Crossers Page 4

  Maybe some wounds weren’t meant to heal. America seemed to have become a society dedicated to the proposition that no one should suffer, at least not for long. A Xanax in my tummy, and all’s right with the world. Castle had taken to reading the Roman stoics like Seneca and certain Greek tragedians like Aeschylus, whose voices spoke to him, across an ocean of time, with a thoughtfulness and a gravity utterly absent from Ms. Hartley’s psychobabble. And as in the November gloom he approached the Exchange Street station, a chorus from the Oresteia sang somberly in his mind’s ear. He who learns must suffer. And even now in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God. Suddenly, at the station’s mouth, the clammy subterranean air lofting up into his nostrils, he stopped and, without making a conscious decision, turned around and headed for Ground Zero. This was peculiar. Although HarrimanCutler’s offices were only a short distance from it, he always walked blocks out of his way to avoid setting eyes on it. Two months ago, during the observances of 9/11’s first anniversary, he made sure not to turn on the news. But now, for what reason he didn’t know, a compulsion like a magnetic force drew him to see and smell and touch the place where Amanda had been blown to atoms, also for a reason he didn’t know.

  He climbed up to a platform and joined a crowd watching giant shovels take bites of debris and spew it, giant mouthful by giant mouthful, into dump trucks. Workers in hard hats and hazmat suits descended into an excavation deep as a stone quarry. Cutting torches flashed amid the wreckage, which by this time had taken on an orderly appearance. Gone were the smoking, jumbled mountains of melted steel and pulverized concrete he’d seen in photographs; gone as well the tall, jagged fragment of a tower’s facade that had thrust out of the ruins like a broken idol from some vanished civilization. How strange to see so much light pouring into these streets. It wasn’t a cheering light; it heightened the impression of a vast desolation, like the sun on an empty plain. What awful power had directed those nineteen men to wreak this calamity? His pastel Episcopalianism rejected the existence of the devil except as metaphor, yet the scene before him testified that real evil roamed the earth. Castle had studied the photographs of the hijackers in newspapers and newsmagazines, paying special attention to Muhammad Atta, the ringleader, the Egyptian engineer with the unsmiling mouth and hooded eyes. A sinister face, but no more sinister than the mug shot of an ordinary criminal, its lineaments offering no clue to the madness within. No, not madness. The attacks had been too well planned and executed to have been the work of lunatics. That was a new thing in Castle’s experience, and it was beyond grasp—an insane act perpetrated by sane minds.

  He watched the workmen, he watched a team of dogs sniffing for remains in the mass grave of three thousand human beings. Mandy’s grave. Having been left without a body to bury had deepened the cruelty. Amanda hadn’t been killed, she’d been annihilated in that supernova of exploding jet fuel.

  He left the platform, ducked under a sawhorse barricade, and strode over hoses and past pumps and grinding machinery toward a mound of rubble, an incongruous figure in his pinstripes and trench coat. Spotting a hard hat on the ground, he put it on, figuring to masquerade as a city official who had business there. With the furtive movements of a shoplifter, he plunged a hand into the mound and filled a coat pocket with dirt and ash, imagining, or pretending, that it contained some remnant of Amanda. Before someone saw through his paltry disguise, he walked away quickly, dropping the hard hat. He would place the contents of his pocket in an urn, like funeral ashes. Or maybe he would scatter them over Long Island Sound, where she’d loved to sail on summer weekends. It would provide a catharsis of sorts. Closure, in Ms. Hartley’s annoying argot.

  The atmosphere from Ground Zero lingered as he walked back toward the subway. The air felt charged with menace, as before a thunderstorm. He’d made predictions throughout his career. The market was going to be bullish or bearish, this stock or mutual fund or commodity should be bought, sold, held. But nothing was predictable, was it? And if nothing was predictable, how was one to make sense of anything—or anyone? It was as if the fireballs of the exploding airliners had revealed a terrible truth previously hidden from him—his whole benign life and the faith it was founded on, that reason triumphs in the end, had been beautiful illusions.

