After


Ted Krever



Published by Ted Krever at Smashwords

copyright 2010 Ted Krever
www.tedkrever.com

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual places, events or persons, living or dead, is entirely fictitious. 


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Author’s Note

This is a collection of short stories, some of them directly about September 11th, others just reflective of the era. I’ve included the dates they were originally finished because I find it interesting to see the way perspective changed over time.

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After

November 9, 2001

I knew something was wrong when I saw the heavy rubber fireman’s coat on the couch.
I had been up in Washington Square Park, in the garden of candles, swaying and singing with the crowd, watching people holding each other and standing together, praying in the manner of our 21st Century secular grab-bag religion—a little Christian good faith, a touch of Buddhist stoicism, a dash of Taoist centering, strained through a mesh of Jewish skepticism. 
The young people were talking, sharing this experience in the hushed tones they’d previously heard only on golf telecasts, talking with the shock and fresh pain of the uninitiated. I, on the other hand, could tick off without effort Francis Gary Powers being shot down, policemen with fire hoses and clubs attacking black people in the streets of Mississippi, Jacqueline Kennedy climbing the trunk of the open limousine, Dr. King on the balcony in Memphis, Bobby Kennedy on the floor of a Los Angeles hotel kitchen, policemen with clubs attacking students in Chicago, Chappaquidick, 4 dead in Ohio, helicopters straining to lift off the roof of our embassy in Saigon with passengers clinging to the skids, Reagan shot, Challenger exploding, Sadat, Indira Gandhi and Yitzhak Rabin. While this shock was deeper and the hole in the skyline much much bigger than I’d ever imagined possible, the shock itself was familiar, the same breathtaking vivid vacuum in my chest that I’d known periodically since childhood. Welcome to the World, kids, I thought condescendingly, and was properly ashamed of myself for it.
So when I got home and saw the fireman’s coat, my stomach started growling immediately.
“What’s with the coat?” I asked Sam. He was in the kitchen in his underwear drinking beer.
“I got lucky,” he said, switching between Conan and some French movie on Bravo. He was watching both simultaneously. 
“You used the coat to get laid?” I yelled and he looked over at me like I was some sort of child.
“What is your problem?” he demanded, with the weariness of a combat veteran. Which is obviously what he’d been pretending to be. Sam is the kid who’s renting the third bedroom in my apartment since Maura moved out. He was a volunteer fireman in Staten Island before moving to Manhattan—I saw the coat when he first moved in. He promised he’d get me out alive if the building ever caught fire. Now, for the first time in the four months he’s lived here, the coat had come out of the closet.
“Did you put charcoal on your face to make it look like you just came from the site?” I continued screaming. “Did you tell her the names of the dead men in your company? Did you tell her how you led people down the stairs and just managed to get that one wheelchair victim out as the tower came down?”
“Off the pedestal, please,” he said. “She was upset, she was scared, like everybody else. You think I’m not affected by this? You think I don’t have a heart? I wanted to do something. I went down to the site. They said they couldn’t take more volunteers right now. They said come back tomorrow. So I’m coming back up here and she’s standing on a streetcorner bawling her eyes out. She had three friends who worked there and she’d just gotten off the phone with them, right there on the corner—all alive. They all got out. She needed to be with someone. And so did I, if you want to know the truth. I was really kind of upset they had nothing for me down there. I couldn’t stand not doing anything. So we ended up together. I didn’t go out looking to fool anybody.”
Coming from him, this was an aria of raw emotion. His dullness—his lack of feeling, the old-fashioned John Wayne granite resolve—had struck me from the day he moved in. He had lost his parents just a few months before, and seemed determined not to be touched by anything. Unlike my college roommates—the last time I’d ever had roommates—he refused to be drawn into any conversation that involved feelings. He almost appeared to have no personal aspect at all. 
I rendered this judgment even though rendering judgments made me uncomfortable, and guilty in some strange way. I grew up in a generation that obsessed over the shallowness, the condescension, the puritanical straitjacket of the idea of judging others, of boiling down another human’s hard-fought worldview and putting it on a scale. We believed there was always another mile to be walked in the other guy’s shoes. So I tried not to judge Sam harshly for his…whatever it was. Maybe just self-reliance. He was honest, no drugs, a decent roommate who paid his rent on time. Just not particularly blessed—or cursed—with deep feeling. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Sorry I went off.”
“It’s okay,” he murmured, opening another beer. “You didn’t know. There’s probably somebody out there trying that scam right now.” He looked over at the coat lying on the couch—I looked at it too. 
“So—can I borrow it? Go check out a couple bars?” I asked, and burst out laughing. It felt good to laugh, funny joke or not.
“Absolutely not,” he said, laughing too. 
I drank too much wine while he finished a six-pack. We saw the end of the French movie—it lasted longer than Conan so we stared at the last twenty minutes without channelswapping, not that either of us could recollect a frame of it after. Then I went off to my room with a view of the lights and the smoke, the noise and the smell from half a mile away. I didn’t sleep for a long time. I found myself going through the catalog again, from Francis Gary—a saint’s names—to Yitzhak, the litany of impersonal poundings my heart has taken that have never really faded away.
He did fool her, I thought. She thought he was from the site. She thought he was one of them. Or maybe it didn’t matter, like he said. Maybe she just wanted to be with someone. But that coat was the price of admission, the coat all by itself. That’s why there was no pleasure in it for him. That’s why he was sitting in the kitchen drinking a six-pack at 1 in the morning. That’s why he wasn’t still at her place. Bet he doesn’t even have her number, I thought. And maybe that’s alright with her, too. 
I knew I was turning mental cartwheels , but that was nothing new for me. Again, I didn’t want to be judgmental, to attach any moral stigma to these thoughts. I wasn’t thinking badly of Sam—I was just weighing the scales as some sort of exercise. It was abstract, almost random, but somehow, it felt important to me at the moment. It was something I needed to do. Some impulse was tugging at me, something that felt fresh, that required new muscles to be exercised, muscles I’d neglected for a long time. There was a change of routine here that had less to do with the past than the future, if we had a future.
Sam went back to the site the next day and worked, worked there for over a week. He returned to the apartment every couple of days, and then he’d drink and stare at the television and sleep, which is all anybody could do. 
I went to work each day, sprinting from morning to night, putting out the news. I’m an operations executive in the news division of one of the television networks, and all any of us could do at first was try to keep up. 
It took several weeks, but we almost regained routine. Every morning on the way to work, I ticked off subway stations and store names and floors on the elevator, listing them for myself by rote, from habit, rebuilding each morning the reassurance of familiarity. We had just enough of a respite to begin to relax. 
Then the first anthrax attack hit—at another network. Over the next few days, several networks got the innocuous letters.
I bought a gas mask one afternoon on lunch break, at an odds-and-ends store down the block from the office. Sam laughed when I brought it home. “That’s useless,” he informed me. “If it’s anthrax, all you need is antibiotics anyway. If it’s sarin, the mask won’t help.” He was back at his job by then, at a newsstand in Rockefeller Center—where the first tainted letter had arrived—so he had studied up on the subject.  
I tried to keep my mind on subway stations and elevators and the price of overpriced coffee. In time, there were new encouraging signs— my friends began gossiping about each other again, partisan politics returned in fits and starts to Washington, big businesses began poking each other in competition for bailout money. Normalcy was returning, I was able to tell myself, despite the couple of threatening powdery letters received by the competition.
Then I got the phone call. 
“Can you come to Don’s office?” Don Masters is, of course, our anchor, veteran of thirty years in the news wars, an esteemed journalist, expansive late-night talk show commentator on world affairs, obsessive visitor to tarot and numerology readers and a man who insists on riding the same expensive quarter horse that’s thrown him three times and almost killed him once. One approaches Don at the best of times only when summoned, and then discusses only the topics he raises—any other course can quickly throw this very finicky expensive train right off the tracks.
“What’s up, Don?” I said, leaning against his doorpost, trying to appear nonchalant.
“Come in,” he said tensely, not even pretending to be social. “Close the door.”
I settled into the buttery leather chair next to his sea captain’s desk, piled with horsy knickknacks and model sailboats, the detritus of a man who always needed to be reminded of his own vitality. Don paced behind the desk for a few moments, his TV-blue shirt open at the collar, the tie—dramatically casual—loose around his neck.
“We need anthrax,” he said.
“I’m sorry?”
“All the other networks have anthrax. We’re falling behind. Bin Laden’s decided we’re irrelevant. What’s that going to do to us as an organization?” 
One of Don’s obsessions is his role in the history of the network, his special place in ‘the organization.’ The most venerable news organization in the history of television—he’d learned the phrase so well it rolled off his tongue at the end of every show, and whenever he’d had a few drinks. But I didn’t smell alcohol on his breath. It didn’t even sound like competition was concerning him at the moment.
“Don, I don’t think anyone’s keeping score in quite that way,” I ventured.
“Don’t be naïve,” he muttered. “Everything counts. Everything registers somewhere inside the minds of human beings. If the other networks all have anthrax letters and we don’t, it diminishes us forever.”
“Okay—so what do you have in mind?” I asked, giving him a second chance to state his goal, a chance to back away from what I was afraid he meant.
“We have to get some,” he insisted, without a second thought. “We have to find someplace that has some and get it on a letter here. And I think we need to do this today, so it can be discovered no later than tomorrow. We’re already lagging behind.” He looked at me with the tension I’d seen on his face in national crises when he’d ‘taken charge’ of the newsroom—not among my favorite memories. 
“If I were thinking of myself,” he said, “it would be nice if the letter made it as far as my personal assistant. Look at the mileage Brokaw got out of that—it probably bought him  five more years in the chair. But I don’t want to take chances with anyone’s health—they can find it in the mailroom.”
“Uh-huh,” I stammered, because I couldn’t think of another reply. “Have you talked to anyone else about this? Anybody from upstairs?”
“No,” he said, wheeling around from the window and leaning over the desk. “And neither will you. This is not an operation anyone can know about. I don’t know about it and neither does anyone else. Neither do you, for that matter. As long as you get some powder and get it on a letter, nobody ever has to know anything about it. You drive out to Trenton and mail it tonight. I know a doctor who’ll give you Cipro today—you can say you’re nervous, working at a network. Tomorrow you’ll look like a genius.”
I could see he was serious. But apparently he wasn’t sure yet that I saw it, or that I was clear as to just how serious he was.
“I’ll break you,” he said, “if you speak about this with anyone.”
This was no idle threat, coming from Don Masters. He’d done it before—everyone knew the stories. 
In the past ten years, as the world have become ever more centered around the United States, Don Masters had become ever more centered around Don Masters. He threw fits over promos that didn’t include his picture in the first two seconds. He remade the set of the Seven O’Clock News twice at the advice of his numerologist, with 7’s (for success) and 9’s (for profundity) stitched into the pattern of the chairs. This was fine until the late 90’s, when we had to prepare for HDTV and the engineers found that the pattern could now actually be read—by the three civilians in the country with an HDTV set and sending station. Nonetheless, this required another set rebuild, with smaller and more obscured numbers still present in the stitching. 
And the piece de resistance was surely the news magazine piece that required a new voiceover during Don’s monthlong vacation in the Hamptons. Don refused to come back to town, even when the network proffered a helicopter to make the trip quicker. Instead, he forced the brass to send a mobile recording truck three hours out to the tip of Long Island, to camp outside a local radio station in order to re-voice his 3 minutes of track. And every time Don was unhappy about something, not only did he get his way, but someone lost their job.
