Forever

116.

A chill wind blows north on Sunday evening. Cormac leaves the 6 train at 110th Street and walks east. The streets are emptied by the cold. Police cruisers move slowly along the avenue, suburban eyes studying the city profiles. They peer at Cormac too, a white man probably searching for a connection. Before him are tenements, bodegas, a shuttered church. But other images rise from the pavements. He sees the African faces of old comrades. He sees hills that were scraped away. He sees the subway tunnels being chopped out of earth and granite. He thinks: I’m making a long circle home.

He sees an old brown-skinned man staring from the top of a stoop. He doesn’t see Cormac. He is staring into the past. A man who was an infant when Cormac was already old. Does the brown-skinned man dream of palm fronds rattling on a tranquil shore? No: Cormac is sure he dreams of a lovely woman who is now long gone.

This morning, as on every ninth of September, he walked to the river to drop a rose into the flowing waters. A rose for his mother. He wonders now if any of his flowers have ever reached the dark Atlantic, where they might catch a current bound for the Irish Sea. No matter, perhaps: With any luck he will see them all soon, in the place of emerald light. He imagines Kongo somewhere in the city, wonders where he sleeps, or if he sleeps at all, wonders where Kongo has been while he has lived his own long life in Manhattan. In this neighborhood, in this East Harlem, here in El Barrio, many people would understand the existence of a babalawo.

Now Cormac arrives in a dark street of darker tenements. The iron calligraphy of fire escapes. Lights glowing beyond curtains. New lampposts with hard bright burning light. Cars jam the curbs. Two men work on a double-parked Chevy, each wearing woolen gloves. A few kids run past hills of stuffed trash bags (where did all the garbage cans go?), darting from one tenement doorway to the next.

Here is the building. Number 378. No stoop. Just a door on street level, with clear glass to reveal anybody waiting in ambush, and then a second door with stairs beyond. Cormac enters the vestibule and sees rows of mailboxes and bells. He rings 4-A. Top floor. A buzz comes back, and he enters with a click. The stairs resemble those of a hundred other tenements that were old the year they were built. A banister scabby with layers of paint, the pentimento of the poor. Walls chipped and painted and dirtied and painted and battered and painted. Up one flight. The joined odors of meals, of sauces and roasts and chicken, seeping through closed doors (as they no longer drift into the streets), along with soundtracks from sit-coms and telenovelas and baseball, and the flooding vowels of Spanish warring with the consonants of English. The word PUTO spray-painted on a wall, and a reply, in a different hand, with an arrow pointing, saying SU NOMBRE.

Another flight. On each landing a sealed door where once a dumbwaiter hung from ropes. Now dumbwaiter floats in the Sea of Lost Words. The last flight. A closed green door, with 4-A neatly lettered on its face.

He knocks.

The door opens. He sees no face, no light: a darkness.

And then the sound of a fat wooden stick hitting a block of wood.

Klok-klok, klok-klok-klok.

And the lights explode, and Delfina is standing there, all golden and shining, with her wide white grin, and behind her there’s a band, and they smash into the music, four musicians jammed into the kitchen, a man on timbales, an old man with a gourd, a kid bent over a tall conga drum, a bearded young man playing flute, the music loud and full of joy. And from other rooms come smiling men and laughing women, and Cormac sees a table against a wall, heaped with food, and a bucket full of ice and canned beer, and the music drives and now more people are coming in the door with more platters of food, neighbors celebrating a stranger, and Delfina grabs each of his hands and says: “Oye, como va?”

For that’s what they’re playing; that’s the tune the musicians sing, the words full of flirtation and bravado, all of them beaming at the success of the surprise, at Cormac’s astonished face, at the many fine women, at the children who start dancing, at the great exuberant release of the music.

And now Delfina takes Cormac and she begins to dance with him. To move him with her hands: a touch, a nudge, a shift of the wrist. And then she adds the staccato of her shoes against the floor, the abrupt bump of a hip. And he surrenders to the music and surrenders to her. His hands come up, and he feels the music in his hips and his waist and his legs, in his shoulders and hands, he feels the music pushing him, driving him, he feels it invade him, he feels himself taking small precise steps in the narrow space of the kitchen, crowded with dancers, feels the music in his bones and in his flesh: he cuts left, then right; he laughs and whirls; and gazes at Delfina, at this golden woman, at her fathomless eyes, at her urgent grin, at her body showing him the way, her body telling him how and where to move, her body telling him when to pause and when to explode, her body setting all the moves.

And then the band finishes and shifts into a bolero and she pulls him close and puts her hands on the back of his neck.

“Happy birthday, mi amor.”

He pushes his face through her hair to kiss her skull. He feels her breasts and belly against him, as someone dims the lights, and then Delfina, still dancing, is introducing him to her friends and her neighbors. This is Elba. Mariano. Rosa. Gerson. Meet Cormac. Hey, glad you’re here, happy birthday, man. This is José. Marisol. Pancho, a crazy Mexican from the second floor. Hola, cómo está… This is my friend Cormac. Chucho. María Elena. Doris. Ramona. You better be nice to this girl, man. Yes, Cormac says. Claro que sí.

They are dancing in every room of the railroad flat, and Delfina gives him a tour, still dancing with him, leading him, moving him. Hey, meet Miguelito. This is Cormac. My lonesome gringo. The rooms are laid out like those of every other railroad flat in history: first the kitchen, with its table, refrigerator, shelves, and sink, the furniture pushed against walls to make room for the band, the windows open to the night, and a door leading to the bathroom; then two tiny bedrooms, which give way to a living room that overlooks the street, a room filled with a large bed, an armchair, a television set. Four couples are dancing in the open space beside the bed. To the right of the bed is the only room in the flat with a door. The door is closed. Delfina pauses, kisses Cormac on the cheek, but says nothing under the force of the driving merengue that follows the bolero. She makes more introductions, while he puts a map of the flat into his head. The first bedroom holds a desk, computer, and printer, with five or six small Mexican mirrors, a map of Hispaniola, a wall of books. The second bedroom is all books. On the walls above the bookcases there are rows of primitive masks; small tin hands with eyes painted on the palms; framed browning nineteenth-century photographs of bejeweled women and mustached men squinting in the harsh Caribbean light; a poster from the Museo del Barrio for a show of Taíno art. It’s a smaller version of Cormac’s own eclectic piece of New York. He tells her it’s beautiful.

“Hey, it’s not much, but it’s mine,” she says.

More than half the books are in Spanish: histories, treatises, reference books, novels, and poetry.

“I had a friend,” she says, leaning close so he can hear over the music, “an old Dominican man who lived on a top floor on 116th Street. He was a schoolteacher back home and an exile for forty-five years. When he died, his grandchildren wanted to throw his books in the garbage. So I rescued them…. You know what I really mean: I stole them.”

She laughs.

One shelf is packed with books on physics, the legacy of Hunter. Another is jammed with histories of the Dominican Republic, including a few oversize volumes from the nineteenth century, and she points at them in an excited way, tells him how rare they are and how the first editions were lucky to reach three hundred copies, and her excitement reminds Cormac of talks they’ve had across the summer, scattered over dinners and long evenings together. Then she turns away from the books and pulls him again into the dancing, into the music, into the rising heat of the rooms, into the bumping collisions of bodies, into the drum breaks, and the scratching of gourds, and the sound of vowels: and he is for a moment back in Stone Street, in Hughson’s when the Africans played for themselves, when they took Africa into New York to stay; when they joined the Irish in filling their laments with defiant joy.

He takes Delfina Cintron by the hand and dances to the music of her time. And his.

Food becomes feast. A deep covered dish of steamed string-beans cut lengthwise in a vinaigrette of olive oil and lemon juice. Bowls of moros, black beans, or red beans, to spread wetly on a field of white rice. “Blacks, Indians, and white guys,” she says. “Mix ’em all together and you’ve got me. Una trigueña.” Then two kinds of chicken, roasted and boiled, and slices of pork, and pescado en coco, red snapper with a coconut milk sauce, reddened with annatto (she explains) and laced with cilantro. On the side, platters of sliced avocado and limes. The band breaks, descends upon the food, and everybody pauses while Benny More sings from the grave on the CD player. Hello. Welcome. Happy birthday. How old are you? Too old. Yeah, like everybody. I hope you’re not married, man, or Delfina gonna put you in a river.

Cormac feels pleasured by the small perfections of spice, of taste and texture, the flow of vowels, the humid warmth. Thinking: How many meals have I consumed on this passage? How many as good as this one? And then remembers the Cuban barber: I star’ thinkin’ abou’ things like that, ’mano, I go nuts.

Music again from the CD player in the first room off the kitchen: Juan Luis Guerra (Delfina says). Fragments of grief and anger behind the smooth vowels; here, timbales serve as consonants. Then the front door opens, and three kids come in with a birthday cake on a platter, huge and creamy and bearing a single candle. A large beaming brown-skinned woman is behind the kids and the platter, and Delfina directs her to a space on the table and then lights the candle, and then Pancho, the Mexican from the second floor, pushes in with a steel guitar, plays a few notes, and starts to sing “Las Mañanitas,” a song as sad as Done-gal, a song about all the little mornings of life, and then everyone is singing. Estas son las mañanitasQue cantaba el rey David…

The emotion fills the room, one woman sobbing, not for Cormac, and not for herself, but for loss itself, for vanished mornings, for years that won’t come back. At the end, cheers, and shouts of vaya! Cormac bows to Pancho from the second floor and the Mexican smiles and bows back, holding the guitar as if it were the weapon of a glad warrior, the way Bobby Simmons held his alto in homage to Horse Campbell. Then here comes the coffee, the aroma permeating the entire flat, the taste rich and sweet, brewed in a greca, sipped from demitasse cups. Dos cafecitos, corazón. She tells him it’s Café Santo Domingo, but if he wants American coffee, they have that too. Then an immense plate of guava paste and queso blanco. And the band playing again, after shots of dark Barcelo rum. Cormac lights a cigarette and Delfina points at an ashtray, where three cigars are smoldering while their smokers dance. He tamps out his own cigarette after a few drags, grabs her, and they dance, Cormac leading her now, moving her body with his, leaving behind his past for this present, for this room, for this woman before him, for all the other joyous dancers. Cuidado, man: Don’t mistake this for a Happy Nigger scene. No, he answers himself: I know better. His head then fills with images of verandas, tropical foliage, the bougainvillea on a wall in Sargent’s watercolors, the wind in Winslow Homer. Que tropical, señorita. And white men in white suits unleashing machetes with a nod and a grunt upon the brown necks of Dominicans. Upon the bodies of slaves and Indians and rebels. The world that sent Delfina here, as remote now as the arctic Irish wind that sent him on his own long voyage to Manhattan’s granite shores.

She reaches for his face.

“Why are you crying?” she says.

The band leaves first, bound for another gig, all smiles and carrying away pieces of cake wrapped in napkins, refusing money. Cormac tries to help with the dishes, but Elba and Rosa and Marisol and Doris and María Elena and Ramona push him aside. “It’s your birthday, man,” says Elba (bony and a bit worn around the eyes). “You just be nice to Delfina, you hear me?”

Delfina comes in from the other rooms with glasses and plates and one of the women (Marisol? Doris?) takes them and washes them and stacks them on a drainer (for there is no dishwasher), while someone else (María Elena?) scours pots and pans and another wraps unfinished dishes with Saran Wrap. “You can eat here for a month,” says the woman named Rosa. “Maybe more!”

In the bathroom off the kitchen, the door closed and the guests all gone, Cormac sees lotions and vials and soap, towels and facecloths, all arranged on shelves as neatly as her books. Over the toilet, there’s a portrait of Trujillo, the old dictator, with his white pancake makeup and killer’s eyes. When Cormac comes out, the women are gone, as if on command, and Delfina is leaning against the opening to the rest of the flat. She has changed into a long high-collared yellow gown. Cotton. A kimono. Her feet in red thong slippers. Nails painted yellow too.

“Thank you,” he says in a soft voice.

“You danced.”

“I did. Thanks for that too. Maybe most of all.”

She says nothing, then flicks off the kitchen lights. The flat is now dark. She takes his hand, and her palm is damp. She leads him through the dark book-lined rooms to the place where she has pitched her bed. In the darkness, he hears her kick off slippers, and he sits on the edge of the bed and unlaces his shoes.

“I want to pray first,” she says. “Do you mind?’

“Of course not.”

She opens the door to the small room. Slowly. As if revealing something about herself that she fears might frighten him. But he has been here before, at the bottom of an Atlantic slaver, in the vanished streets around the Battery, in the small house of Quaco, in sealed rooms in the Five Points. He has been here with Kongo. He has been here with men and women now dead. For he knows he is in a chapel of the old religion of Africa. Which is like the Old Religion of Ireland, with different names and similar verbs. Here in Tir-na-Nog.

