Forty Leap (8 page)

I really didn’t know what was going to happen
after our meeting, but Jennie chose to stay with me for some time.
Initially I asked her if there were any other people around. Of
course, there were, but she travelled alone. She warned me never to
trust anyone in a small group and to stay out of the subways. Every
time we spoke about how to survive in New York City, it seemed as
if she was preparing me for a grand mission. After each
conversation, I expected her to slip off into the night, leaving
her trainee to face the cruel city by himself. Yet she never did.
For three weeks we travelled together, sleeping on the upper floors
of those buildings that still held upper floors. Jennie usually
liked to stick to the office buildings. They were cold and empty
and there was little to be scavenged. That made them safe. The high
floors were also safer because most people didn’t like to climb the
stairs, which could be unstable.

“If you’re careful, it’s okay, though,” she
explained.

The only time we went into apartment
buildings was when we needed food or clothing. This, she explained,
was what had brought her to me. Food was hard to find and often
came in the form of mice and birds.
You got to whack ‘em over
the head and burn ‘em up to kill all the diseases.
But we never
cooked them where we found them. We always brought them deep into
an office building where there were no windows or doors and
suffered the smoke so we wouldn’t be seen. Rain came down in
spatters every couple of days and we collected it in tins that
Jennie kept in her backpack. She came to me every night and slept
close for comfort and protection, as a daughter does with a father.
Before long, though she knew how to survive much better than I, I
felt as if I was protecting her. After all, she was just a child,
and I an adult.

She questioned me frequently, unable to truly
comprehend what had brought me to that place and that time. I
showed her my notebook and, much to my own surprise, I showed very
little emotion over what I had lost. And yet, it touched her and I
saw tears glistening on her cheeks for the first time. Frantically,
I searched the conversation for some terrible thing I might have
said, but nothing came.

“I didn’t realize,” she said and her voice
was much more tender than ever before. “I thought, you know, since
you didn’t live through it, you didn’t lose anything.”

Considering this, I nodded subtly. To be
honest, the idea of losing my brothers and their families was a
very abstract concept to me. For all I knew, they were alive and
safe. They didn’t live in the city and may have gotten out of the
state. Any pain I felt still stemmed from the loss of my mother and
Morty. I tried not to think of them too much because I still felt a
tremendous amount of guilt associated with those two deaths.

“I was living with my grandma,” Jennie
said.

We were sitting very high up over the city,
looking out over the destruction. The building we had found stood
twenty two stories, with the top five completely blown off. A
ragged pattern of concrete and girders jutted out toward the sky
with the exposed seventeenth floor open to the sky. Most of it had
collapsed and, really, the only safe place inside was down on
fifteen. But, after finding a good place to sleep and cook our rats
and pigeons, we had discovered a way to climb through the rubble.
There was a stone platform high up that allowed us to see almost
all the way downtown. We were approaching July and the air was
still and hot down below, but up there was a sweet breeze which
brought the scent of the sea with it from the east.

“When the bombs hit, we were sleeping. Of
course they hit us at night. There was this huge boom and
everything shook. Grandma went for the TV and we got a signal for a
couple minutes until the power went out. There was this burnt guy
on screen yelling about the ‘first bomb attack on American soil
since Pearl Harbor’. I don’t know. It don’t matter. The bombs got
closer and we could hear breaking glass and falling buildings. My
grandma grabbed me and we ran out of the house and down the
stairs.”

She paused, just looking out over the city. I
suppose she was trying to put the facts together in her head
because, as she began the story again, it seemed more real and more
coherent.

“Everyone, all my neighbors, were in the
halls and running down the steps. It was hard to see because half
them had flashlights and they was pointing them in my eyes and all
over. Grandma held my wrist and dragged me to the steps. I knew she
was a tough woman; she raised me from a baby. But in the steps
there was so many people. The Lopez’s from upstairs was coming
down. They had like ten little kids and Grandma waited to let them
all get through. It was the
right
thing to do.”