I wondered sometimes if he didn’t pay people to repeat these stories in the halls—they did a lot to bolster his reputation, and the reputation of having such power conferred that power. I’d been with the organization myself for twenty years—I had a pension and child support payments—it was hard to think of leaving, and especially to go out over this.
And when I started looking at things his way, he actually had a point: the lack of a letter did make us look bad. We’d been lagging in the ratings for several years, our demographics showed our audience getting progressively older—and now this. I found myself wondering at the fact that I hadn’t thought about it myself. I assumed we could weather this storm—the only network not to receive an anthrax letter—but maybe I was being naïve. At the same instant this thought occurred to me, it struck me as rank insanity. Hannah Arendt would have a field day here, I thought.
I needed to think. I needed to get out of the office. Besides, even if I decided to do it, how the hell was I going to get ahold of anthrax? On a few hours notice? I searched my memory for scientists who might work with the stuff—friends of Maura’s or people I’d interviewed over the years. It was all a blur. And something was nagging at me, some impulse in my chest that felt off-kilter, like a drumbeat that’s a half-step off.
After prowling the halls aimlessly for ten minutes, I decided to talk to Sam. He was a disinterested party and an honest man. He’d keep his mouth shut, come hell or high water, and he wasn’t a judgmental sort, not one to take positions or draw moral distinctions at such a time. He’d fooled the girl with his fireman’s jacket, after all. He’d listen, I’d talk, and I’d figure out what to do. And then he’d forget it, go home, watch movies on television and drink beer and not bother me about this ever again. Maybe, with luck, he’d know someone who had some anthrax.
I went to Rockefeller Center, to his newsstand, but he wasn’t there.  The owner of the newsstand said he’d gone home sick. The owner stood in a corner of the tiny cubicle in front of a stack of yesterday’s newspapers. He was short, swarthy, mustached and accented—Lebanese? Afghan, maybe? 
I scanned the wall racks. I hadn’t read a magazine in a month. Now I saw all the special issues, the pictures I’d seen before, many I hadn’t. The owner held up one commemorative issue to me. “You want this one?” he said. 
“Yes, that’s what I was looking for,” I told him. It was the magazine we read in my parent’s home thirty-five years ago, when my litany of bad memories started. Now it was a comfort to see the disturbing pictures beneath the familiar banner.
He held the magazine up for me, but before I could take it, he pulled it back and opened to one of the center pages, the centerfold with the graphic of the Trade Center, the trajectory of the planes, the timeline of their impact and the general geography we all know so well. 
He pointed to the base, the ground floor, of Tower 2. “I worked here,” he said, chewing on the words a bit. “I worked the newsstand here,” he said, pointing again. I knew that stand, one of the biggest downtown. I’d probably given him money many times. “I was there when it hit,” he said. “I was fixing up my stack,” and at first I didn’t understand what he meant. Then I looked at the pile of newspapers in front of him, the banners cut off for return to the jobber. He’d been preparing his merchandise for return. 
“I stayed,” he continued. “I heard the noise but I fixed my stack. Then I closed up.” There was no irony in his voice, no self-reproach. It’s just the way things happened. It was like, all these weeks later, he still had to tell the story in order to discover what he thought about it himself.
“I headed this way,” he said, still with the diagram, pointing at a doorway now. “They stopped me—they said ‘No—can’t go this way. Go over there.’ So I go over there. Ten minutes later, I’m back at the same place.  I made a circle. I go outside, and the whole thing comes down. Dark cloud all over, in my face in my eyes my mouth my nose. I can’t breath to speak.” He opens his mouth and puts his hand in, hands as scoops. He moves them in and out of his mouth a few times, showing me how he worked to be able to breath again. “I scoop the dust out. Then I yell ‘HELP!!’ A man comes—fireman—from ten feet away. He takes me. His head is bleeding—my head is bleeding, my shoulder is bleeding. His blood is on my shirt, here on the shoulder. I can’t wash it now.”
They took him to Liberty State Park, he said, for hospital. Then, when they found out he had no way to return to Brooklyn, the police drove him to a New Jersey police garrison, where other policemen drove him to Brooklyn. That was nice of them, he said. He didn’t expect such courtesy from policemen, especially in New Jersey.
“My shoulder still hurts,” he says. “I can’t lift heavy weight now.”
“But you’re here,” I said.
“I’m here,” he repeated, hollowvoiced and paused for a moment, staring out into the busy lobby. “I have a friend, he got a job in the restaurant on the Tower, at the top? His first day—“ he stopped.
“That was his first day?”
He nodded. “His first day. He’s gone.” He was staring at me, without visible feeling, with no response to what he had just said, looking at me as though I could tell him what he should feel, what he should do. 
I had nothing to say. I could feel those unfamiliar muscles flexing inside me, those inactive muscles that needed exercise. I could feel them working away, but to no end I could determine as yet. Considering the mission I was on, I was in no position to tell anyone which way was up.
He went back to doing what he could do, all he knew to do at the moment. Six weeks after his world exploded, he was back at work, slitting the banners off the tops of newspapers, slitting them with a boxcutter.
I watched him, watched the blade—almost a visual pun—for what seemed like several minutes. Then I walked back across town, tasting the air and the smells of the city. I went up the elevator and walked right into Don’s office.
“We shouldn’t do this,” I said to Don.
“No?” he said. “And why not?” His mouth was working and his eyebrows got that twitch I’d seen every once in a while during major breaking news stories. We’d even sent him to a consultant several years earlier to try to get control of it, but to no avail. Now I took it as a hopeful sign, that maybe he was feeling a little pressure from me, from inside himself, from some memory or dormant feeling that might now be nagging at him.
“Because it’s wrong. Because it’s a bad idea.” I paused, to see if the words might penetrate. They felt funny coming out of my mouth. I wondered when I’d last used the word ‘wrong’ in adult conversation—clearly, it had been a long time.
Don was chewing on this, but it was clearly a battle for him, a battle against at least ten years of his own history, his comfort level of familiarity and routine and certain levels of authority he’d worked hard for. I decided it would be better not to wait for him to come to a conclusion.
“Besides,” I said, looking him firmly in the eye, “it betrays a lack of faith in the organization.”
He stiffened at this. “What do you mean?”
“It’s there, Don,” I told him. “It’s in our mailroom. It’s probably addressed to you. Somebody down there just bungled it. They put it in the wrong pile. If they go looking for it, they’ll find it.”
I could see his jaw stiffen. I could see the old resolve return, the pride and bravado that made him accept the anchor job in the first place, back when he was a field reporter who didn’t want to get stuck behind a desk.
“You’re right,” he said. “Can you make that happen?”
“Sure,” I said. I called the mailroom and told them to initiate a complete search of the entire facility, with workers wearing protective gloves, and to call the instant they found anything suspicious.
And of course, it was there. It was even addressed to Don, like I’d promised. I was surprised to see how many executives around the office seemed heartened by this news. They called a press conference immediately to make the announcement. We might have been last, but we were still in the game.
When I went home that night, Sam was on the couch, flipping the channels. A very pretty young woman was feeding him soup. 
“I pick up the shipments in the mailroom,” he explained. “I tested positive today—they think some of the powder got on a pile of newspapers. So I’m taking Cipro. Shouldn’t you?” he asked. He looked positively chipper about it. The girl kept bringing soup from the kitchen. 
I must have had a look on my face. “What?” Sam demanded.
I went back to my room and looked out the window. The smoke was gone now, though I knew I’d see it out my window again sometime. I could feel those muscles working inside again, working hard now, trying to get accustomed, trying to achieve the level of familiarity, of routine.
Sam came into my room with the girl.
“I’m moving out,” he said. “You’ve changed.”
I nodded and helped them call a cab. Then I went back to watching out the window, watching where the smoke used to be.

~~~~

Missing

May 6, 2004

The Halls of Justice looked like white whales in a winter storm. Superior Court, Family Court, Hall of Records. Chalky-coated and glinting dull, they loom ghastly against the charcoal clouds. No other footsteps echo the square. No other faces in sight, just a few slim forms on the balconies and rooftops of Chinatown staring south, staring downtown like everyone else in the world.
I’m going to Chinatown. That’s the address on the card in the wallet in my jacket pocket. 
There are newspapers blowing around the street, though it doesn’t feel like a breeze anywhere else. There was a primary today. Did I vote? One more question I can’t answer. One of many. Maybe I’ll know more at the office. 
At the office. The phrase feels familiar. I worked at an office. But this one? We’ll see. See if it looks familiar when I open the door. 
Even Chinatown is deserted. A few men in their white shirts, slacks and aprons stand around the doorways. Every eye strains above street level, watching the clouds, the clouds from downtown. 
The keys in my pants pocket don’t fit the street door. But the ones in the jacket pocket do. The dimpled key on the same ring fits the deadbolt of Room 306. Ned Schindler, Investigator. That would be me, I suppose. I’ve got the keys. I’ve got the wallet.
It doesn’t look familiar, but not much does. I know New York. But then, I could be a tourist from Salt Lake City and know what New York looks like, even today, even on the day when it least looks like itself. But I knew this was Chinatown before I could read the signs. I knew how to find Mott Street. I know Little Italy is a few blocks away. I can distinguish the subway tokens in my pocket from the change. So I know the city. There’s just nothing anywhere that feels like mine. 
Drawers locked. The small key on the jacket ring opens it. It’s a top drawer. Files and pens, envelopes and candy, a hundred notes on scrap paper, a few dollars and a few photos and a few more keys.
I leaned back in the seat and then it was morning. Light was pouring in the windows, I could hear at least a few people on the street chattering in Cantonese and I was stiff as a board when I got up. 
I looked at the room for signs of the owner. A few photos but totally generic—a zeppelin over the Empire State Building before the TV antenna spire, an autographed picture of Keith Hernandez in Mets blue and orange and a certificate of completion of the Investigator’s Preparedness Program in Drug Recognition and Compliance at SUNY Downstate. I’m not connecting with any of this. Now in the light of morning, I see the small television wedged into the middle of a bookshelf. I turn it on and of course it’s full of the hole in the city, the hole downtown, the hole that created the cloud. 
I came from there. I don’t have to watch this to know that. Watching doesn’t help though—nothing gets clearer. I don’t know how I got there or what happened to me. Obviously I got out but I don’t remember a thing. The anchors show the footage of the cloud of dust. I walk to the bathroom and look in the mirror. I’m coated in the stuff. So is the windowsill outside, like the courthouses were. They say it’ll take weeks to clear. It takes me half an hour and twenty-five paper towels to clean myself off. There’s another set of clothes hanging on the back of the bathroom door—they fit. Of course. This is my office. What else could it be?
I head back to the desk and sit. I turn off the TV. I pull the wallet out of my pocket. The picture on the driver’s license looks something like me. Why shouldn’t it? The address is in Staten Island. I couldn’t get there anyway—the ferry’s not running. Or do I have a car? I call 411 to get my own phone number. The phone rings a long time. No answer, no machine, but no one picks up either.
I should just go home. I should get a cab. There have to be cabs running. I’d have to walk above 14th Street—they aren’t letting anyone downtown. But I could get a car to the address. I have lots of keys. Something will fit. Why do I doubt this? Why don’t I feel anything for the address? Why do I doubt that I will know it either when I get home?
Because everything is strange. I acknowledge the overview, the world I live in, but everything has changed simply because familiarity has disappeared. I’m not talking about familiarity with something in particular—the whole concept of familiarity is gone. Everything is at a distance, removed, detached from me, from any associations, from feeling or pleasure or dread or pain. Pain floats over the city in a cloud. It takes no effort to identify. But you can’t touch a cloud. It communicates nothing. It offers nothing on its own. It’s just there.
Just as I’m about to feel something—just as the fear and fright begin to become palpable—there’s a knock at the door. I left it hanging when I came in, so all she has to do is push on it to get it open. 
“I need help,” she says, sitting in the chair across from me. “I’m trying to find a missing person.”
“Aren’t we all?” I answer.

