Eternity and Other Stories

ONLY PARTLY HERE

There are legends in the pit. Phantoms and apparitions. The men who work at Ground Zero joke about them, but their laughter is nervous and wired. Bobby doesn’t believe the stories, yet he’s prepared to believe something weird might happen. The place feels so empty. Like even the ghosts are gone. All that sudden vacancy, who knows what might have entered in? Two nights ago on the graveyard shift, some guy claimed he saw a faceless figure wearing a black spiky headdress standing near the pit wall. The job breaks everybody down. Marriages are falling apart. People keep losing it one way or another. Fights, freak-outs, fits of weeping. It’s the smell of burning metal that seeps up from the earth, the ceremonial stillness of the workers after they uncover a body, the whispers that come when there is no wind. It’s the things you find. The week before, scraping at the rubble with a hoe, like an archaeologist investigating a buried temple, Bobby spotted a woman’s shoe sticking up out of the ground. A perfect shoe, so pretty and sleek and lustrous. Covered in blue silk. Then he reached for it and realized that it wasn’t stuck—it was only half a shoe, with delicate scorching along the ripped edge. Now sometimes when he closes his eyes he sees the shoe. He’s glad he isn’t married. He doesn’t think he has much to bring to a relationship.

That evening Bobby’s taking his dinner break, perched on a girder at the edge of the pit along with Mazurek and Pineo, when they switch on the lights. They all hate how the pit looks in the lights. It’s an outtake from The X-Files—the excavation of an alien ship under hot white lamps smoking from the cold; the shard left from the framework of the north tower glittering silver and strange, like the wreckage of a cosmic machine. The three men remain silent for a bit, then Mazurek goes back to bitching about Jason Giambi signing with the Yankees. “You catch the interview he did with Werner Wolf? He’s a moron! First time the crowd gets on him, it’s gonna be like when you yell at a dog. The guy’s gonna fucking crumble.” Pineo disagrees, and Mazurek asks Bobby what he thinks.

“Bobby don’t give a shit about baseball,” says Pineo. “My boy’s a Jets fan.”

Mazurek, a thick-necked, fiftyish man whose face appears to be fashioned of interlocking squares of pale muscle, says, “The Jets… fuck!”

“They’re playoff bound,” says Bobby cheerfully.

Mazurek crumples the wax paper his sandwich was folded in. “They gonna drop dead in the first round like always.”

“It’s more interesting than being a Yankee fan,” says Bobby. “The Yankees are too corporate to be interesting.”

“‘Too corporate to be interesting’?” Mazurek stares. “You really are a geek, y’know that?”

“That’s me. The geek.”

“Whyn’t you go the fuck back to school, boy? Fuck you doing here, anyway?”

“Take it easy, Carl! Chill!” Pineo—nervous, thin, lively, curly black hair spilling from beneath his hard hat—puts a hand on Mazurek’s arm, and Mazurek knocks it aside. Anger tightens his leathery skin; the creases in his neck show white. “What’s it with you? You taking notes for your fucking thesis?” he asks Bobby. “Playing tourist?”

Bobby looks down at the apple in his hand—it seems too shiny to be edible. “Just cleaning up is all. You know.”

Mazurek’s eyes dart to the side, then he lowers his head and gives it a savage shake. “Okay,” he says in a subdued voice. “Yeah… fuck. Okay.”

Midnight, after the shift ends, they walk over to the Blue Lady. Bobby doesn’t altogether understand why the three of them continue to hang out there. Maybe because they once went to the bar after work and it felt pretty good, so they return every night in hopes of having it feel that good again. You can’t head straight home; you have to decompress. Mazurek’s wife gives him constant shit about the practice—she calls the bar and screams over the phone. Pineo just split with his girlfriend. The guy with whom Bobby shares an apartment grins when he sees him, but the grin is anxious—like he’s afraid Bobby is bringing back some contagion from the pit. Which maybe he is. The first time he went to Ground Zero, he came home with a cough and a touch of fever, and he recalls thinking that the place was responsible. Now, though, either he’s immune or else he’s sick all the time and doesn’t notice.

Two hookers at a table by the door check them out as they enter, then go back to reading the Post. Roman the barman, gray-haired and thick-waisted, orders his face into respectful lines, says, “Hey, guys!” and sets them up with beers and shots. When they started coming in he treated them with almost religious deference, until Mazurek yelled at him, saying he didn’t want to hear that hero crap while he was trying to unwind—he got enough of it from the fuckass jocks and movie stars who visit Ground Zero to have their pictures taken. Though angry, he was far more articulate than usual in his demand for normal treatment, and this caused Bobby to speculate that if Mazurek were transported thousands of miles from the pit and not just a few blocks, his IQ would increase exponentially.

The slim brunette in the business suit is down at the end of the bar again, sitting beneath the blue neon silhouette of a dancing woman. She’s been coming in every night for about a week. Late twenties. Hair styled short, an expensive kind of punky look. Fashion model hair. Eyebrows thick and slanted, like accents grâve. Sharp-featured, on the brittle side of pretty, or maybe she’s not that pretty, maybe she is so well-dressed, her makeup done so skillfully, that the effect is of a businesslike prettiness, of prettiness reined in by the magic of brush and multiple applicators, and beneath this artwork she is, in actuality, rather plain. Nice body, though. Trim and well tended. She wears the same expression of stony neutrality that Bobby sees every morning on the faces of the women who charge up from under the earth, disgorged from the D train, prepared to resist Manhattan for another day. Guys will approach her, assuming she’s a hooker doing a kind of Hitler office bitch thing in order to attract men searching for a woman they can use and abuse as a surrogate for one who makes their life hell every day from nine to five, and she will say something to them and they will immediately walk away. Bobby and Pineo always try to guess what she says. That night, after a couple of shots, Bobby goes over and sits beside her. She smells expensive. Her perfume like the essence of some exotic flower or fruit he’s only seen in magazine pictures.

“I’ve just been to a funeral,” she says wearily, staring into her drink. “So, please… Okay?”

“That what you tell everybody?” he asks. “All the guys who hit on you?”

A fretful line cuts her brow. “Please!”

“No, really. I’ll go. All I want to know… that what you always say?”

She makes no response.

“It is,” he says. “Isn’t it?”

“It’s not entirely a lie.” Her eyes are spooky, the dark rims of the pale irises extraordinarily well-defined. “It’s intended as a lie, but it’s true in a way.”

