Cataclysm
Kelly called me that afternoon to have a drink after work at a little dive bar near Grand Central. She was wearing one of her blue Ann Taylor business suits. Since she was barely five-foot-two, had a cherubic face, and cut her blonde hair in a short, boyish bob, she looked like a college student going for a job interview.
“I’m not going to your place tonight,” she said apologetically. “I’m gonna stay at my studio in Chelsea until you’re better.” She had kept her little studio, despite the fact that she’d moved in with me two months ago. I didn’t blame her for having a backup plan since we’d only been dating for eleven months.
“It’s ok,” I said, knowing that I was being dumped over a few bad dreams.
“It’s not permanent, just until you’re over this.”
“You think I’m psycho,” I said.
“No, just a little…”
“Psycho.”
***
At 9:05 A.M. on September 11th, as United Airlines Flight 175 hit the south tower of the World Trade Center, I was finishing my cereal on my futon in front of my 19-inch television on a perfect late-summer day. I usually had a late start in the mornings. I was a junior associate at a law firm near Grand Central Station that did not start business hours until 9:30 A.M., and I lived only 15 minutes away in a one-bedroom in Murray Hill. When I first saw the news footage of the attack, I instantly felt a switch in my mind click from on to off, and I knew that this tragedy was the unseen “cataclysm” of my dreams. My sense of impending doom was gone, replaced by a tremulous powerlessness. Unsure of what to do, I focused on my television, which was repeating the same footage half a billion times. Phone service was sporadic at best that day but my family and close friends eventually got through.
Kelly called me mid-afternoon, saying she’d been trying to reach me from her Chelsea studio all day. After she realized I was fine, she asked, “Did you talk in your sleep last night too?”
“I don’t know. No one was around to hear,” I replied, playing martyr.
“You okay? For real?”
“As okay as I can be right now.”
I did not sleep the night of 9/11, choosing to stay up all night drinking every drop of alcohol alone in my apartment (a few beers, part of a bottle of vodka, some white wine I’d forgotten about in the back of the refrigerator) and watching CNN. The next morning, I did not feel tired. I craved something that resembled normalcy like jumping in the shower, shaving, putting on freshly laundered clothing, and taking a leisurely stroll. It was a crystalline late summer morning, perfect except for an acrid smell in the air that evoked a garbled memory of some botched experiment in high school chemistry class.
Despite the empty storefronts, despite the streets jammed with the grim cacophony of people trying desperately to leave New York, I enjoyed an early autumn walk in my neighborhood. I walked north hoping to get a bagel on 30th Street or a smoothie on 33rd, but both shops were closed so I kept going. Before I realized how far I had walked, I was right next to Grand Central Station, only two blocks from my office. I figured I might as well stop in to check my e-mails.
When I walked in my office building on Lexington Avenue, I was greeted in the cavernous marble lobby by a gaggle of security guards who did a check of everything on my body. I took the elevator up to my floor and realized that I was completely alone. The egg-white hallways of my office were lined by rows of dark computer screens and empty chairs. All the lawyers’ dark wood office doors were closed and the lights inside were out. Walking into the very familiar at a most inappropriate moment, I was reminded of a time I broke into my junior high school on a Saturday night with a couple of skater slackers when I was 13. The egg-white hallways of my office were lined by rows of dark computer screens and empty chairs. All the lawyers’ dark wood office doors were closed and the lights inside were out.
