31
BEN
SEPTEMBER 2001
The only reason I’m awake is because Tatum had an early class and set off the fire alarm when she tried to fry bacon before leaving.
“Shit, shit, sorry,” she said, scrambling around her tiny studio, flopping an oven mitt toward the smoke, batting down the alarm with a broom handle. The plastic cover popped off and crashed to the floor, where it promptly split in two. Tatum jumped like she hadn’t expected that, for gravity to work, and then her apartment was silent again, other than the sizzle of the torched bacon.
“Shit,” she said again. “Go back to sleep. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
I’d been up too late in the edit bay, splicing together the final cut of Romanticah before I sent it out into the festival world, praying someone will take notice and give me my shot.
“It’s fine,” I said, rubbing my eyes, waving her closer. “I promised Tom I’d read two manuscripts today anyway.”
“You’re seriously the best assistant agent he could hope for. Two books in a day?” She shook her head and kissed me, hovering over the bed so her tank top fell low and offered me a view.
“Now how am I supposed to concentrate with that on my mind?”
She straightened and laughed, low and husky, and I leaned back against her headboard, my arms folded behind my head, and matched her grin. The first two months since her mom died were a spiral of gray, everything muted, everything numb. She kissed me because she loved me, and she sometimes (not as often as before) slept with me because that’s what you do, but she wasn’t here here. She didn’t eat enough, and she nearly got fired from the bar because she kept mouthing off to customers, but slowly she’d come back. I didn’t know if she would, though I never dared say that. Those words were never worth the damage they would have inflicted. I’d give her space, and she’d tell me I didn’t care. I’d try to talk to her, and she’d tell me I was hovering. Then she’d cry and say it wasn’t me, it was her fucking grief, and that I was the best thing about her life, and to please forgive her for being such a bitch. And of course I was going to forgive her for that.
I didn’t understand it, though, her moodiness, her push/pull. Daisy explained that all actresses (herself included) are basically nuts, so get used to it. But that was too easy, too pat an explanation. So Daisy said that Tatum must trust me in order to show me all her ugliness, to not try to dress up her grief into something rosier or shinier or easier, and then I understood: she was letting me inside her, and for me to stand by her, to sit with her, was enough.
But now she is coming back to me. Her classes help, I know. The structure of having a planned day, the lightness of becoming someone else for a few hours. Someone whose mom hadn’t died. Someone whose dad wasn’t a fucking mess. And time too, though it had been only three months.
This morning she’d said, “If you keep this in mind long enough, I’ll be back from class, and then—”
“Then what?” I laughed.
“Then it will just be your lucky day, I guess,” she said, her hand on the front door. Then she was gone.
By the time I shower and scrub the burned pot she’d abandoned on the stove, it’s nearly nine a.m. Her coffeemaker is broken, like many other things in the apartment, so I slide on my flip-flops, thump down the building’s concrete stairwell to the cart on the corner. It’s a perfect, cloudless September day. Crisp breezes. Powder blue skies. As if this is our reward for suffering through the sweltering days of August. It does kind of feel like my lucky day, actually. My editing session had gone well; I’m getting paid by a top literary agent to read early manuscripts. My girlfriend is smiling again and wants to screw me tonight.
I pay for the coffee, slide my headphones into my ears, and decide to take a walk. Stretch my legs. Enjoy the fall air. The caffeine electrifies my blood, and I resolve to do this every day. Self, I say, do this every day! Rise early. Kiss your sexy girlfriend good-bye. Start the day with some exercise to pump some energy into your veins! You are young! You are virile! It is going to be your goddamn lucky day!
Three police cars race by me so quickly that I can literally feel the wind off their wake. Two fire engines roar to life behind me, flying around the corner, startling a woman next to me such that she jumps and slaps her hand to her heart. I fiddle with my Walkman radio where the DJs are talking about a small plane that has hit the World Trade Center. I halt quickly at that, peer around to see if anyone else is hearing what I’m hearing, but the morning rush hour keeps passing by. A Cessna, they’re saying. Must have been a total fluke.
I adjust my headphones and start up again. My dad works in the World Trade Center, but what are the odds? These guys probably don’t even have it right. A small plane hitting a building?
I shake my head. That can’t be.
Through the foam of my earbuds, I can hear sirens suddenly burst from all corners of the city, and this time people around me do stop, their faces registering alarm, like we were all listening to these same radio stations and all thinking bullshit but now perhaps realizing that this is not a joke. Not at all funny. The DJs shout in my ear, “There’s another plane! Another plane has hit the Towers. Folks, this appears not to be an accident. We can only speculate, of course . . .”
A woman stops next to me, her headphones plugged into her own radio, and grabs my arm.
“Holy shit,” she says.
“Oh my God,” I reply. Then: “My dad!”
