Forever

by Pete Hamill

  There are no birds in the Wednesday sky. Not even a raven. He remembers seeing the first airplane, the simplicity of its path, and then glimpsing the second. Each pilot heading for a city he did not know. Each heading for this dense and layered, most human of all places. Each heading here to kill thousands and find Paradise. Heading for Delfina, and all those others they did not know.

  Then he sobs. He whispers, “You lousy fuckers.” He holds a chimney to steady himself, and his body is wracked with tears for the ruined world.

  He thinks: I want to go. More than ever before, I want to flee the world.

  Except for this: I cannot go until I find Delfina.

  Routine is created as he makes his rounds. There is still nothing to discover at Stuyvesant or St. Vincent’s, no civilians, no wounded. He has added the sword to the backpack, the blade at an angle, the handle rising out of the top and covered with a towel. He thinks he might need it, since the cops are all dealing with the emergency and the bad guys will soon be back on the streets. He sees no bad guys, only crowds cheering as fire trucks go by, and accuses himself of paranoia. He has breakfast in Healey’s new favorite coffee shop on Twenty-third Street, his arms full of newspapers. The unemployed dot-commers are packed into booths. He uses the pay phone to call various casualty hotlines. Sorry, nobody by that name. He calls Delfina’s number too. No answer. He calls Elba from the third floor, and Delfina is not yet home (but the whole building is praying for her). Now Cormac knows what everyone else must know, what the mayor meant when he said about the numbers that they would be more than anyone could bear. Nobody who was in those towers when they came down would be found alive.

  In every newspaper, starting on page eight of the tabloids, he sees Warren’s face. He was one of the best-known people at breakfast in Windows on the World on Tuesday morning. A businessmen’s alliance breakfast, a clean-up-the-city breakfast. The stories don’t say he’s dead. He is just among the missing. But even his own newspaper writes about him in the past tense. The New York Times uses a handsome portrait by Richard Avedon, from a profile in The New Yorker. There are pictures taken at openings, including one from the show at the Metropolitan. Most of them include Elizabeth. The Daily News runs two photographs of her taken on Tuesday afternoon, one leaving the apartment house on Fifth Avenue, the other, her back to the camera, peering south from the Chambers Street Bridge at the burning ruins. The second was at dusk on Tuesday. The Post was also on the bridge, and their photo shows her with a scarf covering the lower part of her face, as if wearing a burka. The scarf turned into a filter against the ash and the odor. As always, she looks beautiful. And in the Post photograph, stricken. And to Cormac, detached. She has nothing to say to reporters except, “I’m so sorry for everybody.”

  * * *

  After his long day’s journey, and an evening patrol, Cormac comes home in the dark. There are still no lights. Duane Street is black and empty, although Church Street is now full of hard, bright imported lights and out-of-state police cars and a holding pen for the media and a long line of heavy vehicles pointed south. He thinks: They are already organized, they know what they are doing, they are doing it better than any other city could have done it. He enters Duane Street from the Broadway side and finds himself whistling the Coleman Hawkins version of “Body and Soul.” The last whistler on Duane Street. The only man in all of the wounded city who is whistling. “I long for you, for you, dear, only…” He gets off the bicycle and fumbles for keys, his eyes sore from the poisoned air. He wants to be rid of the weight of the sword. He wants bed. Some drops of soft rain begin to fall. He thinks: Rain will help. Rain will clean the air. Rain will cool the molten steel. Rain will chill the burning bodies.

  Then he sees Kongo.

  He’s squatting low in the doorway, a cape turning him into a dense black triangle. He stands up slowly.

  “Do you still want to go?” he says.

  Cormac knows what he means. He pauses, weary, exhausted, without much residue of hope.

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t sound as certain as you did.”

  “How can I go without finding the woman? I need to find her. I can’t go without that.”

  He looks toward Church Street, hearing the unseen muffled voices, the grinding of gears. Kongo sighs. A siren wails.

  “You couldn’t kill this fellow Warren.”

  “True.”

  “That was the sign of a merciful man,” he says, and smiles. “And after all, his death was your duty, not ours.”

