|
Edited on Thu Apr-13-06 12:03 PM by Poll_Blind
It was already weakened, to be sure. This wasn't the first time something like this had happened. Whatever they say it was- a bunch of little explosions over time or one big hay maker, the whole place creaked like it needed a long rest. Not yet. Please, not just yet.
Swaying in high winds isn't so bad. You get your sea legs when you work over the 60th floor one of the cleaning staff told me. She smiled that white-white smile they have. She looked as honest as those teeth were white. I didn't understand what she may have been implying. I didn't take her for being smart at the time, she looked too honest to know much about the truth.
But she's not here now. She's somewhere else, and that's a pretty wise move this morning. Probably praying for me earnestly. But not here where the half-charred portfolios blow through the floor and out the window like a cut finger bleeding underwater. She will come and help clean up and if she finds my body or what's left of it she'll cover me and give my wife our ring- no, that's not going to happen. I can't let it happen.
So we all climb up, toward the light, toward clean air. That maniac put fire into the heart of the biggest building on earth and damn if I don't believe that he can take us down. There must be five hundred people on this roof all experiencing the thrill of their life just to breathe again, to see something bright like the sun or white clouds. The Devil's had his way with us and somehow, when his back was turned, we ran. Ran, up, toward Heaven. But there's a four-cornered wall of black that won't be happy with the smoldering hell below. It wants us, wants to drag us like some great soulless wall-eyed squid back into the hot darkness and fuck us or eat us alive or some other Hell I don't want to imagine.
A lady about my mother's age, almost completely soot-black except for her white bra and panties tells me she saw the Devil. She'd been looking out the window when it caught her eye. She'd watched (what else could you do?) Air Force One fly up and into us.
She was so close, she keeps insisting she saw the pilot with big mirrored Ray-ban Aviators, grinning like an aging Judas just before he fucked us with that thing. I'd been taking a piss when it hit. I always lock the stall door even when I'm peeing and I think that saved my life.
But for what? This? My ungratefulness at being alive is cruel to the charred armless and legless thing I thought was a coffee table on 86. If I live I'll probably go to Hell just for that.
Why all the helicopters? Everyone with some different flag painted on the side but none landing. Circling, watching. The prop wash from one flying too close blew a kid clean off the roof just a few minutes ago. It happened without sound. I don't think anyone noticed but me. He couldn't have been 21 yet, hunched by the edge and either looking for help or contemplating jumping. It was like someone pushed him. I'm glad I didn't see his face when he went pinwheeling or I might have followed just to stop the memory of it.
There's a handyman, some hearty industrious fellow, who's keeping everyone calm. I notice he only looks into their eyes, my eyes. He doesn't stare over the edge. He says we have to make a plan but the best we can think so far is just to wait up here and swear never to eat cooked meat ever again. We left so much of that behind just to get here.
God-damned helicopters. They see us. We see them. I see asians and europeans and africans with video cameras on those choppers- they're all watching. Like the zebras do when one of their herd is caught by the lion. The herd could run en masse and drive the lions off but they don't. Instead, they watch.
There's no hope for us, is there? Two hundred years to build this monolith. Fighting wars and losing millions of lives just to have the honor of placing another stone down, growing another floor. And one madman and his flight crew are going to boil it all away into dust and paper and tiny tiny bits of charred flesh. So tiny you don't know they were meat until you see the birds go picking for them.
I'm so sad. Not for my death- I'm sure it will be spectacular. It won't be heart disease or cancer or diabetes for me. I'll become an interesting story for a grand-niece genealogist. No, I'm sad for my daughter. The Devil's brains are filling some gull but his madness spreads and there will be more to don those big mirrored sunglasses and bring Hell and Fire to what had taken so long to build.
He'll rape her. Maybe not with his paw, but with someone's. Maybe it'll be a real cock or maybe it'll be a life in thick black smoke- the kind that chokes out everything but the urge to survive. His new world will be a world without poetry. A world where a full bowl of gruel is poetry. And a long life in it. If that's the case I dearly hope she could trade places with me now. Oh God, only the Devil can make a man hope that.
So I climb onto one of the big air-conditioning units. I haven't climbed anything in years and it makes me feel like a boy again. I should have climbed things more often. Instead, I walked around them. Maybe the world could use less people who walk around obstacles.
I thought about climbing up the antenna but I won't do that just yet- I still have some hope. There are a few up there. One with his arms out hoping for a Heavenly hand to pluck him off and deliver him.
More choppers, we must be on all the stations. "America's about to collapse- come watch!" in two-hundred languages. Motherfuckers, but I can't blame them. Motherfuckers just the same.
The wind is picking up and when it blows against me I think the building's going. Dropping underneath me. So much work to build this all up. It wasn't folly. It wasn't some grand joke.
It was Hope against tyranny's red eyes and we thought we'd beaten it.
And maybe we will. But not today and not, I suspect, for a long time.
PB
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