“But that’s what you say, right? To everybody?”

“This is why you came over? You’re not hitting on me?”

“No, I… I mean, maybe… I thought…”

“So what you’re saying, you weren’t intending to hit on me. You wanted to know what I say to men when they come over. But now you’re not certain of your intent? Maybe you were deceiving yourself as to your motives? Or maybe now you sense I might be receptive, you’ll take the opportunity to hit on me, though that wasn’t your initial intent. Does that about sum it up?”

“I suppose,” he says.

She gives him a cautious look. “Could you be brilliant? Could your clumsy delivery be designed to engage me?”

“I’ll go away, okay? But that’s what you said to them, right?”

She points to the barman, who’s talking to Mazurek. “Roman tells me you work at Ground Zero.”

The question unsettles Bobby, leads him to suspect that she’s a disaster groupie, looking for a taste of the pit, but he says, “Yeah.”

“It’s really…” She does a little shivery shrug. “Strange.”

“Strange. I guess that covers it.”

“That’s not what I wanted to say. I can’t think of the right word to describe what it does to me.”

“You been down in it?”

“No, I can’t get any closer than here. I just can’t. But…” She makes a swirling gesture with her fingers. “You can feel it here. You might not notice, because you’re down there all the time. That’s why I come here. Everybody’s going on with their lives, but I’m not ready. I need to feel it. To understand it. You’re taking it away piece by piece, but the more you take away, it’s like you’re uncovering something else.”

“Y’know, I don’t want to think about this now.” He gets to his feet. “But I guess I know why you want to.”

“Probably it’s fucked up of me, huh?”

“Yeah, probably,” says Bobby, and walks away.

“She’s still looking at you, man,” Pineo says as Bobby settles beside him. “What you doing back here? You could be fucking that.”

“She’s a freak,” Bobby tells him.

“So she’s a freak! Even better!” Pineo turns to the other two men. “You believe this asshole? He could be fucking that bitch over there, yet here he sits.”

Affecting a superior smile, Roman says, “You don’t fuck them, pal. They fuck you.”

He nudges Mazurek’s arm as though seeking confirmation from a peer, a man of experience like himself, and Mazurek, gazing at his grungy reflection in the mirror behind the bar, says distractedly, weakly, “I could use another shot.”

The following afternoon Bobby unearths a disk of hard black rubber from beneath some cement debris. It’s four inches across, thicker at the center than at the edges, shaped like a little UFO. Try as he might, he can think of no possible purpose it might serve, and he wonders if it had something to do with the fall of the towers. Perhaps there is a black seed like this at the heart of every disaster. He shows it to Pineo, asks his opinion, and Pineo, as expected, says, “Fuck, I don’t know. Part of a machine.” Bobby knows Pineo is right. The disk is a widget, one of those undistinguished yet indispensable objects without which elevators will not rise or refrigerators will not cool; but there are no marks on it, no holes or grooves to indicate that it fits inside a machine. He imagines it whirling inside a cone of blue radiance, registering some inexplicable process.

He thinks about the disk all evening, assigning it various values. It is the irreducible distillate of the event, a perfectly formed residue. It is a wicked sacred object that belonged to a financier, now deceased, and its ritual function is understood by only three other men on the planet. It is a beacon left by time-traveling tourists that allows them to home in on the exact place and moment of the terrorist attack. It is the petrified eye of God. He intends to take the disk back to his apartment and put it next to the half shoe and all the rest of the items he has collected in the pit. But that night when he enters the Blue Lady and sees the brunette at the end of the bar, on impulse he goes over and drops the disk on the counter next to her elbow.

“Brought you something,” he says.

She glances at it, pokes it with a forefinger and sets it wobbling. “What is it?”

He shrugs. “Just something I found.”

“At Ground Zero?”

“Uh-huh.”

She pushes the disk away. “Didn’t I make myself plain last night?”

Bobby says, “Yeah… sure,” but isn’t sure he grasps her meaning.

“I want to understand what happened… what’s happening now,” she says. “I want what’s mine, you know. I want to understand exactly what it’s done to me. I need to understand it. I’m not into souvenirs.”

“Okay,” Bobby says.

“‘Okay.’” She says this mockingly. “God, what’s wrong with you? It’s like you’re on medication!”

A Sinatra song, “All Or Nothing At All,” flows from the jukebox—a soothing musical syrup that overwhelms the chatter of hookers and drunks and commentary from the TV mounted behind the bar, which is showing chunks of Afghanistan blowing up into clouds of brown smoke. The crawl running at the bottom of the screen testifies that the estimate of the death toll at Ground Zero has been reduced to just below five thousand; the amount of debris removed from the pit now exceeds one million tons. The numbers seem meaningless, interchangeable. A million lives, five thousand tons. A ludicrous score that measures no real result.

“I’m sorry,” the brunette says. “I know it must take a toll, doing what you do. I’m impatient with everyone these days.”

She stirs her drink with a plastic stick whose handle duplicates the image of the neon dancer. In all her artfully composed face, a mask of foundation and blush and liner, her eyes are the only sign of vitality, of feminine potential.

“What’s your name?” he asks.

She glances up sharply. “I’m too old for you.”

“How old are you? I’m twenty-three.”

“It doesn’t matter how old you are… how old I am. I’m much older than you in my head. Can’t you tell? Can’t you feel the difference? If I was twenty-three, I’d still be too old for you.”

“I just want to know your name.”

“Alicia.” She enunciates the name with a cool overstated precision that makes him think of a saleswoman revealing a price she knows her customer cannot afford.

“Bobby,” he says. “I’m in grad school at Columbia. But I’m taking a year off.”

“This is ridiculous!” she says angrily. “Unbelievably ridiculous… totally ridiculous! Why are you doing this?”

“I want to understand what’s going on with you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, I just do. Whatever it is you come to understand, I want to understand it, too. Who knows. Maybe us talking is part of what you need to understand.”

“Good Lord!” She casts her eyes to the ceiling. “You’re a romantic!”

“You still think I’m trying to hustle you?”

“If it was anyone else, I’d say yes. But you… I don’t believe you have a clue.”

“And you do? Sitting here every night. Telling guys you just got back from a funeral. Grieving about something you can’t even say what it is.”

She twitches her head away, a gesture he interprets as the avoidance of impulse, a sudden clamping down, and he also relates it to how he sometimes reacts on the subway when a girl he’s been looking at catches his eye and he pretends to be looking at something else. After a long silence she says, “Were not going to be having sex. I want you to be clear on that.”

