The Happening(Mash Edwards) ----

“Deb! Over here!” muted screams and urgent cries volley through the bitter dark air. It had been quite a while since the initial charge. Joe had been leaning back in his chair and as he had often been warned, finally tipped over. The boom had knocked out the fluorescents and the floor went instantly soundproofed, insulated. The entire structure still trembles, as if with fear, emitting groans, whines and sobs. For the first time, the tower is one with all of those inside of it. There had been days, early on, even before Joe’s birth, when young bankers stood tall in a confident new building and discussed the energy crisis of the moment. There was the seeming connection. Today, metaphor dies. Instead, pure equivalency.

“Ya have to go down!” a voice tears the fumes. It sounds like Miller, “but Cory has such a deep voice, church-calm,” Joe wonders. “Couldn’t be.”

Bash! Blang! Bang! Joe remains under his desk, near to where he had been rocked from his chair. On his hands and knees, he clinches his telephone handset. His tears are dry and now his emotions ride wholly on the sounds that form his closed-eye landscape.

“Stop,” Joe pleads of himself. “Look up,” he mutters. He releases the silent telephone receiver. His palms hold flat to the floor, fingers now tangled in the plugs beneath his desk. His hands rest quietly. They do not shake, mostly because they press the infirm floor and support his wavering body. Yet the dim sight of his hands, his first since he fell to his hands and knees, is a pill of courage.

Bash! Blang! Blash! Joe looks up. Cory frantically pounds the window glass with a metal panel torn from copy machine 92 Civic—92 for the floor, Civic because C is for Color. 92 stories down the planters are scattered with cigarette butts. The pebble courtyard spreads naked to the yawning sky, which drops sun like leaflets and to-do lists and cloth.

"Miller has totally lost it!” Joe says to himself. “I need to change into my sneakers,” and he calmly rolls onto his bottom and sits like he did in grade school, hugging one knee at a time, slipping off either loafer. His sneakers go on. He moves his fingers following the ritual, so normal, but his fingers do not pinch the laces. Nothing is tied. Joe
thinks he has tied them.

The conflagration below is now flooding the 92nd floor with sublimated matter. Like wax the air moves, hot and massy.

“Joe,” Joe says aloud. “Mom.” At the very thought his heart leaps. On mornings as dark as this, Mom would always call from the lighted hallway, “Up and at-em!” and Dad came in mocking cardiac resuscitation on Joe’s tough little ribcage. “Uppy-uppy-uppy,” he would say with each rapid compression.
“When you string the same words together,” Joe always thought, “sometimes they divide and change and become: pee-up, pee-up, peeyup, peeyup, p, yuppee, yuppee, e-up, e-up,” and drive Joe part-way crazy the way words tend to liquefy like the earth falling away—meaning dis-invited.

A mighty roar. A steamy, steely blast charges through Joe’s body. The very loudest moment— beyond hearing, touch or taste. Joe’s life becomes terrible with new knowledge and suddenly, the meaning of his father’s words repatriate to their sound. “Rush up!” Joe’s mind screams, “not down! Not out like Cory whose solution is silly. My,” Joe pauses for effect, “shoes!”

Cory lies slumped against the windowpane, loosely holding the abused metal slat with which he had punished the glass of the tower. Not Joe. Joe gets up. He feels a little nauseous but grits his teeth. Joe runs by Cory. Poor guy. No time. Before entering the stormy ambulatory that leads to the elevator bank, Joe inhales an extraordinary breath of murkiness. Lungs contracting spasmodically, he launches through the dark passage. The steel surfaces of doors and trashcans, marble veneers and antiqued-brass fixtures throw pitiful glints through the poison gas. A person, who knows, is heaped dead against the elevator doors. The stairs are right there! Joe leaps into the entry-bar of the stairwell door. Purplish-black billows out.

“I’m gone,” Joe silently eulogizes, his cheeks puffed out. “I’m over.”

All of a sudden, from within the hot breath of the stairwell, a hand of clear air pushes the smoke ceiling-ward. Joe is saved. He throws out his exhale and chokes on two gulps of relatively clear air from within the stairwell.

“92 to 110 is eighteen stories, plus the service story and then the roof,” Joe does the math. “Closer to heaven,” he mutters taking three steps for every stride. He feels his way in perfect darkness, makes a half-floor landing and calls out, “37!” having divided the 19 stories above him by twos to mark his ascent. Joe dearly holds his bic lighter and checks floor placards as he reaches them.

