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(A one-act play.)
CHARACTERS
The Man: A man in his late twenties. He wears a Yarmulke and speaks with a strong Brooklyn accent.
Julie: A woman in her late twenties.
TIME
The present. Early Friday evening.
SCENE
The emergency room of a Manhattan hospital, ringed by
long banquettes and end tables piled with magazines. A few framed
posters for Impressionist art exhibits hang on the walls. The
receptionist's head is just visible above a tall counter at the far wall. A
large clock hangs on the wall behind her, reading 6:17 when the curtain
rises. A closed door, leading to the examining rooms, is to the right
of the reception counter. The Man is sitting a bit hunched over, speaking on his phone. His girlfriend, Julie,
sits beside him. They are angled toward each other so that their knees
touch. She occasionally fondly caresses his knees and thighs. Around
them other patients sit and wait silently, doing the things people do in
waiting rooms: leafing through magazines, checking their phones, urging
restless children to keep quiet and behave.
The Man: I’m still in the city.
No, I’m still in the city. I need to ask you a favor. Big favor. You going by a liquor store?
A liquor store.
A LI-QUOR STORE.
I need a bottle of wine.
[A few seconds pass.]
What about your uncle?
He’s not home? Where is he?
[A few more seconds pass.]
You think he’ll pass by a liquor store on his way home?
Why? I need him to buy me a bottle of wine is why. Like I told you so.
[A few more seconds pass.]
Alright.
[The Man hangs up and dials another number.]
Jonah! Where are you?
You’re not home? You heading home?
Are you by any chance driving by a liquor store?
LIQUOR. Liquor, liquor, liquor. Wine.
Not now. On your way. On your way home, Jonah. Do you think you will be driving by a liquor store on your way home? If it’s on the way.
Why? I would like a bottle of wine.
What
do you think I’m going to do with it? I’m going to drink it, that’s
what I’m going to do. I like to have a nice bottle of wine for shabbas.
The Carmel. I like the Carmel.
Well are you going to pass one?
You don’t know. [To Julie, mockingly, not making an effort to cover the receiver: He doesn’t know.] Where’s Morty? You think he’s at work still?
I’m still in the city.
His train is two stops shorter. He’ll get home before me. Maybe he can go pick me up a bottle of wine at the liquor store.
OK. Alright.
[The Man hangs up the phone. Julie gazes at him quizzically. She no longer caresses him but her hands still rest on his knees.]
The Man: Why you looking at me like that? The look.
Julie: I’m not! It’s just...
The Man: It’s just what? It’s what?
Julie: It’s just... Nothing.
The Man: It’s what? It’s what? It’s what?
Julie [loudly]: The wine!
The Man: The wine?
Julie: The wine! You and your bottle of wine.
The Man [defensively]: What, I like to have a nice bottle of wine. What’s wrong with that? For shabbas.
Julie: I know...
The Man: We’re stuck in this verkochte waiting room. I would like to have a bottle of wine when I get home.
Julie: It’s just...
The Man: What, it’s just?
Julie: It’s just that you’re being so weird about it.
The Man [shaking his head and rolling his eyes]: I gotta call Morty.
[The Man dials another number.]
The Man: Morty! Where are you?
I’m in the city still. I’m still in the city. Listen—
No, no. I know. What?
[A few seconds pass.]
Really? She what?
She said that to him directly?
She said that to him on the phone? She said those words to him on the telephone?
What’s he going to do?
Uh-huh?
Uh-huh...
Ruthie warned him about that! She warned him about exactly that! She warned him about that exact thing.
Uh-huh...
I cannot believe she said those words to him by telephone. Morty, you are pulling my leg. Listen!—
Uh-huh?
Uh-huh...
Well tell them shabbat shalom from me, OK?
[Julie nudges the Man on the knee and gives him a pointed look.]
Tell them from me and Julie. From Julie too. Hey! I’m forgetting what I called you for with your crazy story.
Hmm? I need to ask you a favor. A simple favor. Will you pass a liquor store on your way home?
For what? A bottle of wine. A bottle of red wine.
Get me the Carmel. I like the Carmel.
What
do you mean, you don’t know? A man doesn’t know if he passes a liquor
store on his way home from the train? Day after day after day? You don’t
know.
Morty, you get home fifteen minutes before me. Even if I leave now.
In the city. I’m still in the city.
[Away from the receiver, to Julie]: Honey, find out if we’re next. Please. Find out if we’re next.
[Julie
releases his knee brusquely, with a trace of contempt (but only a
trace), and walks up to the counter to find out if they are next. She
and the receptionist can be seen speaking to each other but their words
are inaudible.]
