In those days, I was working as a marketing coordinator for an interior architecture firm in the World Trade Center. There were two of us, Michael and me, in our windowless little workroom on the 21st floor of Tower Two.
Did I radiate hauteur at this job? Because at first it seemed like everyone there was looking to put me down. Hey, marketeer, one architect was always sneering at me, a chubby married man who claimed politically progressive bona fides but who looked at women like they were meat for the taking. I’d put a mild, weird smile on my face and say something like, “If I had any investment in my job title at all I’d be insulted.” Meanwhile I had so much suppressed rage that I’d be thinking: I will slap you to Kingdom Come. I was so convincingly haughty that no one seemed to understand that this wasn’t my essence but my armor.
I was thirty years old when I started there – already too late! – and I was supposed to be a writer. Not a proposal writer. I was one of those people always playing the age game: if a writer achieved something with her novel and she was older than me, that meant I still had time. If that person was younger than me, it only added to the volcano of impatience I carried around in my chest. B.G., get cracking! In fact I’d been cracking for years, writing an endless novel, an omnium-gatherum that I stuffed every experience I’d ever had into as if it were a mythical limitless bag. I was the recording angel bearing witness to my life. It was vital that I write everything down or it would be lost. I’d had an agent for some years, a good one, and it was safe to say that by 2001 I had exhausted this poor man. I wasn’t thinking of him, however; I was thinking of me.
I was thinking of me, me, me, and why was everything so hard for me?
My group from graduate school seemed to feel the same. Everyone wanted to know where the novel was. There was a woman convinced of my brilliance who, just before the new millennium, had called me up with the idea of going into some kind of fiction-teaching business together. I told her thanks, but I was okay to have this day job while I finished my novel. I was always “finishing” this novel, a novel that would be finished, perhaps, when I was dead, because only then I would run out of story.
Maybe a year after the woman had made this offer, I picked up my ringing phone, in that little workroom on the 21st floor of Tower Two, said my work name (“Mary speaking”), and heard the woman exhale in disgust. Then she hung up the phone.
I was late, late, late.
All my life I was the girl telling herself stories. Actually it was The Story in my mind, and as a child it was about my real father – fictitious – coming to rescue me from the disaster of a family I was born into. Later The Story became about a lover who would come to claim me. I could spool out The Story at any time, click out of the reality around me and send myself there, away from my father’s violence, my mother’s sorrow, from the shameful knowledge that my family was poor and “different.” This grew into actual writing when I was a teenager – terrible writing – then slightly less awful writing in college. After college I’d had a series of full-time and temp jobs, fell into the Slough of Despond, then been rescued by an all-paid MFA program when I was twenty-eight. I graduated with a huge manuscript, half-done but recognized with a fat award. It was full of promise. I just had to finish it.
I wrote all weekend and just about every night of the week, sitting at my kitchen table in Southside Williamsburg, then at that same table in Sunset Park. It was an old Formica table, my mother’s from her days as a “career girl” in the nineteen-fifties, before she’d made the irreparable mistake of marrying my father. The light of heaven seemed trained on her face when she told stories from that time. She lived at the Y with a group of boisterous girls, had crackers and Tang for breakfast, threw dance parties, played “Peg o’ My Heart” on her acoustic guitar, loved her job as a commercial artist. My mother really was a person who said things like, “The world was my oyster.” She seemed to me an innocent, not of this world. In my darker moods, she seemed to me like a simpleton.
Did I hate my job? I resented my job. I was wasting precious time there. Every page of a proposal I wrote was a page of fiction I was not writing. It all would have been unbearable except for my officemate Michael.
I was brought in to “manage” him – my new boss Al was insistent on this – as well as to write proposals. Things appeared hopeless at first. Michael had been at this job for years and was suspicious of the new person. He made no eye contact, offered nothing about himself, but patiently trained me on the job. He had a sure-footed way of explaining things and a pitch to his voice that we called “ironic” in those days. Clearly he knew everything about the work and needed no managing. The problem was that his father was a big client of the firm, and no matter how hard Michael worked, people treated his presence there as a favor. Also they seemed to judge him by his social anxiety issues, which were complex, and maybe by the fact that he was gay but didn’t “act gay” – whatever that meant. How did we finally come together? We talked about music. And tentatively, then like a landslide, we realized we were each other’s mirror. We talked about music and we talked about books, about film, we made fun of received ideas. We opened a door together on a secret world, and stepped inside.