“Uppy, up an’at’em, Uppy, up an’at’em,” Joe calls out instead of left, right, left, right. His legs are doing their job. This is nothing compared to running stadium steps as a defensive tackle for Rockaway High School. A lineman. He laughs to think of it. Five foot nine, 155 pounds. Not much of a lineman. His teammates called him JoeSlo—“Why are you so
Joeslo?! Ya not even big!”

“Uppy Joeslo, up an’at’em Joeslo. 32! And the caissons go rolling along,” Joe hum-sings in the dark.

Tss. Tss. Tss. Tss. Joe hears a metered step just a landing away.

“Hey!” Joe shouts.

“Hi!” a voice calls back. A blue suit, pin stripes, no shoes, look of horror. “Hi. It’s Joe,” Joe introduces, holding the lighter between their two faces.

“Roberto,” the man calls out, unaware that he yells. Joe discovers Roberto has been climbing since floor 85. He is older than Joe, 40 maybe. South American, Joe guesses by his accent. “Vaya con Dios,” Joe thinks as he moves on and overtakes Roberto. “See you on the roof?” Joe says, turns and looks Roberto full in the face. He is committed. Firm. Roberto gladdens; his pallor warms a bit. Then they are both climbing again, one by three steps, another by single steps— one counting half floors, the other counting each breath.

At seven, the air above Joe becomes an impenetrable ceiling. The initial burn of plastics, fuel and the middle floors (generally) had funneled up the stairwells. It now forms a clot, a mean plug, a perfect seal with a roiling black underbelly. The Vulcan barrier intimidates the lighter Joe holds beneath the cloud. He must back track. He begins
to sweat. His bottom lip curls and quakes.

“You’re not on your knees anymore Joe!” he shouts. He presses his hand against the wall, blind and blinded. It has a touch of moisture and slight coolness to it.

“It’s okay. I can breathe. The building's not cooking up here. I’ll run back down a half flight, call down to Roberto who must be getting close to the 107th floor and we’ll find a way,” Joe chats with himself in a sublimely rational tone. He gingerly steps back down the stairs in darkness, finds the door without lighting his bic, and opens it.

Joe stands stunned. The smoke that leapt up the stairwell had thoroughly dispatched with the 107th floor. The stairwell door must have been left open because tens of people lie about, asphyxiated. The faces of the dead are pained, shocked, awake, piscine. Through a set of blackened blinds, one gentleman sits atop a boardroom table Indian-style, slumped over his own crossed legs. Joe stands agape.

Agape. Exactly, but how can Joe stand here and breathe this beautiful air? Several workers had, apparently, succeeded to break a number of windows on either end of this floor. It was not soon enough for all those hugging cell phones and snapshots, dead in the corners and nooks of their cubicles. September had blown through and cleared the floor of the poison that left its victims peppered about for Joe to see.

Joe clutches his sides. The hurt fills him to the top of his heart and he wails, walking through the scene of the unsacred dead. A woman, kind, he knew, who had just exchanged hellos with him that morning, lies splayed on the floor, a doll, tongue-protruding, in her frilly yellow skirt. She is the last daffodil of the year, bent at the stalk, browning at the edges; not picked for the table-piece but stepped on out of the unrighteous mercy of an ignorant child.

The alternate stairwell is on the opposite side of the building. Joe walks along the line of windows instead of through the interior of the floor towards the stairs, looking from side to side. He peers once into the building at the dead with their understated looks of chagrin, and alternately at the city, well, below.

Joe hears sirens through the broken windows. Tiny sirens. Insanely small sirens that could not compare with the thunder that sounded like collapse which had spurred Joe to go, find, escape, live, in the first place. Joe arrives at the opposing stairwell and realizes, aloud, “Roberto!” What if Roberto, with no light of his own, had simply entered the deadly cloud at 107 and 1/2? The smoke would devour him indiscriminately and his expression, that face lit so
briefly by Joe’s bic would turn blue in the mouth like the others.

“It is too terrible to think of!” Joe thinks, all the while thinking exactly of it. A water-fountain stands beside the stairwell entrance.

“It won’t work,” Joe laments. He presses the button. It shoots a jet of clear water, to his great surprise. “Doesn’t this thing run on power? Whatever.” Joe mumbles as he sips, “and lilies of the field and sparrows and dammit me and
my water-fountain,” and he almost smiles except for Roberto.

“Uppy Joe,” he reminds himself.

“Up an’at’em Joeslo,” he replies. His tears again are dry.

The staircase is clear. Joe licks his lips and starts up. Five, four—no sign of anyone else heading up— three. Joe slows. “Is it this easy?” Two. “Just one more half story and I’m there?!"

