I
arrived at Melissa’s to find my sister, red-eyed, sitting on the
crimson Persian rug, gazing at the TV. A vodka martini sat before her in
its iconic glass.
“What’s yer poison?” asked Melissa.
These
were her first words to me after I crossed the threshold. There were
funny things about that question. Among them was this: there was only
one poison on offer.
“I’ll have a martini,” I replied. She popped the cork of her beloved Belvedere to pour me the first of many.
With
each iteration the narrative onscreen further coalesced around a set of
themes: Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden. The planes, one, two,
three, four; the Pentagon, the Pennsylvania field. If the whole story
could be told at the top of the hour, just once, perfectly—with all the
names right, and the times—maybe everything would be OK.
I
remembered a night I’d been here, two weeks before, maybe three, and
spotted a story in the Times on the kitchen counter. It was about four
members of a Viennese art collective who had stayed up all night in
their studio on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center. At dawn, they
put on climbers’ harnesses, affixed suction cups to the inside of a
window, unscrewed it from its mounting, and pulled it into the room.
They installed a cantilevered balcony and each, in turn, stepped outside.
Accomplices circled in a helicopter taking pictures; a grainy
enlargement appeared in the paper. It depicted a human form, sheathed
from the waist down by the makeshift structure and framed by one of the
tower’s unmistakable columnar striations.
One
of the artists was quoted as follows: The amazing thing that happens
when you take out a window is that the whole city comes into the
building.
No
one could confirm that it had happened. No verifiable evidence was
found. The Austrians turned mum and the event quickly lapsed into myth.
Only its name remained: The B-Thing.