New York Echoes (13 page)

“Frankly, Scarlett,”
she said. “I don't give a damn.”

Then she pranced out
of the room.

“No politics please,” Irma said.

“I don't talk politics. Only common
sense,” Bob replied.

“Okay then. No common sense.”

“I mean it. I'll never forgive you.”

He was helping her fold the linen
napkins in a special way to make them look like birds in flight. There would be
eight guests, she had told him, agonizing over the placement of each person in
the dining room of their East Side apartment. They were her people, meaning
people from her law office, partners mostly and their spouses. He was a
salesman for a firm making ladies' underwear, which might as well have been an
occupation on another planet.

After five years of marriage, Irma
placed a great deal of importance on these little dinner parties for building
consequential relationships outside the office with spouses or significant
others in attendance. This one, he knew, was particularly special, and he was
being duly warned to control his behavior. Occasionally, he admitted, he had
become a bit too confrontational, especially when the subject veered toward
what others might misinterpret as political. He did not see it in those terms.

“Above all, don't show that horrid
thing.”

“Whatever you say,” he promised.

He had been sitting in his office on the
twenty-second floor of an adjacent building working on a big order for a Midwest chain on September 11, 2001, when he first saw that horrid thing. He had stopped by
the video store on the way to work to pick up his video camera that had been in
for repairs and was lying on a leather chair in his office when he heard the
strange noise.

His office window was directly in the
line of sight of the Twin Towers, and when someone in the office screamed, he
turned and saw where the first plane had sliced into the north tower. It was
such a bizarre occurrence that, at first, he thought it might have been an
accidental collision. Then, in swift succession, another plane smacked into the
other tower.

By no means was he a video buff. He had
taken occasional pictures at outings and other events, but did not have that
special visual curiosity of the dedicated photographer. Nevertheless the
proximity of the video camera and the circumstances at hand were motivation
enough, and he found himself standing by the window pointing the camera at what
was quickly becoming a major catastrophe.

It took him a minute or two to get the
damned thing focused and working, but when it was finally buzzing he saw
through the lens finder the incredible spectacle of people jumping out of the
windows like little puppets whose strings had been cut. There was little time
for reflection nor did the horror of it register as reality. It was as if he were
watching a special-effect-laden movie.

At some point, the truth of the incident
set in and the collapse of the buildings set them all running from their
offices. By then, he had filmed at least twenty minutes of the episode.

Although his office
building was unscathed, the evacuation was orderly and he, along with others in
the building, marched like robots down the twenty-two floors to street level
and hurried from the chaos as fast as they could.

What he had captured on that video was,
even now, something so horrendous, so weird, so horrifying, that it became over
the years one of those visual atrocities that challenged the very idea of
authenticity. You saw it, but it was difficult to believe it had happened
before your eyes. You saw it over and over again to assure yourself that it was
an exact representation of something that had occurred to real people in real
time in his city and not simply a slick camera trick.

To see human beings
falling like stones from high windows, surrounded by other items floating in
the air beside them, like shoes, papers, and miscellaneous debris, as they
jumped to certain death and smashed and exploded like ripe melons against the
cement of the street below, was not exactly family fare.

Nevertheless, in those early days, he
had shown it on demand. Other times he watched it by himself. As time went on,
he mostly watched it in secret, as if he needed to validate its authenticity
again and again to prove to himself that the memory must be preserved before it
disappeared completely from the public consciousness. 

In the early days, showing the video was
the centerpiece of any social gathering, especially in their apartment, but as
time went on, it became, as Irma characterized it, sort of like pornography.
After numerous showings, the effect wore off. She began to call it “that horrid
thing.”

“I will not watch it
again,” Irma had protested finally. They were still considered newlyweds then
and while she indulged his insistence that it be viewed by them and shown to
their friends and acquaintances, she began to find it repulsive, disruptive,
and irritating and, ultimately, boring.

The media drumbeat about the falling
towers and the loss of thousands of people continued for months. By then, the
area had become a shrine. The gates of the nearby church and armory were enshrouded
by photos and artifacts. People continued to mill about in hopeless pursuit of
their lost relatives. Clean-up crews worked day and night to clean up the mess.
It was, of course, the most awful thing that had happened in New York in his
lifetime.

A few months ago he had bought a giant
flat-screen television that took up one whole wall of the den. He told Irma he
had bought it to watch sports events, but he knew the reason that he had bought
it was to watch the footage he had shot of the people jumping out of windows.

“Can't you stop watching that horrid
thing?” she would tell him often.

“I need it to remind me.”

“I'd rather you'd try to forget it. It's
so unnerving.”

“It must never be forgotten,” he would
counter. In his daily life he had observed that people were talking about it
less and less, shutting it out of their memory.

“We all know it's a historical fact.
Constantly dwelling on it is sick.”

“The danger seems to be increasing,” he
told her. “Look what's happening throughout the world, suicide bombings,
Muslims protesting everywhere. Look at the signs they wave, ‘Death to America,' ‘Kill Christians and Jews,' ‘Behead the Infidels.' ‘Bush is a murderer, a
terrorist.' ‘Jews are Nazis.' What does that tell us?”

“So the world is a mess. Some Muslims
hate us. What else is new?”

“They want us dead, all of us. As we
speak, it would be naïve to believe that we are safe. Our future is in doubt.
The people who are not afraid to die will win.”

“What will watching people jumping out
of windows do to solve the situation?”

“It will remind us,” he insisted.

“You're going to drive yourself nuts,
Bob.”

