Forever

by Pete Hamill

  “Take the sword with you,” Warren says. “I don’t want it around here.”

  “I never thought about leaving it,” Cormac says. “My father made it in his forge.”

  120.

  He comes out on Fifth Avenue and feels that he is rising into the air. The bag is slung on his back. His feet are moving on the sidewalk. Taxis move south, their wheels making a tearing sound on the wet pavement. But he feels lifted, weightless, floating. He has failed to keep his vow but now feels released from its long burden. There is no blood on the sword. There is no corpse on a living room floor. On this rainy Monday night, there is no need for flight.

  And now he hears drums. He looks for Kongo but does not see him, and yet the drums pull him north. He crosses to the park side, under the dripping black trees. Ahead are the bright lights of the Metropolitan Museum. He hears the bata. He hears the toques. Somewhere, a dog is barking.

  Then he sees them high on the steps: three musicians. Two on drums, one playing flute. They are together out of the rain, playing for the empty world. He floats up the stairs. The musicians are young but seem older than the city. The bata player has bandages on three of his fingers, the sleeves of his jacket rolled up, his black forearms laced with muscle. The man supplying the toques is short and squat, like a fire hydrant. The flute player is tall, lean, with a hawk nose and jet-black beard. His gleaming skin is the color of coffee. The drummers are singing in Yoruba, slyly invoking Chango. Asking for his intercession. Smiling. Celebrating. Asking Chango to bless them with women, to bless this great city, to bless this cold world.

  The drummers play without pause. The flutist rises high above the drums, telling five thousand stories at once, filling the night with lost women, with laughing children, with the sigh of tropical winds.

  Cormac puts down the backpack with its hidden sword. He steps forward, feeling the rain on his face, letting the drums enter his body, his arms and legs and belly and balls, and a drummer shouts, “Vaya!” and Cormac Samuel O’Connor begins to dance.

  121.

  In the morning, Duane Street glows with the rising sun. At ten after eight, Cormac goes out for the tabloids, passing volunteers on Broadway handing out leaflets for the primary election. He has never voted in an election because that would have left a trail, an identity, proof of his presence in the world, but he loves the intense faces of the few people heading for the polls. They care about this process, which took so long to turn from promise into fact. He remembers the ward heelers reporting to Bill Tweed’s office, and the way Hugh Mulligan’s shoulder hitters roamed the streets near here, bumping people away from the polls or delivering others to vote for the third time in an hour. If he had registered under some name, any name, and used his address on Duane Street, voting year after year, decade after decade, Willie Warren’s private detective would have found him on some computer weeks ago, and warned off Warren, who would have closed the door against him (too mysterious, too uncertain), and he would never have faced that baffled man with a sword in his hand.

  He wonders now what happened after he left Warren the night before. Did he open another bottle? Did he consult some family history where the earl still lived in a line engraving? He probably did call Elizabeth. He probably did tell her that he loved her. Cormac feels that none of the aftermath matters. He only needs this day, this evening, this night.

  There’s a long line at the Korean deli for bagels and coffee, as courthouse guards and a few stray policemen carry away their breakfasts. The tabloids are full of politics. Cormac glances without interest at the headlines and walks back home under a sky scrubbed blue by the night’s rain. On the corner of Worth Street, parents and kids wait for a school bus. He wonders if Delfina will wait some morning on this corner too, gripping a boy’s hand. He calls her with the cell phone, but there is no answer at home, and her own cell phone is shut down. He leaves a message on her voice mail at Reynoso & Ryan. He’s certain that she’s in the subway, heading for work.

  At home, he sips coffee, chews the bagel, and scans the newspapers. His mind shifts from release to weariness. He glances at the sword and then whispers a few words asking his father to forgive him. He was to pursue the Warrens to the end of the line, and instead had chosen mercy over vengeance. Please, he says to his unseen father, understand that I am sick of killing. I’m sick of revenge. If that should bar me from the Otherworld, so be it. I can’t kill again. I can’t kill a man I actually like. Forgive me, he says, I hope I will see you very soon.

  Tonight I’ll meet Delfina and travel north, driven by another script from the eighteenth century. I have failed to keep one eighteenth-century vow, but perhaps it will not matter. Perhaps pity and mercy will count in any verdict about entrance to the Otherworld. With any luck, tonight I might be released.

