“What did you say?” I ask.
“Nothing. Instead, I told him to shut up and had him FedEx it to me overnight. I thought it would be best, considering the state he was in, if I was able to keep an eye on it. I had visions of him accidentally drawing the FBI down on his head, so I thought it would be best to end it.” Longdale reaches into his coat pocket, taking out a small plastic case. “So here it is.”
I take the case from him, holding it in my hand. “You didn’t try to open up the file?” I ask.
“I did try, and I couldn’t.” Longdale says.
“That’s weird,” I say, staring at the plastic case. I pop off the lid, dropping the horse-shaped flash drive into my hand. “Even if some manufacturer was making these back in ‘98, why the hell do you think they would have made one that looked like this?”
“Beats me,” Longdale says.
“Do you think he could be right?”
Longdale laughs, then grows quiet. “What, that it’s military?” Longdale leans forward. “Do you still believe that someone intentionally killed Molly?”
Shaking my head, I set the flash drive back in its box and replace the lid. “No, of course not. That was the grief talking.”
I become dimly aware that something must be happening as a man runs past us on the street, a cell phone clutched in one hand.
“You’re right,” Longdale says. “I’m sorry.”
Another siren screams past. Longdale cranes his head around. “Is something going on?”
I lean forward, ignoring the wail of the siren. “In fact, if I told you some of the things I’ve found out, you might be inclined to call it a conspiracy yourself. But I’ve dropped it, anyway. Okay? So could you do me the favor of…”
I trail off as the sound of voices rise around us, joining the noise of the sirens. A woman runs past, pointing at the sky. Nearby, someone else is screaming. “Something’s crashed into the Sears Tower!”
Longdale stands, turning to look out at the street. I follow his gaze. All around us, people are staring up at the sky. Some are standing and pointing. Others are moving forward, arms pointed up toward the sky. I feel a sinking sensation, deep in my gut as I turn to follow their gaze. Above us, the Sears Tower stretches into the sky. Near its apex, a plume of smoke billows out.
Immediately, my heart is beating faster. I feel my hands go clammy, and the noise begins to fade around me. For a moment, I am back on that street in Saudi Arabia, the sound of gunfire still echoing in my ears as a crowd of screaming children run away from the gunshots.
This time, the crowd is running toward the fire.
“What happened?” I ask, my voice weak.
A woman in a suit answers without looking as she jogs by. “They’re saying it was a plane!”
“What, it just crashed into the Sears Tower?” Longdale asks.
“I saw it myself.” This time, it’s a street vendor. Egyptian by the looks of him. “It crashed straight into the building!”
“That doesn’t just happen,” I say to no one in particular.
“Come on!” Longdale says, taking off down the street.
“Where are you going?” But I already know the answer. He’s running toward the building.
The Egyptian man grabs me by the arm. “People are going to need help.”
I snatch up my camera and throw the strap around my neck. We sprint down Michigan Ave. around stopped and slowly driving cars. Some of them with windows open, the drivers leaning practically all the way out for a better view. To our left, the construction underway for the upcoming Millennium Park has stalled completely. Construction workers line the street, hard hats in hand as they all stare up at the skyline just southwest of us. The Sears Tower looms over the other buildings, coming in and out of view, but the column of smoke rising from it is ever present.
We slow at a point where stopped traffic clogs the street.
“This way!” The Egyptian man calls out. We turn down Monroe. The sidewalks are already crowded with people. The traffic here has bottle-necked at Michigan Ave. but it clears enough just east of there that we can easily run around the vehicles. Ahead of me, I see Longdale weaving through the cars as well.
“Longdale!” I shout.
He doesn’t hear me.
We pause at Clark Street as a line of police cars and fire trucks push their way down the street. The air is thicker here. Darker. I cough, noticing the smoke for the first time. I see Longdale again, just a few feet ahead, and rush to catch up with him.
“There you are!” he says between gasps.
There’s a surge of movement around us as everyone seems to stop at the same time. Hands raise up, fingers pointing to the sky.
“Another plane,” someone says incredulously.
We all stand there, watching, feeling the combined sense of helplessness, as this second plane moves across the sky, impossibly slow in its inevitability, until it finally crashes into a lower floor of the Sears Tower.
A sense of despair settles around us. A sense of hopelessness deeper than I thought possible.
They had come after the bombs had gone off. That’s when they had taken me. That’s when…
“It’s collapsing!” Someone shouts.
Hundreds of us look up at the impact site, our eyes moving across the two burning scars on the tower, as the massive structure slowly folds in upon itself.
I remember then the hands grabbing me. The shouts of “American! Reporter!” still ringing in my ears.
And I am back again as smoke rushes toward us down the street, turning the world black.
It looks like it's snowing. Scraps of paper float lazily through the air, littering the ground and filling the gutters and piling on the tops of cars, mailboxes, and food stands. A gray smoke fills the sky. Through the haze, figures appear and disappear, staggering like zombies in some kind of post-apocalyptic nightmare. But this isn’t a nightmare. This is downtown Chicago on a Wednesday morning.
