Another slut, the middle-aged waitress, wrinkled and thickened—a pot of curdled lewdness, of soured American opportunities—was waving a slip of paper at him. “Going off-duty… finish up my tables… forty-eight dollars.” Her twanging “cracker” accent was difficult to penetrate, and from her agitation he gathered that this was not the first time this evening that he had offended her.
He did not see why he should hurry to pay. Zaeed was still in the bathroom, and the sandwiches they had ordered were still on the table, uneaten. That was it: she had offered some time ago—an hour? ten minutes?—to clear the table and he told her he was not done, though in truth the food disgusted him. It was, like everything in this devilish country, excessive and wasteful—an open hot roast-beef sandwich, not rare but gray, now cold and limp on its bread, dead meat scattered beneath his hands, as far beneath them as if under the wings of an airplane. The disgusting sandwich had been served with French fries and coleslaw, garbage not fit for a street dog. Yet he kept thinking he would turn to it, to muffle the burning of the whiskey while he spoke to Zaeed, hardening the younger man’s shell for the great deed that had been laid out like a precision drawing in a German engineering class. Mohamed had studied engineering among the unbelievers, absorbing the mathematics they had stolen centuries ago from the Arabs.
He must eat. The day, the fateful morning, of culmination was approaching, and he must be strong, his hands and nerves steady, his will relentless, his body vital and pure, shaven of its hair. The greatness of the deed that was held within him pressed upward like a species of nausea, straining his throat with a desire to cry out—to proclaim, as had done his prophetic namesake the Messenger, the magnificence, beyond all virtues and qualities imaginable on earth, of God and His fiery justice. For the unbelievers We have prepared fetters and chains, and a blazing Fire. Flames of fire shall be lashed at you, and melted brass.
The blonde whore flicked away the sparkling thong and with spread legs waddled about the pole showing her shaved slit, an awkward, ugly maneuver that won scattered cheers from the jaded tables in the darkness. Zaeed returned, looking paler. He had been sick, he confessed. Mohamed abruptly felt a great love for his brother in conspiracy, the younger brother he had never had. Mohamed had been raised in a flowery Cairo suburb with a pair of sisters; it was to keep them from ending as sluts that he had dedicated himself to the holy jihad. They were too light-headed to know that the temptations twittering at them from television and radio were from Satan, designed to lure them into eternal flame. Their parents, in their European clothes, their third-rate prosperity measured out in imitation-Western goods, were blind to the evil they wrought upon their children. Hoarding their comforts in their heavily curtained, servant-run house in Giza, they were like eyeless cave creatures, blind to the grandeur of the One Who will wrathfully reduce this flimsy world and its distractions to a desert. Mohamed carried that sublime desert, its night sky clamorous with stars, within him. When the sky is rent asunder; when the stars are scattered and the oceans roll together; when the graves tumble in ruin; each soul shall know what it has done and what it has failed to do.
The waitress had returned accompanied by a man, a hireling, the bald bartender in a yellow T-shirt advertising something in three-dimensional speeding letters, a beer or perhaps a sports team, Mohamed could not quite bring it into focus. Zaeed looked worried; he exuded the sickly sweat of fear, and his movements betrayed a desire to leave this unholy place. Mohamed quenched the boy’s alarm with a touch on his forearm and stood to confront the hireling in the speeding T-shirt. Standing so quickly dizzied him but did not weaken his wits or dull his awareness of the movements around him. A fresh female on the stage, the abdah with bare feet again, dressed in filmy scarves that would soon come off, altered the light of the place, diluting its darkness as the spotlight played upon her. Pale faces, natives of this forsaken coast, turned to witness Mohamed’s quarrel with the hirelings. Within him his great secret felt an eggshell’s thickness from bursting forth. More than once, small mishaps and moments of friction—a traffic ticket, an INS summons, a hasty slip of the tongue with an inquisitive neighbor seeking, in that doglike American way, to be friendly—had threatened to expose the whole elaborate, thoroughly meditated structure; but the All-Merciful had extended His protecting hand. The Great Satan had been rendered stupid and sluggish; its sugary diet of freedom had softened its mechanically straightened teeth.
