Superpowers (29 page)

After coming to Madison Caroline had gradually stopped coloring her hair. She tried making an event of it with girlfriends, but none of them appreciated the ritual significance of it, and it wasn't the same. She'd eventually let it settle into the striking dark color— almost black—that might have been close to her mother's natural color. But Jenna had continued redesigning herself as a platinum blonde, a brunette, a redhead. There were no pictures of her with her natural hair color. There weren't even any pictures of her with her most recent hair color, which Arturo—through his sister—had described as a strawberry blond.

Arturo's family had taken her in. His mother fed her brisket and vinegary salad and hard bread, and although Caroline had no appetite she ate all that was put in front of her.

The family was a spectrum of fluency. The mother's English vocabulary consisted, apparently, of
eat
and
no,
while Arturo's sister Sylvia filled Carobne's silences with monologues in a soothing NPR voice. Arturo was somewhere in the middle, between his older brother, who hardly spoke at all but occasionally came out with grammatically disastrous declarations in a flawless accent, and his niece, Sylvia's daughter, who was six and had picked up enough foul language in the two years since moving to New York to actually embarrass Caroline.

They sat at the kitchen table in the Pinos' small apartment, looking at the pictures Arturo had been able to find. Neither Arturo nor Caroline wanted to stay at the apartment he had shared with her mother. Instead Arturo's younger brother and three friends were staying there, in case Jenna Bloom should emerge, ash covered but otherwise unscathed, from the crater of confusion in the financial district.

They chose a photograph Sylvia had taken of Jenna and Arturo at a Mets game. Jenna's hair was chestnut brown, with honey-colored highlights, and she smiled straight into the camera. Arturo stood behind her, leaning in so the camera could catch him.

Sylvia scanned the photo onto her computer, cropped her brother out of the image, and enlarged it. She and Caroline struggled over the text for a long time. Caroline felt so brittle that she was afraid the least mention of her mother in the past tense would make her crumble. But Sylvia was careful. The headline
MISSING,
so painful and yet so necessary and true, was the most jarring part of the text. They left out words like "Beloved" or "Adored" or anything else that sounded like a memorial. Caroline suspected that anything beyond Jenna Bloom's vital statistics and the phone numbers was superfluous anyway.

They had lunch at a Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn, and then they fanned out around Manhattan, each with fifty copies of the poster. Caroline and Sylvia went together. Caroline wondered how the rest of the family would manage with their broken English, but Sylvia laughed and said that dogged insistence was something that needed no translation, and all the Pinos had that in excess.

As they wandered, Sylvia alternately carrying her daughter and holding her by the hand, they met others with similar documents. There were grainy black-and-white handwritten flyers and glossy full-color photographs being distributed by women with small children seeking fathers, grown siblings missing mothers, lovers in search of better halves, gray-haired couples lacking sons and daughters. Recognition was in their faces as they met Caroline's eyes, wordless loans of staple guns and tape, but few words. Caroline found that she begrudged these fellow bereaved even the merest wish of good fortune, as if there was not enough hope to go around.

_______

Harriet slipped into the hospital room through the open door just as Richard Raymond hung up the phone and rose from his wife's bed. "Damn it!" he said. "They said they couldn't even guarantee he'd call me back within the week."

"I'm sure the mayor is busy, honey." Cheryl Raymond had elevated the upper half of her adjustable bed. Her husband had told reporters that his wife had been beautiful before the explosion. Her face now was a study in pathos, certain to arouse first disgust and then pity and guilt. The left side was relatively unscathed, but her right cheek was nothing but blisters and scars.

Richard paced, head down. "No one's going to attack Madison," he said. "They're just trying to avoid me."

"Honey," Cheryl said.

"I can't even get through to the deputy mayor. And that city council woman is useless."

"Honey."

"They've got no concept of justice. While you were on TV they wanted to talk to me. Now we'll probably never hear another word from them."

"That's fine with me, Richard."

Richard looked out the window. "I don't know what that's supposed to mean."

"It means that I wish you'd stay off the phone and look at me."