Before them stands a long table made of a door set upon wooden sawhorses. A dark green cloth covers its top, and set upon the cloth are sixteen burning votive candles. In their flickering, ancient light, Cormac sees other things: glasses of water, unlit cigars in ashtrays, a plate of broken chocolate, crackers, a slice of coconut. He counts nine brass bells of different sizes. On the table there are two fetishes. To the left stands a double-edged ax adorned with silvery beads, for Chango, god of fire and thunder, iron and male power. It is set at an angle facing the goddess Oshun. Cormac knows her too: the goddess of water, of rivers and streams and wells. A cool, liquid deity. Tender, healing, yielding, cleansing, free of jealousy and avarice. She is cradled in a yellow wooden boat and adorned with fans, amber beads, cowrie shells like tiny vulvas. She is flanked by a mound of parrot feathers and a wooden mortar and pestle containing smooth black stones, shaped by the lightning. Above Oshun on the wall hangs a machete with a red handle. Oshun wears spiral earrings.

“Moyuba,” Delfina says in a supplicant’s voice, a Yoruba word that Cormac knows means “I salute you.” She lifts one of the bells.

Then she kneels on a straw mat spread before the altar, stretches in her yellow gown, facedown, and rings the bell. Oshun, Cormac thinks. Like Oisin. Or Usheen. Kongo gave me his gods, those words, with his blood; as I gave him mine from the Sacred Grove of Ireland. Delfina rings the bell sixteen times. Then chants: Olokun, OlokunBaba Baba, OlokunMoyuba—Baba Olokun…

A submission to the God of Gods, the Owner of the Ocean, the Owner of all Destinies, the god above Chango and Oshun. Above Yahweh and Jesus and Allah, and all the other gods. She must be thanking her god for food and drink and music and dance, and perhaps even the gift of love. When she rises, she turns to Cormac and reaches for him with her hand.

“Don’t step on the mat,” she says.

“I know.”

Then she leads him out of the small chapel and lights a votive candle on a small table beside the bed. He sees a bowl, beads, a jar. She tells him to undress and then she touches a switch. From the far end of the flat, he hears music from the CD player. All drums. A sharp bata drum, and then counterpoint from smaller drums, the toques, like altos playing into and against the baritone of the bata. The rhythm is insistent, caressing, suddenly explosive, then returning to a steady texture, and he surrenders to it.

Delfina opens the buttons of the yellow kimono. There’s a slight, ironical smile on her face. She wears a high collar de mazo on her neck, like the many-layered necklaces of sculpture from Benin. Cormac knows that there’s a bead for each ancestor, and nine strings sewn into a single piece. On each wrist and ankle she wears an ide made of amber beads, the color of Oshun. Her orisha. Her Santeria guardian angel. The drums are joined by the sounds of shaking gourds filled with gravel or nuts. She climbs on the bed and leans toward Cormac and kisses him.

“I don’t want you to cry,” she says.

They lie together for a long time, the flesh of her body cooling against his in the dark. They hear a siren somewhere in the night. And from the street, a muted shout, a bottle breaking. Candles still flicker from the chapel of Oshun. She reaches behind her neck and unclips the collar de mazo. He kisses her naked neck.

“I have a couple of things to tell you,” she says.

“Tell me.”

“First? I’m not twenty-eight. I’m thirty-two.” Her voice is remote. “I left out four years when I told you the story of my life. The four years I lived in Puerto Rico, in a town called Loiza Aldea. A black town up in the mountains, with jungle all around it, and Oshun living in the rivers. In the old days, cimarrónes hid there, escaped slaves, the wild men. I went there with a priest. One of our priests. He gave me the tattoos, not some man in the Bronx. I didn’t know one day from another, one month from the next.” A pause. “But I saw the gods there.”

“Why did you come back?”

“He told me to come back. He said he had read my shells, and they said I should go back. He didn’t say why. Maybe he didn’t know. But when I saw you that first time, I knew why. I could smell the blood of a babalawo from you.”

The smell of Kongo.

“Mi Chango,” she whispers with affection, and a hint of irony, and then chuckles.

Their breathing merges in the darkness.

“You said there were two things you had to tell me. What’s the other one?”

She’s silent for a long moment, then exhales softly.

“I’m pregnant,” she says.

117.

In the morning, leaving her to dress for her downtown job, he goes to the street, his head swirling. He lights a cigarette, trying to steady himself, to focus. He sees kids playing, and traffic thickening, as cars peel off the FDR drive into the streets, coming in from the Bronx and Long Island, pushing for passage. A boy of ten or eleven pitches a pink rubber spaldeen hard against a box painted on a factory wall. He uses a complete windup, mixing Roger Clemens with El Duque Hernandez. He throws one strike after another. A thickset woman in a yellow dress turns a corner pushing a child in a stroller, her eyes puffy with morning or the loss of sleep. She has a blue sweater over her shoulders and pulls it tighter with a free hand. Autumn is coming now.

Cormac feels a heaviness rising in him. It’s as if too many events are pushing for his attention and combining to block all focus: the party, the musicians, the women, the food, the dancing, and his yearning to live in a crowded, intimate world. The heaviest presence of all is Delfina. And the creature she says she is carrying. Could this be true? They talked and talked, and she is certain that the boy���she knows it is a boy—could not be from Reynoso, she made certain, and there has been nobody else except Cormac. He did not ask her any of these questions. She raised the subject, blurting it out to him, her voice trembling with emotion, swearing on Oshun. The words coming in a rush: I lied about my age, yes, but every woman lies about her age. This I can’t lie about. She saw a doctor in the Dominican, just to be sure, but never thought for ten seconds of staying for an abortion. I want this child because I’ve already lost one, do you understand me? Yes, he said to her, I understand, I do understand. I do. And she said, fiercely: I want this boy.

He walks now toward the Lexington Avenue subway and tries to remember Delfina’s words and what he said to her in reply and what he thought and didn’t say. A lifetime of caution still caged him; he promised her nothing, neither marriage nor money nor the best doctors. He could speak none of the oily clichés, none of the plastic language of paternal joy. Five thousand movies and a hundred thousand television commercials have robbed those words of meaning. He knew he would take care of her, would make her richer than she could imagine, but he couldn’t say that, couldn’t bring those words to her like a gift, and she wasn’t demanding them. She asked him for nothing. Not even love.

Which made him love her more. He loved her toughness. He loved the way she faced the world.

And as he reaches the subway, he asks himself again: How can this be? He feels in his bones that it is true. Everything is now altered by the arrival of a life. All plans. All old vows. The end of the Warren line. The journey to the cave and the passing into the Otherworld. The sense of time too. All changed. His blood will live on, no matter what happens in the next forty-eight hours. How can this be?

Kongo will know. Of course. When Kongo returned to the city, Cormac thinks, something must have changed. He must have seen something in me. Or in Delfina. Or in this big scary heartbreaking piece of the world. He must be here as a messenger.

Yes: Kongo will know.

He hears a woman’s voice, sibilant and tough, speaking under the roll of music: You better be nice to this girl, man.

118.

At 7:30 on Monday evening Cormac left Duane Street for the home of William Hancock Warren. There was no passion in his movements, no tingling anticipation, no feeling that he was rising out of a trench to confront the enemy. He was going uptown to fulfill an ancient contract, its terms set many years before and remembered now in the voices of Mary Morrigan and his father. He had an appointment to keep, the day and hour set by Elizabeth, but an appointment that could fulfill an old vow. In the morning Warren had called to confirm. We’ll have to rough it, he said on the phone, his voice waxy with the effort at good cheer. Everybody will be gone, he explained. Even Elizabeth, who’s off somewhere for a few days.

“We can send out for pizza,” Warren said, and laughed. “And by the way, bring me back my bloody sword.”

The rest of Monday morning had been spent on final things. The news from Delfina moved in and out of him, swinging back and forth. A child. Absurd. Too strange. He cleaned the loft while listening to Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony and the CD of Charlie Parker with strings, and an album of Spanish monks singing Gregorian chant. The music of farewell. I won’t even see this child. He dusted the bookshelves. He tied up all the newspapers, his eyes weary of the shrapnel of the world beyond New York. Killings on the West Bank. Assaults in Belfast. The endless violence of believers. Won’t hear him squalling. He carried two roped bundles down to the bin at the back of the ground floor. Where is Kongo? What will he tell me about the child? For lunch, he ate a bowl of yogurt filled with grapes, sliced papaya, and mango, and then emptied the refrigerator.

Safe in Delfina’s womb, right down there, seven blocks south, at a desk on the eighty-fourth floor. Listen, son. Pay close attention. I made a vow to my father, and I must keep it, or live in damnation. Everything truly serious is absurd. He called Delfina. Just to hear her voice. And got her recorded voice, with its curl of a Spanish accent, explaining she was away from her desk, please leave a message. “It’s me,” Cormac said. “I love you.”

Around four, he walked down to Chambers Street under an iron-colored sky. Can I look at this world from the Otherworld? Can I see the boy learn to walk? Three Africans were emptying a truck outside a Big Sale shop named Great Expectations (how Dickens would have embraced them), talking in the percussive rhythms of Ashanti. Cormac couldn’t make out all the words and wished they were speaking in Yoruba, but the subject seemed to be soccer. I won’t see him run.

He bought some things he needed from an Indian shopkeeper, and then went into a Korean deli on the corner of Church Street. He bought a black coffee and then stepped outside and stood beside a pay phone, using its back wall to shield him from the river wind. He lit a cigarette. The view down Church Street was as always: the post office, the towers in gray fog, all lights burning. He wanted to be in Mary’s with Healey, hearing his booming voice, but Mary’s was closed now forever, and he hadn’t been able to find Healey since his expedition to the Hamptons. He might still be there. He might be lashed to a bed in a hospital, lost on Long Island, cursing fate and Hollywood. Cormac thought: Where are the morning sirens who called us sweetheart? Healey’s my last friend. The only friend in the great dense city. I couldn’t bear to bury another.

Time was racing in him now, the way it did when he would meet deadlines on the newspapers. Decade after decade. One deadline tonight, at Warren’s house. Another deadline tomorrow night, in a cave in Inwood. He might never see Healey again. He would never see the waitresses again. Nor would he see faces like these, passing him on the street: the high cheekbones and flared nose of this elegant high-hipped black woman hurrying downtown toward the post office or the World Trade Center; the gullied skin of the Puerto Rican man with the worried face and gray mustache, angling through traffic to the coffee shop across the street; the slack jaw of the teenage hip-hopper shambling along in his suit of polyester armor. Never see the boy become a man. He tried sketching the faces in his mind, drawing on old habit, using his eyelids like the shutter of a camera, freezing a moment: the Asian woman wrapped in solitary thought as she came out of a watch shop; the panicky glance of a heavy black woman whose three-year-old had jerked free of her grip. Never hear him talk about the Count of Monte Cristo.

And here’s a white rummy in filthy clothes spewing a personal jumble of words as if looking for directions to a mission that no longer exists. Take a left, Cormac instructs him from the side of the phone booth. Go up past Broadway and make another left. You’ll be in the Five Points then, old man. You’ll be in the Bloody Ould Sixth. They’ll know you there. Someone will give you succor.

There is harm in the world, son. There’s evil. There’s whiskey. There’s smack and crack and too much heartbreak. There’s violence. Listen to me, son.

And then he thought: If I do what I need to do tonight, I’ll see her on Tuesday evening. Then I’ll try to explain why I’ve killed a man named Warren. I’ll tell her that he’s the man in all the morning newspapers, on television, on radio. That man.

William Hancock Warren. Then I’ll take her to the north, to my farewell in the cave that gave me too much life, and tell her all of the truth. The least I can do: the truth. About who I am. All of it. While swearing to her that Usheen and Oshun will bring us once more together, forever.

He imagined her at this very moment, coming back from lunch, smiling, radiant, possessing her secret, walking between desks in her new suit from Century 21, women pleased with her, or envious, and men watching her with hungry eyes. But you can deal with it, son. You can deal with anything the world throws at you.

He stepped into the booth and called Healey.

“This is Healey,” the recorded voice said. “I am out of TOWN. With any luck, I will rob a BANK before I come home. If you leave a MESSAGE, I will call you BACK from the penitentiary!”

Cormac laughed and left a message: “Make sure it’s a big bank.”

He dropped the empty coffee cup in a trash bin and started walking home. Rain was predicted on New York 1, and they were never wrong. In a corner store, he bought a small bag of jellybeans, tiny, glistening, and delicious, one of the marvels of a long life. His sweet tooth had cost him many hours in a dentist’s chair, but he’d never gotten fat. Too much walking with Wordsworth in his head. Or (he thought) one more eerie mutation of my metabolism. A pregnant woman walked into the candy store as he was walking out. She was ochre-colored, with tired eyes above high cheekbones. He thought: Will her daughter ever know my son? You’re free to wander the whole wide world, son. Do it. See Paris and Rome and Florence. See Tokyo and Samarkand. Roam deserts and jungles. Sleep in an Irish meadow. Climb the Matterhorn. Go. Do what I could never do. Your mother will keep you safe.

He turned on Duane Street. Kongo was waiting in front of his building.

