The Railroad (6 page)

Sean heaved a few ragged breaths. I suppose he was trying to think of something that would further his bullshit cause, but he couldn’t. Eventually he just stormed out of the bar. Applause followed.

Colm snorted. “The last time he got like this he started going through the bar asking people where they were born if they happened to look like they
might
be foreigners. He got a few Italians in his net and his father chewed him out for driving away customers. He’s a fucking moron.”

For an hour or so the atmosphere of the bar seemed to improve. Some of the regulars came over and patted me on the shoulder. I felt almost normal for a short time. I guess the whiskey was dulling that ache in my gut and for a time I felt like things just might be all right.

*

They weren’t.

Barbara pointed it out first. “Do you know you’re drinking a lot more, honey?”

There was an acid tone to her voice. Barbara never made observations of the critical kind without there being an object lesson in it. She never had liked the fact that I drank in bars as much as I did, despite the fact that it was usually only on Friday or Saturday nights. I had always suspected that it was just the time away from her that she resented.

I stared at her. “I guess I have. Why?”

She stared off at the TV. It was a classic Barbara tactic: tacit disapproval. Looking back, I couldn’t fault her observation, just her methods. “It’s not good for you.”

I found myself getting angry, irrationally and quickly. “I know that. Neither is breathing in whatever is coming from Ground Zero. Neither is living in this city!”

Yes, I had shouted, a no-no with Barbara. Her father had shouted almost every day of his life and it made her crazy. It had driven her to become the overly-precise controlled person that I knew.

“I’m worried about you,” she told me through a single sob. “You drink. I don’t see you as much. You don’t even go out and hang out with your friends at the Emerald Isle anymore.”

The sob got my attention. Barbara never let herself cry about things that happened to her. Movies, starvation in Africa, all that was fine, but no crying when it came to her life.

“You hate the Emerald Isle. That’s where I
did
drink.”

“At least you got out. It was the subway, wasn’t it?” she probed.

“Yes, Barbara. I hated being stuck in a subway with the Twin Towers coming down and people crying and screaming about God. It occurred to me, at least a couple of times, that I might die. Not a lot, but at least a couple of times. Why do you ask me that like it’s something that never occurred to you before? We both know what the problem is. It’s what happened to
me
.”

“Are you angry?”

The laugh that followed that incisive question could have set off car alarms. “Oh yes! I am. I had a life. It was mine and one I deserved. I haven’t done anything shitty to anyone and someone just came and fucked with my city and with me! Those assholes don’t know anything about me. They don’t know that I hate my boss. They don’t know that I used to volunteer at a soup kitchen. They don’t know that I watched my father die of cancer! They don’t know shit! So who the fuck are they? Why shouldn’t I be angry?”

I had stood up without realizing it and I was breathing hard. The only amusing note was that I was naked. It’s hard to do the soapbox thing when your apparatus is hanging out; it robs you of a certain amount of credibility.

But Barbara wasn’t focused on that. All she knew was that I had shouted. I had done the dirty deed; I had acted like her father. It didn’t matter what had happened to me. And while I couldn’t really blame her for being hurt and scared, I realized that I didn’t like her all that much and I didn’t have much respect for her. I never had.

“I know. I acted like your father. And it’s all going to come down to that isn’t it?”

“You know I can’t handle that!”

“I know you probably think I’m being an asshole. But you might want to consider the fact that what’s happened to me and thousands of other people might be a little more upsetting than the childhood you carry around on your sleeve. At least for a while, while the rest of New York and I clean the dirt off ourselves."

I could have gone to hug her, as I usually did when things got out of control. This time I let her fight back her tears long enough to get up and leave.

Chapter Three

I didn’t see much of Barbara after that. There was the once a week courtesy call, which left us both uncomfortable and the occasional tense lunch. Despite what I had told myself, having Barbara mostly out of my life didn’t make me feel much better. I was getting more and more depressed.

Work had resumed a couple of weeks after 9/11 and, from the first day back, I could barely stand it. A lot of it was the fact that I had to take the subway to work; it was the same one I’d taken
that
day.

I took my usual place in the front of the train. I tried to find traces of the pain I was feeling in the eyes of my fellow New Yorkers. I should have known better. As much as I needed to see it, it would have violated rule number one: thou shalt not show emotion. I wondered if everyone else had made the adjustment except me. But then I’d hear little snippets of conversation and I knew the truth; there were many people who were handling things less effectively than I was.

Pathetically, I found myself looking for
Mr
.
Cool
who seemed strangely absent. One day it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen him in weeks. I began to obsess about what might have happened to him. Had he changed jobs, moved away, changed his schedule?

Each morning I hoped to see him. I wondered if he was having trouble getting to work as well. Or maybe it was something worse, something more permanent.

Each morning I watched myself walk through the door of  Dain and Crabtree, knowing I was late, knowing I never had been late until a  couple of weeks before, knowing I’d been a superstar, and knowing people were beginning to talk about me. I felt my skin tingle as I walked past what seemed like a hundred accusatory eyes.

