In Spirit

by Pat Forde

  With a twirl of black cotton, she quickly slipped out of the cage. And within seconds the inward-angled cones on all the arcing yellow bars began to focus shimmering beams on him, opening a “transient N-space fold” around him. Raed blinked through the bars, met the hard eyes of the young Muslim psychologist, still refusing to believe—until the woman began to blur, and shift, and slide off to one side, and everything around Raed swirled into a tunnel of light—

  A light thump, and the tunnel of light focused into a tubular space. Raed's eyes adjusted, recognized an oh-so-familiar interior: he was inside a large, mostly empty 767 passenger jet sitting on a runway.

  Raed had dropped down into one of the rearmost seats from midair, as the “gravity” of the simulation took hold of him. It was a simulation, wasn't it? He blinked at his surroundings, seeing every detail of the seat-back ahead of him and the belts and buckles lying on the empty seats beside him, the empty row across the aisle, the magazines and folded-up meal tables all perfectly visible, his surroundings absolutely real no matter which way he looked. Light has a strong multidimensionality, Francis had said, but such negligible mass it can only cross one-way, from the past to the present....

  But then Raed noticed he was sinking right through the padded seat-cushion beneath him—he could feel himself bumping down against the hard steel frame inside the seat itself. Flaws in the simulation, just as he'd suspected! He let out a sigh of relief, and watched his body rebound slightly, settling into place almost on the surface of the seat cushion visible between his legs. It was a strange sensation, but Raed was sure it was controlled by the coiled harness cables back in the “projection” cage he had to be still hanging in.... From a great distance away, too far off and far too soft to be real, the whining sound of jet engines powering up. More like a whisper, when the sound should have been screamingly loud in his ears—another flaw! Raed felt he was hearing a faulty soundtrack in a movie theater too big for the speakers.

  But then he recalled the materials he'd been given to study: sounds would be strange, nothing would be loud enough to make out unless Raed was standing close to the source.

  Slowly the 767 went through a 30-degree turn on the runway, and the quality of light spilling through windows across the aisle made it clear to Raed this was an early morning flight. His heart began to beat faster. He leaned over the seat beside him, peered out the oval window. His plane appeared to be taxiing toward a main runway, and the airport was—

  Logan International, Boston.

  No doubt this was supposed to be the fateful day. Raed struggled to get up, wanting to see if he could see Nazir or Sayf seated in the rows ahead, biding their time until the 767 had taken off. But no, something was wrong—the weird far-off whining of the engines was powering down, shutting off altogether. Raed tried to get to his feet, struggling with the distorted friction of this simulation-world, all the while clinging to the fact that he was really attached to a harness in the air somewhere. In the seat ahead of him, a passenger was sleeping, one arm thrown across his lap, digital wristwatch visible: 9:13 am.

  An hour after the time they should have been in the air, if this was one of those infamous flights. No wonder the plane was at a standstill! Plopping back down in the empty window seat, Raed pressed his face to the strangely rubbery glass of the window, caught sight of other motionless planes lined up on another runway.... On the morning of 9/11, all flights in the country had been grounded shortly after 9 am.

  They'd projected him back aboard the wrong plane! Raed released a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.

  But if it was all just a simulation, under the control of the two projection operators, then shouldn't this be one of the planes that had left Boston an hour earlier?

  He moved back to the aisle seat, saw a stewardess walking towards him from the front of the plane, looking distraught, touching the passengers she passed on the shoulder, and speaking soundlessly to them. Raed heard nothing at all until she was quite close, then he heard the stewardess speaking four words to the passengers in the rows ahead of him: “Never forget this day."

  Her voice sounded too loud, and more than a little hoarse, as though she was on the edge of tears. “Never forget this day,” she boomed again, leaning in to touch the passenger in the seat directly ahead on the shoulder. She passed Raed by without looking at him, but her knee brushed his hand, resting on the hard plastic aisle-arm—

  FEAR-ANGUISH-DISBELIEF! All three emotions flooded out of the passing stewardess and into Raed, the potency of his brief physical contact with her a kind of pain he'd never experienced before. He recoiled from the aisle, clutching his hand as though he'd been burned, and feeling certain in every fiber of his body that the stewardess had just been informed about the planes striking their New York targets.