He wore a dark green corduroy jacket, a black turtleneck, and jeans. His brown boots were polished to a high sheen. His hands were jammed into his pockets. When he smiled, Cormac realized how much he looked like Michael Jordan. The true messenger of Chango.

“Good afternoon,” he said, as they embraced. “I just wanted to make certain all was ready.”

“All is ready.”

They talked about the coming night and where they would meet after Cormac’s appointment with Warren.

“It will be a cold night,” Kongo said.

“With rain, says the weather report.”

“Yes, with rain.”

They stood for a long moment without speaking, while cars and taxis honked for passage, the street blocked by a wide truck holding a construction crane. Kongo smiled.

“The woman is pregnant,” Cormac said. “With my child.” Kongo looked at him in a severe way.

“I know,” he said.

“It’s unfair.”

“Think of it as another gift.”

“But why now? Why after all the other women…”

“The time was right.”

Cormac thought: God damn you.

“You made it happen, didn’t you?”

“No, you made it happen and she made it happen.” He looked toward the river. “It was a sign that I must come and help you cross.”

“And leave the child behind me?”

He touched Cormac’s arm.

“Don’t worry about the child,” he said. “The gods will watch over him.”

He smiled, raised an open palm, then walked away toward the waterfront. To the flowing waters. To the abode of Oshun.

When Cormac entered the loft, there was a recorded message from Healey:

“Brother O’Connor, it’s me. I’m in the city of Lost Angels. My idiot producer was so excited over our spitballing, he ordered a private jet. He says it’s perfect for REDFORD, and this kid named DiCAPRIO, and some young blond chick with a belly button. He’s gonna pay me a SHITPOT of money to turn it into a movie. Believe this? I’m in some hotel, the Tarantula Arms with room service, and I got some insane real estate lady in the lobby, looks like Carol Channing; shit, maybe she IS Carol Channing. She’s taking me to see some apartment she says is PERFECT. Probably in a nursing home. Sorry I missed you, amigo. I’ll call when I know where the FUCK I am!”

He was always Healey, and Cormac was relieved, knowing he was safe. He sat down and wrote him a letter. He would ask Delfina to mail it on Wednesday.

He went to the bedroom and took a long nap, full of poisonous dreams. And then he dressed for his appointment with William Hancock Warren. One final uptown ride on the Lexington Avenue subway. One final trip back home. The sword was inside a long black Chambers Street backpack, the kind made for camping.

119.

In the lobby of Warren’s building, the sour doorman looks at Cormac, takes his name, calls the Warren apartment. Then he grunts his dubious approval. Cormac feels his heart and blood racing. When he reaches the penthouse, Patrick is standing in the open door. Cormac thinks: Shit, he isn’t supposed to be here.

“Evening, Mister O’Connor,” he says.

“Hello, Patrick.”

“Would you like to leave your—the pack, sir?”

“No, I have something in it for Mister Warren.”

“Very well. A drink?”

“Just water.”

Warren is standing near the fireplace when Cormac enters the downstairs living room. A large chunky log burns in the hearth. Cormac thinks: When I’m finished here, I’ll leave by the Western door, as in Ireland long ago. The door reserved for the dead. With me, I’ll take the fire out of the hearth. Warren reaches out a sweaty hand and Cormac shakes it. He wears a long-sleeved Brooks Brothers dress shirt, pale blue, the cuffs folded up, stains in the armpits. He glances at the backpack.

“You going camping?” he says.

“No, I’ve brought you something that would look strange on the subway.”

He opens the zippers and takes out the sword, which is wrapped in a blue towel. Cormac removes the towel in a ceremonial way and shows Warren the sword. His eyes widen and he leans forward.

“My God,” he says. “It’s beautiful.”

“ ’Tis.”

Cormac offers him the handle and Warren grips it, turns the sword to examine the blade and tip, and then squints at the etched spirals. Holding the sword, he stares at Cormac for a beat.

“Your fellow did a fine job.”

Cormac thinks: The fine job was done by the man who made it.

“He says it was almost certainly made in Ireland in the eighteenth century. By a blacksmith, not an armorer. It could be worth almost anything, depending upon the desire of the buyer. The spirals are Celtic. They’re symbols of immortality.”

With a kind of reverence, Warren lays the sword on the polished top of a captain’s table and sits down in an armchair. Cormac sits facing him. The sword points north.

“Thank you, Cormac, for seeing what I didn’t see,” he says. “I bought it, oh, ten years ago, in a junk shop in Rhinebeck. Hanging in a mess of cobwebs. The owner had no—what is the word? No provenance. No history of the sword. He thought it was made around the time of the Revolution but didn’t really know. I had been collecting other swords, in England, in France, thinking someday I might have time to become an expert, and the size of this one—well, it just seemed to fit with the others.”

Warren sees a piece of decoration or a hobby for old age. Cormac sees the sweat on his father’s brow as he worked at the forge.

“It was good of you to do this, Cormac.” A small smile. “Of course, you could have just asked me for it. You didn’t need to steal it while my wife was asleep.”

So she told him everything, Cormac thinks. And here he is, still mad for her. Or so it seems.

Patrick comes in with a tumbler of water on a tray, ice in a cup on the side. Cormac glances at the fake Sargent portrait of Elizabeth Warren and hears her say the word “intimacy,” the name of a place as far from her as Jupiter.

“Would you like the food now, sir, or—”

“Now, Patrick. That would be fine.”

Patrick bows and goes out. If I kill Warren first, Patrick might hear, might call the police, or race to the street… Now it’s Warren’s turn to glance at the portrait of his wife, as if he has noticed where Cormac’s eyes had drifted. He takes a deep breath, then exhales. Cormac feels shame seeping from him.

“The sword is one thing, Cormac,” Warren says. “But I want to discuss something personal with you. Personal, and painful.”

“And I with you.”

For a second, Warren looks as if they are thinking of the same subject. Then he smiles in an uncertain way. His hands find each other, the fingers opening and closing. The sword is within Cormac’s reach.

“In that case, I’ll go first,” he says. “It’s about my wife.”

“Yes?”

He exhales. “First, a confession. Many weeks ago, I put a private detective on your trail.” He shrugs as if this were a ludicrous decision. Then smiles. “I simply wanted to know who you were. Elizabeth was very impressed with you, with your interests, your way of speaking, your good looks. From the moment she met you at the Met, and more so after our dinner party… So I wanted to know more. Were you married? Or gay? Were you some kind of con man, the sort of predator that always hangs around museum openings with a slick line of bullshit? I wanted to know. I don’t ever want Elizabeth to be hurt. Emotionally or physically.”

He does love her, Cormac thinks. That he does.

“The private detective did discover something very interesting: You don’t exist. You don’t have a driver’s license. You don’t use credit cards. You don’t pay taxes, at least not under the name of Cormac O’Connor. You don’t vote, or subscribe to magazines. You live in a building downtown. He followed you there one night, but your name is not on the bell, or on a lease. And you do have a girlfriend. A beautiful young Latin woman who lives in East Harlem. Otherwise, nothing, nada, zilch.”

“Sorry to have been such an inconvenience.”

“But here you are, sitting in my living room.”

Cormac stares at him. “And why were you really on my trail?” Warren inhales deeply, then exhales slowly, and says, as if uttering a confession, “Because I want you to become my wife’s lover.”

Cormac smothers a smile. It’s absurd. A moment from a daytime soap opera. On cue, Patrick enters with a tray: a small pizza sliced in quarters, plates and silverware and napkins, salt and pepper. Cormac moves the sword to his side of the captain’s table. Patrick places the tray on the table. Bows slightly.

“That will be all, Patrick,” Warren says. “You’re going out, am I right? Well, we can clean up. See you in the morning.”

“Good night, sir. Good night, Mister O’Connor.”

He leaves, the door clicking shut behind him. Warren’s hands knead each other. He stares at Cormac, then looks at the pizza.

“Are you shocked that I’d want you to make love to my wife? Or that I suspect you already have? Or that I still want you to take up with her?”

Too many words. The daytime audience would now go to the refrigerator. But Cormac can feel anguish in those words. His hand trembles as he lifts a slice and lays it on his plate.

“No, I’m not shocked,” Cormac says. “The heart has its reasons….”

Warren smiles in a knowing way. He trims the point off the triangle of pizza. Spears it with a fork. Cormac does the same.

“So you see, your blank résumé doesn’t bother me,” he says. “It’s actually a plus.” A pause. “If I can’t find you, can’t prove you exist, then how can Page Six?” He chuckles, and then his face goes grayer and more troubled. “You see, I have a problem. I can’t, uh—well, let’s say, I can’t…”

He doesn’t finish and starts chewing his small wedge of pizza. Not looking at Cormac. Not looking at anything.

“I have a problem,” he goes on, the voice waxier now. “I love my wife. I think she loves me. But we can’t give each other what we need. I need other women. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know. I do know that I must have her in my life, even if we have no children, even if we have to create a public image, a double mask, that’s different from our private lives. The fact is, I need her. And she needs a man who can give her what I can’t. If I had to name that thing, it would be intimacy.”

Her word fills the air as Warren shrugs his shoulders hopelessly, and Cormac feels pity again make its treacherous move, as it did with the man’s wife. For Warren, this conversation might be worse punishment than any swipe with a sword.

“So I want you to know that I don’t mind if you, if she—if she takes a lover and that lover is you. I don’t really mean lover. That’s the euphemism. I mean if she has me for love and you for sex. I told her this. Told her that all I would ask is discretion, which I would guarantee in my own life with her. She could find a small apartment, in a building without a snoopy doorman or nosy neighbors. You could still love your girlfriend as I love Elizabeth. There would be certain, uh, material compensations for you. At the newspaper, where I’m known as a generous boss. But with my wife, it could be…”

Cormac thinks: The rich are all like this, God damn them. Even the best of them. From the end of the Revolution until now, they’ve been certain that money can provide the solution to every human imperfection. The men have whores or mistresses. The women find other cocks. I know: Across the years, I’ve provided my own share of these services.

Now sweat is blistering Warren’s brow and he tamps at it with a napkin. His voice trails off. He chews a second portion of pizza, looking defeated and sad. He stares at the portrait.

“She’s a beautiful woman,” Cormac says.

“And a beautiful person.”

“I’m sure,” Cormac says.

Warren chews another bite of pizza while Cormac now uses his hand to lift a full slice. It’s very good pizza.

“I do have my fears,” Warren said. “I just don’t know you, can’t find a line in your life that makes sense. You understand?”

“I do understand,” he said. “And I’m afraid I can’t do it, Mister Warren.”

Warren stares at Cormac, looking as if he realizes he has blundered.

“I’m sorry if I offended you.”

Fuck you, pal.

Cormac says, “I’m leaving on a long trip.”

Warren struggles to control the anger of a man accustomed to buying what he wants.

“I wish you would reconsider.”

“It’s a wonderful offer, Mister Warren. To take your money and fuck your wife. But I have other things to do.”

Warren stands up angrily. Cormac remains seated and lays a pizza crust on the plate.

“You can leave now,” Warren says, jerking a thumb at the door. “And you can take the pizza, if you like.”

Cormac reaches for the pizza but picks up the sword.

“Sit down,” he says, tapping the tip of the sword on the table. For the first time, Warren looks afraid.

“I want to tell you a little story,” Cormac says.

Warren sits down heavily, his eyes moving to the door, to Cormac, to the sword. A nerve twitches in his cheek.

“Once upon a time, almost three centuries ago in the north of Ireland, there was a boy who lived with his parents, their horse, and their dog,” Cormac begins. “The mother was dark-eyed and beautiful, a descendant of the daughters of Noah, a secret Jew among masked Christians. The boy’s father wore a mask too. He was Irish, not Christian, and his allegiance was to the old gods. He made this sword.”

Cormac raises the sword, admiring its beauty. Warren’s eyes don’t blink.

“But in this part of Ireland there lived a man named the Earl of Warren….”

Warren squints now.

“There also lived a woman named Rebecca Carson, whose real name was Rebecca O’Connor,” Cormac says. “She was killed by a coach belonging to the earl. She was crushed by its wheels and died in the mud of Ireland. Her son was raised by his father, a man called John Carson, whose real name was Fergus O’Connor. The false names were necessary because they were Irish, and suspected of being Catholics, which they were not. The boy loved his father more than life itself.”

“The earl was my ancestor?” Warren said quietly.

“Yes. He made money in the slave trade and entertained his friends by juggling. Smiling, laughing, proud of his skill. And one day, on a frozen road in Ireland, he confronted the boy’s father over a horse. He wanted the horse, whose name was Thunder, and the boy’s father resisted. One of the earl’s men shot him dead.”

Warren’s brow creased. He had obviously never heard this part of the Warren family saga.

“And what happened to the boy?”

“The boy escaped.”

“And then…?”

“And then followed the earl to America.”

“Where he killed him?”

“With this sword.”

Warren listens intently, elbows on knees, chin supported by thumbs. There’s a long silence. They hear distant thunder, a whisper of rain.

“I know some of that story,” Warren says in a sober voice. “Family legend and all that. Nobody ever found the earl’s body.”