~~~~

Bridge and Tunnel People

March 31, 2003

“Bridge and Tunnel people.”
“What is this?” 
“This is what they call us—bridge and tunnel people, like everyone should be able to afford Manhattan.”
“It’s status,” S replied. “The Manhattan people look down on the Queens people, the blacks think the Jews are cheap, the Irish think the blacks are lazy, the hip-hoppers think the punk people are not hip, anybody making over $100,000 a year hates the Democrats, and someday the Natives are going to hate the guys who put up the casinos for taking all their money.”
“We won’t live to see that one,” said M.
“Thanks be. But I see it every day in the store. They all come in talking about everybody else, like nobody knows as good as them. And like I’m not there at all.”
“That’s because you’re bridge and tunnel people.  Nobody sees us anyplace. We’re below everybody.”
“Take the upper level or the bottom?” 
“The top makes better pictures. Don’t you pay attention?”
“This is not about me,” S replied. “Things will happen according to plan, despite my weakness.”
“Where do you get this nonsense? You watch Oprah too much.”
“It’s a good show. She at least helps people sometimes. Did you leave food for the dogs?”
“Lots of food,” M assured him.
“The ones from the Towers, they sent out people to their houses to save their dogs. We should have that,” S said.
“Are you comparing yourself?”
“No, no, it’s the dogs I’m thinking of.”
The line of cars was stacked up along the approach ramp. Two trucks were moving slowly in adjoining lanes, which held up everyone behind them. 
“This is rudeness,” S said. “They know people are in a hurry.”
“Yeah—this is New York. Everybody has very important travel plans,” his passenger echoed and they both laughed. “Watch the pothole.”
“No problem at this speed,” S assured him. He was able to steer around it in any case. The van lumbered carrying the weight in the back but he had practiced for a week with sandbags and cinder blocks to simulate it and the handling was pretty much what he expected.
“I saw two American girls in the neighborhood wearing burkas,” S said. “You think this means something?”
“They’ll be wearing them with miniskirts this summer,” M answered. “They take nothing seriously.”
“Nothing?”
“They fight a war on terrorism and on the front page of the newspaper for weeks is ‘Joe Millionaire.’”
“That won’t change, you don’t think?” S asked. M heard the twinge in his voice and recognized a destructive sort of doubt seeping into his driver’s resolve. This could not go unanswered.
“I think over time, things must change,” he said. He could see S considering him between glances at the traffic, which was further snarled by an accident ahead. “When people are comfortable, they want to stay comfortable. When all the real choices are uncomfortable, they watch television instead. They have to be made uncomfortable so that their minds adjust. Then making a choice becomes a necessity.”
S seemed to be considering this, considering it at greater length than M liked. 
“How do we know they’ll make the right choice?” he asked.
M stifled the temptation—it was strong in him—to squash this altogether. This is the wrong question, he thought, but did not say. 
“It is not for us to know the results of our work. The world goes the way the world goes,” he added, thinking this might appeal to S’s Oprah-watching side. “All we can know is our role.” He smiled. “We’re bridge and tunnel people, that’s our role.”
S laughed, and the tension eased. They passed the accident and now they were climbing the ramp with a small group of cars, heading for the tall bridge towers and the broad roadway over the river. The sun came from behind a cloud and gleamed on the stanchions.
“Look at the new Mercedes,” S said, always watching the machines. He wasn’t good for much but he knew his machines. 
“Yeah—see the look he’s giving us,” M added.
“Bridge and tunnel, that’s what he’s saying,” S said. “We’re almost there.”
“Roll down the window,” M suggested, climbing into the back of the van. “Tell him if there’s no bridge, there’s no bridge and tunnel people.”
He mouthed a prayer and bent to push the red button.

~~~~

The Lawyer’s Story

February 20, 2003

I used to be a matrimonial attorney. You think it’s all guys who’ve beaten up their women and they come in with sunglasses to cover the bruises, the bums. But we also had a gold digger club.
I had one woman who came in—hot little number. She’s around 40, he’s 68. He’s a bum, she says, he cheated on me, I want everything he’s got. We hire a detective—he’s an off-duty cop, he gets a couple hundred a week to follow people for us, take pictures, you know, the usual kind of thing. So he follows the old guy around. He walks stooped over he’s got his lunch in a paper bag, you can see the apple at the bottom of the bag yknow. So after a couple of days, we have the detective follow her. She comes out of a health club in Bay Ridge, kind of a ritzy place, you know and she’s coming out with the personal trainer, who’s like a Fabio type with dark hair and he’s got one hand on her tit and the other down her back pocket. And our guy gets the picture.
So I ask her to come by my office and she’s like Oh I’m kind of busy and I say it’s important. So she comes by and I leave the one photo on the desk in an envelope and I tell her I have to go to the bathroom, being an old guy—I’m 61—would you please just have a look at this while I’m gone and tell me what you think. You know, I don’t’ have to rub it in, right? 
So I come back, her whole jaw is on the table, she’s like “Ohhh.” I say, “Now look, I don’t sit in judgment, that’s not my job. But if we’re going to court, it’s a war and if you take the bullets out of my gun, we get killed. So I need to know what’s coming—is there anyone else?” She finally says, “One other.” So of course, since we caught her lying already and she’s admitting to one other, there’s probably a few more someplace. So I ask her, “What do you want?” And she, without a second’s hesitation, says, “$15,000 a month, the primary residence, the Mercedes and sole custody of the kids.” I tell her “Well, I will go to the other side and talk to them, but I think that’s unlikely. But I’ll try.”
So I call the other lawyer, he says ‘Come down tomorrow at 10.’ I get to his office and he says, “Okay, here is what I will propose and what your client will accept. $60,000 a year, the primary residence, a car—unspecified, and sole custody with liberal visitation.” Then he looks at me and he says, “Tell your client that, between the waist and the knees, she’s not the best and not the worst, but she’s way too liberal about the entry fee. It’s been nice talking at you—welcome to the big leagues.” He was a tough guy, this lawyer.
So I went back and gave her the offer. I didn’t tell her what he said, cause how could I? This didn’t seem to get through. She said, “That’s a third of what I wanted.” I said, “Okay, but look at this way: You’re getting $60,000, the house paid for, the car paid for, you’re getting 25% of his income for child support and you work two days a week. So you’re going to end up with about $100,000 a year. The other thing to remember is: they’ve got detectives just like we do. My advice is: take the deal.” It took her five days but she took it.
Every once in a while, the shoe is on the other foot. One guy, I was representing his wife, he called me and said, “Can I come down and talk to you?” I said I can’t do that, it’s against the Code of Ethics. So he shows up at the office and plants himself in the door and says, “Let’s just go to lunch. Just eat with me.” So I go like an idiot. And he says, “This is going to cost me a lot of money.” I say, “Well, that’s what you have a lawyer for. You can fight it and maybe bring it down a little, but you should find a way to make it work for the both of you.” He was in the waste management business, you know? One of those guys. So he had a 42 year old wife who he’s dumped for a 40 year old number a little hotter than the wife and he wants out. But he repeats, “This is gonna cost me a lot of money.” And then he says, “I think maybe I should get somebody to bump her off.” And I knew I was in trouble then, so I told him, “Look—I’ve got an account here, but we’ve got to leave now because I can’t hear this, and I have to report it, understand?”
So we left and I went back to the office and we dropped her as a client, because now I had guilty knowledge of both of them, and I called the District Attorney. I told him what the guy said and he said “Oh shit—why were you having lunch with this guy?” and I said “He planted himself in the office and wouldn’t take no.” So they dragged him in and he said he had a little wine—he only had a Diet Coke, but I wasn’t going to contradict him—and just got loose and said things he shouldn’t have but he didn’t mean it. And he got off on it. But the DA turned him over to the IRS, who discovered he hadn’t paid his taxes in nine years. I saw him a year later and he comes up to me and I thought, O God, he’s going to deck me but he puts his arms around me and says Pallie, I should have listened to you and settled, I should’ve taken your advice. The IRS got me and she took me to the cleaners and the girlfriend doesn’t want me anymore. I should have listened to you. And I thought, this is what got me a heart attack—caring too much.


