If Angels Fight (4 page)

As I made excuses in my mind Mags gripped my arm. “He’ll want to find us,” she said. Chilled, I watched her walk away and wondered how long she had been coming apart and why I hadn’t noticed.

Back at work, Marco waited for me. He was part Filipino, a bit of a little wise ass who dressed in downtown black. But that was the week before. Today, he was a woebegone refugee in oversized flip-flops, a magenta sweatshirt and gym shorts, all of which had been made for someone bigger and more buff.

“How’s it going?”

“It sucks! My stuff is all downtown where I don’t know if I can ever get it. They have these crates in the gym, toothbrushes, bras, Bic razors but never what you need, everything from boxer shorts on out and nothing is ever the right size. I gave my clothes in to be cleaned and they didn’t bring them back. Now I look like a clown.

“They have us all sleeping on cots on the basketball courts. I lay there all last night staring up at the ceiling, with a hundred other guys. Some of them snore. One was yelling in his sleep. And I don’t want to take a shower with a bunch of guys staring at me.”

He told me all this while not looking my way but I understood what he was asking. I expected this was going to be a pain. But, given that I couldn’t seem to do much for Mags, I thought maybe it would be a distraction to do what I could for someone else.

“You want to take a shower at my place, crash on my couch?”

“Could I, please?”

So I took a break, brought him around the corner to my apartment, put sheets on the daybed. He was in the shower when I went back to work.

That evening when I got home, he woke up. When I went out to take a walk, he tagged along. We stood at the police barricades at Houston Street and Sixth Avenue and watched the traffic coming up from the World Trade Center site. An ambulance with one side smashed and a squad car with its roof crushed were hauled up Sixth Avenue on the back of a huge flatbed truck. NYPD buses were full of guys returning from Ground Zero, hollow-eyed, filthy.

Crowds of Greenwich Villagers gathered on the sidewalks clapped and cheered, yelled, “We love our firemen! We love our cops!”

The firehouse on Sixth Avenue had taken a lot of casualties when the towers fell. The place was locked and empty. We looked at the flowers and the wreaths on the doors, the signs with faces of the firefighters who hadn’t returned and the messages, “To the brave men of these companies who gave their lives defending us.”

The plume of smoke downtown rolled in the twilight, buffeted about by shifting winds. The breeze brought with it for the first time the acrid smoke that would be with us for weeks afterwards.

Officials said it was the stench of burning concrete. I believed, as did everyone else, that part of what we breathed was the ashes of the ones who had burned to death that Tuesday.

It started to drizzle. Marco stuck close to me as we walked back. Hip twenty-year-olds do not normally hang out with guys almost three times their age. This kid was very scared.

Bleecker Street looked semi-abandoned with lots of the stores and restaurants still closed. The ones that were open were mostly empty at nine in the evening.

“If I buy you a six-pack, you promise to drink all of it?” He indicated he would.

At home, Marco asked to use the phone. He called people he knew on campus looking for a spare dorm room and spoke in whispers to a girl named Eloise. In between calls, he worked the computer.

I played a little Lady Day, some Ray Charles, a bit of Haydn, stared at the TV screen. The President had pulled out of his funk and was coming to New York the next day.

In the next room, the phone rang. “No. My name’s Marco,” I heard him say. “He’s letting me stay here.” I knew who it was before he came in and whispered, “She asked if I was Lord Geoff.”

“Hi, Mags,” I said. She was calling from somewhere with walkie-talkies and sirens in the background.

“Those kids I saw in Astor Place?” she said, her voice clear and crazed. “The ones all burned and drowned. They were on the General Slocum when it caught fire.”

“The kids you saw in Astor Place all burned and drowned?” I asked. Then I remembered our conversation earlier.

“On June 15, 1904. The biggest disaster in New York City history. Until now. The East Village was once called Little Germany. Tens of thousands of Germans with their own meeting halls, churches, beer gardens.

“They had a Sunday excursion, mainly for the kids, on a steamship, the General Slocum, a floating fire trap. When it burst into flames there were no lifeboats, the crew and the captain panicked. By the time they got to a dock over a thousand were dead. Burned, drowned. When a hole got blown in the city, they came back looking for their homes.”

