Hold Me Now
[In this excerpt, Paul Brenner, the main character, is visiting his daughter
Elizabeth in New York City, a month after the attacks on the World Trade Center.]
LATER THAT NIGHT, restless and unable to sleep, he slipped out of Elizabeth’s
apartment and walked the six blocks to the subway. The evening air was still
warm and heavy from the energy of the day. On the subway, Brenner sat opposite a
middle-aged man wearing bright blue pants and shirt, a black and white plaid
jacket, purple socks, and enormous glasses. Both wrists were filled with dozens
and dozens of elastic bands. The man balanced a large courier envelope on his
knees. He pulled out blank pieces of paper, wrote furiously on them with a
ballpoint pen and then stuffed the pages back into the courier envelope. He did
this over and over again, with furious intensity. Was he mad? Brenner couldn’t
help but stare, even though everyone else in the car ignored him.
Brenner got off near Wall Street and walked the rest of the way. The streets
were surprisingly dark, and almost deserted. An enormous wire fence, guarded by
New York police, kept the onlookers at a distance. Brenner stood on the
sidewalk, in front of a closed-up fast food restaurant, beside some tourists
speaking loudly in German and trying to take photos of the site with
expensive-looking cameras. Brenner moved away from them.
Through the fence, he saw a scene that reminded him of newsreel footage from the
war. Enormous lights suspended from cranes illuminated the ground, the mounds of
collapsed metal and glass and drywall, and the single shard of wall still
standing. The light was dazzling. There was no colour to speak of, only
brilliant whites and the deep blacks of background shadow. It was like staring
at a full moon on a cloudless night. Toy-like bulldozers were flattening mounds
of rubble and sifting through tangled heaps of girders. The only section of wall
still standing looked like a piece of melted plastic. Everything in this scene
was tiny and reduced and quite insignificant, like history through the wrong end
of a telescope, Brenner thought.
Brenner’s heart had been in his throat during the subway ride, but now, standing
in front of this scene, hearing a woman ten feet away begin to sob, he felt
simply stripped and exposed. He did not cry or turn away. Some young people
behind him were jittery and excited, but he didn’t feel excitement either. The
wealthy, well-groomed couple to his right were calm and kept telling each other
how surreal it looked, but Brenner didn’t think the scene was surreal at all. It
was sadly familiar. Death from the skies. Destruction on the ground. Brenner
felt he knew it intimately, although he had never fought in a war. Hiroshima,
Dresden, Tokyo, Berlin, Nagasaki, Spain in the thirties, Vietnam in the sixties,
Iraq in the nineties.
Further along the wire fence, someone had mounted a few panels of cheap plywood
to hold messages. “Justice, not wrath, please God,” was the first one that
Brenner read. On the ground, a half dozen candles flickered in the wind.
Bouquets of flowers were strewn at the bottom of the fence. He watched a woman
in a black leather jacket bend down and add her flowers, then straighten up and
hug a young man. Brenner wished he’d brought something to leave.
Later he would see these small memorials all around the city, on the front steps
of apartment buildings and brownstones, on windowsills, beside statues in
Central Park, on the walls of Grand Central Station. The saddest ones displayed
photos of missing husbands, wives, sons, and daughters and the plea, weeks too
late, to contact their families. The newspapers said five thousand people were
dead.
On the subway back to the Upper West Side, Brenner slumped in his seat and
looked around him. Across the aisle sat two black men side by side. One looked
like a rapper, dressed in baggy
black pants and shiny jacket, with an absurdly large gold chain around his neck.
He was plugged into a music gadget of some kind, nodding his head in time to the
music and playing imaginary drums on his knees. The other black man looked like
a prep school graduate, gray pants, white shirt, blue tie, blue blazer, polished
black shoes. Beside him, two college girls in tight party dresses propped up a
very drunk young man who kept sliding down his seat onto the filthy floor of the
subway car. To Brenner’s right, a black woman leaned against the plexiglass
divider. She stared straight ahead without expression, dazed by exhaustion; her
three small sleeping children were lined up in a row against her side, precisely
mimicking her angle of rest as the car bumped and screeched its way northward.