  For an instant, just one instant, Raed was clutched by the fear that he was not in a simulation....

  Murmurs were rising from the surrounding seats:

  “What'd she mean?"

  “Why aren't we taking off? Know what's going on?"

  Raed rubbed at his hand, wondering whether stewardesses had actually acted this way on the real day of infamy. Two rows ahead and across the aisle, a man was listening to his cell phone, a shocked look dawning on his face. And in the aisle seat three rows ahead, a woman was standing, turning, walking slowly toward the back, moving as though she had arthritis even though she was only in her thirties. She looked directly at Raed when she came alongside him, leaned over him and repeated the same four words: “Never forget this day.” Then she reached down to Raed's shoulder, but before she could touch him, the woman's arm elongated, slid away, there was a whirl of light and—

  Raed was back in the deep-projection facility, hanging in the center of the projection cage, groggy and disoriented and fighting a desire to remove the harness, exit the cage, and ask to be returned to his cell in Lew. The veiled psychologist stepped through the bars beside him, gave him a thumbs-up to show his bioreadings were acceptable, wanted a thumbs-up in return—Raed was supposed to signal if he was up to continuing, ready for the next part of the program.

  He didn't give her a thumbs-up. Instead he lifted his breather, gasped to her, “I thought you said the people of the past couldn't see me?"

  “They can't,” she agreed, tapping a note onto the slate she was holding.

  The projection cage operators called out that the target-coordinates were recalibrated, and the cage was ready for a second “folding.” Was Raed ready for a second “ghosting"?

  “They can't see you,” she repeated, covering her veiled mouth with her hand to remind Raed to refit his breather. “And don't worry,” she assured him, “you'll get used to ghosting after another few tries.” She slipped sideways out between the bars again, before turning back and adding, “You won't be harmed, Raed."

  Who did she think he was? Raed wasn't afraid of a computer simulation. His hand still tingled from his brushed contact with the stewardess, but it was all a trick of the ‘trodes lining his harness straps, all just a trick of the mind. He'd been conned into overreacting by all the holeo material they'd made him study, that's all. He was playing the game so well he was beginning to con himself.

  But they could not send him into the past.

  And he was not ready to give up. The thought of being driven back to Lew was deeply comforting—Cell #1 was the only place Raed felt safe, felt under his own control. But Cell #1 was also a cage more frightening than this cage, and after leaving it two nights in a row, Raed knew the crack inside him was yawning wider. He sensed the new need pouring through, throwing the balance of his desire in the direction of continuing these trips out of Lew, no matter what simulation they put him through.

  The psychologist gave him the thumbs-up again, and in response Raed balled up the hand that had touched the stewardess into a defiant fist, and said into his breather-microphone, “I am ready."

  And said to himself only a simulation as the universe around him shifted, slid, swirl
ed into the tunnel of light—

  —which widened to become a vast, impossibly wounded sky. It was the sky of some inhuman world wreathed in shadow, pierced only by shafts of weird blue light, and threatened by thunderclouds that coiled not with water, but with ash that rained down on a dead land.

  Another bump as Raed fell back onto a patch of ground littered with jagged concrete shrapnel and twisted piping, which did not cut him; he barely sensed any sharp edges. Pushing himself up off this rubble was extremely difficult. Raed struggled to stay on his feet, see where he was. All round him lay a spaghetti-panorama of tangled wiring, twisted metal braces, giant steel girders scattered like logs, sections of shattered furniture—and paper. Crests and swirls of scattered pages, documents jammed between wiring, sticking out from shards of concrete. Suddenly a nearby swell of paper shot skyward as steam vented from the unsteady, uneven landscape. Raed had “projected” to a place where some war had been going on forever, by the littered looks of things—a place worse than any he'd seen before coming to America as a teen. Far worse than any part of Beirut, where he'd lived for a time as a small boy.

  Unfortunately, Raed knew the name of this impossible place.