And, then, one morning, there over my desk, stood my boss and two of my “users”, people who used the systems I’d helped design. They all looked angry.

I froze for a second and then fired the first salvo at my boss, figuring that I needed a good offense. “Hi, Todd. Is there a problem?”

He jerked up, embarrassed for a moment at being in my office uninvited, then annoyed. I caught sight of my little Lucite desk-clock: forty-five minutes late. “We were looking for the fund reconciliation specs,” he declared, a bit of anger in his voice.

I toughed it out. “I sent those out last week to everyone.”

The three of them exchanged uncertain glances. It was sort of a Mexican stand-off, nerd style. I was late as I had been every day for a few weeks. And yet the trio in my room were famous for not reading their e-mail carefully and for not saving valuable documents. When I was in my prime, they had become dependent on me to re-circulate the same documents whenever one of them found that they weren’t conveniently available to them. It had been one of my greatest assets as far as they were concerned.

Todd regrouped. “We need the specs now. Matthew needs to look at the reports. He thinks there’s one missing that was in the old version of the system.”

I nodded, pushing past them to my desk. I sent three copies of the specifications document to my printer and then made a show of removing them, stapling each copy and handing one to each of them. Todd glared at me; I’m sure they had been bad-mouthing me before I got there but somehow I had gained the upper hand and I laid it on thick. “Which report do you think is missing, Matt?”

He grunted, having no immediate answer. Matt lives in constant dread that someone has cheated him out of something, as if anyone would bother to take the time. He looked down the list of reports that the new system would create. The light of triumph shone in his eyes. “I don’t see the summarized transactions by state report! We have to have that.”

I scanned through the specification, pretending to be searching for the missing report. “Oh, I see. You forgot, Matt. That report was done away with. Here’s the report that replaced it. It gives you a whole lot more information in addition to what you had in the old report. As I remember, your group was the one who requested the new report in place of the old one. Do you need to change the spec to include the old report?”

“No,” he answered. I could barely hear him.

“If you guys want to go over the whole spec again, that’s fine with me. Things are always changing and we still have time to make whatever changes we need.”

I watched them do a few minutes as the Keystone Kops before they thanked me and left the room. I lay back in my chair, relishing the moment and knowing full well that I was on the verge of fucking up. I’d won this battle but wasn’t sure how many more I cared to win. Todd had never been 100% comfortable with me; I was too sarcastic. But, up until a few weeks ago, he had tolerated me and even appreciated my efforts on his behalf.

I had earned my chits many times over but sooner or later my lack of enthusiasm would take its toll. I found that I didn’t care and
that
scared me more than anything.

*

I think I might have eased back into a semblance of my old self if it hadn’t been for the phone call. It came on a typical post 9/11 night for me. I had debated whether to call Barbara or to give in to my depression and simply watch some mindless television. I had let depression and anxiety win. Part of my new nightly ritual was a couple of neat bourbons from a small low-yield distillery. Within an hour of my arriving home, I was pleasantly numb, though a bit of the knife-edge of anxiety could still be felt.

Television had become like an old friend; events were comfortable and predictable. Re-runs of
Friends
could be expected at the same time each night, as could those of
Seinfeld
. The familiar themes lulled me into a strained sense of familiarity and comfort.

Just as I was getting into a
Seinfeld
episode that I’d seen at least five times, the phone rang. I groaned, figuring it was Barbara checking up on me. I checked the caller ID and saw that it was an unknown number.

“Hello,” I said, doing my best to sound tired or under the weather. I was hedging my bets, ready to get off the phone quickly no matter who it was.

“Calvin?” A woman’s voice.

Relief flooded over me; it wasn’t Barbara calling from a pay phone two blocks from my apartment; it was a wrong number. “Sorry. I think that you’ve dialed incorrectly.”

“This isn’t the home of Calvin Haggers?”

“No. Sorry.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to bother you. I thought this was his number.”

“It may have been at some point. I only moved in a few months ago.”

“Oh! You wouldn’t know where he went?”

“I never met him, sorry. I just moved in and didn’t know anything about who was here before.”

“Do you think the landlord might know?”

“The landlord? I don’t know. You can call the offices of Franklin Properties. It’s a big company, but they might know.”

“Oh.”

There was a pause, as though this woman was still expecting something from me. I began to get annoyed. Did she think I was lying, hiding Calvin from her? A good ten seconds passed and I wondered whether I was dealing with a fruitcake. “Well, I’m sorry but I’m the only one here,” I said finally.

“Yes. I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve been out of the country for a few months and I just got back. I want to find out where he is.”

And why the fuck are you bothering me
, I thought. “Perhaps his old job?” I suggested with an obvious lack of enthusiasm.

“Well that’s it. You see he worked on the 94
th
Floor of Tower Two in the Trade Center and I haven’t found any way of getting in touch with him.

