Derailed

FORTY-TWO

When I brought the gun out from under the bed, the world collapsed. It ended.

There was a flash of light, a blast of heat, and then the earth imploded and went black.

Then I woke up.

I opened my eyes and thought: I'm dead.

Vasquez has killed me. I am dead. I am in heaven.

Only I couldn’t have been in heaven.

Because I was in hell.

Pick up Dante's Inferno and go right to the sixth circle. The black sulfurous fumes. The inferno of boiling oil. The screams of agony. I opened my eyes and couldn’t see. It was still morning, but it was night.

This much was clear. The eighth floor of the Fairfax Hotel had somehow become the basement. The seventh floor down had become a grave.

The room itself was half standing. It was spring, but it was snowing (plaster powder, I discovered when I tasted it on my tongue). An entire air-conditioning unit was lying on top of my left leg.

This is what I know now, but not then. What I pieced together from newspapers and TV and my own limited observations.

That women’s health center next door to the Fairfax Hotel provided federally subsidized abortions, which meant that to certain people out there it wasn’t a women’s health center as much as an abortion center.

That man in the University of Oklahoma jacket whom I met in the elevator the day I checked in and then later saw in the lobby, complaining about having no Bibles in his room? He was one of those people out there. A muscular Christian, a devout right-to-lifer, but one with an aggrieved sense of injustice and a fascination with explosives.

It turned out he wasn’t spending his time playing three-card monte and buying fake Rolexes on the street. He was spending his time up in his room, painstakingly putting together a bomb made out of fertilizer and acetates. When it was done, he strapped it carefully to his body.

He took the elevator down to the lobby of the Fairfax Hotel with the intention of walking into the women’s health center next door and blowing it and himself up.

Let me explain the volatility of this kind of bomb. According to later reports in the papers, it is not your most stable kind of explosive. Not like dynamite, for instance, or plastic explosives. It’s extremely volatile, very transmutable.

He never made it out of the elevator. Something happened. The elevator stopped short. Or he was jostled. Or he pressed the detonator by mistake. Something.

The bomb exploded at the very epicenter of the building. If you were trying to take down the Fairfax Hotel and not the abortion center next door, and you were smart about blast ratios and shock indexes and structural weaknesses, this is where you would do it.

In the elevator directly between floors five and six.

And the Fairfax Hotel was a structural weakness waiting to be put out of its misery.

Its bones were cracked and creaky and brittle. Peeling asbestos made it a model firetrap. It had several leaks in its gas heating system, or so it was later determined. In short, it was a disaster waiting to happen.

Steel beams. Sections of roof. Plaster wall. Plate glass. People. All hurtling up in the air and then, true to Newtonian physics, down. On top of what was left of the Fairfax Hotel. Flattening it like a crushed wedding cake.

One hundred and forty-three people died that morning in the Fairfax Hotel and four surrounding buildings.

One hundred and forty-three and, eventually, one more.

I heard a voice.

“Anyone alive down there? Anyone?”

“Yes,” I said. If I hear myself, I thought, then maybe I’m alive.

“Yes,” I said, and heard it.

Arms grasped my arms. Lifted me out of the rubble and carnage and blackness, and I was suddenly alive and breathing.

This is what I know now, but not then.

Two rooms had remained intact — or mostly intact. Who knows why? When someone decides to strap a bomb to his body and obliterate himself, rhyme and reason take a holiday. Some people that morning went to the left and survived. Some people went right and didn’t. One person lay this close to death on a hotel floor and made it out alive.

And pretty much unscathed.

They brought me out of the rubble and laid me down on a stretcher at the side of the street, and they went in and brought out anyone else they could find. Including Vasquez and Lucinda and Dexter and Sam. Of the four, three of them were dead and the other one almost. Dexter and Sam and Lucinda had blankets pulled up over their faces. Vasquez was unconscious and bloody and barely breathing.

They laid him next to me on the sidewalk, and a fireman took his pulse and shook his head. When someone with a red cross on his arm came running over, the fireman said, “Take care of the old woman over there,” and pointed at a woman whose clothes were smoldering.

“He’s not going to make it.”

Eventually I decided to get up and leave. To just walk away.

Even though I must have been suffering from some sort of shock, I felt terrifyingly lucid.

Visibility was almost zero. But I could see Lucinda’s body not five feet from me. I could touch Vasquez. Firemen and policemen were running back and forth in a choking maelstrom of black smoke.

I got up. I began walking. I vanished in that maelstrom.

I walked quite a while. I was wondering if Deanna had been right all along, that things happened for a reason. I wasn’t sure now. People stared at me as if I’d just landed from another planet. But no one stopped me — no one asked me if I was hurt or needed a doctor or an ambulance. Maybe they were immune to this kind of thing now. I walked straight down Broadway. I thought my hair was singed — when I ran my hands through it, it crackled like static. I ended up hailing a taxicab somewhere near Central Park.

I went back to my apartment in Forest Hills. The taxi driver had the radio on. Someone was talking about the explosion. Possibly a gas leak, a woman was saying — she was interviewing a fire captain. It would be a while before they’d find evidence to the contrary. The taxi driver asked me if I was all right.

“Yes,” I said. “Couldn’t be better.”

When we got to Forest Hills, the street I lived on was deserted. Maybe everyone was glued to the news. No one saw me enter the building, go into my apartment, fall into a stupor.

I slept an entire day.

When I woke the next morning, I went into the bathroom and didn’t recognize myself. I was in blackface — I belonged in a minstrel show.

I turned on the news. Three talking heads were debating figures. What figures, exactly? It took me a while to figure it out. The number of dead — that’s what they were talking about. Somewhere around 100 was the consensus. On another channel they claimed it was 96, 150 on another. The hotel dead and the peripheral casualties in the four surrounding buildings. But who knew how many died, really? That’s what the talking heads said. The bodies were burned up, crushed, incinerated. It was impossible to tell, one man said, they might never know. If someone who was in the hotel showed up, they were alive — he said. If they didn’t they were dead. People had already begun scouring hospitals and Red Cross shelters, putting up pictures on walls and fences and street lamps — a hollow-eyed and desperate army of bereaved.

I watched for an entire day without moving.

I didn’t call anyone — I didn’t speak to anyone. I was more or less paralyzed. All that horror. I couldn’t move — I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t speak.

The illusion of invulnerability I used to carry around like a birthright — the one Vasquez and Lucinda had stripped me of — had now been taken from 143 others. No one was safe anymore. No one.

The rubble from the explosion was taken by truck to the city dump. To the dump in Staten Island. To the place you can get to by following the stench straight down Western Avenue.

To make room for the tons of debris, they first had to move other tons of debris. Move those piles of debris from one place to another. And amid the pile of twisted steel, crushed cardboard, tin cans, broken bones, rotten food, cracked brick, and human waste — they found a wasted human.

They finally found Winston.

This was all the police had been waiting for. A body. They had me on tape telling Winston what I wanted him to do, but they didn’t have Winston.

Now they did.

I discovered this when I finally called Deanna three days after I stumbled away from the blown-up buildings. From what looked like downtown Beirut. She was happy to hear from me.

“Thank God, Charles,” she said. “I thought you were dead. ”