  He glances through the skylight and decides to finish his coffee under the cobalt sky. The day is glittering and lovely. With any luck, he can inhale the sky itself. He climbs the stairs and opens the door that leads to the roof.

  He stands there for a long time, breathing the clean morning air. The fresh sparkling air of the world. The wind that is blowing from the north and making dazzling horizontals of the flags. The air of a city built on rivers and the sea.

  Then he hears the sound of an engine. He turns right, smothering a yawn, and sees a jetliner moving south above the river. Coming very fast toward the North Tower. An airplane that looks black against the brightness of morning. Moving on Delfina. And their unborn son. Roaring straight at the tower. Small and black and flying with purpose.

  “You fucking idiot!” Cormac shouts into the wind. “Turn! Turn!”

  As it smashes brutally into the north face of the tower.

  He runs down Church Street, punching buttons on the cell phone, shouting into its deadness, gazing up at the streaming black smoke. The smoke is billowing violently now, trailing south in the hard wind, a long dark diagonal that throws immense black faces against the sky, and gigantic black horses. At Park Place, he can see orange flames erupting from a high floor. What floor? The eighty-fourth floor? He can’t tell, can’t pause to count. If the tower is one hundred and ten stories, it would be easier to count from the top down. How many stories? Can’t tell. Some kind of facade is in the way. A steel grille he’s never noticed. And what if the plane crashed below the eighty-fourth floor? Could she get down? Can she reach the roof? Can helicopters lift people to safety?

  The television antenna on the roof now looks like a standard without a flag. The stream of smoke is moving to the Narrows, over the Verrazano, moving remorselessly south. Sirens split the air. The sounds of Mayday. The soundtrack of emergency. Police cruisers, fire engines, ambulances. Hundreds of coatless people are running north, waved on by policemen, their faces stunned and blank, while others run east and south. High above the street, sheets of paper move gently in the blackening air, like snowflakes. Again, Cormac dials Delfina’s cell phone. Gets a whining sound. Dials again. Gets nothing. Dials his own number on Duane Street. Nothing.

  At the corner of Vesey Street the giant wheel of an airliner lies on its side, four feet high, its housing ripped and torn and scorched. Beside it is the body of a heavy black woman, blood flowing from a hole in her head, and an ambulance crew works frantically to save her. Newspaper photographers are leaping from cars, green press cards flapping from chains, looking down at the black woman, up at the burning North Tower, shooting and shooting and shooting. The smoke is streaming, while atomized glass rains down from the smoke. Cops bark orders. Dozens of firemen trudge into the lobby of the North Tower. A cop shoves Cormac back, shouting: “Get the fuck out of here. Now!”

  And then he hears the sound of another airliner, roaring from the south, unseen behind the North Tower. Everyone around him looks up too: cops, firemen, ambulance drivers, newspaper photographers, civilians rushing out of the North Tower. Sirens screaming. They sense that the second airliner is following the streaming smoke as if it were a beacon. Then, for a fraction of a second
, they glimpse it: small, black, looking puny as a wasp as it aims itself at the South Tower.

  Lower than the first. A woman screams. Then another. Then a black man beside Cormac says, “Oh, shit, man.”

  The world freezes.

  Cormac feels all of time leave him.

  And then the second airliner smashes into the South Tower with a ferocious orange explosion. Cormac can’t move. Burning fuel erupts from three sides of the tower, a third of the way down from the roof. In a kind of erupting orange counterpoint to the streaming black smoke of the North Tower. As if this pilot were trumping the first. And Cormac knows, along with everyone else, that this is no accident. Knows it’s not some spectacular replay of the plane that crashed through fog into the Empire State Building in 1945. Knows that both planes have been aimed at the towers like missiles. Knows that the madmen are here. Knows without thinking that they’ve come from across the planet, from blasted deserts, from the ruins of Acre, from the road to Medina, from Saladin. He can hear the death calls. Death to crusaders. Death to infidels. He can hear the orgasmic scream of Allah Akhbar!