"Honey, this is important. The All-Stars—"

"I don't give a shit about the All-Stars, Richard!" Cheryl's voice broke. "We're going to have to get used to this. I need to know now if you aren't going to be able to handle it."

"Handle what?"

"Richard, look at me. I need for you to start accepting what's happened. Interviews and phone calls and meetings with lawyers don't matter to me."

"Cheryl, the money—"

"Our insurance will cover the bills. I don't need a year in court with maybe a million-dollar payoff and maybe nothing. I need a husband. And if you can't be that, I need you to tell me now."

Richard turned then, and looked at his wife. The silence was still unbroken when Harriet slipped out of the room.

_______

The sun warmed Charlie's blood and bones and heated the black rubber inner tube in which he sprawled. There wasn't a cloud in the sky—in fact, there was no sky. There was the sun, and the stream, and sometimes there was the shore. Otherwise there was only Charlie and Chuck and Charles and a beer cooler, each with their own inner tube, all four lashed together with twine.

Chuck belched and crushed a beer can against his forehead. "Nice day for it," he said. His gut hung over the waistband of his cutoff jeans. He wore sunscreen on his nose, but the rest of his body was already hot pink.

"One could say." Charles wore a Speedo that fit him perfectly and drank Weisse beer from a tall glass with a lemon wedge.

"This isn't real." Charlie tried to sit up in the tube, but it was slippery.

"You already proved you can't handle reality." Chuck hurled the crushed beer can at a target along the shore. The can struck the painted target and fell into the steel trash bin below it.

"This is your vacation," Charles said. "Not the spot I would have chosen, but I suppose it has the appeal of nostalgia."

"I can't stay here." Charlie tried again to lift himself. He was drowsy from the sunlight, and his arms didn't work.

"I wouldn't do that," said Charles.

"You're really not dealing well," said Chuck. "You go back now and you're going to lose it. Whoa!" He reached out to steady the beer cooler as Charlie's struggles rocked the makeshift raft. "Dude, you're going to flip us."

Charlie shoved at the slick hot rubber, abraded his arm against the air valve, and managed to throw himself out of the tube. He sank under for a moment—
it could happen any second no one knows what aren't they telling us
—and then grasped the side of the tube and dragged himself to the surface.

"You'll drown," said Chuck.

"I can swim," said Charlie.

Charles shook his head. "You can swim in water. In this you were barely staying afloat, and that was before it was stirred up like it is now."

Charlie looked up at the sun. It was shrinking him down. The longer he stayed here, the less likely it was he could ever return.

"Why would you want to go back?" asked Chuck, and slammed another beer.

Charlie let go of the tube. He danced with his arms and kicked, keeping himself afloat. The current carried Chuck and Charlie away. They spoke in low voices but never once looked back.

By the time they were out of sight Charlie's legs were tired, and his arms burned with exertion. There was no shore to swim for now, and no relief from the sun. Steam rose from the water, and bubbles trickled up along his skin, tickling him. He found himself fighting sleep.

—even the president ran what happens now drop the bomb Nostradamus said the world would end in oil is a religious crusade what if we're—

He didn't realize he'd gone under until he broke the surface again. The sun was gone, but radiance came from the water itself. He thought he saw a log raft flowing downstream, empty except for a firepot and a lantern hanging from a post, but then it was gone and he was caught up by the sparking, restless water, which stagnated and spun, a vortex that did not drain but rather gathered the waters around it, swirling thoughts together, minds colliding and conflicting, feeding one another's fears, imagination becoming speculation becoming rumor becoming fact growing fingers grasping him pulling him down.

Afghanistan anthrax draft United 175 Republicans dirty bombs FAA John O'Neill serin sleeper agents American 11 Taliban oil pipeline Wall Street Democrats King Fahd Prince Abdallah Laili Helms United 93 Al Qaeda Timothy McVeigh Karl Rove Thomas Burnett smoke Christina Rocca ash wreckage Saudi Arabia American
77
Carlos Bulgheroni evacuate collapse Mullah Omar Dick Cheney box cutters BCCI Bin Laden George W. Bush fear fire foes

_______

Ray had slept two hours out of the last forty-eight, and the coffee keeping his body moving was powerless to jump-start his brain. The lieutenant had sent him home to get some sleep.

