A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2 page)

“Where.” Marshall could hardly speak. He was shaking, he was vibrating, he looked like he was about to launch himself into space. He gasped after every word. “Were. You?”

“Viola pooped in her pants.”

“You abandoned him!”

“Fuck you. I was cleaning her off.”

Snuffles must have thought they were talking about dinner. Wagging his tail and barking, he lunged at Joyce and gleefully stabbed the nails of his front paws into Joyce’s legs. Joyce teetered back, Viola fell wetly against her blouse, and she saw that the leash was being held by Marshall’s very close friend Roger, husband of her former very close friend Linda; in fact, she had once been her best friend. A year ago, before they agreed to tell their friends about their marital difficulties, Marshall had confessed them to Roger and Linda in one long night of tears, hugs, and vows of everlasting friendship. Now Roger looked away, embarrassed to see her again.

“For how long?” Marshall cried. “You didn’t come back for five minutes
after
we got here! We timed it. A baby-snatcher would have been over the bridge by now! This is it, Joyce. You’re finished. My lawyer’s going to question your fitness as a mother.”

Marshall’s promise was kept: the incident was brought up at their meeting the following Friday. Roger would testify, if need be. Joyce’s lawyer told her not to worry, she would have to do much worse to lose primary residential custody, that he had no case, that custody hadn’t even been an issue before now. Joyce knew that Marshall didn’t even
want
custody, but the threat would be potent enough to persuade her eventually, wretchedly, tearfully, inevitably, to scale back or fully eliminate her mortgage demands—and there was no way she could afford the apartment on her own. She was being beaten and crushed, suffocated and abandoned. The force of Marshall’s hatred was nearly self-validating: after all, how could a man believe with such fervor and be wrong? How could she have left Victor like that? Everything was going against her now: she had gained another three pounds, the Berkeley deal was stalled, her annual review was coming up.

Afterward she sought refuge in Connecticut with her parents, who were visibly disappointed that she came without the children, even though they knew it wasn’t her weekend with them. Back in Brooklyn peace reigned. With Joyce gone, Marshall was suddenly more optimistic, more free, more alive. He sang show tunes. He wrestled with the kids. He took them out for pizza. They walked Snuffles along the promenade over the harbor, where Viola named for Victor all the important buildings in the Manhattan skyline. On Saturday night Vic fell asleep on Marshall’s chest. The boy’s weight comforted the man, who had begun to feel himself hollow and insubstantial. The boy’s mass was real and truthful and loving. For the first time since they lit the fuse to their divorce, Marshall believed that he could succeed as a single father.

Marshall’s golden weekend was extended through Monday. Joyce went to her office from her parents’ and after work ate dinner out. Marshall cheerfully brought the kids home from day care, fed them, and put them in front of the TV so that he could review some company reports. The phone interrupted him twice, both times on Joyce’s behalf. The first call was from some dickhead in California who had been trying to reach her on her cell. Breathy and agitated, and clearly clueless about their family situation, he told Marshall at length that such and such negotiations now appeared to be moving forward but desperately required Joyce’s presence the next day. The second was from a woman at her corporate travel office, who at the dickhead’s request had booked Joyce’s flight from Newark and made the other arrangements.

LaGuardia would have been more convenient, but Marshall stayed silent. As a matter of principle he was reluctant to help Joyce at all. He doodled the information into his workbook, unsure whether he would pass it on—any message could be seen as weakness, or a peace feeler, or an apology for not passing on messages before, or even an expression of forgiveness for
all the messages
she
hadn’t passed on to
him
. On the other hand, here was an opportunity to get her out of the apartment perhaps for the rest of the week. He contemplated the semiotics. Still brooding, he finally copied the flight number and the name of the hotel onto another sheet of paper, without salutation or closing, as tersely and as barely legibly as possible, and placed it on the kitchen counter below the microwave, where she would very likely miss it.

But Joyce was hungry when she came home. Compelled against her better judgment to put a frozen pastry into the microwave, she found the message. She was relieved that Marshall’s bedroom door was closed because she feared the slightest possibility that she might blurt a word of gratitude. She recharged her cell phone and packed. The next morning her taxi came so early that Marshall had to take the kids to preschool, which dictated a vein-bulging, door-slamming argument just as she left.

He dressed the kids in their sleep.

“Where’s Mommy?” Viola mumbled.

“Berkeley. It’s near San Francisco, in California. She’s left you to go to California.”

“Before breakfast?”