[In the meantime]: Yeah, so, Morty. I need you to do me this favor.
Well go out of your way a little. Not too far. A little. As a favor to me. For all those times I, you know.
[Julie
returns. The Man looks up and inquires with his eyes. She shakes her
head and sits back down. The Man shakes his head slightly as he returns
to his conversation.]
All those times, I don’t know. All those times I bought you fireworks.
[A few seconds pass.]
[Dejectedly]: Alright. Yeah. Alright, bye-bye.
[The Man hangs up with a sigh and notes the time.]
[To Julie]: What, are you saying we should get out of here?
[Julie gives him a funny-reproachful grimace.]
[About 10 seconds pass.]
The Man: Alright, let’s go.
Julie: You sure?
The Man: Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go. Come on. Up.
Julie: But what about—
The Man [interrupting]: We have to go. The time.
Julie: OK.
The Man: We’re running out of time.
Julie: OK.
[They
both get up but the Man does so with extreme difficulty. He can barely
put any weight on his left leg. He winces and makes some half-suppressed
exclamations of pain.]
Julie: You OK?
The Man: Yep.
Julie: Take it easy, honey. Easy.
The Man: Yep.
[They
walk slowly, laboriously out of the office, Julie supporting the Man from under his
shoulder, and helping to direct him until they are finally out the door.]
THE END
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.
I
picked up my overnight bag at home and headed out to Melissa’s, jumping
on a crowded bus that crept down Fifth. I stood in front, near the
driver. Everyone was talking about it. Nervously, I suppose. But their
chatter had a tone of eerie glee. They seemed eager to outdo each other
in hyperbole, like kids at recess. Was it vanity—unbridled, like our
other basest urges, by the trauma? Or was it a tactic? If they made it
worse in their heads, and made it worse out loud, mere reality might not
be so hard to bear.
“I heard forty thousand people died," a woman said.
"Oh no. Way more than that," said a man. "Two hundred thousand."
Then the driver told his story.
"I was down there," he began. "I looked out the window and I saw what you call it. Graffiti. I
saw graffiti comin’ outta the sky." We all knew what he meant. "But
then I realized it ain't no graffiti. It's pieces of paper.” He shook
his head. “Eight and a half by eleven."
I
got off around the Metropolitan Museum and crossed Central Park with
the crowd. Everyone’s pace had slowed by half a step, as though in a
dream. With nothing left to escape, our bodies moved with
processional solemnity. In a way, it was just a beautiful day in the
park. There were lots of children—acting like children, skipping,
swinging their parents' arms. But they knew. I heard a little boy say:
"Daddy, did the airplane really hit the building?"
"Yes."
"What happened to the people inside?"
A roaring fighter jet pierced the empty sky above us.
It
occurred to me that I ought to do some work. I was at the office, after
all. Everything around me—computer, desk, chair—had been set in place
to facilitate my productivity. Besides, it might be useful to lose
oneself in labor at a time like this. Therapeutic.
But after I opened the document of code I’d been working on the day
before, I got the eerie feeling the earth was trembling and sliding
under me.
There
was nothing left to do but go. A few of us set out onto Fifth Avenue,
must have been one o’clock or so. Every building downtown—those still
standing as well as those that weren’t—had disgorged its contents onto
the streets, and now a great tide of corporate humanity, of minions and
executives, some blasted with ash, some weeping, many women in their
stocking feet, was rising like bile up the gullet of the city.
Julie muttered that she’d heard from her Israeli fiancé’s cousin that Yasser Arafat had taken credit for the attacks.
“The
Sears Tower is next,” she said. “Mark my words. Lev told me so. He
knows. Arafat won’t stop until he’s made us bleed out every drop of
blood.”
After a few tries I managed to reach Mike in Chinatown.
“You heading uptown?” he asked.
“Yeah. What are you doing?”
“I’ve been on my roof. I took some Super 8 of the towers before they fell.”
“Wow.”
“You know what this means, don’t you?” he asked.
“No. What?”
“From now on there’s a before and an after.”
“Yeah.”
“From now on there will always be before. And then there will be after. And there will always be this.”
“This here right now,” I said. Then we got disconnected.
A
pickup truck drove slowly up the street, its bed crowded with men.
Still one more ran after it and clambered up the bumper, the others
grabbing his arms and pulling him aboard as to a life raft.
I contemplated the Empire State Building, radiantly naked in the sun.
I
heard something behind me and turned to find that it was a woman,
crying inconsolably. I expected her to look up, to offer me the
opportunity to express my sympathy. But she did not.