She let the implication hang like a fifty ton weight. “Oh god,” I said.

“I’ve been worried about him. We’ve been friends for thirty years. We were almost married once. I hope nothing happened to him.”

The room had started to swim slightly. I found that I was leaning over my kitchen counter
. He’s dead
I told the woman, in my head. “I’m sorry,” I said out loud.

“Do you know anything about the rescue efforts,” she asked desperately.

I didn’t want to tell her that everyone who’d been alive had most likely been found. I didn’t want to tell her that, short of a miracle, Calvin was dust. I wanted her to go away, and yet I couldn’t just cut her off. “I think that they’re still searching but most of the people have been found.”

It was vague and it wasn’t what she wanted to hear. In a few seconds I heard her sobbing. “I loved him. I was hoping to come back from Nice and tell him that.”

One of them
, I thought, seeing the hundreds of handouts I’d passed going through my head. All the loved ones left behind. I’d been lucky; I hadn’t known anyone who actually lost a loved one. And here was the real thing, a real person who lost someone forever. It all clicked into place for me; the enormity of it all, the horror. Thousands of people who I used to pass on the street, people I sat next to during brunch in restaurants, people I shared the subway with.
Mr. Cool
, as annoying as he was; maybe he was dead and I knew nothing about him. All real people like me and they had someone die on them for no good reason. Or they died. This had really happened.

“I’m really sorry.” I wasn’t trying to dodge it anymore. “You have to contact the police. They know who’s been found. You have to find out for sure.”

She cried some more and I found that I was crying too. I think we spoke for another hour but I can’t remember much of what was said. Just two people on a sinking ship who share nothing but a little humanity because that’s all they have left: the sound of another human voice.

*

The next day I called in sick. And the day after that. And the day after that. And when I finally went back to work, I hated everybody. I hated Todd for his pompous preoccupation with a job that meant nothing to anyone. I hated everyone, including myself, for being alive and relatively oblivious. I wanted to tell them all about Calvin, but I knew they wouldn’t have understood.

*

“You’re going to quit your job, aren’t you?” Barbara asked me suddenly one night in Mid-November.

She’d forced herself on me that night, coming over despite my protests. I’d seen very little of her or anyone else for weeks. As time went on I’d found it harder and harder to go out. Sometimes, any disturbance in the sky, an airplane, the wavering of the sun behind a cloud, the setting sun, would fill me with an irrational fear. I spent as much time as I could alone, watching movies that predated September 11. Oddly, I found some small comfort in seeing the odd glimpse of the Twin Towers in a film, as though their celluloid existence argued that the most horrendous event on American soil never happened.

“I’ve been thinking about leaving,” I finally told Barbara. “I don’t think Todd would be very unhappy.”

“Have you thought about me and how it would affect me?”

Well, there it was. The real point. “Has it occurred to you that our relationship hasn’t been very fulfilling at its best moments?”

“I’ve had my doubts too.”

“So why didn’t you say something?”

“I was comfortable. I thought it would change. You’re the kind of guy I thought I was looking for.”

“What kind of guy is that? I’d love to find out what kind of guy I am because I’ve been wondering about it a lot lately.”

“Successful. Ambitious. A bit on the nerdy side. A little bit of the artist.” Both of our eyes strayed to the collection of guitars in the corner of my living room. I hadn’t spent much time with them lately.

When I didn’t respond her mouth writhed in that way that I hated, sort of like she was about to stamp her foot and have the tantrum she said I was having. “I can’t fucking stand this anymore!”

“I didn’t ask you over. In fact I think that I did my best to convince you that you wouldn’t have the best time if you came over here.”

Then she did something she’d never done before: she hit me in the arm. It wasn’t done with a lot of force, but it was shocking all the same. A little grunt of frustration escaped her lips when she did it.

We stared at each other. “I guess I’ve disappointed you,” I said sarcastically. “Sorry I didn’t make the grade.”

She stood up to leave. “Don’t call me until you’ve gotten over this shit. I’d like to be able to tell my friends I’m dating an adult.”

The door slammed. I sighed and turned back to the tube. Law and Order was coming on. An
old
episode. I smiled sadly.

I was back on the 4 train, the same one that I’d been riding
that day
.
Mr
.
Cool
was absent. Like a few other people I knew, I was dosed with some mild narcotics, all legal of course. It was time for me to make a decision about work. I’d been using up sick days from the enormous sick bank that I’d accumulated over the years. I probably could have gone on being employed at Crabtree and Dain for another few months without ever having to go to work, but if I was going to make the break, I’d have to do it right away.

I’d rehearsed the speech I was going to make to Todd, chanting it over and over the last few days; first it was going to be a “kick in the groin, and your life is worthless” bit of radical rhetoric. Then I got tired and realized that Todd was probably just as tired as I was. The only difference was that he still wanted to be on the treadmill. Or he had no choice.