In the Shadow of the Towers

by Douglas Lain

  Mags was in the midst of classic New York work and housing trouble. Currently she was on unemployment and her landlord wanted to get her out of her apartment so he could co-op her building. The money offer he’d made wasn’t bad, but she wanted things to stay as they were. It struck me that what was youthful about her was that she had never settled into her life, still stood on the edge.

  Lots of the Village restaurants weren’t opened. The owners couldn’t or wouldn’t come into the city. Angelina’s on Thompson Street was, though, because Angelina lives just a couple of doors down from her place. She was busy serving tables herself since the waiters couldn’t get in from where they lived.

  Later, I had reason to try and remember. The place was full but very quiet. People murmured to each other as Mags and I did. Nobody I knew was there. In the background Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances played.

  “Like the Blitz,” someone said.

  “Never the same again,” said a person at another table.

  “There isn’t even anyplace to volunteer to help,” a third person said.

  I don’t drink anymore. But Mags, as I remember, had a carafe of wine. Phone service had been spotty, but we had managed to exchange bits of what we had seen.

  “Mrs. Pirelli,” I said. “The Italian lady upstairs from me. I told you she had a heart attack watching the smoke and flames on television. Her son worked in the World Trade Center and she was sure he had burned to death.

  “Getting an ambulance wasn’t possible yesterday morning. But the guys at that little fire barn around the corner were there. Waiting to be called, I guess. They took her to St. Vincent’s in the chief’s car. Right about then, her son came up the street, his pinstripe suit with a hole burned in the shoulder, soot on his face, wild-eyed. But alive. Today they say she’s doing fine.”

  I waited, spearing clams, twirling linguine. Mags had a deeper and darker story to tell; a dip into the subconscious. Before I’d known her and afterward, Mags had a few rough brushes with mental disturbance. Back in college, where we first met, I envied her that, wished I had something as dramatic to talk about.

  “I’ve been thinking about what happened last night.” She’d already told me some of this. “The downstairs bell rang, which scared me. But with phone service being bad, it could have been a friend, someone who needed to talk. I looked out the window. The street was empty, dead like I’d never seen it.

  “Nothing but papers blowing down the street. You know how every time you see a scrap of paper now you think it’s from the Trade Center? For a minute I thought I saw something move, but when I looked again there was nothing.

  “I didn’t ring the buzzer, but it seemed someone upstairs did because I heard this noise, a rustling in the hall.

  “When I went to the door and lifted the spy hole, this figure stood there on the landing. Looking around like she was lost. She wore a dress, long and torn. And a blouse, what I realized was a shirtwaist. Turn-of-the-century clothes. When she turned toward my door, I saw her face. It was bloody, smashed. Like she had taken a big jump or fall. I gasped, and then she was gone.”

  “And you woke up?”

  “No, I tried to call you. But the phones were all fucked up. She had fallen, but not from a hundred stories. Anyway, she wasn’t from here and now.”

  Mags had emptied the carafe. I remember that she’d just ordered a salad and didn’t eat that. But Angelina brought a fresh carafe. I told Mags about the family at the barricades.

  “There’s a hole in the city,” said Mags.

  That night, after we had parted, I lay in bed watching but not seeing some old movie on TV, avoiding any channel with any kind of news, when the buzzer sounded. I jumped up and went to the view screen. On the empty street downstairs a man, wild-eyed, disheveled, glared directly into the camera.

  Phone service was not reliable. Cops were not in evidence in the neighborhood right then. I froze and didn’t buzz him in. But, as in Mags’s building, someone else did. I bolted my door, watched at the spy hole, listened to the footsteps, slow, uncertain. When he came into sight on the second floor landing he looked around and said in a hoarse voice, “Hello? Sorry, but I can’t find my mom’s front-door key.”

  Only then did I unlock the door, open it, and ask her exhausted son how Mrs. Pirelli was doing.

  “Fine,” he said. “Getting great treatment. St. Vincent was geared up for thousands of casualties. Instead.” He shrugged. “Anyway, she thanks all of you. Me too.”

