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By Root 419 0

inversions” he used to experience on summer vacation, those odd days at the beach when a ghostly fog would drift in from the sea and leave your skin damp and raw no matter what you were wearing. He realized that the terror he experienced as an adult was a sense not only that something was seriously wrong—which, of course, it was—but also that it was simply a matter of time before the tide came in and swept him out forever. As Martin considered the scene in front of him, there was something similarly indescribable and terrifying about it, but by the same token, his earlier confrontation with mortality—and his continuing familiarity with it, in the form of the pills he took every day, each one a rock in the temporary jetty—explained his reluctance to cave in to his fear. What he saw outside hovered so much more distantly than what he had already endured, and still did, even if the virus was suppressed. Rather than flee death, he felt obliged to confront it, to stare it down, to meditate on it and even to mock it, all in the attempt to gain some kind of power or control.

He poured himself a new drink and proposed a toast, as much to his reflection as to what lay beyond it: “To the shittiest birthday ever,” he saluted, glass raised, “and even worse, one I will never forget.”

THE WHISKEY NULLIFIED Martin’s thoughts for a few seconds as a slight tingling spread from his stomach to his fingertips. Though he was not about to leave—despite the chills that continued periodically to pass through him—it occurred to him that he might find some solace in one of his LPs. It was only when listening to music that he had ever been able to grieve, to cry real tears of anger and remorse as he pictured his life ending at such an absurd and unanticipated juncture, and how hard it was to tell the younger version of himself—with whom he inevitably associated such songs—the sad news.

He weighed his options carefully; far from wanting to denigrate or belittle the moment, he wanted to reflect its gravity in a mournful and perhaps even resigned way that acknowledged a sense of aching fear, of melancholy and impotence. Almost of its own accord, his hand reached over to his shelves and extracted A Gift from a Flower to a Garden, a double LP by Donovan, a work Martin had always associated with the kind of pathos displayed by a precocious child on the verge of madness. On the cover, Donovan could be seen in a lavender-filtered photograph dressed in an Indian caftan and appearing to offer the listener a tufted poppy. It might have come across as a caricature of hippie idealism—the musical ghetto where Donovan was so often pigeonholed—were it not for what appeared to be dark rings around his eyes, an effect of the saturated exposure of the shot and his barely tinted sunglasses, as if he were already haunted by the manic dreams he offered.

As Martin listened to the crack and hiss of the needle against the vinyl, followed by Donovan’s whispered lyrics, he looked out the window and was newly astonished by the amount of smoke that continued to pour forth from the towers. More unbelievably, the north tower began to vibrate like a corrugated sheet of metal before it buckled and collapsed, as if a bomb had been detonated underneath it. As a mushroom cloud erupted from the site, Martin remembered a passage in which Thoreau described the deafening groan of the last of a stand of majestic white pines being felled by two woodmen with a crosscut saw. Though he could hear nothing except Donovan’s soft voice and an acoustic guitar, the destruction at hand seemed no less egregious, although the remorse he felt was as much for the building and those he imagined inside it as for himself, as if just by being alive he was in some way responsible for this monstrous act.

MARTIN’S HEAD POUNDED slowly and even dogmatically to such an extent that he was reminded of a tolling church bell. Determined to finish what he had started, he poured himself another shot and flipped over the record; as he swiveled back to face the window, beads of sweat rolled down the sides of his