She was crying now and I knew how it would
end, but I let her continue. I didn’t want to hear it, but I
wouldn’t interrupt her. That she had chosen to share this with me
meant so much.

“He pushed her. It was Bender, that stoner
from 4C. He pushed her right into Mr. Lopez, who fell over three of
his kids and they all fell down the stairs, over all the people in
front of them, like a human avalanche. I didn’t fall because
Grandma let go of me so I just stood there, looking at them. There
must have been ten or fifteen people on the landing. They was all
struggling to get up and Grandma was caught right in the
middle.

“Mr. Lopez came up first, digging through the
bodies for his kids. He was crying and screaming and Bender shot
right past him with all the others who didn’t fall. They was just
running
over
the people that did fall. Mr. Lopez fought them
off, yelling, screaming, throwing his fists. But some kid from
upstairs came around and kicked him in the nose and he went down so
fast and he didn’t get up. I mean he
never
got up.

“I just stood there, looking at it ‘til the
last of the people from upstairs ran past me and out the building.
I could still hear the bombs and screams, but I couldn’t move. The
people on the stairs, the ones who had fell, got themselves out now
that they could and ran out. Mr. Lopez never moved. I saw one of
his kids crawl out, look at her dad, and go on.”

She stopped talking then and just began to
sob as the story played itself out in her head. Next to her, so
close, I couldn’t do anything. Never had I felt so completely
useless in my whole life. My heart was breaking for this child, my
friend Jennie. So I just sat there with her, silent, waiting for
her to get it out of her system. We sat for almost an hour while
she composed herself. I imagined, with relief, that she was
finished, but I was wrong. When the tears had gone and the sniffles
had ceased, she began to speak again and I felt a captive audience.
As much as I could hardly bear the images she projected, I would
not ask her to stop. Telling the story was her choice to make and
listening was my obligation.

“Grandma never called me nothing but
Child
. This is what I heard from the tangled people below.
It was like a whisper and I knew it was Grandma calling for me. For
a minute, I thought she was a ghost ‘cause I was sure she was dead.
But, no, it was Grandma and she was the only one alive. There was
still five or six people down there and they all broke their necks
or their backs and none of them was moving. Mr. Lopez lay over one
of his other kids, bleeding all over him from the nose.

“I moved some people to get Grandma free, but
she wasn’t going nowhere. Both her legs was broke and maybe her
head. She was hurting so bad.

“’Why you still here, Child?’ she said to me.
What could I do?” Jennie looked at me, whispering, “Mathew, what
could I do?”

I took her hand. “What did you do?”

“I kissed her face and waited for her to die.
I couldn’t leave her. She was my Grandma. I brought her water and
some food. She took the water, but she wouldn’t take no food. She
wasn’t really Grandma no more. I knew she was dead when she stopped
taking the water. I didn’t leave, though. The bombs had stopped a
long time ago so I just stayed there with the dead people and the
smell.”

I waited a while for her to continue, but she
didn’t start talking again until I asked, “When did you leave?”

“Reesha came for me. She was with Devon and
when they couldn’t find me with all the people, they came back.
They was good friends. We helped each other for a while, kind of
like you and me.”

“What happened to them?”

“They’re gone,” she said. “When the soldiers
came into the city, people started breaking up and hiding. We did
the same. We didn’t see no one for a long time. Then we saw a group
of guys and they was with these two girls and they looked
used
. You know what I mean? Devon took us away from them
because he knew what would happen. They’d have killed him and used
me and Reesha. So we left them.

