Apocalypse- Year Zero Read online

We got there before eight, and it was surprisingly hopping. Every table was occupied by corporate breakfast meetings or suburban parents, taking their college-aged kids out for a treat.

  To our mutual delight, the host pulled it out from his pocket, then handed it to Cole, who slipped it back on my finger. I was surprised by how much I’d missed it.

  “Thank God,” Cole said, while greasing the host’s palm with a fifty-dollar bill. “If she lost it, I’d have had to put her to work washing dishes!” The host smiled. I rolled my eyes.

  It was 8:15. We took the elevator down, and stood in the long pedestrian hub that connected the two towers. Cole’s new disposable phone beeped with a text message: his breakfast at Bull Run was cancelled. “Want to be my date, birthday girl?” he asked.

  I shook my head, and pointed at Tower Two. “The grind calls.”

  September and October were the biggest market months of the year. If I wanted to stay on track, I needed a promotion by December, so I could quit by thirty-five and start a hedge fund. Well, unless Cole hit it big and made executive vice-president. Then I’d probably go to lunch a lot and helm a foundation: recycling for welfare moms; incubators for crack baby hospitals; global warming education for senior citizens; fashion for Sudanese immigrants.

  “Coffee, then,” he said, pointing at the Starbucks kiosk. “Peel last night’s red wine from your teeth.”

  I linked my arm in his and we pushed against the tide of New Yorkers headed for offices in the opposite direction. Black suits, brown suits, short suits, tall suits. They clogged the halls and elevators, subway entrances and escalators. The fabric of their clothing rustled like fall leaves.

  Let’s keep going, I wanted to tell him. Let’s hop on the subway to the Bronx, see the zoo. Have sinful sex in the Central Park Ramble and moan loud enough to traumatize the school kids straying from field trips. Catch a ball game at Coney Island. Do that stuff we laughed about: drop out and be hippies. Let’s not get drunk for a night. It’ll be like a vacation. We’ll start with one night, and then the next, and the next, and then forever, like wedding vows, only more important. We’ll run away and become the people we were meant to be.

  Instead of saying any of that, I ordered a gallon-sized venti coffee. I was crying again. All this weeping for no reason, it was exhausting.

  “What’s wrong champ?” he asked. He had to shout to be heard.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  He leaned against the wall. I faced him. People scurried by, packed so tightly they might have been a single organism. Tens, hundreds, thousands. We pressed ourselves against marble to keep from being carried away.

  He lowered his voice. “What is it?”

  The building felt cold. Inhuman. Too big. Too ugly. Too 1970s. The people inside it, they were inhuman, too. I’d been thinking for a while that Cole might do better with a trophy wife. Somebody prettier, more interested in shaking hands and harmlessly flirting with his boss, picking out China patterns, teaching our fat, spoiled children French - all that crap I used to care about, but suddenly, for unfathomable reasons, no longer did.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I told him.

  “But you do,” he said. His teeth ground together hard enough to squeak. “You’ve been a real bitch lately.”

  “Remember that time you told me that you wanted to build houses? Like a construction worker? We could move to Oregon and do that.”

  He shook his head. “What are you talking about?” Another squeak of his teeth. “Don’t you love me?”

  I considered this, because I’d never really done so before. Did I love him? The things only I knew: Cole folded his underpants, and chewed toothpicks until they were mash, then ate them. His mother was black and lived in Paris, but since he didn’t look African American, he’d never bothered to tell anyone at the office or at school. While the men he worked with made a habit of taking Score’s strippers into back rooms, and paying for more than lap dances, he told me he never did because the only girl he wanted was me, and I believed him. His parents had spoiled, but never loved him, which was why my minuscule acts of kindness, like making the bed, or feeling his forehead for a temperature, broke his heart. He kept an unloaded revolver in his nightstand, because he was just a little paranoid. His mother, on one of her infrequent visits to the United States, had called him a traitor to his race. He wanted to own me, because I was the only person he’d ever trusted and let into his life, and he was terrified I’d run away. It was all these things that informed me of the truth. I loved him. I really did.

  “It’s not you. I …I’m empty,” I told him. “I’m a pretty shell.”