  “They were always together in my mind, like the East River and the Hudson, coming out in the harbor,” Cormac says. “But you’re right, of course. You’re right. And now it doesn’t matter. The man, Warren, was in one of the towers, above the fires. It’s in all the newspapers. He’s surely dead.”

  Kongo looks at him.

  “You can leave this world tonight.”

  “Not without seeing Delfina.”

  “I know where she is,” he says.

  123.

  They use both bicycles and pedal north. They pull over at the corner of Fifty-eighth Street, a half block from Roosevelt Hospital, and chain the bicycles to a lamppost. Cormac knows the hospital. When the third Madison Square Garden was still on Eighth Avenue and Fiftieth Street, battered prizefighters were taken here to be stitched up or to die. Now, Kongo says, Delfina Cintron is in a bed on the sixth floor.

  “I can heal her,” Kongo says. “The way I once healed you.” He shows Cormac how he entered in his own search of the city. The route goes from a loading dock in the rear to a freight elevator. Most ambulances are downtown, along with many of the nurses and doctors, and there is an atmosphere of abandonment around the back entrance.

  “I’ll wait for you there,” he says, pointing a few blocks toward Central Park. “Just inside the entrance, in the darkest trees.”

  He gives Cormac the cape and takes the backpack that holds the sword, the towels, the earrings. Its weight makes Kongo smile. Then he walks away in a loping, long-legged stride, and Cormac slips into the hospital. He finds an elevator, pushes six.

  With the cape on his shoulders, he walks past an empty nurse’s station and into a large room with six beds, each filled with a sleeping woman. Delfina is in the bed nearest the window. Her face is swollen and she’s deeply sedated. But there are no tubes in her nose, no IV dripping into her veins. Her right hand is raw, her nails cracked, and her breath is shallow. She looks like an injured child. Boy, nothing can be harder than the road that you took to get here.

  “Hey, who are you? The Phantom of the Opera? What are you doing here?”

  A heavy black nurse with a tough face stands in the doorway, hands on her hips.

  “This is my wife,” Cormac says. “I’ve been looking for her for two days.”

  “You can’t—”

  “She was in the North Tower.”

  The nurse picks up a clipboard from the foot of the bed. She still looks professionally angry.

  “She’s pregnant too,” Cormac says. “Or she was.”

  The nurse squints at the case file.

  “She still is,” she says. “Some kind of miracle.”

  “I want to take her home.”

  She looks at him more carefully now. “Sorry for your trouble,” she said. “But I’m sure that ain’t possible. It sure ain’t advisable. Let me go find a supervisor. You can wait right here.”

  When she leaves, Cormac wraps Delfina in the cape, lifts her heavy body, feeling its warmth, and carries her down the deserted hallways to the stairwell. Easy, boy, don’t make a move, just take a ride now. All the way down to the loading area, Delfina makes small whimpering sounds, tiny protests, but says no words, not even when Cormac moves with her into the rain.

  Columbus Circle is slick with rain and Cormac can see lights downtown in Times Square and nothing at all in the far distance. Traffic is light. A dozen yellow cabs. A few buses. No police cars at all. When the street is empty, he hurries into the park, straining a
gainst the weight of Delfina. As promised, Kongo is waiting in a grove of dripping maples.

  With Thunder.

  He is here again, as he was on the night when Cormac and Kongo rode him north, blood merging, language merging, gods merging. Thunder: back from the place where he has been waiting.

  The great horse paws the earth, stretches in pleasure and renewal, shudders, but makes no other sound. The sword is slung from the saddle horn, the black bag beneath it. Kongo hands Cormac the reins and holds Delfina in his own arms, her face masked by the cape against the rain. Cormac strokes the great horse and whispers in Irish. We go now to see Da. Then he swings into the saddle. Kongo passes Delfina to him. Her eyes are closed, her face bleary. She faces Cormac, her body against his, her legs spread in the saddle, burrowed against him. He pulls the cape tight around her body, steadying her with his elbows, gripping the reins.

  “I’ll see you there,” Kongo says, and slaps Thunder’s haunch.

  124.

