Pattern Recognition

15. SINGULARITY

Win Pollard went missing in New York City on the morning of September 11, 2001. The doorman at the Mayflower flagged an early cab for him, but couldn't remember a destination. A one-dollar tip from the man in the gray overcoat.

She can think about this now because the Japanese sunlight, with the robotic drapes fully open, seems to come from some different direction entirely.

Curled in a body-warm cave of cotton broadcloth and terry, the remote in her hand, she unforgets her father's absence.

Neither she nor her mother had known that Win was in town, and his reason or reasons for being there remain a mystery. He lived in Tennessee, on a disused farm purchased a decade earlier. He had been working on humane crowd-control barricades for stadium concerts. He was in the process, at the time of his disappearance, of obtaining a number of patents related to this work, and these, should they be granted, would now become part of his estate. The company he'd been working with was on Fifth Avenue, but his contacts there had been unaware of his presence in the city.

He had never been known to stay at the Mayflower, but had arrived there the night before, having made reservations via the web. He had gone immediately to his room, and as far as could be known had remained there. He had ordered a tuna sandwich and a Tuborg from room service. He had made no calls.

Since there was no known reason for his having been in New York, that particular morning, there was no reason to assume that he would have been in the vicinity of the World Trade Center. But Cynthia, Cayce's mother, guided by voices, had been certain from the start that he had been a victim. Later, when it was revealed that the CIA had maintained some sort of branch office in one of the smaller, adjacent buildings, she had become convinced that Win had gone there to visit an old friend or former associate.

Cayce herself had been in SoHo that morning, at the time of the impact of the first plane, and had witnessed a micro-event that seemed in retrospect to have announced, however privately and secretly, that the world itself had at that very instant taken a duck in the face.

She had watched a single petal fall, from a dead rose, in the tiny display window of an eccentric Spring Street dealer in antiques.

She was loitering here, prior to a nine-o'clock breakfast meeting at the SoHo Grand, fifteen minutes yet to kill and the weather excellent. Staring blankly and probably rather contentedly at three rusted cast-iron toy banks, each a different height but all representing the Empire State Building. She had just heard a plane, incredibly loud and, she'd assumed, low. She thought she'd glimpsed something, over West Broadway, but then it had been gone. They must be making a film.

The dead roses, arranged in an off-white Fiestaware vase, appeared to have been there for several months. They would have been white, when fresh, but now looked like parchment. This was a mysterious window, with a black-painted plywood backdrop revealing nothing of the establishment behind it. She had never been in to see what else was there, but the objects in the window seemed to change in accordance with some peculiar poetry of their own, and she was in the habit, usually, of pausing to look, when she passed this way.

The fall of the petal, and somewhere a crash, taken perhaps as some impact of large trucks, one of those unexplained events in the sonic backdrop of lower Manhattan. Leaving her sole witness to this minute fall.

Perhaps there is a siren then, or sirens, but there are always sirens, in New York.

As she walks toward West Broadway and the hotel, she hears more sirens.

Crossing West Broadway she sees that a crowd is forming. People are stopping, turning to look south. Pointing. Toward smoke, against blue sky.

There is a fire, high up in the World Trade Center.

Walking more quickly now, in the direction of Canal, she passes people kneeling beside a woman who seems to have fainted.

The towers in her line of sight. Anomaly of smoke. Sirens.

Still focused on her meeting with a German outerwear manufacturer's star designer, she enters the SoHo Grand and quickly climbs stairs made from something like faux bridge girder. Nine o'clock exactly. There is an odd, sub-aquatic quality to the light in the lobby. She feels as though she is dreaming.

There is a fire in the World Trade Center.

She finds a house phone and asks for her designer. He answers in German, hoarse, excited. He doesn't seem to remember that they are having breakfast.

“Come please up,” in English. Then: 'There has been a plane.” Then something urgent, strangled, in German. He hangs up.

A plan? Change of? He is on the eighth floor. Does he want to have breakfast in his room?

As the elevator doors close behind her, she closes her eyes and sees the dry petal, falling. The loneliness of objects. Their secret lives. Like seeing something move in a Cornell box.

The designer's door opens as she raises her hand to knock. He is pale, young, unshaven. Glasses with heavy black frames. She sees that he is in his stocking feet, his freshly laundered shirt buttoned in the wrong holes. His fly is open and he is staring at her as though at something he has never seen before. The television is on, CNN, volume up, and as she steps past him, uninvited but feeling the need to do something, she sees, on the screen beneath the unused leatherette ice bucket, the impact of the second plane.

And looks up, to the window that frames the towers. And what she will retain is that the exploding fuel burns with a tinge of green that she will never hear or see described.

Cayce and the German designer will watch the towers burn, and eventually fall, and though she will know she must have seen people jumping, falling, there will be no memory of it.

It will be like watching one of her own dreams on television. Some vast and deeply personal insult to any ordinary notion of interiority.

An experience outside of culture.

SHE finds the right button on the remote and the drapes track open. She crawls out of her white cave, the terry robe hanging wrinkled around her, and goes to the window.

Blue sky. A clearer blue than she remembers in Tokyo. They use unleaded fuel, now.

She looks down into the woods surrounding the Imperial Palace and sees the few visible sections of rooftop that Bigend's travel girl promised.

There must be paths through those woods, paths of a quite unimaginable charm, which she will never see.

She tries to judge her degree of soul-delay but feels nothing at all. She is alone here, with only the background hum of air-conditioning. She reaches for the phone and orders breakfast.