  “But I’ll take care of you. We’ll have more than everybody else,” he said. “You’ll never have to do anything you don’t want to.”

  “I just wish we could take off our masks,” I told him.

  “I don’t get it,” he said, and right then, the uglier truth occurred to me. If he quit his job and moved to Oregon, I’d probably dump him. Because I wanted the stuff, but I wanted to pretend I was an innocent, and it was Cole alone who insisted on trapping us within this glittering, gilded cage.

  “We’re living a lie,” I said. And still the swooshing suits, passing us by. An endless, anonymous flow.

  “I’m not. Are you?”

  I could see it on his face; the way he flinched. He wasn’t being honest with me, either. Everything except what we felt for each other was a lie.

  “It doesn’t matter. I’ll get over it,” I told him.

  He took my hand. We were only half facing each other, still pressed against the wall, trying to stay out of the path of the charging bears and bulls. “If you’re having second thoughts you should tell me now.”

  I shook my head like a traitor to the only country that mattered. “No. I love you.”

  He smiled with undisguised relief. I said it again. “I love you.”

  He kissed me, and we lingered for a second. His lips were thick and soft, the perfect size. Then we parted. I headed for the 104th floor of Tower Two. Holding his light and sweet Sumatra, watching me go, he stood still while the ants raced. The crowd overtook, and then devoured him.

  It was 8:22, twenty-four minutes before American Airlines, flight 11, crashed into Tower One.

  Chapter 4

  The Ladder Doesn’t Reach

  “Happy Birthday!” the card on my desk announced.

  All ten members of my department, Eastern European Markets had signed it. Lots of scrawled signatures, their sizes varying according to their author’s self esteem. Most were John Hancock huge. The front of the card showed a kitten playing with yarn, likely bought last minute, when the choice had come down to that, or a cartoon old-lady with saggy boobs where the liner read a variant of: “You’re old, but it’s funny!”

  The red light on my phone was blinking. Two “happy birthday” calls from the social x-rays I’d see tonight at Daniel, and another from my mother, asking whether I’d been taking my vitamins, because you start to lose bone mass after a certain age.

  I called my mom first, and thanked her for the pens, then told her to shut up about the calcium.

  “I’m just saying—” she told me. Her voice sounded pathologically cheerful, which was her general condition. I took after my father, the worrier. Like all good Irish, we Murphys inwardly seethed.

  “I heard you. Now we don’t have to talk about it again.”

  “Okay! I’ll mail you a couple of bottles of OsCal. Oh, and I found some old blank canvases and paints. Do you want them, too?”

  I shook my head into the phone. Truth was, I didn’t keep my old paintings hidden for modesty’s sake; they just weren’t that good. “Painting’s for suckers,” I told her.

  “Well aren’t you spicy. I’ll send them out this afternoon, dear. Love you!”

  I was still shaking my head into the phone when she hung up.

  Next, I phoned my boss to tell her that the Czech Republic coal futures prospectus would be on her desk by noon -
I still needed to proof it. “Give me, like…two minu—” I said, when I heard the unmistakable sound of a too-close airplane engine.

  I dropped the phone and stood. The sound got closer. Claire, in the cube next to mine, was obliviously checking her e-mail. Her perky brunette head bopped to the sound of “You’ve got Mail!”

  “Huuh!” I said, by means of warning, because I didn’t have the time or wherewithal to ask, “Do you hear that?”

  And then that crash. The sound was so loud that for a little while afterward, I couldn’t hear. My ears rang. Everything rocked. My cube wall fell. The papers tacked to it fluttered. I don’t remember getting there, but somehow I was down on the floor, crawling bare knee over bare knee under my desk, where my nylons snagged on hardened ramen. Through my terror, I remember thinking: Gross. Did I spill all that?

  The building swayed, and the floor under my knees sloped left, then right. Loudon Wainwright’s “Four is the Magic Number” played in my mind, and when I closed my eyes I saw four riders on horseback watching me from far away. The edges of them were hazy because they hadn’t happened yet, but it was hot where they lived, and the dying horses plodded, foaming at their mouths.