We both loved things well outside the mainstream, and loved them in the same way. Michael had real enthusiasm, real joy; when I think of him now, I think of the words boyish ardor. I smile to think of his broad, goofy smile, his cowlick, his glasses with fingerprints all over the lenses. He had piles of ties thrown under his desk, some of them with footprints on them. Neither of us was exactly young, but we became “the kids in marketing,” and we evolved our own language together. Michael had a highly attuned sense of the absurd, and there was nothing I loved so much as to make him laugh. We both prized minute observations about ridiculous things. We could talk for hours about the wrongness of the office’s entrance door, which had been mistakenly specified with a 50-pound closing mechanism and no doorstop, so someone heaving it open in frustration had busted a huge hole in the facing drywall. This hole had never been repaired. We wondered what potential clients made of an interior architecture firm that didn’t know how to take care of its own home.
And neither of us had any love for the World Trade Center.
It was ugly, it was arrogant, it was unheimlich. It introduced an insane scale to Manhattan, dwarfing all buildings around it. The lower façade detailing, with its lancet-arched windows in those startlingly unpleasant triple-height lobbies, was total kitsch. When Michael told me that Yamasaki, the architect, was afraid of heights and that was why the perimeter convectors were as high and the windows as narrow as they were, it all made sense to me: here was a place designed by someone who hated to be inside of it.
Moving myself through the concourse, “swiping” my badge at the turnstile entrance to Tower Two, going up in the weightless elevator, walking down the carpeted corridor to the door with the hole bashed in the facing drywall, all of it was like floating in an alien landscape. I would think of sci-fi stories where the natural world has been blasted away, and children wistfully ask their elders for tales of trees and grass and sparrows. It seemed only right to Michael and me that Don DeLillo appeared to be obsessed with the Twin Towers: the monotonousness and inevitability and huge corporate menace of them. The towers showed up not only in Underworld but in Mao II and back in Players (“… what then was the World Trade Center itself? Was it a condition, an occurrence, a physical event, an existing circumstance, a presence, a state, a set of invariables?”). Michael and I were constantly fighting against the sterility and blandness of the place by introducing incursions of the unlikely into it – books about anarchists, Tropicália CDs, wooden toys, old photographs – all of which looked just plain wrong there, and so gave us hope. I put up Sous les pavés, la plage! as my screen-saver text, and – the master’s tools in the master’s house or not – things like this helped us get through our day.
How strange the land felt around the Trade Center, the loveless plaza and the ragged side streets. Further west was Battery Park City and the four ungainly chess pieces of the World Financial Center, all of it built on landfill, dirt dug up to accommodate the deep foundations of the Twin Towers. On warm days this was where I would go with my lunch. I’d sit on a bench on the esplanade, chew my eternal cheese sandwich, and stare across the river at the Colgate clock. I would write in my little notebook and wait for my real life, my writing life, to begin.
Time was a-wastin’.
I would write notes for my novel, overheard conversations, funny things that Michael said (“Make noise so you don’t hear me stirring my yogurt”). I would rant into this notebook, write out last night’s dreams, scribble down ideas for other novels and short stories. Looking through this notebook now, a Pearl River Mart special with a red brocade cover, I also see a lot of prayers, a lot of grief.
It was in spring 2001 when my mother was diagnosed with dementia and began her sharp decline.
My siblings and I knew it was coming, but no one had wanted to deal with it. Of course dementia made all the sense in the world to me, given what I saw as my mother’s retreat from reality. Wringing her hands but essentially doing nothing when her husband would beat up her children in the name of “discipline.” It was far in the past, my father long dead, but I still had not forgiven her.
What I didn’t foresee was the deep depression I would fall into when I realized I was losing her.
Two-thousand-and-one was a hot, broke summer. I’d worked at the job for two-and-a-half years by then. How was this possible? I was supposed to be a writer. And my mother, what was she supposed to have been? After the death of my father, I was always waiting for her to find her wings again. She was an artist, after all. Art spoke deeply to her. She loved taking us kids to museums when we were little. I remember her standing in front of a minor Renaissance painting and explaining to nine-year-old me how sloppy it was, that the perspective lines didn’t meet. As her dementia progressed, she went from understanding such finer points to making meticulous drawings of my old stuffed animals in various groupings. She made many, many, many of these drawings. Later, I understood that the Cute is perhaps the last thing to have a hold over the brain. My mother wanted childhood again, wanted to start her life all over.