“It’s out there,” Cormac says, pointing the sword west. “In the river.”

“An obvious question,” Warren says. “How do you know?” “I’m the boy.”

Warren’s eyes blink. Then he laughs.

“What a marvelous story,” he says.

“It’s not just a story,” Cormac says. “It’s history.”

Warren stares at Cormac as if he were a madman. His eyes move from Cormac’s face to the sword.

“But that was almost three centuries ago.”

“I know. I know better than you do.”

Warren stands, and so does Cormac, who holds the sword at his side. Warren jams his hands in his pockets.

“Would you like a brandy? The bloody pizza is cold.”

“No, thanks.”

He eyes the sword again. Now he squints, his eyes cold and clear.

“You came here to kill me, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“That would be truly stupid.”

“But necessary. At least to me.”

At the small wheeled bar Warren pours a brandy for himself, his hands trembling.

“Well, if you’re going to do it, can we go out to the terrace? Elizabeth would be very upset if there was blood all over the rug.”

Cormac thinks: God damn it, Warren. Stop making this harder than it will be. Warren drains the brandy, pours another. Then walks to the door opening out on the lower terrace. Cormac follows, holding the sword at the present-arms position. There’s a spray of rain, a rising wind. The shrubs flutter in their pots. All is dark in the west.

“You know,” Warren says, gazing out at the rain-lashed city, “when I invited you here tonight, I thought part of me would die. The part that involved pride. I knew that when I asked you to… to give Elizabeth what she needs, that I would be stripping myself naked. So be it. Life is strange.” He lets the rain spray his face and shoulders. “It never occurred to me that I could end up a corpse.” He laughs. “Over some ancient relative.” He turns to Cormac. “Or that I would meet a man who thinks he has lived since the eighteenth century. Jesus Christ… But now, right here, right now, part of me thinks, Well, fuck it, why not? Why not just die now, instead of crumbling into some fleshy ruin. Besides, we’d sell a ton of newspapers, wouldn’t we? PUBLISHER SLAIN IN PENTHOUSE MYSTERY. No, that’s too many words. How about BOSS DEAD, with an exclamation point?”

He drains the brandy and drops the glass among the potted plants.

“I don’t have a clue about you, old sport,” he says. “You’re just another New York demento, as far as I can tell….”

He sighs. “So go ahead,” he says. “Just do it.”

Cormac is facing him, seeing his head and shoulders silhouetted against the rain-smeared glow of distant lights. The sword feels heavy. He spreads his feet, prepared to strike.

“Just do me one favor,” Warren says. “When the deed is done, please tell Elizabeth that I loved her. Somewhere out there, beside the telephone, you’ll find the number of her hotel….”

And Cormac feels something dissipating in his heart: the hard knot of the past. The fingers of his free hand open and close and he longs to sit at a piano. I can’t do this. To hell with the past.

“You can call her yourself,” Cormac says.

The tension seeps out of William Hancock Warren. He leans on the rail. Cormac turns and goes back inside, with Warren behind him.

“That’s it?” Warren says.

“I’ll be going now,” Cormac says. “Please don’t call the police.” “And have what: a tabloid scandal?”

Cormac smiles. Warren stands there looking at him, his hair and shirt wet from the rain. The fire is guttering in the hearth. The smoke rises slowly, as if it contained all the hatred, all the old vows of revenge, all the unburied dead that Cormac has carried across the decades. They walk to the door and Cormac lifts his black bag.

“Take the sword with you,” Warren says. “I don’t want it around here.”

“I never thought about leaving it,” Cormac says. “My father made it in his forge.”

120.

He comes out on Fifth Avenue and feels that he is rising into the air. The bag is slung on his back. His feet are moving on the sidewalk. Taxis move south, their wheels making a tearing sound on the wet pavement. But he feels lifted, weightless, floating. He has failed to keep his vow but now feels released from its long burden. There is no blood on the sword. There is no corpse on a living room floor. On this rainy Monday night, there is no need for flight.

And now he hears drums. He looks for Kongo but does not see him, and yet the drums pull him north. He crosses to the park side, under the dripping black trees. Ahead are the bright lights of the Metropolitan Museum. He hears the bata. He hears the toques. Somewhere, a dog is barking.

Then he sees them high on the steps: three musicians. Two on drums, one playing flute. They are together out of the rain, playing for the empty world. He floats up the stairs. The musicians are young but seem older than the city. The bata player has bandages on three of his fingers, the sleeves of his jacket rolled up, his black forearms laced with muscle. The man supplying the toques is short and squat, like a fire hydrant. The flute player is tall, lean, with a hawk nose and jet-black beard. His gleaming skin is the color of coffee. The drummers are singing in Yoruba, slyly invoking Chango. Asking for his intercession. Smiling. Celebrating. Asking Chango to bless them with women, to bless this great city, to bless this cold world.

The drummers play without pause. The flutist rises high above the drums, telling five thousand stories at once, filling the night with lost women, with laughing children, with the sigh of tropical winds.

Cormac puts down the backpack with its hidden sword. He steps forward, feeling the rain on his face, letting the drums enter his body, his arms and legs and belly and balls, and a drummer shouts, “Vaya!” and Cormac Samuel O’Connor begins to dance.

121.

In the morning, Duane Street glows with the rising sun. At ten after eight, Cormac goes out for the tabloids, passing volunteers on Broadway handing out leaflets for the primary election. He has never voted in an election because that would have left a trail, an identity, proof of his presence in the world, but he loves the intense faces of the few people heading for the polls. They care about this process, which took so long to turn from promise into fact. He remembers the ward heelers reporting to Bill Tweed’s office, and the way Hugh Mulligan’s shoulder hitters roamed the streets near here, bumping people away from the polls or delivering others to vote for the third time in an hour. If he had registered under some name, any name, and used his address on Duane Street, voting year after year, decade after decade, Willie Warren’s private detective would have found him on some computer weeks ago, and warned off Warren, who would have closed the door against him (too mysterious, too uncertain), and he would never have faced that baffled man with a sword in his hand.

He wonders now what happened after he left Warren the night before. Did he open another bottle? Did he consult some family history where the earl still lived in a line engraving? He probably did call Elizabeth. He probably did tell her that he loved her. Cormac feels that none of the aftermath matters. He only needs this day, this evening, this night.

There’s a long line at the Korean deli for bagels and coffee, as courthouse guards and a few stray policemen carry away their breakfasts. The tabloids are full of politics. Cormac glances without interest at the headlines and walks back home under a sky scrubbed blue by the night’s rain. On the corner of Worth Street, parents and kids wait for a school bus. He wonders if Delfina will wait some morning on this corner too, gripping a boy’s hand. He calls her with the cell phone, but there is no answer at home, and her own cell phone is shut down. He leaves a message on her voice mail at Reynoso & Ryan. He’s certain that she’s in the subway, heading for work.

At home, he sips coffee, chews the bagel, and scans the newspapers. His mind shifts from release to weariness. He glances at the sword and then whispers a few words asking his father to forgive him. He was to pursue the Warrens to the end of the line, and instead had chosen mercy over vengeance. Please, he says to his unseen father, understand that I am sick of killing. I’m sick of revenge. If that should bar me from the Otherworld, so be it. I can’t kill again. I can’t kill a man I actually like. Forgive me, he says, I hope I will see you very soon.

Tonight I’ll meet Delfina and travel north, driven by another script from the eighteenth century. I have failed to keep one eighteenth-century vow, but perhaps it will not matter. Perhaps pity and mercy will count in any verdict about entrance to the Otherworld. With any luck, tonight I might be released.

He glances through the skylight and decides to finish his coffee under the cobalt sky. The day is glittering and lovely. With any luck, he can inhale the sky itself. He climbs the stairs and opens the door that leads to the roof.

He stands there for a long time, breathing the clean morning air. The fresh sparkling air of the world. The wind that is blowing from the north and making dazzling horizontals of the flags. The air of a city built on rivers and the sea.

Then he hears the sound of an engine. He turns right, smothering a yawn, and sees a jetliner moving south above the river. Coming very fast toward the North Tower. An airplane that looks black against the brightness of morning. Moving on Delfina. And their unborn son. Roaring straight at the tower. Small and black and flying with purpose.

“You fucking idiot!” Cormac shouts into the wind. “Turn! Turn!”

As it smashes brutally into the north face of the tower.

He runs down Church Street, punching buttons on the cell phone, shouting into its deadness, gazing up at the streaming black smoke. The smoke is billowing violently now, trailing south in the hard wind, a long dark diagonal that throws immense black faces against the sky, and gigantic black horses. At Park Place, he can see orange flames erupting from a high floor. What floor? The eighty-fourth floor? He can’t tell, can’t pause to count. If the tower is one hundred and ten stories, it would be easier to count from the top down. How many stories? Can’t tell. Some kind of facade is in the way. A steel grille he’s never noticed. And what if the plane crashed below the eighty-fourth floor? Could she get down? Can she reach the roof? Can helicopters lift people to safety?

The television antenna on the roof now looks like a standard without a flag. The stream of smoke is moving to the Narrows, over the Verrazano, moving remorselessly south. Sirens split the air. The sounds of Mayday. The soundtrack of emergency. Police cruisers, fire engines, ambulances. Hundreds of coatless people are running north, waved on by policemen, their faces stunned and blank, while others run east and south. High above the street, sheets of paper move gently in the blackening air, like snowflakes. Again, Cormac dials Delfina’s cell phone. Gets a whining sound. Dials again. Gets nothing. Dials his own number on Duane Street. Nothing.

At the corner of Vesey Street the giant wheel of an airliner lies on its side, four feet high, its housing ripped and torn and scorched. Beside it is the body of a heavy black woman, blood flowing from a hole in her head, and an ambulance crew works frantically to save her. Newspaper photographers are leaping from cars, green press cards flapping from chains, looking down at the black woman, up at the burning North Tower, shooting and shooting and shooting. The smoke is streaming, while atomized glass rains down from the smoke. Cops bark orders. Dozens of firemen trudge into the lobby of the North Tower. A cop shoves Cormac back, shouting: “Get the fuck out of here. Now!”

And then he hears the sound of another airliner, roaring from the south, unseen behind the North Tower. Everyone around him looks up too: cops, firemen, ambulance drivers, newspaper photographers, civilians rushing out of the North Tower. Sirens screaming. They sense that the second airliner is following the streaming smoke as if it were a beacon. Then, for a fraction of a second, they glimpse it: small, black, looking puny as a wasp as it aims itself at the South Tower.

Lower than the first. A woman screams. Then another. Then a black man beside Cormac says, “Oh, shit, man.”

The world freezes.

Cormac feels all of time leave him.

And then the second airliner smashes into the South Tower with a ferocious orange explosion. Cormac can’t move. Burning fuel erupts from three sides of the tower, a third of the way down from the roof. In a kind of erupting orange counterpoint to the streaming black smoke of the North Tower. As if this pilot were trumping the first. And Cormac knows, along with everyone else, that this is no accident. Knows it’s not some spectacular replay of the plane that crashed through fog into the Empire State Building in 1945. Knows that both planes have been aimed at the towers like missiles. Knows that the madmen are here. Knows without thinking that they’ve come from across the planet, from blasted deserts, from the ruins of Acre, from the road to Medina, from Saladin. He can hear the death calls. Death to crusaders. Death to infidels. He can hear the orgasmic scream of Allah Akhbar!

There’s a moment of absolute silence, and then the street is loud with screaming shouting running. Cormac rushes toward the lobby of the North Tower, but the same cop grabs his arm and turns him. “How many fuckin’ times I gotta tell you, pal? Get the fuck out of here. This ain’t over!” He heaves Cormac toward the giant wheel, he bounces off its hard rubber, and another cop hurls him into Vesey Street. To face the burning towers. On Cormac’s left is St. Paul’s Chapel, with its ancient graveyard, its tombstones smoothed blank by weather and years. The place where Washington prayed after his inauguration, and Cormac stood on Broadway, watching him leave. Behind him, next to a coffee shop masked by the rigging of rehabbers, is 20 Vesey Street, where he worked for nine years as a reporter for the Evening Post. On what he then thought was a high floor. The fifth.

Now he gazes at the coal-colored plumes of smoke rising into the wind from the North Tower, and he tries again to count floors. Delfina, please come down from there, go down the stairwells, follow the firemen out. One ten, one nine, one eight… Then, above the orange flames, he sees people. Moving dots behind the steel grille. Above the orange flames. Waving shirts and hands as signs of life. Surely gasping for air. Surely feeling as if condemned to ovens. Not the ovens of the twentieth century. Not Auschwitz. No barked commands of Arbeit macht frei. New ovens, created without blueprints. Here in New York. Where fire attacks steel and oxygen at a few thousand degrees above zero. And he sees that the people are being pushed by the heat of the ovens to the edge of that high floor. Is it eighty-four? Above eighty-four? Below? One hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight… There they are: tiny figures: men indistinguishable from women: voiceless at this distance: beyond help: beyond helicopters: without parachutes: beyond salvation.

He tries the cell phone again.