I turn and start running back to Tatum’s apartment, my flip-flops not able to match my pace, and I stumble when all I want to do is move faster than I’ve ever moved in my life. I take the steps two by two, jiggle the shaking key in her lock, and flip on her TV, which, thank God, is working today (it isn’t always). I grab the phone and dial my mom.
“Benjamin,” she says, out of breath. “He’s not there. It’s OK. He’s on a flight today. Going to San Francisco for a deposition.”
I can feel myself uncurl, like the cells in my body had been magnetically bonded together and have been granted release.
“Jesus, Mom, thank God.”
“I know, I know, but those poor people,” she says, as I find CNN on the dial, the reality of the images worse than I could have imagined even when the DJs were shouting in their mics. “Oh, Ben, call waiting. Let me take this.”
I can see a monstrous, foreboding plume of smoke rising from each tower, like a death knell, like the black plague. My dad’s firm is on the ninety-ninth floor. I lean over and squint, trying to assess where the planes hit, if he’d know anyone inside.
The commentators are saying things like intentional and terrorist, and they already have a reporter on the ground. There is debris flying and terrified New Yorkers running, and though the reporter is trying to stay calm, her voice is quavering, and she is coughing into her elbow.
“Get out of there!” I shout to the screen, as if I know her, as if she can hear me. Then I remember: Tatum. She’s downtown in class, not too far from the Towers. She doesn’t have a cell phone because she is foolish (and tells me she doesn’t want another bill to pay). I call her beeper number. I call it again. I try Daisy, but they’re not sharing a course load this semester: Daisy is focusing on stage, Tatum on film, and their schedules rarely overlap now.
The CNN anchors press their fingers to their ears. “We are hearing that these were not small planes,” one of them says. “They were major airliners. We are talking about a possible hijacking situation.”
I feel my stomach rise to my throat, my pulse quickening in my neck.
My dad is on a major airliner.
No. No, no, no, no, no. I just spoke to my mom, and she said he was fine.
I call Tatum’s paging service again. Where is she?
I rise and open the front door, poke my head out, looking for . . . I don’t know, someone, Tatum, a neighbor, to confirm that this is real, this is actually happening, and I’m not completely losing my shit. I should call Leo. I close the door. I should call Leo, and he will tell me that I am being overdramatic and paranoid, because Leo is never overdramatic and paranoid, and he’ll make me laugh because I’m such a worrywart of a baby. I’ll probably wake him. Fucking college students and their ability to sleep until noon. But I’d promised my dad over the weekend that I’d call him anyway, have a heart-to-heart about his future, try to “get his head on straight.”
“He’s barely pulling Cs; Bs if he’s lucky,” my dad said. “Forget about the LSAT, a decent law school.”
“That’s just Leo,” I replied. “Don’t worry.”
“I’m trying to get him an interview on the trading floor at Merrill.” He sighed. “Calling in some favors. He needs to have a plan. He’s graduating in nine months. He can’t live on our dime forever.”
“No law school at all?” I asked. My dad had always wanted him to come on board his firm, especially when it became clear that I wouldn’t.
“Maybe a year or two as a trader, then he can transition. He needs to grow up, Ben.” I could picture my dad shaking his head like he couldn’t imagine how Leo had gotten this far in life without being drafted into clown school.
“He’s all right, Dad.”
He was silent for a beat. “I know,” he said finally. “Of course I know that.” He didn’t sound like he did, though. “I know I push you hard, Ben, and I know you don’t always appreciate it . . .”
I laughed, but not really in a joyful way.
“Anyway, you’re making something of yourself,” he said. “That’s why I do it. And now it’s time for your brother to do the same. He’s slid by for too long.”
“It’s because he’s so fucking charming,” I said.
My dad laughed at that, but this time with true glee, because it was the truth.
I grab the phone now, sink back onto the couch. Just as I start to punch in Leo’s number, the CNN reporter starts shouting, running; then a black cloud like nothing I have ever seen rushes toward the camera and overwhelms it. I drop the phone, cover my mouth, let out a scream that bounces off Tatum’s small studio walls.
No.
The first tower falls, crumbling like a fragile set of pick-up sticks. I sit there, paralyzed, completely disbelieving what my brain is attempting to register.
Tatum. I need Tatum so very much right now.
The door unlatches behind me, and she steps over the threshold, as if she could hear my spirit calling out.
“Jesus,” she says, which comes out more like a wail. “Jesus,” she says again, this time crying for real.
The phone rings on the couch where I’d left it. I look at her, she looks at me.
“I don’t know who it is,” I say. “I’d only been trying to reach you.”
I free it from the cradle.
“Ben,” my mom shrieks. “Ben! It was his plane! It was his flight!”
“What?” I say, my mouth dry, my stomach already lurching through my throat. “What?”
“Your dad,” she screams, a piercing pitch that I’ll dream about for years into the future. She breaks down into unintelligible sobs. “He was here this morning. And now he is gone.”