That summer, I was losing my desire to live at all.
In my ruined little journal I see entries about sitting on my bed in my bathrobe, unable to stand and dress myself, my boyfriend Damian kneeling before me and holding me. Endless anguished words about my mother. Grief in my heart over my mother, and it is so present it has color and shape, and it is red and it is shaped like a wedge, in my heart, with the point facing down. I dreamed endlessly about her. Dreams where she is well and we can have a future together – only to wake up to worse grief. In the midst of this I somehow managed to finish my endless novel. “Finish” my “novel.” My agent, he needed some time to read it. Why wasn’t he excited by it? In my little red journal, these twenty-five years later, I read this entry:
I am back to thinking I should kill myself. If my novel was better, I probably would.
Which suggests that my sense of humor wasn’t totally gone.
It seemed like the height of perversity that life carried on around me and I was expected to go along with it. I went to work, wrote proposals, ran blocks east to get to the late-closing Federal Express on Broad Street in time, but I was elsewhere. I was made of want and dust. Damian’s best friend was getting married, and we had to spend money we didn’t have to go to his destination wedding in Ireland. Among all those happy people, I floated like a ghost. I looked about me, wondering: What’s the point of all this? Why are you even bothering? “Life” was a flickering projection on a wall.
I was looking for something. A way out? Clues as to how to live? The moment in my life when I’d taken a wrong turn and screwed up everything? A way to cure my mother?
Around this time the very closedness and sterility of the Trade Center became a balm to me. Walking west from the downtown Strand after looking at the books everyone else had managed to publish, I could see right down Fulton Street to the hard, skinny lines of the Trade Center. Turning from my bench on the esplanade and my inevitable cheese sandwich, there the towers were, rising up behind me. They were always there, waiting for me. Wherever I went in the city, way uptown, south Brooklyn, far out in Ozone Park, I could look up and there they were: waiting for me. In time I actually began to think, How will I ever be able to work anywhere else? How will I ever live without the protection of the Trade Center, its concourse, its corridors, its enormousness?
The concourse particularly began to take on an abstract, dreamlike quality for me. There were clues in this; if only I knew how to comprehend them, they would yield a magic key. One time I saw a slick broker type, with fancy suit and Hollywood hair, yelling into a cell phone in front of The Children’s Place, a copy of Glamorama held cover-out to his chest. Once I saw two businessmen sailing through the concourse, laughing and looking down, hands in pockets, to compare the blue of their trousers. The paths from each transportation line, particularly at rush hour, were an obstacle course, but sometimes the most uncanny calm would pass over the concourse like a quieting snowfall. For the morning rush, a special flavor of Muzak was piped in, which I suggested to Michael should be called “angel-flotation” music. It wafted you along on your way, dope for the ears, drowsing and containing you. In my mind this music came from a top-secret source, a station run by a silent, all-seeing World Trade Center intelligencer. This felt like another clue for me, the edge of a dream.
They held lunchtime concerts out on the loveless plaza in that long, hot summer. The sound of the music would rise up, play off the building angles, create odd distortions inside our windowless office. Very often the band was some act from the 1960s, and the sound of Chubby Checker singing “The Twist” seemed like a melancholy echo of a distant memory. More haunting was the afternoon of Glenn Branca’s hundred guitars playing “Hallucination City.” How it rose up in the hot air over the plaza, the sound of a giant hive. The walls of our windowless office seemed to vibrate with it. Even then, it suggested the end of an era.
The strangest memory I have of these afternoon concerts checks out nowhere. And yet it’s so clear in my mind. It’s of a kind of circus troupe of musicians playing selections from the Carmina Burana. It was a scorching afternoon out on the plaza, and I remember a tall, lanky man at a toy piano, his knees up by his ears, banging away at “Tempus est iocundum,” a joyous, whirling, nearly unhinged song about the fire of young passion. I remember a woman in a formal gown, a little person, singing “Dulcissime” with untold sweetness in that terrible heat. This really happened. A few years before I’d gone to hear the Carmina Burana at Tanglewood, and we’d driven home some teenage musicians from Simon’s Rock who had hitchhiked there. They told us there was always some tragedy that follows the Carmina Burana when it gets played live. A fall, a broken bone, a death. A catastrophe.
