“My aunt Lourdes called around midnight,” she says, forcing herself out of the darkness. “I didn’t want to wake you.”
“Where are you now?”
“Kennedy. I wish you were with me.”
“Me too.” He pauses. “Call me when you get time,” Cormac says. “Call collect. But only if you can.”
“I will.”
The hardness seeps out of her voice now. He can hear the blur of public announcements in the background.
“I hope all goes well. For you. For him too.”
“I hope so too. For him. You always think you have all the time in the world to find out the things that really matter to you. Then you get a phone call in the middle of the night, and you’re talking about days or hours. Life is weird, sometimes.”
“It sure is.”
“And Cormac? We’ll have dinner in my place as soon as I get back. For the first time…”
“Of course. Just do what you’ve got to do down there.”
“Okay.”
“Vaya con Dios.”
Then she’s gone. He lies on the couch for a while and then picks up the remote control and clicks on New York 1 for the time and weather. Temperatures in the high eighties. No wind. He needs to go out into the city. In August, he thinks, I can even wear shorts.
She doesn’t call that night, or the day after. And on the following morning, he walks down Broadway with Healey, who is unhappy in a new way. Without warning, Mary’s coffee shop has closed. The building is being rehabbed, with money obviously raised before the dot-com collapse. The pipes and planks of rigging climb three stories above the sidewalk, throwing the front of the coffee shop into darkness, and a team of Mexicans is adding one new floor of rigging to another. The interior of the coffee shop is dark. The Miss Subways posters are still there, but gone are all those waitresses who called them sweetheart in the New York mornings.
“They’re gonna take everything we love right out of the world, Cormac,” says Healey, his walk slower, his face rippling with emotion. “They’ll put a fucking Starbucks in here, wait and see. With waitresses right out of Area Code 800. Women from NOWHERE. Wactresses, waiting for the BIG BREAK, not waitresses.”
Their legs take them south, as if there were concentric rings of time and eventually they’ll find their way to 1947, when Mary’s opened, selling eggs and jelly doughnuts to politicians from City Hall. But it’s all Duane Reade and Staples and Gap, flying the flags of globalization. Stockbrokers move in urgent waves from the subways and PATH trains in the World Trade Center, crossing Church Street, heading for Wall, right up past Brooks Brothers, all of them carrying the Times or the Wall Street Journal, and briefcases full of anxiety. Healey and Cormac watch them as if they are part of a movie, and then wander toward the Twin Towers.
“If all these business guys are going to their offices,” Healey says, “there must be some room for US.” They turn at a sign marked Cortlandt Street, which is no longer a street but only a marker erected at the plaza. “I mean, there’s gotta be a COFFEE shop, where you can sit down, and make remarks.” Cormac thinks: I lived on this street once, and then they shoveled it into landfill. They find a door and descend on an escalator into the vast concourse of the underground mall, looking at the strained faces on the packed stairs of the up escalator.
Then, in the concourse, Cormac sees a woman he is certain is Delfina. Coming up out of the N&R trains. There are hundreds of people moving around one another, and he has only a glimpse. It’s her hair. Her skin color. His stomach flips. She’s here, not in the Dominican Republic. She made up a lie. He excuses himself to Healey, then hurries after the woman, calls, “Delfina.” The woman turns. It’s not Delfina.
He goes back to find Healey in the swirling morning crowds, standing in front of a Florsheim’s shoe store.
“What’s with YOU?”
“I thought she was someone else.”
“That Latin chick?” Healey says.
He looks at Cormac, who mumbles, and then he shakes his head and says, “Fucked up, man. Fucked up.”
107.
Now Cormac feels time expanding, contracting, then expanding once again. His narrative has stalled. Through the pages of the Light, he keeps track of the separate journeys of the Warrens, while Delfina is off on her own journey, about which nobody writes. Elizabeth is photographed in an African village, and then meeting with a U.N. investigator, and then at a hospital. Adopting a “letter to the reader” format not seen since the Hearsts abandoned New York in the 1960s, Warren writes his impressions of Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac and Silvio Berlusconi, their concerns about the missile defense shield, about the threats of terrorism spreading from the streets of Tel Aviv to all of Europe, the problems of immigrants, or the need to create a humane form of globalization. Warren writes, or dictates, articles on peace in Northern Ireland and how it could be a model for peace in the Middle East, each article running with a photograph of Warren shaking hands with the leading politicians. The pieces are tedious, written in the flat prose of a ghostwriter, but from them Cormac knows where Willie Warren has been, if not where he is. He feels like a burglar from the 1950s, studying the society columns to find out whose apartments were empty on Park Avenue.
Delfina calls collect late in the evening of the second day after she leaves. The connection is bad, with gaps in words, and blurred by a parallel nonstop conversation in Spanish that he can hear from a separate line.
“I’ve been trying every which way to get a number for you,” he says, trying to be cheerful. “I even called Reynoso and Ryan, but Reynoso is out of town too.”
“I’m okay,” she says. “My aunt picked me up at the airport and got me here. It’s out in the boonies. I’m calling from a neighbor’s house.” Static and interference. Then: “My father’s still alive. But quién sabes, mi amor. Hey, I’ll try to find a better phone and call you tomorrow….”
She doesn’t call.
Elizabeth does. She’s back in town. Can he come to dinner?
108.
It’s the eve of the first weekend in September. On his Thursday walk, taken around noon, he sees the streets emptying, as the city evacuates for Labor Day. Buses groan uptown on Church Street, loaded with passengers for Staten Island and New Jersey. Taxis push their way to Penn Station, Grand Central, or the Port Authority bus terminal, and he sees men and women waiting on corners with black wheeled suitcases, waving frantically for someone, anyone, to stop and take them away.
Above him, the sky is tossing, the clouds scudding and turbulent before the power of an emptying wind. Down at the Battery clouds assemble into a white horse, complete with rider. He thinks: New York 1 should add an Omen Report. With a Portent Index. And a Death Chill Factor. He stares for a long while as the clouds unravel and blow to the east.
He naps and dreams great shuddering dreams that he can’t remember when he comes awake. Through the skylight, out past the towers, the clouds are now arranged like a stallion. The Black Horseman of famine. And then a shift of wind, and the dying sun colors the horseman red. The Red Horseman of war. Which then bleaches into the Pale Horseman of pestilence and death. Joined to the White Horseman of the afternoon, they warn of strange births and terrible deaths, ruinous storms, conflict and rage, the season of Apocalypse. Are they forming over New York for the first time, or were they drawn by Albrecht Dürer half a millennium ago? Yeats would have read those clouds.