  They move north through the park to the place of farewell, to the hidden cave. Delfina is pressed against him and he can feel her breath against his chest. A woman dressed like an Eskimo in a fur-trimmed coat comes toward them on the path, holding seven dogs on seven leashes. All are docile, heads pressed to the ground, anxious to be taken to dry rooms. Neither the Eskimo nor her dogs seem surprised by the presence of a horse in the rain, holding two riders.

  They make good time. Away in the distance to the east, he sees the bright lights of the Metropolitan Museum, and suddenly imagines an airliner packed with fuel smashing into it and destroying the finest works of man. They could do it. They want to do it. Here, and everywhere. He turns Thunder to the west, away from the revealing lights of the Metropolitan. He hopes the musicians are back on its steps. He wishes he could take Delfina there and dance. You will dance on marble terraces, boy. You will feel candle wax dripping on your shoulders from the chandeliers. You will waltz. You will mambo. Vaya. Raindrops now look like a shower of atoms in the more distant lights of the park lamps. The rain fills the world with a steady drumming sound, without accents from bata or toques, without congas or bongo, just steady drumming, erasing the sounds of the city, mashing time, cleansing the filthy air. Delfina murmurs through unconsciousness. Oh, shit… oh, shit… Her head stirs, her nose sounds clogged. He holds her closer with a free hand, her head flat against his chest.

  He can see the turrets and battlements of Belvedere Castle as they move across the Great Lawn into the North Meadow, empty now of people, of children, of ballplayers. He loves this place. A place created long ago by the sweat and muscle of Irishmen and Africans and Germans who came here from the Bloody Ould Sixth when Cormac was already old, who loved one another, who married one another, who huddled together in the shacks of Seneca Village. All these eight hundred and forty-three acres were then a wilderness of rock and scrub and shanties, where men and women and children shared the land with the last of the free animals and five hundred thousand birds. They were the same people who changed the place, who moved the earth and drained the swamps and cut the roads from a master plan, knowing that when they were finished they could not come back to live, only to visit. Cormac thinks: They left us this tamed sylvan man-shaped place, and all of them are dead and buried, and I am still here. The only man left alive who ever saw them work. Now, on a wet, moonless night in the wounded city, the lawns drink the rain, the last birds huddle in nests, and even the ghosts are silent.

  Thunder carries them out of the park at 106th Street, following the smell of earth westward into the strip of Riverside Park. Man, woman, and horse are joined now, like a single creature, pelted by the rain. They pass the gloomy monument they visited together in the summer, and Cormac remembers Delfina saying, “I want to be buried in Grant’s Tomb.” You will be buried nowhere, he says now. Not for a long, long time. Thinking: You will see Rome, you will stroll in the piazzas of Florence, you will see our child walk and read and dance. I will not. But you and the boy will swim in the azure waters of the Mediterranean, off the point named for Palinurus. You will read The Aeneid at a table where lemons await you in a white ceramic bowl. You will teach the child to be strong and kind.

  Through the rain, he sees a rusting freighter plowing toward Albany. He glimpses it between buildings, and then the ship is gone. The rain is now washing away the city’s cargo of fine ash. The great swooping arc of the George Washington Bridge is dotted with the red taillights of stalled commuters heading for New Jersey. No cars are coming into Manhattan. Cormac feels Harlem’s presence from the heights to the right, here where Washington fled to the killing plains of New Jersey. He was not a face on a dollar bill, boy, he was a great big tough son-of-a-bitch who made a country. Cormac sees Washington as he always sees him: slashing the air with his own swift sword. And sees Bantu and the others, sees them fighting for the liberty that Washington did not deliver. All of that in a year when he was still too young to know that most great hopes end with a broken heart.

  Then Washington disappears, and now Cormac feels Duke Ellington beckoning him to a table at Frank’s, in a year when he was writing about music for the New York Sun, and there too is Charlie Parker raising his alto to the night and Lady Day whispering through the rain. What was the name of the hotel on 118th Street where Minton’s Playhouse opened the stage to the true geniuses of the wretched twentieth century? Cormac can no longer remember, but there was Max behind the drums and here came Birks and there was Bird and in from the coast one night came Art Tatum. That was the night, hearing Tatum shower the room with music, when he knew his own work on a piano was a pathetic counterfeit. His hand drops to Delfina’s belly.

