WHEN BENNY AND MARCIA WALKED into Joe’s office and discovered he wasn’t there, Marcia, who had not left Benny’s side since he reached out and took her arm, looked at him and asked, “What do we do now?”
He had no immediate answer. “We don’t even know that Tom’s in the building,” he said. “We could be totally overreacting. Roland’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer.”
“But what if he is here?”
“What if?” said Benny. “Maybe he’s just come to say hello.”
“What if not?” said Marcia.
Gone, suddenly, was her spunk, her sass, her strutting and calling out how she saw things without softening or accounting for feeling. Replacing all that now in Joe’s office was someone much smaller — a hundred and ten pounds with a very thin, pale neck and bright Irish eyes, spooked by Amber’s hysterical reaction. And now she was asking him, Benny Shassburger, the boy-faced and slightly overweight Jew from Skokie who, despite the Jews’ well-documented historical peril, had grown up in the northwest suburbs of Chicago knowing no greater danger than a wild curveball thrown at his head during a pony league game. Marcia Dwyer, who had laughed at him yesterday for not knowing the difference between an Allen wrench and a socket wrench. Marcia, who he was madly in love with. She was asking him to take charge. Do something! Save lives, if lives need saving! See me to safety! He nearly collapsed under the weight of it. But then he rose to the occasion. Recalling suddenly that they were standing in Joe’s office, and the ongoing antagonism between Joe and Tom in their day, he said, “We leave this office, that’s the first thing we do.”
As they departed, for a brief second, in the midst of confusion and fear, he felt flattered. My love Marcia, looking to me for guidance!
In the next instant, pure, blood-chilling fear snapped him out of it. The doors to the elevator opposite them suddenly flew open.
It was only that clueless goober Roland, finally making his way up from the ground floor.
“Have you seen him yet?”
“You’re not even sure it is him!” cried Benny.
“I know,” said Roland, “I know.” He shook his head, deeply disappointed with himself. “But Mike wants everybody to evacuate anyway,” he said, “just to be on the safe side. He told me to tell everyone to take the emergency stairs.”
“Why not the elevators?” asked Benny.
“Because Mike said,” said Roland.
So Benny and Marcia hurried to the emergency stairs. As they started their descent in the cold echoing stairwell, Benny could not stop himself from thinking — much as he couldn’t help feeling flattered in Joe’s office when she had turned to him for help — that in its way, this was romantic. Taking the stairs with Marcia, their hearts racing, fleeing death together. He had to consciously stop himself from turning to her on one of the landings and grabbing both of her doe-like arms and finally declaring his love for her. It would have been a poorly timed moment, and much more likely that she would have replied not by saying, “You like me, Benny?” but “Are you out of your fucking mind, telling me this right now?” Better to tell her after all this was over, which he promised himself he would do. Finally he would get up the courage. That whole business about Marcia not being Jewish, that was only to protect himself from the humility of rejection if it turned out Marcia didn’t feel the same way. As long as Marcia would agree to raise the children as Jews, he really didn’t give a damn what his aunt Rachel on her West Bank settlement thought of his apostasy.
They took the stairs quickly. They said nothing, but it was still good to be the one accompanying her from the building. He was glad it was him and not somebody else, and the only thing that could have improved matters was if he had had the nerve to take her by the hand. But that was the same nerve he needed to admit his crush, a nerve he didn’t seem to possess. Nerve, he thought — and the next thing he knew, he was seized with a thought as inappropriate as confessing his love: when all was said and done, would she think he was a coward for having fled with her down the stairs, when what he should have done was stay with Roland and tell the others to evacuate? He wanted nothing more right then than to share the experience of fleeing the building with Marcia. What couple could say they had done that together? But was it more important than letting her know that he wasn’t a coward? He regretted his next thought even more: wasn’t it in fact more important not to be a coward than to flee the building? Without considering his duty or the question of his courage, he had followed Roland’s instructions from Mike Boroshansky and hurried out the heavy gray door. Was it the right thing to have done? To leave everyone’s fate in the hands of Roland — that was dicey business. Suddenly the final, most inappropriate thought of all came to him, and he forgot Marcia entirely. Grabbing hold of the rail to halt his momentum, he stopped abruptly in the middle of a flight of stairs. Marcia made it to the bottom before turning back, and on the landing between the forty-eighth and forty-seventh floors, she looked up at him and saw that he had stopped, and the expression on his face was full of reticence and uncertainty. “What did you forget?” she asked. He just stood there, not looking at her, but not not looking at her, either, staring indeterminately with eyes glassy and faraway. He focused finally just as the fleeing footsteps of others began to descend upon them.
“Jim,” he said.
LARRY HAD FINALLY MANAGED to coax Amber into the server closet on sixty, which felt more like a walk-in refrigerator. The small room was bright, well insulated, and maintained at a steady temperature so the elaborate machines didn’t overheat. Larry and Amber went to the back and hid behind the black metal shelving that supported the hardware, while Larry tried to calm her hyperventilating tears by saying, “Shh.” “Shh,” he kept saying, as she clung to him in their contorted, half-fallen position in the far corner behind the massive wire coils spilling from the well-spaced servers humming like fans on their shelves. “Shh,” he said, as she buried her face into his chest and wept as soundlessly as she possibly could, heaving in his arms with her great waves of irrepressible fear, until his T-shirt had soaked up so many of her tears that he felt them cooling on his skin in the intemperate air. “Shh,” he said, even as a malignant, hopeful thought crept over him, as sinister and troll-like as an evil wish in a fairy tale doomed to end badly: rather than killing them, maybe Tom Mota was actually saving Larry’s life by traumatizing Amber so thoroughly that she would have a miscarriage. Wouldn’t that be a great turn of events. Because if the trauma wasn’t sufficient to rid them of the problem at hand, and if she fell on the wrong divide of the debate, which seemed more and more likely as the days progressed — to put it plainly, if that baby didn’t disappear, Larry Novotny might as well throw open the door and holler at Tom wherever he may be to please come spray them with automatic fire because his life was over. Over. His wife had given birth to a child herself just a little over a year ago, and their marriage was too fragile, too young, too troubled already to withstand the revelation of an infidelity, even a little workday one that had meant nothing, Susanna, swear to god it meant nothing. “Shh,” he kept saying, as he grew more and more angry with Amber and her crying. She was always concentrating on crises happening elsewhere, while paying little attention to the one growing and dividing, dividing and growing within her very body, the body of the woman he had once desperately desired but now had come to mildly hate, the woman he held in his arms as she wept and trembled like a child but as only an adult can tremble, fully aware of the possibilities of violence and death. “Shh,” he said, when what he wanted to say was, “Listen, I really need you to tell me once and for all that you’re having this abortion.” Because if she wanted to avoid carnage and annihilation, if she cared a whit about limiting the destruction, she would do something about those cells activating and organs maturing right there inside of her — otherwise his marriage was in bloody fucking tatters. “Shh,” he said, and this time he added, “Amber, shh. Why are you so hysterical?” She lifted her head off his chest and looked at him. The raw rims of her nose were bright red and her pale cheeks were wet and puffy. “Because I’m scared,” she whispered breathlessly between sobs. “But we don’t even know that he’s out there.” “I’m not scared for me,” she said. “Can we please stop talking?” But he didn’t want to stop talking. “Who are you scared for?” he asked, with a creeping concern. “Me?” he suggested. “Are you scared for me?” She put her head back on his chest and resumed trembling. “Lynn Mason?” he asked. She wouldn’t reply. He went down the list. Was it Marcia? Benny? Joe Pope? How could any of them be the cause of such emotion?