With no time to walk Snuffles, Marshall urged himself to remember to call the dog-care service. They finally made it to school, where he fell into a prolonged and subjectless but immensely amiable conversation with Viola’s bouncy, curly-haired teacher. She was probably just out of college, with cheeks no less ruddy than those of her charges. Marshall dug her and—and this was not entirely confirmed and it might have been wishful thinking, like his self-conscious optimism about single parenthood, intended to counteract his desperate emotional state, which comprised sentiments of worthlessness, unattractiveness, failure, and mortality—she appeared to dig him digging her. But now he was late for work.

AN HOUR LATER
Marshall was sprawled across some debris that he had fallen over in the dark, in a place that he could not precisely identify, after a series of events that he could neither order nor fully signify. There had been panic in the elevator lobbies, explosions, contradictory emergency announcements, pandemonium in the stairwell. He had never made it to his office. Now, in the smoke and dust-choked gloom, men and women were moaning and crying and calling in pitiful voices for help. Breathing was difficult. Water ran someplace, plashing and tinkling as if in an alpine glade. Parts of the ceiling and walls had collapsed, and something had either fallen on him or he had run hard into it. People had struggled up the paralyzed escalator with him, perhaps even following him.
Up
had seemed wrong, but that’s where he thought the cop at the bottom of the stairwell had directed him. Now they were lost.

He came to his feet and brought his hand to his head. The side of his head felt wet, probably with blood, but Marshall told himself that he was all right and that his mind remained clear, unbearably so. Nothing that had happened earlier this morning—the argument with Joyce, the flirting with Miss Naomi—had subsided or grown distant in his recollection. A portion of his consciousness recognized that these were probably the last moments of his life and that he would never again see Viola and Vic; also, that he would never again be permitted to think of them. Yet he also remembered that he had to call the dog-walking service, or the dog would piss on the rug in the entrance foyer. It had already ruined the afghan. Drywall dust pitted his face and he could taste, without explanation, the odor of gasoline on an airport runway.

“Police! Police! We’re trapped!” The shouts echoed. No reply was made, but he could hear the sirens outside. They seemed close.

Marshall ran his hands against some debris and pulled away when he touched a jagged shard from a broken window. He was aware now that the fabric of the darkness was more tenuous up ahead, and he moved toward the faint glow, his hands directly in front of his face in case he encountered more glass. He understood that he was stepping through the window. His hands led him around some kind of support column.

He turned and called behind him, “I see daylight!”

He bumped into more debris and passed around it, and then abruptly found himself at the edge of the plaza between the twin towers—another planet’s landscape, lightning-charged, caustically lit, inimical. He recoiled. Ashy flakes fell on a carpet of ash inches deep, covering fleeing footprints. Objects burned in the ash, pieces of industrial-like machinery, pieces of concrete that had fallen from the towers, and some other things that required another moment to be identified. They were human body parts, yes, and with them whole bodies scattered on the slate pavement blocks. Charred memos, reports, printouts, balance sheets, and Post-its eddied around them like departing spirits. Men and women ran from the building, some shrieking, their briefcases on their heads, though the things that fell into the plaza were much larger than briefcases. Taffies of molten steel spilled from the upper floors of the towers, fragmenting into gorgeous sparks of blazing shrapnel when they hit the cold ground.

“Here we are!” he shouted back inside the building, against an outpouring of gray smoke. “C’mon, let’s go!” He thought of a joke. “Ladies and gentlemen, this way to the egress!”

But people were already coming out, led by a trembling middle-aged woman whose white blouse was streaked with grime and tears. She wasn’t wearing shoes. She blinked against the light and then against what she saw in the plaza, flinching just as he had.

The precipitation was becoming heavier every minute.
Pelted by small, stinging objects, Marshall shrank against the sheer wall of the tower. The middle-aged woman took off toward an abandoned line of ash-rimmed sandwich carts at the far edge of the plaza, running in her stockinged feet, nimbly avoiding the most obvious pieces of sharp debris in her path. Men and women were still falling from the upper stories, possibly even from his own office: colleagues and friends.

Shadows continued to emerge from the tower, materializing halfheartedly into substance, coughing and wiping their eyes. Shocked by the plaza’s carnage, the survivors didn’t see Marshall. They immediately ran off, one couple holding hands. The sirens were tremendous now, their voices filling the sky. Marshall knew he should go, but he hung back. He wondered about this reluctance, this sudden loss of instinct for his own preservation. It was the divorce, the fucking divorce—he had been beaten down so badly. He called into the building, “Hey, anybody left?”

