The first runner starts firing as he approaches the group. A man in a sweater falls, golf balls rolling out of his pockets. The terrorists, trying to isolate their victims singly or in twos, have three men dead almost immediately. Bodies tumble in slow motion. There's blood on golf bags, on white shoes, spreading over tartan pants. Several men try to run. One swings his club and is shot in the groin by the man with the Enfield. He topples into a pond, clouding it with blood. The stewardess serves mixed drinks to the male couple and a ginger ale to the woman in the rear.
It isn't until now that the silent-movie music reveals the extent of its true relationship to the events on the screen. To the glamour of revolutionary violence, to the secret longing it evokes in the most docile soul, the piano's shiny tinkle brings an irony too apt to be ignored. The simple innocence of this music undermines the photogenic terror, reducing it to an empty swirl.
We're prompted to remember something here, although this act of recall may be more mythic than subjective, a spool of Biograph dreams. It flows through us. Upright pianos in a thousand nickelodeons. Heart-throbbing romance and knockabout comedy and nerve-racking suspense. History this weightless has an easy time of it, we learn, contending with the burdens of the present day.
In the piano bar the small audience laughs, except for the woman drinking ginger ale. Despite the camera's fascination for the lush slaughter of these clearly expendable men, the scene becomes confused, due to the melodramatic piano. We're steeped in gruesomely humorous ambiguity, a spectacle of ridiculous people doing awful things to total fools.
What conceivably makes this even funnier (to some) is the nature of the game itself. Golf. That anal round of scrupulous caution and petty griefs. Watching golfers being massacred, to trills and other ornaments, seems to strike those in the piano bar, at any rate, as an occasion for sardonic delight.
Bodies are blown back into sand and high grass. If it's all a little bit like cowboys and Indians, so much the better. One of the golfers tries to escape in his cart, steering it toward the woods. The young woman with the machete sets out in pursuit, arms pumping in slow motion, hair sailing out.
The piano player introduces a chase theme. His mock-boyish face carefully qualifies every smile-a grimace here, a shudder there. The violence, after all, is expert and intense. His fellow passengers laugh as the golf cart overturns on a slope and the woman skids down after it, her arm slowly raising to deliver a backhanded slash. The man tries to crawl away. She walks calmly alongside, chopping at his back and neck. Here the chase music gives way to a lighthearted lament.
The woman leaves the machete in his body and heads back to the others.
The man who'd remained on the hill walks down now into this scene of fresh death. He is liberation's bright angel, in watch cap and black slicker, coming out of the sun. He wears lampblack under his eyes and thick white pigment across his forehead and cheeks. The others stand around, taking deep breaths, consciously intent on nothing but their own exalted fatigue. He holds the shotgun out away from him, as nearly parallel to his body as he can feasibly manage, muzzle up. The golfers are strewn everywhere. We see them frame by frame, split open, little packages of lacquer. The terrorist chief,
And now the stewardess serves drinks to those who need them and everybody gradually moves to different parts of the piano bar, their loss of interest in the movie manifesting itself in this nearly systematic restlessness. With the configuration thus upset, the piano silent, the film ignored, there is a sense of feelings turning inward. They remember they are on a plane, travelers. Their true lives lie below, even now beginning to reassemble themselves, calling this very flesh out of the air, in mail waiting to be opened, in telephones ringing and paper work on office desks, in the chance utterance of a name.
ONE
1
The man was often there, standing outside Federal Hall, corner of Wall and Nassau. Lean and gray-stubbled, maybe seventy, sweating brightly in a frayed shirt and slightly overused suit, he held a homemade sign over his head, sometimes for whole afternoons, lowering his arms only long enough to allow blood to recirculate. The sign was two by three feet, hand-lettered on both sides, political in nature. Loungers at this hour, most of them sitting on the steps outside the Hall, were too distracted by the passers-by to give the man and his sign-familiar sights, after all-more than a cursory glance. Down here, in die district, men still assembled solemnly to gape at females. Working in a roar of money, they felt, gave them that vestigial right.
Lyle stood at the door of a restaurant, cleaning his fingernails with the toothpick he'd lifted from the little bowl when he paid the check. He no longer ate in the Exchange luncheon club, pleasant as it was, restricted to members and their guests, well run and comfortably appointed as it was, so capable the waiters, knowing one's name, so effortless the attentions of the washroom personnel, swift with towels, brilliant in the understated brushing of one's suit, actual blacks, convenient as it was, an elevator ride from the trading floor itself. He watched the old man standing in the sun, arms upright, one hand trembling. Then he moved into the lunchtime crowds, wondering if he'd somehow become too complex to enjoy a decent meal in attractive surroundings, served, a minute from the floor, by reasonably cheerful men.
Across Broadway, a few blocks north, Pammy stood in the sky lobby of the south tower of the World Trade Center, fighting the crowd that was pushing her away from an express elevator going down. She wanted to go down, although she worked on the eighty-third floor, because she was in the wrong building. This was the second time she'd come back from lunch and entered the south tower instead of the north. She would have to fight the lunch-hour mob in the sky lobby here, go down to the main floor, walk over to the north tower, take the express up to
'It's Pam, isn'tit?”
'I don't, what.”
'Jeanette.”
'Actually no.”
'High school.”
'Jeanette.”
'How many years was that ago?”
'High school, Jeanette.”
'I don't blame you not remembering. Boy, the time.”
'I think I may remember now.”
'You work here, right? Everybody works here.”
'I'm supposed to be on the down.”
'You're still remembering? Jeanette, who hung around with Theresa and Geri.”
'I remembered just then.”
'That was how many years, right?”
'They won't let me on.”
'But don't you love this place? You should see how I have to get to the cafeteria. A local and an express down. Then an express up. Then the escalator if you can get there without them ripping your flesh to pieces.”
'Torn asunder, I know.”
'You work for the state, being here?”
'I'm in the wrong tower.”
Pammy and Lyle didn't go out much anymore. They used to spend a lot of time discovering restaurants. They traveled to the palest limits of the city, eating in little river warrens near the open approaches to bridges or in family restaurants out in the boroughs, the neutral decor of such places and their remoteness serving as tokens of authenticity. They went to clubs where new talent auditioned and comic troupes improvised. On spring weekends they bought plants at greenhouses in the suburbs and went to boatyards on City Island or the North Shore to help
