Dashboard Elvis is Dead, page 23
You okay, miss? someone asks.
I can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman. We are all coated in dusty gray. Like we’ve crawled from an ash-filled pit.
Yeah. I think so, I say, and my throat feels like sandpaper has been drawn across it. The person – I think it’s a woman: stoutly built, and with a deep, croaky Joan Rivers accent – pours cold water on my face. I reel from the shock of it.
Be careful, she says. That looks real nasty.
I put my hand to my forehead and feel the wetness. I look at my fingers. Whatever it is, it’s dark and thick against the gray. I sniff the rusty-iron odor. My head is cut; but then so is everyone else’s. I brush it off, feeling for my camera. I can’t determine if it’s damaged or not. I drip some of the bottled water across the lens and wipe it clean. And I press again.
Outside, the neighborhood is still engulfed in the dust cloud’s darkness. But another sudden dull, booming sound makes me run again. This time, away from the carnage. My running stops quickly. My windpipe feels like it is constricting, preventing air getting in or breath getting out. 7th Street is an exodus of fellow survivors slowly making their way out of the smoke and towards the daylight. Everyone is completely powdered. Everyone is bleeding from some source. Nevertheless, it’s remarkable how calm and quiet we have become as shock takes hold. We just silently, slowly make our way to safety. I catch myself whispering – Don’t be at work, don’t be at work, don’t be at work – over and over and over.
I pray that he’s sick. I pray that he missed a train. I pray to the Lord God Almighty – whom I’ve never called on for favors before – that some divine intervention has stopped Hennessey from being one of those damned, doomed souls who jumped from thirteen hundred feet to avoid being incinerated by twenty thousand gallons of aviation fuel.
The voices inside the apartment surprise me. They are coming from the television, which I must’ve left on. Rudy fucking Giuliani is being interviewed. I turn the volume down. I’m exhausted. Filthy. Smeared in the grit and the dirt and the dust and the ash of what feels like a cremated city. I burst into tears for the umpteenth time in a few hours. I can’t order my thoughts. I have no idea what to do next. I suddenly want to get out of the city, to head south, away from this destruction. But I can’t until I know Hennessey – and the artist I was due to meet – are safe. And I need to shake a terrible thought; that Astrid Atard might have perished, saving me from future disciplinary action. I need answers. My phone beeps. I’d left it on the table in the rush to leave. Sixteen missed messages. None from those I’m currently concerned about. Fourteen are from Larry. One is from Ben. One is from Andi.
Sun rises on the twelfth. I haven’t slept. It wasn’t a nightmare. It really happened. The streets are empty. Downtown from 14th Street the police patrol relentlessly. I venture out, with camera. Dumbfounded by the eerie silence, punctuated only by a speeding ambulance. Staggered by the extent of the devastation, these monumental structures rendered to rubble. Dumbstruck by the carcass of twisted, ragged steel around what is now being referred to in the media as Ground Zero. A rib cage ripped open, exposing the city’s ischaemic heart.
For two desperate days, I pace the detritus-ridden streets of downtown Manhattan, searching for clues of Hennessey. But all I find is hundreds and hundreds of bereft people hunting cluelessly, like me. I have pictures of him, from the Think Different! times. Black-and-white mugshot photographs; Hennessey, once again, a wanted man. I visit the local hospitals, showing his picture to sad shakes of the head. I become convinced that he is wandering the streets, dazed and confused, and unaware of who he is or what has just happened to him. Some kind people I show the photo to ask his name, but I can only say ‘Hennessey’. An address? I burble that…
He has a new place … over in The Bronx, but I don’t know where. He hasn’t told me. He wants to wait until he’s fixed it up better before I visit…
I paste the contact sheets to walls, trees, store windows, subway signs – any public surface where the tape will adhere. Hennessey is a tiny part of a massive collage of pain. Some pictures bear medical or dental records to help identify the corpses. But most of the images just tell personal stories. The children that are without a parent. The wives missing a husband. The brothers, the sisters, the uncles, the aunts. Each poster registers a pain that is impossible to describe. Many of the missing are smiling in these photographs. The juxtaposition of happiness and loss is devastating. Another one of Janet Delaney’s lessons: there is a truth in photography that is multi-layered.
