Ten Thirty-Seven

There was a light first.

He did not see it so much as find that he had seen it, afterwards, the way you find you have seen a car before it hits you. A white light, very big, from the far side of the floor, from the gates, that was there and was everything and was gone, all in less time than it took to blink, so that afterwards he could not have said whether he had blinked or not.

Then there was a weight.

It was not a sound. It was not anything he had a word for. It came across the floor from the gates faster than anything could come across a floor, and it was the air, the whole air of the concourse, all of it at once, made solid, and it hit him in the chest and the face and the whole front of his body at the same moment, and he was not standing at the mouth of the Lexington passage any more.

He was on the floor of the passage. He did not know how he had got there. He was on his back, on the cold stone, some yards in, and the ceiling of the passage was over him, low, and dark, and something was coming down out of it, very slowly, a grey snow.

There was no sound.

There was a ringing. It was very high and very loud and it was inside his head and it was the only thing, a single note held on and on like the note Nico had held at the top of the third tune, except that it did not stop, and there was nothing under it. He could see the grey snow coming down. He could see, at the edge of his eye, a shoe on the floor of the passage beside his head, on its side, a brown shoe, a man’s, with nobody in it. He could see his own hand, up in front of his face, white, all of it white, his sleeve and his hand and his fingers, the colour of chalk. He could not hear anything at all except the ringing.

He thought, quite clearly: my ears.

Then he thought: get up.

---

He got up. It took a long time. His legs did it in the wrong order and he had to tell them again, and then he was on his knees on the floor of the passage, and then he was standing, with one hand on the tiled wall, and the wall was warm, and the tiles were wet with something.

The ringing went on. Under it, now, very far down, as if from the bottom of a well, other things were beginning. A rushing sound like a lot of water. A scraping. A voice, high, going up and down without words.

He turned round.

The mouth of the passage, where it came out onto the concourse, where he had been standing with his back to the wall a minute ago, was a square of grey. Not dark: grey, bright grey, full of light and dust together, so thick he could not see one yard into it, and the dust was moving, rolling, coming down the passage towards him in a slow wave, and above it, coming down too, very slowly, in pieces, bits of something green and gold, turning over and over in the air as they fell, like leaves.

The ceiling. It was the ceiling. It was the stars.

He put his arm over his mouth and went into it.

---

He found Mr Pettiford first, because Mr Pettiford was nearest.

He was a yard from the mouth of the passage, under his own chair. The high wooden chair with the two steps and the brass rail had gone over on top of him and he was lying under it on his side on the floor with his brown coat over his head, and his rag was a yard away on the floor, white, and his tins had gone everywhere, and the photograph on the wall behind the chair, of the young Mr Pettiford and the man reading the paper about a war, was hanging by one corner with its glass gone.

Tom got the chair off him. It was heavy. He did not remember afterwards lifting it; he remembered it being off, and Mr Pettiford under it, moving.

He was alive. He was moving. He took the brown coat off his head and looked up at Tom, white all over, his face white, his eyebrows white, his eyes very dark in the white and very wide, and there was blood coming out of his hair on one side, running down, through the white, red, and he looked at Tom and his mouth moved.

Tom could not hear him.

He bent down. He put his face close to Mr Pettiford’s face. Under the ringing, from the bottom of the well, he heard it.

“Officer.”

And Mr Pettiford’s face did not move. Not by a hair. It was the face he said it with every morning, the straight face, the face of a man saying a word of respect to a uniform; and it stayed exactly that face, white with the dust, with the blood running down it, and the eyes in it very dark and very wide and full of something that was not the joke, and the face held. It held the joke. It held it for him. Tom understood that, with his face a foot from Mr Pettiford’s face on the floor of the passage. The old man was holding the joke up for him the way you would hold up a light.

“Mr Pettiford.”

“I’m all right.” The voice came up from the bottom of the well. “Go on. I’m all right. Go on, son.”

He went on.

---

His radio was making a noise.

It was on his shoulder still, on its clip, and he had not noticed it, and he noticed it now because he could feel it through his collarbone more than hear it: a buzz, a hiss, like rain on a roof, continuous, and under the hiss voices, a lot of them, all at once, on top of each other, so that none of them was anything.

He pressed the button and put his mouth to it.

“Central. Central, Keane. Grand Central, the main concourse. An explosion on the main concourse.” He could not hear his own voice. He could feel it in his throat and in his chest and he did not know how loud it was. “A big one. On the floor. Mass casualties. Many. I need everything. Everything you’ve got. Grand Central, the main concourse, explosion, mass casualties, everything.”

He let go of the button.

The rain came back. The voices. He did not know whether anybody had heard him. He did not know whether anybody could hear anything on that channel at all, with everybody in midtown on it at once. He said it again, the same words, and let go, and the rain came back, and he stopped, and went out onto the floor.

---

It was not the floor.