“Forget it, buddy,” a uniformed cop says. “They’re all out of order.”

Cormac knows he’s right. He lights a cigarette with a trembling hand.

And then sees the first man jump. From a floor above the flames of the North Tower. Shirtless. Faceless at that height. White skin. Tumbling and tumbling and tumbling through the indifferent air. Then vanishing behind the building where Cormac used to buy books at Borders. Gone. Like that.

And here comes another. And another. And then a couple. A man and a woman. Holding hands. Her skirt billowing above her pale thighs.

Then gone.

“I make that fourteen,” the cop says.

More cops arrive, walking backward, all of them young, gazing wide-eyed at the burning towers. “They just hit the fucking Pentagon,” one of them says. “I swear. The Pentagon!” They look at Cormac, who has been joined by an older reporter, a Japanese woman, a young photographer, and they gesture to them to move back. Are you people outta your minds? They spread yellow crime scene tape across the aluminum poles of the rigging. Get back! Get the fuck back! Under the rigging, a coffee shop. Two Mexicans inside, stoic, unmoving. In the gutter, Cormac sees a puddle of coagulating blood, thickening with purple ridges. Along with an unopened bottle of V-8 Splash and a cheese Danish still wrapped in cellophane, and a single high-heeled woman’s shoe. Come down, Delfina. Go to the street. Run. And there, in the middle of Vesey Street: a smaller wheel from the first airplane. The wheel that must have hit the woman whose shoe lay next to the blood. She must have died before breakfast. Come down.

And then his eyes catch movement at the top of the South Tower, above the glossy orange flames. It’s pitching forward. A cracking sound. Oh. It’s tipping at an angle, aimed for Church Street, for Century 21, for Brooks Brothers. Oh oh oh. He hears a scream, another, a chorus of screams, and then the tower begins to come down.

But it does not topple. The high floors, above the crack, above the flames, right themselves, and then they all come down in a straight line. Floor hitting floor hitting floor, like pancakes from a machine. There’s a sound of an avalanche. A glass and steel avalanche. With some high-pitched sound that must be the meshed screams of a thousand human beings. The sound of impact is so loud it shuts down Cormac’s hearing. And in that sudden silence he sees the Cloud begin to rise from the empty space.

He knows that the Cloud is made of pulverized carpet, desks, computers, artwork, paper, flowers, breakfasts, shoes, umbrellas, briefcases, mirrors, doors, counters, toilets, tons and tons and tons of concrete, and thousands of human beings. He knows this: The nouns skitter through his mind; but he can’t absorb it. He glances at the North Tower, still burning, still sending smoke into the sky, while a helicopter lurches through the sky behind it. Delfina. Oh, baby.

The Cloud is now rising like some angry genie. So opaque it looks like a solid. Like some new creature. Some devouring god released from the ruptured earth. Animated by those who have just died. By those who flew that airplane. And by those who lived here when Cormac was young. Up out of Cortlandt Street, up out of the rotting timbers of the house where he once lived. Writhing with power and dirtiness. Coming at them. Coming to take them too.

Cops ram into them, into Cormac and the others, cops running from the Cloud, cops looking for foxholes. One grabs the Japanese woman and hurls her toward Broadway. “Run,” he shouts, “run run run run.” Others push into the lobby of 20 Vesey Street. Cormac starts to run toward Broadway too, trips over something in the street, falls. And like a whirlwind the Cloud comes down upon him.

The world vanishes. There’s no horizon. No floor. No sky. No limits. No exit. He hears voices within the Cloud. Men screaming. Noooooooooooooo. Women screaming. Noooooooooo. Names called. Nancy. Mary. Freddie. Harold. Enrique. And then a mixture, male and female: Noooooooooooooooooo. A high-pitched chorus of the dead. Calling to husbands and wives and lovers. Shouting farewells to children. Reduced to powder. Then, rising above them all, in the dense dry powdery heart of the Cloud, he can hear the meshed voices of weeping women. Dead of smallpox and typhus and cholera. Dead of gunshots and knife wounds. Dead in childbirth. Dead of shame and loneliness. Calling from the unburied past, from the injured earth, from landfill and ruined wooden houses and splintered ships, from vanished decades and lost centuries. A chorus. Symphonic and soaring, the voices of the New York Götterdämmerung.

Then receding echoes.

Then silence.

When the Cloud settles, the world has turned white. The color of death to the Africans who once lived here. A fine white dust covers the graveyard of St. Paul’s and the steeple of the chapel. It covers the street and sidewalks of Vesey Street. It covers the police cars. It covers the small wheel of the first doomed airliner and the blood of the woman who must have been killed by it. Up toward Broadway he can see the building on Park Row where J&R Music has its stores. It’s white. So are the buildings on Ann Street. The Cloud has coated them all.

He looks at the emerging stump of the South Tower, black and jagged through the wind-tossed dust. Smoke still pours from the high floors of the North Tower. He knows that it soon will come down too. Carrying all with it. No sound drifts through the white air. Not a sob, a whimper, or a prayer. And then, away off, he hears sirens. He moves east.

Broadway is white and City Hall Park is white and City Hall itself is white, and then he sees people moving lumpily through the white landscape, and they’re white too. Black men and black women are white. Mexicans and Dominicans and Chinese: all white. They move like stragglers from a defeated army. Like refugees. Coated with white powder. All heading north. Alive.

Cormac joins them. If Delfina escaped, if she’s alive, coated white, she’ll head for Duane Street. She would believe that Cormac must be there. Broadway is covered with the powder, which is fine and slippery, like the powder used on babies. He sees hundreds of women’s shoes, kicked off so that women could run faster on bare feet. Two school buses, coated with dust, are at the curb near Park Place, with nurses offering water and help. He looks inside for Delfina. She’s not in either bus, although some children are huddled together in each of them, while a policewoman tries to calm them and get them moving. He sees movement in the interiors of shops and hurries over to peer inside, but Delfina isn’t in any of them. That’s when he first glimpses himself in a mirror: completely white. His tongue is dusty, his nostrils clogged. He tries the cell phone again. No sound at all. At Chambers Street, dozens of people are lined up to use a pay phone. Delfina isn’t one of them. He waits for a few minutes on the northeast corner, not far from the Tweed Court-house, hoping she will come along in the stunned line of survivors. She doesn’t.

Then he hears the roar of the North Tower coming down. Above the building where Mary’s once served laughter and breakfast, he glimpses the upper floors and the television antenna vanishing, feels the ground shudder from the impact of a million tons of pancaking floors, all of it coming down beyond the view from Chambers Street, carrying with it Windows on the World, and uncountable stockbrokers, and the offices of Reynoso & Ryan. All vanished. And then, after a few seconds, he sees the second cloud.

This one is wilder, denser, angrier than the first cloud. It rises over the buildings, extending a thousand arms, rumbling up Murray Street and Warren Street toward City Hall, recombining on Broadway, engulfing every puny human before it, rising high when it hits an obstacle, a parked police car, a hot dog vendor’s cart, a park bench, then, filled with the screams of dead souls, rolls on its furious path until it settles on the southern border of the Five Points. At the vanished ridge of the Collect. At the hanging ground. On the graves of the Irish and the Africans.

In the shocked stillness, a flock of birds, confused and stunned, races across the sky from Park Row toward the Hudson, then turns back toward Brooklyn. Away from the whiteness. Away from doom.

And now people are running again, dozens of them, then hundreds. They abandon the pay phones. They burst out of the shops where they’ve found shelter. They run in a chaotic wave up Broadway past the federal buildings, past the police cars and the ambulances, racing toward Canal Street and the city beyond. There’s no emotion on their whitened faces. Cormac sees no blood. But they run. Everything else can wait.

He hurries down Duane Street, hoping Delfina will be waiting at his door.

She isn’t.

Even here, seven blocks from the North Tower, the walls are white with dust and ash and death.

There are five calls on the answering machine. The first is from Delfina. “Hey, it’s me. Call me back at work.” Cheer in her voice. A call made before the airplanes. Before the horror. He skips past the voices of Healey and Elizabeth. Each has called twice. There is no other call from Delfina.

He peels off his clothes and steps into the shower, rinsing his eyes, scrubbing away the white powder, shampooing his hair. He can hear the screams now, but his ears feel stuffed and muffled. He dries himself and pulls on a bathrobe that smells vaguely of Delfina. He plays the answering machine again.

Delfina’s last tape. Then Healey (grave and straight): “Hey, you got the TV set on? Put it on, man.” Then Elizabeth. “Call me.” Followed by a click. Then Healey, very gently: “Hey, man, you okay? Call me at 310-265-1000.” Then Elizabeth, hysterical: “Cormac, he was there, in the goddamned tower, in that Windows on the World place. Willie was there! And the fire was below him, and the building just went down! Oh, my God.”

Cormac turns on CNN, which is full of pictures of the burning towers, and running people, and the collapse. He switches back and forth, from network to network, to New York 1. While reports flood in, he calls Healey, gets a machine in his hotel room, leaves a message that he’s okay. He doesn’t call Elizabeth. But he feels a surge of pity for Willie Warren. Cormac thinks: The world is truly nuts. Last night, I wanted to murder him and didn’t. I walked away from his house thinking he would live for decades. Long after any possible crossing into the Otherworld. And here on a bright Tuesday morning in September, a dozen hours later, he’s probably dead. There is no family vow that can now be fulfilled on this island.

He tries Delfina. The machine at home. Nothing on the cell phone.

A grave television reporter is saying that nobody yet knows the numbers of the dead but they could be in the many thousands. Talking heads take turns offering theories, while the screen splits, showing the towers falling, showing people in the streets. He studies each image, looking for Delfina, while the talking heads talk. Surely it was terrorists. Surely it was Osama bin Laden. A terrible day for America. More casualties than Pearl Harbor, more than D Day, more than the Titanic. Now on the screen: the mayor, with his commissioners, their faces masked by inhalators, all of them grave and restrained. Cormac switches to MSNBC and then New York 1 again, to each of the networks. The same. More and more of the same. Talk of survivors. Talk of the loss of hundreds of firemen. And details about the Pentagon being hit, with hundreds dead, and another plane down in the fields of Pennsylvania, after a possible fight by passengers against hijackers. A canned piece on Bin Laden. Much about terrorists and the attack on the Trade Center in 1993, and the embassies in Africa, and the U.S.S. Cole, and the trails that lead to Afghanistan. Clearly it’s terrorists. Clearly it’s an act of war. All played against the astonishing images: the black planes, the tendrils of smoke, the collapse of each tower, and the Cloud that followed each, as if hunting down the survivors. He studies the crowd scenes. Looking for one face.

He leaves the volume on, very loud, while he dresses in jeans and denim shirt and boots. He keeps flexing his jaw, trying to open his cottony ears. Then an announcer gets excited, as another building goes down. Live. Just behind the post office. Number 7 World Trade, where the mayor had his crisis center. A smaller building this time, and a smaller cloud, like chamber music pitted against a symphony. More shots of people running from the Cloud, this time up Greenwich Street. Cormac squints at the new images, looking for Delfina. She’s not there either.

Then the TV goes abruptly black, the sound ends in midsentence. The lights go off. Power gone. He pockets the cell phone, slips a portable radio into his shirt pocket, tuned to an all-news station, takes a thousand dollars in fifties and twenties from a wall safe, locks up, and goes down to the street.

She’s out here somewhere. He’s sure of that. He has to find her.

122.

In his search for her, Cormac tries to be methodical and careful. If she is under the twisted steel and rubble, there is no hope. But before the power failed, the television news was encouraging. The airliner had crashed into the ninety-first floor, destroying the stairwells (or so the anchormen theorized), setting off the fire, almost certainly dooming everybody above the flames. From those floors, Cormac had seen men and women jumping into eternity. But several thousand people below the flames in the North Tower had made it down the many flights of stairs to the street. Delfina’s office was on the eighty-fourth floor. There was footage of these people bursting out of the building, gasping for air, and of police and firemen urging them to run. Cormac saw some of them. He knows now that he must act on faith: She ran out with them.

As he moves through emptied streets, starting as close to the burning stumps as possible, moving first east, then west, combing the grid for signs of her, he assaults himself with questions. If that boy lives in her, would she have accepted easy death? Never. She’d have killed to live. How would he have behaved if he’d been on that eighty-fourth floor? Would he have chosen death from roaring flames or the emptiness of the air? Perhaps, for the jumpers, the final leap wasn’t even a choice. It was driven by the flames. And for Cormac? For decades, death has been his goal. Not death by his own hand. Not death through the violence of others. The sweet, consoling death that completes life. If there had been time, how would he have chosen?

He walks the white darkness of John Street, smelling the river on whose shore he arrived long ago, plus a new odor, rising from the ruined towers: burning steel and desks and carpets and paint and food and files and human flesh. Sheets of paper still drift through the sky like giant snowflakes. He sees the orange glow and remembers Diamond screaming as he was charred on the Common. The odor of Diamond’s roasted flesh was a stench he never smelled again, not even during the fires that came later. Now it has returned, multiplied by many thousands.