On
the Upper East Side I happened to pass a posh restaurant. It was open. I
peered through a pane of its French window. Inside, the space seemed
cool and dark and quiet. Two couples in late middle age, the men
broad-shouldered, wearing jackets, the women delicate and thin, sat
knifing and forking as a waiter hovered at the ready. A bottle of wine
rested in a dewy bucket in the middle of the table, ringed by four
glinting glasses, each a quarter filled.
We
think words mean things. But they really mean ideas. This is by
design—this is how we want them to behave. If we don’t like something,
we can change its name. Or pretend its name means something else. We’re
in control. But the thing is: we don’t live in truth. We inhabit a
brokered, dubious realm, situated in the gaps between words and what
they represent. We are insulated by language—most of the time. What
happens when it fails to protect us?
A
few of us were going to the game on Monday night. Kevin, Rob. Maybe
Peter, Jimmy. Maybe Steve. It was going to be Yankees-Red Sox, Roger
Clemens. But a hard rain started in the afternoon and didn’t let up.
After work we went to the dark bar around the corner to wait and see if
the game got called. In the cozy barglow we felt a little lazy, like we
were playing hooky. But on TV we saw the tarp get rolled out over the
infield. A few intrepid souls in garbage-bag ponchos huddled in the
stands. We began to drink in earnest then, shooting pool, insouciant.
Outside the rain was grim and unforgiving.
The
following morning I awoke later than I wanted to. As usual. Coffee,
shower. The whole routine. At my bus stop all was quiet and serene, the
sky a limpid blue pierced by a column of black smoke from some
building on fire downtown. As the bus progressed along Fifth I had that
thought that everybody has: I wonder if it’s my building that’s on fire.
It probably wasn’t. Hundreds of buildings down there. Thousands. But still.
“The
last stop on this bus will be Fawteenth Street,” the driver suddenly
announced. “Fawteenth Street will be the last stop on this bus.”
There was a French couple near me, young, eager to see the sights. Qu'est-ce qui se passe? she asked him. What’s going on? He translated the thing about 14th. That’s all anybody knew.
A
fire engine passed us and one of the firemen, in a rear-facing window
seat, leaned his head out, looking back. He bore the smile of a man who
knows exactly where he’s going and what he has to do.
I
got off at 23rd, the smoke still far away. The building super, an older
Hispanic man, was sweeping the little foyer by the elevator. He stopped
and looked at me, resting his hands atop the broomstick. He seemed a
bit alarmed to just be clearing out the dust.
“The
towers!” he said. “Plane hit towers!” He made a swooping gesture with
his hand by way of illustration. “Twin Towers! Yes? Plane!”
“Really?” I replied. I tried to strike an appropriate posture of concern. “Wow.”
“Two!” he added, eyes wide, holding up his fingers in a V. “Two plane hit!”
“What?”
“Two plane hit towers! Two!” he insisted.
It
seemed like he’d doubled the number in dissatisfaction at my response.
What on earth could he actually be talking about? I imagined a little
prop plane wobbling off course, bonking into the side of a building;
another somehow following suit. (Didn’t a bomber do that after the War?
Stick into the side of the Empire State? Then a giant ape came along and
tore it out?) I tried again to pitch my voice to the urgency of his
outlandish assertion.
“Two planes?!” I said. “That’s incredible!”
I
got off the elevator to find most of my coworkers on the other side of
the sculpture and the plant, staring dumbfoundedly at the television.
The same plume of smoke was on the screen, bigger and closer, a little
less real. Newscasters were gravely reciting the facts as they were
known: airline names, flight numbers, emergency response activities.
Origins and destinations. Times to the minute. Speculations as to the
dead and injured. Each of the twins bore on its face a crooked maw with a
tongue of fire inside, vomiting torrential sheets of slate-gray smoke
into the sparkling, baby blue sky. Down below, safe in the valley of
shops and streets and sidewalks, many stared up at the conflagration
with hands over their mouths. Police waving stand back, stand back. Nothing to see here, folks.
A
blizzard of documents—reports, charts, memos, contracts and
faxes—animated the air and fell, confetti-like, upon the living. There
went our paperwork. There went our records.
The
rest of the office looked normal. The same walls and floor, desks,
lamps and chairs. Yesterday’s coffee mugs sat upside-down in the rack
beside the sink.
Were we now living in a new world, different than the one before? A world of smoke and death, where nothing can be trusted?
Neil
paced between his office and the TV, murmuring a word or two of
consolation when it appeared to be expected. He suggested we all go home
if we like. This is so bad, you don’t even need to do your jobs.
