2

There is a shadow.

It is a plane.

And it is flying far too low.

God Bless them all.

And all heads turn, because it cannot be, but we know in a sickening sense that it must be. Because nothing else could be it. The accident we’ve all feared in our sleep, when something goes horribly wrong. The pilot he must be asleep.

It lolls in the air and mists on impact, the massive building billows out. There is a horrible light. And then a shroud that is pieces of people, we can feel the spatter, and the spray. Stuck looking up, in terror and in awe. How could such an accident happen, a once in a lifetime moment of failure? There is disaster here, in Manhattan. The American Alps one writer called them.

There is a shadow.

It is a plane.

And it is flying far too low.

God Bless us All.

I startle to the sound of nothing but the banging of a unlocked door. Dark floods my eyes, there is light from a passing car shuffling along the wall. It was a dream. Thank god. I had to be a dream. A terrible dream. One vision, nothing like that could have happened.

I blink.

There is a white smear across my vision

I blink.

There is a white smear across my vision.

There is grey snow falling from the clouds. Grey snow in September. And the clouds are far too low. It irritates my eyes.

“It’s alright there little lady. You just passed out.”

There is a a severe constriction over my mouth and nose, I feebly flail an arm up. But the helmeted man easily restrains it. He smiles, despite the soot on his face, and the hellish flakes. His face is close, far too close.

I read the tag, in bright yellow. Hampton. I will remember that. Hampton. I sigh and let my head fall back and stare up. There is an umph and lift, and I am inside ambulance. There is a rattle as the whole apparatus is slid into place. I can see the scene of rampant rain of particles down. But it is just bits office detritus, just bits of the files and folders of life. I am crying, half in pain and irritation, and half in a pang for all the people must be in the towers. How many would die today?

I resolve to not let my blood sugar drop like that from dieting again. I’ve never been so thin. I’ve also never let myself pass out before.

The ambulance pulls away, and after a slow start it seems we are moving.

There is the roar of something I have not heard, not since I was a young girl. it was on the plains, in Kansas, during a sickening green storm that seem to stretch like a wall forever and back again; it looped back around on itself. I stared at it, my nose to the screen door. My mother pulled me down as a finger stretched and slithered down from on high. I heard something that the adults had read one day in Sunday school.

“God has judged your kingdom. And finished it.”

It seemed like the pen of god, or the finger of the devil. I have a falsely clear vision where I can see the white feathers like a quill arabasequed around the black jet. I was yanked and saw a swirl of our yellow and white kitchen, with the calico curtains and the speckles on the hard linoleum. Down steps, into a stony dark that smelled of urine and moss.

There was a deadly quiet for a long time. And then the floorboards started to rumble. My mother covered my face and my eyes, though I fought for breath and light. What I wanted to see. Finally I pulled out of her grip and there that roar. Air tortured to a pitch that there was not reality to it. On one hand it seemed as thick as milk, filled with scents and smells that were conjured up from seeming nowhere. The world had never had such a vivid scent. I could smell my mother’s sweat, I didn’t know she had that scent. I could smell the mice, smell them. I could smell the grime and the dirt. I could smell the metal on the cans stored down there, I could feel it all rushing into my face. Into my body.

At the same time it seemed as if all the air were trying to smash it self through my ears, and pull my brain out through the small canals that carry sound into my head. The space inside my head had never felt so big before.

And that was the roar. The roar was not a sound, it was my teeth rattling against each other. It was my hands shaking. It was light pouring through the boards of the ceiling. How did that happen?

There was a moment of pause, but it felt like the top of a roller coaster, it is not actually quiet, it is just that the rattle has subsided enough that it feels like silence, even as your bones rattle and tingle, even as you can hear banging and breaking and shattering. Even as there is light in the darkness, and the darkness knows it not. Half blind, the roar begins again almost as soon as it the pause made itself felt.

My face is buried back in my mother’s soft folds around her chest. I didn’t know the names then.

Later when we emerged, there was no house, just some boards sticking up like saplings stripped of leaves. My mother covered my eyes almost as quickly. Years later she would tell me the truth.

The truth about why I never saw my cat again.

That sound. It snapped me back to what was then the awful present. The present I knew with that rattle not to be a dream, but forever visited again in nightmares. That roaring rattling, you don’t hear it but feel it… crunch. A sheet of white darkness passes in front of the windows. It would be weeks before I could bear to watch the video. Then I watched it as obsessively as I watched the grainy television footage of the tornado that claimed my childhood house.