He imagines himself now in the North Tower above the flames, holding Delfina’s hand. She wants to dive into the sky. And she calls on Oshun, goddess of river waters. “Save us,” she calls to the emptiness. “Save us both and save the boy.” They jump. And the river goddess sends zephyrs of cool air, lifting them together above the fire, beyond the smoke, beyond the circling helicopters, beyond all harm. Why could that not have happened? After all, I am a man once saved by the river gods. Bumped through a black night while the tides took the Earl of Warren. In the grainy black air above the burning city, Delfina might have found confirmation of all she believed. Or learned a terrible lesson about the whimsy of the gods. Thinking this, imagining it, he hears a cynical New York ensemble from the streets below, a piano tinkling in a slow honky-tonk style, Bill Tweed leading the chorus: He flies through the airWit’ da greatest of ease…

And laughs grimly at himself.

He is, after all, here on the ground, alive on his own streets, not performing on the perilous stages of the Bowery Theater. At Murray Street, where all is white from powder, he sees a lone Chinese teenager pedaling a bicycle, a kid in a Stuyvesant High School jacket. He waves him down and buys the bike for three hundred dollars, including the chain and padlock. The kid takes the money and runs, as they used to say, like a thief. Cormac needs the bike if he is to make any time. Delfina, show me your face. Show me your golden skin. Protect that boy who is not yet here. The subways are shut down. There are no buses running below Fourteenth Street. Blue police barriers are being erected everywhere against cars and taxis. The tunnels are sealed. On the transistor, CBS reports hundreds of survivors walking across bridges to Brooklyn and Queens or trudging many miles uptown. Like refugees walking away from napalm in Vietnam, from killers in Armenia and Macedonia, from bombs in Kosovo and Cambodia and a thousand other places Cormac has never seen.

The boy will live in safety. He will read ten thousand books. He will play basketball in playgrounds. He will live in this city, in its plural streets, in its magic. He will gaze at the Woolworth Building. He will dance with many women. He will never trudge to a refugee camp. He will not shoot guns at strangers.

Cormac moves more quickly on the bicycle, slowed only by the slippery fine powder on the streets. A policeman, grungy with ash, tells him that NYU Downtown is closed. “They’re taking the hurt people to Stuyvesant, or Saint Vincent’s. You know where they are?” Yes, Cormac says, I know where they are, and thanks, man. “Be careful,” the cop says. “Who knows what’s next?”

He makes it across the pedestrian bridge at Chambers Street to the new building of Stuyvesant High School. This place will still be new when the boy is fourteen. Looking downtown, he sees flames rising angrily from the Marriott Hotel, and an immense column of smoke blowing now toward Brooklyn. Ambulances scream down the West Side Highway in one lane, and north again in another. The entire eastern side of the highway is starting to fill with heavy trucks, with emergency generators and lamps, with earthmovers, all aimed at the burning site, which the radio is now calling Ground Zero. Cormac locks the bicycle to a fence and hurries into Stuyvesant. The students are all gone, of course, the lobby now filling with doctors and nurses. Volunteers are unfolding cots. Technicians set up rigs for blood transfusions. But so far, a nurse says, the only patients are firemen with damaged eyes or blistered hands. Not a single civilian is there. She says these words in a mournful voice. She is saying that there are no survivors.

“If they come, we’re ready,” the nurse says. “But they’re not coming.”

Delfina isn’t at St. Vincent’s either. “Hey, man, she could be anywhere,” a black EMS driver tells Cormac. “ ‘East Side, West Side, all around the town…’ ” Then Cormac wheels back downtown, in and out of streets. Delfina’s nowhere that he looks. Cormac circles home, and she isn’t on his doorstep either. God damn it: I should have given her a key. She should have moved in with me when she returned from the Dominican Republic. I should have loved her more. God damn it all to Hell.

Now he has two bicycles but no lights. I’ll save one for the boy. The radio tells him that power is out from Worth Street to the Battery, from Broadway to the Hudson. Battery Park City is being evacuated. The boy will read all this in a history book, but I must tell Delfina to save all the newspapers. He was short of breath. I must tell Delfina how much I love her. Police are knocking on doors all over Downtown, afraid of fires, afraid of exploding gas mains. Come here, Delfina. Join me here, bring your inhabited body here as I close these drapes against the dust and the sirens and burn these logs in the fireplace. As we did in Ireland one terrible winter. The hearth will give us light and heat, and even food. As each hearth did before electricity surged in these streets.

Every muscle in his body now feels pulled and extended beyond all limit. He sleeps for two dreamless hours, and then goes out again. This time with a backpack slung on his shoulders, filled with a towel, a roll of bandages, a flashlight, a bottle of Evian water, and the box containing his mother’s earrings. They are for you, Delfina. When I find you, you will wear them. You will wear them when I’m gone.

This time too he takes his own bicycle, pedaling all the way to East Harlem. He locks the bicycle to a fence and buzzes his way into Delfina’s building. Look who’s here. El irlandés. El amigo de Delfina from the four’ floor… Here are Elba and Rosa and Marisol. All out in the hall, their doors open, their faces blank with shock and horror and the repeated images of towers flaming, smoking, collapsing. Here is Pancho the Mexican from the second floor. No, nobody had seen La Guapa Dominicana, La Soltera, from the fourth floor, the one that threw the party the other night. Cormac explains that she worked in the North Tower. There are sobs, tears, wailing. Que pesadilla… Elba from the third floor starts praying at the kitchen table, facing the Virgen de Altagracia, others come in and pray too, while the news from channel 41 plays in another room, the voices of announcers filled with urgency. Cormac glimpses images of the burning towers. A shot of one of the airplanes, black and small and low, aiming at the South Tower. They try to get Cormac to eat chicken and rice and then accept his refusal, spoken in his clumsy Spanish. A time like this who can eat? They give him a beer. They say it’s crazy Arabs, they say they hijack four planes, one of them hit the Pentagon. Pancho offers him a Pall Mall, which he smokes. Then Elba puts her arms around Cormac and begins to weep. They go with him in a procession to the fourth floor and he scribbles a note and slips it under Delfina’s door. Come to my house. I love you. C.

He pedals downtown along Lexington Avenue, whispering the lyrics of “Give My Regards to Broadway” as if the old tune were a dirge. He thinks that if Delfina tried to walk home and then fell, because she was somehow hurt and didn’t know it, stunned, in shock, if she fell like that, then she might be here in some doorway. Anywhere. Even up here. She wasn’t. The radio is now loud with the cause of the calamity. Islamic terrorists. Four different hijacked airplanes. Teams of hijackers armed with box cutters. A brilliantly simple plan, flawlessly executed. He tries to imagine those final seconds, tries to imagine himself at the controls as he soars toward the tower at six hundred miles an hour, tries to imagine himself shouting “Allah Akhbar,” and understands that the moment of obliteration might also have been a moment of consuming ecstasy.

“Tell all the gang at Forty-second Street that I will soon be there.” Nothing approaches ecstasy in P.J. Clarke’s on Third Avenue. Four men, each in a pool of solitude, stare at Peter Jennings on the TV set. The bartender seems to know that Jennings understands the Middle East better than most because he spent years there as a reporter, and so he does not flick from channel to channel. Jennings talks about a nation at war. On the jukebox Sinatra sings about Nancy with the laughing face and how summer could take some lessons from her. Cormac remembers when the song was first played on the radio, during another kind of war. Jennings is smooth and effortless as he moves from one piece of the story to another, but anger is very close to his urbane surface. On tape, the towers fall once more. On tape, the Cloud once more comes rushing between buildings or over their rooftops. On tape, men and women run north. The firemen run into the smoke. Over and over and over again. He peers at televised faces. He does not see Delfina.

Cormac orders a hamburger at the bar, remembering glad nights here in the 1950s, with Lady Day and Sinatra on the juke, and sometimes Sinatra himself at a table in the back room with Jimmy Cannon or Jilly Rizzo or William B. Williams, and dancers and stars coming in after the shows and the night stretching out forever. Fragments of songs move through him, and now on the juke Billie Holiday is singing “I’m a Fool to Want You.” The voice ruined, her ravaged face before him in a flash, alongside her beautiful face when she first arrived in 1936. None of the music sounds sharp, and he realizes that his ears are still plugged from the roar of the collapse. Cormac finishes the burger. Delfina is more beautiful than all those beautiful women of the 1950s. Summer could take some lessons from her, all right. And still the television tells the story of death and horror. Cormac forces himself to remember the Great Fire and the seven hundred ruined buildings and how a year later all were replaced. But that was when houses were three stories high and there were no airplanes, no gasoline, no God-sick lunatics prepared to kill thousands, including themselves. This is disaster nostalgia, he tells himself, a new category among all the New York nostalgias. He smokes a cigarette. Sinatra dead, Jilly dead, Cannon dead, Billie dead, William B. dead. The dancers are grandmothers. I’m alive, he thinks. Delfina is alive too. And so is the boy. I can feel it in my bones.

He pays the check and goes past the out-of-order cigarette machine through the side door into Fifty-fifth Street. The bike is where he left it. Even the thieves are home watching the calamity on television. And all the way up here, so many miles from Ground Zero, the air is dirty with the odor.

Back at home, he lights three candles. He wishes he could wrap himself in a coat of many colors. He tries the cell phone again and hears only the void. Where is Kongo? he thinks. Where the fuck is Kongo? And where are you, Delfina?

In the morning, his ears are unplugged, but his body aches. Lying there, nothing about Tuesday seems real. Was this another act of New York theater, a working of the mad imagination? He hears the roof door banging, left unlocked when he ran to the street to find Delfina. He goes upstairs in a bathrobe. The skylight is sprayed with ash. Ash and powder have entered the loft from the open door, to gather in drifts an inch deep, and when he gazes out across the rooftop, his heart trips. The towers are gone. He saw them falling, but now he sees how completely they have disappeared. From the place they once occupied, a long black pennant of smoke drifts toward Brooklyn. And the air is heavy with the odor.

There are no birds in the Wednesday sky. Not even a raven. He remembers seeing the first airplane, the simplicity of its path, and then glimpsing the second. Each pilot heading for a city he did not know. Each heading for this dense and layered, most human of all places. Each heading here to kill thousands and find Paradise. Heading for Delfina, and all those others they did not know.

Then he sobs. He whispers, “You lousy fuckers.” He holds a chimney to steady himself, and his body is wracked with tears for the ruined world.

He thinks: I want to go. More than ever before, I want to flee the world.

Except for this: I cannot go until I find Delfina.

Routine is created as he makes his rounds. There is still nothing to discover at Stuyvesant or St. Vincent’s, no civilians, no wounded. He has added the sword to the backpack, the blade at an angle, the handle rising out of the top and covered with a towel. He thinks he might need it, since the cops are all dealing with the emergency and the bad guys will soon be back on the streets. He sees no bad guys, only crowds cheering as fire trucks go by, and accuses himself of paranoia. He has breakfast in Healey’s new favorite coffee shop on Twenty-third Street, his arms full of newspapers. The unemployed dot-commers are packed into booths. He uses the pay phone to call various casualty hotlines. Sorry, nobody by that name. He calls Delfina’s number too. No answer. He calls Elba from the third floor, and Delfina is not yet home (but the whole building is praying for her). Now Cormac knows what everyone else must know, what the mayor meant when he said about the numbers that they would be more than anyone could bear. Nobody who was in those towers when they came down would be found alive.

In every newspaper, starting on page eight of the tabloids, he sees Warren’s face. He was one of the best-known people at breakfast in Windows on the World on Tuesday morning. A businessmen’s alliance breakfast, a clean-up-the-city breakfast. The stories don’t say he’s dead. He is just among the missing. But even his own newspaper writes about him in the past tense. The New York Times uses a handsome portrait by Richard Avedon, from a profile in The New Yorker. There are pictures taken at openings, including one from the show at the Metropolitan. Most of them include Elizabeth. The Daily News runs two photographs of her taken on Tuesday afternoon, one leaving the apartment house on Fifth Avenue, the other, her back to the camera, peering south from the Chambers Street Bridge at the burning ruins. The second was at dusk on Tuesday. The Post was also on the bridge, and their photo shows her with a scarf covering the lower part of her face, as if wearing a burka. The scarf turned into a filter against the ash and the odor. As always, she looks beautiful. And in the Post photograph, stricken. And to Cormac, detached. She has nothing to say to reporters except, “I’m so sorry for everybody.”

After his long day’s journey, and an evening patrol, Cormac comes home in the dark. There are still no lights. Duane Street is black and empty, although Church Street is now full of hard, bright imported lights and out-of-state police cars and a holding pen for the media and a long line of heavy vehicles pointed south. He thinks: They are already organized, they know what they are doing, they are doing it better than any other city could have done it. He enters Duane Street from the Broadway side and finds himself whistling the Coleman Hawkins version of “Body and Soul.” The last whistler on Duane Street. The only man in all of the wounded city who is whistling. “I long for you, for you, dear, only…” He gets off the bicycle and fumbles for keys, his eyes sore from the poisoned air. He wants to be rid of the weight of the sword. He wants bed. Some drops of soft rain begin to fall. He thinks: Rain will help. Rain will clean the air. Rain will cool the molten steel. Rain will chill the burning bodies.