The connection started to dissolve into static.

“Where are you, Mags?”

“Ground Zero. It smells like burning sulfur. Have you seen Geoffrey yet?” she shouted into her phone.

“Geoffrey is dead, Mags. It’s all the horror and tension that’s doing this to you. There’s no hole . . . .”

“Cops and firemen and brokers all smashed and charred are walking around down here.” At that point sirens screamed in the background. Men were yelling. The connection faded.

“Mags give me your number. Call me back,” I yelled. Then there was nothing but static, followed by a weak dial tone. I hung up and waited for the phone to ring again.

After a while, I realized Marco was standing looking at me, slugging down beer. “She saw those kids? I saw them too. Tuesday night I was too jumpy to even lie down on the fucking cot. I snuck out with my friend Terry. We walked around. The kids were there. In old, historical clothes. Covered with mud and seaweed and their faces all black and gone. It’s why I couldn’t sleep last night.”

“You talk to the counselors?” I asked.

He drained the bottle. “Yeah, but they don’t want to hear what I wanted to talk about.”

“But with me . . .”

“You’re crazy. You understand.”

The silence outside was broken by a jet engine. We both flinched. No planes had flown over Manhattan since the ones that had smashed the towers on Tuesday morning.

Then I realized what it was. “The Air Force,” I said. “Making sure it’s safe for Mr. Bush’s visit.”

“Who’s Mags? Who’s Lord Geoff?”

So I told him a bit of what had gone on in that strange lost country, the 1960s, the naïveté that lead to meth and junk. I described the wonder of that unknown land, the three way union. “Our problem, I guess, was that instead of a real ménage, each member was obsessed with only one of the others.”

“OK,” he said. “You’re alive. Mags is alive. What happened to Geoff?”

“When things were breaking up, Geoff got caught in a drug sweep and was being hauled downtown in the back of a police van. He cut his wrists and bled to death in the dark before anyone noticed.”

This did for me, what speaking about the dead kids had maybe done for him. Each of us got to about what bothered him without having to think much about what the other said.

Friday 9/14

Friday morning two queens walked by with their little dogs as Marco and I came out the door of my building. One said, “There isn’t a fresh croissant in the entire Village. It’s like the Siege of Paris. We’ll all be reduced to eating rats.”

I murmured, “He’s getting a little ahead of the story. Maybe first he should think about having an English muffin.”

“Or eating his yappy dog,” said Marco.

At that moment, the authorities opened the East and West Villages, between Fourteenth and Houston Streets, to outside traffic. All the people whose cars had been stranded since Tuesday began to come into the neighborhood and drive them away. Delivery trucks started to appear on the narrow streets.

In the library, the huge TV screens showed the activity at Ground Zero, the preparations for the President’s visit. An elevator door opened and revealed a couple of refugee kids in their surplus gym clothes clasped in a passion clinch.

The computers around my information desk were still fully occupied but the tension level had fallen. There was even a question or two about books and databases. I tried repeatedly to call Mags. All I got was the chilling message on her answering machine.

In a staccato voice, it said, “This is Mags McConnell. There’s a hole in the city and I’ve turned this into a center for information about the victims Jennie Levine and Geoffrey Holbrun. Anyone with information concerning the whereabouts of these two young people, please speak after the beep.”

I left a few messages asking her to call. Then I called every half hour or so hoping she’d pick up. I phoned mutual friends. Some were absent or unavailable. A couple were nursing grief of their own. No one had seen her recently.

That evening in the growing dark, lights flickered in Washington Square. Candles were given out; candles were lighted with matches and Bics and wick to wick. Various priests, ministers, rabbis and shamans lead flower-bearing, candlelit congregations down the streets and into the park where they joined the gathering Vigil crowd.

Marco had come by with his friend Terry, a kind of elfin kid who’d also had to stay at the gym. We went to this 9/11 Vigil together. People addressed the crowd, gave impromptu elegies. There were prayers and a few songs. Then by instinct or some plan I hadn’t heard about, everyone started to move out of the park and flow in groups through the streets.

