Out of Such Darkness Read Free Page B

translating the message for others. Jay will have to wait at New Canaan and Rachel will pick him up. He tries her number. Engaged. He wonders how many New Yorkers’ lives have been disrupted and how many millions of people are trying to make a telephone call at the same time.
    He pictures the Trade Center floor plans. If his office is below where the plane hit his colleagues will be safe. He imagines them labouring down the flights of stairs. How long does it take – 95 floors? Yes, they’ll be traumatised but they’ll survive.
    What if Straub, DuCheyne’s office is above where the plane burst in? (He remembers how the announcement had called it a ‘crash-landing’. Why did they describe it this way?) There must be an evacuation procedure. They’ll climb to the roof. There will be helicopters – an airlift.
    Unwelcome thoughts press in on him. What would abrupt and immediate obliteration feel like? It’s as if he’s picking at a scab in his brain. I would have been there if I hadn’t been so vain, he thinks. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Where did that come from? He feels a presence behind him – a spectre of his imagining. If he could turn round quickly enough he would see who it is.
    Still the questions come as if this ‘other’ is interrogating him. They snap at him like unruly hounds. Would
you
have died bravely in the maelstrom of flame? What will
you
make of your second-chance life? He tries to quell the negativity rising within him. A song reverberates inside his head:
Who let the dogs out? Who? Who?
He shivers and murmurs to himself that somebody has walked on his grave.
    Rachel! He straightens in his seat. She knows. She’ll be watching news bulletins. What is she thinking? Does she know which floor was hit? Is she assuming he was below the impact and safe? Above it and waiting for rescue? In it – and dead?
    He presses the ‘home’ button on his mobile phone and puts it to his ear. Engaged. He looks round the carriage. Many of the other passengers are doing the same thing. Pressing buttons, putting mobile phones to their ears. Shaking them. Inspecting the screens. The networks must be overwhelmed. He will have to sit tight and wait for New Canaan. Jay starts chewing the skin around the thumbnail on his right hand. He shifts on the seat and the damp patch on his back cools in the air-conditioning, a sensation that is soon overwhelmed by the heat from his adrenalin-pumped heart.
     
    When the train approaches the terminus he moves to stand by the door. There is a sweat-perfumed scrum waiting as the carriage glides alongside the platform but Jay is aware of an unspoken understanding by the brown-skinned people: they will defer to his Anglo-Saxon height. As soon as the doors are open he runs towards the exit where he spies a bank of payphones. There’s already a line formed at each one. The train, the swarming crowd, the misery of the lines, a newsreel image from the Holocaust springs unbidden into Jay’s mind and he shakes his head to send it spinning away. ‘Where did that come from?’ he asks himself as he sizes up the lines.
    Having decided on the shortest queue, Jay delights in elbowing others aside so he can join it. He shifts his weight from foot to foot and jiggles coins in his hand. He strains to overhear the woman making her call. Can he tell from her tone whether she’s reaching the end of her conversation? He counts the bodies in front. Four. He turns round. There are already three people behind.
    The other lines are at least seven or eight deep. He will have to wait his turn. The tension of frustrated communication clings to him like a Boston fog. The woman uses a clawed finger to click off the connection and leaves the handset dangling. Jay watches it spin on the twisted chord like a ghetto corpse strung from a wire and he has to shake his head again to detach himself from the image. The woman pushes her way through, pressing close by, weeping. Jay turns to the front and curses