In the midst of my unraveling, I started seeing messages on the sidewalks all around the Trade Center. Desperate pleas they were, written out in blue chalk, and they seemed to be meant for someone who, in her despair, walked around looking at her feet. In a word: me. I dutifully wrote them down in my notebook. In late June 2001, by the Rector Street Station: “SAVE ME DAVID ROSS BENNETT” – here a phone number was written out – “FAMILY DEAD.” On July 17, on the southwest corner of Liberty Plaza: “SAVE ME MY WHOLE FAMILY WAS TORCHURED I M DAVID ROSS” – and then the phone number. On July 30th, on Vesey Street: “THERE GOING TO GRIP LOCK ME HURRY PLEASE” – then the phone number, which was eight digits – “DAVID ROSS.” Could I help David Ross? What was “grip lock”? Cleary this man was insane. But just in case, should I call the number? No, of course I shouldn’t. What I should do, as a writer, was write a story about it.
But I didn’t know how to write stories like this. I’d never been tortured, “grip-locked,” subjected to dark forces. If I were Don DeLillo, I thought, I would know how to write such a story. But I was so stuck in my own life and the limits of my experience that I had forgotten how to invent. In a way, I’d forgotten how to dream.
It was at the end of the summer when I had to go to another event that was meaningless to me, a friend’s baby shower. Babies? Why have them? What’s the point? I’d forgotten her gift, left it on my desk at work. The shower was on a Saturday, September 8th, so there was nothing for it but to go into the office that afternoon to pick it up. I went into the Tower Two lobby, swiped my badge at the turnstile, pressed the elevator button, floated up to the 21st floor, and used my key to unlock the main office door. The office was much, much worse without anyone in it. I got the present, then locked the door behind me. My office keys had a fob of Michael the Archangel I’d bought in Little Italy. I liked that St. Michael slew the dragon. I liked that he carried souls to heaven. I liked that his name was Michael.
My own Michael was genuinely kind and loyal, but I don’t know that I told him about my mother. It was too much to bring into that snug little space. I didn’t want to frighten him, talk about how I wished for death.
I finally was able to listen to my friend Sarah, a therapist who’d been urging me to see one who dealt in grief counseling. He was a Catholic priest, “but a cool one.” I was long lapsed but this appealed to me. Mostly, it seemed like a connection to my deeply Catholic mother. I made an appointment for after work on the evening of Tuesday, September 11th. That day was also the mayoral primary, so I realized I’d have to get up early in order to vote. Only in retrospect does it seem absurd that I found it so crucial to vote in the Green Party primary. When I got to the polling place in solidly Democratic Sunset Park and told them I was Green Party, they looked at me like I was cuckoo. Where were the ballots for that? I’d read there was a special paper ballot, I told them, did they have them? Together we turned to a pile of unopened boxes unloaded haphazardly against the wall. They set to work with box cutters.
Great, I thought, I’ll be late for work again. Al’s going to kill me.
I was underground, on the R train, coming in from Sunset Park. They told us over the hopeless PA system that there was a police action at Cortlandt Street. The train would terminate at City Hall. Everyone grumbled. It was when I was coming up the steps from the City Hall subway that I heard the strangest thud. What? This was the sound of the second plane scudding into Tower One. But I didn’t even understand that it was planes, that it was the Trade Center. I didn’t understand anything.
I ran up to street level and debris was flying – paper, paper, lots of it. My first thought was: we’re being attacked and they’re leafleting us. I grabbed up a charred piece of paper off the sidewalk and stuck it in front of my face. It was in Chinese. What the – ?
I began moving south with the crowd and when the canyon of buildings cleared I saw it was the towers. It was my World Trade Center. My first thought was for Michael. Michael, my Michael. Our workroom had no windows; Michael liked to get in early; he would be wearing headphones. He would be off in his own world, he would be listening to something loud and all-consuming, Merzbow, 2 Many DJs. Headphones, he would be wearing headphones. Would he even feel the impact?
Run toward Tower Two?
Instead I stood there with the crowd. We were frozen. We looked up at the sky through the smoke and that was when I saw the people jumping, outlined like starfish against the blue sky. I just stood and stared up at them jumping into the sky. I actually pulled out a cigarette and lit it with my violently shaking hands. A young woman next to me said, I don’t smoke, but could you give me a cigarette? We stood smoking together, looking up at the sky. A boy on the other side of me kept saying, Oh shit, oh shit, in the way you say such things when you watch a crazy stunt in an action-adventure movie.
