This Book Does Not Exist (20 page)

Like Geppetto.

I put aside my pain, open the door and descend into the stairwell.

Rushing down the stairs, I recall the two floor numbers Geppetto mentioned – 99 and 90 – while checking the one I’m passing (102). Picking which floor to go to is arbitrary. I have no reason to believe one floor would be more suitable for Naomi than the other. Plus,
Geppetto
said she was here “the last he heard” – meaning she might not be in the building at all.

I wheel by floor 100.

A second plane should be hitting this tower. I can’t predict when. The first plane crashed sooner than it was supposed to, sooner than Geppetto said it would. Did he lie? I already concluded he wasn’t malicious. Do I have to go back on that?

I reach floor 99.

Looking down the stairwell, I see crowds of people fleeing. My path to the 90
^th
floor is impeded. I stare at the door in front of me.

I take a chance.

The floor is over-populated by men and women wearing business attire. Most are working the phones. Others scurry back and forth across the carpeted floor talking and delivering paperwork. No one seems to know that an aircraft struck the North Tower minutes ago.

I storm the office, yelling for everyone to get out of the building. I don’t care if these people are real or not. My eyes don’t need to witness
anymore
deaths.

Not a single person pays attention to me.

Time is evaporating. Everyone needs to evacuate, and I need to find Naomi.

I canvas the entire office space.

I don’t see her.

Coming
to this floor was a mistake. I should be trying to get to the bottom of the building. Naomi knows the end game. If she’s here, that will be her destination.

I turn around. One last time I scream, “Everyone needs to go!”

No one listens.

I push back towards the stairwell, splitting between a thin man and a stocky woman. Both are unafraid. In the corner of my eye, however, I catch a glimpse of someone huddled underneath a desk.

Katie.

She’s trembling, as tears slide across her cheeks. She sees me looking at her. She recognizes me. Hope amasses in her picturesque eyes.

I run, saying, “Katie… Come on, we need to go.”

She cries out, “The building’s going to collapse, and we’re all going to die.”

“I don’t know how you got pulled into this, but that’s why we have to move. Now!”

I hold out my hands. She takes them. I lift her up. Although we have to run, she doesn’t let go of me. “We’ll never make it,” she says, locking on to my eyes. “The towers collapse.
Both of them.
Thousands of people die.”

 
Of course she knows this. That’s why she’s scared.

“Are we from the same world?”

Cryptically, she responds, “I can be from wherever you want.”

And then she kisses me.

I pull back.

“What was-”

“I wanted to,” she says. “I wanted to kiss you before we all die.”

I tell her I won’t let us die, and I tug my hands away from her. This is insane, inexplicable that it’s happening at all let alone in this moment. We have to go. I start to leave, hoping she’ll follow. I look over my shoulder. She’s coming. “Okay,” I say. “Everything will be okay.” Her cheeks dent
. Her lips curl. I think about our kiss, and it agonizes me to realize I would like it if she kissed me again
.

I grab the handle on the stairwell door.

The second plane hits the building.

The shockwave sends
me and Katie
to the floor. My shoulder lodges into the indoor-outdoor carpeting. I roll over. My temple cracks against the floor. Blood runs down my cheek. Katie clings to my chest. I hear her whispering that this will be our grave.

I try to stand but the tower is shaking. The plane must have hit somewhere beneath us. I fall. I can’t get untangled from Katie. I see that the rest of the people on the floor are finally panicking. Frightened and confused men and women with bloody
faces
scream and cry.

The structure finally settles.

Everyone runs.

Katie holds on to me. Tears rain from her eyes. “I want you,” she says, while the world prepares to fall apart. I say I want to survive and latch onto her hand, leading her into the stairwell like a fullback ripping through the defensive line. Smoke and ash billow up from whichever floor the plane struck, flooding the chute. I can’t see more than an arm’s length in front of me. People flutter in and out of the haze. They look like ghosts. I’m afraid that’s what we’re all about to become.

Nothing stops me from trying to get down the stairs. As dangerous as it is, there is no alternative. Katie and I know this. Not everyone else does. Some people are actually running up the stairwell, towards the top of the tower, away from the site of the crash. I yell at them. It doesn’t matter.

In the chaos, I lose Katie’s hand. “Stay with me!” I shout. I can no longer see her. The stairwell is in disarray, a coffin full of noise. Feet stomp, bodies fall,
people
hack in between piercing cries. Every sound echoes. The smoke and the ash make it unbearable to breathe. I wonder if I might die from asphyxiation. I squint my eyes to keep out the dust. I think I see Katie coming back to my side. I feel a hand on my back. I force past the people crowding the steps in front of me, initiating a cluster of thoughts – survival of the fittest, Naomi seeing me with Katie, the number of floors to go…
 
Nothing sticks. As if in a dream, my sense of time and place decomposes. The march of my descent becomes impossible to track. There are no more demarcation points, only images that come and go – dark colors of clothing, pale patches of skin, the floor Naomi might have been on, the numbers nine and zero, smoke pouring out of doors like burning ovens, ash
greying
Katie’s face like a zombie, a clearing beneath where the plane crashed, fewer bodies taking up less surface area – and then everything rushes back into form and coalesces, and I think I see a clear pathway out.