Brett embraced Julie in a comforting, older-brotherly fashion, his
leather jacket muffling her sobs. It was like we were in high school and
a friend committed suicide. It was hard to say what it was like.
I
wandered over to my desk and placed a call to Melissa. She was up on
the roof with her binoculars. While my voice was worried, tense,
aggrieved—all the things it was supposed to be, I thought—hers was
weirdly calm, detached. Like it always was, in fact. Why shouldn’t it
be?
“I can see it from here,” she said. “I can see it really well.”
“You can see the towers?”
“I can see the smoke.”
“You can see the smoke?”
“I can totally see the smoke.”
I
told her I’d probably head up to her place in a little while. I called
my sister and my brother. Then I wandered to the TV just in time to see.
It came as a surprise, at least to me. How does a burning building
crumble to the ground?
I
returned to my desk and watched the calamity as it was haltingly
presented online. I expected some reassurance from the words arrayed in
different sizes on the screen. Not from the words themselves—the words
were UNDER ATTACK, TERROR, STUNNED—but from the fact that they were words. Our
words. We had typed them into a machine. The machine displayed them
back to us. This was still the world as it should be. Was it not?
Instead I felt a greater unease, almost nausea. The words, the phrases, they only pointed feebly—cravenly—toward
the meanings that they would contain. I perceived the awful intrusion
of something raw and powerful—something unnameable—into our insular
domain.
“Oh my God,” I heard Lucy wail across the divide. “Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.”
“What?”
“The second tower just collapsed.”
I
was beside myself, what to do with Melissa. All I could imagine was her
disappearing. And me grasping at the space where she had been. She’d
been a little quiet lately. What was up? I made mental lists of things
to say to her. Little jokes to make. As though to appease some
insatiable beast.Still,
our relationship persisted. I shuffled fearfully to her apartment every
couple of days, convinced she’d send me right back home. Instead, we’d
order out. Watch some old movie. Fuck. Wake up and brush our teeth and
that was that.I
began to make a tally of the good days and the bad. I took her out to
dinner for her birthday. That was good. I got her drunk enough so she
forgot my apprehension.We
planned a vacation. A trip out west. A visit to a friend of mine and to
a friend of hers. Hotels, wineries, a drive up the coast. Carmel and
Monterey. Some camping. I hated camping. I would have done anything she
said.There
appeared a warning light on the dashboard of our rental car and I
called the 800 number that was provided in our pamphlet of materials.
Ignore it, they said. There’s no problem with the car. There’s a problem
with the warning.The
first few days were fine. She liked to get high. As long as we were
smoking pot together, everything was all right. That’s what I thought.
We sat on the windowsill of a motel room in Santa Monica, blowing smoke
into the shaft. Little sparks flew up into the darkness.The
night before it was all over we were staying at an extremely expensive
inn overlooking the rocky Pacific shore in Big Sur. We got high on our
patio. I sucked each papery hit deeply and held it in as long as I
could, drawing every last bit of intoxicating smoke into my lungs in
little bursts, trying not to cough. Then we walked the path to the
restaurant perched over the foggy cliffs.We
were offered a table facing an angry orange fire; for a moment it
seemed lovely and then my hands and knees and face heated intolerably
and in my hazy state I felt the thing was ruined and the whole world was
sure to end."Ask
the Maitre d' for another table," said Melissa quite reasonably, so I
did, and we were promptly seated at a table by the picture window
looking out to sea.We
ordered white wine and oysters and California caviar and when it came
we set the oysters between us and slipped them off the shells into our
mouths, and everything was fine as gray turned to black outside, and far
below us the foamy surf that beat upon the shore receded into darkness
too.Suddenly
there was a man standing behind her, his nose to the window. He had
wound his way around nearby tables and chairs and appeared to be
examining the glass with intense curiosity. His fingers walked upon the
surface and its ghostly, gold reflections of faces and hunched bodies,
chairs, tables, plates and softly glowing candles. He probed it timidly,
hesitantly, like an explorer who has discovered a new world far more
mysterious and wonderful and terrifying than he could ever have
imagined."Sir?" said Melissa.After a beat more puzzled fumbling he broke out of his trance."Oh! I… I thought that was another room!" he said, and pivoted back among the real things from whence he came.As
we watched the lost man and debated the meaning of his behavior—was it
some kind of joke? Was he very drunk? Senile?—I became convinced I
wasn’t me.We
drank more in the restaurant, got the check, wandered through the
parking lot and smoked some more. We tried to break in to the swimming
pool, the fancy one that’s in the pictures in the travel magazines.