~~~~

A Shiver and a Crack

March 29, 2009

Mark and Susan met at Danny’s on Saturday morning, five days after September 11th. There were several customers waiting for booths to free up for breakfast when Mark said, “Why don’t we just eat together?” He and Danny pulled a couple of tables together in the back room, the walls mounted with pictures of zebras and rhinos, baboons and elephants Danny’s son had taken on vacation two years earlier, in the peaceful years following the end of history. 
Pam and Tom joined them but neither talked a whole lot. Pam had lost her husband aboard one of the jets that crashed into the Towers. Tom wasn’t her husband but he had the same name as her husband and he’d already moved in with her. All of this information was readily available from Danny’s waitresses, Consuela and Lucy, who knew everything about everyone, all over the world, just ask. 
With the other two not talking much, Mark tried amiably to fill the gap, bringing up the weather—it had turned colder the previous day. That topic died, without much effort to preserve it. Susan responded with a comment about Bob Dylan’s new album, which he hadn’t heard. After a few more dead ends and fleeting attempts at comments by Pam—Tom just smiled and listened to the others—Mark said, “Did you hear about the hijacker? The one who actually lived in this neighborhood?”
Susan smiled a tortured smile. “He lived in my basement, actually,” she answered. 
She felt a grim satisfaction from the sudden intake of breath around the table—it’s the way she’d been feeling the whole week. Pam went even whiter than usual and seemed entirely unable to speak. Susan felt sorry for her in particular. If there had been another way to answer—or a way not to answer—Susan would have taken it. But there wasn’t, not really, not for her. What Susan felt, she would say, eventually, inevitably. She was a creature of limited control. It was just the way she was.
“When was this?” Mark asked, actually sounding a bit out of breath.
“About a year ago—that’s when he left. He lived in the house about a year. He really didn’t talk much—that’s always what people say, isn’t it? Serial killers, child molesters, the neighbors always say ‘Such a quiet person, kept to himself.’ That’s how he was. I could hear him praying sometimes—he prayed a lot more at the end. He gave me just a couple of days notice moving out but he wasn’t the first to do that.” She was looking at the food on the table, her half-eaten egg, the yellow running across the plate under the home fries and those little round sausages Danny liked. “He liked motorcycles. Remember Bill Truitt, the guy with the handlebar mustache, was always in here? Worked for the Bridge and Tunnel? He had a Harley and…well, they’d always be talking out on the street about the bike. But he’d never take a ride—Bill offered him a couple times that I saw. He was afraid to ride on the back of the bike.” 
“But he flew a plane,” Mark offered and she nodded. Pam winced and the conversation drifted immediately in other directions. When they’d all finished eating, Mark insisted on paying. “Just this once,” he said. “I instigated so it’s my party.” When they stepped outside, the clouds parted just enough to let a few rays of sunlight through and the waitresses said they walked away together. 
There were lots of people on the street despite the weather gone cloudy and gray. They were milling at the window displays and clustered around the park fence near the playground, talking and greeting each other, seeking company. Mark and Susan walked the long avenue next to each other without acknowledging in any way that they were together. But they already were, somehow. The decision not to separate was an unusual one for them and they were both very aware of it.
“The sun’s trying to break through,” Mark said finally.
“Optimist,” she sneered.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing wrong,” she said. “You’re just more courageous than me. I don’t want to be disappointed so I always expect the worst.”
He smiled at that. “I figure if I can’t imagine something good, it can’t happen. That doesn’t mean I expect it.”
She was running her hands through her the streaks of gray in her hair, he noticed, self-conscious maybe, but also playing with it, flirtatious. That was a sign, he knew, he remembered, a sign she was interested. He would have jumped on this when he was younger, he knew, fastened on it, gotten all lathered up about it. He’d have fashioned ten wild fantasies in three seconds out of that falling hair. Was she aware of it, of his noticing? Were women ever not aware of men noticing? Even if they weren’t interested?
They walked two more blocks without speaking. He was aware of feeling relaxed, of not feeling the need to say anything. He was aware of that but not more than aware, not self-conscious himself. That was surprising, it was unusual for the last few years. He hadn’t relaxed in an attractive woman’s company in a while. Then again, he hadn’t been in an attractive woman’s company in a while either. 
He found himself watching what she was watching, taking note of the things she paid attention to. She didn’t seem much interested in clothes in the store windows but she did stop a few times to glance at fabrics, sashes on chairs and curtains ruffling the corners of store displays. People’s faces passing—he was used to staring discreetly, fixing an image of someone in just a momentary glance and he noticed she seemed as aware of the striking faces as he was. And then, as they approached President Street, they both stopped spontaneously, independent of one another, to stare at a painting in a window. It was representational, just an interior of a back yard garden with sunlight cutting through at an angle. It  appeared simple, almost naïve, at first, the surfaces barely modeled, the shadows almost opaque. But the coloring was superb and the whole effect somehow touching, almost heartbreaking. He stared at it for almost a minute before he noticed her face, the look she was giving it.
“You want it,” he said.
“No—uh, well, who knows how much it is?” she answered.
“Tell you what—let’s share it,” he said. “Split the cost, you get custody for a month, then me.”
She looked at him for a several seconds, the smile growing across her face despite her attempts to suppress it. “What a really horrible idea,” she marveled and then they broke up laughing.
“Okay—I’ll race you for it,” he said. “Whoever gets inside and offers the guy the price first. But then we can’t haggle him down. He’ll play us against each other.”
“But I don’t want it,” she said.
“Oh please,” he said. “You’re a terrible liar. It’s all over your face.”
“I get it the first month,” she said and they went inside.
He carried it to her house and went in to help her hang it. She removed a Mary Cassatt print over the fireplace in her living room and placed it carefully in the closet. “It’ll come back out in a month,” she said as he hung the new painting. “This is the first real painting I’ve ever owned.” She looked at him for a reply. 
“I’ve been buying originals for a few years,” Mark said a little sheepishly. “I saw a painting in a gallery window, just like we did here and I didn’t buy it. I went home and dreamed about the thing for two nights in a row—that was it for me. I knew this one would stick with me too.”
“I guess I’ve had those too,” Susan mused, “but it never occurred to me to buy them.”
“So I’ll be a bad influence on you,” he shrugged. “You won’t be the first.”
She smiled. “Any particular style you buy?”
“Cheap,” he answered, laughing and she laughed too despite her reserve, both the reserve she maintained with men and the reserve she maintained against her own feelings. A look passed across her face nonetheless, a kind of grateful surprise at his humor. He recognized that look and the heat behind it and then followed a moment of real confusion, the two of them grappling with the obvious attraction between them that had become too obvious to ignore. “Listen,” he offered, “I’d like to buy you dinner if you’re interested.”
She looked out the window, surprised to see the sun nestling near the horizon across the river. She felt her cheeks redden. “I…I can’t,” she stammered. “I can’t date.” He colored too and she felt terrible. She was trying to figure out how to explain what she meant as he backed toward the door, offering unnecessary apologies and let himself out. How old do I have to be, dammit, before I get these things right? She had just enough time to really regret her actions before she heard knocking just where he’d left.
Mark stood smiling like he’d just wandered by. “You’re right, now that I think about it,” he said. “I’ve been on so many horrible dates lately. It just doesn’t work, does it?”
“No,” she rushed to agree, to make sure he understood that this was what she meant, that she hadn’t meant to throw him out. She was surprised and shaken about how happy she was to see him.
“I mean, I go to dinner and sit there trying to figure out how to be charming and attractive. Which is what I did when I was twenty. And the only problem is, I’m too old for that now. I know better. If I just genuinely have a good time, I’ll be plenty charming and attractive. I just want somebody to like me the way I am anyhow. But that’s not what a date is about, is it?”
“No, it’s not,” she said, a little breathless over his explanation.
“So, you’re right, no date. I’m not buying dinner under any circumstances. What if we cooked something together some night? Would that be okay?”
“That would be very nice,” she said, feeling her cheeks flush again and not caring a bit. 
“Okay,” he said, breathing as though filling his lungs after a climb. “So we just have to figure out what night.” His eyes were bright, a young man’s hungry eyes. On her. It had been a long time since she’d made a man that hungry. She basked in those eyes.
“Well,” she said, making the decision in the middle of the sentence, “we have to eat tonight, don’t we?”
He nodded. “That’s what I was thinking.” He was trying to remain low-key, to make it all very nonchalant. When she was younger, this would have made him seem disreputable somehow. Now, it just seemed futile and kind of cute—and hopeless. Maybe it was cute because she could see that he knew it was hopeless as well. “So—can I come in?” he said finally, having stood in the doorway awkwardly through this four-second simultaneous epiphany. She laughed and let him in and everything changed, because they both knew at that moment how the evening was going to play out. 
He took her direction in the kitchen gracefully and was reasonably good—but not too good—with the tasks he was assigned. They were passing back and forth in close quarters, bumping into each other at first and then exchanging more purposeful touches as time went on. Mark in the middle of cutting carrots became very aware of the smile on his face, that it kept igniting all by itself, igniting out of nothing. Glancing sheepishly in her direction, he realized she was doing the same and a warm current immediately started at his fingers and toes and spread all through his body like dye in cotton. He felt like cotton suddenly, like he was made of cotton—light and airy, the breeze passing right through him. Lightheaded. They were talking to each other constantly but none of it sounded like anything—just words, assurances, I’m still here and so are you, we’re here together. None of it meant anything as words but the message was outside the words—you don’t feel this all alone, I’m with you, we’re having this moment together. Both of them were wrapped up in the feeling of the moment, willing to wallow in it—but neither expected anything more than the evening. If you’d asked, neither would be sure they wanted anything more. Too complicated. Too much to deal with. Have my life the way I want it. I’m too hard to live with. I don’t want to compromise.