  As he rode the uptown train to Grand Central, paranoia overtook him. That dark-complected man in the doorway could be an Arab with a bomb or a gun concealed under his padded jacket. Why not? Anything at any moment. The policemen and National Guardsmen patrolling Grand Central did not reassure him. If some suicide bomber decided to blow himself up, right now at rush hour, they could not stop him. Beneath the zodiac on the terminal’s dome, painted stars on a painted sky, Castle dodged through the hurrying crowds toward the track for the Stamford train. He’d missed the 3:17 but was on time for the next express. An unshaven derelict approaching from the side—“Hey, got some spare change?”—so startled him that he almost broke into a run.

  He walked down the platform, found a nearly empty car, and sat next to the window, alert and watchful, his back stiff, his knees locked, his briefcase on the seat beside him to deter unwanted company. Afraid of what? he wondered as more passengers entered the car. Of being blown up by some fanatic from the Arabian deserts? The terrorist who killed him would be doing him a favor. Of the unknown, the unpredictable? Yes, that. Of another strike that would take someone else dear to him? That, too. Morgan, sporty, competitive Morgan, slender Justine, her willowy frame belying her tough, lawyerly mind. To lose his daughters would be unendurable. Maybe he should talk to his girls, urge them to move someplace safer, insist on it. As the soldier who loses faith in his commander trembles before the enemy, so did Castle’s loss of faith in an understandable world bring on this queasy dread of the armies gathering even now in desert huts and city apartments and mountain villages to plot new outrages; the fevered armies delirious with visions of the paradise they would gain by killing themselves and hundreds or thousands of innocents who weren’t innocents in their eyes but infidels deserving of death.

  Soon enough the car was packed. A stylishly dressed young woman stood in the aisle, glancing at the briefcase that occupied the empty seat, then at him. She looked safe enough. He put the case on his lap, and she sat down and pulled a book from her shoulder bag. It could just as easily have been a grenade or a canister of poison gas. What was wrong with the Metro-North railroad? Airline passengers were being screened and searched and wanded as never before, but rail commuters weren’t given even the most cursory once-over. Imagine releasing poison gas in a crowded car. It had happened once, in Japan he thought it was. Sarin gas, if he remembered right.

  The train rolled through the underground darkness, then into the fading daylight and past the Westchester suburbs into Connecticut. As it approached Stamford, another frightening thought came to him: the stuff in his pocket was as likely to contain remains of the hijackers as anything of Amanda. He knocked his knees together, drummed the briefcase with his fingers, and even as he said to himself, For chrissake, get a grip, he stood up, crouching under the luggage rack, and muttered, “Excuse me,” to the young woman. She swung her legs aside, and he wriggled past her into the doorway. The train stopped, the doors snapped open. He got out. In the late-autumn dusk, several commuters on the platform threw quick, puzzled looks at the well-dressed fiftyish man dipping into his coat pocket and flinging dirt over the tracks, like someone scattering grass seed over a lawn. He felt embarrassed but relieved. He called the House of Hope and canceled his appointment with Ms. Hartley, then caught the train for New Canaan.

  Half an hour later he pulled into his drive on Oenoke Ridge. For ten years, he and Amanda had shared the white frame colonial with black shutters and the plaque beside the front door declaring the name of its original owner, one Seth Raymond, and the year it was built, 1801. Its windows were darkened. He unlocked the door. As always, Amanda
’s absence was a presence in itself. Samantha slightly deflected the blow, bolting inside through the dog door in back to prance around him, giddy, as if he’d been gone for a month. He petted her, thinking, They live outside of time; a few hours can seem like a month to a dog. The English setter trailed him to the hall closet, where he hung his coat, then to the bar in the den, where he knocked back a scotch to calm his nerves, then upstairs to the master bedroom, where he changed into jeans and a sweatshirt. He took a piss. “I went to …,” he said aloud as he came out of the bathroom. He was going to tell Mandy about his visit to Ground Zero. It wasn’t the first time he’d begun to speak to her before catching himself. There were times when he half-expected to see her.

