“I suppose,” he says.
She gives him a cautious look. “Could you be brilliant? Could your clumsy delivery be designed to engage me?”
“I’ll go away, okay? But that’s what you said to them, right?”
She points to the barman, who’s talking to Mazurek. “Roman tells me you work at Ground Zero.”
The question unsettles Bobby, leads him to suspect that she’s a disaster groupie, looking for a taste of the pit, but he says, “Yeah.”
“It’s really…” She does a little shivery shrug. “Strange.”
“Strange. I guess that covers it.”
“That’s not what I wanted to say. I can’t think of the right word to describe what it does to me.”
“You been down in it?”
“No, I can’t get any closer than here. I just can’t. But…” She makes a swirling gesture with her fingers. “You can feel it here. You might not notice, because you’re down there all the time. That’s why I come here. Everybody’s going on with their lives, but I’m not ready. I need to feel it. To understand it. You’re taking it away piece by piece, but the more you take away, it’s like you’re uncovering something else.”
“Y’know, I don’t want to think about this now.” He gets to his feet. “But I guess I know why you want to.”
“Probably it’s fucked up of me, huh?”
“Yeah, probably,” says Bobby, and walks away.
“She’s still looking at you, man,” Pineo says as Bobby settles beside him. “What you doing back here? You could be fucking that.”
“She’s a freak,” Bobby tells him.
“So she’s a freak! Even better!” Pineo turns to the other two men. “You believe this asshole? He could be fucking that bitch over there, yet here he sits.”
Affecting a superior smile, Roman says, “You don’t fuck them, pal. They fuck you.”
He nudges Mazurek’s arm as though seeking confirmation from a peer, a man of experience like himself, and Mazurek, gazing at his grungy reflection in the mirror behind the bar, says distractedly, weakly, “I could use another shot.”
The following afternoon Bobby unearths a disk of hard black rubber from beneath some cement debris. It’s four inches across, thicker at the center than at the edges, shaped like a little UFO. Try as he might, he can think of no possible purpose it might serve, and he wonders if it had something to do with the fall of the towers. Perhaps there is a black seed like this at the heart of every disaster. He shows it to Pineo, asks his opinion, and Pineo, as expected, says, “Fuck, I don’t know. Part of a machine.” Bobby knows Pineo is right. The disk is a widget, one of those undistinguished yet indispensable objects without which elevators will not rise or refrigerators will not cool; but there are no marks on it, no holes or grooves to indicate that it fits inside a machine. He imagines it whirling inside a cone of blue radiance, registering some inexplicable process.
He thinks about the disk all evening, assigning it various values. It is the irreducible distillate of the event, a perfectly formed residue. It is a wicked sacred object that belonged to a financier, now deceased, and its ritual function is understood by only three other men on the planet. It is a beacon left by time-traveling tourists that allows them to home in on the exact place and moment of the terrorist attack. It is the petrified eye of God. He intends to take the disk back to his apartment and put it next to the half shoe and all the rest of the items he has collected in the pit. But that night when he enters the Blue Lady and sees the brunette at the end of the bar, on impulse he goes over and drops the disk on the counter next to her elbow.
“Brought you something,” he says.
She glances at it, pokes it with a forefinger and sets it wobbling. “What is it?”
He shrugs. “Just something I found.”
“At Ground Zero?”
“Uh-huh.”
She pushes the disk away. “Didn’t I make myself plain last night?”
Bobby says, “Yeah… sure,” but isn’t sure he grasps her meaning.
“I want to understand what happened… what’s happening now,” she says. “I want what’s mine, you know. I want to understand exactly what it’s done to me. I need to understand it. I’m not into souvenirs.”
“Okay,” Bobby says.
“‘Okay.’” She says this mockingly. “God, what’s wrong with you? It’s like you’re on medication!”
A Sinatra song, “All Or Nothing At All,” flows from the jukebox—a soothing musical syrup that overwhelms the chatter of hookers and drunks and commentary from the TV mounted behind the bar, which is showing chunks of Afghanistan blowing up into clouds of brown smoke. The crawl running at the bottom of the screen testifies that the estimate of the death toll at Ground Zero has been reduced to just below five thousand; the amount of debris removed from the pit now exceeds one million tons. The numbers seem meaningless, interchangeable. A million lives, five thousand tons. A ludicrous score that measures no real result.
“I’m sorry,” the brunette says. “I know it must take a toll, doing what you do. I’m impatient with everyone these days.”
She stirs her drink with a plastic stick whose handle duplicates the image of the neon dancer. In all her artfully composed face, a mask of foundation and blush and liner, her eyes are the only sign of vitality, of feminine potential.
“What’s your name?” he asks.
She glances up sharply. “I’m too old for you.”
“How old are you? I’m twenty-three.”
“It doesn’t matter how old you are… how old I am. I’m much older than you in my head. Can’t you tell? Can’t you feel the difference? If I was twenty-three, I’d still be too old for you.”
“I just want to know your name.”
“Alicia.” She enunciates the name with a cool overstated precision that makes him think of a saleswoman revealing a price she knows her customer cannot afford.
“Bobby,” he says. “I’m in grad school at Columbia. But I’m taking a year off.”
“This is ridiculous!” she says angrily. “Unbelievably ridiculous… totally ridiculous! Why are you doing this?”
“I want to understand what’s going on with you.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, I just do. Whatever it is you come to understand, I want to understand it, too. Who knows. Maybe us talking is part of what you need to understand.”
“Good Lord!” She casts her eyes to the ceiling. “You’re a romantic!”
“You still think I’m trying to hustle you?”
“If it was anyone else, I’d say yes. But you… I don’t believe you have a clue.”
“And you do? Sitting here every night. Telling guys you just got back from a funeral. Grieving about something you can’t even say what it is.”
She twitches her head away, a gesture he interprets as the avoidance of impulse, a sudden clamping down, and he also relates it to how he sometimes reacts on the subway when a girl he’s been looking at catches his eye and he pretends to be looking at something else. After a long silence she says, “Were not going to be having sex. I want you to be clear on that.”
“Okay.”
“That’s your fall back position, is it? ‘Okay’?”
“Whatever.”
“‘Whatever.’” She curls her fingers around her glass, but does not drink. “Well, we’ve probably had enough mutual understanding for one night, don’t you think?”
Bobby pockets the rubber disk, preparing to leave. “What do you do for a living?”
An exasperated sigh. “I work in a brokerage. Now can we take a break? Please?”
“I gotta go home anyway,” Bobby says.