Pete Hamill - Forever

“They’re gonna take everything we love right out of the world, Cormac,” says Healey, his walk slower, his face rippling with emotion. “They’ll put a fucking Starbucks in here, wait and see. With waitresses right out of Area Code 800. Women from NOWHERE. Wactresses, waiting for the BIG BREAK, not waitresses. ”

Their legs take them south, as if there were concentric rings of time and eventually they’ll find their way to 1947, when Mary’s opened, selling eggs and jelly doughnuts to politicians from City Hall. But it’s all Duane Reade and Staples and Gap, flying the flags of globalization. Stockbrokers move in urgent waves from the subways and PATH trains in the World Trade Center, crossing Church Street, heading for Wall, right up past Brooks Brothers, all of them carrying the Times or the Wall Street Journal, and briefcases full of anxiety. Healey and Cormac watch them as if they are part of a movie, and then wander toward the Twin Towers.

“If all these business guys are going to their offices,” Healey says, “there must be some room for US.” They turn at a sign marked Cortlandt Street, which is no longer a street but only a marker erected at the plaza. “I mean, there’s gotta be a COFFEE shop, where you can sit down, and make remarks.” Cormac thinks: I lived on this street once, and then they shoveled it into landfill. They find a door and descend on an escalator into the vast concourse of the underground mall, looking at the strained faces on the packed stairs of the up escalator.

Then, in the concourse, Cormac sees a woman he is certain is Delfina. Coming up out of the N&R trains. There are hundreds of people moving around one another, and he has only a glimpse. It’s her hair. Her skin color. His stomach flips. She’s here, not in the Dominican Republic. She made up a lie. He excuses himself to Healey, then hurries after the woman, calls, “Delfina. ” The woman turns. It’s not Delfina.

He goes back to find Healey in the swirling morning crowds, standing in front of a Florsheim’s shoe store.

“What’s with YOU?”

“I thought she was someone else.”

“That Latin chick?” Healey says.

He looks at Cormac, who mumbles, and then he shakes his head and says, “Fucked up, man. Fucked up.”

Now Cormac feels time expanding, contracting, then expanding once again. His narrative has stalled. Through the pages of the Light, he keeps track of the separate journeys of the Warrens, while Delfina is off on her own journey, about which nobody writes. Elizabeth is photographed in an African village, and then meeting with a U.N. investigator, and then at a hospital. Adopting a “letter to the reader” format not seen since the Hearsts abandoned New York in the 1960s, Warren writes his impressions of Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac and Silvio Berlusconi, their concerns about the missile defense shield, about the threats of terrorism spreading from the streets of Tel Aviv to all of Europe, the problems of immigrants, or the need to create a humane form of globalization. Warren writes, or dictates, articles on peace in Northern Ireland and how it could be a model for peace in the Middle East, each article running with a photograph of Warren shaking hands with the leading politicians. The pieces are tedious, written in the flat prose of a ghostwriter, but from them Cormac knows where Willie Warren has been, if not where he is. He feels like a burglar from the 1950s, studying the society columns to find out whose apartments were empty on Park Avenue.

Delfina calls collect late in the evening of the second day after she leaves. The connection is bad, with gaps in words, and blurred by a parallel nonstop conversation in Spanish that he can hear from a separate line.

“I’ve been trying every which way to get a number for you,” he says, trying to be cheerful. “I even called Reynoso and Ryan, but Reynoso is out of town too.”

“I’m okay,” she says. “My aunt picked me up at the airport and got me here. It’s out in the boonies. I’m calling from a neighbor’s house.” Static and interference. Then: “My father’s still alive. But quién sabes, mi amor. Hey, I’ll try to find a better phone and call you tomorrow….”

She doesn’t call.

Elizabeth does. She’s back in town. Can he come to dinner?

It’s the eve of the first weekend in September. On his Thursday walk, taken around noon, he sees the streets emptying, as the city evacuates for Labor Day. Buses groan uptown on Church Street, loaded with passengers for Staten Island and New Jersey. Taxis push their way to Penn Station, Grand Central, or the Port Authority bus terminal, and he sees men and women waiting on corners with black wheeled suitcases, waving frantically for someone, anyone, to stop and take them away.

Above him, the sky is tossing, the clouds scudding and turbulent before the power of an emptying wind. Down at the Battery clouds assemble into a white horse, complete with rider. He thinks: New York 1 should add an Omen Report. With a Portent Index. And a Death Chill Factor. He stares for a long while as the clouds unravel and blow to the east.

He naps and dreams great shuddering dreams that he can’t remember when he comes awake. Through the skylight, out past the towers, the clouds are now arranged like a stallion. The Black Horseman of famine. And then a shift of wind, and the dying sun colors the horseman red. The Red Horseman of war. Which then bleaches into the Pale Horseman of pestilence and death. Joined to the White Horseman of the afternoon, they warn of strange births and terrible deaths, ruinous storms, conflict and rage, the season of Apocalypse. Are they forming over New York for the first time, or were they drawn by Albrecht Dürer half a millennium ago? Yeats would have read those clouds.

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Which Bill Tweed would answer with another question: What are you gonna do about it?

He sees a light blinking on the answering machine. He plays the lone message.

“It’s me,” Delfina says, her voice wavering across the miles. “I had a terrible time getting through to you. Sorry, mi vida. Everything’s okay with me, but they don’t think my father can last the night. I’ll let you know as soon as I can come home. Check the e-mail too. Love ya.”

That’s all. The crisp message of someone using someone else’s telephone, at long-distance rates. A voice that’s at once concrete and vague, but alive.

And then he feels a green worm move in his heart. Suppose this is a game? Suppose she is lying? Suppose she never left New York? Just because the woman in the Trade Center concourse was not Delfina, that doesn’t mean she’s not somewhere else in the city. He calls her number. In English and Spanish, she says she has gone on a short trip out of town, on family business, and should be home by Labor Day, please leave a message. Cormac relaxes and curses himself for an adolescent fool. But the worm still gnaws. He glances at the clock. Almost six. He calls her office and asks for Mr. Reynoso. “Sorry, he’s out of town until after Labor Day. Would you like to leave a message?” No, he says, I’ll call after the holiday.

He checks e-mail, but there are no messages from Delfina, and he thinks: I’d better read Stendhal tonight. I’m too old for this shit.

The doorman looks at Cormac as if he’s a jewel thief. Standing in the vestibule, the doorman is like a remnant of the Hapsburg Empire, all gold braid and buttons on a field of royal blue, and in the great tradition of doormen, he has adopted the haughty manners of his masters. He fixes his hooded eyes on Cormac while he calls the penthouse. The clock behind him says 8:15. Back turned, he murmurs into the house phone, then hangs up.