  In fact, I hadn’t done much. We said good night, and he shuffled on upstairs to where he was crashing in his mother’s place.

  Thursday 9/13

  By September of 2001 I had worked an information desk in the university library for almost thirty years. I live right around the corner from Washington Square, and just before 10 a.m. on Thursday, I set out for work. The Moslem-run souvlaki stand across the street was still closed, its owner and workers gone since Tuesday morning. All the little falafel shops in the South Village were shut and dark.

  On my way to work I saw a three-legged rat running not too quickly down the middle of MacDougal Street. I decided not to think about portents and symbolism.

  The big TVs set up in the library atrium still showed the towers falling again and again. But now they also showed workers digging in the flaming wreckage at Ground Zero.

  Like the day before, I was the only one in my department who’d made it in. The librarians lived too far away. Even Marco, the student assistant, wasn’t around.

  Marco lived in a dorm downtown right near the World Trade Center. They’d been evacuated with nothing more than a few books and the clothes they were wearing. Tuesday, he’d been very upset. I’d given him Kleenex, made him take deep breaths, got him to call his mother back in California. I’d even walked him over to the gym, where the university was putting up the displaced students.

  Thursday morning, all of the computer stations around the information desk were occupied. Students sat furiously typing email and devouring incoming messages, but the intensity had slackened since 9/11. The girls no longer sniffed and dabbed at tears as they read. The boys didn’t jump up and come back from the restrooms red-eyed and saying they had allergies.

  I said good morning and sat down. The kids hadn’t spoken much to me in the last few days, had no questions to ask. But all of them from time to time would turn and look to make sure I was still there. If I got up to leave the desk, they’d ask when I was coming back.

  Some of the back windows had a downtown view. The pillar of smoke wavered. The wind was changing.

  The phone rang. Reception had improved. Most calls went through. When I answered, a voice, tight and tense, blurted out, “Jennie Levine was who I saw. She was nineteen years old in 1911 when the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory burned. She lived in my building with her family ninety years ago. Her spirit found its way home. But the inside of my building has changed so much that she didn’t recognize it.”

  “Hi, Mags,” I said. “You want to come up here and have lunch?”

  A couple of hours later, we were in a small dining hall normally used by faculty on the west side of the Square. The university, with food on hand and not enough people to eat it, had thrown open its cafeterias and dining halls to anybody with a university identification. We could even bring a friend if we cared to.

  Now that I looked, Mags had tension lines around her eyes and hair that could have used some tending. But we were all of us a little ragged in those days of sun and horror. People kept glancing downtown, even if they were inside and not near a window.

  The Indian lady who ran the facility greeted us, thanked us for coming. I had a really nice gumbo, fresh avocado salad, a soothing pudding. The place was half-empty, and conversations again were muted. I told Mags about Mrs. Pirelli’s son the night before.

  She looked up from her plate, unsmiling, said, “I did not imagine Jennie Levine,” and closed that subject.

  Afterward, she and I stood on Washington Place befor
e the university building that had once housed the sweatshop called the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. At the end of the block, a long convoy of olive green army trucks rolled silently down Broadway.

  Mags said, “On the afternoon of March 25, 1911, one hundred and forty-six young women burned to death on this site. Fire broke out in a pile of rags. The door to the roof was locked. The fire ladders couldn’t reach the eighth floor. The girls burned.”

  Her voice tightened as she said, “They jumped and were smashed on the sidewalk. Many of them, most of them, lived right around here. In the renovated tenements we live in now. It’s like those planes blew a hole in the city and Jennie Levine returned through it.”

  “Easy, honey. The university has grief counseling available. I think I’m going. You want me to see if I can get you in?” It sounded idiotic even as I said it. We had walked back to the library.

  “There are others,” she said. “Kids all blackened and bloated and wearing old-fashioned clothes. I woke up early this morning and couldn’t go back to sleep. I got up and walked around here and over in the East Village.”

  “Jesus!” I said.