He knew it was. He knew it by the shape of it, the size of the room round him in the dust, the way the dust went up and up into a height that was the height of the concourse and nothing else in the city, and the light coming down through it from the high windows on the Forty-Second Street side, the long panels of it, gold, coming down through the dust in shafts that were solid, like pillars. He knew it by the clock. He could see the clock. It was there, in the middle, on top of the booth, coming and going in the dust, the four faces, one of them turned to him, and he could not read it, and it was there.

But everything else was not the floor.

He saw it. He saw all of it, in the first second, the way you see a room when the light goes on, and something in him that he had not known was there took what he saw and put it somewhere, behind a door, very fast, before he could look at it, and shut the door, and stood in front of it. He felt it do that. He did not argue with it.

He went to the nearest one.

That was all he could do, and he knew it, and he did it. Not the gates. Not the far side of the floor. Not the place where the light had come from. The nearest one. A woman, on her side, on the floor, ten yards from the mouth of the passage, white with the dust, with a suitcase beside her, moving her hand. He knelt by her. He did what the academy had taught them to do, and then what his mother had taught him at fourteen at the kitchen table with a tea towel and an orange, which was more. She was alive. She looked at him. He said something to her; he did not know what; he could not hear it. He got her up, onto her feet, and she held onto his arm with both hands, and he walked her back to the mouth of the passage and put her against the wall by Mr Pettiford, who was sitting up now against the wall with his rag held to his head, and Mr Pettiford took her hand.

Then the next one.

A man. A boy, a teenager, in a school blazer, one of the ones who did the whispering at the corners of the ramp, sitting up on the floor with his hands over his ears and his mouth open, screaming, Tom could see him screaming, he could not hear it, and there was nothing wrong with him that Tom could see, and Tom got him up by the arm and walked him to the wall.

Then the next one.

---

Teresa walked out of the dust.

She came from the west, from the Vanderbilt side, from the far side of the floor, through the pillars of gold light and the grey, walking, not running, with one hand out in front of her and the other on her radio, white from head to foot, her hat gone and her hair white, her uniform white, her face white, so that he did not know her for a second and then knew her by the walk.

She saw him. She came to him. She put her hand on his chest, flat, the way you would put your hand on a door to see if there was fire behind it, and looked at him, and her mouth moved.

He could not hear her. He shook his head, and pointed at his ears.

She put her face close to his. Under the ringing, from the bottom of the well, faint, and shouted, he heard it.

“Keane. Are you hurt.”

“No. I don’t know. My ears.”

“Mine too.” Her mouth was very close. He could see the dust in the corners of it. “Jesus fucking Christ, Keane.”

“I know.”

“The radio’s gone. Nobody can get through. I’ve been trying since.” She looked round, at the floor, at the dust, at the light coming down in its shafts, at the shapes on the floor, and something went over her face that he had never seen on it, and then her face shut down on it like a lid and was her face. “We get them out. West. Vanderbilt. The Lexington’s full of it.” She pointed at the mouth of the passage behind him, where the dust was still rolling down. “West. The doors are gone on Vanderbilt but the stairs are there. We get the walking ones out that way and we come back.”

“The gates,” said Tom.

She looked at him.

“Walter,” said Tom. “The gate for thirty-one. Walter was at the gate. And Mrs Abelson. And the woman.”

He turned and looked across the floor towards the gates.

He could not see them. The dust was thickest there, a wall of it, grey and then darker than grey, and in it, low down, something orange, moving, a light that was not the light from the windows. There was a sound coming from there, through the ringing, from the bottom of the well, a sound he did not want to hear and could not stop hearing and could not name. Between him and it, in the dust, the floor. The shapes on it. And the place where the newsstand had been.

He looked at the place where the newsstand had been.

He knew where it was. He had walked to it every morning for two years. He knew it to the yard, by the ticket windows, on the Forty-Second Street side, between the windows and the gates, and he looked at that yard of floor through the dust and there was no newsstand on it. There was no green wooden stand with a canvas awning. There was no counter. There were no racks of papers and magazines on three sides. There was no little television on a bracket in the corner with the sound down. There was no high stool. There was a space on the floor, darker than the floor round it, and in the space, sticking up, bent, a thin black thing that he looked at for a long time before he understood that it was the bracket where the television had been.

“Keane.”

He did not hear it. He felt it, her hand on his arm, gripping, hard.

He turned back. She was looking at him, very close, and she shook her head, once, slowly, and he understood that she had seen him look at it and had looked at it herself, and that she was telling him something he already knew.

“We can’t get there,” said Teresa, into his ear. “Not yet. It’s on fire. The floor’s gone at that end, I saw it from the stairs, it’s gone through to the lower level.” Her hand tightened on his arm. “The nearest ones. Keane. The ones we can get to. West.”

He looked at the gates one more time.

Then he turned his back on them, and bent down to the next one, who was a man in a suit lying on his front with his briefcase still in his hand, moving, and got him up.