He leaves the volume on, very loud, while he dresses in jeans and denim shirt and boots. He keeps flexing his jaw, trying to open his cottony ears. Then an announcer gets excited, as another building goes down. Live. Just behind the post office. Number 7 World Trade, where the mayor had his crisis center. A smaller building this time, and a smaller cloud, like chamber music pitted against a symphony. More shots of people running from the Cloud, this time up Greenwich Street. Cormac squints at the new images, looking for Delfina. She’s not there either.
Then the TV goes abruptly black, the sound ends in midsentence. The lights go off. Power gone. He pockets the cell phone, slips a portable radio into his shirt pocket, tuned to an all-news station, takes a thousand dollars in fifties and twenties from a wall safe, locks up, and goes down to the street.
She’s out here somewhere. He’s sure of that. He has to find her.
122.
In his search for her, Cormac tries to be methodical and careful. If she is under the twisted steel and rubble, there is no hope. But before the power failed, the television news was encouraging. The airliner had crashed into the ninety-first floor, destroying the stairwells (or so the anchormen theorized), setting off the fire, almost certainly dooming everybody above the flames. From those floors, Cormac had seen men and women jumping into eternity. But several thousand people below the flames in the North Tower had made it down the many flights of stairs to the street. Delfina’s office was on the eighty-fourth floor. There was footage of these people bursting out of the building, gasping for air, and of police and firemen urging them to run. Cormac saw some of them. He knows now that he must act on faith: She ran out with them.
As he moves through emptied streets, starting as close to the burning stumps as possible, moving first east, then west, combing the grid for signs of her, he assaults himself with questions. If that boy lives in her, would she have accepted easy death? Never. She’d have killed to live. How would he have behaved if he’d been on that eighty-fourth floor? Would he have chosen death from roaring flames or the emptiness of the air? Perhaps, for the jumpers, the final leap wasn’t even a choice. It was driven by the flames. And for Cormac? For decades, death has been his goal. Not death by his own hand. Not death through the violence of others. The sweet, consoling death that completes life. If there had been time, how would he have chosen?
He walks the white darkness of John Street, smelling the river on whose shore he arrived long ago, plus a new odor, rising from the ruined towers: burning steel and desks and carpets and paint and food and files and human flesh. Sheets of paper still drift through the sky like giant snowflakes. He sees the orange glow and remembers Diamond screaming as he was charred on the Common. The odor of Diamond’s roasted flesh was a stench he never smelled again, not even during the fires that came later. Now it has returned, multiplied by many thousands.
He imagines himself now in the North Tower above the flames, holding Delfina’s hand. She wants to dive into the sky. And she calls on Oshun, goddess of river waters. “Save us,” she calls to the emptiness. “Save us both and save the boy.” They jump. And the river goddess sends zephyrs of cool air, lifting them together above the fire, beyond the smoke, beyond the circling helicopters, beyond all harm. Why could that not have happened? After all, I am a man once saved by the river gods. Bumped through a black night while the tides took the Earl of Warren. In the grainy black air above the burning city, Delfina might have found confirmation of all she believed. Or learned a terrible lesson about the whimsy of the gods. Thinking this, imagining it, he hears a cynical New York ensemble from the streets below, a piano tinkling in a slow honky-tonk style, Bill Tweed leading the chorus: He flies through the airWit’ da greatest of ease…
And laughs grimly at himself.
He is, after all, here on the ground, alive on his own streets, not performing on the perilous stages of the Bowery Theater. At Murray Street, where all is white from powder, he sees a lone Chinese teenager pedaling a bicycle, a kid in a Stuyvesant High School jacket. He waves him down and buys the bike for three hundred dollars, including the chain and padlock. The kid takes the money and runs, as they used to say, like a thief. Cormac needs the bike if he is to make any time. Delfina, show me your face. Show me your golden skin. Protect that boy who is not yet here. The subways are shut down. There are no buses running below Fourteenth Street. Blue police barriers are being erected everywhere against cars and taxis. The tunnels are sealed. On the transistor, CBS reports hundreds of survivors walking across bridges to Brooklyn and Queens or trudging many miles uptown. Like refugees walking away from napalm in Vietnam, from killers in Armenia and Macedonia, from bombs in Kosovo and Cambodia and a thousand other places Cormac has never seen.
The boy will live in safety. He will read ten thousand books. He will play basketball in playgrounds. He will live in this city, in its plural streets, in its magic. He will gaze at the Woolworth Building. He will dance with many women. He will never trudge to a refugee camp. He will not shoot guns at strangers.
Cormac moves more quickly on the bicycle, slowed only by the slippery fine powder on the streets. A policeman, grungy with ash, tells him that NYU Downtown is closed. “They’re taking the hurt people to Stuyvesant, or Saint Vincent’s. You know where they are?” Yes, Cormac says, I know where they are, and thanks, man. “Be careful,” the cop says. “Who knows what’s next?”
He makes it across the pedestrian bridge at Chambers Street to the new building of Stuyvesant High School. This place will still be new when the boy is fourteen. Looking downtown, he sees flames rising angrily from the Marriott Hotel, and an immense column of smoke blowing now toward Brooklyn. Ambulances scream down the West Side Highway in one lane, and north again in another. The entire eastern side of the highway is starting to fill with heavy trucks, with emergency generators and lamps, with earthmovers, all aimed at the burning site, which the radio is now calling Ground Zero. Cormac locks the bicycle to a fence and hurries into Stuyvesant. The students are all gone, of course, the lobby now filling with doctors and nurses. Volunteers are unfolding cots. Technicians set up rigs for blood transfusions. But so far, a nurse says, the only patients are firemen with damaged eyes or blistered hands. Not a single civilian is there. She says these words in a mournful voice. She is saying that there are no survivors.
“If they come, we’re ready,” the nurse says. “But they’re not coming.”
Delfina isn’t at St. Vincent’s either. “Hey, man, she could be anywhere,” a black EMS driver tells Cormac. “ ‘East Side, West Side, all around the town…’ ” Then Cormac wheels back downtown, in and out of streets. Delfina’s nowhere that he looks. Cormac circles home, and she isn’t on his doorstep either. God damn it: I should have given her a key. She should have moved in with me when she returned from the Dominican Republic. I should have loved her more. God damn it all to Hell.
Now he has two bicycles but no lights. I’ll save one for the boy. The radio tells him that power is out from Worth Street to the Battery, from Broadway to the Hudson. Battery Park City is being evacuated. The boy will read all this in a history book, but I must tell Delfina to save all the newspapers. He was short of breath. I must tell Delfina how much I love her. Police are knocking on doors all over Downtown, afraid of fires, afraid of exploding gas mains. Come here, Delfina. Join me here, bring your inhabited body here as I close these drapes against the dust and the sirens and burn these logs in the fireplace. As we did in Ireland one terrible winter. The hearth will give us light and heat, and even food. As each hearth did before electricity surged in these streets.