He shut the front door behind him and stood waiting for his stomach to lose the debate with the rest of him. He was starving but he didn't think he could stay awake long enough to make something. Even the walk to the fridge was daunting.

He trudged to the couch and collapsed without any conscious decision. He heard someone call his name and thought he was already asleep. He snuggled deeper into the couch cushions.

"Dad." Harriet's voice sounded far away, but her poke in the shoulder was immediate enough.

Ray pushed himself up from the cushion. Opening his eyes seemed a greater effort than sitting up, so he rubbed at his face with his hands instead.

"Dad."

"Harriet? I tried calling you, honey. Are you all right? It's been crazy. Bomb threats, security for the peace march, vandalism ... I know people are afraid, but some of them are fucking idiots."

"Dad."

"Sorry, honey." Ray looked to where Harriet's voice seemed to be coming from, but she wasn't there. "You don't need to hide, Harriet."

"Help me, Dad."

"What's wrong?"

"I can't come back." Harriet's words came in whispers. "I can't turn it off. It's like I'm fading away. You can hear me, right?"

"I can hear you fine," said Ray. "What do you mean, you can't turn it off? How long has it been?"

"Since ... I don't know. More than twenty-four hours. I was afraid to go to sleep, Daddy." She was sobbing. "I didn't know if I was going to wake up."

"Honey. I don't understand this."

"It's like ... I think part of me wants to disappear. I was—" Her voice caught. "I was watching people today. I was pretending I wasn't there. It was like I was watching them on television, except they were real and I wasn't. It felt—it felt—"

"Stop it," Ray said. "Harriet. Give me your hand." Ray held out his own hand, and soon he felt hers slip into it. He squeezed her fingers hard. "Do you feel that?"

"Yes."

"You're here, honey. Lord knows I don't have the least idea how any of this works, but you're the most real thing in the world to me."

"OK."

"I mean that."

"I know."

"But you're not convinced?"

"Oh, Daddy. There are things you don't know about me. Things I've hidden."

"Are you telling me that I don't know you? I do. Enough to know there are things you've kept hidden from me. Besides this."

"You're not going to like it."

"Maybe not. But I'm still going to like you."

_______

Solahuddin Sutadi felt safe in America. His young cousins were forever e-mailing him statistics, mostly to do with firearms, which made his chances of being shot on the way to class seem equivalent to the chance of precipitation.
High tempers, with a 30 percent chance of drive-bys.

He always assured them that there was nothing to fear. He kept to himself, mostly, and in any case Madison was not a city filled with danger. If he was honest with himself, he'd been apprehensive when he'd first arrived, and he still scrutinized men in suits for the telltale bulges of shoulder holsters. But the real danger of being a foreigner in America was not bullets but indifference. Solahuddin did not think himself particularly in need of praise and reassurance, but at times he craved it, craved acknowledgment from his professors and classmates, from his co-workers and customers.

This had all changed in the past two days. He felt as if he carried a floating caption that read
SOLAHUDDIN SUTADI,
M
USLIM
. There didn't seem to be room for any more information, to add that he was from Indonesia and not Saudi Arabia, that he was not fanatical, was at times downright lackadaisical about his religion. That this morning, he had almost broken down and wept in his car as he delivered papers with pictures of the black-and-orange fireball striking the second of the twin towers. Almost. It felt in a way disrespectful for him to weep, like a stranger who wailed loudly at a funeral.

Tonight his shift at the Taco Bell had not gone well. The manager had asked him to work in the back for the evening, which he had done amid several lengthy silences between himself and his typically garrulous co-workers. He wondered if things would get better. He wondered if the FBI would want to question him. He wondered if he would be forced to leave the country.

After closing he walked up State Street toward the ramp where his car was parked. He thought he would call his father when he got home. It was early afternoon in Jakarta, and his father might be able to find out something from his friends in the government. Maybe he should just leave now, withdraw from school, pack up his things, and go. But if he did, there would be suspicion. He might never be allowed to come back.