The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [54]
Short of breath, he collapsed back into his chair, where he picked up the phone and listened for the dial tone. Reassured by this—a fact that both amazed and annoyed him—he decided to call one of the other attorneys scheduled for his 9:15 conference call.
“Oh yeah, it’s off,” his fellow doctor of jurisprudence confirmed after Martin reached him on his third attempt.
“So what’s going on? Have you heard anything?”
“As far as I know, someone hijacked a fleet of commercial jets and flew at least two of them into the towers.”
Martin digested this information before he spoke.
“So there are more?”
“I don’t know—there could be,” said the esquire, who worked on the forty-fourth floor of a building on Fifth Avenue where Martin had been any number of times. “I’m getting out of here, though.”
After he hung up, Martin pictured what was going on just outside his door—and, he reckoned, in every other building in Manhattan—as his coworkers fled for their lives. It was not difficult to imagine them rushing through the halls, carrying picture frames, documents, laptop computers, bananas, bottled water, and bagels as they flooded toward the hated elevator banks. He wondered if the elevators were even working, or if they had been shut off due to planes flying into the World Trade Center.
He stared at his phone, and it rang. “Marty—thank god I got through—have you seen this?” It was his sister, Suzie, calling from Massachusetts.
To hear her voice made his chest collapse, as for the first time he pictured real people on the planes and in the burning towers. “Yeah, Suze,” he said hoarsely. He cleared his throat and tried to sound more cavalier, which at that moment seemed to be the only option short of breaking down. “Front-row seat.”
“What are you doing there?”
“I don’t know,” Martin admitted. “Everyone’s leaving, but I can’t face the elevator right now.”
“What?” She barely paused before responding. “Martin, you’re in shock. Listen to me: leave now, okay?” Her tone softened. “Seriously, big brother—do you want to get hurt on your birthday?”
Martin shook his head “No, I don’t—I’m leaving—don’t worry, I’ll be fine.”
“Okay, good,” she said. “Call me when you get home.”
“I will,” he promised and gently hung up the phone.
MARTIN KNEW THAT his sister was at least partially right, and it now seemed unreasonable just to sit in his office during an apocalypse. “I should go,” he resolved and again picked up his briefcase and took a step toward the door. But the word evacuation reeled through his mind, and he resented the idea of being forced to go anywhere on someone else’s schedule, particularly that of some dumb terrorists, wherever they were from. He mentally apologized to his sister and vowed not to succumb.
He went back to his desk, where from a lower drawer he extracted a bottle of whiskey, the depleted contents of which he noted with remorse before he realized that a second one behind it was completely full. As he poured himself a shot, a chill went through him that was not exactly unfamiliar but that he had not felt in many years, namely since those horrible months before he tested positive for HIV. He had not been particularly sick at the time, much less bedridden—to the contrary, he was working more than ever—but had nevertheless been unable to shake a vague but unsettling cold and frailty, as though his bones were already deteriorating in his body. Yet he could barely acknowledge the symptoms, much less the idea that his life might be ending, even after the doctor informed him of the verdict.
It was not until much later—when the death sentence had been effectively commuted by his “cocktail” of meds—that he felt more capable of describing the chill in terms of something he had gone through as a child, i.e., the “temperature