But, just after dumping the chopped vegetables into the sauce, he turned and put his arm around her waist and she turned as though she’d been waiting for him. The kiss was more than they’d been expecting, though they’d been anticipating it every moment since he returned to the door. It led immediately to a kind of adult groping, skipping the intermediate steps and proceeding immediately to the pleasure zones. She was stunned at what she was letting him do and even more by what she was doing herself—she’d never gone after a man the way she did now. His touch was electric—he wasn’t the first to have that effect on her but this was different simply because she’d taken for granted long before that she’d never feel that way again. The way he looked at her was a wonder—she remembered men looking at her that way but that memory came to her through more recent memories of men looking through her and past her, the vivid miserable experience of being invisible. She was thrilled to be exciting again and she was not foolish enough to think that she would have many more such opportunities. 
Eventually, he leaned over her and flicked off the burners. “Later,” he said and she led him into the bedroom. 
The lovemaking was new for both of them. He hadn’t been with a woman in over a year and was thrilled to find that everything still worked. But she was thrilled because he was slow and sensitive, focused on her pleasure instead of his own, intent on making her shiver and shake and lose control. Once he succeeded, she was determined to return the compliment and she took him with a hunger she didn’t know she had, a hunger she’d never felt for her husband. She wondered if that was his fault or hers but she was too busy and happy to wonder for long. 
They returned to the kitchen eventually to finish cooking dinner. She was wearing a pajama top and he the bottoms—he didn’t ask whose they’d been originally. Once everything else was cooking, she mentioned she needed pasta. When he didn’t react, she said, “It’s downstairs.” This didn’t throw him either so she stood a while in the doorway until he turned to look at her—he still had that magical look on his face—and added, “Can you come with me?” 
They went down the narrow staircase. It wasn’t until they were down to the bottom floor and she’d slowed to a crawl, feeling in the dark for the light switch and then moving uncomfortably between the cardboard boxes marked with pre-printed labels ‘Property of the United States of America’ and her own food stores on countertops and shelves that he understood what she’d meant, what this place was.
She shrugged at the first box. “They took all the stuff that was actually relevant to the…case,” she said. “At least they said they did. They said they’d come back for this but, in the meantime, I’m doing storage for the Federal Government.”
“They won’t let you move it?”
“Who do I ask?” she said. 
“Well, who’s in charge? The FBI?”
“When they come,” she said, “they come in a group with badges and they don’t tell you who’s in charge.” She looked at the boxes. “They wanted to know why he’d left so much stuff behind. He said he was going to come back for it too. And then I got used to not locking up down here so I didn’t hurry to find someone else.” She found the pasta and turned for the stairs again.
“Did they think you were helping him?”
“They didn’t think I was a terrorist, I don’t think,” she said. Then she squirmed, shrugging her shoulders. “They wanted to know if I was having an affair with him.” She responded to Mark’s look by mewling, “He was a baby.” She started as soon as the words came out. “That’s not what I mean,” she said immediately. “Jesus! I don’t mean a baby…not with what he did…he wasn’t…I don’t know…” She fizzled out, helpless, looking to Mark for help.
“You knew him as a person,” he offered, sounding as helpless as she had.
“But I didn’t,” she moaned like an animal. “He wasn’t a person—he was a tenant.” A nervous laughter bubbled up out of her; she wrapped her arms around herself. “He was the guy who rented the basement—not even the basement, the front rooms in the basement—I locked the door to the staircase so I could keep the back for myself, so I could have the garden. He paid the rent the first of the month, cash, he didn’t play music loud, he didn’t have parties so I was happy. I heard him praying once in a while and it sounded romantic. I had a Muslim downstairs. I congratulated myself for being so cosmopolitan.” The laughter choked off, reduced to a nasty gargle. 
“Enough,” he said. He didn’t want to see this, didn’t want to watch her come apart. “He’s dead.” She paused for a moment but it was merely a pause, a catching of breath, so he pressed on. “He lived here, fine. He was a tenant. There’s no reason for you ever to have thought of him in any other way. He lived here, he didn’t give you trouble, he moved out. That’s enough. You don’t have to think any more about it than that.” 
“How?” she asked. “How do I stop?”
He switched off the light and they went upstairs to finish cooking. After dinner, he said, “Do you want to get out of here? Come to my place overnight?” He was expecting a quick ‘no’—when he didn’t get it, he went awkward. “It’s…it’s a bachelor’s place. I’ve gotten used to being alone so everything is right where I put it down last. It might be disgusting, I have no idea.”
“You don’t have to offer,” she said and he recognized this immediately as a ‘yes.’
“I’d love it if you wanted to—I’ll promise to clean up later.”
“I can help,” she offered.
He made breakfast in bed the next morning. She seemed comfortable reading the paper that morning but, when it got to afternoon, she said “My place is nicer.”
“No doubt,” he admitted.
“The kitchen is bigger too.”
“True.”
“Why don’t we have dinner at my place again?”

~~~~

Crossings

April 17, 2007

I could see his eyes—his pupils—six blocks away.
The light had gone green and the cars were scrambling and spreading out, hunting for position. As I pulled to the left, there he was, perched on the center divider, in a parka and checkered woolen hat, stocky and slightly comical. There’s someone on the divider every day—in Brooklyn, crossing at the crosswalk is for wimps and people who have time and no one has time. But he could easily have crossed before we reached him and I found myself wondering why he was waiting. No one, as I said, has time in Brooklyn. Except him. This guy had loads of time.
I had been jockeying the last ten blocks with a black Mazda. The guy kept cutting me off but as soon as he got in front of me, he would slow down. He didn’t want to go anyplace; he just wanted to be first. Now I’d finally got ahead of him and was putting some space between us—I don’t want to fuss on the way to work, I just want to get there. And all at once I see this face on the divider staring at me, staring so I can see his eyes clear as a bell six blocks away and somehow all I could wonder was why he hadn’t crossed the street already. 
The cop asked me later, “Did you get any warning?” and I said “No” but it felt like a lie immediately and I stammered, “Well, it seemed like he was looking at me.”
“What do you mean, looking at you?” He stopped scribbling in his pad. He had one of those big loose-leaf pads, not the real big college ones but one that was too big to fit in any pocket but a cop’s.
“Like he was looking right at me, like he could see my face, while I was coming. I mean, the second before he jumped, I already had my foot off the gas, just for a second, like I knew he was going to.” Because I saw something in his eyes. Because I could read everything that would happen in his eyes. 
“And—?” The cop’s eyes narrowed. He was younger than me and he’d probably seen plenty in his—what? ten years on the force maybe? The look on his face craved simplicity, an answer he could file on his way to lunch and then home to the kids.
“Nothing,” I shook my head. “It didn’t matter. I hit the brake as soon as I saw him jump but it was too late.”
The cop nodded. “Could see that from the tire tracks,” he murmured. He was watching me closely though. “Did you know him?” he asked, eyes tight on me.
“No,” I shook my head. “Never saw him before,” and as I said it, I felt my face screw up like I’d smelled something bad. I couldn’t be proud of that expression—the guy was dead, after all. But he jumped, so I didn’t see any reason I should have to get too reverent about him either. The cop considered this a moment longer, before putting the pencil in his pocket and closing his notebook.
“Just stay put a minute, in case somebody else wants to talk to you,” he said. 
“I’m not going anywhere.” 
I waited while he walked off to join the other cops down by the curb, where EMS had just arrived, the whole wolf pack surrounded by rubberneckers crowding the yellow tape. All of us—the cops, me, EMS, dead body—huddled at a gas station right where it happened. Somebody brought me a cup of coffee from the station café—I have no idea who. I don’t drink coffee but I drank this. I couldn’t taste it anyway. They slid a body bag around the guy but then they had a hard time lifting it into the back of the van. The weight kept shifting like it was moving around on its own.
How many other people had gone by? Before he jumped, that is. He was already on the divider when I first saw him. I’d assumed he’d finished crossing the westbound side of the street and was just waiting to go the other half. But what if he hadn’t? What if he’d been standing there for ten minutes—or an hour—waiting? 
Waiting for what?
EMS pulled away and most of the people at the yellow tape took off, to work or vandalism or whatever else they did to while away the time. The few that were left were now looking at me. I guess I was more interesting than the cops, who saw this kind of stuff every day and were all involved with their spiral notebooks, getting their stories straight in case there was a lawsuit or something. They kept staring at me, the people at the tape, staring like I didn’t see them staring, like their eyes would bounce right off me, like I didn’t notice or didn’t care or wouldn’t feel anything if I did. All of them but one. She was a woman around my age, short and bulky with Inuit eyes. She stared like the others but when I stared back, she turned away, pierced, and I thought, this one’s got a heart at least.
Finally the cops started climbing back into their cars. The detective in charge gave me his card, said he’d be in touch if there were any other questions. The mechanic said my car was okay to drive to the body shop—I saw he’d washed most of the blood off the fender. 
The gas station owner was eyeing me like I should at least fill up or something before I was on my way, here’s your hat what’s your hurry? His eyes bounced off mine, like the others. I had no story for him. The Inuit woman didn’t know my story, but she knew I had one. I’d seen that flash of recognition in her eyes, in the instant before she turned away. 
Just like the man on the divider. My eyes hadn’t bounced off his, hadn’t gone blank or evaded his stare, even when I sensed what was coming, even in that instant when I lifted my foot off the gas. 
He’d been standing there forever in the morning chill, his feet gripping the concrete edge, waiting for a sign, for the signal to trigger his last step. He didn’t even know what he was waiting for until he found it in my eyes. 
Like I told the cop, I’d never seen him before. 
But now I’d see him forever. 

