Pete Hamill - Forever

But it does not topple. The high floors, above the crack, above the flames, right themselves, and then they all come down in a straight line. Floor hitting floor hitting floor, like pancakes from a machine. There’s a sound of an avalanche. A glass and steel avalanche. With some high-pitched sound that must be the meshed screams of a thousand human beings. The sound of impact is so loud it shuts down Cormac’s hearing. And in that sudden silence he sees the Cloud begin to rise from the empty space.

He knows that the Cloud is made of pulverized carpet, desks, computers, artwork, paper, flowers, breakfasts, shoes, umbrellas, briefcases, mirrors, doors, counters, toilets, tons and tons and tons of concrete, and thousands of human beings. He knows this: The nouns skitter through his mind; but he can’t absorb it. He glances at the North Tower, still burning, still sending smoke into the sky, while a helicopter lurches through the sky behind it. Delfina. Oh, baby.

The Cloud is now rising like some angry genie. So opaque it looks like a solid. Like some new creature. Some devouring god released from the ruptured earth. Animated by those who have just died. By those who flew that airplane. And by those who lived here when Cormac was young. Up out of Cortlandt Street, up out of the rotting timbers of the house where he once lived. Writhing with power and dirtiness. Coming at them. Coming to take them too.

Cops ram into them, into Cormac and the others, cops running from the Cloud, cops looking for foxholes. One grabs the Japanese woman and hurls her toward Broadway. “Run ,” he shouts, “run run run run. ” Others push into the lobby of 20 Vesey Street. Cormac starts to run toward Broadway too, trips over something in the street, falls. And like a whirlwind the Cloud comes down upon him.

The world vanishes. There’s no horizon. No floor. No sky. No limits. No exit. He hears voices within the Cloud. Men screaming. Noooooooooooooo. Women screaming. Noooooooooo. Names called. Nancy. Mary. Freddie. Harold. Enrique. And then a mixture, male and female: Noooooooooooooooooo. A high-pitched chorus of the dead. Calling to husbands and wives and lovers. Shouting farewells to children. Reduced to powder. Then, rising above them all, in the dense dry powdery heart of the Cloud, he can hear the meshed voices of weeping women. Dead of smallpox and typhus and cholera. Dead of gunshots and knife wounds. Dead in childbirth. Dead of shame and loneliness. Calling from the unburied past, from the injured earth, from landfill and ruined wooden houses and splintered ships, from vanished decades and lost centuries. A chorus. Symphonic and soaring, the voices of the New York Götterdämmerung.

Then receding echoes.

Then silence.

When the Cloud settles, the world has turned white. The color of death to the Africans who once lived here. A fine white dust covers the graveyard of St. Paul’s and the steeple of the chapel. It covers the street and sidewalks of Vesey Street. It covers the police cars. It covers the small wheel of the first doomed airliner and the blood of the woman who must have been killed by it. Up toward Broadway he can see the building on Park Row where J&R Music has its stores. It’s white. So are the buildings on Ann Street. The Cloud has coated them all.

He looks at the emerging stump of the South Tower, black and jagged through the wind-tossed dust. Smoke still pours from the high floors of the North Tower. He knows that it soon will come down too. Carrying all with it. No sound drifts through the white air. Not a sob, a whimper, or a prayer. And then, away off, he hears sirens. He moves east.

Broadway is white and City Hall Park is white and City Hall itself is white, and then he sees people moving lumpily through the white landscape, and they’re white too. Black men and black women are white. Mexicans and Dominicans and Chinese: all white. They move like stragglers from a defeated army. Like refugees. Coated with white powder. All heading north. Alive.

Cormac joins them. If Delfina escaped, if she’s alive, coated white, she’ll head for Duane Street. She would believe that Cormac must be there. Broadway is covered with the powder, which is fine and slippery, like the powder used on babies. He sees hundreds of women’s shoes, kicked off so that women could run faster on bare feet. Two school buses, coated with dust, are at the curb near Park Place, with nurses offering water and help. He looks inside for Delfina. She’s not in either bus, although some children are huddled together in each of them, while a policewoman tries to calm them and get them moving. He sees movement in the interiors of shops and hurries over to peer inside, but Delfina isn’t in any of them. That’s when he first glimpses himself in a mirror: completely white. His tongue is dusty, his nostrils clogged. He tries the cell phone again. No sound at all. At Chambers Street, dozens of people are lined up to use a pay phone. Delfina isn’t one of them. He waits for a few minutes on the northeast corner, not far from the Tweed Court-house, hoping she will come along in the stunned line of survivors. She doesn’t.

Then he hears the roar of the North Tower coming down. Above the building where Mary’s once served laughter and breakfast, he glimpses the upper floors and the television antenna vanishing, feels the ground shudder from the impact of a million tons of pancaking floors, all of it coming down beyond the view from Chambers Street, carrying with it Windows on the World, and uncountable stockbrokers, and the offices of Reynoso & Ryan. All vanished. And then, after a few seconds, he sees the second cloud.

This one is wilder, denser, angrier than the first cloud. It rises over the buildings, extending a thousand arms, rumbling up Murray Street and Warren Street toward City Hall, recombining on Broadway, engulfing every puny human before it, rising high when it hits an obstacle, a parked police car, a hot dog vendor’s cart, a park bench, then, filled with the screams of dead souls, rolls on its furious path until it settles on the southern border of the Five Points. At the vanished ridge of the Collect. At the hanging ground. On the graves of the Irish and the Africans.

In the shocked stillness, a flock of birds, confused and stunned, races across the sky from Park Row toward the Hudson, then turns back toward Brooklyn. Away from the whiteness. Away from doom.

And now people are running again, dozens of them, then hundreds. They abandon the pay phones. They burst out of the shops where they’ve found shelter. They run in a chaotic wave up Broadway past the federal buildings, past the police cars and the ambulances, racing toward Canal Street and the city beyond. There’s no emotion on their whitened faces. Cormac sees no blood. But they run. Everything else can wait.

He hurries down Duane Street, hoping Delfina will be waiting at his door.

She isn’t.

Even here, seven blocks from the North Tower, the walls are white with dust and ash and death.

There are five calls on the answering machine. The first is from Delfina. “Hey, it’s me. Call me back at work.” Cheer in her voice. A call made before the airplanes. Before the horror. He skips past the voices of Healey and Elizabeth. Each has called twice. There is no other call from Delfina.

He peels off his clothes and steps into the shower, rinsing his eyes, scrubbing away the white powder, shampooing his hair. He can hear the screams now, but his ears feel stuffed and muffled. He dries himself and pulls on a bathrobe that smells vaguely of Delfina. He plays the answering machine again.

Delfina’s last tape. Then Healey (grave and straight): “Hey, you got the TV set on? Put it on, man.” Then Elizabeth. “Call me.” Followed by a click. Then Healey, very gently: “Hey, man, you okay? Call me at 310-265-1000.” Then Elizabeth, hysterical: “Cormac, he was there, in the goddamned tower, in that Windows on the World place. Willie was there! And the fire was below him, and the building just went down! Oh, my God.”