  To the kitchen, where he warmed two slices of leftover pizza and washed them down with several glasses of wine. To the den, where he tried to read the Times and the Wall Street Journal but couldn’t get past the first paragraph of any story. He caught Headline News on CNN … Much talk about getting UN inspectors back into Iraq … Was there a connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 … WMD … A new addition to the lexicon, WMD … At nine-thirty he returned to the bedroom and undressed and went into the bathroom and took an Ambien. He held the bottle for a moment before putting it back in the medicine cabinet and counted the remaining pills. Six. Aware of his state of mind, his doctor allowed him only ten per prescription.

  Castle fell onto the unmade bed, hands crossed over his waist. The interregnum of fear that had gripped him on the train had passed; grief, the true monarch of his heart, resumed its oppression. It was a physical sensation, like a weight on his chest, while from within came a sharp, cold prickling, as if he were breathing ground glass. Would it be this bad, he wondered, if she had died in an accidental plane crash? If she’d been murdered by a mugger? One image that kept coming back to him was of Mandy at the moment she knew she was going to die. She would not have been hysterical, she would not have been begging for mercy, she would have been crying quietly, resigned to her fate, for a phlegmatic, even a tragic temperament dwelled beneath her jaunty exterior. The picture knifed Castle right through his marrow, she imprisoned in that hurtling missile among strangers, facing her death without him, while in the cockpit Muhammad Atta, hands on the yoke and throttles, prayers to Allah on his lips, aimed for the north tower with no feeling for the lives he was about to extinguish. Amanda had been the victim of a huge atrocity calculated down to the last small detail, and that stark fact made all the difference in the world.

  Samantha stood beside the bed, her long snout resting on the mattress, and whimpered a plea to have her ears tickled or her head rubbed, but he couldn’t move his arms against the weight pressing down on him. Morgan had told him to sell the place and move into a condominium before he drove himself crazy. Sensible advice, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Nor to sell Amanda’s car, still in the garage, or her little sloop, still in the boatyard. He hadn’t got rid of her clothes and shoes and jewelry, her hairbrushes and cosmetics and the hundred and one other things that belonged to her. Everything was as she’d left it, right down to the Tampax in the bathroom closet. Castle wasn’t sure why he clung to her possessions. Ms. Hartley assured him his was a normal reaction to a traumatic loss. To remove her belongings would be to acknowledge that she really was gone, and he wasn’t ready for the acceptance stage. He, or some part of him, was still in the denial stage. Another tidy explanation from the young woman whose job was to cage unruly emotions in airtight categories. Denial. Acceptance. Crap. Let the wild beasts pounce and devour, Castle thought. They will anyway.

  Sam’s demands for affection grew more insistent. He managed to reach over and ruffle her floppy ears. Her claws clicking on the hardwood floor, she moved to the other side of the bed. She was seven years old now, and he could not break her of the habit she’d had since she was a pup of going first to his side of the bed for a good-morning and a good-night petting, then to Mandy’s. Nearly every night and every morning she would stand there for a minute or longer, as she was now, and it broke Castle’s heart to see her, waiting and wagging her tail in expectation of the touch that could never come.

  He remembered the last time he and Mandy made love on this same bed—the balmy night before he left for Atlanta on business, she for Boston to visit her family before she was to fly on to L.A. She had been a large woman with large, healthy appetites. She liked to eat and pummeled her body with cycling and sit-ups and swimming at the Y to keep her weight under what she called “the George Foreman range.” That strong, ample body, so much life in it. Anthropologists found bones of protohumans who’d walked the earth with mastodons and saber-toothed tigers. How could there be not a fragment left of her?

  There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present sorrow. His second marriage, in contrast to the first, had been happy, happier than he thought possible. He supposed that was why his pain could find no relief—he could not forget the joys. The heaviness increased, crushing him into the mattress; it had a color—black, of course—a taste, a metallic taste, it was almost tangible. He began to weep. It had been like this for more than a year; he could see no end to it. Too many reminders, prompts to a memory that needed none: this house no longer theirs but his; the friends no longer theirs but his; the neighbors no longer theirs but his.