~~~~

Red Sky

March 14, 2009

In the afternoon, as the awful red-brown smudge spread across the sky over the harbor, they stood and watched the exodus past the front stoop, the endless, aimless procession of the hollow-eyed, the victims, the witnesses, walking home, walking toward home, just walking. 
First had come the shower, just after the towers collapsed—paper, bits of cloth and God knows what else fluttering out of the sky. Pam watched the shower of debris drifting onto the neat gardens and windowsills on her block, each brownstone wearing a scaffolding or a muslin shield like a surgical mask—the neighbors were forever renovating, neatening, restoring, something. Just the first sight of that whitish coating unsettled her. If the weight of the world’s problems fell on Manhattan, it was only fitting.  Manhattan thrived on tumult, on pressure and attention. Brooklyn had always felt just separate enough, a healthy distance. 
But now, out of the sky came the tainted refuse of the world’s troubles, fluttering onto Pam’s stoop, onto the flower boxes under the windows and the tiny patch of lawn Tom trimmed every weekend during spring and summer. And, a few hours later, came the lost and frightened and shell-shocked, marching through Carroll Gardens, seeking that distance, that distance that might never come again. 
Sheila was with her in the kitchen having coffee when the news broke on the TV. “Didn’t I tell you I heard something?” Sheila said, going to the back window, proud of herself for a moment. And then both their faces changed as the TV said the plane came from Boston. It took Pam longer to react—the look was already spreading over Sheila’s face before Pam had her first thought about Tom. “Well, it’s not his flight,” were the first words out of her mouth. He would have called. Regardless of anything, he would have called. “And he’s going to Los Angeles” she continued. The whole thing was a mistake anyway. A bomber flew into the Empire State Building once. So now it had happened again. But when she stepped to the window and looked out at the clear blue sky, her stomach growled and sank. The sound of the sirens rose over the river. 
It was ten minutes before they started up the stairs to the roof, though the thought of it was in them both immediately. They got there just in time to see the second plane hit. And then there was a long time when the world seemed filtered through a haze. The smoke seemed like it should have made noise, crackling or whooshing or something but now there was no sound other than the sirens that never ended, that kept multiplying, the whining from all directions, like car alarms after an earthquake. 
After a while, the traffic stopped on the highways and then even the streets nearby, snarled completely but, moreso, everyone just stymied, watching the spectacle or simply unable to move. You could hear the chatter, voices, whispers, coming from the surrounding rooftops and the streets below—Pam absorbed traces from all over without really listening, just words at random drifting up to her as she nursed the last of her coffee. A plane had attacked the Pentagon. Another was on its way to attack the White House—no, the Capitol. But it didn’t. There were other planes still on the way, though the skies were now eerily clear. 
Just words, words and more words. And then, clearly, so clear that she was able to play back the sound of the voice, the inflection of the words, over and over in her head forever after: the first plane was Boston-to-LA; they picked it because of all the jet fuel, all that fuel to burn.
She lingered on that line, hearing it again and again, three times and more, like a liquid soaking into her skin. When she turned her head slightly, she saw the look on Sheila’s face and knew she’d heard it too. But it didn’t mean…there were other flights from Boston to LA. Nobody had called from his clients…
She went down  into the house for her cell and dialed and got no answer. It went to voice mail and she heard his voice saying ‘You know what to do’ but she couldn’t bring herself to do anything, even though her lips moved and she pressured the back of her throat, trying to coax sound into the air. Sheila refilled the coffee and kept pacing about, trying to think of someone to call who might know but Pam wasn’t thinking anymore. She was drifting through her rooms, light and free and untouched. The walls of the apartment were still white and the sunlight glowed through the lace curtains in the front room—the light was sharp, blooming, like the ball of fire through the smoke when the second plane hit. Which plane was from Boston? Or, which one was for LA, if they were both from Boston. Were they? 
Tom didn’t like the walls white, he kept wanting to paint but they couldn’t decide on a color and she liked the idea of adding color to a room in the furnishings, instead of painting. Sheila was saying there had to be a list somewhere but Pam drifted to the stairs and then back to the roof. Sheila joined her just in time to hear the rumble and watch the first tower go down. And after that they just waited, while the voices of neighbors drifted up to the roof, debating what was next. But they knew, both of them, they had no doubt. They were silent for the twenty minutes or half an hour until the second one fell. Pam’s coffee was cold by then—she hadn’t drunk a drop of it, just kept stirring idly with her finger. 
When the North Tower fell, they heard the cries—from observers?—and saw the smoke billowing through the narrow streets downtown, that chalky white smoke shooting out around the muddy red growing across the sky. The new hole in the skyline registered in Pam as a conclusion. Game, set and match. She was able to go downstairs finally and sit at the kitchen table for a while, still stirring her coffee. She didn’t pick up the phone to call anyone and it didn’t ring. 
Sheila lured her out onto the stoop later by saying she wanted to smoke.
“It’s not a bar,” Pam said absently. “You can smoke inside.”
“I don’t want to stink up the place,” Sheila replied. Pam could see she was watching her, waiting for the powerful emotional reaction that had to inevitably take hold. She was waiting herself. She understood what had happened—somewhere in the back of her mind, she was reciting the details to herself over and over—but nothing seemed to touch her, to come real. Nothing inside was making its way into the world, not yet.
The neighbors were out on their stoops as well—it was impossible to stay inside somehow. Everyone was talking to everyone—New Yorkers traditionally spoke easily to strangers but rarely to neighbors. No longer. Mrs. Colletti next store tried to speak to her, calling from the edge of the stoop where she parked her wheelchair. Pam had nothing against Mrs. Colletti. She was quiet. But she couldn’t find the words to respond now, couldn’t get anything out of her mouth. Sheila went over and had a word with the old woman, who went silent, almost shame-faced. When Sheila returned, Pam asked her to just let people talk from then on. 
It was Tom’s plane. The words kept echoing in her head though they sounded like another language, one she’d studied without mastering. She wondered if it was the plane she saw or the earlier one. She wondered if she wanted to have seen it, if indeed she wanted anything.
She’d run the marathon a few years earlier, before her hamstring started acting up. After that, she’d gone to Fourth Avenue every year to cheer the runners as they went by. The crowd in the street, as the morning drifted into afternoon, made her think of the marathon crowd. They came in a variety of speeds, some briskly passing, still pushing some internal deadline, others trudging doggedly in no hurry, resigned and vacant. A few came with voices raised, finding culprits and enemies; most were as silent and pale as pall bearers. 
As the sky grew darker, she retreated back into the house and found herself climbing the stairs to the roof again. The fire was burning hard across the river—floodlights were already up but they weren’t bright enough to smother that fire. 
A light went on next door—Mrs. Colletti wheeled herself slowly into her bedroom and lifted herself onto the edge of her bed. Five minutes of preparations followed—peeling back the sheets, pushing the wheelchair into a corner and removing the pins from her hair. Pam felt a tear rolling down her cheek, just one, all by itself, rolling down without thought or knowledge, relief or peace accompanying it. When Sheila returned, Pam let her guide her down the stairs and she drank the couple of Scotches Sheila offered, even though Pam never really drank. She would have sworn the booze didn’t do a thing to her but the next thing she was aware of was the light creeping through the curtains in the morning.
When she turned on the television, the news was showing the city of flyers on Broadway, pleading for news of people who’d gone missing, who might have been in the towers or might have been in the subway or might have gone for breakfast somewhere or been running late. There were so many stories like that in the paper—I broke the heel on my shoe so I was ten minutes late and now I’m alive! I wasn’t inside the building! 
She watched a few interviews, waiting all the time to crack, for her veneer to break down. It had to eventually, she knew it. But nothing seemed to do the job. It was all real, she’d seen it happen herself with her own eyes. But Tom wasn’t real. Tom dead wasn’t real. Maybe more to the point, she wondered if Tom alive was real.
You lack feeling, Tom says. It’s there, I just don’t show it. Then it isn’t really there for me, he’d said, on his way out the door. I remember, she thought, hugging herself, her arms tight round, I do remember. I don’t forget things, I just don’t know what to do with them.
Sheila called to say she was running some things over to her mother in Canarsie and would be back in half an hour or four, depending on traffic. No one seemed to know what to do with this day. It wasn’t possible to go to work in Manhattan so everyone was saying stay home. More to the point, nothing you could think of doing felt right, though there were still businesses open in Brooklyn, the local stores if not the big chains. So Sheila had no idea what kind of traffic would be on the streets, if any. She was very apologetic but Pam didn’t mind. She told Sheila she was alright, no rush on her account but this didn’t seem to reassure either of them very much. 
She went down to the street with a bucket of water and a washcloth, to wipe the windowsills and try to clean the flowers, though you couldn’t really get the gunk off them without killing them. The gunk killed them or the cleaning, there’s your choice. While she was there, Danny who owned the diner stopped by on his way to work. It must be earlier than she realized. He obviously had been told about Tom—he was properly mournful and encouraging without mentioning anything specific but she saw that glint in his eyes. He’d be coming round a lot now or trying to. Danny chased anything that moved, right under his wife’s nose. Everybody in the neighborhood had had the moves put on them by Danny. Not me, Pam thought.
She noticed the other man while Danny was still saying his goodbyes, though it was obvious his goodbyes weren’t for long. Tall but not standing tall, stooped a bit, reticent about himself in a way tall men rarely are, watching her from across the street, she was sure of it immediately even though his eyes never focused on her. Maybe because they never did. 
It wasn’t until Danny left and the man began to cross the street toward her, pausing to let a car pass, that she saw the scar on his forehead and the pale dust still in his hair and on his coat and his shoes. Did she know him? There was something familiar about his face but she couldn’t place it. She could see him fighting himself somehow—the way his eyes went back and forth, to her and away, like a priest who can’t bear the sight of the Temple. Like there was something he came to say but doubted his ability to get out. He managed to make the gate in this hesitant way and she didn’t retreat into the house, though it was her first impulse.