We paused at streetlamps that bore signs with pictures of pajama-clad families in suburban rec rooms on Christmas mornings. One face would be circled in red and there would be a message like, “This is James Bolton, husband of Susan, father of Jimmy, Anna and Sue, last seen leaving his home in Far Rockaway at 7:30 A.M. on 9/11.” This was followed by the name of the company, the floor of the Trade Center tower where he worked, phone and fax numbers, the email address and the words, “If you have any information about where he is, please contact us.”

At each sign someone would leave a lighted candle on a tin plate. Someone else would leave flowers.

The door of the little neighborhood Fire Rescue station was open, the truck and command car were gone. The place was manned by retired firefighters with faces like old Irish and Italian character actors. A big picture of a fireman who had died was hung up beside the door. He was young, maybe thirty. He and his wife, or maybe his girlfriend, smiled in front of a ski lodge. The picture was framed with children’s drawings of firemen and fire trucks and fires, with condolences and novena cards.

As we walked and the night progressed, the crowd got stretched out. We’d see clumps of candles ahead of us on the streets. It was on Great Jones Street and the Bowery that suddenly there was just the three of us and no traffic to speak of. When I turned to say maybe we should go home, I saw for a moment, a tall guy staggering down the street with his face purple and his eyes bulging out.

Then he was gone. Either Marco or Terry whispered, “Shit, he killed himself.” And none of us said anything more.

At some point in the evening, I had said Terry could spend the night in my apartment. He couldn’t take his eyes off Marco, though Marco seemed not to notice. On our way home, way east on Bleecker Street, outside a bar that had been old even when I’d hung out there as a kid, I saw the poster.

It was like a dozen others I’d seen that night. Except it was in old-time black and white and showed three kids with lots of hair and bad attitude: Mags and Geoffrey and me.

Geoff’s face was circled and under it was written “This is Geoffrey Holbrun, if you have seen him since Tuesday 9/11 please contact . . .” and Mags had left her name and numbers.

Even in the photo, I looked toward Geoffrey who looked towards Mags who looked towards me. I stared for just a moment before going on but I knew that Marco had noticed.

Saturday 9/15

My tiny apartment was a crowded mess Saturday morning. Every towel I owned was wet, every glass and mug was dirty. It smelled like a zoo. There were pizza crusts in the sink and a bag of beer cans at the front door. The night before, none of us had talked about the ghosts. Marco and Terry had seriously discussed whether they would be drafted or would enlist. The idea of them in the army did not make me feel any safer.

Saturday is a work day for me. Getting ready, I reminded myself that this would soon be over. The University had found all the refugee kids dorm rooms on campus.

Then the bell rang and a young lady with a nose ring and bright red ringlets of hair appeared. Eloise was another refugee, though a much better organized one. She had brought bagels and my guests’ laundry. Marco seemed delighted to see her.

That morning all the restaurants and bars, the tattoo shops and massage parlors were opening up. Even the Arab falafel shop owners had risked insults and death threats to ride the subways in from Queens and open their doors for business.

At the library, the huge screens in the lobby were being taken down. A couple of students were borrowing books. One or two even had in-depth reference questions for me. When I finally worked up the courage to call Mags, all I got was the same message as before.

Marco appeared dressed in his own clothes and clearly feeling better. He hugged me. “You were great to take me in.”

“It helped me even more,” I told him.

He paused then asked, “That was you on that poster last night wasn’t it? You and Mags and Geoffrey?” The kid was a bit uncanny.

When I nodded, he said, “thanks for talking about that.”

I was in a hurry when I went off duty Saturday evening. A friend had called and invited me to an impromptu “Survivors’ Party.” In the days of the French Revolution, The Terror, that’s what they called the soirees at which people danced and drank all night then went out at dawn to see which of their names were on the list of those to be guillotined.

On Sixth Avenue a bakery that had very special cupcakes with devastating frosting was open again. The Avenue was clogged with honking, creeping traffic. A huge chunk of Lower Manhattan had been declared open that afternoon and people were able to get the cars that had been stranded down there.

The bakery was across the street from a Catholic church. And that afternoon in that place, a wedding was being held. As I came out with my cupcakes, the bride and groom, not real young, not very glamorous, but obviously happy, came out the door and posed on the steps for pictures.