  “Geoffrey has come back too. I know it.”

  “Mags! Don’t!” This was something we hadn’t talked about in a long time. Once we were three, and Geoffrey was the third. He was younger than either of us by a couple of years at a time of life when that still seemed a major difference.

  We called him Lord Geoff because he said we were all a bit better than the world around us. We joked that he was our child. A little family cemented by desire and drugs.

  The three of us were all so young, just out of school and in the city. Then jealousy and the hard realities of addiction began to tear us apart. Each had to find his or her own survival. Mags and I made it. As it turned out, Geoff wasn’t built for the long haul. He was twenty-one. We were all just kids, ignorant and reckless.

  As I made excuses in my mind, Mags gripped my arm. “He’ll want to find us,” she said. Chilled, I watched her walk away and wondered how long she had been coming apart and why I hadn’t noticed.

  Back at work, Marco waited for me. He was part Filipino, a bit of a little wiseass who dressed in downtown black. But that was the week before. Today, he was a woebegone refugee in oversized flip-flops, wearing a magenta sweatshirt and gym shorts, both of which had been made for someone bigger and more buff.

  “How’s it going?”

  “It sucks! My stuff is all downtown where I don’t know if I can ever get it. They have these crates in the gym, toothbrushes, bras, Bic razors, but never what you need, everything from boxer shorts on out, and nothing is ever the right size. I gave my clothes in to be cleaned, and they didn’t bring them back. Now I look like a clown.

  “They have us all sleeping on cots on the basketball courts. I lay there all last night staring up at the ceiling, with a hundred other guys. Some of them snore. One was yelling in his sleep. And I don’t want to take a shower with a bunch of guys staring at me.”

  He told me all this while not looking my way, but I understood what he was asking. I expected this was going to be a pain. But, given that I couldn’t seem to do much for Mags, I thought maybe it would be a distraction to do what I could for someone else.

  “You want to take a shower at my place, crash on my couch?”

  “Could I, please?”

  So I took a break, brought him around the corner to my apartment, put sheets on the daybed. He was in the shower when I went back to work.

  That evening when I got home, he woke up. When I went out to take a walk, he tagged along. We stood at the police barricades at Houston Street and Sixth Avenue and watched the traffic coming up from the World Trade Center site. An ambulance with one side smashed and a squad car with its roof crushed were hauled up Sixth Avenue on the back of a huge flatbed truck. NYPD buses were full of guys returning from Ground Zero, hollow-eyed, filthy.

  Crowds of Greenwich Villagers gathered on the sidewalks clapped and cheered, yelled, “We love our firemen! We love our cops!”

  The firehouse on Sixth Avenue had taken a lot of casualties when the towers fell. The place was locked and empty. We looked at the flowers and the wreaths on the doors, the signs with faces of the firefighters who hadn’t returned, and the messages, “To the brave men of these companies who gave their lives defending us.”

  The plume of smoke downtown rolled in the twilight, buffeted about by shifting winds. The breeze brought with it for the first time the acrid smoke that would be with us for weeks afterward.

  Officials said it was the stench of burning concrete. I believed, as did everyone else, that part of what we breathed was the ashes of the ones who had burned to death that Tuesday.

  It started to drizzle. Marco stuck close to me as we walked back. Hip twenty-year-olds do not normally hang out with guys almost three times their age. This kid was very scared.

  Bleecker Street looked semiabandoned, with lots of the stores and restaurants still closed. The ones that were open were mostly empty at nine in the evening.

  “If I buy you a six-pack, you promise to drink all of it?” He indicated he would.

  At home, Marco asked to use the phone. He called people he knew on campus, looking for a spare dorm room, and spoke in whispers to a girl named Eloise. In between calls, he worked the computer.

  I played a little Lady Day, some Ray Charles, a bit of Haydn, stared at the TV screen. The president had pulled out of his funk and was coming to New York the next day.

  In the next room, the phone rang. “No. My name’s Marco,” I heard him say. “He’s letting me stay here.” I knew who it was before he came in and whispered, “She asked if I was Lord Geoff.”