The devastating pleas record just how loved these people are, as if acknowledging this will make the crucial difference between finding them and not. It’s an excruciating gallery of tragedy, pinned along street after street. Many of these pictures will remain in place after all reasonable hope is gone. Nobody will remove them. Nobody will desecrate these memories. They are obituaries-in-waiting for those that won’t return. Hennessey now joins them, this growing army of missing soldiers. All lost in action. My heart breaks for all of them. I photograph as many of these homemade homages as I can.
Three days later, I’m on an overnight Amtrack from Penn Station. It was the first one available. The closure of North American airspace has now been lifted, but I can’t deny the apprehension I have about boarding a plane right now, despite the substantial increases in security that will be in place. Locking the stable door after the horse has bolted is not reassuring me.
It takes more than two days to get to Houston. Two days of listening to fearful, fevered conversations in a hot, cramped economy-class compartment. Manhattan is in ruins. The dead number into the thousands. Hundreds more remain unaccounted for. The attack on the World Trade Center is our generation’s Pearl Harbor. That’s the consistent view. For the more vocal passengers among us, those responsible for the outrage in New York range from the Russians, the Muslims – or towelheads, as they are referenced – and the Democrats.
A fight breaks out as our train nears New Orleans. Not, unsurprisingly, down to anyone mounting a defense in support of these groups, but because a Black man, travelling alone, shakes his head when the burly, red-faced southerner opposite him yells, We gotta nuke all these commie bastards!
Our nation’s questionable foreign policy is one thing, but raw emotions always boil over when our perceived freedoms are threatened on our own soil. We’re a nation of aggressors. With a natural impulse to reach for a weapon as a means of control. As a mechanism to win an argument. To prove a point. To fight back.
My mom died about eight hours after I boarded the train. I’d forgotten to charge the battery for my phone, compounding this by forgetting to take the charger with me. Larry’s face when I glimpse it on the concourse of Houston station tells me all I need to know. I’m ever so slightly relieved, I have to admit. I don’t possess the emotional depth for a deathbed atonement, and I suspect Delphine would’ve preferred it this way too. A flight from New York would’ve given us a few hours at most, but what could that time have achieved? My mom stopped being a mom decades ago. She considered me plain, ordinary, unremarkable. A reflection of herself. A mirror held up to her own low worth and self-hate. If she ever had any pride in me, she kept it well hidden. All I could offer would’ve been regret for the way her life – and our relationship – turned out. Is that really the last thing someone wants to hear before slipping away into the vast nothingness?
I cried in Larry’s arms, but more for him. For his loss, rather than my own.
There’s definitely no place like home. Depressingly, nothing has changed. Except for the advancing disrepair, everything inside is exactly as I remember it. The little wooden cross in the backyard commemorates Gonzo. The old dog’s bones are buried in the spot where he drew his last breath.
He just dragged his fat ass outside one afternoon, lay down in the dirt and died, says Larry. It was his time.
I’m relieved Larry didn’t consider a similar resting place for Delphine. She will be in a small cemetery a half hour’s walk away.
There’s five of us inside the tiny timber-clad chapel on the edge of the burial grounds. A neighbor who looked in on Delphine when Larry was away, and a woman at the rear, dressed in black and wearing a thick veil. I make a mental note to speak to her afterwards.
Meantime, an elderly Black minister attempts to rouse us as only a gospel-loving brother can. But he’s no Al Sharpton. I mouth ‘Delphine’ to him when his memory betrays him. He doesn’t use notes. Presumably, they get in the way of the pontificating. It’s over quickly. The extraordinary details of my momma’s early life don’t feature. Larry doesn’t want them to.
