Pete Hamill - Forever

His hand is above what he is sure is the boy’s beating heart, although he cannot feel it. If only the musicians all could have seen the towers fall, seen the Cloud, reached for their horns or the black and white keys. Make it into art, man, he once heard Miles tell Coltrane. For they all knew one immense New York secret: no pain, no art. Here in these streets the alloy of Irish and Africans invented the new world. Here is where Master Juba’s spirit floated in the wings, dancing beside his Irish friend John Diamond, the two of them inventing tap-dancing. Harlem was the true northern border of the Five Points, after all the Know-Nothing race bullshit broke the Irish away from the children of Africans. Except for those who loved one another. Except for the Africans who took Irish wives and the Irishmen who took African wives and loved them until death did them part. Here on the right. Up there. In this place. This Harlem. Far from the North Tower. Far from Ground Zero.

Oh, how I want music now, Cormac thinks, high on this great muscled horse, this immortal stallion, moving north with my last woman. Moving north with my unborn son. Moving north to die. I want to hear music as I ride through cleansing rain, with my back turned to the great downtown necropolis. Music to redeem the murderous spectacle that now dwarfs all other New York deaths, starting with my own.

They pass under the bridge, gradually rising on wooded slopes into Fort Tryon Park, passing the Cloisters, still moving north, where he will keep his appointment.

The woods are denser now, the trees taller, more majestic and primeval, the rain harder, and Thunder moves cautiously, avoiding small escarpments of rock. They are deep inside Inwood Hill Park. Cormac can see tiny waterfalls, where rivers of rain are rushing over cliffs and pouring down in swift, glassy sheets. Some trees rise more than a hundred feet above them, trees that have been here since he arrived in the lost village on the southern tip of the island. Then Thunder stops. They are before a vaguely familiar wall of jagged rock. Delfina murmurs and Cormac pulls back and sees that her eyes flicker, blink open, close again.

And Cormac thinks: This is madness. I’m going to kill her, and the boy too, bouncing through rain to the chill of a cave. I should have left her in the hospital, where there were nurses and doctors and medicines. A place of warmth and food. He considers going back. Or veering off to the right and the emergency room of Columbia-Presbyterian. And knows that he can’t, that he has moved beyond choice.

“Delfina,” he murmurs. “It’s me.”

She does not answer.

Thunder stops. Don’t die on me, mujer. After I’m gone, you must bring this boy into the world.

They arrive at the foot of the cliff that is sliced by the entrance to the cave. Her face remains swollen and shut. He lifts her down and lays her upon the cape and then turns the cape into a sling, using ropes from the backpack. He buckles on the sword in its scabbard, a tool now for digging instead of killing, and whispers good-bye in Irish to Thunder. Delfina moans. He slings her dead weight over his left shoulder, his knees buckling, pulls the ends of the sling as tight as he can, using the backpack as a cushion, and then starts up the rock face.

Some dim memory guides him to a rough path, hidden by the zigzagged markers of rain-slick boulders and mossy stones. I’m coming; I’ll be there soon … At one angled ledge, he slips backward, totters, then uses Delfina’s weight as an anchor, leaning her against the rock face, gripping her. She babbles words he does not understand and then goes silent again. They climb another three feet, and then Cormac wobbles, his balance lost, and is about to fall more than twenty feet when he grabs the gnarled root of a tree. He trembles, his strength gone, and struggles for a long minute to steady himself. His heart is beating fiercely. He wants nothing to happen to her, or to their child, and he inhales deeply from the wet air. He must go on. And wonders: Are you there too, Mary Morrigan?

Then they are on the narrow ledge and Cormac can see above them the blocked mouth of the cave. Another path moves right and turns abruptly to the higher ground. To a passing pilgrim, some Sunday hiker in pursuit of wildflowers or butterflies, this would be another blank outcrop of schist and granite, lost in a dark forest. But now he has found the path. The city is gone now, dissolved in the falling rain, screened by the primeval trees. He will see no more trembling eastern dawns, no more scarlet western dusks, no sun rising in Brooklyn to set in New Jersey. This is the end of it. The city itself is as erased from sight as the towers. Every man and woman, all those thousands who have just died, all the countless millions who preceded them, reduced now to us, to me, to you, Delfina, to the child, here at the sealed entrance to this last hidden cave. Up ahead are all the others I have loved, in the place where I will wait for you. I will see you soon, Da. I will tell you all that has happened.

Gathering strength, hugging Delfina to him, Cormac remembers his image of the city as gigantic horizontal sculpture, and now sees the gods, all of them, speaking Greek and Latin and Yoruba and Irish, looking down upon this last dreadful alteration, this atrocious mauling of life, and they decide that there should be no more time for the invisible sculptor. They will give all the puny humans twenty-four hours to evacuate, and then they will lift the island from its northern end, and raise it into the sky, thrust it thirteen miles above the harbor, and leave it there forever, as monument to human folly, as warning against all forms of hubris. Cormac sees it being lifted, hears the sucking sound as it rises from its mooring, sees the dangling roots of trees, the bones of humans long dead, the tangled web of ruptured sewers and water pipes and subway tunnels, all buses and automobiles and cranes and trucks falling loosely through the streets to the bottom, while the merging waters of the North River and the East River and the vast Atlantic rush in, to cover the jagged remains of what once was an island called Manhattan. And he sees himself: clinging to the side of the Woolworth Building, the last man left alive, the man who can’t evacuate, the man who must tell the story.

He looks down and Thunder has galloped once more into mist. A rich dark aroma of soaked earth and rotting vegetation rises through the rain to enter both of them. The water of Oshun. The sea of Usheen.

Then, carrying Delfina, he goes up the twisting path until he is at the sealed entrance of the cave that gave him too much life.

He holds her very tight, breathing into her ears and face, kissing her cracked nails and raw hands. The wind is rising.

I must do this, woman, for you, for the boy. He turns from her, and moves her out of the rain, and unsheathes the sword, and begins to chop furiously into the sealed entrance. A kind of cement has formed, made of stones and pebbles and sand, tufts of grass, the enameling power of rain. God damn you, God damn you, open, open to us. He smothers the rage, then makes controlled slices in the surface, wiggles the sword to widen them, then stabs with purpose at the next layer. He keeps thrusting until he feels an emptiness on the other side. He has breached the outer shell, and then the entrance crumbles into porous dust and rubble. He uses his weight and bulk and the sword to keep widening the hole, and then at last the mouth opens. He takes a flashlight from the backpack and peers down its rocky throat.

The cave.

The place where he will find the entrance to the Otherworld. His hidden shee in the American earth.

He pushes into the slit, turns, and gently drags Delfina behind him. She doesn’t stir. I know the child is safe, I know your body shields him, I know that he will live. He wraps the two of them inside the cape, gripping the bag, using it to cushion her body, and they slide gently down a slope, Cormac using his heels as brakes. Then they stop in the blackness. You will not lose him, you will not … He plays the flashlight against the walls. The cave has not changed since last he saw it: dry and high-roofed and deep. He sees the waxy stumps of old candles, made by men long dead, their wicks like tiny black fingers. He needs matches. The lighter. Where’s the lighter? He lifts Delfina and carries her to the place where he awoke long ago and saw Tomora, and felt her healing caress, and heard from Kongo about his gift of life, and its limiting terms, and its possibilities of escape. He lays Delfina on the cape and she moans in a chilly, helpless way.