Survivors

By Ken Kaye

On Sept. 12, 2002, the New York papers reported a murder-suicide in a Times Square office. A former FBI agent, fifty-six years old, Director of Security for Blue Cross of New York, shot a young woman and another man, then took his own life. Both the killer and the young woman had been in the World Trade Center a year and a day earlier. There was no information about their relationship, if any, or his motive, if any.
This novel imagines those characters and the events that changed their lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ken Kaye
• Release date: Feb 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311681522

Ken Kaye

Ken Kaye's fiction, available from online booksellers, includes the collection of short stories "Birds of Evanston" and five novels: "Eve" (Adam's memoir, a novella), "The Net", "Eye of the Storm", "Survivors", and "Be the Best".Kaye lives in Evanston, Illinois, where he has worked as a college professor, a family therapist, and a consultant to family-owned businesses. (His nonfiction books are in the field of psychology.) Thirty-five years after his Ph.D., he earned an MFA in creative fiction from Bennington College.email: [e-mail] (and please remember to leave a review of my book at your favorite online retailer)

Book preview

Survivors

Ken Kaye

eBook published at Smashwords, ISBN 9781311681522

Copyright 2014 by Ken Kaye

Original edition © 2012 by Ken Kaye

Table of Contents

Truth

Survivors

Recovery

Euphoria

Ground Zero

Christmas

Separation

Relapse

Just Friends

About the Author

Truth: On Sept. 12, 2002, the New York papers reported a murder-suicide in a Times Square office. Apparently a former FBI agent, fifty-six years old, Director of Security for Blue Cross of New York, shot a young woman and another man, then took his own life. Both the killer and the young woman had been in the World Trade Center a year and a day earlier. There was no information about their relationship, if any, or his motive, if any.

Fiction: This novel is my attempt to imagine that true story. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Survivors

You saw me on television, over and over on that day of infamy. The whole world saw me: the footage would be re-shown interminably on CNN, a big man staggering out of the cloud of dust like Banquo’s ghost. A Reuters photographer got a dramatic shot of me, too, so I was in newspapers everywhere, and later in magazines. If you bought a coffee table book of the best images from the disaster and its aftermath, you have me there, the guy who’s covered with a thick layer of the stuff from head to foot—whatever it was, smoke or ash or wallboard gypsum (asbestos? who cares?), glass powdered by the force of the avalanche, the crushed bones of three thousand people or the plastic from their telephones or the ceramic china from the restaurant at the top of the world. The only indications that he is not a ghost but a living man are the blood streaming from one arm and seeping from a cut on his forehead, and a single channel of tears glistening down his cheek. In the CNN video clip you see him open his mouth wide for what might have been his last breath, squinting through eyelids weighted with ash, as he keeps coming toward you and passes the camera.

I only mention September the eleventh because that was my Andy Warhol fifteen minutes—in my case two seconds, actually—of world fame. Two seconds that I would give back, if I could. This is not about September 11, though, or skyscrapers coming down, or anybody who lost someone they knew. I was there, but that is not my story. I didn’t know a soul who died that day. No, it’s a love story. A love story with an ending that some will call happy and others, maybe, sad. I only mention the Day of Infamy, as I say, to remind you who I was.

That man was me, Robert Becker, but you felt like he was all of us, our disbelief, our shock and confusion. Our struggles that day, and afterward, to see and move and breathe.

I saw myself on the news that night: with the stiff walk of Frankenstein’s monster, towering a head taller than the paramedics who took hold of me; my salt and pepper hair all one ashen shade of gray; my features barely recognizable as the rugged but kind (so I like to think) face I’d shaved in the mirror that morning.

