After he’d collected his Christmas bonus for the year 2000, he’d opted for early retirement. He had headed the research department at a Madison Avenue advertising agency, and they were just as happy to replace him with someone younger and less expensive. His health was good, and he looked forward to years of leisure, to the foreign travel they’d never had time for, to long walks in the city, to long evenings with his books. They might take to wintering someplace warm, but they’d never move to Florida or Arizona or the Caribbean. Their children were here, and soon they would be grandparents. Anyway, he loved the city too much to leave it.
He’d just finished breakfast that morning, and he was sitting in the living room with the morning paper. The television set was on — his wife had turned it on, then returned to the kitchen to do the breakfast dishes. He wasn’t paying attention to the television, but then it got his attention, and he put down the paper and never picked it up again, because it might as well have been from the last century, or the one before that, for all the relevance it had.
Their windows faced north and east, and they were on the fourth floor, so you couldn’t see anything. At one point he took the elevator to the top floor and climbed up onto the roof, but the building was only sixteen stories tall and there were any number of high-rises that blocked the view of Lower Manhattan. He went back downstairs and sat in front of the television set and they showed him the same shot over and over, the second plane sailing into the South Tower, the bloom of fire and smoke, over and over and over. He couldn’t look at it, he couldn’t not look at it.
His daughter, twenty-seven years old, three months pregnant, was an administrative assistant at Cantor Fitzgerald. They’d joked about the name, how it sounded like an extremely ecumenical cleric, but that was before the plane hit the floor where the firm had its office and made the name a synonym for annihilation.
She could have been late for work. She had severe morning sickness, her husband had joked that she was preparing for the world’s first oral delivery, but it rarely stopped her from beating the rush hour and getting to her desk by eight-thirty.
She’d have been sitting there with a cup of coffee when the plane hit. She wasn’t supposed to have caffeine during pregnancy, but one cup in the morning, really, what harm could it do?
None now.
Her husband worked for the same firm, and in the same office. That wasn’t a coincidence, it was how they’d met, and of course he was always early for work, often arriving at seven or seven-thirty. That was when you could get a lot accomplished, he used to say, but sometimes he’d wait so that he and his wife could share the walk to the subway and the ride downtown. So maybe he’d gone in ahead of her that morning, or maybe they’d been together. There was no way to tell, and what earthly difference did it make?
His daughter, his son-in-law.
His son, his baby boy, was with an FDNY hook-and-ladder company stationed on East Tenth Street between Avenues B and C, and lived with a young woman in a tenement apartment two blocks from the firehouse.
And was involved in rescue operations in the North Tower when the building came down on him.
For days — he was never sure how many — all he seemed to do was sit in front of the television set. He must have eaten, he must have gone to the bathroom, he must have bathed and slept and done the things one does, but nothing registered, nothing imprinted on his memory.
One day he went into the bedroom they shared and his wife was sleeping. He called her name twice, a third time, but she didn’t stir. He went back and sat down again in front of the television set.
Some hours later he went to the bedroom again, and she hadn’t changed position, and he touched her forehead and realized that she was dead. There was, he noticed for the first time, a vial of sleeping pills on the bedside table, and it was empty.
Her action seemed entirely reasonable to him, and he only wondered that she had thought of it first, and only wished she’d told him, so that he could have lain down and died beside her. Without disturbing her body, he took the empty pill bottle downstairs and refilled it at the CVS on Broadway. He took all the pills and got undressed and got into bed.
Twelve hours later he awoke with a splitting headache and a dry mouth and a bottomless thirst. The throw rug beside the bed was stained with vomit.
He got out of bed, showered, put on clothes, and went up to the roof, intending to throw himself off it. He stood at the edge for what must have been half an hour. Then he went downstairs and called a doctor he knew, and a funeral parlor.
His daughter and son-in-law had been vaporized, atomized. Their bodies would never be recovered. His son lay at the bottom of a hundred stories of rubble. He told the funeral director there would be no service, and that he wanted his wife cremated. When they gave him the ashes he walked all the way downtown, five miles more or less, and got as close to Ground Zero as you could get. There were barriers up, you couldn’t get too close, but he did the best he could and found a spot where he could stand in relative privacy, tossing his wife’s remains a handful at a time into the air. He stood there for a few minutes after he’d finished, then turned around and walked back the way he came.
Crossing Twenty-third Street, he realized he was still carrying the container for the ashes. He dropped it in the next trash basket he came to and walked the rest of the way home.
He got up from his park bench now and walked to Christopher and Waverly, where he walked counterclockwise around the little triangular block on which stood the little triangular building that housed the Northern Dispensary. He liked the lines of the building, the way it filled its space. He liked, too, that it stood at the corner of Waverly Place and Waverly Place. The street didn’t just make a ninety-degree turn here, it actually intersected itself, and that had always appealed to him.
What’s the most religious street in the world? he used to ask his daughter, when he’d take her walking in the Village on a Sunday afternoon. Waverly Place was the answer, because it crosses itself.
The Northern Dispensary had been there forever. There’d been a little café on the corner called Waverly & Waverly, but it hadn’t been there for long. Something else had replaced it, and had been replaced in its turn.
Some things lasted, some things didn’t.
He stood listening to the sounds of the city, breathing in the taste and smell of the city. Sometimes, drawing a deep breath, he would fancy that he was inhaling some of the substance of his daughter and son-in-law. They had gone off into the air, and he was breathing the air, and who was to say he was not taking in some particulate matter that had once been theirs?
He turned, retraced his steps, crossed Christopher. Then came West Tenth Street, and then Charles.
Once all three streets were named for one man. Tenth Street, or at least a stretch of it, was then called Amos Street, and the man was Charles Christopher Amos, who’d owned a large tract of land there.
And West Fourth Street had been called Asylum Street. So, when you stood at the corner of West Fourth and West Tenth, you were at the erstwhile intersection of Amos and Asylum, and how many people knew that?
Of course it was no less interesting an intersection now, West Fourth and West Tenth Streets. What business did they have intersecting one another? Numbered streets ran east and west, numbered avenues ran north and south, that was how it was supposed to be, but here everything was askew, everything came at you on a slant, and West Fourth Street angled north even as Tenth and Eleventh and Twelfth Streets angled south.