  You will hear them all, son, the greatest artists of the century; you will hear their music smile, or protest, or console, and you will hear in them what the Africans made of America, all of them in you, as I am in you, and Ireland is in you, and the Jews are in you, and the Caribbean is in you, from me, from your mother, even in the blood I carry still from Kongo, and always, in all years, no matter where you go, son, you will be of New York.

  His hand is above what he is sure is the boy’s beating heart, although he cannot feel it. If only the musicians all could have seen the towers fall, seen the Cloud, reached for their horns or the black and white keys. Make it into art, man, he once heard Miles tell Coltrane. For they all knew one immense New York secret: no pain, no art. Here in these streets the alloy of Irish and Africans invented the new world. Here is where Master Juba’s spirit floated in the wings, dancing beside his Irish friend John Diamond, the two of them inventing tap-dancing. Harlem was the true northern border of the Five Points, after all the Know-Nothing race bullshit broke the Irish away from the children of Africans. Except for those who loved one another. Except for the Africans who took Irish wives and the Irishmen who took African wives and loved them until death did them part. Here on the right. Up there. In this place. This Harlem. Far from the North Tower. Far from Ground Zero.

  Oh, how I want music now, Cormac thinks, high on this great muscled horse, this immortal stallion, moving north with my last woman. Moving north with my unborn son. Moving north to die. I want to hear music as I ride through cleansing rain, with my back turned to the great downtown necropolis. Music to redeem the murderous spectacle that now dwarfs all other New York deaths, starting with my own.

  They pass under the bridge, gradually rising on wooded slopes into Fort Tryon Park, passing the Cloisters, still moving north, where he will keep his appointment.

  The woods are denser now, the trees taller, more majestic and primeval, the rain harder, and Thunder moves cautiously, avoiding small escarpments of rock. They are deep inside Inwood Hill Park. Cormac can see tiny waterfalls, where rivers of rain are rushing over cliffs and pouring down in swift, glassy sheets. Some trees rise more than a hundred feet above them, trees that have been here since he arrived in the lost village on the southern tip of the island. Then Thunder stops. They are before a vaguely familiar wall of jagged rock. Delfina mu
rmurs and Cormac pulls back and sees that her eyes flicker, blink open, close again.

  And Cormac thinks: This is madness. I’m going to kill her, and the boy too, bouncing through rain to the chill of a cave. I should have left her in the hospital, where there were nurses and doctors and medicines. A place of warmth and food. He considers going back. Or veering off to the right and the emergency room of Columbia-Presbyterian. And knows that he can’t, that he has moved beyond choice.

  “Delfina,” he murmurs. “It’s me.”

  She does not answer.

  Thunder stops. Don’t die on me, mujer. After I’m gone, you must bring this boy into the world.

  They arrive at the foot of the cliff that is sliced by the entrance to the cave. Her face remains swollen and shut. He lifts her down and lays her upon the cape and then turns the cape into a sling, using ropes from the backpack. He buckles on the sword in its scabbard, a tool now for digging instead of killing, and whispers good-bye in Irish to Thunder. Delfina moans. He slings her dead weight over his left shoulder, his knees buckling, pulls the ends of the sling as tight as he can, using the backpack as a cushion, and then starts up the rock face.

  Some dim memory guides him to a rough path, hidden by the zigzagged markers of rain-slick boulders and mossy stones. I’m coming; I’ll be there soon… At one angled ledge, he slips backward, totters, then uses Delfina’s weight as an anchor, leaning her against the rock face, gripping her. She babbles words he does not understand and then goes silent again. They climb another three feet, and then Cormac wobbles, his balance lost, and is about to fall more than twenty feet when he grabs the gnarled root of a tree. He trembles, his strength gone, and struggles for a long minute to steady himself. His heart is beating fiercely. He wants nothing to happen to her, or to their child, and he inhales deeply from the wet air. He must go on. And wonders: Are you there too, Mary Morrigan?