Quick cut, from that corner of Church and Vesey Streets to the emergency room in St. Vincent’s Hospital. A paper gown over my shirt and lap, left arm already stitched and bandaged, a smaller bandage on my hand. I breathed oxygen through a nasal cannula. I was in a plastic chair. I saw many more doctors and nurses than patients; no one who was badly hurt. A woman in her thirties was screaming, not with pain but hysteria. The previous hour came back to me then, reconstructed, without my being sure if I’d experienced it or dreamt it. The roar as someone screamed the building was coming down and I looked up and saw it crumple from above. Later I read that it took eleven seconds, top to bottom. Many days later I saw a picture of the ambulance I had been standing next to—flattened under tons of debris just moments after I started running. I must have spent most of those eleven seconds running like hell. Nonetheless I had a picture already in my memory’s eye, even as I sat there in the hospital, of the collapse as if I’d seen it in its entirety. I recalled shouts all around, drowned out by the crashing sound closing down on me, then total blackness—had I gone blind?—then grayness. I could see forms close to me, but not my feet wading through it. I remembered choking, then a squad car carrying me with two others a short distance—it was actually a couple of miles—uptown to the hospital. The snatches of time were like a set of scrambled pictures one had to put in their proper sequence, a puzzle or an IQ test. I do well on tests, as a matter of fact. I enjoy puzzles, but I didn’t want to be tested any more today. I was fine. I said so to the man standing over me, watching the TV above my head. The announcer’s words were another puzzle: two airplanes, American and United, twin towers, and two other airplanes which were also, confusingly, American and United; something about the Pentagon, about Pennsylvania, and Camp David, which I knew was not in Pennsylvania but in Maryland. I barely processed any of that. I don’t need this, I said, lifting the oxygen tube over my head. I felt my hair encrusted with a mixture of blood and the ashy dust. I just want to go home.

Awright, Robert. I was surprised the young man knew my name. You know where you are, now?

St. Vincent’s, I read off his badge. It said he was Carl, and a nurse.

Thass right. West Twelfth Street, right? Where you got to get to?

Bayonne.

Where’s that? Jersey? I nodded. Holland Tunnel, man. There’s no PATH train, nothing’s running. They be walkin’ through the tunnel.

All right, I said. Thanks for stitching me up.

That was my man, Dr. Frantz here.

Dr. Frantz was a portly, bald man in a polo shirt and khakis, his white coat hanging open, without a badge. He said, You don’t need to be in a hurry. Sit here as long as you want. Have you called home?

No, I said. Then: Yeah, yeah I did leave a message to say I was okay. That I’d gotten out of the building. I better call again. Carl dialed out for me on the desk phone. This time Sandra picked up.

Oh, thank God, I was so worried. She was crying.

I left a message on the machine.

She said she’d got home right after I left my second message, but she couldn’t reach me on my cell. And the towers collapsed. And just now they had seen me—did I know I was on CNN?—staggering out of Hell. She said Kevin was with her. Where are you now?

I’m at the hospital where they cleaned me off—sort of—and gave me a few stitches. I’m fine. I’m going to start home now.

She told me what she’d seen on the television: people beginning to stream through the Holland Tunnel. I don’t know what you’ll do when you get to this side, if the buses are running, or what. Just call me, I’ll stay here until you tell me where to come get you.

That felt good. I was sorry she’d been frightened, but it was good that she cared so much. Things were less than great between us, hadn’t been great for a long time. She was angry about so many things, I had stopped counting or caring, and I was fed up with her, and of course she was mad about that, too. But even in the middle of this day while it was too early to make sense of anything, I thought maybe it would change now. Maybe a war like our parents’ war, or like living in London in the Blitz, this is the kind of thing that sends your whole life on a different path, and there is nothing she and I need more than a new start. She does love me. And I love her. I have to get home.

It was mid-afternoon before I emerged into sunlight across the Hudson. Some people in the crowd on the Manhattan side had balked at the tunnel entrance when they remembered that it, too, had once been a target, a foiled target of Islamic terrorists—What if they blow it up now, when we’re under the river? Others who brushed that aside and entered the tunnel began to panic in the crowd of pedestrians, though they had driven their cars through thousands of times. I barely thought about it. I thought, instead, of the stairwell. How I had come down eighty floors. I remembered how stiff and battered my legs felt, half way down—I didn’t feel anything there now—and then I remembered the firemen, clambering up against the tide of fleeing souls.

I was limping, favoring the right foot that was shattered by a bullet fifteen years ago. I would soak it in a hot bath, wear an Ace bandage for a week or two, and it would be fine. The cuts on my arm and hand were superficial. But I felt my heart racing, my throat parched.

Had I actually seen people falling from the highest floors of the towers? Perhaps I only imagined that part.