  “Hi, Mags,” I said. She was calling from somewhere with walkie-talkies and sirens in the background.

  “Those kids I saw in Astor Place?” she said, her voice clear and crazed. “The ones all burned and drowned? They were on the General Slocum when it caught fire.”

  “The kids you saw in Astor Place all burned and drowned?” I asked. Then I remembered our conversation earlier.

  “On June 15, 1904. The biggest disaster in New York City history. Until now. The East Village was once called Little Germany. Tens of thousands of Germans with their own meeting halls, churches, beer gardens.

  “They had a Sunday excursion, mainly for the kids, on a steamship, the General Slocum, a floating firetrap. When it burst into flames, there were no lifeboats. The crew and the captain panicked. By the time they got to a dock, over a thousand were dead. Burned, drowned. When a hole got blown in the city, they came back looking for their homes.”

  The connection started to dissolve into static.

  “Where are you, Mags?”

  “Ground Zero. It smells like burning sulfur. Have you seen Geoffrey yet?” she shouted into her phone.

  “Geoffrey is dead, Mags. It’s all the horror and tension that’s doing this to you. There’s no hole . . .”

  “Cops and firemen and brokers all smashed and charred are walking around down here.” At that point sirens screamed in the background. Men were yelling. The connection faded.

  “Mags, give me your number. Call me back,” I yelled. Then there was nothing but static, followed by a weak dial tone. I hung up and waited for the phone to ring again.

  After a while, I realized Marco was standing looking at me, slugging down beer. “She saw those kids? I saw them too. Tuesday night I was too jumpy to even lie down on the fucking cot. I snuck out with my friend Terry. We walked around. The kids were there. In old, historical clothes. Covered with mud and seaweed and their faces all black and gone. It’s why I couldn’t sleep last night.”

  “You talk to the counselors?” I asked.

  He drained the bottle. “Yeah, but they don’t want to hear what I wanted to talk about.”

  “But with me . . .”

  “You’re crazy. You understand.”

  The silence outside was broken by a jet engine. We both flinched. No planes
had flown over Manhattan since the ones that had smashed the towers on Tuesday morning.

  Then I realized what it was. “The Air Force,” I said. “Making sure it’s safe for Mr. Bush’s visit.”

  “Who’s Mags? Who’s Lord Geoff?”

  So I told him a bit of what had gone on in that strange lost country, the 1960s, the naïveté that led to meth and junk. I described the wonder of that unknown land, the three-way union. “Our problem, I guess, was that instead of a real ménage, each member was obsessed with only one of the others.”

  “Okay,” he said. “You’re alive. Mags is alive. What happened to Geoff?

  “When things were breaking up, Geoff got caught in a drug sweep and was being hauled downtown in the back of a police van. He cut his wrists and bled to death in the dark before anyone noticed.”

  This did for me what speaking about the dead kids had maybe done for him. Each of us got to talk about what bothered him without having to think much about what the other said.

  Friday 9/14

  Friday morning two queens walked by with their little dogs as Marco and I came out the door of my building. One said, “There isn’t a fresh croissant in the entire Village. It’s like the Siege of Paris. We’ll all be reduced to eating rats.”

  I murmured, “He’s getting a little ahead of the story. Maybe first he should think about having an English muffin.”

  “Or eating his yappy dog,” said Marco.

  At that moment, the authorities opened the East and West Villages, between Fourteenth and Houston Streets, to outside traffic. All the people whose cars had been stranded since Tuesday began to come into the neighborhood and drive them away. Delivery trucks started to appear on the narrow streets.

  In the library, the huge TV screens showed the activity at Ground Zero, the preparations for the president’s visit. An elevator door opened and revealed a couple of refugee kids in their surplus gym clothes clasped in a passion clinch.

  The computers around my information desk were still fully occupied, but the tension level had fallen. There was even a question or two about books and databases. I tried repeatedly to call Mags. All I got was the chilling message on her answering machine.