Just hours earlier it had been business as usual. Coffee and college classes and business meetings and breakfast dates. Senioritis and the first-year freshmen jitters. A million mundane things interrupted by one single moment. A bright and sunny fall day that, in an instant, became the end of the world.
I don’t know what to do, so I start taking pictures. I take photos of people as they stop each other in the street, asking for the latest details. Of a small group that has gathered around someone with one of those new electronic PDAs, reading updates over email. Of store fronts that have opened their doors, pushing televisions to face the street and tuning them to the national news stations. Of the crowd of people watching the news, and of the news anchors speaking out of the screens, their stoic faces seemingly unaffected by the tragedy.
Longdale finds me, and we pass out water bottles, sodas, and Gatorade bottles handed to us by a nearby restaurant owner. A man huddled over a television says the words “terrorist attack,” and others around us begin to repeat the words in escalating fearful tones.
“Has it happened anywhere else?” a teenage girl asks.
“A plane hit Langley,” a man responds.
“Another plane was taken down en route to the United Nations building,” another adds.
I try to process the staggering implications of this news, but I can’t.
Longdale walks over, handing me a bottle of water. “You should sit down, drink something.”
“There are others who need it more,” I croak.
“You’re one of them,” Longdale says.
I move to a cafe and sit at one of the outdoor tables. Glancing behind me, I see that it’s a Starbucks. Employees clad in green aprons fill up large cups of water, handing them down a line that leads out the door. A nearby man uses the cup to wash the ashes off his body and clothes.
I catch a reflection of myself in the storefront window. I’m just as dirty, maybe worse. My skin color is almost completely masked by the gray soot. My clothes and hair are roughly the same color as well. Loo
king around, that’s all I see.
Different shades of gray.
I take the bottle, fumbling with the cap. The water is cool in my mouth, and I feel it sliding all the way down my throat and into my chest and stomach and limbs. It’s the best damn water bottle I’ve ever had.
When I open my eyes, Molly is standing at the street corner across from me. She’s wearing jeans, tennis shoes, and a dark jacket. Her curly hair is cut short and pulled back. There is almost no ash on her, and she seems different. Older.
The bottle drops from my hand, spilling onto the street, as I leap to my feet.
“Molly!” I shout.
She turns, moving away from me and is soon obscured by the gray smoke and crowds of people. I fumble with my camera, raising it to my eye, but the lens cap is on. I rip it off, snapping a picture.
“Molly!” My voice sounds strained and hoarse.
I run across the street, shoving someone out of the way. Nobody seems to notice or care about what I’m doing. I’m not the only one who’s done this today, who’s run down the street screaming the name of a loved one. But I might be the only person chasing a woman who’s already been dead for two years.
There’s a break in the crowd of people and I see her again, dark curly hair bobbing in the crowd.
“Molly!” I shout again.
Why doesn’t she hear me? Why doesn’t she turn around?
Molly turns, crossing the street toward a crowd of emergency vehicles. I surge forward, racing across the street. Briefly I get a clear glimpse of her as she moves across the street. She reaches into a jacket pocket, pulls out a pair of sunglasses, slips them on, and disappears behind a fire truck.
“Stop her!” I shout, pointing after Molly. “Stop that woman!”
Police officers and firefighters turn to look at me. I spring forward, but one of the firefighters reaches out and grabs me by the arm. I twist away, but his arm gets caught up in my camera’s strap and he yanks the camera off my neck. There’s an impossible long moment as I watch the camera falling toward the pavement. And then it hits. There’s a crunch as the lens separates from the body, and the back of the camera pops open, exposing the film.
“Oh shit!” I gasp.
I pull off my jacket and throw it over the camera. Bending down, I gather the bundle up into my arms, cradling it like a child.
“Whoa there, pal. What’s wrong?” the firefighter asks.
“That woman,” I say. “You need to stop her.”
“What woman?”
“She just walked by!”
“Why do I need to stop her?”
“She’s—” I stop, realizing how crazy the sentence is that I am about to say. I can’t say that she’s my dead wife… And yet, she is. And she was here. I saw her, and she saw me.
“What was that?” the firefighter asks.
“She’s my wife,” I say.
“Come on then,” he says, waving for me to follow him. We walk around the fire truck. There are far fewer people on this side of the street, and the smoke is thinner, allowing us to see all the way down the block.
“Do you see her?” the firefighter asks.
“No,” I say, and then I bend over clutching my bundled jacket in my arms as a round of coughs wrack through my body.
“Take it easy, pal.”
“Why did you stop me?” I say between coughs.
“This is a disaster zone,” the man says. “We can’t just have people running around yelling ‘stop that woman.’ You want to cause a panic?”
A police officer rounds the fire truck and stops a few feet away from us. “Everything okay here?” he asks.
The coughing subsides. I stand and raise my free hand in a gesture of compliance. “Everything’s fine.”
“He thought he saw his wife,” the firefighter says, and the officer nods, looking at me with a mixture of compassion and weariness. And then it strikes me. How many people are playing out the same drama on these blocks this afternoon? I’d witnessed a few others, just like myself, running through the street and screaming for a loved one. To them, I’m no different. Just another poor soul who’d lost someone in the attack.