Mohamed felt himself mighty in his power to restrain his tongue, that muscle which summons armies and moves mountains. He produced his wallet and opened it to display the thickness of twenties and fifties and even hundreds, depicting in dry green engraving the dead heroes of this Jew-dominated government. “Plenty to pay your fucking bill,” he told the threatening man in the yellow T-shirt. “And look, my good man, look here—” Not content with the cash as a demonstration of his potency, Mohamed showed, too swiftly for a close examination, the card registering him in flying school and another, forged in Germany, stating him to be a licensed pilot. “I am a pilot.”
Impressed and mollified, his antagonist asked, in the languid accents of a tongue long steeped in drugs, “Hey, cool. What airline?”
Mohamed said, “American.” It was an inspired utterance that, in the utterance, became blazingly true, as the suras of his namesake, the Prophet, became true when they blazed from the Messenger’s mouth, promising salvation for believers and for the others the luminous boiling Fire. He had been not some ridiculous crucified God but the perfect person, insan-i-kamil. Mohamed’s assertion sounded so just, so prophetic, he repeated it, challenging his bald, drugged enemy to contradict him: “American Airlines.”
From where Jim Finch sat in his cubicle, about a third of the way into the vast floor—a full acre—populated by bond traders and their computer monitors, the building’s windows held a view of mostly sky, cloudless today. If he stood up, he could see New Jersey’s low shore beyond the Statue of Liberty. From this height, even the Statue, which was facing the other way, looked small, like the souvenir statuettes for sale in every Wall Street tourist trap. Jim lived in Jersey—three children and four bedrooms on an eighth of an acre in Irvington—and from where he lived he could see, picking his spots between the asphalt rooftops and leafy trees, where he worked. To impress the kids he tried to locate his exact floor, counting down from the top, though in truth it was hard from that distance to be certain; the skyscraper was built of vertical ribs that ran individual floors and windows together. Steel tubes, like a row of drinking straws, held it up, and that made the windows narrower than you felt they should be, so the view from his cubicle was more up and down than sideways. Today the windows were a row of smooth blue panels, except that curling gusts of smoke and flickering pieces of paper strangely invaded the blue from below. Some minutes ago, deep underneath him, while he had been talking to a client on the phone, there had been a thump, distant like a truck hatch being slammed down on West Street, and yet communicating a shudder to his desk.
His cell phone rang. Jim’s motion of snatching it off his belt was habitual and instant, like a snake’s strike. But instead of business it was Marcy, back in New Jersey. “Jim, honey,” she said, “don’t hate me, I forgot to say, you went out the door so fast, when you pick up the cleaning on the way home could you swing by the Pathmark and pick up a half-gallon of whole milk and maybe check out their cantaloupes.”
“O.K., sure.”
“The ones last week went straight from green to punky, but they said there’d be better ones in on Monday. There should be a little give to the skins but your thumb shouldn’t leave a dent.” He watched a piece of charred insulation foam rise into view and then float away. “For the milk there’s plenty of skimmed for ourselves but Frankie and Kristen, the way they’re growing, they just wolf the whole kind down; she’s as bad as he is. Honest, I meant to pick some up but the cart was already so full. Sorry, hon.”
“Hey, Marcy—”
“Any dessert you’d like for y
ourself, buy it. And maybe—be sure to check the sell-by date—a half-dozen eggs, the large size, not the extra-large. But don’t forget Annie has that event at the church hall tonight, six-thirty, the beginning of indoor soccer, she’s very nervous and wants us both there.”
“Honey—”
“The new young assistant minister scares her. She says he’s uptight—he wants too much to win.”
“Hey, Marcy, could you please for Chrissake shut up?”
There was a hurt silence, then her voice tiptoed back. “What is it, Jim? You sound strange.”
“Something strange happened a couple minutes ago, I don’t know what. There was this thump underneath us; I thought it was on the street. But everything shook, and now there’s smoke you can see out the windows. Hold on.” Cy Walsh, the man in the cubicle across from his, was signalling for his attention, and tersely told him some things that Jim relayed to Marcy. “The interior phone lines seem to be all out. People have come back saying the elevators aren’t working and the stairs are full of smoke.”
“Oh my God, Jim.”