“Okay.”

“That’s your fall back position, is it? ‘Okay’?”

“Whatever.”

“‘Whatever.’” She curls her fingers around her glass, but does not drink. “Well, we’ve probably had enough mutual understanding for one night, don’t you think?”

Bobby pockets the rubber disk, preparing to leave. “What do you do for a living?”

An exasperated sigh. “I work in a brokerage. Now can we take a break? Please?”

“I gotta go home anyway,” Bobby says.

The rubber disk takes its place in Bobby’s top dresser drawer, resting between the blue half shoe and a melted glob of metal that may have done duty as a cuff link, joining a larger company of remnants—scraps of silk and worsted and striped cotton; a flattened fountain pen; a few inches of brown leather hanging from a misshapen buckle; a hinged pin once attached to a brooch. Looking at them breeds a queer vacancy in his chest, as if their few ounces of reality cancel out some equivalent portion of his own. It’s the shoe, mostly, that wounds him. An object so powerful in its interrupted grace, sometimes he’s afraid to touch it.

After his shower he lies down in the dark of his bedroom and thinks of Alicia. Pictures her handling packets of bills bound with paper wrappers. Even her name sounds like currency, a riffling of crisp new banknotes. He wonders what he’s doing with her. She’s not his type at all, but maybe she was right, maybe he’s deceiving himself about his motives. He conjures up the images of the girls he’s been with. Soft and sweet and ultra feminine. Yet he finds Alicia’s sharp edges and severity attractive. Could be he’s looking for a little variety. Or maybe like so many people in the city, like lab rats stoned on coke and electricity, his circuits are scrambled and his brain is sending out irrational messages. He wants to talk to her, though. That much he’s certain of—he wants to unburden himself. Tales of the pit. His drawer full of relics. He wants to explain that they’re not souvenirs. They are the pins upon which he hangs whatever it is he has to leave behind each morning when he goes to work. They are proof of something he once thought a profound abstraction, something too elusive to frame in words, but has come to realize is no more than the fact of his survival. This fact, he tells himself, might be all that Alicia needs to understand.

Despite having urged Bobby on, Pineo taunts him about Alicia the next afternoon. His manic edginess has acquired an angry tonality. He takes to calling Alicia “Calculator Bitch.” Bobby expects Mazurek to join in, but it seems he is withdrawing from their loose union, retreating into some private pit. He goes about his work with oxlike steadiness and eats in silence. When Bobby suggests that he might want to seek counseling, a comment designed to inflame, to reawaken the man’s innate ferocity, Mazurek mutters something about maybe having a talk with one of the chaplains. Though they have only a few basic geographical concerns in common, the three men have sustained one another against the stresses of the job, and that afternoon, as Bobby scratches at the dirt, now turning to mud under a cold drenching rain, he feels abandoned, imperiled by the pit. It all looks unfamiliar and inimical. The silvery lattice of the framework appears to be trembling, as if receiving a transmission from beyond, and the nest of massive girders might be awaiting the return of a fabulous winged monster. Bobby tries to distract himself, but nothing he can come up with serves to brighten his sense of oppression. Toward the end of the shift, he begins to worry that they are laboring under an illusion, that the towers will suddenly snap back in from the dimension into which they have been nudged and everyone will be crushed.

The Blue Lady is nearly empty that night when they arrive. Hookers in the back, Alicia in her customary place. The juke box is off, the TV muttering—a blond woman is interviewing a balding man with a graphic beneath his image that identifies him as an anthrax expert. They sit at the bar and stare at the TV, tossing back drinks with dutiful regularity, speaking only when it’s necessary. The anthrax expert is soon replaced by a terrorism expert who holds forth on the disruptive potentials of Al Qaeda. Bobby can’t relate to the discussion. The political sky with its wheeling black shapes and noble music and secret masteries is not the sky he lives and works beneath, gray and changeless, simple as a coffin lid.

“Al Qaeda,” Roman says. “Didn’t he useta play second base for the Mets? Puerto Rican guy?”

The joke falls flat, but Roman’s in stand-up mode.

“How many Al Qaedas does it take to screw in a light bulb?” he asks. Nobody has an answer.

“Two million,” says Roman. “One to hold the camel steady, one to do the work, and the rest to carry their picture through the streets in protest when they get trampled by the camel.”

“You made that shit up,” Pineo says. “‘I know it. Cause it ain’t that funny.”

“Fuck you guys!” Roman glares at Pineo, then takes himself off along the counter and goes to reading a newspaper, turning the pages with an angry flourish.

Four young couples enter the bar, annoying with their laughter and bright, flushed faces and prosperous good looks. As they mill about, some wrangling two tables together, others embracing, one woman earnestly asking Roman if he has Lillet, Bobby slides away from the suddenly energized center of the place and takes a seat beside Alicia. She cuts her eyes toward him briefly, but says nothing, and Bobby, who has spent much of the day thinking about things he might tell her, is restrained from speaking by her glum demeanor. He adopts her attitude—head down, hand on glass—and they sit there like two people weighted down by a shared problem. She crosses her legs, and he sees that she has kicked off a shoe. The sight of her slender ankle and stockinged foot rouses in him a sly Victorian delight.

“This is so very stimulating,” she says. “We’ll have to do it more often.”

“I didn’t think you wanted to talk.”

“If you’re going to sit here, it feels stupid not to.”

The things he considered telling her have gone out of his head.

“Well, how was your day?” she asks, modulating her voice like a mom inquiring of a sweet child, and when he mumbles that it was about the same as always, she says, “It’s like we’re married. Like we’ve passed beyond the need for verbal communion. All we have to do is sit here and vibe at each other.”

“It sucked, Okay?” he says, angered by her mockery. “It always sucks, but today it was worse than usual.”

