City of Dreams (57 page)

“I guess I’ve said enough. . . . Sorry things went bad with Intermetro . . . but it was worth it. . . . You kids reached for the sky. . . . And take it from me, that’s what life’s all about. That and . . . and . . . dying before you finally break your hip.” He clicked off.

She hung up, looked again out the window, and decided that the best thing she could do would be to go up to that nursing home and say something good to that old man about his grandson. That’s what would drive her now, to take the hand and ease the pain of a man who had become the father she never had.

She pointed her eyes front and headed down the hallway. She didn’t look at Brink Leekman. She gave just the briefest glance at Nancy, who lay back in the chair with her eyes pointed at the ceiling. Dmitri was in the doorway of his office. Only his feet showed.

The core of the building around the stairwell and the elevator shafts smelled of smoke and fear. The smoke was real. It was seeping into the ventilation system and sucked down the miles of elevator shafts. The panic was real, too. She smelled it on the others who were stepping onto the elevator, two accountants from the firm next door. One of them said that they really shouldn’t be riding the elevator in an emergency. The other said he just wished that building security could get their stories straight:

“Evacuate. Go back. The building is safe. Get out. What the hell do they want?”

“I got my PalmPilot and my papers,” said the other. “So I can work from home till they put that fire out over there.”

Jennifer thought they were right. They should have taken the stairs. But today she was gambling.

They popped out on the seventy-eighth floor, the Sky Lobby where riders changed from local elevators to big express cars that could carry fifty-five people to the ground in sixty seconds. She came around the corner from the bank of locals, and stepped in the crowd bunching up around the expresses.

Two men in gray suits were heading for the locals. They stopped and looked at her, then looked again, as if they recognized her.

She hardly noticed them. She was scanning the mob—a hundred, maybe two hundred, frustrated, angry, frightened people.
Go up. Go down. Stay put. Stay calm
. They had heard it all in the fifteen minutes since the plane struck the other tower. Now they were all looking for direction, looking to one another, and looking up and down the marble-lined concourse that ran the length of the sky lobby.

Jennifer watched the lights flashing above a bank of elevators and gauged which one would arrive first.

Then she heard another PA anouncement: “If the conditions warrant on your floor, you may wish to start an orderly evacuation.”

A great groan of frustration rose on the concourse, and a deeper groan of fear played beneath it.

Then the doors of one of the express elevators opened, causing the movement of the whole crowd. There was nothing panicked about it, just a slow, quietly frightened push of people.

And then, the two men who had noticed Jennifer were on either side of her.

One was tall, serious, silent.

The other, who did the talking, was shorter, stockier, and all attitude. He flashed a badge. “I’m Agent Berranova. FBI. This is Agent Johnson. Are you Jennifer Wilson?”

“Yes.”

“We are supposed to be interviewing you and your associates.” Berranova started to lead her north on the concourse to the elevator that would take her back upstairs.

She pulled away. “Are you nuts? Look around you. Look what’s happening.”

Agent Berranova said, “We understand. We’d just like you to—”

“I just want to get out of here. I just—”

At that moment, she thought she saw something moving toward the south windows.

Toward the windows? The windows!

And then she died. . . .

B
ECAUSE WHEN SHE
woke, she was in hell, paying for her sins.

Hell choked and burned and crushed. Black smoke boiled and flames roared and a heavy piece of Sheetrock lay across her. Walls had collapsed everywhere, the ceiling had turned to fire, bodies lay in bunches and in pieces and in hopeless tangles of debris. Some were still, some were moving, and some cried out for help, but she couldn’t hear them because of the roaring inside her head.

She saw one of the FBI agents. He had been sliced in two by a piece of aluminum. It looked like part of an airplane.

But the other guy was gone. Blown apart? Buried?

She still did not know what had happened, but she knew that in hell there were stairways. Some led to more misery and some led to escape. She could have stayed to help those who were still alive. She should have stayed. She told herself that, even then. If she knew a way out of hell, Jennifer should be an angel of the light and show others. If someone was uninjured—and she had been protected by the Sheetrock—she should help others. But she could not hear for the ringing in her ears. She could barely breathe for the acrid smoke. So she staggered toward stairway B, the one she had always run on.

