In the Shadow of the Towers

by Douglas Lain

  In a staccato voice, it said, “This is Mags McConnell. There’s a hole in the city, and I’ve turned this into a center for information about the victims Jennie Levine and Geoffrey Holbrun. Anyone with information concerning the whereabouts of these two young people, please speak after the beep.”

  I left a message asking her to call. Then I called every half hour or so, hoping she’d pick up. I phoned mutual friends. Some were absent or unavailable. A couple were nursing grief of their own. No one had seen her recently.

  That evening in the growing dark, lights flickered in Washington Square. Candles were given out; candles were lighted with matches and Bics and wick to wick. Various priests, ministers, rabbis, and shamans led flower-bearing, candlelit congregations down the streets and into the park, where they joined the gathering vigil crowd.

  Marco had come by with his friend Terry, a kind of elfin kid who’d also had to stay at the gym. We went to this 9/11 vigil together. People addressed the crowd, gave impromptu elegies. There were prayers and a few songs. Then by instinct or some plan I hadn’t heard about, everyone started to move out of the park and flow in groups through the streets.

  We paused at streetlamps that bore signs with pictures of pajama-clad families in suburban rec rooms on Christmas mornings. One face would be circled in red, and there would be a message like, “This is James Bolton, husband of Susan, father of Jimmy, Anna, and Sue, last seen leaving his home in Far Rockaway at 7:30 a.m. on 9/11.” This was followed by the name of the company, the floor of the Trade Center tower where he worked, phone and fax numbers, the email address, and the words, “If you have any information about where he is, please contact us.”

  At each sign someone would leave a lighted candle on a tin plate. Someone else would leave flowers.

  The door of the little neighborhood Fire Rescue station was open; the truck and command car were gone. The place was manned by retired firefighters with faces like old Irish and Italian character actors. A big picture of a fireman who had died was hung up beside the door. He was young, maybe thirty. He and his wife, or maybe his girlfriend, smiled in front of a ski lodge. The picture was framed with children’s drawings of firemen and fire trucks and fires, with condolences and novena cards.

  As we walked and the night progressed, the crowd got stretched out. We’d see clumps of candles ahead of us on the streets. It was on Great Jones Street and the Bowery that suddenly there was just the three of us and no traffic to speak of. When I turned to say maybe we should go home, I saw for a moment a tall guy staggering down the street with his face purple and his eyes bulging out.

  Then he was gone. Either Marco or Terry whispered, “Shit, he killed himself.” And none of us said anything more.

  At some point in the evening, I had said Terry could spend the night in my apartment. He couldn’t take his eyes off Marco, though Marco seemed not to notice. On our way home, way east on Bleecker Street, outside a bar that had been old even when I’d hung out there as a kid, I saw the poster.

  It was like a dozen others I’d seen that night. Except it was in old-time black and white and showed three kids with lots of hair and bad attitude: Mags and Geoffrey and me.

  Geoff’s face was circled and under it was written, “This is Geoffrey Holbrun, if you have seen him since Tuesday 9/11 please contact.” And Mags had left her name and numbers.

  Even in the photo, I looked toward Geoffrey, who looked toward Mags, who looked toward me. I stared for just a moment before going on, but I knew that Marco had noticed.

  Saturday 9/15

  My tiny apartment was a crowded mess Saturday morning. Every towel I owned was wet, every glass and mug was dirty. It smelled like a zoo. There were pizza crusts in the sink and a bag of beer cans at the front door. The night before, none of us had talked about the ghosts. Marco and Terry had seriously discussed whether they would be drafted or would enlist. The idea of them in the army did not make me feel any safer.

  Saturday is a work day for me. Getting ready, I reminded myself that this would soon be over. The university had found all the refugee kids dorm rooms on campus.

  Then the bell rang and a young lady with a nose ring and bright red ringlets of hair appeared. Eloise was another refugee, though a much better-organized one. She had brought bagels and my guests’ laundry. Marco seemed delighted to see her.

