A Hard and Heavy Thing (4 page)

Levi stalled on the rejection speech he had planned. “No. I gotta figure out what's going on with my grandpa,” was all he could muster as he disappeared down the hall to his room.

•••

Hours later, Nick opened Levi's bedroom door and turned on the light. “There are three messages on the machine from your parents.”

Levi nodded against his pillow.

Nick threw open the curtains. The lancinating light of the noon sun streamed onto Levi's closed eyes and turned the dark orange of his eyelids to a bright white. He put his head down and his hand up to shield his eyes.

“Levi, you have to call your parents. Just let them know you're alive, will ya?”

“I just need a minute.” Levi got up and closed his door. He pulled out the lone drawer of his pressboard desk, reached into the back corner, and removed a 35mm film canister of weed. He packed a small bowl for himself and sat on the window ledge. He looked down into the empty alley as he smoked. He was static for long periods of time with his hands in his lap, the bowl cupped in one and a lighter cupped in the other. He passed an hour or two, crippled by the anxiety and sadness that followed his comedown. The absence of pedestrians and traffic on an otherwise bustling street and the silence of the neighborhood made his chest swell with a sense of impending doom. Shards of broken glass on the asphalt made him want to cry. Despite the early hour, when there was nothing left in the bowl but blackened ashes, he took off his clothes and went to bed.

[This was depression.

Also, contrary to popular belief, this is where the process ends. In my experience, acceptance is a myth.]

The weed helped some, but he slept fitfully and didn't leave his room until the next morning. When he rose, he felt far better than he had the day before. He ate a bowl of cereal, showered, shaved, and tried to make himself look presentable. His eyes were no longer dilated, and apart from a little melancholy, he felt relatively normal.

He had no desire to encounter the suspicious, calculating glare of his father the litigator and the litany of questions that went along with it. He was also in no mood for his mother's fawning and expressions of worry. Nevertheless, he had put it off long enough. He skipped class and drove east on I-90 toward home. Levi's dad balanced a stuffed suitcase on the edge of his Buick's trunk. Levi parked over all the old oil spots that still remained from the beater he drove in high school.

“Mom inside?” he said.

“Yeah.” His dad shoved the suitcase the rest of the way into the trunk and slammed it. “If you wanna talk to her, you better hurry. We're about to leave.”

“To where?”

“Whaddya mean where? Arizona.”

“Arizona? We're having the funeral there? We're not bringing him back here?”

His dad turned and walked toward the house in a rush. “Who's we? Like the royal we? We're we; i.e., your mother and I are we. If you want a funeral here, someone has to physically get him and bring him back.” He stopped at the steps and turned around. “You obviously got the messages. Was it too much to call back? You live twenty minutes away, for God's sake. It shouldn't be this hard to get a hold of you.”

“Dad, I'm—”

His dad turned and went into the house and called for Levi's mother.

Levi reached up and touched his dad's shoulder. “Dad, I'm sorry.” His dad turned and looked down into his eyes and frowned. “I was just having a hard—forget it. I should have been here sooner. He was your dad after all.” Levi looked down at his shoes. “How are you holding up? Are you okay?”

His dad unclenched his jaw and his face relaxed. He let out a deep loud sigh and hugged Levi. He squeezed and patted his son's back. “I'm fine, Son. I'll be fine.”

This was his father, and these were the pendular swings between fearsome judgment and bold, shameless compassion.

When Levi pulled away, his father took to the professional tone in which he felt most comfortable. “Your mother and I will go to Phoenix and help your aunt clean out his room. We'll help her make the arrangements, and we'll bring Aunt Trudy when we come back with the body on Thursday. It's not set in stone, but the funeral will most likely be Saturday. At Immanuel.”

“Uncle Thomas officiating?”

“Yes, Pastor Anhalt officiating.” His dad turned to get in the car.

Levi's mother came fumbling with the keys and an oversized handbag as she tried to hold the storm door open with one foot. She dropped the keys, and as she bent to pick them up, the bag slipped off her shoulder. Levi picked up the keys for her.

