Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [120]
It was eight forty-three. Damn! Val’s office was, what, four, five blocks away? Ten, twelve minutes at a fast limp. There goes your credibility, Ackroyd, I thought, climbing the stairs. Late for a crucial meeting. What does that say about your commitment? And where the hell is my enthusiastic impersonator? Thank you, Frankie, for coming uninvited out of the bloody past and making me late.
I turned onto West Broadway and called Val on my cell.
“Val? Hi, it’s me. Look, I’m sorry, really. I’m gonna be just a tiny bit late.”
“Clem, hi. So where are you?”
“Chambers and West. Don’t worry. I’ve got the work, and it’s good. But I had a call from home, you know? And I had to take it. Then the damn subway . . .”
Val said something I didn’t catch because a loud plane came overhead. I remember thinking it was unusual; planes don’t come in low over Lower Manhattan as a rule.
I stopped walking. I looked up at where Val’s office was, maybe thinking, stupidly, that she might be looking back at me from her window on floor 102 of the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
“Sorry, Val, I missed that.”
“I said, don’t sweat it. Right now we’re just going through some figures here.”
Something silvery, a fleck, like a fault in the clear blue sky, appeared then disappeared behind the twin towers.
I said, “Sounds like fun. I’ll —”
I pulled the phone away from my ear because it tried to savage me. A noise came out of it like . . . I still can’t say what it was like. Immensely brutal; the war cry of some huge primeval beast concentrated into a single second. Then silence.
And as I watched, the North Tower split open and extruded an impossibly vast orange-and-black flower of boiling flame and smoke, which, as it blossomed, spat out seeds of fire and steel and stone.
When the sound of it rolled down over us, we in the streets, the Spared, the Elect, began to shout obscenities and the various names of God.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Clem Ackroyd is an unreliable historian. In concocting his narrative of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he has used (and sometimes abused) material from the following books:
The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis, edited by Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow
One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War, by Michael Dobbs
Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis, by Robert F. Kennedy
The Cuban Missile Crisis: A Concise History, by Don Munton and David A. Welch.
There is some evidence that he has also accessed the websites of the National Security Archive and the Cold War International History Project.
Finally: there are still approximately seven thousand nuclear warheads in existence. More than enough to blast the planet into a perpetual winter. I assume there are people who know where they all are. But we don’t talk about them much anymore. We have other things on our minds.
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