But each time I watch, not the collapse which was an unreal moment to me, but instead that lolling turn moment, that belly lufting lurch and spray moment.

Of a shadow.

That was a plane.

And it was far too low.

You don’t know what white is until you’ve been installed in a chaotic emergency room, and been poked and prodded in calm hysteria, after having seen the world come to an end around. I joked easily with other people. Several times I pushed other patience to the attention of the intake.

“You look like you’ve been through this before.”

“I’m a trauma and triage nurse. Yes.” Since I was seven I have been going through this.

“So you know we have to check you out completely.”

“I’ll be a good patient, but that older woman over sounds like she is having trouble breathing and might be on the verge of acute respiratory distress.”

The intake did a quick auscultation with the steth. Long elegant fingers crooked just so. Precise movements. Too precise. She had to be new. R1 or R2. Welcome to the Super Bowl Dr. Washington. The whole world is watching. I could tell she could feel the eyes that had to be on all of us.

“Only minimal rales. But I will get her down to radiology, that is the only way to check.”

“You are going to see a lot of that. Lungs burned.”

The tight black curly hair of the intake seemed to bob differently from her face. Her round fat black cheeks seemed to give a her a more uplifting spirit than the frown on her lips.

“You are good. You sure you don’t want to lend a hand? We are swamped here. I’ll push the paper.”

I looked down at my body which had become torqued about as I had been talking.

“Doctor Washington, you have yourself an extra pair of hands.”

And that was how I ended up on intake, with an R1 who had worked fewer double shifts than I had worked three alarm fires.

It was six hours later that a huge hulking figure was wheeled in. All heads turned, as they did for everyone who wore a uniform that day. We could not help it. A firefighter was wheeled in and swooped into the process, without waiting or hesitation. Even amidst the croaking cries and sobbing.

We had to cut him out of his fire fighter’s gear. I saw the tag, I felt a screaming shock run up my arm from the scissors. It said “Hampton.”

Suddenly the world moved far more slowly, as if everyone else was a child’s toy running out of battery or spring. The procedures for cutting someone out of garments were fluid and easy. It was the natural thing to. The other nurse seemed to be barely moving, I had the jacket open and my hands under probing to feel if the heat had blasted it to his body. When the heat from his chest was normal and the inside of his suit was cool, I knew that he had been knocked about, but not flash burned.

He was going to live.

I don’t need to tell you that when I got off that I waited by his bed that night until he stirred. His voice was still soft, but his fingers intertwined around mine. I found out the next morning that I was not flying back to San Diego any time with a definite date. The world stood still. But we did not. On September 22 we were married in a small civil ceremony. There was a weight on my finger that felt like it made me lighter than air.

But even then the pieces of trust were shattering into the night. It didn’t occur to me to ask how Dr. Washington managed to be there, I was happy to see her. But I hadn’t asked her. My husband later would mumble something about a fraternity of that day. I accepted it. I should have heard another word starting with “frat.”

I had a dream. That moment almost the whole world had a dream. A dream of pure illusion. We thought there was one vision. For a moment the who world was five again, believing in the monster under the bed, and Santa Claus. We were all one flesh. One bone. And so how could we two not be made one flesh?

The night he proposed was magic, we were at a restaurant more expensive than either of us could afford, but the owner wasn’t taking any money from heroes of 9/11 that day. The carpet was a satiny red velvet color, the walls of a paneled darkened wood. So were the chairs to made of a rich mahogany. I bought a tight tight long white sequined dress. I put it on, alright, I had a friend zip it up because it felt like I was being sutured into it. All the while I worried whether it made my fundament look like it needed a “wide load” sign. But from the stares I got as I walked, I knew that if I did, that was a good thing.

After the main meal, I draped myself over his shoulder as the brought out a white cake with a sparkler. He looked back, I could feel his eyes roam to the white curves of my breasts, allowed to nestle with only the most minimal strapless bra. I could feel his desire fall down the darkness like an abyss.

I coo’ed “Happy Birthday to You” slowly in his ear, and then gently bit his ear lobe. He whispered back that he wanted to marry me.

I said “Of course.”