We go outside, ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore’ still playing from the small cassette player. The woman in black has gone, and I curse myself for not being sharper; for shaking hands with the minister and for indulging his polite small talk. And this only intensifies when I see a new bouquet at the edge of the grave as we walk behind the coffin. I reach down and see the hand-written note:
You were the best of us! God bless.
H. x
I look for her.
Jesus, Larry, look.
What, Jude?
This!
There is no-one around us apart from the minister and the four staff members who’ve lifted my mom’s simple coffin from the back of the flatbed truck we walked behind.
It must be her sister, Larry. Happyness, the one you told me about, remember? I almost met her in San Francisco. I’ve seen a photograph. We gotta go, Larry. She can’t be far. C’mon, Larry let’s…
Desperation is making me hyperventilate.
Jude, your momma ain’t even in the ground yet, Larry says.
But Larry, it’s her sister!
He sighs, and then puts an arm around me.
Jude, I’m so sorry, girl.
What for?
He pauses. The minister is watching us. Looking for a sign that we’re ready to lay her to rest. But I’m not ready. Not yet.
Larry? What’s goin’ on?
He clears his throat. Uh, that thing I told you about her sisters … I made that up, he tells me.
And it draws the wind straight out of me. I cough to encourage some airflow. I don’t know whether to cry or to slap him.
What the fuck do you mean? I shout, and the five-man burial team stop in their tracks.
I … um. Uh, I jus’ … I wanted you to care. Think differently about her, he says. The tears well up in his eyes. He’s a broken man. And despite my rage at him, I can’t help but console him.
We sit on a polished stone bench with no back to it. Our posture must look awkward. The graveside breakdown aside, Larry is looking better than when I first arrived over a week ago. His face remains wrinkled and ridged, but there’s a clarity about his eyes that suggests he’s managed to sleep for the first time in a while. His dark hair is streaked with silvery gray, but, still in the suit he hasn’t been seen out of since the burial, he portrays a distinguished mourner. One who wears grief well, if that isn’t a ridiculous notion.
Y’know, I went to the store th’other day an’ came out with four different kinds of toothpaste. I bought tins of tomatoes, an’ I don’t even like ’em, says Larry. I stayed up til three in the mornin’ watchin’ a documentary on Jim an’ Tammy Faye, for Chrissake!
It’s only been a few days, yet he doesn’t recognize himself.
Grief makes you crazy, I tell him. He just slowly nods.
My momma’s grave, newly filled with soil, is just aways over to our left. Only thirty feet or so. When we speak, it’s in hushed tones, like we used to out on the porch, and it almost makes me smile to think it’s because we don’t want her to hear what we’re saying.
She might not have shown it, but she always loved you, girl, he says, barely above a whisper.
She didn’t, Larry, I say.
Not angrily, just realistically sanguine. No point in glossing over the facts of it.
Don’t be unkind, now, he says.
He’s a good man. He always has been. I hope she knew how lucky she was in having him by her side.
I’m not, I tell him. And I’m not upset about your wild cover stories either, although I was. We all just gotta get through shit…
I feel myself slipping back into the exaggerated southern twang of a good ole’ boy.
Larry smiles.
She said some wicked things, Jude, it’s true. But she didn’t mean it. She’d so much pain wrapped up tight. That was her way of lettin’ it out, is all.
I remember a fight once, I say, can’t even recall what it was about, but she ended it by remindin’ me that she almost died givin’ birth, as if that was somehow my fault. As if her inability to conceive afterwards was my doin’. Part of a devious masterplan cast in the womb.
I laugh at the absurdity of it. Larry doesn’t.
Well, I wasn’t around back then, but I know she never blamed you, Jude.
His defense of her is unstinting.
She had such low expectations for me though, I say.
This time I’m not laughing.
