Pete Hamill - Forever

Then he hears the sound of an engine. He turns right, smothering a yawn, and sees a jetliner moving south above the river. Coming very fast toward the North Tower. An airplane that looks black against the brightness of morning. Moving on Delfina. And their unborn son. Roaring straight at the tower. Small and black and flying with purpose.

“You fucking idiot!” Cormac shouts into the wind. “Turn! Turn! ”

As it smashes brutally into the north face of the tower.

He runs down Church Street, punching buttons on the cell phone, shouting into its deadness, gazing up at the streaming black smoke. The smoke is billowing violently now, trailing south in the hard wind, a long dark diagonal that throws immense black faces against the sky, and gigantic black horses. At Park Place, he can see orange flames erupting from a high floor. What floor? The eighty-fourth floor? He can’t tell, can’t pause to count. If the tower is one hundred and ten stories, it would be easier to count from the top down. How many stories? Can’t tell. Some kind of facade is in the way. A steel grille he’s never noticed. And what if the plane crashed below the eighty-fourth floor? Could she get down? Can she reach the roof? Can helicopters lift people to safety?

The television antenna on the roof now looks like a standard without a flag. The stream of smoke is moving to the Narrows, over the Verrazano, moving remorselessly south. Sirens split the air. The sounds of Mayday. The soundtrack of emergency. Police cruisers, fire engines, ambulances. Hundreds of coatless people are running north, waved on by policemen, their faces stunned and blank, while others run east and south. High above the street, sheets of paper move gently in the blackening air, like snowflakes. Again, Cormac dials Delfina’s cell phone. Gets a whining sound. Dials again. Gets nothing. Dials his own number on Duane Street. Nothing.

At the corner of Vesey Street the giant wheel of an airliner lies on its side, four feet high, its housing ripped and torn and scorched. Beside it is the body of a heavy black woman, blood flowing from a hole in her head, and an ambulance crew works frantically to save her. Newspaper photographers are leaping from cars, green press cards flapping from chains, looking down at the black woman, up at the burning North Tower, shooting and shooting and shooting. The smoke is streaming, while atomized glass rains down from the smoke. Cops bark orders. Dozens of firemen trudge into the lobby of the North Tower. A cop shoves Cormac back, shouting: “Get the fuck out of here. Now! ”

And then he hears the sound of another airliner, roaring from the south, unseen behind the North Tower. Everyone around him looks up too: cops, firemen, ambulance drivers, newspaper photographers, civilians rushing out of the North Tower. Sirens screaming. They sense that the second airliner is following the streaming smoke as if it were a beacon. Then, for a fraction of a second, they glimpse it: small, black, looking puny as a wasp as it aims itself at the South Tower.

Lower than the first. A woman screams. Then another. Then a black man beside Cormac says, “Oh, shit, man.”

The world freezes.

Cormac feels all of time leave him.

And then the second airliner smashes into the South Tower with a ferocious orange explosion. Cormac can’t move. Burning fuel erupts from three sides of the tower, a third of the way down from the roof. In a kind of erupting orange counterpoint to the streaming black smoke of the North Tower. As if this pilot were trumping the first. And Cormac knows, along with everyone else, that this is no accident. Knows it’s not some spectacular replay of the plane that crashed through fog into the Empire State Building in 1945. Knows that both planes have been aimed at the towers like missiles. Knows that the madmen are here. Knows without thinking that they’ve come from across the planet, from blasted deserts, from the ruins of Acre, from the road to Medina, from Saladin. He can hear the death calls. Death to crusaders. Death to infidels. He can hear the orgasmic scream of Allah Akhbar!

There’s a moment of absolute silence, and then the street is loud with screaming shouting running. Cormac rushes toward the lobby of the North Tower, but the same cop grabs his arm and turns him. “How many fuckin’ times I gotta tell you, pal? Get the fuck out of here. This ain’t over!” He heaves Cormac toward the giant wheel, he bounces off its hard rubber, and another cop hurls him into Vesey Street. To face the burning towers. On Cormac’s left is St. Paul’s Chapel, with its ancient graveyard, its tombstones smoothed blank by weather and years. The place where Washington prayed after his inauguration, and Cormac stood on Broadway, watching him leave. Behind him, next to a coffee shop masked by the rigging of rehabbers, is 20 Vesey Street, where he worked for nine years as a reporter for the Evening Post . On what he then thought was a high floor. The fifth.

Now he gazes at the coal-colored plumes of smoke rising into the wind from the North Tower, and he tries again to count floors. Delfina, please come down from there, go down the stairwells, follow the firemen out. One ten, one nine, one eight… Then, above the orange flames, he sees people. Moving dots behind the steel grille. Above the orange flames. Waving shirts and hands as signs of life. Surely gasping for air. Surely feeling as if condemned to ovens. Not the ovens of the twentieth century. Not Auschwitz. No barked commands of Arbeit macht frei . New ovens, created without blueprints. Here in New York. Where fire attacks steel and oxygen at a few thousand degrees above zero. And he sees that the people are being pushed by the heat of the ovens to the edge of that high floor. Is it eighty-four? Above eighty-four? Below? One hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight … There they are: tiny figures: men indistinguishable from women: voiceless at this distance: beyond help: beyond helicopters: without parachutes: beyond salvation.

He tries the cell phone again.

“Forget it, buddy,” a uniformed cop says. “They’re all out of order.”

Cormac knows he’s right. He lights a cigarette with a trembling hand.

And then sees the first man jump. From a floor above the flames of the North Tower. Shirtless. Faceless at that height. White skin. Tumbling and tumbling and tumbling through the indifferent air. Then vanishing behind the building where Cormac used to buy books at Borders. Gone. Like that.

And here comes another. And another. And then a couple. A man and a woman. Holding hands. Her skirt billowing above her pale thighs.

Then gone.

“I make that fourteen,” the cop says.

More cops arrive, walking backward, all of them young, gazing wide-eyed at the burning towers. “They just hit the fucking Pentagon,” one of them says. “I swear. The Pentagon!” They look at Cormac, who has been joined by an older reporter, a Japanese woman, a young photographer, and they gesture to them to move back. Are you people outta your minds? They spread yellow crime scene tape across the aluminum poles of the rigging. Get back! Get the fuck back! Under the rigging, a coffee shop. Two Mexicans inside, stoic, unmoving. In the gutter, Cormac sees a puddle of coagulating blood, thickening with purple ridges. Along with an unopened bottle of V-8 Splash and a cheese Danish still wrapped in cellophane, and a single high-heeled woman’s shoe. Come down, Delfina. Go to the street. Run. And there, in the middle of Vesey Street: a smaller wheel from the first airplane. The wheel that must have hit the woman whose shoe lay next to the blood. She must have died before breakfast. Come down.

And then his eyes catch movement at the top of the South Tower, above the glossy orange flames. It’s pitching forward. A cracking sound. Oh. It’s tipping at an angle, aimed for Church Street, for Century 21, for Brooks Brothers. Oh oh oh. He hears a scream, another, a chorus of screams, and then the tower begins to come down.