Was the explosion one of those airplanes they kept talking about, or was it a bomb? And how had I come to be in the stairwell, part of a crowd walking down, before it exploded?

In Jersey City I was still miles from home, but there were buses to be found and police and unofficial volunteers giving directions. I crowded onto a bus for Bayonne Town Center. Seeing my torn clothing, matted hair and bandages, people gave me a seat, and when I didn’t answer about where I’d been or how I’d escaped or what it was like being right there (even now, months later, it’s still the center of world attention), they let me be quiet. A man who got off with me on Broadway said, My car is here. I’m driving you home. Fastening my seat belt, I found a Zip-Loc bag in my lap. Covered with dust inside as well as out, it contained the tie I’d put on that morning. I must have had it in my hand all the way from St. Vincent’s. It was my maroon colored tie with coins of many countries. An especially suitable choice this morning—so long ago—for a meeting in the World Trade Center. I had no idea what became of the jacket I had carried over my shoulder from the PATH station below the towers to my appointment with someone I barely knew.

Her name was Karen Powell. I’d met her only once before, soon after starting at Dutch Street Clearing House as Vice President for Security and Investigations. My office was in the company headquarters, four blocks away. Did I ever arrive at Karen’s office? Did we have the meeting? At the moment, I recalled nothing between stepping onto the eighty-first floor and some time later when I was in a stairwell, blown down a flight of stairs to seventy-four by a deafening explosion from above.

And there was a young woman with me. Not Karen Powell. Someone else.

Too late, I remembered my own car, sitting at the Exchange Place station in Jersey City.

Thank you, I said, when the man dropped me in front of my house. Other than telling the man where I lived, we had not exchanged a word.

Recovery

I stood at my window peering up at blue sky above the building across the street, blue where the cloud of ash had finally blown away, the blue sky where towers no longer stood. Into that space, several thousand people had vanished while I and thousands more had escaped. I remembered it now, as much as I ever would; even the parts I had blanked for awhile, the sixteen minutes between the planes hitting the north and south towers, also the time on the street inside the blackness with a deafening roar all around me, the gray cloud in which I could neither breathe nor see, then emerging, somehow (though I couldn’t identify with the clips of myself on TV: my reruns) and the next half hour while they brought me to one of the medical stations I had been escorting others to, where they cleared my airway and tourniqueted my arm. I remembered the squad car and the hospital and the long walk to Jersey City. But the slice of memory that was hardest to make sense of in that day three weeks earlier was the surreal time in the stairwell, the tall thin shaft of space inside what used to be the south tower: How we were all so calm, under circumstances that were catastrophic only in retrospect. At the time, the building’s collapse had been unimagined and unimaginable. For half an hour, in quiet, orderly fashion, we had walked down and down a shaft, oblivious to the fact that the structure holding it up was melting. I had thought about how smoke could overtake us from above, how the crowd would swell at the bottom and gridlock us from moving out of the building, but I had put those possibilities aside and focused on walking down, literally step by step. What did happen, after we were safely out, was beyond belief. Yet it was historical fact now, a numerological coincidence: the emergency number 911 now a date in history no one would ever forget.

The whole twentieth century had been about America’s loss of innocence, some talking head said on Sunday television, but we lost as much innocence again on that one day in the first year of the twenty-first. For me, who had never deluded myself about man’s capacity for evil and mayhem, those minutes of routine fire drill shortly before the whole thing collapsed were impossible to connect with anything. The fact that we had been so close to the building’s collapse without anticipating it made me disbelieve those final minutes of being inside. I clearly recalled getting off the PATH train that morning and entering the Trade Center with my DSCH badge—a building I’d visited at least a dozen times during my two years as Assistant Special Agent in Charge in the New York office—and I could call up a clear picture of myself going up to Seventy-eight and crossing to the local elevators to ride up to eighty-one. But that surreal descent in the stairwells a few minutes later, I had trouble believing.

At this morning’s meeting, like everything else in the last three weeks, we’d been dealing with part of the aftermath. This committee of five executives and senior managers was tasked with the logistics of downsizing. DSCH’s founder and CEO, Pierre Neuchateau, had asked his VP for Human Resources, Connie Bevilacqua, to chair the group. Most of the work had fallen to me and Connie.

