The Driver (4 page)

SEPTEMBER
11, 2001

I suspected something was wrong when I tuned in Howard Stern—even through soap-clogged ears I heard his typical cadence replaced by intermittent remarks and dead air. I grabbed a towel, ran out onto the fire escape, and saw the black shape of the second plane across the North Tower's face.

It was just after nine o'clock in the morning.

The South Tower exploded northward. I, who'd long considered myself an intelligent person capable of logical jumps, didn't even guess what had happened.

 

My father was extraordinarily protective of his sons, but I couldn't remember him speaking more then a few words to me until I turned ten. “Stop complaining,” he'd say before I did, or “Come sit,” a euphemism for keeping him company while I did homework. His wisdom was revealed on fragmentary tablets, and only at twelve did I first realize the difference in having a father one generation older than those of my friends. Sometimes he inexplicably stopped midstory, then continued another from weeks or months earlier, and the stories would converge in an uncomfortable moment whose meaning remained unclear to me for years. Only in my twenties did I grasp that their conclusions were withheld until I'd reached the age at which he'd lived them.

“You're such a complainer,” was his answer to my request for a new G.I. Joe action figure. “You've no idea how lucky you are. The Luftwaffe bombed our house when
I
was your age, in Brussels. Everyone panicked. My best friend Jojo's parents said everyone should go to the station to get a train to Paris, but Tata said that was suicide. You remember your grandfather Tata, don't you? Jojo wanted to stay with us and he cried when they dragged him away. We didn't own a car and Tata couldn't drive, but my brother Jack—he'd just turned seventeen—suggested we break into the Citroën dealer and steal a car. Jack read all the car magazines. Jack said the newer ones had easier clutches and he could figure it out. When we got there all the windows were smashed. All the new models had been stolen. We heard the explosions getting closer. The Junkers were flying over the city. In the back we found an older-model Citroën with a hand crank, and your Tata and I got on our knees and cranked and cranked until it started. We sat in the front and your aunt Janette and Mama got in the back, and we picked up an older couple Tata knew and—”

My father told me this story more than once, always pausing in the same place.

“—and…Jack…he struggled to keep the car going. There were people everywhere, and the engine stalled every time he stopped to avoid hitting someone. And people were trying to climb into the car. And they were on top. And Jack—”

At this point he always stopped, eyes slightly out of focus, and just barely stopped himself from crying before continuing.

“My poor brother, my poor Jack. He fought with the transmission and got the engine started again. He always got it started.”

Jack was killed five years later. He joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, rapidly completed navigator and flight engineer training, and was shot down over Munich in the closing days of the war.

“What,” I asked the first time my father told this story, “happened to Jojo?”

“What do you think? The Nazis strafed the train and killed them all.”

“What about your house?”

“It's still there. So is the building where Tata had his matchbook factory.”

I didn't know what to make of this.

“Tata had to start over again, in Paris. But he never complained. Then the Nazis took Paris, and we fled to Toulouse and he started over again. And Tata never complained. Then they came to Toulouse and we fled to Spain. He had many friends in shipping. He wanted to take us to New York, but some of the boats full of refugees to America were turned back, so Tata found a boat to Canada. And he started over again. And still he never complained.”

All this precipitated because of the new swivel-arm G.I. Joe available for $11.99 at the Lamston's across the street, or $8.99 with the coupon I was poised to show him before he began.

“You listen to me with this toy you want. Don't be a complainer. Do your best with what you have. Never give up. And don't panic.”

“But all I wanted was—”

“Enough.”

 

Don't panic.

And I didn't, standing in the shower that Tuesday morning. My staff would just be arriving at the Europe By Car office on William Street, three blocks east of the World Trade Center. Europe By Car was the last family-owned independent European car rental agency in the United States. We were the last fish in a sea of larger sharks. I was responsible not only for my brother and mother, but for this legacy my father left me, and that meant looking after our employees, a second family that had been part of my life ever since I'd been a secretary there during high school summers.

I had to turn the staff around, send them home, get them out of the black smoke and away from whatever was happening. The rest of the staff would still be on the subway, heading south toward the disaster. They would emerge on Broadway, one block east of the Trade Center, the worst possible place to be in case the buildings fell. My knowledge of structural engineering failures was based on a boyhood visit to Pisa, and a domino-style toppling toward the east would crush the seven-story building in which we worked.

I'd still have to go down there myself and wait for them. It was my responsibility.

I called Alfred, but all cell circuits were busy.

I ran south on West Broadway, the streets strangely devoid of rush-hour traffic, people clustered around stationary cars with their windows down, radios blaring local news. I ran down the center of the road as far as Canal Street, almost halfway to my office, stopped to catch my breath, and was nearly run over by a convoy of fire trucks and unmarked police cars heading in the same direction. I chased after them until, just a few blocks north of the Trade Center, a police officer stopped me from going any farther.

I called the office. All circuits were still busy.

I ran east and south, passing a group of gawkers silently surrounding an aircraft engine smoldering in the middle of the street. I made it as far as Broadway and Liberty, one block east of the Trade Center, and looked up.

The South Tower loomed above, paper and debris drifting down and collecting at the feet of the crowd around me. Tiny specks fell from the top. People were jumping.

I didn't quite believe or understand how or why, but the building's top began to shake, the tower's grand vertical lines blurring in what had to be some entirely explicable optical effect of the heat and thickening smoke, when suddenly the tower's length began to compress, enormous pieces cascading onto the fire trucks and police cars visible below. The crowd began screaming above the rumble of the great structure's fall.

Then I remembered more paternal advice born of the war—advice so obvious that I didn't need to recall the story ending with it.

