… sometimes people simply disappear. One morning they go to the airport out among the paddocks at the edge of the city and fly away. Over the ocean, hour upon hour of watery blue, light to dark to light, before touchdown and transfer and more hours, blurry with jetlag across the whole span of the continent until seatbelts are fastened and they sway down at last to solid ground.
This part Emma can imagine. Her father seated by a window, glancing out at America, eager to get there, to check into the hotel, shower, stretch out at last on the long bed and sleep. He hated flying, even in the privileged seats, his big body crammed into the spaces deemed ergonomically feasible for the transportation of the human anatomy.
In theory, he was fascinated by flight, its engineering, its history, bringing back for his children, when they were small, models of early flying machines purchased at some science museum. His gifts tended toward the instructional. He thought it important that they should be scientifically informed. She remembers a microscope, a kit for growing crystals, balsawood dinosaurs. ‘Look at this!’ he’d say, calling them to examine a monarch breaking free from its green chrysalis, or running a magnet underneath a sheet of white paper onto which he had spilled dust and leaf mould scooped from the spouting. Tiny flecks of black skittered over the page, shreds of molten iron, molten nickel. The air wasn’t empty at all, but filled with all sorts of stuff: dust from meteorites and distant deserts and jungle fires and the smoke of cities far away. You didn’t notice unless you paid proper attention.
She remembers sitting at the table, glueing a model of a little gondola slung from a giant bird while her brother frowned over some wings attached to a kind of bicycle. People had climbed aboard, putting their faith in paper, feathers and wire, they had leapt from high towers, beating their arms up and down, paddling frantically with their legs strapped to rudders and ancillary wings.
‘What happened?’ she said, carefully fitting slot B into slot A.
‘They crashed,’ her father said. But the crash wasn’t the point. The point was their spirit of enquiry, their determined optimism. John Damian on wings of chicken feathers flapping into the future.
She has thought of her father as she followed him across that ocean, and as she checked into the hotel: not his, which was by Central Park, near Mount Sinai, but a cheaper place off Times Square selected by the tour company as comfortable and convenient to the city’s attractions. She thinks of him as she crawls, buzzing still, into the enormous bed and is finally, mercifully, able to stretch out to full length, for, like her father, she is tall and not designed for hours in economy.
She lies looking up into the dark as her body races to adjust to a new time zone. She thinks of him when she wakes abruptly, ready to go, only to find the city in darkness. Cars pause soundlessly at the lights below her window. She is hungry and would like to go out, but she has never been here before and doesn’t know her way around. Best to wait until morning when she can find a diner. It will have bare tables and a tough waitress who will slam down her bagel. She has seen it all on screen and knows how it will be. She eats peanuts from the minibar instead and chocolate, incredibly sweet, which won’t help with the pre-race build up.
She feels the prickling at her skin that sometimes washes over her in hotel rooms: that feeling of desolation at the universal black faux leather chair, the pile-up of cushions, colour-coded on the bed. (Why do they do that? Surely everyone just tosses them straight onto the floor?) The universal bathroom with the tiles, bone white, and the bevy of tiny bottles. In their presence she can be overwhelmed by the certainty of her own anonymity. She has to force herself to lie still, close her eyes, breathe slowly, in, and out, in, and out.
She thinks of him then, and the feel of his hand holding her steady as she walked along the top of the seawall at the esplanade, the big waves gnawing at the rocks below, trying to get through. She thinks of him reaching up to hang her bird machine from a thread in the window of her room at Sumner and how it spun in the sunlight. She thinks of him in the photo, seated on the back step of the house by the river, taking off his shoes after a run, his hair damp with sweat and looking up, laughing straight into the camera. She knows it is not her but Stephie he is seeing through the lens, but it doesn’t matter. You can see the boy in that photo who existed inside their father, the same boy she heard sometimes through the wall that separated her bedroom from theirs, laughing quietly at some shared private joke. When Stephie said did she want anything, anything at all, she had said, yes, that photo. It is there, in her wallet, in her bag on the black leather chair.