He begins, then, to unburden himself. He tells her about him and Pineo and Mazurek. How they’re like a patrol joined in a purely unofficial unity, by means of which they somehow manage to shield one another from forces they either do not understand or are afraid to acknowledge. And now that unity is dissolving. The gravity of the pit is too strong. The death smell, the horrible litter of souls, the hidden terrors. The underground garage with its smashed, unhaunted cars white with concrete dust. Fires smoldering under the earth. It’s like going to work in Mordor, the shadow everywhere. Ashes and sorrow. After a while you begin to feel as if the place is turning you into a ghost. You’re not real anymore, you’re a relic, a fragment of life. When you say this shit to yourself, you laugh at it. It seems like bullshit. But then you stop laughing and you know it’s true. Ground Zero’s a killing field. Like Cambodia. Hiroshima. They’re already talking about what to build there, but they’re crazy. It’d make as much sense to put up a Dairy Queen at Dachau. Who’d want to eat there? People talk about doing it quickly so the terrorists will see it didn’t fuck us up. But pretending it didn’t fuck us up… what’s that about? Hey, it fucked us up! They should wait to build. They should wait until you can walk around in it and not feel like it’s hurting you to live. Because if they don’t, whatever they put there is going to be filled with that feeling. That sounds absurd, maybe. To believe the ground’s cursed. That there’s some terrible immateriality trapped in it, something that’ll seep up into the new halls and offices and cause spiritual affliction, bad karma… whatever. But when you’re in the middle of that mess, it’s impossible not to believe it.

Bobby doesn’t look at Alicia as he tells her all this, speaking in a rushed, anxious delivery. When he’s done he knocks back his drink, darts a glance at her to gauge her reaction, and says, “I had this friend in high school got into crystal meth. It fried his brain. He started having delusions. The government was fucking with his mind. They knew he was in contact with beings from a higher plane. Shit like that. He had this whole complex view of reality as conspiracy, and when he told me about it, it was like he was apologizing for telling me. He could sense his own damage, but he had to get it out because he couldn’t quite believe he was crazy. That’s how I feel. Like I’m missing some piece of myself.”

“I know,” Alicia says. “I feel that way, too. That’s why I come here. To try and figure out what’s missing… where I am with all this.”

She looks at him inquiringly, and Bobby, unburdened now, finds he has nothing worth saying. But he wants to say something, because he wants her to talk to him, and though he’s not sure why he wants this or what more he might want, he’s so confused by the things he’s confessed and also by the ordinary confusions that attend every consequential exchange between men and women. Though he’s not sure of anything, he wants whatever is happening to move forward.

“Are you all right?” she asks.

“Oh, yeah. Sure. This isn’t terminal fucked-uppedness. ’Least I don’t think it is.”

She appears to be reassessing him. “Why do you put yourself through it?”

“The job? Because I’m qualified. I worked for FEMA the last coupla summers.”

Two of the yuppie couples have huddled around the jukebox, and their first selection, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” begins its tense, grinding push. Pineo dances on his barstool, his torso twisting back and forth, fists tight against his chest, a parody—Bobby knows—that’s aimed at the couples, meant as an insult. Brooding over his bourbon, Mazurek is a graying, thick-bodied troll turned to stone.

“I’m taking my masters in philosophy,” Bobby says. “It’s finally beginning to seem relevant.”

He intends this as humor, but Alicia doesn’t react to it as such. Her eyes are brimming. She swivels on her stool, knee pressing against his hip, and puts a hand on his wrist.

“I’m afraid,” she says. “You think that’s all this is? Just fear. Just an inability to cope.”

He’s not certain he understands her, but he says, “Maybe that’s all.” It feels so natural when she loops her arms about him and buries her face in the crook of his neck, he doesn’t think anything of it. His hand goes to her waist. He wants to turn toward her, to deepen the embrace, but is afraid that will alarm her, and as they cling together, he becomes insecure with the contact, unclear as to what he should do with it. Her pulse hits against his palm, her breath warms his skin. The articulation of her ribs, the soft swell of a hip, the presence of a breast an inch above the tip of his thumb, all her heated specificity both daunts and tempts him. Doubt concerning their mental well-being creeps in. Is this an instance of healing or a freak scene? Are they two very different people who have connected on a level new to both of them, or are they emotional burn-outs who aren’t even talking about the same subject and have misapprehended mild sexual attraction for a moment of truth? Just how much difference is there between those conditions? She pulls him closer. Her legs are still crossed, and her right knee slides into his lap, her shoeless foot pushing against his waist. She whispers something, words he can’t make out. An assurance, maybe. Her lips brush his cheek, then she pulls back and offers a smile he takes for an expression of regret.

“I don’t get it,” she says. “I have this feeling…” She shakes her head as if rejecting an errant notion.

“What?”

She holds a hand up beside her face as she speaks and waggles it, a blitheness of gesture that her expression does not reflect. “I shouldn’t be saying this to someone I met in a bar, and I don’t mean it the way you might think. But it’s—I have a feeling you can help me. Do something for me.”

“Talking helps.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. That doesn’t seem right.” Thoughtful, she stirs her drink; then a sidelong glance. “There must be something some philosopher said that’s pertinent to the moment.”

“Predisposition fathers all logics, even those disposed to deny it.”

“Who said that?”

“I did… in a paper I wrote on Gorgias. The father of sophistry. He claimed that nothing can be known, and if anything could be known, it wasn’t worth knowing.”

“Well,” says Alicia, “I guess that explains everything.”

“I don’t know about that. I only got a B on the paper.”

One of the couples begins to dance, the man, who is still wearing his overcoat, flapping his elbows, making slow-motion swoops, while the woman stands rooted, her hips undulating in a fishlike rhythm. Pineo’s parody was more graceful. Watching them, Bobby imagines the bar a cave, the other patrons with matted hair, dressed in skins. Headlights slice across the window with the suddenness of a meteor flashing past in the primitive night. The song ends, the couple’s friends applaud them as they head for the group table. But when the opening riff of the Hendrix version of “All Along The Watchtower” blasts from the speakers, they start dancing again and the other couples join them, drinks in hand. The women toss their hair and shake their breasts; the men hump the air. A clumsy tribe on drugs.

The bar environment no longer works for Bobby. Too much unrelieved confusion. He hunches his shoulders against the noise, the happy jabber, and has a momentary conviction that this is not his true reaction, that a little scrap of black negativity perched between his shoulder blades, its claws buried in his spine, has folded its gargoyle wings, and he has reacted to the movement like a puppet. As he stands Alicia reaches out and squeezes his hand. “See you tomorrow?”

“No doubt,” he says, wondering if he will—he believes she’ll go home and chastise herself for permitting this partial intimacy, this unprophylactic intrusion into her stainless career-driven life. She’ll stop coming to the bar and seek redemption in a night school business course designed to flesh out her resumé. One lonely Sunday afternoon a few weeks hence, he’ll provide the animating fantasy for a battery-powered orgasm.