“Oh, hi honey.” She put her hand on one of his cheeks, stood on her tiptoes, and kissed his other. She was flushed and out of breath. “Oh, honey. I'm so glad I got to see you before we left. I was worried. Are you okay?”

“What about you guys?”

“Oh you know your father. Crisis mode.”

Levi looked down the walkway at his dad standing by the driver's side door. His father's smooth, tanned forehead held a slight sheen of sweat. He pulled a comb from his back pocket and fixed his thick black hair, which he wore with a side part. He put the comb away and rubbed the side of his face as if feeling the closeness of his shave. He tapped his fingers on the top of his car. He unbuttoned his two-button black suit coat so that it hung open. He loosened his tie and climbed into the driver's seat. He rolled down the passenger's window and leaned across the seat, looking impatiently at their prolonged hug.

When they broke, Levi walked his mom to the car and opened her door for her. When she was in, he leaned down and looked into her window. “I'll be around. Available all week, I guess. And so, let me know if I can do anything on this end.”

His father nodded and started rolling up the window.

“Seriously,” Levi said. “If you need anything here, just call?”

His dad tossed up a dismissive wave as the window closed against the seal. His mother blew a kiss.

“I'll answer the phone this time,” Levi shouted as the car backed out the driveway.

On Tuesday morning, Levi looked down at his watch as he strolled into the periodicals department office at 7:51
A.M.
Central Standard Time and tried to put on his most carefree smile. He fully expected a disapproving frown and a shake of the head from his already exasperated middle-aged work study supervisor, Doris. He expected a suppressed giggle from plain Jane Poorman, his periodicals coworker, who even as a senior was still plenty happy filing copies of everything from
The American Journal of Physiology—Endocrinology and Metabolism
to
Revista de Música Latinoamericana
every semester for $5.15 an hour.

“Just in time,” he beamed, knowing full well he was nearly half an hour late. Neither of them, however, paid him any mind. Both of them sat in the far corner of the room huddled over the old transistor radio that Doris used to listen to NPR every morning.

Levi pulled the industrial steel cart from its home in the corner to a more accessible spot next to his beech-veneer desk. The cart carried three teetering piles of periodical journals and magazines. In his three-hour shift, Levi needed to check each one into the online library catalog, place a white sticker on the top right corner denoting the volume and issue, and apply a Tattle-Tape strip to the interior of each publication. Then he needed to shelve all of them. He had no time to dawdle on any normal day, and having already lost a sixth of his shift, he would have to hustle to get it all done in time.

He could barely hear the radio in the back of the room. He focused on his ancient monitor with the dark background and monochromatic amber printing.

“Hey,” Doris called up to him. “Listen to this.”

“What are they saying?” Levi said without turning around as he typed
The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
at a pace of approximately ninety-three words per minute.

“A plane flew into the World Trade Center in New York City.”

“Wow. Terrible,” Levi said as he set aside the first journal and started typing
Der Spiegel.
He flipped through that one because sometimes the foreign magazines had pictures of women with their tops off. Not a year, he thought. Not a year goes by that some Cessna driven by some amateur doesn't smash into some building.

“They say,” said Doris, “that it's some kind of terrorist attack.”

“How do they know it wasn't some kind of accident?” He placed
Der Spiegel
on top of
The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
and picked up
The Journal of English and Germanic Philology.

Jane shushed them both and then said, “Quiet, I'm trying to hear this.”

Levi finally broke from his rote cataloging and turned around. Jane leaned far over on her chair as if she were warming the bench in a close basketball game. Doris sat upright with her back straight. Every few seconds she reached up and put both palms on her head and ran her fingers through her shoulder-length gray hair.

“Could you turn it up?” Levi asked. The volume level didn't change. He continued his work.

When he had finished shelving his first stack, Doris and Jane hadn't moved. “So what was it?” Levi asked. “Like a puddle-jumper or something?”