She breathes in, and out, in, and out, switches on the television, watches people sitting on the sofa that is always the same sofa, set dead centre in the same room with the same staircase behind. She watches their mouths opening and closing. She breathes in, and out, in, and out, as the city fades into a pallid autumnal grey and she can go out, find that diner with the grumpy waitress, have her bagel. She walks along streets that feel, after a lifetime of movies and television, weirdly familiar, visits an art gallery, a museum. The trees in Bryant Park are already tipped with gold, and all the time there is that black hole, that absence which she cannot approach, now that she is here. She cannot even come close.
She thinks of him as she lines up for her race pack. She thinks of him as she stands in the early morning in her orange race bib, identity pinned to her chest. ‘EMMA’ above a row of numbers. The crowds, corralled by the officials, are twitchy with nerves. She is wearing old warm clothes as advised by the tour company, for they have to wait for several hours and it is cold here, in autumn, when she has left behind a country bursting into her leaf. Wear old warm clothes you can toss aside, they said, as you set out, leave them behind for the volunteers to collect for charity. She shifts from foot to foot, talks inconsequential talk with other runners as restless as herself: a woman from Berlin, a team from Minneapolis, a man running his eighth marathon. Nothing like it, he says, and he has run plenty others. In California, in Paris, in London, two a year, but this is the best. The five boroughs, the bridges, the bands, the crowds. You wait, he says, just you wait till you get to Brooklyn! Your first? Wow. You’ve come a long way for this!
She waits, trying to keep warm, trying for the perfect balance between hydration and the necessity to pee. The men, someone told her, just pee off the bridge, but it’s trickier if you’re a woman and there are long lines for the portaloos.
And the minutes tick by, the hours, and finally, they’re off! Wave after wave, the wheelchair competitors first, and the disabled, the blind with their companions. Then the élite women who lope away, graceful as cheetahs or antelopes or some creature designed by its very nature to do this, to run. And then the élite men, the ones who will chalk up spectacular times, and finally, after hours of waiting, they are released. The ones who have spent the past year running their 10 kilometres, 20 kilometres around the streets of towns and cities or along country roads or through leafy parks, in America and well beyond. Along the waterfront at St Heliers, for example, Rangitoto an elegant curve on the harbour’s glisten. She had run thinking of him then and his steady heavy tread, and his big running shoes that smelled of sweat so that they had held their noses when they were little, said, ‘Ugggh yuck! Stinky!’
She thinks of him as, one among thousands, she runs steadily upward to the crest of the bridge, legs up, arms swinging, body tilted a little, still fresh but careful to pace herself for the long road ahead.
And at the top she permits herself at last to look. There it is, on her left, the gap in the skyline. The place where flame had billowed forth and tiny people stumbled or fell or jumped from that immense height. They were consumed.
No bone. No body. Just dust blowing through the canyons between buildings. Dust that settled inches thick half a mile, a mile away. Dust that held all that was left, those tiny twisted threads of DNA to be identified in the mud that washed into sewer grates, or brushed from balconies and rooftops. Dust that blew with all the dust we leave behind, dust to dust, ashes to ashes, across continent and ocean to settle with the dust of desert, jungle and distant cities, the particles of meteors and stars, on a roof perhaps on a house on a leafy street. In the spouting. With a handful of leaf mould, perhaps, in a spouting.
People can disappear. She has no idea if this is where her father died. He left no credit card trail, no security camera footage anyone can readily identify. He had taken his passport with him from his hotel room, and his wallet and briefcase, but left behind an open suitcase of clothes and a child’s insect-collecting kit with magnifying glass, gift-wrapped, probably for Ben’s daughter.
Perhaps he ran toward disaster, driven by instinct and professional training.
Or perhaps he was there already, a tourist in the city, taking in the view from the top-floor restaurant when the world exploded under his feet. Perhaps he, too, blundered about in the smoke, or jumped or fell, diving, or lying on his back for the long seconds it took to meet the ground.
Perhaps he was one of those who grasped a tablecloth, held its corners in both hands, hoping, against all reason, for flight.
Or perhaps he was not there at all, but miles away running another …