And a young Hispanic man came stumbling through the smoke. He wore a name tag: Gomez. He worked in the World Trade Center. He shouted to her, “No. Stairway A. It’s the only way out.”

She couldn’t hear him, so she kept walking, so he turned her, pushed her, helped her stumble over the debris and the people till they reached the stairway door and pushed it open, and she stepped out of hell. She looked for the glow in the dark strip at the edge of each tread, and . . .

Down. . . . Down. . . . Turn. . . . Down. . . . Down. . . . Turn. . . . Turn. . . . Down. . . . Don’t look. Don’t count. Don’t talk. Can’t hear yourself anyway. Don’t cough because you’ll stop and slow and cough your guts out and vomit and die
.

She looked over her shoulder, but the Hispanic guy had never followed. He had gone back.

Down. . . . Down. . . . Turn. . . . Down. . . . Down. . . . Turn. . . . Turn. . . . Down
. . . .

She did not know how long it was before she realized that the fluorescent lights were on and shining now through the gloom. She did not know how long it was before she began to pass firemen climbing the stairs in their heavy helmets and heavy turnout coats and hundred-pound equipment packs. And she did not know how long it was before she began to hear her feet hitting the steps, because her ears were clearing. . . .

Down. . . . Down. . . . Turn. . . . Down. . . . Down. . . . Turn. . . . Turn. . . . Down. . . . Down
. . . .

And as she got lower, she realized that her feet were wet. Water lines had broken and the stairs grew slick. But the air was clearer. So . . .

Down. . . . Down. . . . Turn. . . . Down. . . . Down. . . . Turn. . . . Turn. . . . Down
. . . .

Five minutes . . . ten minutes . . . twenty minutes . . .

Just down. . . . Down. . . . Turn. . . . Down. . . . Down. . . . Turn. . . . Turn
.

And then, finally, sunlight. She had reached the plaza level, the upper part of the huge two-story lobby. But—

“Don’t look out. Keep moving. Don’t look out.” A Port Authority policeman was shouting, directing, doing his best to keep everyone going. But Jennifer glanced back at the plaza and
The Sphere
outside, and she saw why she shouldn’t be looking. The plaza had become a battlefield. Then something hit the ground and burst red, like a . . . like a . . . like . . .

Don’t look out. . . . Down. . . . Down. . . . Down. . . . Down
. . . .

Down
. . . to the underground shopping mall and the PATH plaza where the trains from Jersey came into Manhattan. And now there were more Trade Center workers, and firemen, and police, and ordinary people, who had taken up the task of encouraging the rest, shouting, directing, doing their best to keep the crowd moving to safety. Hundreds of people were splashing though the ankle-deep water gushing from broken mains and sprinklers, past the blown-out windows of the stores that sold clothing and books and breath fresheners.

She felt as if she were watching herself run, through a world half real and half Hollywood, a world that she remembered but had never seen, the kind of world she would inhabit in a dream.

Keep moving . . . Keep moving . . . Keep moving
.

Toward the light. Toward the escalator. Toward Bugs Bunny, six feet tall, standing there in front of the Warner Brothers store. Bugs . . . fucking . . . Bunny.

She came up into the bright sunlight of Church Street and saw a line of ambulances along the back of the St. Paul’s fence. The air itself seemed to be screaming. A dozen sirens . . . two dozen . . . a hundred . . . she couldn’t tell. What did it matter?

She tried not to look down. There were puddles of blood on the street, and papers, some of them burning, and airplane parts, and shoes. Empty? Most . . . but not all.

An EMT came up to her and said, “Lady, you need help?”

She just shook her head and kept going. She just had to keep going.

The paramedic grabbed her by the arm. “But, lady, your face. You need help.”

She brought her hand to her mouth and realized that she was missing two teeth. Something had hit her a blow of such surgical perfection that it had knocked out her two front teeth. Nothing else.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s clean you up, anyway.”

