roadway, men with handweights, running, and women running behind baby strollers, pushing babies, and runners with dogs on leashes. You come to the park to see dogs, he thought.
The road bent west and three girls wearing headsets went rollerblading past. The ordinariness, so normally unnoticeable, fell upon him oddly, with almost dreamlike effect. He was carrying the briefcase and wanted to turn back. He crossed up the slope and walked past the tennis courts. There were three horses hitched to the fence, police helmets clipped to their saddlebags. A woman ran past, talking to someone, miserably, on her cell phone, and he wanted to toss the briefcase in the reservoir and go back home.
She lived in a building just off Amsterdam Avenue and he climbed the six flights to her apartment. She seemed tentative, letting him in, even, strangely, a little wary, and he started to explain, as he had on the telephone the day before, that he hadn’t meant to delay returning the briefcase. She was saying something about the credit cards in the wallet, that she hadn’t canceled them because, well, everything was gone, she thought everything was buried, it was lost and gone, and they stopped talking and then started again, simultaneously, until she made a small gesture of futility. He left the briefcase on a chair by the door and went over to the sofa, saying he could not stay very long.
She was a light-skinned black woman, his age or close, and gentle-seeming, and on the heavy side.
He said, “When I found your name in the briefcase, after I found your name and checked the phone directory and saw you were listed and I’m actually dialing the number, that’s when it occurred to me.”
“I know what you’re going to say.”
“I thought why am I doing this without checking further because is this person even alive?”
There was a pause and he realized how softly she’d spoken inside his jumpy commentary.
“I have some herbal tea,” she said. “Sparkling water if you like.”
“Sparkling water. Spring water. There’s a small bottle in the briefcase. Let me think. Poland Spring.”
“Poland Spring,” she said.
“Anyway if you’d like to check what’s in there.”
“Of course not. No,” she said quietly.
She stood in the entranceway to the kitchen. The small boom of traffic sounded outside the windows.
He said, “See, what happened is I didn’t know I had it. It wasn’t even a case of forgetting. I don’t think I knew.”
“I don’t think I know your name.”
He said, “Keith?”
“Did you tell me this?”
“I think so, yes.”
“The phone call was so out of the blue.”
“It’s Keith,” he said.
“Did you work for Preston Webb?”
“No, one floor up. Small outfit called Royer Properties.”
He was on his feet now, ready to leave.
“ Preston ’s so sprawling. I thought maybe we just hadn’t run into each other.”
“No, Royer. We’re just about decimated,” he said.
“We’re waiting to see what happens, where we relocate. I don’t think about it much.”
There was a silence.
He said, “We were Royer and Stans. Then Stans got indicted.”
Finally he moved toward the door and then picked up the briefcase. He paused, reaching for the doorknob, and looked at her, across the room, and she was smiling.
“Why did I do that?”
“Habit,” she said.
“I was ready to walk out the door with your property. All over again. Your priceless family heritage. Your cell phone.”
“That thing. I stopped needing it when I didn’t have it.”
“Your toothbrush,” he said. “Your pack of cigarettes.”
“God, no, my guilty secret. But I’m down to four a day.”
She waved him back to the sofa with a broad arc of the arm, a traffic cop’s sweeping command to get things going.
She served tea and a plate of sugar cookies. Her name was Florence Givens. She placed a kitchen chair on the other side of the coffee table and sat at a diagonal.
He said, “I know everything about you. A sonic toothbrush. You brush your teeth with sound waves.”
“I’m gadget crazy. I love those things.”
“Why do you have a better voice recorder than I had?”
“I think I’ve used it twice.”
“I used mine but then never listened. I liked to talk into it.”
“What did you say when you talked into it?”
“I don’t know. My fellow Americans,” he said.
“I thought everything was lost and gone. I didn’t report a lost driver’s license. I didn’t do anything, basically, but sit in this room.”
An hour later they were still talking. The cookies were small and awful but he kept nipping into them, unthinkingly, eating only the first baby bite and leaving the mutilated remains to litter the plate.
“I was at my screen and heard the plane approach but only after I was thrown down. That’s how fast,” she said.
“Are you sure you heard the plane?”
“The impact sent me to the floor and then I heard the plane. I think the sprinklers, I’m trying to recall the sprinklers. I know I was wet at some point, all through.”
He understood that she hadn’t meant to say this. It sounded intimate, to be wet all through, and she had to pause a moment.
He waited.
“My phone was ringing. I was at my desk now, I don’t know, just to sit, to steady myself, and I pick up the phone. Then we’re talking, like hello, it’s Donna. It’s my friend Donna. I said, Did you hear that? She’s calling from home, in Philadelphia, to talk about a visit. I said, Did you hear that?”
She went through it slowly, remembering as she spoke, often pausing to look into space, to see things again, the collapsed ceilings and blocked stairwells, the smoke, always, and the fallen wall, the drywall, and she paused to search for the word and he waited, watching.
She was dazed and had no sense of time, she said.
There was water somewhere running or falling, flowing down from somewhere.
Men ripped their shirts and wound them around their faces, for masks, for the smoke.
She saw a woman with burnt hair, hair burnt and smoking, but now she wasn’t sure she’d seen this or heard someone say it.
Times they had to walk blind, smoke so thick, hand on the shoulder of the person in front.
She’d lost her shoes or kicked them off and there was water like a stream somewhere, nearby, running down a mountain.
The stairwell was crowded now, and slow, with people coming from other floors.
“Someone said, Asthma. Now that I’m talking, it’s coming back a little bit. Asthma, asthma. A woman like desperate. There were panic faces. That’s when I think I fell, I just went down. I went down five or six steps and hit the landing, like stumble-falling, and I hit hard.”
She wanted to tell him everything. This was clear to him. Maybe she’d forgotten he was there, in the tower, or maybe he was the one she needed to tell for precisely that reason. He knew she hadn’t talked about this, not so intensely, to anyone else.
“It was the panic of being trampled even though they were careful, they helped me, but it was the feeling of being down in a crowd and you will be trampled, but they helped me and this one man I remember, helping me get to my feet, elderly man, out of breath, helping me, talking to me until I was able to get going again.”
There were flames in elevator shafts.
