of him, as German. He had assertive lips, something of a natural sneer, and there were times when he nearly drooled while laughing, bits of fizz appearing at the corners of his mouth. These were things Pammy associated with scenes of the German high command in World War II movies.
'Maybe we'll go up and look.”
'Look at what?' she said.
'The terrain. Get the feel of it. Just to see. He's telling everyone. Maine or else. Not that I'd commute, obviously. But just to see. Three or four weeks. He'll get it out of his system and we'll come back. Life as before, the same old grind.”
'Maine.”
'You're right, you know, Pammy old kid. It does have a kind of hewn strength. Sort of unbreakable, unlike Connecticut. I like hearing it.”
'Maine.”
'Say it, say it.”
'Maine,' she said. 'Maine.”
Lyle saw his number on die enunciator board. He went to one of the booths along the south wall, reaching for the phone extended by a clerk.
'Buy five thousand Motors at sixty-five.”
'GM.”
'There's more behind it.”
He put down the phone and walked over to post 3. An old friend, McKechnie, crossed toward him at an angle. They passed without sign of recognition. Sporadically over the next several hours, as Lyle moved to different parts of the floor, traded in the garage annex, conversed with people at his booth, he thought of something that hadn't entered his mind in a great many years. It was the feeling that everyone knew his thoughts. He couldn't recall when this suspicion had first occurred to him. Very early on, obviously. Everyone knew his thoughts but he didn't know any of theirs. People on the floor were moving more quickly now. An electric cross-potential was in the air, a nearly headlong sense of revel and woe. On the board an occasional price brought noise from the floor brokers, the specialists, the clerks. Lyle watched the stock codes and the stilted figures below them, the computer spew. Inner sex crimes. A fancywork of violence and spite. Those were the shames of his adolescence. If everyone here knew his present thoughts, if that message in greenish cipher that moved across the board represented the read-outs of Lyle Wynant, it would be mental debris alone that caused him humiliation, all the unwordable rubble, the glass, rags and paper of his tiny indefinable manias. The conversations he had with himself, straphanging in a tunnel. All the ceremonial patterns, the soul's household chores. These were far more revealing, he believed, than some routine incest variation. There was more noise from the floor as Xerox appeared on the board. Male and female messengers flirted in transit. The paper waste accumulated. It was probably not an uncommon feeling among older children and adolescents that everyone knows your thoughts. It put you at the center of things, although in a passive and frightening way.
'I'm in no mood.”
'Neither am I.”
'It's total decay.”
'What are we talking about?' Lyle said.
'The outside world.”
'Is it still there? I thought we'd effectively negated it. I thought that was the upshot.”
'I'm walking around seeing death masks. This, that, the other. My wife is having tests. They take tissue from underneath the arm. My brother is also out there with his phone calls. I'm seeing visions, Lyle.”
'Don't go home.”
'I understand you people have something to look at these days.”
'What's that?”
'Zeltner's new sec'y. I understand it walks and talks.”
'I haven't been over yet this week.”
'Living quiff, I hear. I wish you'd check that out and tell me about it. I have to live somehow. I'm in no mood for what's out there. She goes for more tests tomorrow. Fucking doctor says it could be cancer.”
'Let's have lunch sometime.”
Pammy thought of the elevators in the World Trade Center as 'places.' She asked herself, not without morbid scorn: 'When does this place get to the forty-fourth floor?' Or: 'Isn't it just a matter of time before this place gets stuck with me inside it?' Elevators were supposed to be enclosures. These were too big, really, to fit that description. These also had different doors for entering and leaving, certainly a distinguishing feature of places more than of elevators.
If the elevators were places, the lobbies were 'spaces.' She felt abstract terms were called for in the face of such tyrannic grandeur. Four times a day she was dwarfed, progressively midgeted, walking across that purplish- blue rug. Spaces. Indefinite locations. Positions regarded as occupied by something.
From Grief's offices she looked across the landfill, the piers, the western extremities of anonymous streets. Even at this height she could detect the sweltering intensity, a slow roiling force. It moved up into the air, souls of the living.
2
Lyle shaved symmetrically, doing one segment on the left side of his face, then the corresponding segment on the right. After each left-right series, the lather that remained was evenly distributed.
Crossing streets in the morning, Pammy was wary of cars slipping out from behind her and suddenly bulking into view, forcing her to stop as they made their turns. The city functioned on principles of intimidation. She knew this and tried to be ready, unafraid to stride across the angling path of a fender that probed through heavy pedestrian traffic.
The car turning into Liberty Street didn't crowd her at all. But unexpectedly it slowed as she began to cross. The driver had one hand on the wheel, his left, and sat with much of his back resting against the door. He was virtually facing her and she was moving directly toward him. She saw through the window that his legs were well apart, left foot apparently on the brake. His right hand was at his crotch, rubbing. She was vaguely aware of two or three other people crossing the street. The driver looked directly at her, then glanced at his hand. His look was businesslike, a trifle hurried. She turned away and walked down the middle of the street, intending to cross well beyond the rear of the car. The man accelerated, heading east toward Broadway.
They roamed in cars now. This was new to her. She felt acute humiliation, a sure knowledge of having been reduced in worth. She walked a direct line toward the north tower but had no real sense of destination. Her anger was imparted to everything around her. She moved through enormous smudges, fields of indistinct things. In a sense there was no way to turn down that kind of offer. To see the offer made was to accept, automatically. He'd taken her into his car and driven to some freight terminal across the river, where he'd parked near an outbuilding with broken windows. There he'd taught her his way of speaking, his beliefs and customs, the names of his mother and father. Having done this, he no longer needed to put hands upon her. They were part of each other now. She carried him around like a dead beetle in her purse.
In college the girls in her dormitory wing had referred to perverts as 'verts.' They reacted to noises in the woods beyond their rooms by calling along the hall: 'Vert alert, vert alert.' Pammy turned into the entrance and walked across the huge lobby now, the north space, joined suddenly by thousands coming from other openings, mainly from the subway concourses where gypsy vendors sold umbrellas from nooks in the unfinished construction. They'd been stupid to make a rhyme of it.
Lyle checked his pockets for change, keys, wallet, cigarettes, pen and memo pad. He did this six or seven times a day, absently, his hand merely skimming over trousers and jacket, while he was walking, after lunch, leaving cabs. It was a routine that required no conscious planning yet reassured him, and this was supremely important, of the presence of his objects and their locations. He stacked coins on the dresser at home. Sometimes he tried to see
