The Carpenter was watching a newsreel.
They had newsreels all the time when he was a boy. Coming attractions, and then cartoons, and a short, either a travelogue or something funny, and then the feature. Followed, more often than not, by the second feature, itself preceded by more cartoons and coming attractions.
Now you got commercials, and animated exhortations to put your trash in the basket and be quiet during the movie.
Once, he remembered, there had been a newsreel theater near Times Square that showed nothing but newsreels from morning to night, a sort of theatrical version of CNN. Television had put paid to that enterprise, as it had meant the end of newsreels altogether. So the Carpenter couldn’t be watching a newsreel. It had to be a dream.
He was awake enough to reason that out, while sufficiently asleep to remain in the dream and go on watching the dream newsreel. It was in black and white, of course, as newsreels were meant to be, and it included moments the Carpenter had seen in newsreels, or might have seen — the mushroom cloud of an atomic explosion, German soldiers goose-stepping, Allied troops liberating a concentration camp. Then, still in black and white, a plane sailed into the World Trade Center tower, and flame billowed, and the building fell in on itself.
There is an announcer throughout, and the Carpenter can hear the words he speaks but can’t make them out. And then one word leaps out, the word Carpenter, with nothing intelligible before or after it. And there he is on the screen, dressed not as he is today, in dark trousers and a dark nylon sport shirt from the store in Greenpoint, nor in the clothes he has in his backpack, his yachting costume. No, on the screen he is wearing a dark suit, like one of the ones he used to buy at Brooks Brothers, and a striped tie, and he’s surrounded by a crowd, and they’re cheering, they’re all there to honor him.
Savior of the city, he hears the announcer say, and President Eisenhower is there, smiling that huge smile of his, and Mayor Wagner, and John Wayne, and they’re giving him some sort of reward. And now the noise dies down, and he’s supposed to say something.
And can’t think of a thing to say.
That’s unsettling enough to wake him, or seems to be, and he opens his eyes, or thinks he does, and now the screen fills with the image of a stunningly beautiful woman. He thinks at first that she looks familiar, and then that he knows her, and of course it’s Carole, his wife, and she’s looking right at him.
Carole...
I’m right here, Billy.
Why did you leave me, Carole?
I told you I could only stay for a minute. Didn’t I tell you that?
The first time, Carole. When you took the pills. Why did you do that?
Oh, Billy.
You should have told me.
You would have made me stay.
No, I’d have come with you. I tried to follow you, but then I woke up. It wasn’t my time.
No, Billy.
I had things I had to do.
I know you did.
But I’ll be along soon, Carole. I can’t do much more. I get so tired.
I know you do.
Are you going again, Carole? Don’t go.
I have to, my darling.
Carole? I’ll be with you soon, Carole.
His eyes were open. Had they been open all along? And his cheeks were wet. Did anyone notice him weeping? No, there was no one near. No one noticed a thing.
And the movie was back, the Henry James movie, with women in gowns and everyone looking sensitive and aristocratic. And an audience, even on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, that filled fewer than half the seats.
There were two people between him and the aisle. They rose to let him past, sat down once he was by them. Their eyes never left the screen.
The men’s room, the stairs, the sidewalk outside. He’d walk home, get something to eat along the way. He knew he ought to eat, although he wasn’t very hungry. He hadn’t touched his popcorn.
One trick, Fran Buckram thought, was to move around a little. If you sat in the same spot forever, your eyes on the same scene, it got harder and harder to pay attention to what was in front of your eyes. If you got up and walked around you got the blood moving, and when you sat down again on a different bench you saw things from a different angle.
It helped, but what would help even more was to have something to do.
A book or a newspaper would be handy. And what could look more natural than a man reading? Always the chance, though, that he’d get caught up in his reading and miss the man he was waiting for. Of course that wouldn’t happen if he had something he couldn’t read, and he found himself wondering about that Asian man he’d seen earlier with his Spanish newspaper. Was he on a stakeout of his own?
He got out his cell phone, tried to think of somebody to call. Arlene? No, he really didn’t have anything to say to her. Susan? Yeah, right. She’d tell him to take off all his clothes and handcuff himself to the bench. Then take two enemas and call her in the morning.
He called his own number, thinking he’d check his messages, then heard his own outgoing message, the one that told people not to leave messages, and saw the futility of that. And what an arrogant message he’d recorded — I’m too busy for you, so don’t leave me a message, but try me again later when I might have time for you. Nice, very nice.
Even if he had a paper it was getting too dark to read. Good, he thought. Pretty soon it would be dark enough and the human traffic sparse enough to think about boarding the Nancy Dee. First, though, he’d better get something to eat. He’d pee while he was at it, but peeing wouldn’t be that much of a problem once he was on the boat. There was bound to be a toilet, which you were probably supposed to call something else. The head? That sounded right. So he could go to the head, or pee in a wastebasket (and God knew what they’d call that) or a bottle. Or in the corner, because it wasn’t his boat, and the man whose boat it was would never know the difference.
The Carpenter had walked all the way back from the theater, a distance of about two miles. He’d taken his time, stopping to buy a sandwich, eating it as he walked, stopping again for a can of soda. The sun was down by the time he reached Riverside Park, but the day was still bright, and the sky over Jersey was stained red and purple.
It was a wonderful city for sunsets. You couldn’t see them from his old apartment, and that was the one thing he would have changed about the place. It did something for a person to see a beautiful sunset.
He walked through the park, walked a hundred yards or so past the Boat Basin, sat for a few minutes, then walked back the way he’d come. Looking at the people, paying attention to what he saw.
Something felt wrong.
He’d felt glimmerings of it on the way back from the movie house. He thought about the date he’d circled on his calendar. Well, he’d made the circle on paper with a felt-tipped pen. He hadn’t carved it in stone. Who was to say he couldn’t move it up?
A year, of course, was the conventional period of mourning. Making the final sacrifice a year to the day after their magnificent sacrifice had a certain poetic value, not to mention a mathematical precision. But how trivial such considerations seemed to him now.
The sooner he carried out his mission, the sooner he could rest. And he was tired, so tired, in a way far beyond what sleep could cure. His spirit ached with the tiredness he felt.