There I lay draped over him. The room had gotten far too warm. My skin was far too flush. I was having trouble breathing, when breathing out would only go so far. The exposed skin of my shoulders and cleavage felt eager for the slightest touch of cool breeze. As if he read my mind, he blew gently across the rift of my décolletage, making a whispy caress across the arc of my right breast, and making me flinch. A tickle kissed my cheek, and then like a spirit felt like it was drawing forward across my face.

The back of hand slide around the shape of my behind, first on hemisphere, and then the other, coming to rest palm and fingers open upon me as if I were the fresh soft globe of a white fleshed peach. I could feel his face tilt up in expectation. My whole being swooned down, as I tilted my head and brought my lips to meet his.

He sucked on my lips. It was impossible to breath just through my nose, and my lips parted slightly drawing air in. His were already parted and his tongue entered my mouth as if had been waiting for that precisely that moment.

Oh if only our lovemaking was like this.

But it was if our sex were like drinking. The first bottle you open is the best, and by the rest, you are too drunk too know.

We went back to the hotel I was staying in, he told me his apartment was closed off. The ride in the cab back was tumble of searching for the position where our bodies fit. Each one twisting around an unbreaking contact of our lips, closed, or tongues painting passion across the other. When we almost were there I had to break contact to tell the cab driver, and instantly my husband to be was feasting at the nape of my neck. My head felt clouds rolled and spun through it, chasing each other and turning in tight circles. I could no longer think, the back of my mind burbled words, while the front was only clear enough to fumble with my purse and pull out the bills needed to pay for the trip.

We skipped up the stairs to my room in a giddy laughing dance. The door was closed, and I was half bent back against the door, closing it with my hips and feeling a click that told me I could rest the rest of my weight against it.

I didn’t even realize how fast my cloths were off, he virtually peeled my like a banana. I was stripped to my waist and my by now half twisted off bra felt like it sprung away from me.

His mouth was upon my nipples. Teasing and suckling upon then. The light flush on my face was overwhelmed by a flowering of sensation on the one he held in his mouth, and then the other that he pinched between his thumb and forefinger, rolling it back and forth, as if were dial, and he were seeking the station that played my inner most needs.

My own hands were sliding the dress over my curves, there was an aching in the bones of my pelvis and legs. An aching in my heart which stopped beating hard, and fluttered with the assault on my breasts by his hands and mouth. There was a moment of perfectly precise memory as I stared across the small hotel room, its cheap carpet littered with the remains of our noon meal together, and my own things precisely and neatly laid out. The bead tightly made, our clothes loosely thrown over it in a heap. I vaguely remember stepping out of my dress and panties, and him bending down and throwing them on the bed over his shoulder.

His hands raced up the insides of my thighs, pressing my legs apart as he went. I slipped down in gulps. It felt like the point where they joined was sweating, and blushing at the same time. Oh yes, I was ready for him. Not just wet, but open, as a child’s mouth is open and eager for the first large bite of praeline ice cream, with its soft white smoothness set with sweet crunch.

The next sensations were indistinct, I had given way. I felt his legs wedge between mine, and the tip furrow through my pubic hair several times, but clumsily, as if he had aimed and missed. I ran my hands softly between our legs, over the surface of his sex, and directed his prong directly at my all to hungry self. I swallowed him between legs in a single swallow.

The minutes that came were an uncounted repetition of exactly one pumping motion, as if he were an engine with only one speed. Each one jold my hips up in a role against the door, and ended with a clasp between the crook where his erection met his body and the now burning spear of lust. From this collision a peculiar slush of pleasure shot up which was peculiar clarity amidst a more indistinct haze of pleasure of having him inside me.

It went on like this until he flagged and slowed, and withdrew.

“Did you?” His eyes seemed to plead.

“Of course.” I patted him on the back. He scooped me up and gently placed me on the bed, and was kissing me again. We would couple again, but it would be the same in the hard folds of stiff sheets as it had been against the door.

I drifted to sleep after that time. The rest of the days until we were wed were more or less in an erotic fuzz, where I was thinking of him having me, or enjoying the feeling of his praying at my body.

I remember the ceremony vividly. But the night after? I can only remember his roman nose, his smile and smiling eyes. And how close they were.

And the peculiar shadow that neon makes on a man’s face, it was a cheap hotel and we had no curtains. That shadow and orange bright light are the face of my husband as I remember them.

There is a shadow, on his face. And it is far too close.

Take me darling.

God bless us all.