Then he sees Kongo.

He’s squatting low in the doorway, a cape turning him into a dense black triangle. He stands up slowly.

“Do you still want to go?” he says.

Cormac knows what he means. He pauses, weary, exhausted, without much residue of hope.

“Yes.”

“You don’t sound as certain as you did.”

“How can I go without finding the woman? I need to find her. I can’t go without that.”

He looks toward Church Street, hearing the unseen muffled voices, the grinding of gears. Kongo sighs. A siren wails.

“You couldn’t kill this fellow Warren.”

“True.”

“That was the sign of a merciful man,” he says, and smiles. “And after all, his death was your duty, not ours.”

“They were always together in my mind, like the East River and the Hudson, coming out in the harbor,” Cormac says. “But you’re right, of course. You’re right. And now it doesn’t matter. The man, Warren, was in one of the towers, above the fires. It’s in all the newspapers. He’s surely dead.”

Kongo looks at him.

“You can leave this world tonight.”

“Not without seeing Delfina.”

“I know where she is,” he says.

123.

They use both bicycles and pedal north. They pull over at the corner of Fifty-eighth Street, a half block from Roosevelt Hospital, and chain the bicycles to a lamppost. Cormac knows the hospital. When the third Madison Square Garden was still on Eighth Avenue and Fiftieth Street, battered prizefighters were taken here to be stitched up or to die. Now, Kongo says, Delfina Cintron is in a bed on the sixth floor.

“I can heal her,” Kongo says. “The way I once healed you.” He shows Cormac how he entered in his own search of the city. The route goes from a loading dock in the rear to a freight elevator. Most ambulances are downtown, along with many of the nurses and doctors, and there is an atmosphere of abandonment around the back entrance.

“I’ll wait for you there,” he says, pointing a few blocks toward Central Park. “Just inside the entrance, in the darkest trees.”

He gives Cormac the cape and takes the backpack that holds the sword, the towels, the earrings. Its weight makes Kongo smile. Then he walks away in a loping, long-legged stride, and Cormac slips into the hospital. He finds an elevator, pushes six.

With the cape on his shoulders, he walks past an empty nurse’s station and into a large room with six beds, each filled with a sleeping woman. Delfina is in the bed nearest the window. Her face is swollen and she’s deeply sedated. But there are no tubes in her nose, no IV dripping into her veins. Her right hand is raw, her nails cracked, and her breath is shallow. She looks like an injured child. Boy, nothing can be harder than the road that you took to get here.

“Hey, who are you? The Phantom of the Opera? What are you doing here?”

A heavy black nurse with a tough face stands in the doorway, hands on her hips.

“This is my wife,” Cormac says. “I’ve been looking for her for two days.”

“You can’t—”

“She was in the North Tower.”

The nurse picks up a clipboard from the foot of the bed. She still looks professionally angry.

“She’s pregnant too,” Cormac says. “Or she was.”

The nurse squints at the case file.

“She still is,” she says. “Some kind of miracle.”

“I want to take her home.”

She looks at him more carefully now. “Sorry for your trouble,” she said. “But I’m sure that ain’t possible. It sure ain’t advisable. Let me go find a supervisor. You can wait right here.”

When she leaves, Cormac wraps Delfina in the cape, lifts her heavy body, feeling its warmth, and carries her down the deserted hallways to the stairwell. Easy, boy, don’t make a move, just take a ride now. All the way down to the loading area, Delfina makes small whimpering sounds, tiny protests, but says no words, not even when Cormac moves with her into the rain.

Columbus Circle is slick with rain and Cormac can see lights downtown in Times Square and nothing at all in the far distance. Traffic is light. A dozen yellow cabs. A few buses. No police cars at all. When the street is empty, he hurries into the park, straining against the weight of Delfina. As promised, Kongo is waiting in a grove of dripping maples.

With Thunder.

He is here again, as he was on the night when Cormac and Kongo rode him north, blood merging, language merging, gods merging. Thunder: back from the place where he has been waiting.

The great horse paws the earth, stretches in pleasure and renewal, shudders, but makes no other sound. The sword is slung from the saddle horn, the black bag beneath it. Kongo hands Cormac the reins and holds Delfina in his own arms, her face masked by the cape against the rain. Cormac strokes the great horse and whispers in Irish. We go now to see Da. Then he swings into the saddle. Kongo passes Delfina to him. Her eyes are closed, her face bleary. She faces Cormac, her body against his, her legs spread in the saddle, burrowed against him. He pulls the cape tight around her body, steadying her with his elbows, gripping the reins.

“I’ll see you there,” Kongo says, and slaps Thunder’s haunch.

124.

They move north through the park to the place of farewell, to the hidden cave. Delfina is pressed against him and he can feel her breath against his chest. A woman dressed like an Eskimo in a fur-trimmed coat comes toward them on the path, holding seven dogs on seven leashes. All are docile, heads pressed to the ground, anxious to be taken to dry rooms. Neither the Eskimo nor her dogs seem surprised by the presence of a horse in the rain, holding two riders.

They make good time. Away in the distance to the east, he sees the bright lights of the Metropolitan Museum, and suddenly imagines an airliner packed with fuel smashing into it and destroying the finest works of man. They could do it. They want to do it. Here, and everywhere. He turns Thunder to the west, away from the revealing lights of the Metropolitan. He hopes the musicians are back on its steps. He wishes he could take Delfina there and dance. You will dance on marble terraces, boy. You will feel candle wax dripping on your shoulders from the chandeliers. You will waltz. You will mambo. Vaya. Raindrops now look like a shower of atoms in the more distant lights of the park lamps. The rain fills the world with a steady drumming sound, without accents from bata or toques, without congas or bongo, just steady drumming, erasing the sounds of the city, mashing time, cleansing the filthy air. Delfina murmurs through unconsciousness. Oh, shit… oh, shit… Her head stirs, her nose sounds clogged. He holds her closer with a free hand, her head flat against his chest.

He can see the turrets and battlements of Belvedere Castle as they move across the Great Lawn into the North Meadow, empty now of people, of children, of ballplayers. He loves this place. A place created long ago by the sweat and muscle of Irishmen and Africans and Germans who came here from the Bloody Ould Sixth when Cormac was already old, who loved one another, who married one another, who huddled together in the shacks of Seneca Village. All these eight hundred and forty-three acres were then a wilderness of rock and scrub and shanties, where men and women and children shared the land with the last of the free animals and five hundred thousand birds. They were the same people who changed the place, who moved the earth and drained the swamps and cut the roads from a master plan, knowing that when they were finished they could not come back to live, only to visit. Cormac thinks: They left us this tamed sylvan man-shaped place, and all of them are dead and buried, and I am still here. The only man left alive who ever saw them work. Now, on a wet, moonless night in the wounded city, the lawns drink the rain, the last birds huddle in nests, and even the ghosts are silent.

Thunder carries them out of the park at 106th Street, following the smell of earth westward into the strip of Riverside Park. Man, woman, and horse are joined now, like a single creature, pelted by the rain. They pass the gloomy monument they visited together in the summer, and Cormac remembers Delfina saying, “I want to be buried in Grant’s Tomb.” You will be buried nowhere, he says now. Not for a long, long time. Thinking: You will see Rome, you will stroll in the piazzas of Florence, you will see our child walk and read and dance. I will not. But you and the boy will swim in the azure waters of the Mediterranean, off the point named for Palinurus. You will read The Aeneid at a table where lemons await you in a white ceramic bowl. You will teach the child to be strong and kind.

Through the rain, he sees a rusting freighter plowing toward Albany. He glimpses it between buildings, and then the ship is gone. The rain is now washing away the city’s cargo of fine ash. The great swooping arc of the George Washington Bridge is dotted with the red taillights of stalled commuters heading for New Jersey. No cars are coming into Manhattan. Cormac feels Harlem’s presence from the heights to the right, here where Washington fled to the killing plains of New Jersey. He was not a face on a dollar bill, boy, he was a great big tough son-of-a-bitch who made a country. Cormac sees Washington as he always sees him: slashing the air with his own swift sword. And sees Bantu and the others, sees them fighting for the liberty that Washington did not deliver. All of that in a year when he was still too young to know that most great hopes end with a broken heart.

Then Washington disappears, and now Cormac feels Duke Ellington beckoning him to a table at Frank’s, in a year when he was writing about music for the New York Sun, and there too is Charlie Parker raising his alto to the night and Lady Day whispering through the rain. What was the name of the hotel on 118th Street where Minton’s Playhouse opened the stage to the true geniuses of the wretched twentieth century? Cormac can no longer remember, but there was Max behind the drums and here came Birks and there was Bird and in from the coast one night came Art Tatum. That was the night, hearing Tatum shower the room with music, when he knew his own work on a piano was a pathetic counterfeit. His hand drops to Delfina’s belly.

You will hear them all, son, the greatest artists of the century; you will hear their music smile, or protest, or console, and you will hear in them what the Africans made of America, all of them in you, as I am in you, and Ireland is in you, and the Jews are in you, and the Caribbean is in you, from me, from your mother, even in the blood I carry still from Kongo, and always, in all years, no matter where you go, son, you will be of New York.

His hand is above what he is sure is the boy’s beating heart, although he cannot feel it. If only the musicians all could have seen the towers fall, seen the Cloud, reached for their horns or the black and white keys. Make it into art, man, he once heard Miles tell Coltrane. For they all knew one immense New York secret: no pain, no art. Here in these streets the alloy of Irish and Africans invented the new world. Here is where Master Juba’s spirit floated in the wings, dancing beside his Irish friend John Diamond, the two of them inventing tap-dancing. Harlem was the true northern border of the Five Points, after all the Know-Nothing race bullshit broke the Irish away from the children of Africans. Except for those who loved one another. Except for the Africans who took Irish wives and the Irishmen who took African wives and loved them until death did them part. Here on the right. Up there. In this place. This Harlem. Far from the North Tower. Far from Ground Zero.

Oh, how I want music now, Cormac thinks, high on this great muscled horse, this immortal stallion, moving north with my last woman. Moving north with my unborn son. Moving north to die. I want to hear music as I ride through cleansing rain, with my back turned to the great downtown necropolis. Music to redeem the murderous spectacle that now dwarfs all other New York deaths, starting with my own.

They pass under the bridge, gradually rising on wooded slopes into Fort Tryon Park, passing the Cloisters, still moving north, where he will keep his appointment.

The woods are denser now, the trees taller, more majestic and primeval, the rain harder, and Thunder moves cautiously, avoiding small escarpments of rock. They are deep inside Inwood Hill Park. Cormac can see tiny waterfalls, where rivers of rain are rushing over cliffs and pouring down in swift, glassy sheets. Some trees rise more than a hundred feet above them, trees that have been here since he arrived in the lost village on the southern tip of the island. Then Thunder stops. They are before a vaguely familiar wall of jagged rock. Delfina murmurs and Cormac pulls back and sees that her eyes flicker, blink open, close again.

And Cormac thinks: This is madness. I’m going to kill her, and the boy too, bouncing through rain to the chill of a cave. I should have left her in the hospital, where there were nurses and doctors and medicines. A place of warmth and food. He considers going back. Or veering off to the right and the emergency room of Columbia-Presbyterian. And knows that he can’t, that he has moved beyond choice.

“Delfina,” he murmurs. “It’s me.”

She does not answer.

Thunder stops. Don’t die on me, mujer. After I’m gone, you must bring this boy into the world.

They arrive at the foot of the cliff that is sliced by the entrance to the cave. Her face remains swollen and shut. He lifts her down and lays her upon the cape and then turns the cape into a sling, using ropes from the backpack. He buckles on the sword in its scabbard, a tool now for digging instead of killing, and whispers good-bye in Irish to Thunder. Delfina moans. He slings her dead weight over his left shoulder, his knees buckling, pulls the ends of the sling as tight as he can, using the backpack as a cushion, and then starts up the rock face.

Some dim memory guides him to a rough path, hidden by the zigzagged markers of rain-slick boulders and mossy stones. I’m coming; I’ll be there soon… At one angled ledge, he slips backward, totters, then uses Delfina’s weight as an anchor, leaning her against the rock face, gripping her. She babbles words he does not understand and then goes silent again. They climb another three feet, and then Cormac wobbles, his balance lost, and is about to fall more than twenty feet when he grabs the gnarled root of a tree. He trembles, his strength gone, and struggles for a long minute to steady himself. His heart is beating fiercely. He wants nothing to happen to her, or to their child, and he inhales deeply from the wet air. He must go on. And wonders: Are you there too, Mary Morrigan?

