seriously ill people must when they awaken one day, assess themselves by the sane
light of morning, and discover that the fever has broken. I tucked my takeout bag
under my left arm (an awkward maneuver but workable in the short run) and then
unlocked my door. I turned on the light. There, on the table where I leave bills that
need to be paid, claim checks, and overdue-book notices, were Sonja D’Amico’s joke
sunglasses, the ones with the red frames and the heart-shaped Lolita lenses. Sonja
D’Amico who had, according to Warren Anderson (who was, so far as I knew, the
only other surviving employee of Light and Bell’s home office), jumped from the one
hundred and tenth floor of the stricken building.
He claimed to have seen a photo that caught her as she dropped, Sonja with her hands
placed primly on her skirt to keep it from skating up her thighs, her hair standing up
against the smoke and blue of that day’s sky, the tips of her shoes pointed down. The description made me think of “Falling,” the poem James Dickey wrote about the
stewardess who tries to aim the plummeting stone of her body for water, as if she
could come up smiling, shaking beads of water from her hair and asking for a Coca-
Cola.
“I vomited,” Warren told me that day in the Blarney Stone. “I never want to look at a
picture like that again, Scott, but I know I’ll never forget it. You could see her face,
and I think she believed that somehow…yeah, that somehow she was going to be all
right.”
I’ve never screamed as an adult, but I almost did so when I looked from Sonja’s
sunglasses to Cleve Farrell’s CLAIMS ADJUSTOR, the latter once more leaning
nonchalantly in the corner by the entry to the living room. Some part of my mind
must have remembered that the door to the hallway was open and both of my fourth-
floor neighbors would hear me if I did scream; then, as the saying is, I would have
some ’splainin to do.
I clapped my hand over my mouth to hold it in. The bag with the General Tso’s
chicken inside fell to the hardwood floor of the foyer and split open. I could barely
bring myself to look at the resulting mess. Those dark chunks of cooked meat could
have been anything.
I plopped into the single chair I keep in the foyer and put my face in my hands. I
didn’t scream and I didn’t cry, and after a while I was able to clean up the mess. My
mind kept trying to go toward the things that had beaten me back from the corner of
75th and Park, but I wouldn’t let it. Each time it tried to lunge in that direction, I
grabbed its leash and forced it away again.
That night, lying in bed, I listened to conversations. First the things talked (in low
voices), and then the people who had owned the things replied (in slightly louder
ones). Sometimes they talked about the picnic at Jones Beach—the coconut odor of
suntan lotion and Lou Bega singing “Mambo No. 5” over and over from Misha
Bryzinski’s boom box. Or they talked about Frisbees sailing under the sky while dogs
chased them. Sometimes they discussed children puddling along the wet sand with the
seats of their shorts and their bathing suits sagging. Mothers in swimsuits ordered
from the Lands’ End catalogue walking beside them with white gloop on their noses.
How many of the kids that day had lost a guardian Mom or a Frisbee-throwing Dad?
Man, that was a math problem I didn’t want to do. But the voices I heard in my
apartment did want to do it. They did it over and over.
I remembered Bruce Mason blowing his conch shell and proclaiming himself the Lord
of the Flies. I remembered Maureen Hannon once telling me (not at Jones Beach, not
this conversation) that Alice in Wonderland was the first psychedelic novel. Jimmy
Eagleton telling me one afternoon that his son had a learning disability to go along
with his stutter, two for the price of one, and the kid was going to need a tutor in math