He digs in his wallet for a five, a tip for Roman, and catches Pineo looking at him with unalloyed hostility. The kind of look your great enemy might send your way right before pumping a couple of shells into his shotgun. Pineo lets his double-barreled stare linger a few beats, then turns away to a deep consideration of his beer glass, his neck turtled, his head down. It appears that he and Mazurek have been overwhelmed by identical enchantments.

Bobby wakes up a few minutes before he’s due at work. He calls the job, warns them he’ll be late, then lies back and contemplates the large orange and brown water stain that has transformed the ceiling into a terrain map. This thing with Alicia… it’s sick, he thinks. They’re not going to fuck—that much is clear. And not just because she said so. He can’t see himself going to her place, furnishings courtesy of The Sharper Image and Pottery Barn, nor can he picture her in this dump, and neither of them has displayed the urge for immediacy that would send them to a hotel. It’s ridiculous, unwieldy. They’re screwing around is all. Mind fucking on some perverted soul level. She’s sad because she’s drinking to be sad because she’s afraid that what she does not feel is actually a feeling. Typical postmodern Manhattan bullshit. Grief as a form of self-involvement. And now he’s part of that. What he’s doing with her may be even more perverse, but he has no desire to scrutinize his motives—that would only amplify the perversity. Better simply to let it play out and be done. These are strange days in the city. Men and women seeking intricate solace for intricate guilt. Guilt over the fact that they do not embody the magnificent sadness of politicians and the brooding sympathy of anchorpersons, that their grief is a flawed posture, streaked with the banal, with thoughts of sex and football, cable bills and job security. He still has things he needs, for whatever reason, to tell her. Tonight he’ll confide in her, and she will do what she must. Their mutual despondency, a wrap in four acts.

He stays forever in the shower; he’s in no hurry to get to the pit, and he considers not going in at all. But duty, habit, and doggedness exert a stronger pull than his hatred and fear of the place—though it’s not truly hatred and fear he feels, but a syncretic fusion of the two, an alchemical product for which a good brand name has not been coined. Before leaving, he inspects the contents of the top drawer in his dresser. The relics are the thing he most needs to explain to her. Whatever else he has determined them to be, he supposes that they are, to a degree, souvenirs, and thus a cause for shame, a morbid symptom. But when he looks at them he thinks there must be a purpose to the collection he has not yet divined, one that explaining it all to Alicia may illuminate. He selects the half shoe. It’s the only choice, really. The only object potent enough to convey the feelings he has about it. He stuffs it into his jacket pocket and goes out into the living room, where his roommate is watching The Cartoon Network, his head visible above the back of the couch.

“Slept late, huh?” says the roommate.

“Little bit,” Bobby says, riveted by the bright colors and goofy voices, wishing he could stay and discover how Scooby Doo and Jackie manage to outwit the swamp beast. “See ya later.”

Shortly before his shift ends, he experiences a bout of paranoia, during which he believes that if he glances up he’ll find the pit walls risen to skyscraper height and all he’ll be able to see of the sky is a tiny circle of glowing clouds. Even afterward, walking with Mazurek and Pineo through the chilly, smoking streets, distant car horns sounding in rhythm like an avant-garde brass section, he half persuades himself that it could have happened. The pit might have grown deeper, he might have dwindled. Earlier that evening they began to dig beneath a freshly excavated layer of cement rubble, and he knows his paranoia and the subsequent desire to retreat into irrationality are informed by what they unearthed. But while there is a comprehensible reason for his fear, this does not rule out other possibilities. Unbelievable things can happen of an instant. They all recognize that now.

The three men are silent as they head toward the Blue Lady. It’s as if their nightly ventures to the bar no longer serve as a release and have become an extension of the job, prone to its stresses. Pineo goes with hands thrust into his pockets, eyes angled away from the others, and Mazurek looks straight ahead, swinging his thermos, resembling a Trotskyite hero, a noble worker of Factory 39. Bobby walks between them. Their solidity makes him feel unstable, as if pulled at by large opposing magnets—he wants to dart ahead or drop back, but is dragged along by their attraction. He ditches them just inside the entrance and joins Alicia at the end of the bar. Her twenty-five watt smile switches on, and he thinks that though she must wear brighter, toothier smiles for co-workers and relatives, this particular smile measures the true fraction of her joy, all that is left after years of career management and bad love.

To test this theory he asks if she’s got a boyfriend, and she says, “Jesus! A boyfriend. That’s so quaint. You might as well ask if I have a beau.”

“You got a beau?”

“I have a history of beaus,” she says, “but no current need for one, thank you.”

“Your eye’s on the prize, huh?”

“It’s not just that. Though right now, it is that. I’m”—a sardonic laugh—“I’m ascending the corporate ladder. Trying to, anyway.”

She fades on him, gone to a gloomy distance beyond the bar, where the TV chatters ceaselessly of plague and misery and enduring freedom. “I wanted to have children,” she says at last. “I can’t stop thinking about it these days. Maybe all this sadness has a biological effect. You know. Repopulate the species.”

“You’ve got time to have children,” he says. “The career stuff may lighten up.”

“Not with the men I get involved with… not a chance! I wouldn’t let any of them take care of my plants.”

“So you got a few war stories, do you?”

She puts up a hand, palm outward, as to if to hold a door closed. “You can’t imagine!”

“I’ve got a few myself.”

“You’re a guy,” she says. “What would you know?”

Telling him her stories, she’s sarcastic, self-effacing, almost vivacious, as if by sharing these incidents of male duplicity, laughing at her own naiveté, she is proving an unassailable store of good cheer and resilience. But when she tells of a man who pursued her for an entire year, sending candy and flowers, cards, until finally she decided that he must really love her and spent the night with him, a good night after which he chose to ignore her completely… when she tells him this, Bobby sees past her blithe veneer into a place of abject bewilderment. He wonders how she’d look without the makeup. Softer, probably. The makeup is a painting of attitude that she daily recreates. A mask of prettified defeat and coldness to hide her fundamental confusion. Nothing has ever been as she hoped it would be—yet while she has forsworn hope, she has not banished it, and thus she is confused. He’s simplifying her, he realizes. Desultory upbringing in some Midwestern oasis—he hears a flattened A redolent of Detroit or Chicago. Second-rate education leading to a second-rate career. The wreckage of mornings after. This much is plain. But the truth underlying her stories, the light she bore into the world, how it has transmuted her experience… that remains hidden. There’s no point in going deeper, though, and probably no time.

