Eden’s face was still a medium for the sorrow that had been inscribed there by such a wickedly heavy hand, but something was off.
Somehow she was alive again; there was an illicit flare to her nostrils, as though she was carrying a great secret. Indeed she was. She was a 9/11 widow who’d regained her substantial nature. It was almost as though she could move her body again.
They put you inside what? I said.
Inside the building. But it’s specific to you. To what you need.
Cognitive therapy? I said.
No, she said. There’s nothing therapeutic about it.
Sign me up, I said. Do they yell at you about what a piece of shit you are? I’d pay five hundred an hour for that.
They might, she said, wincing.
Ohhh, I said. It’s—
No. Well, I think they have the equipment, if that’s what works for you… but that’s not really their main line of business.
Can you just fucking tell me what it is? Is it Fight Club?
It’s Fight Club, she said.
Fight Club’s for little boys, I said. What are we talking about here?
It depends. There are a lot of variables. What they did for me isn’t what they’ll do for you. Unless that’s what you want. It’s bespoke.
Oh, perfect, I said.
I’m fucking this up, she said. It’s not bespoke. Everyone who goes gets something different. And they will figure out what you want. You can be honest or lie but if you lie you’ll probably just have to keep going back, so it’s cheaper to be honest.
Honest about what?
About everything. Everything. There’s a question about, you know, what’s your greatest fear or something. It’s more subtle, but that’s what they’re after. And I gave them the usual bullshit at first, you know, like, What have I got to be afraid of at this point? Nothing scares me now except my own face. And this woman, she’s a shrink, she writes that down and goes on with the rest of the questionnaire and then at the end she says, Would you like to die? As in, If you would like to die right now I can make that happen for you.
She what?
This woman, if I’d said yes, I would like to die, she would have, I don’t know, shot me right there, pulled out a needle, whatever. I knew it like I know my own name. She was totally calm about it. It was an adult conversation and we both knew exactly what she meant. The way a doctor tells you it’s stage four and you’re terminal. She let me know that she knew I’d already weighed the options and could make a perfectly informed decision.
And you said?
I said, No, thank you, not today. And she said, What, then, is your greatest fear? And I was like, All right, I get it. I understand. And we talked some more and finally I said: I’m afraid that he’s not dead. I’m afraid that he’s still out there.
Okay. Right.
And she says, Good. We can work with that. And they did.
What do you mean? I said.
I mean they worked with that.
They made a hologram of him?
Jesus, Hazel. They applied the information I’d given them, and…
And what?
They built a complication for me. They call them complications. They built his office. His desk, where he sat, what he saw out the window. And I got to sit in his chair and look in the drawers and look out the windows—I guess they were screens or something, but they were hi-def, and I didn’t see the same boat twice on the river. There was the bullpen, you know, the traders, and the analysts, Bloomberg terminals, TVs on the walls. I mean, they pulled out all the stops. And they said to me, you know, Now sit in his chair, and become him. Take your time, as much time as you need, and when you feel comfortable, allow yourself to occupy his body. And so I did. I watched the boats on the river, and a helicopter went by, and when I was ready I said, I’m ready, and the phone rang, and it was Tyrone Flint on the other end, because he was talking to Tyrone Flint when the plane hit. Because Tyrone Flint reported to me himself—the guy who insisted that I meet him in Central Park, face-to-face, do you remember that?
I remember.
And I’d told them this, they’re very thorough, and I say, Hello? and there’s Tyrone Flint on the phone about some cross-border lease agreement that was tied up in legal. And, you know, he called before nine deliberately to miss Stephen. He wanted to dump a message on voice mail. So I say, Ready, and the phone rings, and it’s, Oh, Stephen! I didn’t think you’d— Tyrone Flint at Crutchfield Alliance here!
And the time on the phone is 8:45, so I have sixty seconds, give or take. I have questions, of course. But he won’t shut up. I don’t think it was a recording, but he didn’t let me get a word in edgewise. And he kept calling me Stephen.
Do you think it was really him?
Who knows. They seem to have the ability to— I don’t know. They seem committed to providing good service.
And?
And then it’s 8:46. And everything turns into a furnace. The whole office—like a volcano. The walls are gone. Vanished. The desks flew up, the TVs exploded, the fire ate everything. Everyone was on fire. The black smoke. Everything exploded.
What do you mean exploded?
It—everything. Not just the TVs. I screamed and got under the desk. The floor moved, I could feel the concussion in my chest. My eardrums felt like they were shredding.
But the fire and the—how did you survive?
The fire didn’t come into Stephen’s office.
They protected you.
Apparently what I told them was that I wanted everyone in the office to die except Stephen.
You told them you were afraid he hadn’t died.
Yes.
So they… interpret?
They have ways of figuring out what you really want, Eden said. And then they leave you to it.
Turk had turned operations over to her staff years earlier, but for me she was front and center, met me right there in the lobby. White-glove service. I don’t recall being surprised to see her there, the only addition to the jeans and button-down shirt she wore every day a blue shawl, an attempt to appear matronly. I’d known her my entire life, of course. I’d assumed she was independently wealthy. We were neighbors, but what can you really know about anybody? Every so often she would come tapping at the service door. Spare some milk, have any sugar? When there was a blackout, I’d check on her if she didn’t check on me and Vik first.
As I emerged from the cryptoporticus, she took my arm and walked me through the marble lobby to her office in the back. The lobby looks the same today as it did then. Standard corporate scenery. Glass, marble, tasteful gray twill sofas that have never hosted a set of buttocks. When I asked Turk why she hadn’t extended the corporate façade all the way out, she explained that it was of particular importance that participants remember they were underground, down with the rats and ancient creeks. Anyway, she said, leaning in to me, do you have any idea what it would cost to waterproof that tunnel?
Good Turk.
Her team constructed a complication for me that put me right back in the same office space Eden had watched erupt in flame. Vik’s office, after all, had been right next to Stephen’s. But I wanted some changes. I wanted to be out there in the bullpen when the flames swept through. I wanted the place to disintegrate around me. Wanted the ceiling to collapse. I wanted to be buried in rubble.
On the appointed day, they sent a car to deliver me to the compound upstate, on the Wallkill River. They layered me in Nomex, full hood, breathing apparatus, forty pounds of shielding, ushered me onto the office floor, where I stood among my husband’s colleagues—professional stuntmen and -women, I now know—variously hammering at their keyboards, or sucking on coffee cups with a foot on the file cabinet, or watching the news, and there was this one guy who had a phone to his ear, nodding, scribbling on a pad, and it was he who got my attention because I wanted to know what he was writing (gibberish, doodling interlocking benzene rings, or had he so committed himself to the role that he had collected research on deals the firm would have been tracking that morning and was jotting from memory so that I, the participant, might in some way benefit from his method approach?). I stood against the back wall in my green EOD suit, peering out through the acrylic visor at the scenery, and there above the windows (Eden was right, what a view!) were the LED clocks for London, Singapore, Tokyo, Frankfurt, Buenos Aires, Shanghai, Milan, New York, and it was 8:42, by my request, and when I said, Ready, into the hands-free, the colons on the LEDs began to flash and I prepared to die. I’d spent a month under the supervision of a psychologist, but when it was showtime I didn’t feel like I was Vik or myself or an all-seeing eyeball. I felt like I was a stranger to us both, someone who’d paid an outrageous sum of money to participate in an outrageous stunt in the name of distraction. I felt crass and dishonest and utterly American.