Pete Hamill - Forever

Cormac turns on CNN, which is full of pictures of the burning towers, and running people, and the collapse. He switches back and forth, from network to network, to New York 1. While reports flood in, he calls Healey, gets a machine in his hotel room, leaves a message that he’s okay. He doesn’t call Elizabeth. But he feels a surge of pity for Willie Warren. Cormac thinks: The world is truly nuts. Last night, I wanted to murder him and didn’t. I walked away from his house thinking he would live for decades. Long after any possible crossing into the Otherworld. And here on a bright Tuesday morning in September, a dozen hours later, he’s probably dead. There is no family vow that can now be fulfilled on this island.

He tries Delfina. The machine at home. Nothing on the cell phone.

A grave television reporter is saying that nobody yet knows the numbers of the dead but they could be in the many thousands. Talking heads take turns offering theories, while the screen splits, showing the towers falling, showing people in the streets. He studies each image, looking for Delfina, while the talking heads talk. Surely it was terrorists. Surely it was Osama bin Laden. A terrible day for America. More casualties than Pearl Harbor, more than D Day, more than the Titanic . Now on the screen: the mayor, with his commissioners, their faces masked by inhalators, all of them grave and restrained. Cormac switches to MSNBC and then New York 1 again, to each of the networks. The same. More and more of the same. Talk of survivors. Talk of the loss of hundreds of firemen. And details about the Pentagon being hit, with hundreds dead, and another plane down in the fields of Pennsylvania, after a possible fight by passengers against hijackers. A canned piece on Bin Laden. Much about terrorists and the attack on the Trade Center in 1993, and the embassies in Africa, and the U.S.S. Cole, and the trails that lead to Afghanistan. Clearly it’s terrorists. Clearly it’s an act of war. All played against the astonishing images: the black planes, the tendrils of smoke, the collapse of each tower, and the Cloud that followed each, as if hunting down the survivors. He studies the crowd scenes. Looking for one face.

He leaves the volume on, very loud, while he dresses in jeans and denim shirt and boots. He keeps flexing his jaw, trying to open his cottony ears. Then an announcer gets excited, as another building goes down. Live. Just behind the post office. Number 7 World Trade, where the mayor had his crisis center. A smaller building this time, and a smaller cloud, like chamber music pitted against a symphony. More shots of people running from the Cloud, this time up Greenwich Street. Cormac squints at the new images, looking for Delfina. She’s not there either.

Then the TV goes abruptly black, the sound ends in midsentence. The lights go off. Power gone. He pockets the cell phone, slips a portable radio into his shirt pocket, tuned to an all-news station, takes a thousand dollars in fifties and twenties from a wall safe, locks up, and goes down to the street.

She’s out here somewhere. He’s sure of that. He has to find her.

In his search for her, Cormac tries to be methodical and careful. If she is under the twisted steel and rubble, there is no hope. But before the power failed, the television news was encouraging. The airliner had crashed into the ninety-first floor, destroying the stairwells (or so the anchormen theorized), setting off the fire, almost certainly dooming everybody above the flames. From those floors, Cormac had seen men and women jumping into eternity. But several thousand people below the flames in the North Tower had made it down the many flights of stairs to the street. Delfina’s office was on the eighty-fourth floor. There was footage of these people bursting out of the building, gasping for air, and of police and firemen urging them to run. Cormac saw some of them. He knows now that he must act on faith: She ran out with them.

As he moves through emptied streets, starting as close to the burning stumps as possible, moving first east, then west, combing the grid for signs of her, he assaults himself with questions. If that boy lives in her, would she have accepted easy death? Never. She’d have killed to live. How would he have behaved if he’d been on that eighty-fourth floor? Would he have chosen death from roaring flames or the emptiness of the air? Perhaps, for the jumpers, the final leap wasn’t even a choice. It was driven by the flames. And for Cormac? For decades, death has been his goal. Not death by his own hand. Not death through the violence of others. The sweet, consoling death that completes life. If there had been time, how would he have chosen?

He walks the white darkness of John Street, smelling the river on whose shore he arrived long ago, plus a new odor, rising from the ruined towers: burning steel and desks and carpets and paint and food and files and human flesh. Sheets of paper still drift through the sky like giant snowflakes. He sees the orange glow and remembers Diamond screaming as he was charred on the Common. The odor of Diamond’s roasted flesh was a stench he never smelled again, not even during the fires that came later. Now it has returned, multiplied by many thousands.

He imagines himself now in the North Tower above the flames, holding Delfina’s hand. She wants to dive into the sky. And she calls on Oshun, goddess of river waters. “Save us,” she calls to the emptiness. “Save us both and save the boy.” They jump. And the river goddess sends zephyrs of cool air, lifting them together above the fire, beyond the smoke, beyond the circling helicopters, beyond all harm. Why could that not have happened? After all, I am a man once saved by the river gods. Bumped through a black night while the tides took the Earl of Warren. In the grainy black air above the burning city, Delfina might have found confirmation of all she believed. Or learned a terrible lesson about the whimsy of the gods. Thinking this, imagining it, he hears a cynical New York ensemble from the streets below, a piano tinkling in a slow honky-tonk style, Bill Tweed leading the chorus: He flies through the airWit’ da greatest of ease…

And laughs grimly at himself.

He is, after all, here on the ground, alive on his own streets, not performing on the perilous stages of the Bowery Theater. At Murray Street, where all is white from powder, he sees a lone Chinese teenager pedaling a bicycle, a kid in a Stuyvesant High School jacket. He waves him down and buys the bike for three hundred dollars, including the chain and padlock. The kid takes the money and runs, as they used to say, like a thief. Cormac needs the bike if he is to make any time. Delfina, show me your face. Show me your golden skin. Protect that boy who is not yet here. The subways are shut down. There are no buses running below Fourteenth Street. Blue police barriers are being erected everywhere against cars and taxis. The tunnels are sealed. On the transistor, CBS reports hundreds of survivors walking across bridges to Brooklyn and Queens or trudging many miles uptown. Like refugees walking away from napalm in Vietnam, from killers in Armenia and Macedonia, from bombs in Kosovo and Cambodia and a thousand other places Cormac has never seen.

The boy will live in safety. He will read ten thousand books. He will play basketball in playgrounds. He will live in this city, in its plural streets, in its magic. He will gaze at the Woolworth Building. He will dance with many women. He will never trudge to a refugee camp. He will not shoot guns at strangers.

Cormac moves more quickly on the bicycle, slowed only by the slippery fine powder on the streets. A policeman, grungy with ash, tells him that NYU Downtown is closed. “They’re taking the hurt people to Stuyvesant, or Saint Vincent’s. You know where they are?” Yes, Cormac says, I know where they are, and thanks, man. “Be careful,” the cop says. “Who knows what’s next?”