The Blue Lady fills with the late crowd. Among them a couple in their sixties who hold hands and kiss across their table; three young guys in Knicks gear; two black men attired gangsta-style accompanying an overweight blonde in a dyed fur wrap and a sequined cocktail dress (Roman damns them with a glare and makes them wait for service). Pineo and Mazurek are silently, soddenly drunk, isolated from their surround, but the life of the bar seems to glide around Bobby and Alicia, the juke box rocks with old Santana, Kinks, and Springsteen. Alicia’s more relaxed than Bobby’s ever seen her. She’s kicked off her right shoe again, shed her jacket, and though she nurses her drink, she seems to become increasingly intoxicated, as if disclosing her past were having the effect of a three-martini buzz.

“I don’t think all men are assholes,” she says. “But New York men… maybe.”

“You’ve dated them all, huh?” he asks.

“Most of the acceptable ones, I have.”

“What qualifies as acceptable in your eyes?”

Perhaps he stresses “in your eyes” a bit much, makes the question too personal, because her smile fades and she gives him a startled look. After the last strains of “Glory Days” fade, during the comparative quiet between songs, she lays a hand on his cheek, studies him, and says, less a question than a self-assurance, “You wouldn’t treat me like that, would you?” And then, before Bobby can think how he should respond, taken aback by what appears an invitation to step things up, she adds, “It’s too bad,” and withdraws her hand.

“Why?” he asks. “I mean I kinda figured we weren’t going to hook up, and I’m not arguing. I’m just curious why you felt that way.”

“I don’t know. Last night I wanted to. I guess I didn’t want to enough.”

“It’s pretty unrealistic.” He grins. “Given the difference in our ages.”

“Bastard!” She throws a mock punch. “Actually, I found the idea of a younger man intriguing.”

“Yeah, well. I’m not all that.”

“Nobody’s ‘all that,’ not until they’re with somebody who thinks they are.” She pretends to check him out. “You might clean up pretty nice.”

“Excuse me,” says a voice behind them. “Can I solicit an opinion?”

A good-looking guy in his thirties wearing a suit and a loosened tie, his face an exotic sharp-cheekboned mixture of African and Asian heritage. He’s very drunk, weaving a little.

“My girlfriend… okay?” He glances back and forth between them. “I was supposed to meet her down…”

“No offense, but we’re having a conversation here,” Bobby says.

The guy holds his hands up as if to show he means no harm and offers apology, but then launches into a convoluted story about how he and his girlfriend missed connections and then had an argument over the phone and he started drinking and now he’s broke, fucked up, puzzled by everything. It sounds like the prelude to a hustle, especially when the guy asks for a cigarette, but when they tell him they don’t smoke, he does not—as might be expected—ask for money, but looks at Bobby and says, “The way they treat us, man! What are we? Chopped liver?”

“Maybe so,” says Bobby.

At this the guy takes a step back and bugs his eyes. “You got any rye?” he says. “I could use some rye.”

“Seriously,” Bobby says to him, gesturing at Alicia. “We need to finish our talk.”

“Hey,” the guy says. “Thanks for listening.”

Alone again, the thread of the conversation broken, they sit for a long moment without saying anything, then start to speak at the same time.

“You first,” says Bobby.

“I was just thinking…” She trails off. “Never mind. It’s not that important.”

He knows she was on the verge of suggesting that they should get together, but that once again the urge did not rise to the level of immediacy. Or maybe there’s something else, an indefinable barrier separating them, something neither one of them has tumbled to. He thinks this must be the case, because given her history, and his own, it’s apparent neither of them has been discriminating in the past. But she’s right, he decides—whatever’s happening between them is simply not that important, and thus it’s not that important to understand.

She smiles, an emblem of apology, and stares down into her drink. “Free Falling” by Tom Petty is playing on the box, and some people behind them begin wailing along with it, nearly drowning out the vocals.

“I brought something for you,” Bobby says.

An uneasy look. “From your work?”

“Yeah, but this isn’t the same…”

“I told you I didn’t want to see that kind of thing.”

“They’re not just souvenirs,” he says. “If I seem messed up to you… and I’m sure I do. I feel messed up, anyway. But if I seem messed up, the things I take from the pit, they’re kind of an explanation for…” He runs a hand through his hair, frustrated by his inability to speak what’s on his mind. “I don’t know why I want you to see this. I guess I’m hoping it’ll help you understand something.”

“About what?” she says, leery.

“About me… or where I work. Or something. I haven’t been able to nail that down, y’know. But I do want you to see it.”

Alicia’s eyes slide away from him; she fits her gaze to the mirror behind the bar, its too-perfect reflection of romance, sorrow, and drunken fun. “If that’s what you want.”

Bobby touches the half shoe in his jacket pocket. The silk is cool to his fingers. He imagines that he can feel its blueness. “It’s not a great thing to look at. I’m not trying to freak you out, though. I think…”

She snaps at him. “Just show it to me!”

He sets the shoe beside her glass and for a second or two it’s like she doesn’t notice it. Then she makes a sound in her throat. A single note, the human equivalent of an ice cube plinking in a glass, bright and clear, and puts a hand out as if to touch it. But she doesn’t touch it, not at first, just leaves her hand hovering above the shoe. He can’t read her face, except for the fact that she’s fixated on the thing. Her fingers trail along the scorched margin of the silk, tracing the ragged line. “Oh, my god!” she says, all but the glottal sound is buried beneath a sudden surge in the music. Her hand closes around the shoe, her head droops. It looks as if she’s in a trance, channeling a feeling or some trace of memory. Her eyes glisten, and she’s so still, Bobby wonders if what he’s done has injured her, if she was unstable and now he’s pushed her over the edge. A minute passes, and she hasn’t moved. The juke box falls silent, the chatter and laughter of the other patrons rise around them.

“Alicia?”

She shakes her head, signaling either that she’s been robbed of the power to speak, or is not interested in communicating.

“Are you Okay?” he asks.

She says something he can’t hear, but he’s able to read her lips and knows the word “god” was again involved. A tear escapes the corner of her eye, runs down her cheek, and clings to her upper lip. It may be that the half shoe impressed her, as it has him, as being the perfect symbol, the absolute explanation of what they have lost and what has survived, and this, its graphic potency, is what has distressed her.