I can’t believe it, but we might actually make it.

The bottom of the stairwell comes fast. The door to the lobby dangles open. Someone runs through the gap. I race after them, irrationally alarmed the door will swing shut and lock before I reach it. I look back for Katie. I don’t see her. Where is she? I can’t lose anyone else.

A horde plows through me, escaping the stairwell. I face the lobby, staring through the open door, hoping Katie somehow beat me down. Firemen, police, and paramedics are everywhere. So many will die trying to save people that can’t be saved.

I dash into the lobby. Maybe I can still find Katie. Maybe Naomi is outside. Sprinting, my vision becomes abstract. So little of what I see equates, so little of what I do feels as if it is within my control.

Daylight. There is daylight.

And then I’m standing in it. I’m outside the tower.

Outside the tower, I search everywhere, through wounded people and emergency personnel, shouting for Naomi, the woman I can’t see but still love.
I grasp and wish and stumble. Every time I hear a new sound, I assume the tower is beginning to crumble. Every other moment I think I’ve stayed one moment too long. People are hysteric. Amongst them I see glimpses of Naomi – her hair, her profile, her earrings, her nape – but it’s never her. Nor is it Katie. It’s not even Geppetto. A grand feeling of emptiness, of being utterly alone in the universe, ushers over me, and then the South Tower implodes, as if God were playing
Jenga
and he pulled the wrong piece.

I sprint to get outside the blast radius.

Everything quakes. I capsize, ricocheting off a parked car. Time plays its trick – one second feels like ten – the catacomb of debris lands, and a surge of rock and ash and metal and the flesh and bones of the dead
chases
me and everyone else who is fleeing. I anticipate the impact. I sense it coming, but I don’t want to believe I’m going to die, and in that same instant I find an enclave and throw every joule of energy I have into getting inside of it, praying for protection, and then the cloud of devastation is no longer coming… It has come.

I close my eyes.
I know that people are dying, that the destroyed tower is now destroying the world around it, that there will be massive ramifications far outside of this circle. The lives lost here will crack the lives of those in other places, the parents, siblings, lovers, grandparents, and children of the dead. Destruction begets destruction – another catastrophe is waiting to happen once the flow of information travels.

Debris batters my body. A flood of smoke cascades over me, and my world turns black.

Lying at the bottom of an assembly of broken things, I smack at my face, ridding it of ash and dirt. I test my arms and legs. They move without incident. I crawl out of the pile and clamber onto the street. After regaining my footing, I survey the area.

Ground Zero has been vacated.

Only haze and ash and two bottomless pits of rubble remain, all of it grey, all of it wallowing in desolation and remorse. Now that I’m actually here and at one with the city instead of in Ohio staring sadly at a television screen with my dad and brother, as I was on 9/11/01, I consider what it will take to rebuild. The streets whisper to me, “The horrible thing has happened and now we have to live with it.”

I stand still for a long while and ponder my failings.

A voice says, “I take it you didn’t get to either of them.”

I turn around. You-Know-Who is gawking at me.

“How the hell-”

“I found a nice, soft place to land.” He adds, “So… No Naomi. No Katie…”

“Katie,” I tell him, letting the matter of how he survived leaping off the tower pass as just another unbelievable occurrence in a world defined by the inconceivable. “But then I lost her.”

“Katie, not Naomi? Hmmm. From afar, it seemed like you did a good job trusting your instincts.”

As
Geppetto
walks towards the rubble, I tell him I had too much information to act on instinct.

“Do you think you would have lost Katie at the end if you weren’t stuck on reaching Naomi?”

I can’t answer that. He beckons for me to follow him.

 
“How do you feel now?” he asks. “How do you think you would have felt if you had gotten out with Katie at your side? Different than this, I’m sure. Different than if you had Naomi, too.
But better or worse?
The same?”

Concurrently,
Geppetto
leads me into the heaviest smoke, where the rubble begins, to show me pieces of a pale-skinned woman with mahogany hair trapped underneath the ruins. Much of her, including her face, is obscured. As my mind sketches in the rest of her parts, she takes on a familiar shape…

I dive down to dig.

The rock rips open my jeans and gashes my knee. I push aside layers of stone. When I uncover her face, I shatter.

The woman is Naomi, but she is completely disfigured. Her right eye is bleeding from the inside and the left side of her face is smashed in and bloodied, as if it were run over by a truck. She is unmoving and silent.

I pull away more and more rock.

She makes a noise. Her lips sputter unintelligibly, like mutterings from a drunken singer whose record is being played backwards. She is incoherent. I want to comfort her. I want to tell her everything will be
alright
, but I can’t because it won’t. I want to ask her why she left me, why she hid from me, why she stopped loving me – if that’s what she did – and why it has to be like this, but my vocal chords won’t work. My strength gives out. My attempt to do the unfeasible and get all of this awful rock off of her fails in midstream.