A man started yelling that we had to move, we had to move. What made sense? Not to go north to the towers, south was wrong, west was the river; I needed to go east. I kept going east. I had given away my last cigarette so I actually stopped at the Duane Reade on Fulton Street that was somehow still open and bought a pack of cigarettes from the crying young woman at the register. From there I went north. I was in Chinatown walking beside a petite Chinese auntie in a floral shirt when something made me turn. She and I and everyone else turned, as if there was a noise. Two World Trade Center seemed to shiver in the air, and then it all came down. Pancaked down and done in seconds. I was holding a sweater in my hands and I put it over my head and started screaming.
Michael was gone.
I joined the exodus and continued north.
*
That black sweater, that plum camisole, those gray cotton jeans, those Steve Madden platform slip-ons that you had to snap when you walked. I still have those jeans, now with a hole in one knee. I never wear them but I can’t put them in the rag bag.
Our company made a list after September 11th, of all the people who were missing. I was on that list. Michael was on that list. But turned out that he never even got into work that day. He overslept. Then got as far as the Flatbush Avenue terminal in Brooklyn. We all got reunited two days after, on September 13th, at the office of a client up in Midtown. Some jerk at the firm agreed to having a film crew, led by Lynn Sherr, cover our firm’s “recovery,” so we had people with cameras up our noses while we tried to deal with our grief. I made excellent B-roll footage, staring up at the sky with a look of sorrow on my face.
We also made lists, Michael and I. Of the things in our little office that we lost. My copy of Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness. Michael’s copy of Edmund White’s The Flâneur. A pair of clogs from Denmark given to me by my friend Kim. Michael’s box of Little Debbie “enrobed cakes” that I gave him as a joke. A starfish-shaped bottle opener …
I became obsessed with the stories of sacrifice and commitment, the priest who stayed behind with the man in the wheelchair. The firefighters running up the stairs. The people holding hands as they jumped into the sky. When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and so many people at our firm supported it, spoke with real bloodlust, I was heart sick. When you see so many people die in front of you, how can you want to reign down that terror on other people? Maybe others at the firm felt the same way, but it seemed like it was only Michael and I who spoke against it. It was like we were two against the world.
He was deep in his grief, listening to Tallis’s Spem in alium over and over and over again. I began going to every protest against the war. I remember one that went past Rockefeller Center, and I can still picture in my mind how we turned the corner to see that the flags of all nations around the skating rink had been replaced by U.S. flags. It was as if we were the only country that mattered now, all others be damned.
If you really want to make me crazy, tell me this: Everything happens for a reason. Did my mother’s illness save me? If I hadn’t been late for work, would I have been the lone left-behind at our firm, sitting in that little windowless office plugged into headphones blaring The Fall? For years, I felt like I was supposed to have died there, in that little windowless room on the building core.
And how long did it take me to understand that there was no “supposed” about it? The story of my life, it didn’t have some inevitable, shapely narrative arc. My mother’s dementia was not “caused” by her behavior. Reading the sidewalks for clues would produce no ultimate revelations. I was not living in a systems novel. There was no magic key. There was only work, determination, not giving up.
My mother died the day after my birthday in May 2004. By then she had lost language entirely. She had gone from nonstop walking to no mobility at all. She lay on her side in her bed in the Alzheimer’s home, curled up like a baby. Her caregivers told us she was the gentlest of ladies, like a “little lamb.”
I threw out all my writing around 2007 and started again. I ran on that hamster wheel of false starts for years after. I thought I was supposed to be a prodigy but turned out I was a late bloomer: I published my first novel in 2017, two days before my forty-ninth birthday. And there I am, in the filmic pull-back, with my little book in my hand, in a country much uglier and more vicious than the pre-9/11 country, or at least much more happy to show its fangs. And how much more vicious and hate-filled now.
After I finally left that job, I never saw Michael again. I made efforts to get together, but he didn’t answer my notes or respond to my messages. Our friendship is so old that the only number I have for him is a 212 landline. His internet presence, once robust, seems to have dwindled. But he always had aliases – a Greek dramatist, a shade of blue – so it could be that he’s out there, in the ether, in full force, like the nun at the end of Underworld. It matters to me and then it doesn’t. Because somehow I see us as still there, it’s so vivid, together in our windowless little office on the 21st floor of Tower Two, with our repetitions, our talismans, our love for each other. The thing about the World Trade Center was that we hated it, but it felt like home.
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