Then they are on the narrow ledge and Cormac can see above them the blocked mouth of the cave. Another path moves right and turns abruptly to the higher ground. To a passing pilgrim, some Sunday hiker in pursuit of wildflowers or butterflies, this would be another blank outcrop of schist and granite, lost in a dark forest. But now he has found the path. The city is gone now, dissolved in the falling rain, screened by the primeval trees. He will see no more trembling eastern dawns, no more scarlet western dusks, no sun rising in Brooklyn to set in New Jersey. This is the end of it. The city itself is as erased from sight as the towers. Every man and woman, all those thousands who have just died, all the countless millions who preceded them, reduced now to us, to me, to you, Delfina, to the child, here at the sealed entrance to this last hidden cave. Up ahead are all the others I have loved, in the place where I will wait for you. I will see you soon, Da. I will tell you all that has happened.

Gathering strength, hugging Delfina to him, Cormac remembers his image of the city as gigantic horizontal sculpture, and now sees the gods, all of them, speaking Greek and Latin and Yoruba and Irish, looking down upon this last dreadful alteration, this atrocious mauling of life, and they decide that there should be no more time for the invisible sculptor. They will give all the puny humans twenty-four hours to evacuate, and then they will lift the island from its northern end, and raise it into the sky, thrust it thirteen miles above the harbor, and leave it there forever, as monument to human folly, as warning against all forms of hubris. Cormac sees it being lifted, hears the sucking sound as it rises from its mooring, sees the dangling roots of trees, the bones of humans long dead, the tangled web of ruptured sewers and water pipes and subway tunnels, all buses and automobiles and cranes and trucks falling loosely through the streets to the bottom, while the merging waters of the North River and the East River and the vast Atlantic rush in, to cover the jagged remains of what once was an island called Manhattan. And he sees himself: clinging to the side of the Woolworth Building, the last man left alive, the man who can’t evacuate, the man who must tell the story.

He looks down and Thunder has galloped once more into mist. A rich dark aroma of soaked earth and rotting vegetation rises through the rain to enter both of them. The water of Oshun. The sea of Usheen.

Then, carrying Delfina, he goes up the twisting path until he is at the sealed entrance of the cave that gave him too much life.

He holds her very tight, breathing into her ears and face, kissing her cracked nails and raw hands. The wind is rising.

I must do this, woman, for you, for the boy. He turns from her, and moves her out of the rain, and unsheathes the sword, and begins to chop furiously into the sealed entrance. A kind of cement has formed, made of stones and pebbles and sand, tufts of grass, the enameling power of rain. God damn you, God damn you, open, open to us. He smothers the rage, then makes controlled slices in the surface, wiggles the sword to widen them, then stabs with purpose at the next layer. He keeps thrusting until he feels an emptiness on the other side. He has breached the outer shell, and then the entrance crumbles into porous dust and rubble. He uses his weight and bulk and the sword to keep widening the hole, and then at last the mouth opens. He takes a flashlight from the backpack and peers down its rocky throat.

The cave.

The place where he will find the entrance to the Otherworld. His hidden shee in the American earth.

He pushes into the slit, turns, and gently drags Delfina behind him. She doesn’t stir. I know the child is safe, I know your body shields him, I know that he will live. He wraps the two of them inside the cape, gripping the bag, using it to cushion her body, and they slide gently down a slope, Cormac using his heels as brakes. Then they stop in the blackness. You will not lose him, you will not… He plays the flashlight against the walls. The cave has not changed since last he saw it: dry and high-roofed and deep. He sees the waxy stumps of old candles, made by men long dead, their wicks like tiny black fingers. He needs matches. The lighter. Where’s the lighter? He lifts Delfina and carries her to the place where he awoke long ago and saw Tomora, and felt her healing caress, and heard from Kongo about his gift of life, and its limiting terms, and its possibilities of escape. He lays Delfina on the cape and she moans in a chilly, helpless way.

Her feet are sliced and scabbed. Her face is swollen and distorted on one side, as if she had been punched. Her damaged hand seems thicker now. Her eyes are closed. Her breathing is slowing and then she moans and a hand goes to her stomach, to her spiraled belly, to the place where the child lives, to the place where the child might now be dying. Now Cormac lashes himself. She is broken and hurt and you brought her here because you need her for your own good-bye. You selfish idiot. She will die. The child will die. For you.

He touches her face. She begins to shake from the cold. Her teeth clack. Death has entered her.

He shouts at the emptiness: “Kongo! Where are you, Kongo?”

He arrives from the dark rear of the cave, not the entrance. He is dressed now entirely in white, including a white shawl over his shoulders. He looks at Cormac in the light of the upraised flash-light, says nothing, lights two of the candles with matches and then kneels over Delfina. Cormac switches the flashlight off as Kongo begins to chant in a language that is neither Yoruba nor Ashanti. His head is bowed. As he chants, he moves his own hands above her hands, and above her damaged face, and then takes each scabbed foot and runs his tongue over her wounds. His voice is pitched higher than her moaning. Then he places both hands a few inches above her stomach. He is more intense now, his voice rising from chant into plaintive song. His hands move horizontally above her stomach, then caress her belly, as his singing begins to float, to echo, to fill the cave.

The scabs on her feet fall away. The swelling leaves her face and her injured hand. Her moaning stops. Her eyes remain closed, but now she is radiant.

Kongo ends with a small song of supplication and then rises. He turns to the rear of the cave. To the darkness.

“The place you are searching for is back there,” he says, pointing into blackness.

He removes the white shawl from his shoulders and lays it over Delfina’s breasts and shoulders. He nods at Cormac, and then walks abruptly to the entrance, to climb the slope and go out into the wet New York night.

She sits up and faces Cormac, flexing her fingers, turning her feet as if they were adorned in spangles. She smiles in a shy way, she stretches, she rubs her hands on her belly. Her eyes move around the cave, wide in surprise and alarm.

“Where are we?” she says.

“In a cave in Inwood.”

“How did I get here?”

“I carried you.”

He holds her face in his hands and kisses her very lightly on the lips.

“I can feel him,” she whispers. “He’s there. He’s moving. He wants to meet you.”

He hugs Delfina, her golden warmth streaming into his own body, and he feels his own surging emotion, his need, his fear. They are quiet for a long time. And then she stares around her at the walls of the cave.

“I was in a staircase, packed with people, with lots of smoke,” she says, a kind of wonder in her voice. “There was thick smoke everywhere. I looked down and there were hands on banisters going down and down and down, all the way down.” She pauses. “There was a man in a wheelchair being carried by three men. Doors opened and the smoke was thicker, and we kept going down, and then there were firemen, lots of firemen, all going up, and we were reduced to one lane, and then we weren’t moving at all. Everybody was quiet. Nobody was crying. And I tried my cell phone, and it didn’t work, and I thought: I might die here. I might die here, carrying this baby, I might die here without… without ever saying good-bye to you.”

She begins to weep now, her body shaking with great wracking sobs.

“I was trying to find you too,” he says. “The cell phones didn’t work anywhere….”

Her weeping slows.

“After that, I don’t remember much of anything,” she says. “Just running and falling. Like a dream you have when you’re six.”

He tells her what happened, and how both towers fell, how many thousands are dead, how Islamic hijackers took four different airliners and smashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, a field in Pennsylvania, how everybody is talking of war. She listens and doesn’t listen; she hears but does not hear. She stares straight ahead. Cormac says nothing for almost a minute, as her lips move silently and she absorbs what he has said. She clears her throat.

“They’ve ruined the world,” she whispers. “They’ve ruined the world where this boy will walk. They’ve ruined it, haven’t they? God damn them all.”

Candlelight suffuses the part of the cave in which they sit upon the cape. He gazes at her, feeling seconds becoming minutes, and then rises to one knee and turns to face her. He takes her hand. She looks at him with wariness in her eyes.

“I have to tell you a story,” he says. “One that I’ve never told you, or anyone else, and one you never asked to hear.”

“So tell it, man.”

He takes a deep breath, then exhales slowly.

“I was born in 1723, in the north of Ireland,” he begins. She smiles up at him as if expecting a joke, but his serious face keeps her from saying anything. “When I was sixteen, my father was killed over a horse….”

And so he tells her about the Earl of Warren and how he crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of the man, intending to kill him. He tells her about the indentured Irish and the slaves in the hold of the Fury and how he helped give the Africans food and water. He explains about the revolt, and how he saved Kongo’s life, and how his blood merged with the African’s blood as they rode north to this cave.

“He was a babalawo,” Cormac says.

“A babalawo.”

“And in this cave, he gave me a gift.”

“Eternal life,” she says.

Cormac is surprised. “How did you know that?”

“A babalawo can do that,” she says. “The babalawo in Puerto Rico, the man who made my tattoos? Some people say that he’s been there since before the Spaniards arrived. That another babalawo gave him the gift… He was here just now, wasn’t he? I can smell him. I know that smell. And he healed me, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

She stands now too, pulling the white shawl tightly over her shoulders, bending her head to inhale its odor, gazing around the visible part of the cave.

“You really are a little old for me, man,” she says, and laughs. “I’m a little old for everybody.”

She turns with a wistful smile on her face.

“What’s the rest of it about?” she says. “There’s got to be more.”

“There is.”

“You’re gonna leave me, right?”

He doesn’t answer directly.

“There were terms to the gift,” he says. “I couldn’t leave Manhattan. If I did, I would die. And I’d be barred from the Other-world. It would be a form of suicide, and suicide was forbidden…. That’s why I couldn’t go to Brooklyn with you, or Orchard Beach. I was told by the babalawo that I would meet a dark-skinned woman adorned with spirals and that I would make love to her in this cave and then I could pass over…. I looked for the woman for many years and never found her. Until the day I saw you on Fourteenth Street. This might all sound preposterous, but it’s true. I’ve lived it. My life is the proof.”

He thinks: There is no time to tell her how he had lived through all the history of the city, how he absorbed its life, its menace, its cruelties, its toughness, its joys and sorrows and beauties. He could tell her about the women he knew and the friends he made and how Bill Tweed gave him the house on Duane Street, and how everybody he loved had died. But there’s no time. There is no time to tell her of the men he killed. No time to explain how his enemies had died, how houses had died, and neighborhoods had died, and how he kept going: through words and art and time.

She walks around him, looking at him. She pinches the flesh of his arm as if to verify his presence. Then she laughs in a bitter way.

“This is such a bitch,” she says. “I loved you so I could live. And you loved me so you could die.”

She leans down and lifts the cape, angrily shaking away its dust, and slips it over her shoulders with the white shawl beneath it. She picks up a candle.

“I’ll see you, Cormac,” she says, and begins to walk toward the deep part of the cave, the dark unknown place that Kongo pointed to for Cormac.

“Delfina—”

“If you want to die, go ahead,” she says, tossing the words over her shoulder. “I’m just not gonna help.”

Her candle bobs as he goes after her.

“Don’t go there,” he says, his voice echoing now. “That’s the wrong way out. That’s not for you.”

He reaches for her, finds her hand. In the light of the candle, her skin is the color of cinnamon, her eyes liquid with fear and hurt.

“Don’t go there,” he says.

She begins to bawl. A great hopeless weeping, filling the cave. The candle falls and goes out. He holds her, running hands through her hair, caressing her skin, kissing her eyes and ears and mouth, until they fall to the ground, fall upon the cape, fall together, and begin to make love.

“Go,” she whispers, “go. Just go. Please go. Go.”

They rise into each other, joining as one, writhing and weeping and gnashing, obliterating life in the little death. And then breathe as one. And lie silent.

Off in the distance, in the far reaches of the cave, Cormac can see a sliver of emerald light.

He snaps on the flashlight. Her head is turned away from him. He takes the spiral earrings from a pocket. He clips them to her ears.

“Wear these,” he says. “Wear them always.”

“I will,” she says, sitting up and leaning her head to one side and then the other. The earrings dangle in the light, changing shape with each movement of her head. “I’ll always wear them.”

He feels empty now, and free: the story told, the secret revealed. If she has questions, she can ask them now. She asks no questions.

He stands up now, finds the fallen candle, lights it with his lighter. He gazes at her face, its toughness and humor and the way the flicker of candlelight keeps altering her beauty and the way the yellow light glistens on the earrings. Without a word, he takes a breath, picks up the flashlight, and hands it to her. Then he takes the candle and moves into the darkness.

Up there, somewhere, is the entrance. Beyond the jagged stone and the dripping walls. All of them are waiting for him in the emerald light. Some have been waiting for a very long time. His father and his mother, Mr. Partridge and Bill Tweed, Bantu and the black patrol, women and friends, even Bran. He raises the candle and plays the light on the walls. He sees the ceiling lower. He sees a crack that in the distance seems to be an inch wide. He can hear a flute. A damp gust of wind blows out the candle. He moves closer. They are all there, beyond the shimmer of emerald light. All the people he has ever loved.

Except one.

He turns and walks back to Delfina. He reaches down and takes her hand.

“Let’s go, mi amor,” he says.

“Where?”

“Dancing,” he says. “Let’s go dancing.”

He feels her smooth, pliant hand pulsing with life.

“All right,” she says.

“We can try to find a cab.”

“That would be nice.”

“I love you, mi vida,” he says.

“But for how long, señor?”

“Forever,” he says, and they start to climb together toward the rain-drowned city.