And then, without preliminaries, he pulled the wallet from his pocket and held it out to her, as an offering, as though it should mean something to her. “Is…this…?” he stammered. “Am…I…?” And she looked at the wallet again, because he kept looking back and forth at it and, where he was holding it open was Tom’s drivers license, his picture and his signature and his credit cards stacked above and behind it and then the thing was in her hand and inside was a slip of paper with notes about the bulbs he wanted for the kitchen and the apology she’d written for him just before he left and put in his pocket just before he’d put his jacket on and the look on the man’s face was so hopeful and so helpless and suddenly she had her arms around him and was pulling him through the gate hugging him and he was stumbling and stooping lower to allow her to get her arms around his shoulders and the tears wouldn’t stop coming now.
She stayed there for the longest time, just leaning on him crying across the gate. Eventually it dawned on her that he was still stiff—he hadn’t come fully into her embrace. When she straightened up, the look on his face was big enough to swallow up an ocean. Confusion and pain and hope—so much hope! O God—all mingling and flashing across his face. His eyes kept flickering to…to her hand. The wallet was in her hand now. 
“Is…is that me?” he said finally and his voice, too, was packed solid, quaking with desperate feeling. Desperate longing, really. It was a tone of voice she didn’t know, really, that wasn’t part of her life, her ordered life. And, at that moment, she stalled. Her heart stalled. Of course, he wasn’t Tom. Tom was on the plane. She saw the plane…or she saw the other one, whichever. He couldn’t be Tom. He was on the ground and Tom…wasn’t. Couldn’t he see, in her face…that he wasn’t? He couldn’t see something missing on her face? He didn’t seem to. His look remained so hopeful, so…alive. Her heart sank and rose at once, though she told herself that wasn’t possible.
“Look at you!” she stammered, snapping up straight like a sergeant, wiping her eyes dry. “You’re a mess! You need a shower and a change, don’t you?”
He looked down for just a moment at himself as though he hadn’t paid any attention at all and smiled, a tiny sheepish smile. She pulled him inside and up the steps and pushed him into the bathroom. He looked a bit lost. “You remember how to work it?” she said, pointing to the bright metal spike that rose from the bath spigot to a shower head. 
“I…I can do it,” he said and she left and closed the door behind her. She came back a few minutes later. “I’m leaving a change of clothes outside the door,” she announced and then went downstairs to make breakfast.
She made pancakes—everybody likes pancakes, she figured. She had a stack ready when he came down. His shirt sleeves were short and the pants sat low around his waist but not too bad. He rolled up the sleeves—so he had to know they weren’t his. But his face showed no sign—he still had that sheepish, expectant smile. He wanted to remember—to remember anything. He was still shaken, addled. She put the pancakes in front of him and he started wolfing them down, then pulled back a bit, cutting them more politely, aware of her. 
“How do you like your coffee?” she asked.
“I…I don’t know,” he said, after thinking about it a while. Then he said, “I’ll take it like yours,” and smiled a little more broadly. The smile was confused but honest. It wasn’t the leer Danny had given her at the gate. It wasn’t hungry, it held no expectations. He was pleased to be somewhere with someone taking care of him. Someone had to take care of him. She put the coffee on the table and sat down opposite him. “What do you remember?” she asked. 
He slowed eating but not because the question upset him. It was like he was gathering himself to the task of answering. “Walking,” he said simply. “My legs were aching—that’s the first thing I remember. I must have been walking a long time to get them like that but I don’t remember it. I was uptown—Harlem—” 
“With the dust on you—”
He nodded. “Yeah. So I must have walked. Somebody from a bodega gave me a bottle of water but most people kept away from me. I was afraid of everything. It’s terrible…when you don’t remember. Everything is unfamiliar. You see things and know you should be able to…do something with them but you’re uncertain what. It was hours before I could cross a street without being afraid of the lights or a car coming from nowhere, though the cars really weren’t moving. It wasn’t till late that I thought of the wallet—I saw some guy take his out of his jacket pocket so I looked in mine and there it was. I slept in the park. I knew it was dangerous but I couldn’t just sleep on a bench, that seemed worse. And when the sun came up, I came here.” He didn’t say I came home, she noticed. He wasn’t courting her. He wasn’t pretending to know what he didn’t know. But he said my wallet. That wallet is the closest thing to a memory he has. 
She was aware of the time ticking away. Sheila would probably arrive sometime soon. He was staring at her now, blinking and smiling as though both impulses were unfamiliar. “I’m sorry for staring,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m sorry for not remembering. I feel funny about it but…?”
There was no chance he couldn’t have doubts, she told herself. He’d rolled up his sleeves so he had to have noticed they were short. He didn’t say coming home. He was sorry for not remembering, he wasn’t desolate. She told herself to slow down—everything was going to come in fine gradations now.
He was staring at her again—he didn’t seem able to help it. She decided it was an honest stare—he liked the look of her and he needed her. He wasn’t trying hide either side of it. She put her hand out across the table and laid it on his. They weren’t laborers hands, still smooth at his age. The fingers were long like an artists. 
“We’ll just have to start over, I guess,” she said. “Maybe things will come back to you in time.”
“I guess,” he murmured. His hand was warm. Tom’s hands never felt warm. In the middle of summer, he was an oasis of cool. 
“Do you want to take a walk?” she asked. 
 When they came down the steps, , she turned without a thought away from the water and led him uphill into Park Slope. The coop was open—she bought some vegetables. “I’ll make a soup,” she said and he nodded. 
“What kind?” he asked like it was a trick question.
“What sounds good?” she answered. “What do you like?” 
His eyes got big and open, the corneas almost transparent as he considered this. “What kinds are there?”
“Of soup?” She found herself giggling. “You don’t remember soup?” He smiled his shy smile—she was beginning to look for it—and shrugged the tiniest bit, an almost-imperceptible quake of the shoulders. 
“I remember chowder,” he said. “But I know there’s more.”
“Chowder? What kind of chowder?” she demanded.
It only took him a moment. “Fish!” he said triumphantly, the answer on the tip of his tongue.
“That’s it? Of all the soups, that’s the one you remember?” she hectored and then felt ashamed as his face slumped. He’d been so happy to remember a kind, any kind. She dissolved into a kind of nervous titter. “I’m sorry—it’s a funny choice,” she said and he smiled again, without any sign that he found anything funny in it.
I’ve got it wrong, she thought. He doesn’t know he isn’t Tom. He doesn’t know anything for sure. What he’s learning now is what it feels like not to know. Anything that doesn’t make sense—the shirtsleeves, not feeling comfortable with me—he thinks is his fault. He’s exploring new land—Robinson Crusoe on the beach and I’m Friday. Or maybe vice-versa. Or maybe we’re both Robinson Crusoe and Tom is Friday. 
They left the co-op and walked up to Seventh Avenue, each lugging one of the coop cloth shopping bags. Most of the businesses on the street had not opened but the few that had were low-key and quiet, the music quieter than usual and nobody really trying to sell anything. The shopkeepers were out by the doors, talking to passers-by. Everyone seemed to need to talk. Pam kept walking. She paused to consider a dress she’d eyed with Tom the weekend before his flight and stopped at the kid’s bookstore despite having no kids to pamper. She considered the books lined outside the door anyway, in case anything looked familiar or like something she should buy for any future child that might appear. Then her eye roamed to the far corner.
“Ice cream!” she exclaimed. “You must remember ice cream.” 
“I like it,” he said immediately but, clearly, the details eluded him.
“Do you remember what it tastes like?” 
He thought about this for a moment. “I remember how it feels eating it,” he said. He was simple, she told herself, sincere  and thorough—he won’t answer even a silly question without thinking it through. Was he like that before…before this happened? Was Tom? Would I have thought of Tom that way? Would I have thought of him that way when I first met him? They were several different questions, she thought and led him to the counter.
When they came out onto the street, he looked uphill, to where the avenue ended in the watery flickering of Prospect Park. His eyes lit up. “Can we go there?” he asked, like a child who could have only one thought at a time. They walked up the hill and he stared at every detail like it had sprung up brand new right in front of him. Pam watched him taking it all in and when she looked around again, the houses were elephants, stately and lumbering, and the sunlight played peek-a-boo through the leaves of the old trees whose roots pushed up the pavement like a tent every couple of yards.  
In the park, as the bowl of trees encircled them and the city tumult faded away, he seemed to come alive—comfortable and at ease wandering, pointing out boughs arching over the water or birds circling overhead. When she followed his glance upward, all she saw was that red slash across the sky but he followed the birds, stayed with the movement, dancing in place without a word. He seemed far more comfortable anywhere, she thought, where he didn’t have to speak. 
By the time they got home, it was midafternoon. He was flagging the last few blocks, beginning to stumble and wander, babbling to himself, random phrases coming out of him without apparent purpose. She was more preoccupied thinking about Sheila. She was sure Sheila had to have gone already—she couldn’t still be lingering this long—and indeed she wasn’t around. There was a message on Pam’s machine once she got around to checking but she wasn’t in any hurry. She offered him dinner but he climbed the stairs to the bathroom. After twenty minutes, she knocked on the door and heard him wake up on the seat—he nearly fell off from waking. When he came out, he seemed dazed and very aware of himself at once—it was a bad combination. He didn’t seem to know where to go and when she steered him toward the bedroom, he turned stiff, resistant.
“This is an odd situation,” she told him. “I’ll take the guest room. You need the good bed to sleep. You need to sleep.”
“Right now, I could sleep on the floor,” he said and he was snoring to prove it before she could think of a reply. 
Sheila showed up in the morning, as they were sitting down to breakfast. She just walked in the front door the way she was used to. “Where were you yesterday?” she started. “I came by twice, I left messages—” and she stopped all at once, seeing the man at the table. Pam was up quickly and led her back out the door onto the stoop.
“Who is he?”
“He’s got Tom’s wallet,” Pam said, as though it was an explanation.
“What do you mean?”
“He’s got Tom’s wallet. He showed up yesterday. He doesn’t know who he is. He found the wallet and I guess he thinks maybe he’s Tom.”
“You guess?”
“Uh—no. He thinks he’s Tom. He’s not sure of things.”
“Wait—wait a minute—how do you—?” 
“He’s lost,” Pam said, “lost and alone. The only hope he has is that he’s Tom. Otherwise, he’s nobody. No memory, no past. Isn’t that terrible?”
Sheila nodded but her eyes were on Pam, not the man in the kitchen. “How could he have Tom’s wallet?” she asked, finally able to formulate at least one question.