  That morning all the restaurants and bars, the tattoo shops and massage parlors, were opening up. Even the Arab falafel shop owners had risked insults and death threats to ride the subways in from Queens and open their doors for business.

  At the library, the huge screens in the lobby were being taken down. A couple of students were borrowing books. One or two even had in-depth reference questions for me. When I finally worked up the courage to call Mags, all I got was the same message as before.

  Marco appeared dressed in his own clothes and clearly feeling better. He hugged me. “You were great to take me in.”

  “It helped me even more,” I told him.

  He paused then asked, “That was you on that poster last night, wasn’t it? You and Mags and Geoffrey?” The kid was a bit uncanny.

  When I nodded, he said, “Thanks for talking about that.”

  I was in a hurry when I went off duty Saturday evening. A friend had called and invited me to an impromptu “Survivors’ Party.” In the days of the French Revolution, The Terror, that’s what they called the soirees at which people danced and drank all night then went out at dawn to see which of their names were on the list of those to be guillotined.

  On Sixth Avenue a bakery that had very special cupcakes with devastating frosting was open again. The avenue was clogged with honking, creeping traffic. A huge chunk of Lower Manhattan had been declared open that afternoon, and people were able to get the cars that had been stranded down there.

  The bakery was across the street from a Catholic church. And that afternoon in that place, a wedding was being held. As I came out with my cupcakes, the bride and groom, not real young, not very glamorous, but obviously happy, came out the door and posed on the steps for pictures.

  Traffic was at a standstill. People beeped “Here Comes the Bride,” leaned out their windows, applauded and cheered, all of us relieved to find this ordinary, normal thing taking place.

  Then I saw her on the other side of Sixth Avenue. Mags was tramping along, staring straight ahead, a poster with a black and white photo hanging from a string around her neck. The crowd in front of the church parted for her. Mourners were sacred at that moment.

  I yelled her name and started to cross the street. But the tie-up had eased; traffic started to flow. I tried to keep pace with her on my side of the street. I wanted to invite her to the party. The hosts knew her from way back. But the sidewalks on both sides were crowded. When I did get across Sixth, she was gone.

  Aftermath

  That night I came home from the party and found the place completely cleaned up, with a thank-you note on the fridge signed by all three kids. And I felt relieved but also lost.

  The Survivors’ Party was on the Lower East Side. On my way back, I had gone by the East Village, walked up to Tenth Street between B and C. People were out and about. Bars were doing business. But there was still almost no vehicle traffic, and the block was very quiet.

  The building where we three had lived in increasing squalor and tension thirty-five years before was refinished, gentrified. I stood across the street looking. Maybe I willed his appearance.

  Geoff was there in the corner of my eye, his face dead white, staring up, unblinking, at the light in what had been our windows. I turned toward him and he disappeared. I looked aside and he was there again, so lost and alone, the arms of his jacket soaked in blood.

  And I remembered us sitting around with the syringes and all of us making a pledge in blood to stick together as long as we lived. To which Geoff added, “And even after.” And I remembered how I had looked at him staring at Mags and knew she was looking at me. Three sides of a triangle.
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  The next day, Sunday, I went down to Mags’s building, wanting very badly to talk to her. I rang the bell again and again. There was no response. I rang the super’s apartment.

  She was a neighborhood lady, a lesbian around my age. I asked her about Mags.

  “She disappeared. Last time anybody saw her was Sunday, 9/9. People in the building checked to make sure everyone was okay. No sign of her. I put a tape across her keyhole Wednesday. It’s still there.”

  “I saw her just yesterday.”

  “Yeah?” She looked skeptical. “Well, there’s a World Trade Center list of potentially missing persons, and her name’s on it. You need to talk to them.”

  This sounded to me like the landlord trying to get rid of her. For the next week, I called Mags a couple of times a day. At some point, the answering machine stopped coming on. I checked out her building regularly. No sign of her. I asked Angelina if she remembered the two of us having dinner in her place on Wednesday, 9/12.