  There’s a moment of absolute silence, and then the street is loud with screaming shouting running. Cormac rushes toward the lobby of the North Tower, but the same cop grabs his arm and turns him. “How many fuckin’ times I gotta tell you, pal? Get the fuck out of here. This ain’t over!” He heaves Cormac toward the giant wheel, he bounces off its hard rubber, and another cop hurls him into Vesey Street. To face the burning towers. On Cormac’s left is St. Paul’s Chapel, with its ancient graveyard, its tombstones smoothed blank by weather and years. The place where Washington prayed after his inauguration, and Cormac stood on Broadway, watching him leave. Behind him, next to a coffee shop masked by the rigging of rehabbers, is 20 Vesey Street, where he worked for nine years as a reporter for the Evening Post. On what he then thought was a high floor. The fifth.

  Now he gazes at the coal-colored plumes of smoke rising into the wind from the North Tower, and he tries again to count floors. Delfina, please come down from there, go down the stairwells, follow the firemen out. One ten, one nine, one eight… Then, above the orange flames, he sees people. Moving dots behind the steel grille. Above the orange flames. Waving shirts and hands as signs of life. Surely gasping for air. Surely feeling as if condemned to ovens. Not the ovens of the twentieth century. Not Auschwitz. No barked commands of Arbeit macht frei. New ovens, created without blueprints. Here in New York. Where fire attacks steel and oxygen at a few thousand degrees above zero. And he sees that the people are being pushed by the heat of the ovens to the edge of that high floor. Is it eighty-four? Above eighty-four? Below? One hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight… There they are: tiny figures: men indistinguishable from women: voiceless at this distance: beyond help: beyond helicopters: without parachutes: beyond salvation.

  He tries the cell phone again.

  “Forget it, buddy,” a uniformed cop says. “They’re all out of order.”

  Cormac knows he’s right. He lights a cigarette with a trembling hand.

  And then sees the first man jump. From a floor above the flames of the North Tower. Shirtless. Faceless at that height. White skin. Tumbling and tumbling and tumbling through the indifferent air. Then vanishing behind the building where Cormac used to buy books at Borders. Gone. Like that.

  And here comes another. And another. And then a couple. A man and a woman. Holding hands. Her skirt billowing above her pale thighs.

  Then gone.

  “I make that fourteen,” the cop says.

  More cops arrive, walking backward, all of them young, gazing wide-eyed at the burning towers. “They just hit the fucking Pentagon,” one of them says. “I swear. The Pentagon!” They look at Cormac, who has been joined by an older reporter, a Japanese woman, a young photographer, and they gesture to them to move back. Are you people outta your minds? They spread yellow crime scene tape across the aluminum poles of the rigging. Get back! Get the fuck back! Under the rigging, a coffee shop. Two Mexicans inside, stoic, unmoving. In the gutter, Cormac sees a puddle of coagulating blood, thickening with purple ridges. Along with an unopened bottle of V-8 Splash and a cheese Danish still wrapped in cellophane, and a single high-heeled woman’s shoe. Come down, Delfina. Go to the street. Run. And there, in the middle of Vesey Street: a smaller wheel from the first airplane. The wheel that must have hit the woman whose shoe lay next to the blood. She must have died before breakfast. Come down.

  And then his eyes catch movement at the top of the South Tower, above the glossy orange flames. It’s pitching forward. A cracking sound. Oh. It’s tipping at an angle, aimed for Church Street, for Century 21, for Brooks Brothers. Oh oh oh. He hears a scream, another, a chorus of screams, and then the tower begins to come down.

  But it does not topple. The high floors, above the crack, above the flames, right themselves, and then they all come down in a straight line. Floor hitting floor hitting floor, like pancakes from a machine. There’s a sound of an avalanche. A glass and steel avalanche. With some high-pitched sound that must be the meshed screams of a thousand human beings. The sound of impact is so loud it shuts down Cormac’s hearing. And in that sudden silence he sees the Cloud begin to rise from the empty space.

  He knows that the Cloud is made of pulverized carpet, desks, computers, artwork, paper, flowers, breakfasts, shoes, umbrellas, briefcases, mirrors, doors, counters, toilets, tons and tons and tons of concrete, and thousands of human beings. He knows this: The nouns skitter through his mind; but he can’t absorb it. He glances at the North Tower, still burning, still sending smoke into the sky, while a helicopter lurches through the sky behind it. Delfina. Oh, baby.