After awhile, he found himself watching
the tape surreptitiously when Irma was out of the apartment or had gone to bed.
It was as if he was viewing some masturbatory fancy, performing some dirty
little secret act.

There were many
reminders of that terrible day, but nothing, nothing equaled the tape in
intensity. The surviving relatives were determined never to let people forget
what had happened to their loved ones. As with everything that happened in the
city of New York, competing interests inflamed emotions, and the battle over
what would take the place of the Twin Towers continued over the years.

The images that he had captured and had
viewed hundreds of times left him increasingly haunted by the idea that a
similar and more horrendous event would indeed happen again, and he became
vocal on the subject to the point of obsession. When people would accuse the
government and the president of scare tactics it was like throwing a match on
dry tinder.

After repeated rants
and eruptions, he was well aware that people avoided any remark that would set
him off. “There goes Bob again,” he imagined people were telling themselves. He
didn't care. He knew he was right, a one-man early warning system.In
their circles, his views on the subject were becoming increasingly isolated,
since most people they associated with were adamant about their political
choices and believed that scare tactics were being used for political gain by
the president and his party. The Iraq war and its difficulties only exacerbated
the situation. There were moments when, as Irma told him, he became downright
offensive and rude.

He knew, too, that he had become a
one-issue broken record. He was not a committed Republican or Democrat,
although most of his circle could be characterized as liberal Democrats.
Because he defended the war on terrorism, people thought he was a Republican.
He tried to explain that fact, but to no avail. Most of those in their circle
were highly educated, articulate, insistent, passionate. Although they
professed to be reasonable and open to challenge, their core view of the world
was incapable of change. As time went on, their views hardened into hatred of
the president himself, and when he challenged this one aspect of their
viewpoint, the terrorist threat, they would overwhelm him with invective that
eventually became personal.

“The other shoe will drop,” he would
insist. It became his opening cliché. “Those people want to kill us. They don't
care if they die, as long we die.”

“You're being
hysterical,” someone in their group would say. Their arguments were predictable
and, to him, infuriating. The president lied. They are attacking the wrong
people. Saddam was not involved in terrorism. It's all about oil and big
business. Our soldiers are dying needlessly. This mad president must be
impeached. Al Qaeda is a fringe group. Muslims as a whole are reasonable
people. On and on.

Why didn't they
remember? He was able to stoke his memory by replaying the video. Irma would
get increasingly furious when she caught him at it. At times, she would attempt
to reason with him, pointing out the dangers that might come of such an obsession.

“You addiction will
consume you,” she said. There were moments when he agreed with the logic of her
reasoning. She had a point. Sometimes a big noise in the middle of the night,
or a plane flying too low, or even walking through Grand Central Terminal or
riding a bus or a subway would send a brief shiver of fear through him. It was
unavoidable. He wondered if such sensations passed through the minds of other
people.

Perhaps Irma was right
about his obsessing too much. She was, after all, his wife. She had his best
interests at heart. He decided to wean himself away from watching the tapes and
withdraw from the information highway, since everything that he read and saw
underlined his belief that a terrorist event was in the planning stages, its
execution inevitable.

Sometimes, by sheer
will, he could summon the self-discipline and stay away from the news media. He
would avoid all information on the Internet and on television that dealt with
current events. He stopped reading the news section of the
New York
Times.
When he was within earshot of people who expressed themselves on the subject,
he would force himself not to listen, although that was very difficult. He
tried not to respond to their comments.

Still, he could not
stay away from watching the video. The longer he stayed away from absorbing
information about the prevalence of terror, the more it rushed back at him when
he became open to it again. It was like a sore that could not heal.

Lately, he had been
more vociferous than usual, and he suspected that Irma warned people in advance
to stay off the subject. She used the umbrella phrase “politics” to telescope
the meaning. For the dinner party in preparation she was adamant, repeating her
warning again and again to be sure it slipped into his consciousness. 

He felt himself fully
committed to cooperating. This was too important a gathering to create a scene,
especially since he knew that Irma was up for a partnership and the spouse of
such a candidate was scrutinized for any signs that might be disruptive to a
potential partner. He knew how important it was to her. He and Irma were very
supportive of each other. After five years of marriage, they were still
affectionate and considerate to each other. He believed they were still in
love. He had no reason to think otherwise.

The dinner was
prepared by an expensive caterer who supplied two waiters to help. Bob was the
designated bartender. Three of the guests were partners in the law firm, two
males and one female. They were all sophisticated, well-dressed, and
participatory. They knew how to be good guests and he was determined to be a
good and responsive host.

Except for his
marriage to Irma, their occupational worlds did not intersect. They were mostly
involved in Wall Street matters, security work, corporate affairs, while his
business involved women's undergarments, a matter of little interest to any of
them. While he was certain he could match any of them in income, he was well
aware of the divide between them.

Most of them and their
spouses, his included, were the product of Ivy League schools: Harvard, Yale or
Princeton. They encompassed that triumvirate of upward mobility. Irma was
Harvard, then Yale Law School. He was used to their airs, their superior sense
of their own assertions, their talk of old school ties, roommates, and
reunions. He knew they did not think of themselves as snobs, although they
still were. It did not faze him; he was not in the least jealous. Sometimes
their antics were laughable.

He was a graduate of
the School of Commerce at New York University and proud of his own earning
power. In the end, he had learned, salesmanship was the key to success. But
there was no denying that in this little group of corporate Ivy League lawyers,
he was an outsider. He got a kick seeing Irma maneuver herself in this world.
She was sure to make partner, and he was her greatest cheerleader.