“I’ve got to call Iris.”
“I spoke to her. She knows you’re all right. She had another little fall. But she’s all right, she says. The hurt knee was unscathed. That’s how she put it.”
“She wouldn’t say anything if it wasn’t unscathed.”
“Well, she says she’s fine. She doesn’t sound fine, I have to say. But she says she is. And who can be fine after a day like this. What am I talking about?”
“I’m not thinking straight, either,” Faulk said to her.
“Greta’s upstairs in her old room. Her hubby’s in meetings or something with Congress and Senate people.”
Faulk nodded and sighed, and felt his exhaustion like a form of failure.
“Somebody said the Pennsylvania one was headed for the Capitol Building or the White House.”
“Jesus.”
“Can I fix you something to eat or drink?”
“I think I just want a glass of water.”
They went together into the kitchen, and she put ice in a glass and poured the water. “Jack went to bed at nine. He hasn’t been feeling all that well. He’s been fighting the first cold of the year. And then this business has really upset him.”
“Still can’t quite believe it,” he told her. “The whole thing.”
“Nobody can believe it. Everybody’s in shock.”
Then Jack was there, leaning on the frame of the doorway. “I’m feeling all right,” he said. You could hear the congestion in his voice. “Don’t get up, son,” he said as Faulk started to rise. He shuffled over to the refrigerator and got a beer. “Do you believe this shit?”
“That’s exactly what my father said,” Faulk told him.
“We were just saying—” said Clara.
“I heard you.” Jack opened the beer. “And I still end up saying: do you believe this shit?”
“I remember being so appalled at the bombing there in ’93. At what they were trying to do.”
“The cabbie who brought me here got attacked this morning,” Faulk told them. “Poor guy only looks the part. A Palestinian Christian, for God’s sake.”
“What will happen next, I wonder,” Clara said. “I mean we’re at war with somebody. Maybe the whole rest of the world.”
Greta came to the doorway now, wrapped in a light blue robe, looking at each of them. She walked over and hugged Faulk. “Hello, Cuz.”
“Hi.”
She looked at Jack. “Can I have a little of that in a glass?”
Jack got a glass out of the cabinet and poured some of the beer. Greta sat down across from Faulk. “I can’t do this at home unless there’s a big gathering.” She shook her head and smiled, turning to Faulk. “Have you got in touch with Natasha? And congratulations, by the way.”
“Thanks. And no.”
“Imagine. Stranded in paradise.”
“How are you?”
“We were sitting outside eating breakfast and watching the rowing crews on the river. We heard the explosion. It shook the water glasses on the table. And then we saw the smoke. Tom knew immediately it was a plane.”
Jack stood leaning on the stove and drank the beer. He said, “I heard tonight on the news that the bastard who did it, the mastermind, is a guest of the Taliban. In Afghanistan.”
“I can’t remember the name,” Faulk said.
Greta said the name. “Tom’s been talking about him for years.”
“Clinton tried to get him,” Jack put in. “A goddamned rich kid from Saudi Arabia. Big oil family.”
“So we’re gonna be at war with Afghanistan?”
“Looks like it.”
They were silent for a few moments.
“I’d like to see us rebuild both towers even taller than before,” Jack said. “And with both buildings culminating in the shape of a fist with the middle finger raised, facing east.”
“Jack,” Clara said. But she smiled.
“Tom’s afraid they might use this as an excuse to go after Iraq.”
“That’s alarmist,” said Clara. “Isn’t it?”
“Well, there’s a lot of worry about the nuclear thing, and the chemicals. Biological weapons. That pig is importing uranium, they say. And we know he’s used chemicals and gas on his own people.”
“Have to see about the train to Memphis,” said Faulk. “Sorry.”
“Stay with us,” Clara urged.
“Gotta set out finding us a house. Natasha’s furniture’s due to arrive — well, the first day it might arrive is tomorrow, I think. They get a window of ten days. But God I hope it’s sooner.” He sighed, briefly contemplating the new life. “We should’ve settled on something before she left Washington, but it just wasn’t possible.”
“She’ll want to look with you, don’t you think?”
“You’ll stay with Iris,” Jack said. “Wasn’t that the plan?”
“I guess.” Faulk looked into the water and ice in his glass, and rattled it a little. He drank. The water tasted faintly metallic. He held the glass toward his aunt, remembering that he had awakened in the morning of this terrible long day with a hangover. “Do you think I could have a little whiskey in this?”
2
“Oh, Jesus God.” The words coming from her own mouth awakened her, and she lay crying silently for many minutes. Here, in her mind’s eye, was Duego standing over her. She had the realization that this had played and replayed in her fitful dozing the whole night.
A moment later, the idea of Michael Faulk inside the squat cloud in New York, among the dead and dying, flickered across her consciousness with the picture of herself lying in the sand, drunk and stoned, kissing Duego on the beach in Jamaica, before Duego showed himself to be what he was. Putting her hands over her eyes, she attempted to erase all the images, sobbing.
In the night, after the long time in the bathroom, she had come out and wrapped herself in a robe and simply collapsed across the bed.
Now, trying to be quiet, not wanting Constance to hear her, she reached for the room phone and rang the front desk. No answer. She pulled the robe tight around herself and went into the bathroom. There was pain where he had pushed into her, and she took the little mirror attached to the sink and tried to examine herself. Her inner thighs were red, and it felt as though there might be a little tear just inside the opening. Moving her finger gently there, she felt only the slight sting of it but no abrasion.
There was no more blood, either. Her foot hurt, where she had kicked him, and her middle toe was bruised.
She took another long warm bath, trembling and washing herself gingerly with the soft rag. The muscles of her hips ached and were also tender to the touch. Probably there would be bruises there, too. She would need time for that to fade. She wanted desperately to find a way to make it so nothing had happened. Nothing. It would be something not done, not lived through. It would be something that had not ever been.
She heard herself breathing and then realized, slow, that the breathing was a low scream. She stood there in the steam of the bath, dripping wet, turning in a small circle in the light.
Finally she applied a towel to her body and willed herself to clean her teeth, nearly retching when she spit the water.
After managing with her trembling hands to put her hair back in a ponytail, she dressed and went out into the hall and to the elevators. This took all the courage she could muster. She saw no one.
Down in the lobby, there were people on the phones. She went to the front desk, where Mrs. Ratzibungen stood writing in a notepad. “I want to call my fiancé,” Natasha said to her in a shaky voice — oddly, painfully aware of the frightful ordinariness of the words. She pressed on: “They usually put a call through to my room from him about this time.”
“I vill make zuh call for you. Vill you vrite zuh number here?”