Someone with a flashlight saw us and yelled something. So we went back
to our room, drank some more. Fucked in the tub. When I awoke in the
morning she was not beside me and I knew right then it was over. It
wasn’t my own thoughts that told me. It wasn’t my own voice. It came
from outside of me. It had the authority of the other. It’s over. I knew there was nothing I could do. And like an idiot I still tried.
The
crossing guard on Eighth is a nice woman about my age, an old maid
already, maybe. Always says g’mornin’ in her Brooklyn accent. She chats
with the moms and their kids, catching up on gossip. flattering the
girls: Don’t you look beautiful today! With her coffee in her hand and her back to the traffic, the cars and trucks are an afterthought. She knows they’ll stop.
The
Thai food—sausages in buns with cilantro and a trace of sriracha
sauce—was very good. But they took a minute and a half to eat. We went
back up the hill, toward the entrance, hoping to find some stands with
shorter lines. We circled a log cabin-like structure that had vendor
windows on all four sides. Bagel halves were on display under cheese
bells, each draped with a limp and pallid blade of lox. Around the
corner two women stood at a bakery counter. All they had left for sale
were sticks of salty bread. I was so surprised that a vendor with
something in stock had no line before it that I bought some. The women
seemed more surprised than me.We
got some sweets in the dessert sector—those were not hard to obtain.
After a wait in two lines—one line earned you permission to stand in the
other, essentially—we got duck hot dogs created by a particularly
famous restaurant. The cabbage topping seemed, weirdly, to be mixed with
orange zest. I popped a piece of Orbit gum.Frustrated,
defeated, we walked to a little hill beside some trees and lay down for
awhile. The cool grass felt good against my neck. On my palms. I gazed
serenely at the sky through the gaps of the branches looming over us. It
was still a beautiful day. I began to feel good.Suddenly something fearsome and raw violated the idyll. KRANGG!! It was a ferocious chord from an extremely loud, distorted guitar. CHUGGA-CHUGGA-CHUGGA KCHANG KANG CHUGGA-CHUGGA it went, again and again and again. A jolting expression of id to cast a damning pall on the gentle afternoon.We arose blearily, as though hung over.“It’s a Van Halen cover band,” observed Sara.It did not seem possible to me—they sounded more like death metal. But sure enough, they were playing “Panama.”We
gravitated toward one of the exits, at the south end of the park. To
get there we walked past rows and rows of portable toilets. Something
seemed strange about them—an incongruous, dreamy quality. I’d never seen
these objects in quite this way before. Then it occurred to me what it
was: there were no lines.
A
man stood in the window of the Rite Aid on 42nd Street, having just
passed through the checkout. His white plastic bag lay open on the sill,
and in it sat a torn little box from which he’d withdrawn a Styrofoam
and metal finger splint, which he now placed gingerly over his index
finger and wound around with gauze.
The
scene seemed idyllic at first. Pavilions, stands and stages across a
hilly expanse. But then we looked a little closer: you couldn’t buy beer
with real money. You needed special money. You were supposed to trade your real money for the special money first.We
traveled a little further and found a beer stand that took cash. But
you needed a bracelet. I gazed back up the hill. I saw neat rows of food
stands with extravagantly painted signs. People. Trees. No indication
as to where one might obtain a bracelet.We
toured the natural amphitheatre. Around its rim, vendors fed lines of
people extending from the amorphous pit like a hundred hungry tongues.
Employees stood at vague points on the hill with signs that read, “15
minutes to go!”Down
on the lawn some people had food. Some people had beer. Some had food
and beer. It was difficult to imagine what they’d endured to obtain it;
or perhaps into what privilege they had somehow been born.Onstage someone bellowed a perfunctory welcome: How you all doin’ today?
Soon a dixieland band struck up, its jaunty counterpoint bleating
incongruously over the proceedings. I thought about the woman on her
hands and knees.We
found the shortest line—Thai food—and so there we stood, and stood, and
stood. I took a break to try to find the bracelet place. I reached the
side of a beer tent where a worker was chatting with a customer. I asked
the worker where to get a bracelet. He shrugged. Like he didn’t know
what I meant. Certainly he didn’t care. I asked the customer.“How do you get a bracelet?” I ventured. “How do I get a bracelet? Like the one you have.” I pointed to his. “There.”“Over
there, by the entrance,” he replied, pointing at a shroud of trees.
Then he swiveled uncertainly. “Or over there. I dunno. There’s two
entrances,” he said.“Over there?” I asked, pointing where he had pointed first.“I think so. Yeah. I think.”I
found the ID booth. There was a line snaking away from it, around a
tree, and back out of view. Hundreds of people all shifting foot to
foot. I turned away and walked back to find that Sara had made a little
progress up the hill.