“Nobody’s panicking, I mean almost nobody. I’m sure it’ll work out. I mean, how bad can it be?”
“Oh my God.”
“Honey, stop saying that. It doesn’t help. They’ll figure it out. I can’t keep talking, they got to start moving us somewhere. Hey. Marcy. You won’t believe this, but the floor’s warm. Actually fucking warm.”
“Oh, Jimmy, do something! Hang up whenever you have to. I’ve always hated those flimsy-looking buildings, and you being up so high.”
“Listen, Marcy. What phone are you on? The upstairs portable?”
“Yes.” Her voice trembled, putting extra syllables into the word, ye-ess, like a child scared she has done wrong and will be punished. Across the miles between them they shared the sensation of being scolded children—a rubbed, watery feeling in their abdomens.
He asked her, “Go into Annie’s room and look out the window. Tell me what you see.”
While he waited, there was human movement among the desks, herd movement with bumps and shouts, but he didn’t feel it had a direction he should join. A rising smell, a tarry industrial smell, oily and sickening-sweet, reminded him of airport runways and the vibrations you see around the engines while waiting to take off.
“Jim?”
“Still here. What can you see from Annie’s window?”
“Oh God, I can see smoke! From sort of near the top; it’s the tower on the left, the one you work in. Jim, I’m scared. There’s a kind of black ink running down between the grooves. What can it be? Remember that missile that maybe brought down that plane off Long Island?”
“Honey, don’t be dumb. Some kind of malfunction, it must be, within the building. There’s enough wiring in the walls to fry China if there’s a short. Don’t worry, they’ll figure it out. They have guys paid a fortune to sit around and plan how to handle contingencies. Still, I must say—”
“What, Jimmy? What must you say?”
“I was starting to say it’s getting hard to breathe in here. Somebody just smashed a window. Jesus. They’re chucking chairs right through the windows. Hey, Marcy?”
“Yes? Yes?”
“I don’t know, but maybe this isn’t so good.”
“The smoke is coming from a floor somewhere under yours,” she offered hopefully, shakily. “I can’t count how many.”
“Don’t try.” Her voice was a connection to the world but it was entangling him, holding him back. “Listen. In case I don’t make it. I love you.”
“Oh my God! Don’t say it! Just be normal!”
“I can’t be normal. This isn’t normal.”
“Can’t you get up to a higher floor and wait on the roof?”
“I think people are trying it. Can you tell the kids how much I love them?”
“Ye-ess.” Breathlessly. She wasn’t arguing, it wasn’t like her; her giving up like this frightened him. It made him realize how serious this was, how unthinkably serious.
He tried to think practically. “All the stuff you need should be in the filing cabinet beside my desk, the middle drawer. Lenny Palotta can help you, he has the mutual-fund data, and the insurance policies.”
“God, don’t, darling. Don’t think that way. Just get out, can’t you?”
“Sure, probably.” People were moving toward the windows, it was the coolest place, the place to breathe, at the height of an airplane tucking its wheels back with that little concussion and snap that worries inexperienced passengers. “But, just in case, you do whatever you want.”
“What do you mean, Jim, do whatever I want? You’re not making sense.”
“Shit, Marcy. I mean, you know, live your life. Do what looks best for yourself and the kids. Don’t let anything cramp your style. Tell Annie in case I miss it that I wanted to be there tonight.” Of all things, this made him want to cry, the image of his plump little solemn daughter in soccer shorts, scared and pink in the face. The smoke was blinding him, assaulting his eyes.
“Cramp my style?”
“My blessing, for Chrissake, Marcy. I’m giving a blessing on anything you decide to do. It’s all right. Feel free.”
“Oh, Jim, no. No. How can this be happening?”
He couldn’t talk more; the smoke, the heat, the jet-fuel stink were chasing him to the windows, where silhouettes were climbing up into the blue panels, to get some air. Cy Walsh was already there, in the crowd. Jim Finch replaced the phone on his belt deftly; he instinctively grabbed his suit coat and sprinted, crouching, across the hot floor to his co-workers clustered at the windows. They were family, they had been his nine-to-five family for years. They were problem-solvers and would show him what to do. Like an airplane seizing altitude in its wings, he left gravity behind. Connections were breaking, obligations falling away. He felt for these seconds as light as a newborn.
