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  With love to John, James, Paul, and Jonah, who have endured much.

  As I looked to the east · right into the sun,

  I saw a tower on a toft · worthily built;

  A deep dale to the west · and a dungeon therein,

  With deep ditches and dark · and dreadful of sight.

  A fair field full of folk · found I in between,

  Of all manner of men · the rich and the poor,

  Working and wandering · as the world asketh.

  —Piers Plowman

  Are not two sparrows sold for a copper coin? Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father knowing it. Even the hairs of your head are counted. So do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.

  —Matthew 10:29–31

  || PART ONE || if tonight were not a crooked trail

  1

  July 4, 1976: the night they met: mere children but they didn’t feel so. A night of celebration, a million or more marched from subways to the river, George among them, Anna too, his first real vision of her on the train, amid that throng. When they got to the street the crowds expanded, the people like pilgrims, like pictures you saw of pilgrims, moving in a stupor of faith down Cortlandt and Rector, up Water and Wall, a multitude of believers in the moral force behind the founding of the republic. The nation’s tarnished history lay light on their shoulders—they were partygoers, after all, it was the bicentennial and a redemptive-seeming election was on. The country hadn’t yet slow-squeezed the hope out of all but its richest citizens and this grand show was their official fun in the silvered darkness, requiring only a fifty-cent token for the trains. They were here for the fireworks, which came in culmination of a long, decent day, absent so far as they knew the customary lies and assassinations—a day full of tall ships on the river and barbecues and beer on its banks. Now they walked and walked until the water stopped them, with the mammoth towers behind them to the east and the blackening Hudson to the west—a crowd ready to see these fireworks, fireworks such, allegedly, as there had never been, to be set ablaze in the smudged twilight sky above the harbor, with its gathering of sailing ships from around the world. The ships were at anchor, sails furled, creating a seascape of spindly masts like crosses, each awaiting its thief, its zealot or its redeemer.

  George had a special interest in the boats; he was an adequate sailor and had worked for three years in a shipyard in Connecticut. He had never seen the likes of the largest of these vessels, which he’d viewed passing that afternoon up the Hudson, two dozen enormous eighteenth-century ships. You’d have to go to Newport to set foot on anything even remotely close. Of the smaller ships, which were small only relatively, there must have been more than a hundred.

  The piece of property on which the crowd gathered was a landfill, a moonscape of gritty dunes plunked into the river behind the Trade Towers, beyond the gothic remains of the old West Side Highway, which they passed beneath to reach this place, an unexpected gray beach; it was covered with many manner of Americans, mostly youthful—the walk required it—but of every kind, locals and tourists, rich and poor, the colors and the races, giving each other room but still, together. George Langland would come to know that there were moments like this in the life of a city when everyone joined—everyone was fused—in a semi-unified emotional experience. This was his first such moment; he would be twenty come November, an eastern Connecticut boy, and he found himself (usually detached, notoriously a cynic) stunned, unbelieving, at how many people there were, chaotically grouped and thoughtless as bison crossing this sandy nothing. And how genial. The city functioned every day as a dotted map of safe zones amid swathes of jagged hostility and potential violence: but there seemed to be none of that. Here was a new colony, half-stoned, a cheerful drove in milky light, settling the moon—the moon, which had been conquered seven years before, it seemed two or three lifetimes back, George twelve, his mother still alive. She woke him at two a.m. to sit on the couch with her while she smoked Raleighs with her bare legs curled beneath her, to watch the men—dressed as Diver Dan and moving as slowly—stiff-walking and bouncing, looking absurd, across gray desert, planting the flutterless aluminum USA flags to claim the place for their kingdom. He remembered his mother remarking, well, this flag-planting thing was always a good idea, historically, it never caused a problem, it went over well with all concerned. And next day came the golfing, spraying the lunar landscape with Titleist, those boys from NASA—static crack static roger Houston static that was ahh static static about ahh static fifteen hundred yard static crack—electric wash and white noise and whistle and hum of two hundred thousand soul-breaching miles. Sure wish we static static static drive them like static back on the big blue, over static static static. That’s… roger Eagle. NASA hadn’t trained ground control in jovial banter. Cronkite translated for them, adopted a cheerful tone and twinkly half smile—since the day John Kennedy died, the man’s eyebrows had spoken the mood of the nation—to explain how, gravitationally liberated, the astronauts could jump ten feet straight up from the surface, even in their stony costumes, and their golf balls took off like missiles (one-sixth the gravity, he intoned, that holds us to the planet Earth). And who—who?—would have thought they’d have stashed their clubs and balls and tees and whatnot in the tight little cabin of that spider-legged, foil-wrapped pod they’d arrived in? Whatever you do, boys, don’t forget your golf clubs when you’re heading up to the fucking moon.