There was no response. He took a few steps back in under a sagging window frame through a dark, rubble-strewn passage. Smoke and dust seared his eyes. He thought he could feel the building shudder. He told himself that he would go no deeper than the next step, but he pushed on. Something was here at the edge of the passage, some wraith. He could hear its breathing and smell its fear, which was hardly distinct from his own.

“Hey,” Marshall said. “Come. Let’s go.”

Marshall found a sleeve and tugged on it, surprised by its tangibility. The creature to which it was attached moved without speaking. Marshall led him back through the passageway, probably a distance of no more than ten yards, but the exit seemed much farther now, like a journey or transition to a new world. A damp, cold confidence had enveloped him. What he was doing seemed right, just as everything that had gone on between him and Joyce during the past two years had seemed so terribly wrong. In his struggle with Joyce, even when defending his
most fundamental interests, he had doubted that what he was doing was either right or good—it had been only necessary. Now…in these moments of peril, decision, and action…something was being revealed. He could discern hope. He could, at this instant, glimpse a vision of the man he could yet be.

They reached the lip of the plaza, where Marshall turned and briefly examined his captive. He was older than Marshall, with gray around his temples. His thick mustache appeared matted by blood. The man’s eyes were inflamed and the blank expression on his face made Marshall wonder if he could see anything at all. Marshall said, “Okay, we’re almost out of here.”

The man crumpled into a sitting position against the side of the tower. He stared out across the plaza’s wastes for a moment and then bowed his head toward the ground. He might have been praying. Marshall thoughtfully bit his lip and tasted what seemed like plaster. Finally, he said, “Hey, my name’s Marshall, what’s yours?”

The man didn’t stir.

“What’s your name?” Marshall said. For the moment the plaza had become quiet, with no one fleeing the towers and only a drizzle of gray particles. He lightly touched the man’s shoulder, and when that had no effect, he shook him roughly. He recalled that in an emergency the usual urban strictures against body contact with strangers didn’t apply. The man’s head bounced as if it were on a spring. “Tell me your name.”

Startled, the man raised his head and whispered, “Lloyd.”

“Lloyd,” Marshall repeated. “I’m Marshall. Look, this is a bad place to rest. Everything’s falling. What do you say we get out of here, huh? C’mon, you go, I go, maybe we’ll get a skim latte or something. You have to stand, Lloyd. You have to stand and come with me right now. Up, now. Otherwise we’re going to get hurt. Do you have a kid? I’ve got two, Victor and Viola, a real handful. What’s your kid’s name?”

Lloyd looked at Marshall for the first time. The edges of his eyelids seemed crusted with something and the whites were red and heavily veined. Marshall didn’t want to look at them, didn’t want to see what had happened to them, but he knew that it was important to hold the man’s gaze. “Sarah,” Lloyd mumbled.

“That’s sweet. How old is she?”

“Six.”

“Great age, I’m sure. My girl’s four, still has going-to-the-bathroom accidents. Drives us crazy. C’mon, up we go.”

Saying
us
felt false, though it was technically true, since Viola’s incontinence tortured Joyce as well as Marshall, but separately, not as a concern they shared. Marshall had Lloyd by the arm. If he let go, he’d fall. He wondered if Lloyd was married, and if so, how happily; also whether he could possibly explain to him his ambivalence about
us
. He tried to orient Lloyd in the direction of Church Street. The man staggered like a drunk. Just as they were about to make their run, an object that was recognizably a woman in a navy business suit, possibly a suit that could be described in regard to its cut and weave, and possibly even its likely provenance if you knew about such things, thumped hard less than twenty feet away, and bounced and burst. Her shoes had come off in mid-fall and clattered emptily against the pavement a moment later. “Don’t look,” Marshall said. “For God’s sake don’t look.” He pushed him into the plaza. Crazily, both men still had their attachés; Marshall’s was on a shoulder strap, but Lloyd clutched his in both hands, as if the morning’s escape were part of his regular commute. The ash crunched and blood was slicked black around the bodies. Sickly sweet gas fumes tinted the air. Pounding across the plaza, their shoes swirled up ash. Small objects were still falling and something hit Marshall on the shoulder. Whatever happened today was terrible and historic. He kept his eyes fixed on the far side of the plaza and wondered about the date. He knew that
Friday would be September 14, because a once-important meeting had been scheduled for that day, and he knew that today was Tuesday, but he could not from this knowledge make any further calculation.