right?”
“We’re all going home. If you can get to Brooklyn, you know you’re welcome.”
“I’m gonna try for D.C.,” Faulk said. The other had hung up. He put another quarter in and tried to call Iris, Aunt Clara, and then Jamaica. Nothing was going through.
He went out and walked down the blocks, hearing the sirens, his head throbbing, the gritty air smelling of exhaust and drywall and plastic and, scarily, of jet fuel. All his training and all the years of practicing his vocation rose in him, and he looked for some way to help those he encountered on the street — but no one looked at him; they were all moving as if in a kind of severe blundering trance, northward.
4
It was impossible for Natasha to absorb what she saw as something really happening. She couldn’t think past the images on the television.
In the crowded lobby, people were lined up at the row of public phones, waiting to try calling relatives in the States. She saw several people with cell phones, but no one was having any success. There were six wall phones. The sixth was broken, the wire hanging from the silver cabinet without a receiver.
The phone lines to the United States were overloaded. But people kept trying. They kept redialing and putting money into the phones while the crowd waited behind them.
There was a movement to drive the twenty miles to Kingston, to try calling from there. Several people stepped forward, Natasha and Constance among them. They climbed into a van with three older women in shorts and blouses who wore big straw hats and sunglasses, a very heavy middle-aged man in a flowered Jamaican shirt, and a thin, ascetic-looking man in his thirties, whom none of them had seen before. The three women were together. They muttered back and forth about where they would sit, getting settled, and then they were still. Natasha saw the strands of red hair coming down over the ears of the nearest one. No one spoke. Ratzi drove. Constance was in the passenger seat in front; Natasha was in the middle seat, next to the window, the two other men on her right. The three ladies had jammed together in the far back. They were sniffling and murmuring to one another, and it sounded like a kind of whisper argument. Constance kept chewing her cuticles and sighing, staring out at the narrow road. She looked back at Natasha and repeated, “It doesn’t open until something like ten o’clock. I’m certain of it. He couldn’t have been in either building yet unless he worked there.”
One of the women in back, the one with the red hair, said, “I lived in New York for thirty-three years. Those buildings don’t open to the public until nine-thirty.”
“There,” Constance said. “See?”
“You have someone in New York?” the woman said to Natasha.
“Yes.”
“My whole family’s there. In Queens.” She sniffled. “My whole family. I’m so afraid for them. What else is going to happen?”
Ratzi turned the radio on, but it was all static. He kept turning the dial. It had been mostly static before, Natasha remembered, though it was difficult not to think of it as part of the catastrophe. Palm trees shaded the road thinly on both sides. There were mountains to the left. Through the palms to the right was the sea with its repeating foamy waves tumbling across the green surface and crashing ashore. The sight seemed unreal, pitilessly immaculate in the clarity of the sun. She felt sick to her stomach, looking at it, so beautiful, and it occurred to her that there was something ruthlessly insensible, blank, heartless, about the exquisite beach and every natural wonder out the window of the Jeep she and Constance rode in with the six silent others. Absurdly, she thought of the senator’s expansive back lawn and the little pleading statues.
Now the young man spoke. “It must have been the pilots. They must’ve infiltrated the pilot force.”
“Force?” Constance said.
“The roster of pilots,” said the heavy man in the flower-print shirt. He had his big hands folded across his belly. His eyes were red and shadowed, and the sclera were faintly yellow. The odor of alcohol came from him through strong cologne. He had a bulbous nose, with little red lines forking across the tip of it.
“Surely no one could force a pilot to do that to his own plane?” Ratzi said.
No one answered. The young man turned to Natasha. “My name is Nicholas Duego.”
Constance glared back at him from the front seat.
He shrugged and then muttered low, dispiritedly, as if it weren’t even worth saying, “We might as well know who we are.”
“You an American?” Constance asked.
“Cuban American.” His demeanor changed slightly. He was plainly buoyed by the question and felt the need to talk. “On my father’s side. I lived in Cuba. We went to Canada for a vacation when I was nine years old, and my father got us to Detroit. We moved to Orlando, Florida, when I was twelve. My father was a horse trainer. I did not speak English until I was ten.” Constance stared. There was a curious formality in his speech. No one else said anything, and after going on a little more he seemed to wind down, with a sort of sullen embarrassment. “We might as well know,” he muttered into the silence of the others.
On the outskirts of Kingston, houses and huts and shacks lined the road, teeming with Jamaicans, all going about the business of life in their native city. Children ran and played under the spray of water hoses, and there were many roadside stands selling goods — coffee, exotic fruits, vegetables, barrel-cooked meat and fish. The proprietors stared after the crowded car as it moved by into the busy stream of traffic, but people on the streets scarcely glanced at them. On the side of one building was a big painting of an imperial-looking black face superimposed on the form of a lion, with the phrase JAH RASTAFARI below it.