  “Ground Zero,” they'd called it.

  He appeared to be standing on the island of Manhattan, on the spot where the Twin Towers had stood—and stood not long before he'd arrived, if the roiling sky was rendered accurately. This time he seemed to have missed 9/11 not by an hour, but by twenty-four hours. Smoke still hugged the rubble-strewn ground like patches of fog; distant figures drifted in and out of this fog, mostly firemen and policemen; a few were using search-dogs, trying to sniff out victims trapped under the rubble.

  Raed himself smelled nothing. Not the smoke, not the scent of jet fuel that should have filled the air. Not even the singed-cinder aroma from the ongoing fires in the distance. Thirty years, and they still can't program smells properly in computer simulations, he told himself, but that was just his mind trying to deny what he was seeing: an inconceivably detailed landscape of devastation that extended for blocks in every direction, and a too-huge-to-fake sky above, drawing Raed's eyes up through bluish curls of smoke to the heavens. Out under the sky!

  His soul had yearned for open sky for three long decades, but now that he seemed to be standing beneath one, he felt it was too awesome, too exposed, too heavy, too terrible to bear.

  So he turned his eyes down to the tangled ground, and began to pick his way over to the only source of noise close enough to hear: a soft hissing emanating from the mist-shrouded bank of rubble directly behind him. Clambering back over a filing cabinet that might have fallen from the Moon—it was flattened like a stomped soda can—Raed started slowly across the damp ground toward this soft sibilant sound, presumably a very loud sound “in reality.” Keeping his balance was complicated by the fact that he kept plunging through an insubstantial blanket of papers and paper ash, soot and concrete dust, getting his feet stuck in crevices beneath this visible surface-blanket, yet leaving no footprints in it, disturbing nothing he fell against, moving nothing he grabbed onto for support. At one point, he blinked down at a pair of eyeglasses, both lenses starred, crushed underfoot—

  But not by him. Whoever had worn them was not his victim, no. Raed could sense the old defense almost rising to his lips, could almost hear himself saying it in a courtroom long ago. America puffed itself too high in those two towers. Anyone trapped inside them had been trapped there by America alone, so they weren't my victims. The old defense, the denial he'd dropped somewhere along the way, abandoned in an outer room of the labyrinth in Raed's mind, rooms away from the middle-aged man he was now. It all seemed so long ago, too long ago to feel clear on the subject.

  Nothing seemed clear about 9/11, especially not here, not now.

  But then a breeze he couldn't feel began clearing the mists ahead, revealing a looming shape just a few feet from him: the side of a huge fire truck, its designation ash-smeared but still visible. Tower Pumper No. 146.

  Raed maneuvered round the front of the pumper truck, and dragged himself onto an adjacent mound of debris to get a better view of things. He was now level with the top of the truck's cab, and he could see the mist was coming from a hose being aimed from the crow's nest atop the pumper. A giant fireman in a soot-stained yellow coat stood in the center of the crow's nest like an indomitable statue, soaking down a fire inside a half-collapsed structure sixty or seventy feet away. A second fireman lay face-down further down the roof of the pumper, obviously exhausted.

  Only two firemen for a truck this size?

  It had to be less than twenty-four hours after 9/11; otherwise Ground Zero would be swarming with volunteer firefighters from out of state, even out of the country, if Raed recalled correctly. From his debris-hilltop, Raed turned and surveyed the entire scene, which was opening up as the imperceptible breeze cleared more spray and smoke and steam away.

  The scene before him might have been some imaginary rendering of the end of the world. Smoldering multi-story sections of both towers lay strewn about like so many titanic accordions, while in the distance, Manhattan's financial canyons were on fire in a hundred spots. Closer at hand, the ground was draped with stretches of outer tower-walling, glittering and ribbed, resembling enormous metallic mats—or magic carpets used by giants from the Alif Layla Wa Layla, Jinnis that had vanished back into the sky, leaving behind explosive plumes of blue smoke. It was a vista more fantastical than any Shaherazade ever imagined....

  So unreal.