“How do I know? They found one of the hijacker’s wallets, didn’t they? This is real life—weird things happen.” 
A truck drove by on the street out front—after the long hush of the past few days, the sound was jarring. It seemed to shake something loose in Sheila. “Why are you doing this?” she asked, feeling like she’d finally found the words she wanted.
Pam didn’t seem surprised by the question—how could she be, really? But when she answered, her voice was small and searching for itself. “I can do this,” is all she said. She seemed to want more, a more extensive answer but nothing came and she gave up after a minute.
Sheila smiled finally and patted her shoulder. “What do you want me to do?” she asked.
“Just be my friend,” Pam answered. “Just be yourself.” She was about to go inside when Sheila stopped her.
“Do you want me to call him Tom?” she asked and Pam winced just at the sound of it. But she nodded tightly, like a dutiful wife, and they went inside. 
He was reading the paper, poring over the stories, his forehead fretted and his chin set stern. The article was a long one; he kept worrying the top of the page back and forth as he took it in. 
“Do you remember anything?” Sheila asked. Pam shot her a dirty look, which she ignored but he didn’t object. “None of this,” he said wonderingly, as though how could anyone not remember this and Pam thought what a lucky man you are. He turned backward, to the previous page, the article about the sea of candles at Union Square. “I was there,” he said, “I remember that” and Pam thought You can’t; how’d you get uptown to Harlem then? And sleep in the park? The contradiction nagged at her immediately. Was he lying? She stared at him, accusing, for a long minute and he just returned her look, bland and content. Not a liar; not aware of lying, at least. How? She wondered. Maybe his memory came and went. Maybe he had no memory at all; maybe he believed whatever image was in his head at the moment. Maybe, in his condition, there was little difference between imagination and memory—or, if there was a difference, he didn’t know how to parse it yet. 
He pulled the wallet out of his pocket and held it in his hand. He didn’t open it, didn’t seem interested in anything inside it. He just kept hefting it, squeezing the leather, feeling it in his hand. Pam watched and her face grew more alarmed as he continued. 
Sheila grabbed her and dragged her back outside. “You can’t do this,” she told her, so loud that Pam’s major concern immediately became that he would hear—that, in fact, there was no way for him not to hear. “What happens when he remembers?” she demanded. “How’s he going to feel then? How will you feel then?”
“What if he doesn’t?” Pam said. “What if he’s got nobody? What if he never remembers? Isn’t it better for him to have something?”
“Why are you doing this?” Sheila repeated now—the same question as before but with the emphasis in a different place. “What do you get out of it?”
“Don’t ask me things,” Pam pleaded. “Please don’t. I don’t know anything.” She was wringing her hands until the knuckles were white. “It’s—it’s something good.”
“You think you can make something good out of this?” Sheila asked. “Now you’re worrying me.” She clapped her hands to Pam’s temples. “Darling, you’re in hiding.”
“I’m not,” Pam said firmly. “Tom’s dead. I know it. I know it, Sheila,” she said, placing her hands over her friends’. “He isn’t Tom, okay? So what? I have no one; he has no one. He’s not aggressive; he’s grateful. I’m helping him. He’s helping me.”
“He won’t forever,” Sheila said.
“There’s no such thing as forever,” Pam replied.
Sheila didn’t stay long. She found an excuse to leave quickly, less than an hour later, and that was a statement. Under the circumstances, given the opportunity to pity Pam, she would have been expected to linger most of the day. There is such a thing as oppressive friendship, Pam thought and then cursed herself just for the thought, for being clever at Sheila’s expense. Sheila had been there for her in every sense of the phrase; whatever was lacking in the transaction was her fault, not Sheila’s. 
When she came back in, he was sitting at the desk with the computer in front of him. He moved the mouse around on the pad until the screensaver came up and then stared at the images of Ireland that Tom had taken on their last trip together as though they were clues to a riddle—and, in a sense, of course, they were. “Is this me or you?” he asked finally and she answered, “You.” She typed in the password and his desktop came up, with his hundred-and-fifty icons all over the place. Pam’s desktop had three.  “You wholesale hoses,” she said. “You used to have an office but now you do it from home.”
“Hoses?” he asked, smiling as though it was comical and all at once, it was a bit comical to Pam too, the idea of making a living from rubber tubing.
“Car parts,” she explained. “Each car has a different size or length or diameter—or several. You have a bunch of manufacturers off-shore who make them cheaper than the manufacturer—most of them in Asia. You canvas dealer networks and order in bulk ahead of time and get better prices. Most of the time, it’s against their dealer agreements but they make a better dollar this way. Let’s see—your dealer file is here…and your stock order file is…here,” she clicked two icons. “If you compare the two, you’ll get an idea of who usually orders what.” He stared blankly at the screen. “Maybe it’s too early for this now,” she said and he immediately began to shush her. “No, no, it’s okay, just let me look at it for a while,” he said and she backed off. She went into the kitchen and made coffee. When she came out again, he was bent forward in the chair with the two charts lined up next to each other on the screen, looking from one to the other. 
She went upstairs and opened the curtains and the window shades, let the light into her bedroom, cracked the window to let some air in and lay down across the bed. She thought about going back to smoking—she really wanted a cigarette. Was it possible? That he might really make sense of it all? That he could take over the business and run it? It wasn’t complicated, really—she’d surprised herself with what she’d been able to pick out off his desktop. It was more a matter of being dogged and getting commitments—and getting the dealers to actually pay, once things had been ordered. Would he be good at that? How would she know what he was good at? How would he, for that matter?
Somehow, despite everything swirling in her head, she fell asleep. When she woke, the sky was getting dull but the red light in the west was mingling with that muddy slash across the sky, obscuring it a bit. Three days later, it was still there. 
When she came down the stairs, he was leaning forward on the couch, leaning over the coffee table. The television showed the crowds of firefighters and ironworkers testing for places safe to walk, safe to carry, like ants against that humpbacked pile of jagged debris, still searching through the smoke and rubble, past the point that searching entailed any hope. 
He had the wallet out and had taken everything out of it—the credit cards and the gym membership, Patrolmen’s courtesy card and a fortune cookie explaining how to say ‘tea’ in Chinese. And a business card with Pam’s birthday, her Social Security and cell phone number written on the back.  He was fingering them all, the way he’d fingered the wallet earlier, over and over. What was he after? She knew what he was after—trying to make it real, the same as she was.
She sat down on the couch next to him, primly, not offering anything, not withholding either. “Who am I?” he asked, as though he had the question prepared, as though he’d rehearsed it for a long while. And how could that be a surprise, either? Nonetheless, she felt a chill up her back. 
“Who are you?” she mused, sinking back against the cushions. “It’s a big question,” and she laughed a little, lightly, more lightly than she felt. He laughed too but the intensity in his eyes didn’t fade. “You…are quiet, very quiet a lot. You’re very deep or at least I think you are. Whenever I catch you at it, you get goofy, to talk me out of it. But I know it’s there.” She felt her breathing get heavier, thicker, as she drew deeper down. “You’ve always held something away from me, kept something…not secret, not really, I felt I could count on you being who you were but…but there were things you just didn’t talk about, things that were very you that you didn’t want to own to, to have to think about. Does that make any sense?” 
He was quiet, just listening, just taking her in. There was a poise in him now that she found unnerving, that wasn’t there before. He surely hadn’t remembered everything—he couldn’t have, could he?—but he somehow didn’t seem lost anymore. He’d found something, God knows what. 
“You’re really good at bolstering me, and needling me, knowing when I need to feel happy about myself. I’m tough on myself a lot but I didn’t know I was until you told me.” She caught her breath. She was breathing hard, as though too many things were racing through her now, as though the whole thing was trying to fight its way out at once and it was overwhelming her. “You’re not your job. That’s important. And you’ve never been my responsibility…before. I never feel like I have to…like you are…something I have to take care of, or that I know better than you do. I don’t assume you’ll like what I like and I don’t know why but that makes me feel secure somehow, though I guess it shouldn’t, should it?” She was babbling now. The words didn’t even make sense to her. She wasn’t sure if they were really even memories. 
He picked up the drivers license off the table now, held it under the light and studied it for a moment before handing it to her. She hadn’t really looked at it in a long long time but now she did. The face staring back was not much like the one staring at her from the other side of the couch. There was a similarity, of course—hair color and the shape of the face—but the look, the character, was not the same. She looked back and forth a few times and grew redfaced immediately that he was watching her do it but it was only natural, to be expected. 
And he expected it now. He’d reclaimed his own face, his own expression. This expression was not a product of confusion, not a product of anything missing in him, like the expression she’d seen since he’d come to the gate. This expression was his own, because he had somehow found something real, a piece of ground he could stand on by himself, something of himself that he could work from, look out at the world from. 
Staring at the simple dignity of someone who didn’t know anything about himself but knew, somehow, who he was—and, she sensed, who he wasn’t—Pam faded fast, her cheeks going red, her voice stammering, her mind running to any idea that might cushion the blow—for herself if not for him.
“Well, uh…maybe it’s not fair, the way I’m going about this,” she stumbled, “y’know, saying, me telling you who ‘you are.’ That isn’t right, is it? Even if it’s who you were, we all have to move on now. Right?” 
He smiled. It wasn’t Tom’s smile but it wasn’t a bad smile either. “I’ll try my best,” he said. 


~~~~


Author Bio
Ted Krever watched the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, went to Woodstock (the good one), and graduated Sarah Lawrence College with a useless degree in creative writing.
He spent the next few decades in media journalism, at ABC News on the magazine show Day One with Forrest Sawyer and the Barbara Walters Interviews of a Lifetime series, as General Manager of BNNtv, a documentary production company, creating programs for CNN, A&E, Court TV, CBS, MTV News, Discovery People and CBS/48 Hours, and as VP/Production of a short-lived dotcom, followed swiftly by nine months of unemployment.
Ted now writes novels and sells mattresses in Staten Island NY, a job which registers at a loathsome -98 on the Cosmopolitan Eligible Male Job-Status Guide. Ted is happily divorced, purports to be a good kisser and hopes for world peace. 
He was once accused of attempting to blow up Ethel Kennedy with a Super-8 projector.

See my other books at www.tedkrever.com