The two men walk away, leaving me standing in the middle of the street, staring into an empty cloud of smoke and ashes. Was that really Molly? I’ve been through trauma. I’m dehydrated. My body is vibrating with adrenaline. I haven’t eaten in hours. I have every reason to doubt what I had seen. I look down at the bundle cradled in my arm. If the film survived, then I can know for sure. At this moment, the shattered camera casing may be the most precious thing I’ve ever held.
“Jim, there you are.”
I turn to see Longdale standing in the street. He walks around the fire truck toward me. “What are you doing?” he asks.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“I saw you jump up and run away down the street. You were shouting something.”
“I thought,” I shake my head. “I…”
Longdale waits for me to finish. When I don’t, he steps forward, placing a hand on my shoulder. “We should get out of here. Find some food. We’ll only be useful for so long if we don’t take care of ourselves.”
I stare down the empty street, not wanting to take my eyes off it.
“You okay?” Longdale asks.
I nod. “You’re right, we need to get some food and some rest. We can…” I take a step forward. “We can always come out here again, later.”
Was that really Molly? Was she really here, watching me? But why would she do that? And, more importantly, why would she run?
I turn back to Longdale. “My apartment’s this way,” I say. “We can walk there. It’ll only take a few minutes.”
“Have you talked to Samantha yet?” Longdale asks. “She’ll want to know if you’re okay.”
Shit.
“I don’t have a cell phone,” I say. “I’ll call her from my apartment.”
Longdale nods and we begin to walk, making our way slowly up the street. The nearly endless sound of sirens fade away, creating a momentary silence. There’s only the sound of our walking, our ragged gasps. The fallen paper crunches under our feet. The ash in the air whispers past us. The smoke is thinner here, but the sky is still dark. It looks to be late evening, but it can’t even be noon yet.
“This way,” I say, as we reach an intersection.
“It’s a helluva thing,” Longdale says, his voice quiet.
“A helluva thing,” I repeat
April 8, 2002
“As the ashes fell, we pulled together. Dragging one survivor after another from the rubble. Handing out bottles of water, providing care. As the ashes fell, not one of us was the hero. Certainly not me. And certainly no one else there would claim that title as well. Even the brave Chicago police officers and firefighters who ran into a crumbling building have asked not to be called heroes. Not a single one of us alone were heroes. But together, we accomplished something heroic. As the ashes fell, we saved a city.” Scott Weintraub stops reading. He sets the manuscript down next to his wine glass before looking up at me. “It’s great writing.”
“Great writing,” Eli Glick repeats, nodding in agreement. “And the photographs are an amazing touch.”
“Lucky you had your camera that day,” Weintraub adds. “And the fact that you nearly lost the photos?” He taps the top photograph on the stack, next to the manuscript. It’s of the Sears Tower, only minutes after the second plane hit. A ray of light like a lightning bolt cuts diagonally across the photo, the distortion caused when the casing had broken open.
“Sure,” I answer. “I guess it was lucky.” I glance around the restaurant, feeling claustrophobic. My back is facing the entrance. I hate it when my back is facing the entrance. Will the waitress be coming back soon? I fight the urge to jump up and run away. Instead, I grab my wine glass and take a long drink.
Weintraub leans forward. “We’re going to go straight to the point. We want to buy it and we think we can roll it out by 10
/18.”
I set my glass down. “Just in time for the anniversary. But, six months. Isn’t that a little rushed?”
“We can move it to the top of the queue,” Glick says with a dismissive wave of his hands.
“The top of the queue?” I repeat, feeling numb. “Hold on guys. This is not how these meetings are supposed to go. False assurances, ecstatic praise, sure… But solid timelines? Moving me to the top of the queue? What the hell is happening here?”
Glick smiles. “This is rarified air. Feeling dizzy yet?”
I nod. “A little. Yes.”
“There’s only one thing,” Weintraub says before taking a sip of his wine.
I blink, feeling myself floating back down to solid ground. “What’s the one thing?”
Scott Weintraub leans forward. “Why no mention of your wife?”
“I’m not married,” I say.
“Your former wife,” Glick says.
I feel my chest tightening. “My wife died a full two years before 10/18.”
Glick leans forward. “She’s part of your story as well.”
“But that’s not the book I’m writing.”
Weintraub holds up his hands. “We think it’s important. Thematically, it sets the whole thing up. You’re torn apart with grief, wondering if you could have saved her, and then you get this chance to help hundreds of other people.”
Glick nods in agreement. “And you also need something about your imprisonment. Everyone’s been expecting you to write a book on that.”
“Those are two entirely separate books,” I say.
Weintraub and Glick look at each other as if the thought had never occurred to them.
“Three by my count,” Weintraub says.
“Hey,” Glick responds. “Why not? I think a three-book deal could be arranged.”
“Three?” I ask, feeling stunned.
Weintraub nods. “The 10/18 book, the wife book, and the imprisonment book.”
“I don’t know guys,” I say. “I wrote this in a two-month writing binge just after the attack. It was like therapy. Honestly, I’m not sure if I have any others in me.”
Incursion: Book Three of The Recursion Event Saga Page 9