  “I was too busy, staying busy so I wouldn’t scream. I remember you, and I guess you were with somebody. But no, honey, I don’t remember.”

  Then I asked Marco if he remembered the phone call. And he did but was much too involved by then with Terry and Eloise to be really interested.

  Around that time, I saw the couple who had wanted to take their kids down to Ground Zero. They were walking up Sixth Avenue, the kids cranky and tired, the parents looking disappointed. Like the amusement park had turned out to be a rip-off.

  Life closed in around me. A short-story collection of mine was being published at that very inopportune moment, and I needed to do some publicity work. I began seeing an old lover when he came back to New York as a consultant for a company that had lost its offices and a big chunk of its staff when the north tower fell.

  Mrs. Pirelli did not come home from the hospital but went to live with her son in Connecticut. I made it a point to go by each of the Arab shops and listen to the owners say how awful they felt about what had happened and smile when they showed me pictures of their kids in Yankee caps and shirts.

  It was the next weekend that I saw Mags again. The university had gotten permission for the students to go back to the downtown dorms and get their stuff out. Marco, Terry, and Eloise came by the library and asked me to go with them. So I went over to University Transportation and volunteered my services.

  Around noon on Sunday, 9/23, a couple of dozen kids and I piled into a university bus driven by Roger, a Jamaican guy who has worked for the university for as long as I have.

  “The day before 9/11 these kids didn’t much want old farts keeping them company,” Roger had said to me. “Then they all wanted their daddy.” He led a convoy of jitneys and vans down the FDR Drive, then through quiet Sunday streets, and then past trucks and construction vehicles.

  We stopped at a police checkpoint. A cop looked inside and waved us through.

  At the dorm, another cop told the kids they had an hour to get what they could and get out. “Be ready to leave at a moment’s notice if we tell you to,” he said.

  Roger and I as the senior members stayed with the vehicles. The air was filthy. Our eyes watered. A few hundred feet up the street, a cloud of smoke still hovered over the ruins of the World Trade Center. Piles of rubble smoldered. Between the pit and us was a line of fire trucks and police cars with cherry tops flashing. Behind us the kids hurried out of the dorm carrying boxes. I made them write their names on their boxes and noted in which van the boxes got stowed. I was surprised, touched even, at the number of stuffed animals that were being rescued.

  “Over the years we’ve done some weird things to earn our pensions,” I said to Roger.

  “Like volunteering to come to the gates of hell?”

  As he said that, flames sprouted from the rubble. Police and firefighters shouted and began to fall back. A fire department chemical tanker turned around, and the crew began unwinding hoses.

  Among the uniforms, I saw a civilian, a middle-aged woman in a sweater and jeans and carrying a sign. Mags walked toward the flames. I wanted to run to her. I wanted to shout, “Stop her.” Then I realized that none of the cops and firefighters seemed aware of her even as she walked right past them.

  As she did, I saw another figure, thin, pale, in a suede jacket and bell-bottom pants. He held out his bloody hands, and together they walked through the smoke and flames into the hole in the city.

  “Was that them?” Marco had been standing beside me.

  I turned to him. Terry was back by the bus watching Marco’s every move. Eloise was gazing at Terry.

  “Be smarter than we were,” I said.

  And Marco said, “Sure,” with all the confidence in the world.

  Ray Vukcevich is one of science fiction and fantasy’s little-known masters. His first short story collection, Meet Me in the Moon Room, gained a lot of attention and praise for working beyond the realm of readers’ expectations. Back in 2001, around the time of the 9/11 attacks, Publishers Weekly described his stories as “helium-filled,” while Booklist described him as “an outlandish virtuoso.”

  The plot of his Pushcart-nominated story, “My Eyes, Your Ears,” may be impossible to summarize. This is a work that relies on associations and imagery much more than narrative hooks or even causes and effects. The feelings on display here, however, are absolutely true and real.

  MY EYES, YOUR EARS

  Ray Vukcevich

  I don’t know if I’ve told you this story before, because you all have black bars over your eyes, and I cannot tell who you are. I can see one of you is a police officer. I don’t know whose blood this is we’re standing in. Please, God, don’t let it be Caroline’s.

