“That’s what they want you to believe. And who says Pearl Harbor wasn’t a setup?”
They’re actually discussing this? “Forget doing it to your own people, why would anybody do this to their own economy?”
“You never heard of ‘You’ve got to spend money to make money’? Tithing back to the dark gods of capitalism.”
Then something occurs to Maxine. “March, that DVD of Reg’s, the Stinger missile . . .”
“I know. We got snookered.”
• • •
THE PHONE RINGS. “Are you all right?”
Asshole. What the fuck does he care? Not a voice she’s been that anxious to hear from. In the background a bureaucratic pandemonium, ringing phones, lower pay grades being verbally abused, shredders working full-time.
“Who’s this again?”
“You want to talk, you’ve got my number.” Windust hangs up. “Talk,” does that mean “fuck”? Wouldn’t surprise her, that level of desperation, of course, there have to exist losers who would actually use the tragedy unfolding downtown to get laid on the cheap, and no reason Windust as she’s come to know him couldn’t be one.
Still no word from Horst. She tries not to worry, to believe her own pitch to the boys, but she’s worried. Late that night, after they’re in bed, she sits awake in front of the tube, nodding off, being wakened by microdreams of somebody coming in the door, nodding off again.
Sometime during the night, Maxine dreams she’s a mouse who’s been running at large inside the walls of a vast apartment building she understands is the U.S., venturing out into kitchens and pantries to scavenge for food, scuffling but free, and in these small hours she has been attracted by what she recognizes as a sort of humane mousetrap yet cannot resist the bait, not traditional peanut butter or cheese but something more from the gourmet section, pate or truffles maybe, and the moment she steps into the enticing little structure, her simple body weight is enough to unlatch a spring-loaded door that closes, not that loudly, behind her, and is impossible to open again. She finds herself inside a multilevel event space of some kind, at a gathering, maybe a party, full of unfamiliar faces, fellow mice, but no longer exactly, or only, mice. She understands that this place is a holding pen between freedom in the wild and some other unimagined environment into which, one by one, each of them will be released, and that this can only be analogous to death and afterdeath.
And wants desperately to wake up. And once she’s awake to be someplace else, even a meretricious geeks’ paradise like DeepArcher.
She gets out of bed, sweating, looks in to find the boys snoring away, drifts into the kitchen, stands staring at the fridge like it’s a television set that will tell her something she needs to know. She hears sound from the spare room. Trying not to hope, not to hyperventilate, she tiptoes in and there yes it’s Horst, snoring in front of his BioPiX channel, alone of all channels tonight not providing twenty-four hour coverage of the disaster, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world to be alive, and home.
• • •
“DENVER WON IT 31–20. I fell asleep on Jake’s couch. Sometime in the night, I woke up, couldn’t get back to sleep right away.” So strange down there, Battery Park at night. Made Horst think of the night before Christmas when he was a kid. Santa Claus up there invisible, on route, someplace up in that sky. So quiet. Except for Jake snoring in the bedroom. And that neighborhood, even when you can’t see the Trade Center towers, you feel them, felt them, like somebody in an elevator shouldering up against you. And out in the sunlight the soaring hazy aluminum presence . . .
Next morning all hell’s broken loose outside, by the time Jake remembers where the coffee is and Horst puts the news on the tube, there’s sirens, helicopters, all through the neighborhood, pretty soon they notice people out the window, heading for the water, figure it might be a good idea to join them. Tugboats, ferries, private boats, pulling in, taking people out from the yacht basin, all on their own, amazing coordination of effort, “I don’t think anybody was in charge, they just came in and did it. I ended up over in Jersey. Some motel.”
“Your kind of place.”
“The television didn’t work too good. Nothing on but news updates.”
“So if you guys hadn’t decided to sleep in . . .”
“Back in the pits, I used to know this Christer coffee trader who told me it was like grace, something you don’t ask for. Just comes. Of course it can also be withdrawn at any time. Like when I always knew which way to bet on Eurodollars. The times we shorted Amazon, got out of Lucent when it went to $70 a share, remember? It wasn’t me that ever ‘knew’ anything. But something did. Sudden couple extra lines of brain code, who knows. I just followed along.”
“But then . . . if it was that same weird talent that kept you safe . . .”
“How could it be? How could predicting market behavior be the same as predicting a terrible disaster?”
“If the two were different forms of the same thing.”
“Way too anticapitalist for me, babe.”
Later he reflects, “You always had me figured for some kind of idiot savant, you were the one with the street smarts, the wised-up practical one, and I was just some stiff with a gift, who didn’t deserve to be so lucky.” First time he’s said this to her in person, though it’s a pitch he’s made more than once to an imaginary ex-wife, alone at night in hotel rooms in the U.S. and abroad, where sometimes the television speaks in languages he doesn’t know any more of than he needs to get around, the room service always brings him somebody else’s food, which he has learned to go along with in a spirit of adventurous curiosity, reminding himself that he would otherwise never have experienced, say, blackened alligator casserole with fried pickles or sheep’s-eyeball pizza. Daytime business for him is duck soup (which they also brought him once, for breakfast, in Urumqi) with no connection he can clearly see to the other, the backstreets of the day, the 3:00 AM retranslations appropriate to fear of unwelcome dreams, the unreadable vistas of city shadow out the windows. Poisonous blue masses he doesn’t want to see but keeps drawing back the drapes a little to blink through at for as long as he has to. As if something is happening out there he mustn’t miss.
• • •
NEXT DAY AS MAXINE and the boys are heading out to Kugelblitz, “Mind if I come along?” sez Horst.
Sure. Maxine notices other sets of parents, some who haven’t spoken for years, showing up together to escort their children, regardless of age or latchkey status, safely to and from. Headmaster Winterslow is there on the stoop, greeting everybody one by one. Grave and courtly and for once refraining from educated speech. He is touching people, squeezing shoulders, hugging, holding hands. In the lobby is a table with sign-up sheets for volunteer work down at the site of the atrocity. Everybody is still walking around stunned, having spent the previous day sitting or standing in front of television screens, at home, in bars, at work, staring like zombies, unable in any case to process what they were seeing. A viewing population brought back to its default state, dumbstruck, undefended, scared shitless.
• • •
ON HER WEBLOG, March Kelleher has wasted no time shifting into what she calls her old-lefty tirade mode. “Just to say evil Islamics did it, that’s so lame, and we know it. We see those official close-ups on the screen. The shifty liar’s look, the twelve-stepper’s gleam in the eye. One look at these faces and we know they’re guilty of the worst crimes we can imagine. But who’s in any hurry to imagine? To make the awful connection? Any more than Germans were back in 1933, when Nazis torched the Reichstag within a month of Hitler becoming chancellor. Which of course is not at all to suggest that Bush and his people have actually gone out and staged the events of 11 September. It would take a mind hopelessly diseased with paranoia, indeed a screamingly anti-American nutcase, even to allow to cross her mind the possibility that that terrible day could have deliberately been engineered as a pretext to impose some endless Orwellian ‘war’ and the emergency decrees we will soon be living under. Nah, nah, perish that thought.