Joe kicks open a candy-cane striped emergency door marked “O.W.L.” Beyond this door is a short metal stair through a maze of yellow-painted steel piping. The area is pristine. An almost silence pervades the space.

“Almost, almost, almost, stall-most, stallmost, all, mostall, most all,” Joe chants and breaks open onto the huge square platform that is the O.W.L., the very top of the tower. A radio antenna bisects the plane at a perfect right angle. The axis demonstrates a regular strength that, after his ascent through the reverberating hell, Joe had not remembered could exist. Something solid, substantial and clean. Joe breathes the blue and is now safe, he knows.

Like seahorses, planes and helicopters move and stay still in the sky around the island. “The Woolworth looks so sad,” thinks Joe who catches condolences refracted in the grand old building’s southern windows. The Empire State and Lady Liberty do not care.

Joe falls to his knees, exhausted. The air is clear; the sirens are nothing. Huge clouds of black smoke drift out of the belly of each tower. The smoke seethes through the broken teeth of the shattered zones. Papers flutter up above the building and fall back down. No one else is on the roof.

“Where is everyone?” and then Joe thinks of 107 and Roberto in a darkened stairwell. He bows his tussled, brown head.

A helicopter, small, white, is cruising Midtown-West. Joe jumps up and down, gesturing. The Copter turns rudder and faces the antennaed tower.

“Thank God!” cries Joe. It approaches to about a 15-block perimeter and then pauses. The antenna makes it difficult to set down on the building. One gust and the rotor could foul.

“Besides, it’s a news chopper,” mutters Joe who turns to scan the harbor. Three fighter jets lurk the horizon at low altitude in tight formation—a school of slow gray sharks bearing teeth that would bite one another as easily. The sounds of the jet engines, like large conch shells placed over each ear, grow but fade in Joe's mind. No help.

Joe then imagines the news helicopter picking him up. He takes a daredevil leap from the building edge to the chopper’s sleigh. He is saved. All cameras witness the horror of saving someone. Afterwards, the cloying interviewers are far too touched to express themselves, and Joe simply replies to all: “alhamdulillah.”

“What I really need is a military helicopter with a rope-ladder. But can I hold on to the rope? What are you, crazy?! Joe!” Joe yells, “Of course I can! I survived 92 and 107. Now I am going to die for my
fingers?!” Joe agrees, pumping his arms.

The helicopters will not approach. “I know they see me! The whole world probably can. Satellites and telescopic video cameras.” Joe stands alone on top of the most famous burning building in the world. “Do I have to climb the spire and be machine-gunned before anyone finds pity,” thinks Joe, exasperated. He paces the roof. Maybe he had
only imagined the salute of the news helicopter turning south towards him.

“No one wants to come. To help.”

Suddenly, a Coast Guard helicopter appears in the distance with, it looks to Joe, a dull metal basket suspended from a steel lanyard. The orange and white craft circles wide from the Hudson’s mouth
and over Jersey City, taking in the destruction and Joeslo on top of it all.

“Now!” cries Joe, jumping high into the air three times, falling, as desperation tends to weaken the muscles.

“It’s not long enough,” Joe worries. The braided steel line is thirty feet long at most. “It won’t reach.” Joe begins again to narrate his demise. “I will die by a short rope.”

Then, the helicopter begins to cross the Hudson and when it reaches the Winter Garden Joe no longer sees the destruction fluttering and plunging from below, nor the broken windows in nearby offices, nor the pitiful Marriott cowering genuflect. Joe only sees words: Save. Basket. Uppy. And his mother and father back in Breezy are watching this all come true. They see how horrible it is to save someone, and that someone is Joe. All he will say is
“alhamdulillah” and then go to bed for a while and wait for the fervor to die down.

The basket now swings precariously overhead. Joe, agape, looks up and holds out his hands as if to catch a falling baby. The winch-operator waives Joe off. “Let it settle on the roof,” Joe understands him to signal.

“Okay!” Joe yells. “Okay!” he says and smiles with a hint of unease.

Bash! Blang! Blash! The basket strikes the cement surface of the O.W.L. Peril subsides and Joe feels cool relief. The strong wind from the blades presses him into a crouch. The mummy-shaped basket tilts toward him. Joe looks at his hands—a stillness once more.

Then the seismic scream renews and the basket rises in the air. It flits away, impossibly fast and Joe shudders, blinks. His body resets itself, blinks. As the stories consume themselves, pulverizing each between every one before, sending the cloud through the heated midpoint.

Joe still sits beneath his desk, sneakers on. They are untied. He is ready to go, find, escape, live.

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