  I realize now the trick I pulled on Caroline back in high school was a desperate attempt to get her attention. She was so perfect, so strawberry blond, so well-dressed and groomed. You could signal a rescue helicopter by bouncing sunlight off her teeth. She was just so totally Barbie it made you want to grab and squeeze her to see if she’d squeak. Her mother drove her to school. The bumper sticker on her mother’s car said, “My Child is a National Honor Society Student.”

  I replaced it with one that was almost identical but said, “My Child Has Enormous Ears.”

  And then people were honking and grinning and children were giving her the Dumbo ears with their hands up along the sides of their heads, and Caroline and her mother were thinking they’d made some horrible social blunder like coming out in favor of atheism or something, but then one day Caroline spotted the bumper sticker, and you could hear her outraged cry all the way down the block and across the street, and that would have been the big payoff of my prank, if it had really been a prank an not an adolescent attempt to get her to notice me.

  It didn’t take her long to figure out I’d done it. I’d made no effort to cover my tracks. What’s the fun of a practical joke if no one knows you did it? But after a couple of fits of yelling and shaking her fists at the sky and kicking the bumper of her mother’s car, she went all good-sport on me. She accepted my apology, and I scraped off the bumper sticker. Incredibly, she started smiling at me in the high school hallways. One thing led to another, and she went to the senior prom with me. We fooled around a little, but not too much, in the back seat of my car. I almost asked her to marry me. I couldn’t think of how to put it. I considered a bumper sticker that said, “Marry me, Caroline!” But the moment passed in silence.

  I got into a pretty good college, and she went off to an even better one, and I figured that was that. I would drink tequila and read the Beat poets. Sadder, wiser, world-weary, maybe I’d grow a mustache, but then one day, she was back and asking me out for tea. For tea? Yes, tea, you know tea, in a teahouse, with little cakes, oh, I suppose you could have coffee. No, tea is fine. It’s wonderful to see you again, Caroline. Oh look over there, she said, and I looked, and she put something in my tea. I didn’t see her do it. She told me about it a little later, because what fun is a practical joke if no one knows you
did it?

  She had let her hair grow big around her ears, no more perky ponytails. Nice hair, I said. You mean, thank god you can’t see my huge, ugly ears, she said.

  There is nothing whatever wrong with your ears, Caroline. I love your ears, I said. You’re just saying that, she said. Jesus, I had given her some kind of complex about her ears all those years ago with the bumper sticker.

  Here’s looking at . . . your ears, kid, I said, toasting her with my tea.

  Always the jokes. She turned her head away and then turned back, and I saw there was a black bar over her eyes. She was a photograph of someone you shouldn’t know about. All of the people in the teahouse had black bars over their eyes.

  I see you’re getting it, she said, and the kicker is it’s retroactive!

  And it is so true! I have always seen a black bar over the eyes of everyone! It hasn’t been easy. I am not so much blind as unrecognizing. Nevertheless, I have always loved Caroline’s ears. She has nothing to hide when it comes to her ears.

  Oddly, I also see black bars over the eyes of domesticated animals. Dogs and cats, cows and horses. Ferrets. No mice. What would be the point? Whoever worried about an unidentified mouse?

  A server approaches. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him before because of the black bar over his eyes. You should assume the crash position, he tells us. It’s going to be tricky, but our captain thinks she can set this teahouse down with not so many casualties.

  Later in the smoke and shouting and running on the tarmac, I lose track of Caroline. No, no, I tell the rescue helicopter, I’ve got to find Caroline. Is that you? Is that you? I can see that might be you, because you are a woman of a certain width and depth and height, and your hair has red highlights that are subtly reflected an octave higher in your fingernails and an octave lower in your toenails. Nice knees. If you were Caroline, I could see you wearing that frilly white top, that pale green skirt, those brown sandals, that green glass bracelet on your left wrist.