“Then work, Michael. Work very hard, before we are all dead by our own hand.”
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
At the security desk Suzy found a long, powerful flashlight—very fancy, black like binoculars with a beam that could be spread wide or focused in by turning a knob—and set about exploring the concourse and lower-level walkway between the two towers. She spent some time trying on clothes in a boutique, but she couldn’t see herself very well in the flashlight beam and that quickly palled. Besides, it was spooky. She made a half-hearted effort to see if others like herself had entered the building, and even ventured briefly into the Cortlandt Street subway station. When she was satisfied that the lower floors were empty—except for the ubiquitous piles of clothes—she returned to her Candlelight Room, as she had dubbed it, and planned her ascent.
She had found a chart of the north tower and now traced her finger along the plan of the lobby and lower floors. Flipping back each sheet of the thick manual, she realized that the building did not have long stairwells, but stairs at different places on each floor.
That would make her climb even more difficult. She found the door that led to the first stairway on the chart and walked to it. It was locked. Doubling back to the security desk, she nudged a pile of uniform with her foot and revealed a massive ring of keys on a retractable cord. She pulled the belt from the loops, noticing a bra in the clothing, and removed the keys. “Excuse me,” she whispered, rearranging the clothes into an approximation of their former state. “I’m just going to borrow them. I’ll be right back.” She caught herself and bit the fleshy part of her thumb until she left vivid tooth marks. Nobody there, she told herself. Nobody anywhere. Just me, now.
It took her a few minutes of slowly reading the labels on the keys to find the one that opened the door to the stairwell. Beyond the door, the stairs were utilitarian concrete and steel. On the next floor they opened onto a hallway. She peered around the corner and down a white corridor leading past doors to various offices, some marked and some merely numbered. A quick look into several of the offices told her little.
“Okay,” she told herself. “It’s nothing but a hike, a long hike. I’ll need food and water.” She looked down at her loafers and sighed. They’d have to do, unless she decided to borrow a pair of empty shoes from—
She didn’t relish that idea. In the ground floor lobby, she took a plastic shopping bag from behind the newsstand and filled it with lightweight foods from her cart. Water was more difficult; the plastic jugs were too bulky to hang comfortably from her belt, but she decided there was little alternative. And if she found water still available on the upper floor-there
She began her climb at eight thirty in the morning. It was best, she thought, to climb steadily ten floors and then rest, or explore and see what was visible from that level. That way, she might reach the top by the end of the day.
Humming “Michelle,” she went from flight to flight, hands gripping the steel rails, passing through door after door. She tried to establish a rhythm. Kenneth and Howard had taken her hiking in Maine once and she had learned that every hiker had a certain rhythm. Following that rhythm made the trail a lot easier; breaking the rhythm to follow someone else made it much more difficult.
“Nobody to follow,” she told herself on the fourth level. She tried singing “Michelle” again, but the rhythm didn’t match her steps, so she whistled a march by John Williams. On the ninth level she began to feel winded. “One more.” And on the tenth, she squatted with her back against the wall of the elevator lobby, staring at the doors. “Maybe this wasn’t a good idea.” But she was stubborn—her mother had always said so, somewhat proudly—and she would persist “Nothing else to do,” she said, her voice hollow in the deserted lobby.
When her breathing eased, she stood and arranged the bottle of water and the sack of food. Then she crossed to the next door and opened it. Up another flight. Another lobby, more hallways, more offices. She decided to investigate one of the restrooms.
“Check for water,” she said. She looked between the Men’s and Women’s and giggled, then chose the Men’s. Shining the flashlight over the mirrors and fixtures, she gave in to curiosity and walked the length of the lavatory. She had never before seen the tall white porcelain fixtures lining the wall. She had even forgotten what they were called. She looked under the stalls and froze, fear tangling and twisting with perverse laughter inside.
A pile of clothes lined the floor in one of the stalls. “Got sucked right down the toilet,” she murmured, straightening and wiping tears from her eyes. “Poor guy. Goddammit.” She dabbed at her eyes with her rolled-up sleeves and twisted the hot-water knob on the sink. A trickle of water came out. More came when she turned the cold knob, but it didn’t look promising.
She left the lavatory and sauntered down a hallway. Behind a big double wood door with Japanese-sounding names on it was a waiting room, plush velvet couches and glass tables with a big desk near the back wall. There was no receptionist behind the desk, and no pile of clothes, either. Nothing for her there.
From the waiting room, she looked down on the plaza. The concrete was completely covered with brown now. “Climb,” she told herself. Stairway to heaven. Die at the top and be closer. But climb.
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
It’s like crawling down a throat” John said.
“Jesus, you’re morbid.”
“It is, though, ain’t it?”
“Yeah,” Jerry said. He grunted and stooped lower. “We’re behaving like idiots. Why
“You picked it out”
“And I don’t know why. Maybe no reason at all.”
“Good as any, I suppose.”
The tunnel walls were changing as they walked farther along. Big fleshy pipes gave way to fine, glistening net, like spray-painted tripe. John poked his face and the light up close to the surface and saw each little dimple in the net filled with tiny disks and cubes and balls, stacked atop each other in a jumble. The floor was narrowing, the spongy purple rising up in ridges, the ridges running parallel with the tunnel. “Drainage,” Jerry said, pointing.
They passed the light back and forth to share its comfort, sometimes shining it at each other’s faces, or inspecting their skin and clothing to see that nothing was clinging to them.
The tunnel widened abruptly and the thick sweet fog drifted around them. “We’ve walked far enough to be under another mound,” Jerry said. He stopped and pulled his boot from something sticky. “There’s stuff all over the floor.”
John trained the light on Jerry’s boot. Brownish-red goo covered the sole. “Doesn’t look too deep,” he said.
“Not yet, anyway.” The fog smelled faintly like fertilizer, or like the sea. Alive. It circulated in thin, high veils, as if caught between curtains of air.
“Which way now? We don’t want to just walk in circles,” Jerry said.
“You’re the leader,” John said. “Don’t ask me for initiative.”
“Smells like someone left seaweed in a candy store,” Jerry said. “Makes you gag.”
“Mushrooms,” John said, pointing the light down. White capped objects about two inches wide lay all around their feet, popping beneath them as they walked. He aimed the light higher and saw vertical and horizontal lines through the fog ahead.
“Shelving,” Jerry said. “Shelves with things growing on them.” The shelves were less than a quarter-inch thick, supported by irregularly spaced brackets, all made from a hard white substance that glistened in the beam. On the shelves were stacks of what looked like burned paper—wet burned paper.
“Yucch,” Jerry commented, feeling one of the stacks with a curled finger.
“Wouldn’t touch anything if I was you,” John said.
