And then he hears the sound of another airliner, roaring from the south, unseen behind the North Tower. Everyone around him looks up too: cops, firemen, ambulance drivers, newspaper photographers, civilians rushing out of the North Tower. Sirens screaming. They sense that the second airliner is following the streaming smoke as if it were a beacon. Then, for a fraction of a second, they glimpse it: small, black, looking puny as a wasp as it aims itself at the South Tower.
Lower than the first. A woman screams. Then another. Then a black man beside Cormac says, “Oh, shit, man.”
The world freezes.
Cormac feels all of time leave him.
And then the second airliner smashes into the South Tower with a ferocious orange explosion. Cormac can’t move. Burning fuel erupts from three sides of the tower, a third of the way down from the roof. In a kind of erupting orange counterpoint to the streaming black smoke of the North Tower. As if this pilot were trumping the first. And Cormac knows, along with everyone else, that this is no accident. Knows it’s not some spectacular replay of the plane that crashed through fog into the Empire State Building in 1945. Knows that both planes have been aimed at the towers like missiles. Knows that the madmen are here. Knows without thinking that they’ve come from across the planet, from blasted deserts, from the ruins of Acre, from the road to Medina, from Saladin. He can hear the death calls. Death to crusaders. Death to infidels. He can hear the orgasmic scream of Allah Akhbar!
There’s a moment of absolute silence, and then the street is loud with screaming shouting running. Cormac rushes toward the lobby of the North Tower, but the same cop grabs his arm and turns him. “How many fuckin’ times I gotta tell you, pal? Get the fuck out of here. This ain’t over!” He heaves Cormac toward the giant wheel, he bounces off its hard rubber, and another cop hurls him into Vesey Street. To face the burning towers. On Cormac’s left is St. Paul’s Chapel, with its ancient graveyard, its tombstones smoothed blank by weather and years. The place where Washington prayed after his inauguration, and Cormac stood on Broadway, watching him leave. Behind him, next to a coffee shop masked by the rigging of rehabbers, is 20 Vesey Street, where he worked for nine years as a reporter for the Evening Post. On what he then thought was a high floor. The fifth.
Now he gazes at the coal-colored plumes of smoke rising into the wind from the North Tower, and he tries again to count floors. Delfina, please come down from there, go down the stairwells, follow the firemen out. One ten, one nine, one eight… Then, above the orange flames, he sees people. Moving dots behind the steel grille. Above the orange flames. Waving shirts and hands as signs of life. Surely gasping for air. Surely feeling as if condemned to ovens. Not the ovens of the twentieth century. Not Auschwitz. No barked commands of Arbeit macht frei. New ovens, created without blueprints. Here in New York. Where fire attacks steel and oxygen at a few thousand degrees above zero. And he sees that the people are being pushed by the heat of the ovens to the edge of that high floor. Is it eighty-four? Above eighty-four? Below? One hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight… There they are: tiny figures: men indistinguishable from women: voiceless at this distance: beyond help: beyond helicopters: without parachutes: beyond salvation.
He tries the cell phone again.
“Forget it, buddy,” a uniformed cop says. “They’re all out of order.”
Cormac knows he’s right. He lights a cigarette with a trembling hand.
And then sees the first man jump. From a floor above the flames of the North Tower. Shirtless. Faceless at that height. White skin. Tumbling and tumbling and tumbling through the indifferent air. Then vanishing behind the building where Cormac used to buy books at Borders. Gone. Like that.
And here comes another. And another. And then a couple. A man and a woman. Holding hands. Her skirt billowing above her pale thighs.
Then gone.
“I make that fourteen,” the cop says.
More cops arrive, walking backward, all of them young, gazing wide-eyed at the burning towers. “They just hit the fucking Pentagon,” one of them says. “I swear. The Pentagon!” They look at Cormac, who has been joined by an older reporter, a Japanese woman, a young photographer, and they gesture to them to move back. Are you people outta your minds? They spread yellow crime scene tape across the aluminum poles of the rigging. Get back! Get the fuck back! Under the rigging, a coffee shop. Two Mexicans inside, stoic, unmoving. In the gutter, Cormac sees a puddle of coagulating blood, thickening with purple ridges. Along with an unopened bottle of V-8 Splash and a cheese Danish still wrapped in cellophane, and a single high-heeled woman’s shoe. Come down, Delfina. Go to the street. Run. And there, in the middle of Vesey Street: a smaller wheel from the first airplane. The wheel that must have hit the woman whose shoe lay next to the blood. She must have died before breakfast. Come down.
And then his eyes catch movement at the top of the South Tower, above the glossy orange flames. It’s pitching forward. A cracking sound. Oh. It’s tipping at an angle, aimed for Church Street, for Century 21, for Brooks Brothers. Oh oh oh. He hears a scream, another, a chorus of screams, and then the tower begins to come down.
But it does not topple. The high floors, above the crack, above the flames, right themselves, and then they all come down in a straight line. Floor hitting floor hitting floor, like pancakes from a machine. There’s a sound of an avalanche. A glass and steel avalanche. With some high-pitched sound that must be the meshed screams of a thousand human beings. The sound of impact is so loud it shuts down Cormac’s hearing. And in that sudden silence he sees the Cloud begin to rise from the empty space.
He knows that the Cloud is made of pulverized carpet, desks, computers, artwork, paper, flowers, breakfasts, shoes, umbrellas, briefcases, mirrors, doors, counters, toilets, tons and tons and tons of concrete, and thousands of human beings. He knows this: The nouns skitter through his mind; but he can’t absorb it. He glances at the North Tower, still burning, still sending smoke into the sky, while a helicopter lurches through the sky behind it. Delfina. Oh, baby.
The Cloud is now rising like some angry genie. So opaque it looks like a solid. Like some new creature. Some devouring god released from the ruptured earth. Animated by those who have just died. By those who flew that airplane. And by those who lived here when Cormac was young. Up out of Cortlandt Street, up out of the rotting timbers of the house where he once lived. Writhing with power and dirtiness. Coming at them. Coming to take them too.
Cops ram into them, into Cormac and the others, cops running from the Cloud, cops looking for foxholes. One grabs the Japanese woman and hurls her toward Broadway. “Run,” he shouts, “run run run run.” Others push into the lobby of 20 Vesey Street. Cormac starts to run toward Broadway too, trips over something in the street, falls. And like a whirlwind the Cloud comes down upon him.
The world vanishes. There’s no horizon. No floor. No sky. No limits. No exit. He hears voices within the Cloud. Men screaming. Noooooooooooooo. Women screaming. Noooooooooo. Names called. Nancy. Mary. Freddie. Harold. Enrique. And then a mixture, male and female: Noooooooooooooooooo. A high-pitched chorus of the dead. Calling to husbands and wives and lovers. Shouting farewells to children. Reduced to powder. Then, rising above them all, in the dense dry powdery heart of the Cloud, he can hear the meshed voices of weeping women. Dead of smallpox and typhus and cholera. Dead of gunshots and knife wounds. Dead in childbirth. Dead of shame and loneliness. Calling from the unburied past, from the injured earth, from landfill and ruined wooden houses and splintered ships, from vanished decades and lost centuries. A chorus. Symphonic and soaring, the voices of the New York Götterdämmerung.