  Yet this unreality was far harder to pass off as a simulation than the contained commonplace-reality of a passenger plane stranded on a runway. The interior of a 767 was a plausible space to model. But the exterior of New York, under an open sky? Around him the ground was seething, and crews of firemen and rescue workers were materializing from beyond veils of vapor swinging grappling hooks and pick-axes, each figure perfect and alive and real. Many of them disappeared into the gray-white crater in the center of this vast dead zone in time and in place.

  The dead past.

  Not rendered, not simulated.

  Real.

  Legs turning watery, going out from under him. Raed dropped helplessly onto the blackened husk of what might once have been a fine office couch.

  Ground Zero.

  Could his cousins Nazir and Sayf really have brought this about?

  Could he really be here?

  Real or unreal, Raed wanted this re-visitation to end. He was more than ready to return to the present. And if the first projection back to the grounded plane was anything to go by, he wouldn't have to sit here long before they brought him out of all this. So Raed waited, watching the fireman atop the pumper truck hose down flames licking out of a crushed-accordion section of one of the fallen towers, and wondering whether he was seeing something that might be real, might be true: had the two men on Tower Pumper Truck No. 146 been working here through the night, fighting fires since the World Trade Center collapsed?

  For an instant, the huge man working the hose lost his grip on it. A cloud of spray swept over Raed, and he swung his hand through the moisture without feeling a drop. Not massive enough, he thought, the science they'd fed him regurgitating an explanation for this flaw in the visual reality. Things will appear both startlingly real and surreal, the Muslim psychologist had warned him.

  Suddenly the hose shut off altogether, and the weary fireman stumbled out of the crow's nest, tore off his goggles, wiped tears from his eyes—no doubt he'd lost many firemen-friends when the towers came down—then the man collapsed on the pumper's roof right beside his prone coworker. That's when Raed became aware of a prickling sensation, a cloud of something uncomfortably tingly swimming over him....

  Heat! Heat was able to “span the dimensional divide” that purportedly separated Raed from this past. Heat was cumulatively massive, Francis had told him—it had sufficient structure to transmit a force across N-space. Whatever the case, he was definitely sensing a radiation from t
he burning accordion-floors not far away—an itchy, uneasy chill. A cold and ticklish pressure, unlike any cold he'd ever felt.

  So this was heat in the land of the dead, three decades back!

  Raed shivered, on the verge of believing again, wondering if those two firemen really were lying only a dozen feet from him, unaware of his ghostly presence. He rubbed the edge of his left hand, where it had made that fiery contact with the stewardess. Human contact was one that did feel hot in these projections—too hot too handle, which was why Raed was being careful not to get too close to anyone this time around. He would not touch any of the people he encountered at Ground Zero, and he would not be touched by them. He was not responsible. He was not the twenty-four-year-old who'd helped two cousins bring the Twin Towers down. That boy was long gone, locked down in the dustiest, most unreachable part of the labyrinth of Raed's mind, the key to his pre-prison self thrown away ages ago.

  So how could it possibly help him to see all this again?

  But Raed had never seen Ground Zero the first time around, of course; he hadn't dared venture anywhere near it in the aftermath of 9/11.

  A minute after the first fireman shut off the hose and slumped down on the pumper's roof, his resting companion slowly got up, climbed into the crow's nest, and started the hose up again.

  Fifteen minutes later, this shorter, stockier fireman began to tire too, stepped out, dropped onto his back in exhaustion. Then the larger of the two men rose again, and took his place back behind the hose.

  Raed was left to imagine how many hours their tenacious routine had been going on.... After two more edge-of-exhaustion exchanges of duty in the crow's nest, someone else appeared atop the pumper, a track-suited citizen just visible climbing up the ladder at the far end of the truck. A journalist, Raed thought, or some lost local too distraught to go home. Someone foolish enough to show up without a filter over her mouth, at any rate. The woman stepped right up onto the pumper, reached the fireman lying prone on the roof before her and was so overcome she crouched down beside the man, and abruptly embraced him. An emotional show of gratitude for his efforts to extinguish what was left of the angry fire from the jets....