Don't stick around burning buildings
—

But it was too late. The crowd began to turn and flee toward me. I hesitated to help a woman who'd fallen over her own high heels. I tried to hand her one of her shoes, but she grabbed my wrist and pulled me east toward Nassau Street. I took one last look over my shoulder, but the tower was gone, engulfed in a cloud half the building's former height. A ten-story-tall tidal wave of gray smoke and debris headed straight toward us.

I ran after her, passing Nassau Street, hopping over abandoned briefcases and shoes and glasses. I couldn't know how much time I had before I was overwhelmed by this seemingly fatal wall. William Street was less than a block away. If I could just make it there, I might find safety in the lobby of the Chase Bank—certainly the sturdiest building within range.

The bank's entrance was filled with people trying to get inside.

Seconds remained.

I spied a dump truck, but the space beneath it was full of people.

That left only the Mobile Fried Chicken van, the one place I'd sought to avoid since moving the office downtown a year and a half earlier. I sprinted, crouching behind whatever safety the large yellow van might offer, hoping its inventory of frozen chicken would offer some protection. It didn't occur to me that I might get boiled in a rain of cooking oil, grease, and crispy wings.

 

“Do you believe in God?” I once asked my father.

I'd never been a religious person. My mother, who grew up in East Germany and never met her handsome, literary father, a
Panzergrenadier
officer killed in the siege of Sebastopol in 1944, had, despite everything, remained an innocent soul with faith in the ultimate goodness of people. My father was an atheist who'd renounced even the secular Judaism of his parents, the only unit of his extended family to escape the concentration camps. He believed in basic tenets of goodness common to all religions, and, he hoped, other atheists—honesty, hard work, and loyalty. What he saw when his U.S. Army unit liberated Buchenwald turned out the light upon whatever faith he had remaining.

“Please,” he said, pursing his lips.

 

The rumble grew closer. I fell into a fetal position and pulled my messenger bag over my head.

It was time to pull out whatever prayers I knew, except that I didn't know any.

“Here it comes!”
someone yelled.

I prayed that whatever God was listening would grant me this one reprieve and forgive my minor sins. I couldn't remember any major ones, and I wondered how many minor ones equaled…but by then it was too late to equivocate or lie to the creator(s).

If I make it, I'll be good, or at least better, and live, really LIVE
—

The cloud washed over me.

It was empty, a cloud of dust so thick that I inhaled what tasted like bits of wet paper. I could possibly hold my breath for sixty seconds, then I would be in trouble. I opened my eyes. I could barely see my own hands. It was as dark as an undersea cave where mutated fish navigate by their own luminescence.

Silence. Then sirens. Screams. Finished.

With both hands I reached down and pulled up a damp clump of debris. I squeezed, confused, and dropped something with the size and weight of a baseball. Whatever was accumulating was thick enough to suffocate me if I didn't get inside and find air.

I crawled along the edge of the van, feeling my way to its rear bumper. Heat rises, firemen say. Stay low. But there was no fire, and staying low meant kicking up more of the debris and dust that passed through the shirt I'd pulled over my nose and mouth.

A nearby woman called out for help, but I couldn't see, let alone find, her.

I stood in a half crouch, as if this would protect me from whatever else might fall from above. My office lobby had to be no more than fifty feet away. I walked slowly in what seemed the right direction, both hands thrust out like a blind man who's lost his cane, and stumbled on a curb as my limited air gave out.

I wasn't going to make it. I crawled over the curb, reached out, and felt steps.

 

“So you don't believe in anything?” I asked my father a month before he died.

His voice was scarred from the twin tracheostomies he'd endured, making him, despite his weakness, even more imposing.

“Only once…did anything ever happen to make me believe in something…else. I was in the U.S. Army hospital near Saumur, in France. There's a tank museum there now. I can't remember the year. You should go see it.”

We'd been there together. More than once. He'd long feared losing his memory, and his stories were increasingly underscored with items he didn't want to forget, and wanted me to know he remembered. “I was sitting outside in the woods, laughing at how pathetic my injury was when so many others there had lost arms, legs. Then my heart seized. I thought it was subconscious guilt at my good fortune. I thought I was paralyzed. I couldn't speak. I couldn't call for help. When I came to I knew something bad had happened.” His eyes welled up. “A few days later they gave me a letter. My brother Jack…my poor brother Jack…was dead. Shot down. Jack was dead.”

He paused. “I don't know. How could I have known? Maybe there's something. There has to be something…to explain how…”

 

A door opened against my shoulder. Two sets of hands grabbed me, raised me up, and pulled me inside. It was Jerry and Stavros, the Greek father and son who'd opened a deli in our lobby just a few weeks earlier. Several people screamed when they saw me, and as I was helped past the mirror behind the counter I understood why. I was white from head to toe, as if spray-painted, and from a single point on my right temple a line of blood splayed out across my neck and shoulder.

 

“What do you want me to do with the business?” I asked my father a week before he died, just a few days before his revelation about The Driver.

“You want to write, you want to paint. You think you want to do something else. But never forget, Europe By Car must survive. It's the one thing that has made everything possible. Since the war. Since I came here with Tata. Everything you have comes from that. From the business.”

 

Someone doused my head with water, revealing only a superficial cut, and then my right hand, VP, and surrogate brother Alfred Celentano, and the rest of the Europe By Car staff emerged from a side door leading to the emergency stairs. I saw the momentary fear on his face replaced by relief, and then I realized not only how lucky I'd been, but also how irresponsible.

That was the first time I truly understood my father's inner conflict, and the choice he'd made. I had inherited not only his desire to find The Driver, but also his responsibilities. Just as he had backed out of the Cannonball for his family, I'd have to give up my quest for as long as it took to look after the business.