In school – and even at track meets. She wouldn’t come close to those when I was attendin’ Humble High. I know adults have their own shit goin’ on, but you need to put that aside sometimes for your kids.
I see him nodding slowly.
It’s part of the responsibility of havin’ them, I say.
She was a complicated woman, your momma, he says. But I loved her all the same.
I reach out and touch his hand. If he really means it, he must give me something. All I want is a glimmer to hang on to. Something that helps me understand her and the complex relationship we shared. And then unexpectedly, he provides it.
There’s a reason she didn’t go to your track meets, he says. Your first day at Humble High?
I feel myself turning round to face him.
She walked with you to school, he says.
I acknowledge this.
You got closer to the gates, an’ she dropped off an’ walked way behind you?
I remember that, I tell him. I was upset because I needed her there with me that day. But she backed away. She left me on my own, Larry.
He shakes his head slowly.
She didn’t want you to be embarrassed by her, he says. All those privileged white kids … your momma didn’t want you disadvantaged on your first day.
Those ‘coffee-crème’ jibes from fellow students, the hateful references to ‘the help’, the jokes about my speed being ethnically stereotypical. The Black cross I thought I was bearing alone.
Was she right? Would it have been much, much worse if Delphine had been at my side? If she’d been up in the bleachers shouting my name? If she’d been in the front row applauding the day AJ Carter and I received our medals? If she’d drawn attention to a poor Black family skirting around the edges of a lauded southern institution for the predominantly white? At least the ‘what are you?’ question would’ve been redundant. A side would’ve been picked. It matters little now. I should keep the past inside my notebooks. It’s the only place where it makes any sense.
I hug Larry in the George Bush Intercontinental Airport car park. Both of us know it’s for the final time. We don’t labor it, and there’s no forced sentimentality.
Take care of yourself, Jude, he says. I’m sorry, he says yet again. Try an’ enjoy life more. Life’s for the living, honey.
You too, Larry, I reply.
And with that, my tiny circle loses yet another member.
There’s a bizarre protest ongoing. Geriatric and wheelchair-bound veterans have chained themselves to the railings around the terminal. The target of their protest is unclear, but I, and others behind me, get heckled and cussed at as we pass them. Inside and out, airport security officials outnumber passengers. It takes longer to get from the concourse through the numerous personal checks and onto the flight than between take-off and landing. It’s ten days since the Twin Towers fell. A surreal atmosphere pervades everything. An entire nation emerging from a brief period of hibernation, stunned and suspicious of what the awakening will bring.
Back in Manhattan, there’s better news. A switchboard operator from the agency calls, and I panic – the agency never calls. In the time it takes to transfer the call to Beth Haim, my line manager, I rehearse the mitigation it would take to counter Astrid Atard’s accusations. But if she is coming for me, it’s not today. The purpose of Beth’s call is to offer condolences and make sure I’m okay to return to work. And also to say that Vanessa, the artist I was due to meet, has survived despite being on the ninety-first floor of the North Tower when the first plane hit.
She’d gone in early to her studio around 6.00am to paint the sunrise, says Beth. It’s unbelievable. She nipped down to the lobby to get a juice at 8.30am. She came back up and was coming out of the elevator at her floor when … BAM!
Holy shit, I say.
Yeah, Beth says. It’s a goddam miracle.
I hope for a similarly miraculous tale about my friend, Hennessey. God knows there are lots emerging. The New York Times has a supplement dedicated to them. I find one that hits me in the gut. Every word of it:
Republican Senator, Devlin Carter had an incredible escape from the tragedy. The 57-year-old Texan was due at a breakfast meeting at the Windows of the World restaurant on the 106th and 107th floors of 1 World Trade but arrived early for it. The Senator went into the LensCrafters store in the lobby on the off chance that a pair of broken spectacles could be fixed while he waited. He was extraordinarily lucky; the store had just opened and had a vacancy. He waited half an hour to get his glasses fixed during which the first plane hit ten floors below where he should have been.
