“What
But it was worse than all that. When Charlie came over that evening he glanced through the story I’d written and said, “Haven’t I read this before?”
On the third day I didn’t leave my apartment Charlie called me and told me a story:
“Once I wanted to hack all my hair off with a pair of scissors. But I had a crew cut at the time. So I went out and bought next year's calendar and marked the date a year hence with a big red X. For the next twelve months I didn’t touch my hair, and when the day with the X came up I looked in the mirror and realized I liked my hair long. I realized that my crew cuts had been a way of hacking off my hair all along.”
I said the only thing I could think of.
“Huh?”
“Your whole shut-in thing,” Charlie said. “It's not real. Or it's not new. It's just a symbol of something you already do. You’ve already done. Think about it. Where is it you’re
I thought about it.
“But you have a crew cut now,” I said.
“Give me a break, will you? I’m going bald, it's the dignified thing to do.”
When we met Charlie gave me a road map. This was on our third date. Oh, okay, our second. We’d gone back to his apartment and he spread the map out on his kitchen table (IKEA, $99). The table, like everything else in Charlie's apartment, was new and neat, but the map was old and wrinkled, a flag-sized copy of the continental U.S., post-Alaska, pre-Hawaii. Some of the creases were so worn they’d torn, or were about to.
“Now,” Charlie said. “Fold it.”
There were four long creases, twelve short, and folding the map proved as hard as solving Rubik's cube. I got it wrong a half dozen times before I finally got the front and back covers in the right place and, a little chagrined, handed it to Charlie.
“Did I fail?”
“You passed,” Charlie said. “With flying colors. Anyone who can fold a map on the first try is far too rational for me.”
“And what about people who can’t fold one at all?”
In answer, Charlie pulled open the white laminate-fronted drawer of one of those nameless pieces of furniture, a “storage unit.” Inside were several maps practically wadded up, as well as dozens of takeout menus and hundreds of crooked twist ties. He had to scrunch the pile down before the drawer would close again.
“Wow,” I said. “The map test
Charlie grinned, sheepish but pleased. “It's about time I entered into a new alliance.”
By the time I understood what that meant, I thought I was ready to sign. And then Adam came along.
On the fourth day, Grace called. When I asked her how she’d gotten my number she said, “Out of the book,” and when I started to ask how she knew my last name she interrupted me and said, “Honey, I think you’d better turn on the television.”
Months later, when the indemnity claims began to be discussed in the press, New Yorkers would learn that the opposing sides, the insurance companies and the property owners, differed on a crucial issue: whether the collapse of the towers constituted one event, or two. The World Trade Center, it turned out, was insured for three billion dollars, but if it was deemed that the crash of the second plane into the south tower, not quite twenty minutes after the north tower was hit, constituted a distinct historical event, the insurers would have to pay the full amount twice, in effect saying that the buildings had been destroyed not once but two times. A lot of the argument, as it turned out, was rhetorical: to the insurers, the World Trade Center was a single site-maps marked it with a single X, guidebooks gave it only one entry-that had been destroyed by a united terrorist attack. But to the property owners, the Twin Towers were, architecturally, structurally, visibly, two buildings destroyed by two separate planes, either one of which could have missed its target. Which argument began to make more and more sense to me as time went on and details about what had happened came out. Nearly three-quarters of the people who died were in the north tower, and, of those, more than ninety percent were on floors above those hit by the plane, including dozens of people attending a breakfast conference at Windows on the World. The reason why far fewer people died in the second tower, which stood for less than an hour, as opposed to the hundred minutes the north tower remained intact, is that people in the south tower saw what had happened to the north tower and evacuated their offices. Regardless of whether you considered the two plane crashes coincidence or concerted assault, the planes had struck separately-and people in the second incident had learned from the first.
The antonym to history is prophecy. Historical patterns only emerge when we look back in time; they exist in the future as nothing more than guesses. That we make such projections speaks of a kind of faith, though whether that faith is in the past or the future, the predictability of human nature, or physics, or God, is anybody's guess. But in the end, it always takes you by surprise. By which I mean that when I fought my way through the clouds of dust and crowds of dusty people to Charlie's apartment, I found Fletcher had beaten me there. Who could have foreseen that?
In the days to come, I rode my bike around the city, watched as walls and windows and trees and lampposts filled up with pictures of the missing. Dust clogged my lungs and coated the chain of Adam's creaking bicycle, making it harder and harder to turn the pedals, but it was three days before I stopped wandering aimlessly and actually started looking for him. I found him, finally, a day and a half later, at the armory on Lexington and Twenty-sixth. Indian restaurants lined that stretch of Lex, and the air was usually tinged with curry, but all the restaurants had been closed for days. There were thousands of pictures taped to the wall of the armory, hundreds of people queuing to look at them. Many of the pictures were printed by inkjets and had smeared into unrecognizable blurs after two days of thunderstorms. Where there was a television crew, dozens of people holding up Polaroids and snapshots and flyers jockeyed to get on camera.
By common will the line moved from left to right. Heads nodded up and down as feet shuffled side to side. I tried not to look in anyone's eyes, living or photographed. I did look at the living, just in case, but mostly I looked at the pictures on the wall.
Sometimes A leads to Z. But sometimes Z leads to A. What I mean is, I was looking for Adam, but I found Zach. Zach: “You won’t believe his prices.” Zach: “They’re probably all stolen, but what you don’t know won’t hurt you.”
I looked at his face for a long time. He hadn’t been a close friend, but someone I’d known off and on for almost fifteen years, and as I looked at him I was suddenly reminded of everyone I’d known who had died of AIDS in the eighties and nineties, the tragic consequences of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The memory was as unexpected as Adam's blow to my head but produced in me an odd, almost eerie sense of calm. Z had led to A, and A to Z, and Z back to A, but now it was a different A. History wasn’t even a circle but a diminishing spiral, twisting into a tinier and tinier point.
And then:
“Keith? Keith, is that you?”
I didn’t recognize him at first. He was shorter than I remembered, his features less fine. His eyes weren’t gray but blue. But the hair was the same, thick and black and sticking out of his head in a dozen directions. It was streaked with soot now too, as if he hadn’t washed in days. His T-shirt was also filthy, and pinned to his chest were three pictures which I hardly had time to take in-there were two women and one man, all smiling the hopelessly naive smiles of the doomed-before Adam grabbed me up in a huge embrace. His arms collapsed around me, one and then the other, and his tears salved the faded remnants of my wounded face.
“Oh my God, Keith!” Adam cried. “You’re alive!”
Ron Rash