She shook her head again. She didn’t know what she should do or who she should see—her lawyer, a cop, the FBI, but she couldn’t give herself up yet, and if the Russians were watching . . .

The young EMT pushed her toward the ambulance.

She said, “Listen, I don’t need help. I saw people up there who were burned, broken arms, broken legs. Help them.”

That was when a woman screamed, “Oh, my God!” But not just one “Oh, my God!” A rising crescendo of “Oh, my-God-oh-my-God-oh-my-God-oh-my God!”

And at the same time a man screamed, “Holy shit!” But not just one “Holy shit!” A rising crescendo of “Holy-shit-holy-shit-holy-shit-holy-shit!”

And the screaming air filled now from every direction with human screams, male and female, and something far worse, a thundering roaring, as if the sky were splitting open.

And it was.

She saw it and screamed, too. “Oh, my God!”

The paramedic said, “Holy shit!” and he tried to push her into the ambulance, but she was already running for a place that always protected her. She was running through the gate and into St. Paul’s graveyard.

She tripped and fell next to one of the crypts. Then she looked up again.

The building was falling and falling and falling from so far above her that steel was floating and glass was fluttering and aluminum was taking wing, almost as if it were all being blown into the air by the force of the downfalling storm.

The tower truly did create its own climate.

And it sent out a cloud that pulsed down and pulsed out and—

It all happened in ten seconds. No time to run from the little graveyard. Just time to roll over and put her face against the grass and press herself against the little six-inch shelf of crypt that rose from the soil . . .

And the cloud was upon her, bringing a splattering rain of concrete pebbles and tiny shards of glass.

She pulled that Hermès scarf from her neck and wrapped it over her face and hoped that she could keep breathing.

And while the screaming of people and the wailing of sirens went muffled in the cloud, she could hear all around her the sounds of steel splitting, glass breaking, metal smashing, great solid masses of concrete shattering, and huge splinters of debris tearing through the trees, while the roaring, thundering, rumbling went on and on and on, while the compressing mass of hundreds of thousands of tons of poured concrete, welded steel, mortared blocks, bolted aluminum, skim-coated Sheetrock and ram-set doorbucks, all collided with the escaping energy of all the people who had done all the work to put them all in place, like two columns of air colliding in the atmosphere to create a great storm.

The cloud billowed around her and blinded her and almost choked her, and the concrete snow fell and fell. And she coughed and prayed and coughed some more.

She did not know how long she lay there, with her face pressed against the side of the raised crypt and a small patch of green grass below her. It might have been five minutes, maybe ten.

By then, the noise of sirens and car horns had sharpened again, and she could see shafts of sunlight and patches of blue sky.

She coughed again and knew that she was still alive. Then she stood and looked around.

First she looked at the ground in the little graveyard, now covered in three or four inches of pulverized building and larger debris and paper.

Then she widened her gaze and looked up. St. Paul’s still stood, its roof covered in the same concrete snow. And its spire still pierced the noxious sky.

Then she turned and looked back across Church Street, at the row of ambulances covered in dust, at a shattered car, at the shattered building beyond it, then up at the tower still standing and gushing flame and pouring smoke, then over at the space where the other tower had been, where now there was nothing but a column of dust.

And she looked into the air itself, into the cloud hanging low and spreading ever farther, uptown and down and out over the rivers, carrying with it the souls of thousands of people who were now like those in the ancient earth around her, people who had lived their quiet lives and their terrible crises and had gone to God. But they were not sleeping in a small graveyard. They were rising into the air and mixing their elemental selves with the essence of the city itself.

As she turned, she stumbled on the crypt that had been her only protection. She bent down, brushed the surface, and read the names of the Lawrence family—John, Harriet, and their daughter Sally.

Then she read the inscription: The Lord seeth all and loveth all.

Maybe He did, she thought. Maybe He still did.

And she started walking across the graveyard and out to Broadway.

She noticed that street lamps had gone on in the concrete gloom and police cars had put on their headlights.