A police officer had tapped his shoulder just then, as if he’d been waiting for him to wake up. “Wakey-wakey, buddy,” he said. “This is off-limits.”
“I’m already up,” Zal said. “I don’t want to be here anyway.”
The police officer had already walked off, with bigger problems that morning than some pale guy in a suit, likely just another Wall Street banker who’d had a rough bender and made an accidental overnight of it.
Zal had started to walk off, but to where, he did not know. He suddenly felt worried, especially with his reflection ensnared among the mirrors, no matter how far he walked, it seemed. What was going to happen? Was he to stick around? Was he to leave? What was he to do? He suddenly had no idea. What was coming, anyway? He tried to conjure up that peaceful image of his swami girlfriend in her cage-cell, but suddenly he couldn’t see her. All he could come up with was a stick figure, crudely drawn, standing in for her. The only image he could see with any vividness was one he’d never seen: Willa, big beautiful Willa, standing upright for a brief moment and then walking, almost floating, to her bedroom window, and out.
And so he, still sore from the night’s walking, set to more walking, pacing even. As the day lightened into a big bright blue-gold, the crowds seemed even worse than they were during the evening rush hour. People were busier than ever, all their senses of purpose and destiny and fate entangled against his none-at-all.
He could not stop looking back at all that mirror.
He was lost.
Somewhere a second hand was ticking, madly, but he couldn’t hear it.
He had lost his nerve.
His body bobbed and lingered and ebbed in that crude indifferent reflection. He could not get rid of himself, that disdainful monster rendering, no matter what he did.
The next hour and a half was unrecoverable for him, a blur of walking, passing faces of all ages and genders and races and affiliations, at hyper-speed, being pushed and shoved, and yelled, helloed, and hissed at. It was a fever of city workday life. He could not get ahold of any of it. He wandered like a character in a dream, soulless, on someone else’s strings, waiting to evaporate with the waking of the dreamer.
Wake up, he thought, wake up. But to whom?
The suspense was killing him. Suspense was bad enough, but it was a horrible match for being lost.
And as he heard the Silber music in the distance — similar to the Flight Triptych, a bizarrely flashy dirge, slightly avant-garde, brassy, garish, heart-stopping, a chaos of orchestrals — he started to feel like he was getting closer.
And then, seconds before it, he felt the familiar sense of fate catching up with him, like sensing an earthquake seconds before it hits, and he felt himself go in and out and in and out until he was sure he was gone.
When he came to, he was doing what they were all doing: running. The sky was falling. The whole city was screaming in sirens, police and fire trucks and ambulances all talking over one another at different intervals, the only sounds, because the men and women who were running seemed mostly silent.
And there was a strange stillness, a sense that it would get even worse before it got worse.
And as far as you ran, it felt like you were still close.
Suddenly men and women covered in a white dust were running, too, men and women shouting and screaming. They were wearing parts of buildings, Zal realized, they were wrapped in the building’s carnage. The buildings had died on them, and they had somehow still lived.
And Zal ran with them, fast, and he noticed that a few were not silent but shouting, and not crying but laughing. One man was pumping his fists in the air, yelling, “We made it!” And another woman was crying and grinning at the same time, hands in prayer, thanking something in the sky.
They made Zal stop dead in his tracks, against the runners. He stopped, mesmerized by their faces, the brief moment of joy in all that world-ending clamor.
He watched the city move in its frantic motion, away from the end of the island, away from its end, toward itself, toward its heart. And he moved with it, with them, and counted what smiles he saw among the many tears and looks of shock and defeat.
The city was going to be plastered with the smiling faces of their family, friends, and neighbors for months. That was all that was going to be left of those unlucky ones, so frozen in their smiles.
He did not know that. All he knew was the realness of the moment, the most alive he’d ever felt. And by the time he made it to midtown, he had his focus, the only thing he could do to save himself. He practiced over and over. And by the time he made it uptown, to the park, where there was little sign of downtown’s pandemonium, he thought he had mastered it, realized that it was no more than just a human trick—yes, trick! — a beautiful small and yet essential trick of the spirit, a simple contortion of the will. He was engaged in holding what he never imagined he could hold: Zal Hendricks was smiling.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
What is a book but a thing that one person creates, but massive squadrons enable. I will forget people and be haunted by it, but here goes:
Thank you to my agent, outstanding human Seth Fishman, who fell in love with this book without nudging, who refused to ever lose faith in this book even when I (almost) had. Thank you to my editor, fearless unicorn Lea Beresford who “got it” and delivered ninja edits and sweet friendship in lovely helpings; thank you to my tireless and brilliant publicist Summer Smith whose infectious enthusiasm and impeccable taste gives books a chance to really levitate; thank you to the great eyes and infinite patience of Nikki Baldauf. And a huge thanks to the entire gang at Bloomsbury and Gernert, both stellar, class-act operations.
Thank you to my brilliant readers: my ol’ magic man Jason Leddington, Patrick Henry, Max Kortlander, Calli Ray, Paul Tracthman, and most all my brother, Arta Khakpour.
Thank you to those whose friendship during this period kept me sane: Danzy Senna, Victoria Redel, Alexander Chee, Deb Olin Unferth, Jonathan Ames, Stephen Pierson, Matthew White, John McManus, Huey Copeland, Rick Louis, Laura van den Berg, Lauren Groff, Elliott Holt, Josh Weil, Nam Le, Edward Champion, Sarah Weinman, Dexter Filkins, Mike Scalise, Joe Scapalleto, Candice Tang, Sahra Motalebi, Jaclyn Hodes, Darcy Cosper, Jackie Thomas-Kennedy, Lulu Sylbert, Sarah Sleeper, Susan Smith Daniels, Ana Finel Honigman, Ruth Fowler Iorio, Jason Leopold, Whitney Joiner, Jon Caramanica, Emma Forrest, Pete Nelson, Nalini Jones, Margo Rabb, Matthew Specktor, Maggie Estep, Jason Mojica, Michael Rippens, Shiva Rose, Sholeh Wolpe, Tanya Perez-Brennan, Sameer Reddy, John Woods, Andy Moody, Spencer Penn, Marne Castillo, Brett Baldridge, Florian Bast, Dina Nayeri, Jennifer Sky, Kristie and Usama Alshaibi, Susan Barbour, and so many others who stood by me in all sorts of roller coaster moments with this one.
Thank you to Chris Habib, who entered my world late in this game, but whose spirit and dedication to the other life has given me the ability to imagine an existence past this one.
Thank you to Valerie Plame for boundless wisdom and generosity — especially for giving me shelter during the most critical months of writing and editing.
Thank you to everyone who doled out so much support, financial and emotional, to get me out of the dismal rock-bottom of Lyme Disease, and my amazing Santa Fe doctor Russ Canfield for saving my life so I could go back to writing. Thank you to my other doctor and friend, Voyce Durling-Jones, the only mystic I’ve ever believed in, whose bees brought me back to life. And dear healer Charles Yarborough, whose joy and intuition was always my light in my hardest California returns.