  Outside my desk bunker, everything got quiet. Papers fell like sweet cherry blossoms on a spring day. The building kept rocking, and I only then realized that I was moaning - a high-pitched, girlish sound.

  After a while, the building slowed. Sound returned. Then came a second explosion. This time it wasn’t as loud - a pop followed by a crackling roar that lasted for a few seconds and then died out. The building stayed still. As I watched from the floor, yellow Ramen salt stuck to my skin, time started again.

  “You okay?” Willie from the mailroom shouted. Maybe at me. Maybe in general. I could see his high-top Timberland’s and “Every Day is Friday!” khakis from the view under my desk as he wandered down the hall, fallen cube to fallen cube. “You okay?” he asked, again and again, but never waited for an answer. The office seemed a lot smaller without walls.

  A minute passed. Maybe less. Like birds after a hurricane, we rose from our hiding places, and began to chirp. Someone took my hand and squeezed it, then moved on. I did not look to see who it was. Then chatter. Quiet at first, then loud, life-affirming bravado:

  —Did you see that? It was a plane.

  —Is anyone in the boardroom?

  —What the hell jackass pilot would fuck that up that bad?

  —My knee hurts.

  —In Patmos, they speak the Patois, Brigid Murphy. Unmask.

  —Everybody accounted for?

  —I’ve got a meeting right now? Is anyone in the boardroom? I’ve got a meeting!

  —Can we go home now? I wanna go home

  —I think I shit my pants. Seriously. I just shit my pants.

  —Should I cancel my meeting? Is anyone listening to me? This is serious! We’ve got an important meeting right now!

  —Of course, you did, ya shitty yellow belly!

  —Are you an idiot? Screw the meeting!

  —This is gonna be so bad for tourism.

  —Sales is supposed to be at the meeting. Where is sales?

  —You think we should evacuate?

  That last question resonated and spread like a virus from one person to the next. Suddenly associates and secretaries alike headed for the lobby in a rush. Heels and polished leather squeaked along the marble hall. I don’t know who took the lead. Maybe nobody. We stopped in front of the executive boardroom. Its panoramic view showed the Statue of Liberty, the Circle Line, the water, and Tower 1. I heard the gasps before I saw.

  The glass windows were hot, and outside, our mirror twin was ablaze. Red flames chased black smoke into the skyline. Something spun right toward us and I ducked as a long, plastic piece of a window blind helicopterred against the glass, then fell 104 stories in a slow, downward spiral.

  A silent crowd grew behind me. We could see the reflection of the fire, and of ourselves, as if we were burning, too. “Oh, my God,” someone said from in the back. “We’re at war.”

  It dawned on me right then, that I was one of two fire wardens for the 104th floor. I’d signed a contract, taken a two-hour training course three years ago, when I got the job. I was supposed to get everyone out in an emergency, then take attendance, and make sure we were all safe and accounted for. Did this count as an emergency? I left the window and kept walking to the Sandler O’Neil front lobby, where the rest of the office had gathered.

  Eva, the Hispanic receptionist whom we called Charro because her third blouse buttons were always open to display heaving, PG-13 rated cleavage, was bawling. “Russia declared nuclear war!” she screeched. “They’ll cut us up and rape our babies!”

  Rich from my Czech team rolled his eyes as if to ask, “Spics? What do you expect?” His face was splotchy red, like he’d just come from an early morning workout at Equinox. Squats, a little shadowboxing, then tossing the medicine ball with a coach. The new school trend these days was old school.

  Pretty soon, about a hundred people had gathered. The lobby’s double glass doors reflected suit jackets and white shirts that merged into a single, growing organism named panic.

  Out beyond the glass lobby doors, a few people were quietly boarding elevators headed for the ground floor. Shouting inanities about the end of the world, Eva raced after them, and I decided she was smarter than her cleavage implied.

  Somebody wheeled a television out from the board room and turned on CNN. We saw a talking head, then a still image downloaded from the Internet of the World Trade Center viewed from Vessey Street. Two towers, light and dark. “We should go,” I said, just loud enough for the people around me to hear.

  Then I stood there.