Doris's eyes grew large and she shook her head. “No,” she nearly whispered. And lowly and slowly, as if she were telling a ghost story to her children in front of a campfire she said, “A passenger plane.” She continued to shake her head in the slow, deliberate way in which she had begun.

“A passenger plane?” Levi said. “Like a jet?”

“Ssssh,” Jane said.

Levi raced through the next dozen journals. His work was sloppy and the Tattle-Tapes were slanted and clearly visible on the pages, but he didn't have time to open the bindings wide enough to hide them. As he stood at the end of a center aisle placing
Infinite Dimensional Analysis, Quantum Probability and Related Topics
on a bottom shelf where he was sure it would never be touched again, he saw Doris pass by holding a rabbit-ears antenna. Jane followed with a boxy 19-inch color television set.

Levi went back to the empty office and flopped back into his desk chair. The pile of journals didn't seem to be getting any smaller. He picked up the receiver to make a quick phone call while Doris was out of the office, but he couldn't decide whether to call his aunt's house in Phoenix to see if his parents were in or Nick to hazard an apology.

[I still don't know if I ever apologized for punching you in the face that night. Compared to everything else I've done to hurt you, breaking your nose doesn't seem like that big of a deal, but for what it's worth, I'm sorry for that too.]

Doris held onto the doorjamb and swung her torso into the room. She was flushed and out of breath. Levi jumped and dropped the receiver onto its cradle.

“C'mon,” Doris said.

“Why, what's up?”

“Just follow me.”

She made a beeline straight toward the main doors of the library, but veered at the last second and went up the burgundy-carpeted stairs to the second floor. Doris led him down a hallway, all the way through the graduate-student carrels, and she turned the handle on the last door. It was a small room, cramped like an elevator. Jane found a clear picture on the television by holding the antenna and standing to the side of the set.

At 8:01
A.M.
Central Standard Time, the picture of dense black smoke billowing, boiling, pouring, overflowing from the top floors of the North Tower of the World Trade Center came into focus on live television.

The television program was
Good Morning America
. The digital clock on the bottom right-hand corner of the screen said 9:01 and the temperature read 68 degrees. To Levi, it looked no different there than in Wisconsin. The sky was sunny and clear and he could almost feel the crispness of the autumn air. The exception was the dark smoke obscuring the screen.

Doris pointed and stuttered. “We were right there. Gary and I. Right there. There's an observation tower there. Tourists everywhere. Restaurants. The place is like a city by itself.” Diane Sawyer confirmed what she said and Doris nodded, as if to say, “See, I told you.”

“We remind you again,” Diane said. “There was a terrorist bomb that did go off at the World Trade Center years ago.”

“Why is she saying that?” Jane said.

“What do you mean?” Levi said.

Jane switched the hand she used to hold the antenna. “They said it was a plane. Are they just trying to scare people?”

Charles Gibson said, “Absolutely no indication that this could have been related to that.”

[The extent to which the media not only entered, but practically controlled the dialog would become all too clear to us as the day went on—hell, as the entire decade went on.]

Charles and Diane went by telephone to a man who described rescue efforts. It all seemed so mundane to Levi at the time. So journalistic. So newsy.

Until—

Levi, Doris, and Jane all saw the second plane—and it was a huge plane—enter the screen. Charles, Diane, and even the man on the telephone were entirely incognizant about what was going to happen.

Hollywood can't make explosions like this
, was Levi's first thought.

The man on the telephone with Charles and Diane shouted, “Oh my God,” and it wasn't so much like blasphemy; it was an echt and ingenuous prayer.

“Where did these planes come from?” Levi said. “Where were they going? I think—” Levi thought his brother was flying home from DC that morning. Or maybe it was the next morning. He couldn't think. “I think that maybe—” He couldn't bring himself to say it aloud for fear that he would make it so.

The mother in Doris took over and the open-mouthed shaking of the head vanished. All slack left her face. Even her tired eyes grew taut and she looked ready to spring into action.