Pete Hamill - Forever

Back at home, he lights three candles. He wishes he could wrap himself in a coat of many colors. He tries the cell phone again and hears only the void. Where is Kongo? he thinks. Where the fuck is Kongo? And where are you, Delfina?

In the morning, his ears are unplugged, but his body aches. Lying there, nothing about Tuesday seems real. Was this another act of New York theater, a working of the mad imagination? He hears the roof door banging, left unlocked when he ran to the street to find Delfina. He goes upstairs in a bathrobe. The skylight is sprayed with ash. Ash and powder have entered the loft from the open door, to gather in drifts an inch deep, and when he gazes out across the rooftop, his heart trips. The towers are gone. He saw them falling, but now he sees how completely they have disappeared. From the place they once occupied, a long black pennant of smoke drifts toward Brooklyn. And the air is heavy with the odor.

There are no birds in the Wednesday sky. Not even a raven. He remembers seeing the first airplane, the simplicity of its path, and then glimpsing the second. Each pilot heading for a city he did not know. Each heading for this dense and layered, most human of all places. Each heading here to kill thousands and find Paradise. Heading for Delfina, and all those others they did not know.

Then he sobs. He whispers, “You lousy fuckers.” He holds a chimney to steady himself, and his body is wracked with tears for the ruined world.

He thinks: I want to go. More than ever before, I want to flee the world.

Except for this: I cannot go until I find Delfina.

Routine is created as he makes his rounds. There is still nothing to discover at Stuyvesant or St. Vincent’s, no civilians, no wounded. He has added the sword to the backpack, the blade at an angle, the handle rising out of the top and covered with a towel. He thinks he might need it, since the cops are all dealing with the emergency and the bad guys will soon be back on the streets. He sees no bad guys, only crowds cheering as fire trucks go by, and accuses himself of paranoia. He has breakfast in Healey’s new favorite coffee shop on Twenty-third Street, his arms full of newspapers. The unemployed dot-commers are packed into booths. He uses the pay phone to call various casualty hotlines. Sorry, nobody by that name. He calls Delfina’s number too. No answer. He calls Elba from the third floor, and Delfina is not yet home (but the whole building is praying for her). Now Cormac knows what everyone else must know, what the mayor meant when he said about the numbers that they would be more than anyone could bear. Nobody who was in those towers when they came down would be found alive.

In every newspaper, starting on page eight of the tabloids, he sees Warren’s face. He was one of the best-known people at breakfast in Windows on the World on Tuesday morning. A businessmen’s alliance breakfast, a clean-up-the-city breakfast. The stories don’t say he’s dead. He is just among the missing. But even his own newspaper writes about him in the past tense. The New York Times uses a handsome portrait by Richard Avedon, from a profile in The New Yorker . There are pictures taken at openings, including one from the show at the Metropolitan. Most of them include Elizabeth. The Daily News runs two photographs of her taken on Tuesday afternoon, one leaving the apartment house on Fifth Avenue, the other, her back to the camera, peering south from the Chambers Street Bridge at the burning ruins. The second was at dusk on Tuesday. The Post was also on the bridge, and their photo shows her with a scarf covering the lower part of her face, as if wearing a burka . The scarf turned into a filter against the ash and the odor. As always, she looks beautiful. And in the Post photograph, stricken. And to Cormac, detached. She has nothing to say to reporters except, “I’m so sorry for everybody.”

After his long day’s journey, and an evening patrol, Cormac comes home in the dark. There are still no lights. Duane Street is black and empty, although Church Street is now full of hard, bright imported lights and out-of-state police cars and a holding pen for the media and a long line of heavy vehicles pointed south. He thinks: They are already organized, they know what they are doing, they are doing it better than any other city could have done it. He enters Duane Street from the Broadway side and finds himself whistling the Coleman Hawkins version of “Body and Soul.” The last whistler on Duane Street. The only man in all of the wounded city who is whistling. “ I long for you, for you, dear, only…” He gets off the bicycle and fumbles for keys, his eyes sore from the poisoned air. He wants to be rid of the weight of the sword. He wants bed. Some drops of soft rain begin to fall. He thinks: Rain will help. Rain will clean the air. Rain will cool the molten steel. Rain will chill the burning bodies.

Then he sees Kongo.

He’s squatting low in the doorway, a cape turning him into a dense black triangle. He stands up slowly.

“Do you still want to go?” he says.

Cormac knows what he means. He pauses, weary, exhausted, without much residue of hope.

“Yes.”

“You don’t sound as certain as you did.”

“How can I go without finding the woman? I need to find her. I can’t go without that.”

He looks toward Church Street, hearing the unseen muffled voices, the grinding of gears. Kongo sighs. A siren wails.

“You couldn’t kill this fellow Warren.”

“True.”

“That was the sign of a merciful man,” he says, and smiles. “And after all, his death was your duty, not ours.”

“They were always together in my mind, like the East River and the Hudson, coming out in the harbor,” Cormac says. “But you’re right, of course. You’re right. And now it doesn’t matter. The man, Warren, was in one of the towers, above the fires. It’s in all the newspapers. He’s surely dead.”

Kongo looks at him.

“You can leave this world tonight.”

“Not without seeing Delfina.”

“I know where she is,” he says.

They use both bicycles and pedal north. They pull over at the corner of Fifty-eighth Street, a half block from Roosevelt Hospital, and chain the bicycles to a lamppost. Cormac knows the hospital. When the third Madison Square Garden was still on Eighth Avenue and Fiftieth Street, battered prizefighters were taken here to be stitched up or to die. Now, Kongo says, Delfina Cintron is in a bed on the sixth floor.

“I can heal her,” Kongo says. “The way I once healed you.” He shows Cormac how he entered in his own search of the city. The route goes from a loading dock in the rear to a freight elevator. Most ambulances are downtown, along with many of the nurses and doctors, and there is an atmosphere of abandonment around the back entrance.

“I’ll wait for you there,” he says, pointing a few blocks toward Central Park. “Just inside the entrance, in the darkest trees.”

He gives Cormac the cape and takes the backpack that holds the sword, the towels, the earrings. Its weight makes Kongo smile. Then he walks away in a loping, long-legged stride, and Cormac slips into the hospital. He finds an elevator, pushes six.

With the cape on his shoulders, he walks past an empty nurse’s station and into a large room with six beds, each filled with a sleeping woman. Delfina is in the bed nearest the window. Her face is swollen and she’s deeply sedated. But there are no tubes in her nose, no IV dripping into her veins. Her right hand is raw, her nails cracked, and her breath is shallow. She looks like an injured child. Boy, nothing can be harder than the road that you took to get here.