  * * *

  SEVEN YEARS LATER almost to the day, the small dunes of New York City rose and fell and the gravity was pure sea-level American East Coast. The landfill sand was dense and firm and seemed darkish in color, unpleasantly crunchy beneath their sandals and sneakers, inexplicably moist in an unhealthy, oily sort of way. Some serious hippies were humping it barefoot, which George felt was a little… what? Unwise. Over-ideological. He tried to imagine where the powers in charge of New York City infrastructure could have gotten all this dingy moist sand, tried to imagine what befoulments might be in it—and how they could have deposited it all right here. Much of the denser stuff—the schist and rock and paltry earth—would have come from the foundations of the towers behind them, dug up there and distributed here to the riverbed. But whence the sand, brother? And now, tonight, standing upon it, so many people—the subway had been as crowded as it was possible to make it, completely jammed full, including George, going into his second year at Columbia that September, staying on campus for the summer, and his friends, most of whom had left town in May but returned for this, a national display. They’d all been in Riverside Park that afternoon smoking weed, watching the ships cruise by, stunning and romantic, full sail, with the uptown Puerto Rican and Dominican families picnicking all around them in the thick heat on the closed West Side Highway, folding chairs and hibachis, blankets and shoes and kids’ toys all planted right out on the radiator asphalt, a kind of miraculous dispensation.

  At this moment George, no longer stoned, but in that pre-headache state which followed, everything in sharp outline, a hollow acutance, was interested only in the girl; he had not yet learned her name. She was small, dark, and gracefully curved, with green eyes that offered a view into what seemed a calm and melancholy set of rooms. Rough bangs and brown hair hanging at her shoulders. A red cotton plaid shirt, o
ld and soft, opened and pulled backward by its own weight revealing neck and upper back more than chest. She was not wearing a bra; her breasts were lovely. He felt himself drawn to certain women based on hints of liveliness and danger in their intelligence; alert, quick to laugh, vivid-eyed. Again, his mother flashed through his mind. She never let up, even dead. Especially dead. The girl, to accompany the shirt, wore cutoff Levi’s. Keds with open laces. A patriotic outfit, purely American. She was a friend of Geist’s: translation, she had slept with Geist, a prosperous Lothario from Princeton, but, according to Michael, who had run into her and invited her, she was not sleeping with him now.

  George carried a mini-cooler with the neck of an actually decent bottle of Chablis, already corked, sticking out of the unclosed top, plus, buried in a withered-looking baggie in his shorts’ pocket like a codpiece, a quarter ounce of good Colombian: tawny weed with big sticky buds, three joints already rolled. He and she and everyone else slogged up dune and down and up again, they were like a million dumb explorers who’d all decided to go to the south pole at the same time, the grayish brown grit dusting up beneath their sandals and All Stars and forest-green Pumas: the crowd knowledge homing in on the not yet visible southwestern tip of the landfill.

  Her name was Anna. Anna Goff.

  Some of their friends were ahead, some left, some right, and, in their own small group, besides George and Anna, was Robbie, a year ahead of George and his mentor at Spectator, the campus daily where George was an assignment reporter and Robbie was news manager; dragging a few feet behind, the elaborate genius-math-major-stoner, Logan, who came from Hawaii and spent all his non-toking time, especially midnight to five a.m., in the mainframe computer bunker located under the physics building. This was one of the rare occasions when he could be seen without his rubber-banded stack of beige punch cards.

  They sat finally, in that grubby dirt-sand. The fireworks started to gasps and a cheer. A joint was passed and soon they were stoned again. George was lying back, seeing directly above him not so much the fireworks display, which went on and on and on, but the flashes of color higher up, ghostly paint spills come and gone across the charcoal fabric of things.

  He sat up, took a drink of the wine, handed it to her. The wine was good. He flopped back down again.

  This wine is good, he said.

  It is, she said. It is good.

  Too bad we’re not in Spain, he said, and this isn’t a Hemingway story with a somehow miserable but inconclusive ending. In which some things are good and other things are not good and what we have is that we know what’s good and what’s not good and the others don’t know, they confuse what’s good and what’s not good. Which is not good. But we know. This is what makes us good.

  She was watching the fireworks, like blossoms of colored light. Logan and Robbie were a few feet away sharing one of the fat joints and discussing the election.

  But we’re doomed of course, she said. We can never be together. You were injured during the war, you know, down there. And I’m a nymphomaniac.

  What? said Logan. What was that?

  It’s from Hemingway, George said. Don’t get yourself excited.

  I never get excited, Logan said.

  Unless you can get Fortran to spell fuck on a screen, Robbie said.

  I’ve done that, Logan said.

  Why am I not surprised, Robbie said.

  George took advantage of Anna looking at the glittering color to look not at it but at her. Her face, impossibly sensual. It was the mouth, the cheekbones and chin. Her eyes threw out enough intelligence to knock you backward if you didn’t love intelligence, weren’t drawn to it as George was—a taste his mother had induced in him. He pulled his eyes away from her, looked at the mini-cooler and the neck of the bottle. The wine would soon be finished. He would leave his stupid little cooler here. Make it part of the fundament.

  Andrew and Robbie had relighted the joint. Robbie took a pull at it and a seed popped, essentially blowing it up as if it were a trick cigar.

  Fuuuck, Robbie said.

  Somebody didn’t justly clean this leaf, Andrew said.

  I’ve been busy, George called out. I was memorizing the Declaration of Independence.

