The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [69]
“Likewise,” Lucien offered tepidly, dismayed by the ambivalence he detected. “Are you going back to Vienna soon?”
Eduard nodded. “Tomorrow afternoon.”
“Tomorrow afternoon!” Lucien cried, unable to restrain himself. “Will you be coming back soon? I’d like to see you again—I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed talking to someone so much.”
Eduard pursed his lips and considered Lucien for a second before he laughed. “I find myself oddly defenseless.” He looked at his watch. “I really must get back to my hotel to supervise the packing,” he explained, “but if you care to come along, I could be persuaded to share another drink.”
Lucien nodded—of course he would go, and might have killed himself had Eduard not invited him—but if in one second he felt as if he were made of light and air, and was tempted to mock the moody, downcast version of himself who had been moping around under Codruta’s wing just a short time earlier, in the next he felt his throat constrict, less in anticipation of the night ahead than with sadness as he envisioned the next morning, when he would have to say good-bye. It pained him to think of living so far away from Eduard, but he decided it was a good, universal kind of pain—a pain of real love, perhaps—and one that needed to be experienced to be understood.
20
A Section That May Be Skipped by Anyone Not Particularly Impressed by Thinking as an Occupation
NEW YORK CITY, 2001. The towers were gone. Martin turned away, no longer able to watch. He spent a few minutes on the Internet, where he read that the attacks appeared to be over—a fourth plane had gone down in a field in Pennsylvania—but the city was effectively paralyzed. He gathered some documents from his desk, inserted them into his briefcase, and paused: did he really need any of this paperwork, filled with the hieroglyphics of law and business? He remembered Jay’s suggestion that he quit his job, and far from fanciful, it now seemed necessary, as if having witnessed such a radical event demanded from him an equally radical response. He considered his office, and already it resonated with the sepia tones of a faded photograph.
He walked empty-handed toward reception, observing desks covered with half-eaten muffins, uncradled phones, open spreadsheet applications, and other evidence of evacuation. He rode down the elevator and walked through the lobby and he tried not to think about anything—especially what he suspected would be a seven-mile walk home—as he inched forward in the compressed isolation of the glass chamber of the revolving door. The sidewalk was both better and worse than anticipated, for while the day remained pristine, and demanded to be acknowledged as such, the sun was too bright, which made the acrid smell of burning chemicals and broken gas lines—not to mention the unprecedented sight of the thousands trudging past, diverging around him as if he were a rock in a stream—all the more surreal. He stood paralyzed by the procession: although a few people here and there seemed to be heading east or west, hardly anyone went south, with the great majority marching up Seventh Avenue toward Central Park. Again Martin condemned the terrorists for destroying the ordered chaos of the city, the hypnotic ebb and flow that bore no relation to this muted, downtrodden parade of refugees, but with no choice in the matter, he immersed himself in their ranks.
He had taken only a few steps when his attention was diverted by a pickup truck, the bed of which held an assortment of ghostlike figures whose dust-covered clothes led him to assume that they had been much closer to the site of the falling towers. While this scene aroused his sympathy, he found himself distracted by a second group—civilians, as far as he could tell, and apparently uninjured in any way—running alongside of and in front of the truck, furiously waving and shouting at those before them to move out of the way. The ardor expended on this task hardly seemed necessary given how willingly