  The Cloud is now rising like some angry genie. So opaque it looks like a solid. Like some new creature. Some devouring god released from the ruptured earth. Animated by those who have just died. By those who flew that airplane. And by those who lived here when Cormac was young. Up out of Cortlandt Street, up out of the rotting timbers of the house where he once lived. Writhing with power and dirtiness. Coming at them. Coming to take them too.

  Cops ram into them, into Cormac and the others, cops running from the Cloud, cops looking for foxholes. One grabs the Japanese woman and hurls her toward Broadway. “Run,” he shouts, “run run run run.” Others push into the lobby of 20 Vesey Street. Cormac starts to run toward Broadway too, trips over something in the street, falls. And like a whirlwind the Cloud comes down upon him.

  The world vanishes. There’s no horizon. No floor. No sky. No limits. No exit. He hears voices within the Cloud. Men screaming. Noooooooooooooo. Women screaming. Noooooooooo. Names called. Nancy. Mary. Freddie. Harold. Enrique. And then a mixture, male and female: Noooooooooooooooooo. A high-pitched chorus of the dead. Calling to husbands and wives and lovers. Shouting farewells to children. Reduced to powder. Then, rising above them all, in the dense dry powdery heart of the Cloud, he can hear the meshed voices of weeping women. Dead of smallpox and typhus and cholera. Dead of gunshots and knife wounds. Dead in childbirth. Dead of shame and loneliness. Calling from the unburied past, from the injured earth, from landfill and ruined wooden houses and splintered ships, from vanished decades and lost centuries. A chorus. Symphonic and soaring, the voices of the New York Götterdämmerung.

  Then receding echoes.

  Then silence.

  * * *

  When the Cloud settles, the world has turned white. The color of death to the Africans who once lived here. A fine white dust covers the graveyard of St. Paul’s and the steeple of the chapel. It covers the street and sidewalks of Vesey Street. It covers the police cars. It covers the small wheel of the first doomed airliner and the blood of the woman who must have been killed by it. Up toward Broadway he can see the building on Park Row where J&R Music has its stores. It’s white. So are the buildings on Ann Street. The Cloud has coated them all.

  He looks at the emerging stump of the South Tower, black and jagged through the wind-tossed dust. Smoke still pours from the high
floors of the North Tower. He knows that it soon will come down too. Carrying all with it. No sound drifts through the white air. Not a sob, a whimper, or a prayer. And then, away off, he hears sirens. He moves east.

  Broadway is white and City Hall Park is white and City Hall itself is white, and then he sees people moving lumpily through the white landscape, and they’re white too. Black men and black women are white. Mexicans and Dominicans and Chinese: all white. They move like stragglers from a defeated army. Like refugees. Coated with white powder. All heading north. Alive.

  Cormac joins them. If Delfina escaped, if she’s alive, coated white, she’ll head for Duane Street. She would believe that Cormac must be there. Broadway is covered with the powder, which is fine and slippery, like the powder used on babies. He sees hundreds of women’s shoes, kicked off so that women could run faster on bare feet. Two school buses, coated with dust, are at the curb near Park Place, with nurses offering water and help. He looks inside for Delfina. She’s not in either bus, although some children are huddled together in each of them, while a policewoman tries to calm them and get them moving. He sees movement in the interiors of shops and hurries over to peer inside, but Delfina isn’t in any of them. That’s when he first glimpses himself in a mirror: completely white. His tongue is dusty, his nostrils clogged. He tries the cell phone again. No sound at all. At Chambers Street, dozens of people are lined up to use a pay phone. Delfina isn’t one of them. He waits for a few minutes on the northeast corner, not far from the Tweed Court-house, hoping she will come along in the stunned line of survivors. She doesn’t.

  Then he hears the roar of the North Tower coming down. Above the building where Mary’s once served laughter and breakfast, he glimpses the upper floors and the television antenna vanishing, feels the ground shudder from the impact of a million tons of pancaking floors, all of it coming down beyond the view from Chambers Street, carrying with it Windows on the World, and uncountable stockbrokers, and the offices of Reynoso & Ryan. All vanished. And then, after a few seconds, he sees the second cloud.