  Go to sleep in mourning and wake up in dread of each new day, like a man with terminal cancer. The hell of this cancer was that it wasn’t terminal.

  He went downstairs with the movements of someone in a trance, Sam following him. In the den, surrounded by his books, by his prints of leaping trout and flushing grouse, by the trophies attesting to his triumphs in skeet-shooting matches and country-club tennis tournaments, observed from above by the heads of a whitetail buck, a bull elk, and the big glass eye of a mounted tarpon, from below by Samantha, lying on the worn, antique Bukhara, and from his desk by his mother and father, his daughters, and Amanda, with her direct, green-eyed gaze and faint smile, her upper lip thin and straight, the lower lip full, suggesting a tension between the New England rigor and the southern sensuality in her blood—her father’s ancestors were Massachusetts Puritans, her mother’s French Huguenots from Charleston—Castle opened a door behind which stood a tall black safe. He twirled the combination lock, and from the firearms standing upright in felt-lined racks, he selected an old Fox Sterlingworth side-by-side with a double trigger. His favorite shotgun. It had been his father’s. He opened a drawer below the gun racks and took a twelve-gauge shell from out of its box and loaded the right barrel and thumbed the safety off. Turning the photographs facedown, as if to spare everyone the sight, he sat at his desk, placed the gun stock on the floor and, leaning a little forward, put the muzzle in his mouth, his thumb on the front trigger.

  There he sat, looking a bit like a Turk smoking a hookah, his face wearing a relaxed, thoughtful expression. He was actually in a semblance of a cheerful mood and restrained his thumb to give himself a moment to savor it. Then his brow creased as a picture of what he would look like afterward flashed in the brain he intended to blow apart. If his daughters were to discover his body, they would be horrified. Could he do that to them? Yes. And what of Sam? Who would take care of her? She was more than a pet, she was his hunting buddy, a partner. Could he leave her alone? Yes. Yes, if by applying a little more pressure on the trigger, he would hurl himself to Amanda’s side. But he wasn’t convinced that that was where he would go. He envied those who believed in the immortality of the soul, but he considered himself a realist—anyone who managed half a billion in assets had to be or he would soon be out of a job—and Amanda, declared the realist, wasn’t anywhere. Annihilated body and soul. She lived on only in his memory, and if he pressed a little harder, he would obliterate all that remained of her. There would be surcease from pain, yes, but nothing more. The end of everything. Eternal darkness. His resolve drained away as another piece of wisdom came to him: his terror of oblivion exceeded his longing for it. He took the gun out of his mouth, unlo
aded it, and returned it to the safe. He could almost hear the monarch cackling, You can’t get away from me that easily.

  Climbing the stairs to the bathroom, he gulped three Ambiens, not in expectation that thirty milligrams would be enough to kill him but in the certainty that they would give him an installment of death. The installment lasted nearly fourteen hours, from darkness to noon of the next day. He woke to the sound of Samantha slurping water from the toilet bowl. Dry-mouthed and groggy, his knees rubbery from the aftereffects of the drug, he sat up, cleared his head, and then shuffled downstairs to fill Sam’s water dish and food bowl. In the den the red light on his answering machine was flickering—eight messages. The caller ID informed him that four were from his office, two from Morgan, and two from anonymous callers, probably telemarketers. He would deal with the office later. He played back Morgan’s messages, the first just a call to find out how he was doing, the second a follow-up. “Dad? Where are you? Are you all right? Please call me.” A great worrier, Morgan was. A shiver passed through him when he thought of what he would have done to her had last night’s attempt, or rather attempted attempt, succeeded.

  He sat for a while, gazing at the tarpon hung above the doorway, the 120-pounder he’d caught years ago in the Florida Keys, and attempted to bend his normally analytical mind to his predicament. He had proven that death, the boundary beyond which all his ills could not pass, was also a boundary he could not cross until his natural time was up. He was condemned to live. But how was he to live with this pain that was like a chronic migraine of the heart? He was going to go mad if he didn’t find some way out. Out. Yes, out. Morgan was right. Out of this memory-haunted house, and more—out of the East altogether, far away from all these reminders. It was the only solution he could think of.