The jukebox kicks in again, an old Stan Getz tune, and Bobby hears Pineo’s voice bleating in argument, cursing bitterly; but he doesn’t look to see what’s wrong. He’s captivated by Alicia’s face. Whatever pain or loss she’s feeling, it has concentrated her meager portion of beauty and suffering, she’s shining, the female hound of Wall Street thing she does with her cosmetics radiated out of existence by a porcelain Song of Bernadette saintliness, the clean lines of her neck and jaw suddenly pure and Periclean. It’s such a startling transformation, he’s not sure it’s really happening. Drink’s to blame, or there’s some other problem with his eyes. Life, according to his experience, doesn’t provide this type of quintessential change. Thin, half-grown cats do not of an instant gleam and grow sleek in their exotic simplicity like tiny gray tigers. Small, tidy Cape Cod cottages do not because of any shift in weather, no matter how glorious the light, glow resplendent and ornate like minor Asiatic temples. Yet Alicia’s golden change is manifest. She’s beautiful. Even the red membranous corners of her eyes, irritated by tears and city grit, seem decorative, part of a subtle design, and when she turns to him, the entire new delicacy of her features flowing toward him with the uncanny force of a visage materializing from a beam of light, he feels imperiled by her nearness, uncertain of her purpose. What can she now want of him? As she pulls his face close to hers, lips parting, eyelids half lowering, he is afraid a kiss may kill him, either overpower him, a wave washing away a tiny scuttler on the sand, or that the taste of her, a fraction of warm saliva resembling a speck of crystal with a flavor of sweet acid, will react with his own common spittle to synthesize a compound microweight of poison, a perfect solution to the predicament of his mortality. But then another transformation, one almost as drastic, and as her mouth finds his, he sees the young woman, vulnerable and soft, giving and wanting, the childlike need and openness of her.

The kiss lasts not long, but long enough to have a history, a progression from contact to immersion, exploration to a mingling of tongues and gushing breath, yet once their intimacy is completely achieved, the temperature dialed high, she breaks from it and puts her mouth to his ear and whispers fiercely, tremulously, “Thank you… Thank you so much!” Then she’s standing, gathering her purse, her briefcase, a regretful smile, and says, “I have to go.”

“Wait!” He catches at her, but she fends him off.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “But I have to… right now. I’m sorry.”

And she goes, walking smartly toward the door, leaving him with no certainty of conclusion, with his half-grown erection and his instantly catalogued memory of the kiss surfacing to be examined and weighed, its tenderness and fragility to be considered, its sexual intensity to be marked upon a scale, its meaning surmised, and by the time he’s made these judgments, waking to the truth that she has truly, unequivocally gone and deciding to run after her, she’s out the door. By the time he reaches the door, shouldering it open, she’s twenty-five, thirty feet down the sidewalk, stepping quickly between the parked cars and the storefronts, passing a shadowed doorway, and he’s about to call out her name when she moves into the light spilling from a coffee shop window and he notices that her shoes are blue. Pale blue with a silky sheen, and of a shape that appears identical to that of the half shoe left on the bar. If, indeed, it was left there. He can’t remember now. Did she take it? The question has a strange, frightful value, born of a frightful suspicion that he cannot quite reject, and for a moment he’s torn between the impulse to go after her and a desire to turn back into the bar and look for the shoe. That, in the end, is what’s important. To discover if she took the shoe, and if she did, then to fathom the act, to decipher it. Was it done because she thought it a gift, or because she wanted it so badly, maybe to satisfy some freaky neurotic demand, that she felt she had to more or less steal it, get him confused with a kiss and bolt before he realized it was missing? Or—and this is the notion that’s threatening to possess him—was the shoe hers to begin with? Feeling foolish, yet not persuaded he’s a fool, he watches her step off the curb at the next corner and cross the street, dwindling and dwindling, becoming indistinct from other pedestrians. A stream of traffic blocks off his view. Still toying with the idea of chasing after her, he stands there for half a minute or so, wondering if he has misinterpreted everything about her. A cold wind coils like a scarf about his neck, and the wet pavement begins soaking into his sock through the hole in his right boot. He squints at the poorly defined distance beyond the cross-street, denies a last twinge of impulse, then yanks open the door of the Blue Lady. A gust of talk and music seems to whirl past him from within, like the ghost of a party leaving the scene, and he goes on inside, even though he knows in his heart that the shoe is gone.

Bobby’s immunity to the pit has worn off. In the morning he’s sick as last week’s salmon plate. A fever that turns his bones to glass and rots his sinuses, a cough that sinks deep into his chest and hollows him with chills. His sweat smells sour and yellow, his spit is thick as curds. For the next forty-eight hours he can think of only two things, medicine and Alicia. She’s threaded through his fever, braided around every thought like a strand of RNA, but he can’t even begin to make sense of what he thinks and feels. A couple of nights later the fever breaks. He brings blankets, a pillow, and orange juice into the living room and takes up residence on the sofa. “Feeling better, huh?” says the roommate, and Bobby says, “Yeah, little bit.” After a pause the roommate hands him the remote and seeks refuge in his room, where he spends the day playing video games. Quake, mostly. The roars of demons and chattering chain guns issue from behind his closed door.

Bobby channel surfs, settles on CNN, which is alternating between an overhead view of Ground Zero and a studio shot of an attractive brunette sitting at an anchor desk, talking to various men and women about 9/11, the war, the recovery. After listening for almost half an hour, he concludes that if this is all people hear, this gossipy, maudlin chitchat about life and death and healing, they must know nothing. The pit looks like a dingy hole with some yellow machines moving debris—there’s no sense transmitted of its profundity, of how—when you’re down in it—it seems deep and everlasting, like an ancient broken well. He goes surfing again, finds an old Jack the Ripper movie starring Michael Caine, and turns the sound low, watches detectives in long dark coats hurrying through the dimly lit streets, paperboys shouting news of the latest atrocity. He begins to put together the things Alicia told him. All of them. From “I’ve just been to a funeral,” to “Everybody’s ready to go on with their lives, but I’m not ready,” to “That’s why I come here… to figure out what’s missing,” to “I have to go.” Her transformation… did he really see it? The memory is so unreal, but then all memories are unreal, and at the moment it happened, he knew to his bones who and what she was, and that when she took the shoe, the object that let her understand what had been done to her, she was only reclaiming her property. Of course everything can be explained in other ways, and it’s tempting to accept those other explanations, to believe she was just an uptight careerwoman taking a break from corporate sanity, and once she recognized where she was, what she was doing, who she was doing it with, she grabbed a souvenir and beat it back to the email-messaging, network-building, clickety-click world of spread sheets and wheat futures and martinis with some cute guy from advertising who would eventually fuck her brains out and afterward tell the-bitch-was-begging-for-it stories about her at his gym. That’s who she was, after all, whatever her condition. An unhappy woman committed to her unhappy path, wanting more yet unable to perceive how she had boxed herself in. But the things that came out of her on their last night at the Blue Lady, the self-revelatory character of her transformation… the temptation of the ordinary is incapable of denying those memories.