The nice young man beside her told her he was in sales management, on his way to a telecom convention in San Francisco, but he played rugby on weekends in Van Cortlandt Park, in the Bronx. It surprised Carolyn that there were any rugby games in the United States. Ages ago in her long life, after the war, she had spent a year in England and been taken to a rugby game, in Cambridge, and remembered heavy-thighed men in shorts and striped shirts struggling in the mud, under the low, damp, chilly clouds, pushing at each other—there was a word they had used she couldn’t remember—and for spurts carrying the slippery oval ball in a two-handed, sashaying way that looked comically girlish to a woman accustomed to the military precision and frontal collisions of American football. To those same eyes it seemed curious that they played nearly naked, in short shorts, and yet no one, at least that day, got hurt.
The introductory courtesies came early in the flight, out of Newark. The plane had sat stalled on the runway for half an hour but then had pushed into the air and climbed and banked so that the huge wing with its skinny little aerial on the tip threatened, it seemed to her elderly sense of balance, to spill them back onto the sun-streaked flat Earth of streets and housetops and highways below. It was a remarkably clear day. Carolyn had flown a great deal in her life, more than she had ever expected to as a child, when flying was something heroes did, test pilots and Lindbergh, and the whole family would rush out into the yard to see a blimp float overhead. Her first flights had been to college, in Ohio, into the old Cleveland-Hopkins Airport, in bumpy two-engine prop planes, early Douglas all-metals. Daddy, a great man for progress, flew the family for a week’s spring vacation to Bermuda from New York on a British Air four-engine flying boat, and then put her on a Pan Am Boeing Clipper to London for her post-graduate year abroad: there had been a fuelling stop in Greenland, and actual beds where you could stretch out, and meals, with real silver, that people were too nauseated and anxious to eat. After marriage to Robert, she flew to the Caribbean and Arizona and Paris on vacations, and on some of his lecture trips as he became distinguished, and on three-day visits to her children when they married an
d scattered to places like Minneapolis and Dallas, and on matriarchal viewings of new grandchildren—to all the ceremonies that her descendants generated as they grew and aged. After Robert died, she had given herself an around-the-world tour, a widow’s self-indulgence in her grief that no one could begrudge her, though her children, with their inheritance in mind, did raise their eyebrows. They couldn’t understand the need, after sharing a life with a person for all these years, to get away from everything familiar.
All in all she couldn’t begin to count how many hundreds of thousands of miles she had flown, but she had never really liked it—the plane’s panicky run into lift-off, like some cartoon animal churning its legs and gritting its teeth, and the abrupt sudden banking, tilting and leaning on invisible air, and the changes in the sound of the engines nobody in the cockpit explained, and the sudden mysterious sharp jiggling over the ocean, your coffee swinging wildly in your cup, your heart in your throat. The planes had gotten bigger and smoother, to be sure. Some of those early flights, looking back, were little better than the rides in amusement parks designed to be terrifying—those little silver turboprops that bounced over the Appalachians with the tiny rivers below catching the sun, the stubby island-hoppers out of San Juan where you walked up the steep aisle and the lovely black stewardesses gave you candy to suck for pressure in your ears. People used to dress up as if for a formal tea, even—could it be?—with hats and white gloves. Now these big broad jets were like buses, people wore any old disgusting thing and never looked up from their laptops and acted personally injured if they didn’t land on time to the minute, as if they were riding solid iron railroad tracks in the sky.
The nice young man, once the pilot’s drawl had given permission to move about and use electrical devices, had asked her if she would mind, since there were so many empty seats, if he moved to another and gave them both more room. She thought his asking was dear, it showed a good old-fashioned upbringing. She watched him set up a little office for himself in two seats across the aisle, and then she studied the terrain five miles below, familiar to her from those first nervous, bouncy flights of hers, to Ohio so many years and miles ago. She recognized the Delaware, and then the Susquehanna, and while waiting for the stewardess with her rattling breakfast cart to reach the mid-section of the plane Carolyn must have dozed, because she awoke as if rudely shaken; the airplane was jiggling and bucking. She looked at her watch: 9:28. Hours to go.