  Well, you’ve fucked up my pursuit of happiness, Robbie said. Piece almost went in my eye. Plus you’re named George, not a good sign during the revolution.

  George Washington, George said.

  Robbie said, George the Third, fucker, is who you are if the joint blows up.

  He repaired and relit the bone and handed it across the informal space that marked George and Anna apart from the other two. Time stretched itself out like a tablecloth spread on the grass. Behind them, the two towers, like huge magic boxes: they reflected the harbor lights and the fireworks, in long panels, geometric slices running in impossible rows down the side of the building, thinly divided. Like a mural—narrow strips, cut up. An abstract. George touched her shoulder to show her and they turned to face opposite, watching the flat fragments of incoherent colors on the two looming immensities. A million other people were staring in the wrong direction. Within a few minutes they were lying closer together but only the upper portions of their bodies. Shoulder to shoulder, heads tilted in and touching.

  Would it be a cliché to refer here to the black monolith in Kubrick’s 2001? George said.

  Yes, that would be a cliché, she said.

  Then I won’t do that, he said. Did you see when that French guy crossed between the towers on a high wire? Petit?

  I never saw it, she said. You don’t pronounce the t.

  What? George said.

  Petit. You don’t pronounce the final t. It’s like putty but the accent’s reversed.

  Thank you, George said. Putt-EE. I was looking at it on television and I couldn’t accept that it was true. And he stayed out there for a long time too. Dancing around, taunting the cops. Forty-mile-an-hour winds, a hundred stories high. Helicopters zooming around up above him. There were shots from the ground, he looked tiny as an insect with the pole sticking out, you couldn’t believe it.

  She stared for a time, as if trying to imagine it.

  How enclosed he must have felt, she said. Or been able to feel. That’s what I can’t imagine. The state of mind.

  I never got that far, George said. I’m all about the insane height.

  You wouldn’t maybe notice the height, she said, if you were all wrapped up in yourself, in this magical space you’re occupying.

  Again quiet. And then she said: I can’t decide what I think about these buildings. I like them right now, but sometimes I can’t bear them.

  I always like them, he said. I have an uncle who worked on them.

  Tonight, she said, when we’re lying right underneath them—

  She paused. He made an approving, go-on sound: Hmm?

  They’re beautiful, she said. It was weed profundity. George could hear that she felt it—they’re beautiful. They were beautiful. The size was part of it, the widths were massive too: you didn’t notice this from greater distances. So was the twinness. So was the coloration of the glass and steel, in the changing light of all the days and nights, the dawns and dusks, the skies gray or pink or occasionally that divine, transparent blue.

  * * *

  THE JOINT HAD gone out and, with the boom of the fireworks behind them, he relit it. Then they lay back and answered questions about their lives. She was at Barnard, same year as he, studying comp-lit Spanish and politics, the closest she could get to Latin American studies, which Barnard did not have; she was trying to take most of her courses in the department at Columbia but there were no end of hassles and, as she bluntly put the matter, they hated women. The English department too, he told her, was known for hating women. Yes, she’d heard that. He wanted to touch her, pull her close to him and smell the back of her neck and down between her shoulder blades, where, he’d seen in the inches-away proximity of the train, a hint of dark fuzzy hair ran down; that rearward scoop neck, the skin of
her upper back, but they’d only been together what? Ninety minutes? She was from Pennsylvania. Where. She didn’t want to say. Why not? Just didn’t. Central, she said finally. Not far from Harrisburg. Okay, he said. Eventually the show was over, the deep booms and the quick pops, the crowd’s somehow insignificant pleasure, given its vastness, what seemed like thin applause in the humid night; he preferred the sky imbued with its own light—he had not realized it before but fireworks didn’t merely bore him, they actually irritated him. There it was, another adult fact to file: he still savored it, his daily autonomous creation of himself, the grown-up version of himself, a peeling away of childhood propaganda and family myth and incorrect hometown articles of faith. He had spent his childhood and adolescence burning for freedom. And here it was, as sweet as he’d imagined it would be. He was, he now knew, a disdainer of fireworks. They’d be fine if one were a primitive—shit, you’d worship them—but now, cinema and books and premarital sex had been invented, so why was everyone standing there slack-jawed staring at the sky? Ooh. Ahh. All across the harbor and up into the mouth of the Hudson were dozens of the anchored works of art and engineering, the elaborate masts, sails lowered, tied to booms, needle-sharp silhouettes, a fabulous clustering of aquatic woodwork. Everyone rose, collected, brushed, tramped in ragtag retreat out of the landfill and back toward West Street.

  Robbie called after him: Your cooler!

  I’m leaving it for the future, George said. Then he and Anna angled northward and Robbie and Andrew were lost behind. The crowd, with everyone departing at once, soon became enormous, frightening, like some night exodus from a war-torn land, the bottom of Manhattan. He kept himself adjusted to the angles of the towers—really you couldn’t imagine the mass of them until you were near, and once departed you couldn’t reimagine that mass again until next time you stood beneath them. They were almost completely dark, now that the light show was over, like two rising tunnels into the black attic of the universe.