On the Other Side(64)

As soon as the person walked away so did she. She looked at the street signs. She was already on Fourteenth Street. She wasn’t sure how she had gotten there. She could barely remember how to get to her mother’s place in the Bronx. She did know that she would have to ride the subway. She attempted to enter the first subway station she came upon. She didn’t know what train it was or where it would take her; she just wanted to get to where her mother was. She soon learned that subway service had been suspended and the city was in utter and complete chaos.

She began walking, once again. Each time she passed a street she counted it. It was if saying the numbers calmed her. She understood the numbers. It was something she could focus on that had nothing to do with all that was going on around her.

“Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen,” she said aloud.

Before she knew it, she was someplace familiar. For a moment she wondered if she was in the right place. She had become so accustomed to the uniformed gentleman greeting her outside. There was no one there. There was also no one at the desk and for the first time in a long time, she rode the elevator completely alone. She got to the apartment door and looked for her non-existent pocketbook. Fortunately, the door was open. She pushed it, came inside and for at least five minutes, stood in the middle of the living room floor.

As if a light switch had been turned off, she was struck by an overwhelming feeling of exhaustion. Her adrenaline levels stabilized, she could think of nothing but sleep. She curled up in a ball on the floor and slept. The tragedy she experienced somehow erased the memories of what her life had been like in this place in which she found herself.

Neal stirred in his sleep, glanced at the clock radio next to the bed and jumped up. The time read six minutes after noon.

“Bitch!” he yelled.

He walked around the bedroom, talking to no one in particular.

“She wonders why I get angry. I ask her to do one simple thing; wake me up. She can’t even do that. I bet she did that shit on purpose! She probably did do it on purpose! Well, she’ll see what’s waiting for her when she gets home. I’m the man, dammit! I won’t have some woman calling the shots in my own home!”

He went into the middle dresser drawer and pulled out a bag. He then deposited some of what was in the bag, on top of Damita’s vanity tray, arranging several lines of coke. He snorted first one, then two lines into his right nostril and did the same with his left nostril. After shaking his head vigorously, he went into the kitchen for coffee.

It was his assumption that Damita was still at work. He had so much cocaine and alcohol the night before, that he had crashed hard. When he finally walked into the kitchen, he was shocked to see Damita lying dirty on the living room floor. He walked over and nudged her with his foot.

“What the fuck are you doing lying on the floor? Have you lost your mind, or did you go traipsing about and get attacked again?” he asked, chuckling.

Damita began to slowly stir. She looked up at him, slowly remembering the first half of her nightmare. As she attempted to rise from the floor, he kicked her hard in the stomach.

“Didn’t I tell you to wake me up this morning before you left for work? Can’t you do anything right? You’re useless, you know. You’re a waste of space. You can’t fuck; you can’t cook. What the hell can you do?”

“Neal, wait. You don’t know what happened. Turn on the news.”

Damita still, somehow, believed in the intrinsic good in people, even people like Neal. From her way of thinking, once he was aware of what a horrific experience she had been through and how she had narrowly escaped with her life, he would be somehow changed. She wanted to believe that he would embrace the fragility of life and realize that the life both of them had been living was forever changed because of this one single event.

“What are you babbling about?”

She held up her hands. “Wait. I’m going to turn on the news,” she said.

Every channel had coverage of the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers.

She was surprised to see him sit for a moment.

“Whoa,” he said.

“I made it out. I still can’t believe it, but I’m alive. There was a man there. He helped me. He helped a lot of us. He may have died. The building came down right after I got to safety.”

Even amidst his drunken and drug-induced haze, Neal couldn’t help but be awestruck by what was unfolding on the television screen.

Damita watched as his look of shock dissolved into a smile. He turned and looked at her. “So what are you going to do now?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“You heard what I said. What are you going to do?”