“It didn’t matter, though. We picked a bad
place to sleep one night and another group caught us up. I’d gone
to pee so I wasn’t there when they came on Reesha and Devon. I saw
them when I was coming back and I couldn’t do nothing. There were
five guys and one girl and they beat down on Devon like I never
seen before. And Reesha… I just hid away until they was gone. They
left Devon, but they took Reesha with them.
Of course they left
Devon! He was dead!
”

She began to cry again, this time worse than
before, and she didn’t stop for a long time. I just sat there,
feeling terrible, wishing I could do something to help her and
knowing that I was powerless. It was a truly defining moment in my
life. Never before had I been so needed by another person and so
unable to do anything. Never before had I even noticed. Throughout
my life, I had remained so detached, even from my own family. And
now I understood why Martie disliked me so and my nephews shunned
me. I had always felt so much for Livvie because she had cared for
me when no one else did, but now I didn’t understand why. I was a
freak! I recoiled at the thought of basic human emotional contact,
a thing which is second nature to most people. Sniffling, scorn in
her expression, Jennie finally looked up at me. It was as if she
could read my mind because she stood up from where she was and
began the slow climb back down the rubble hill.

I wanted to stop her from going, or at least
follow her. I felt with certainty that this was the last I would
see of her. As she climbed down she looked determined, not as if
she was going back to the place we’d chosen to sleep, but as if she
was going away. But I didn’t follow her. In fact, I remained there,
intentionally giving her every opportunity to leave me alone. I
took a few minutes to add something to my journal, which I had been
keeping less and less religiously. Then I sat by myself watching
the city absorb the darkness until I dozed off and slept, very
peacefully, with my head up against a piece of cinderblock.

It rained while I was asleep. It couldn’t
have been a heavy rain or a cold rain because I suppose it would
have roused me. But when I awoke my clothing was wet and my beard,
which had grown in over the past three weeks, smelled musty. I
truly hated it. A wispy fog had settled over Manhattan and it took
me a few moments to get my bearings. Even though I had been in the
same position when I’d fallen asleep, I wasn’t sure in which
direction I was looking.

Though the silence was complete, I had a
tingly feeling at the base of my spine. I couldn’t see anything out
of the ordinary, but I knew that something was off. Feeling fear
and terrible disorientation, I stared into the mist. I sat for a
long time. The sky brightened, though only slightly. The sun was
well and truly blocked by the low clouds that surrounded me. Then
there was just the smallest noise. It was rock on rock, I knew
that, and it could just as easily have been an animal as a person,
but I knew that it was no animal. Though the sound had not been
close, nor had it come from behind me, I could not pinpoint it and
the fear came to me in a deluge. Squinting into the dimness, I saw
a shape moving on the street below. I felt so exposed. Though I was
eighteen stories up, I felt that this person, if he or she were to
look up, would be able to see me and would be on me so quickly that
there would be no chance of escape. It was ridiculous, of course,
just the blind panic of a rabbit or squirrel. Regardless, I sat
petrified, able only to stare at the shape as it made its way
through the street.

It didn’t take long for the shape to
multiply. It was soon joined by many others, and they were moving
quietly up and down in the morning’s gloom. As more of them
appeared my fear of them diminished rather than increased. They
were not soldiers. Sightings of the enemy were infrequent, but most
nights we could hear the helicopters and the gunshots. When we saw
them they always moved in formation and there were always vehicles.
But that was not the case here. Even at such a height I could see
that there were both men and women, moving with a defined purpose,
but in no particular arrangement. They helped each other through
the tough spots while larger ones stayed to the front and sides to
keep everyone corralled together. Small forms huddled close to the
large ones and I knew that there were children as well.
Children!
I watched them for a while, allowing my composure
to sink back into my consciousness. When finally I felt that my
legs would not wobble under my weight, I stood up and began the
slow climb down the hill.

I hadn’t a clearly defined plan until I saw
that Jennie had not left. She lay sleeping on the floor in the spot
we had decided was safe. For the briefest of moments, I considered
leaving her there, thinking that it was what she would want. I
believed completely that she had stuck to that spot out of a
stubborn desire to keep it from me. What right had I to it? Then I
was beside her, gently shaking her, for I had found that her
presence had filled out my thoughts and ideas. That she was there
made me realize what losing her had meant.