  My department head Agnes heard me, then stepped to the center of the room, and climbed on the Eva’s reception desk. She clapped her hands together, hard. “Ladies and Gentlemen” she shouted. “People! People! People!”

  They quieted. She was wearing a lycra-based gray pant-suit that fit her too loosely in the skinny rump. “We’re safer in here. There’s falling debris on the ground.”

  Brian Morningstar, the CEO, who wore creepy red bowties every day for reasons I was never able to fathom, except perhaps, it was his company and he could be creepy if he wanted, blocked the double glass doors leading to the elevator with his body. The loud speaker in the reception hall crackled, then became audible. “Attention! Attention!” A woman’s voice shrieked from the box. “This is not a test! This is an emergency!”

  Next to me, Rich chortled. “Oh, really?” he asked under his breath, but just loud enough that I knew he wanted me to hear, and be impressed.

  The other tower was probably a thousand yards away, and all the windows at Sandler O’Neil were closed, but I could still smell the burning. It wasn’t smoke, but something electrical. Maybe something human, too.

  “The police and fire departments have arrived,” the woman over the crackling speaker informed us. She was the janitor for all I knew, and everybody smart had already run screaming. “Please remain in the building until the debris has been cleared, and the fire is out. For your own safety, we will not be letting people out of or into the Towers under any circumstances. Thank you.”

  The speakers crackled off.

  Brian Morningstar folded his arms under his bow-tie, which had somehow come undone, and guarded the door. On CNN, there was now live footage. Tower One had become an inferno, and all along the West Side Highway, a Diaspora of white people in suits.

  “I think I’m going now,” I said. Nobody answered, and I didn’t move. From the common kitchen, our smiling chief investment analyst emerged. He’d cut his white starched shirt into rags and wet them, and was now handing them out like thoughtful presents. “Just in case more smoke blows in,” he said.

  Though there wasn’t much smoke, the people who got them quickly covered their mouths and noses. This seemed to calm them; it gave them something to do. I reached my hand out for one, but by the time
he got to me, he was out of rags.

  Then Frank Miller from human resources tugged my sleeve. In a daze I let him lead me to the back stairwell around the corner. He wore a pencil moustache in which a hunk of egg yolk was now embedded like snot.

  A slow trickle of people headed out the emergency exit and down the steps. Click-clack, click-clack. Quiet as mice. In their eyes, and his, I saw fear, and it dawned on me suddenly, that 104 floors is obscenely high.

  Frank’s grip, for a fey head of HR, was surprisingly firm. I wondered why he’d picked me. Maybe because I always asked after his ridiculous pet rabbits, and he didn’t realize I was mocking him.

  They walked single file, like a fire drill. None spoke. Eyes straight ahead. Fast feet, swinging arms. One of the women had taken off her heels and carried them daintily with her index and middle fingers, like a kid sneaking back home after curfew late at night.

  Tomorrow, we’d all know for sure we’d overreacted. If confronted, we’d confess that we’d not abandoned ship, but rather needed a smoke, a stick of gum.

  I almost followed them until I remembered that I was the fire warden. How could I just leave, when I hadn’t even tried to evacuate the office? And what about Cole? I’d left my cell phone on my desk and he’d worry if I didn’t call.

  I squirmed from Frank’s grasp. He descended the stairs, disoriented for a moment without someone to save. But then he caught the shoulder of Claire from the cube connected to mine, and pulled her down with him. She went quietly, without a fight or will of her own, and I envied her.

  On my way back, I passed the meeting room window with its Tower One view. More people had gathered. More black smoke, too. The fire was bigger. I could feel its heat. Windows on the World, that entire restaurant full of people eating eggs Benedict, was gone. On the lower floors, trapped faces looked out at us through broken glass. I dry heaved, I think. And said something like, “Oh-God-My-Bloody-My-Bloody-Bloody-God-Help-Them.”

  Back in the lobby, there were half as many people as before. About sixty. Hopefully the others had left. A few were arguing about how they’d back up all the data on the main server: Should they turn everything off, or just wait and see? Brian Morningstar continued to block the elevators, even though people were taking the back way now, and still hailing them.