It’s a full week before Bobby returns to work. He comes in late, after darkness has fallen and the lights have been switched on, halfway inclined to tell his supervisor that he’s quitting. He shows his ID and goes down into the pit, looking for Pineo and Mazurek. The great yellow earth movers are still, men are standing around in groups, and from this Bobby recognizes that a body has been recently found, a ceremony just concluded, and they’re having a break before getting on with the job. He’s hesitant to join the others, and pauses next to a wall made of huge concrete slabs, shattered and resting at angles atop one another, holding pockets of shadow and worse in their depths.

He’s been standing there about a minute when he feels her behind him. It’s not like in a horror story. No terrible cold or prickling hairs or windy voices. It’s like being with her in the bar. Her warmth, her perfumey scent, her nervous poise. But frailer, weaker, a delicate presence barely in the world. He’s afraid if he turns to look at her, it will break their tenuous connection. She’s probably not visible, anyway. No Stephen King commercial, no sight of her hovering a few inches off the ground, bearing the horrid wounds that killed her. She’s a willed fraction of herself, less tangible than a wisp of smoke, less certain than a whisper. “Alicia,” he says, and her effect intensifies. Her scent grows stronger, her warmth more insistent, and he knows why she’s here. “I realize you had to go,” he says, and then it’s like when she embraced him, all her warmth employed to draw him close. He can almost touch her firm waist, the tiered ribs, the softness of a breast, and he wishes they could go out. Just once. Not so they could sweat and make sleepy promises and lose control and then regain control and bitterly go off in opposite directions, but because at most times people are only partly there for one another—which was how he and Alicia were in the Blue Lady, knowing only the superficial about each other, a few basic lines and a hint of detail, like two sketches in the midst of an oil painting, their minds directed elsewhere, not caring enough to know all there was to know—and the way it is between them at this moment, they would try to know everything. They would try to find the things that did not exist like smoke behind their eyes. The ancient grammars of the spirit, the truths behind their old yet newly demolished truths. In the disembodiment of desire, an absolute focus born. They would call to one another, they would forget the cities and the wars… Then it’s not her mouth he feels, but the feeling he had when they were kissing, a curious mixture of bewilderment and carnality, accented this time by a quieter emotion. Satisfaction, he thinks. At having helped her understand. At himself understanding his collection of relics and why he approached her. Fate or coincidence, it’s all the same, all clear to him now.

“Yo, Bobby!”

It’s Pineo. Smirking, walking toward him with a springy step and not a trace of the hostility he displayed the last time they were together. “Man, you look like shit, y’know.”

“I wondered if I did,” Bobby says. “I figured you’d tell me.”

“It’s what I’m here for.” Pineo fakes throwing a left hook under Bobby’s ribs.

“Where’s Carl?”

“Taking a dump. He’s worried about your ass.”

“Yeah, I bet.”

“C’mon! You know he’s got that dad thing going with you.” Pineo affects an Eastern European accent, makes a fist, scowls Mazurek-style. “‘Bobby is like son to me.’”

“I don’t think so. All he does is tell me what an asshole I am.”

“That’s Polish for ‘son,’ man. That’s how those old bruisers treat their kids.”

As they begin walking across the pit, Pineo says, “I don’t know what you did to Calculator Bitch, man, but she never did come back to the bar. You musta messed with her mind.”

Bobby wonders if his hanging out with Alicia was the cause of Pineo’s hostility, if Pineo perceived him to be at fault, the one who was screwing up their threefold unity, their trinity of luck and spiritual maintenance. Things could be that simple.

“What’d you say to her?” Pineo asks.

“Nothing. I just told her about the job.”

Pineo cocks his head and squints at him. “You’re not being straight with me. I got the eye for bullshit, just like my mama. Something going on with you two?”

“Uh-huh. We’re gonna get married.”

“Don’t tell me you’re fucking her.”

“I’m not fucking her!”

Pineo points at him. “There it is! Bullshit!”

“Sicilian ESP… Wow. How come you people don’t rule the world?”

“I can’t believe you’re fucking the Calculator Bitch!” Pineo looks up to heaven and laughs. “Man, were you even sick at all? I bet you spent the whole goddamn week sleep-testing her Certa.”

Bobby just shakes his head ruefully.

“So what’s it like—yuppie pussy?”

Irritated now, Bobby says, “Fuck off!”

“Seriously. I grew up in Queens, I been deprived. What’s she like? She wear thigh boots and a colonel’s hat? She carry a riding crop? No, that’s too much like her day job. She…”

One of the earth movers starts up, rumbling like T-Rex, vibrating the ground, and Pineo has to raise his voice to be heard.

“She was too sweet, wasn’t she? All teach me tonight and sugar, sugar. Like some little girl read all the books but didn’t know what she read till you come along and pulled her trigger. Yeah… and once the little girl thing gets over, she goes wild on your ass. She loses control, she be fucking liberated.”

Bobby recalls the transformation, not the-glory-that-was-Alicia part, the shining forth of soul rays, but the instant before she kissed him, the dazed wonderment in her face, and realizes that Pineo—unwittingly, of course—has put his grimy, cynical, ignorant, wise-ass finger on something he, Bobby, has heretofore not fully grasped. That she did awaken, and not merely to her posthumous condition, but to him. That at the end she remembered who she wanted to be. Not “who,” maybe. But how. How she wanted to feel, how she wanted to live. The vivid, less considered road she hoped her life would travel. Understanding this, he understands what the death of thousands has not taught him. The exact measure of his loss. And ours. The death of one. All men being Christ and God in His glorious fever burning, the light toward which they aspire. Love in the whirlwind.

“Yeah, she was all that,” Bobby says.