Although eighteen employees had died, in other respects our firm was among the luckier ones, having only lost a satellite office. Dutch Street Clearing House had been scheduled to move the whole company to the tower when our present lease at Thirty Four Dutch Street expired. The two hundred employees on the eighty-first and eighty-second floors of the south tower had been posted there to take advantage of a cut-rate short term sublease, a temporary solution to the overcrowding at headquarters.

Three pieces of luck: We’d almost all got down to lower floors, past the seventy-eighth floor Skylobby, before the exploding 737 engulfed that floor and the nine stories above it in flame. The computers were backed up the night before, onto the mainframe at Thirty Four Dutch Street. And the main office was just far enough from Ground Zero, as this morning’s Times called it, so the only enduring obstacle to getting back to business was the smell.

It would have been a crisis for our firm even had we been a hundred miles away, because it was a business disaster of worldwide proportions. International financial transactions, which our company processed, were down by a third for the month of September. But at least DSCH was still able to handle what work there was.

The question no one could answer was how soon it would pick up again. Our business didn’t depend on the Dow or the S&P or any indicator other than volume: the raw numbers of distinct foreign investments in US public companies, and US investment transactions abroad. Turmoil in the world wouldn’t necessarily be bad for this company’s business, long term. But in the near term, Pierre and his Board of directors provisionally forecast a twenty-five per cent decline in revenues over the next nine months. At this morning’s meeting, our committee had decided to downsize the employee roster by twenty per cent.

What Connie Bevilacqua said in the meeting had made me acutely uncomfortable. "Out of our eighteen employees who disappeared, people who took the elevator down from Seventy-eight remember six who were left behind to wait for the next elevator. The other twelve we can’t account for. No survivors remember seeing them. They may have been in an elevator that didn’t make it, or they followed the instruction on the Public Address, to stay where they were because the fire was in the other tower. In any case, more than a hundred of our people, and more from other companies, listened to Robert and took the stairs—ahead of him—and they all got out."

But most of the ones who ignored my advice about the stairs, and took the elevator, also got out, I said. And faster.

"Most. When the second plane hit the south tower, a bunch of our folks were on the ground floor already. They had just stepped off the last car to reach the Concourse. A contingent of NYPD and Port Authority police got in the car to go up. Our people told me the fireball shot all the way down the elevator shaft, for an instant, and blasted the cops out of the car, half way across the lobby. The explosion must have cut the elevator cables for the upper sections, because even though emergency power was restored, no elevators worked above Forty-four. The upshot—she pressed her point to the group—is that 191 DSCH employees had been in the dead center of the second aircraft’s path ten minutes earlier, when the PA announcement told them to stay put. She looked around at her colleagues. It’s thanks to Robert that they didn’t stay put. At 9:03 when it hit, 173 of them either had already made it to ground level or were in stairwells below the seventy-fifth floor."

In other words, I argued, most of those who ignored my advice about the stairs survived anyway.

"But all those who took the stairs did."

You’re making too much of that, I said. If the tower had collapsed half an hour sooner than it did, all of us in the stairs would be dust right now and my name would be mud. Let’s move on.

Connie’d gone on to report that eleven surviving employees, some from the World Trade Center and some from the DSCH main offices, had resigned for emotional reasons, with the company’s best wishes and a sweet goodbye check. She guessed there might be forty or fifty more who were sending out resumes, looking for jobs across the Hudson, closer to their homes. If all of them leave, we’ll still need to lay off another forty to fifty. The problem, our committee agreed, was how to lay those additional people off with least damage to the survivors’ morale.

I turned away from my window to the work on my desk. The VP of Security and Investigations had other issues besides those of the Logistics Planning committee. Today was the first day the people from the Trade Center had returned to work—here at Thirty Four Dutch Street, in conference rooms and a break room hastily fitted out with temporary work stations and an insufficient number of computers. The Refugees would constitute, for a month or so, a special department reporting through Karen Powell to me, charged with reconstructing paperwork lost on September 11. They were to list the documents that should be recorded as missing, and determine which ones to reconstruct from records elsewhere in the world. The uncertainty of that process, combined with chaos at most of the firms whose paper DSCH had been processing that morning, as well as post-traumatic craziness, and opportunism, on top of the normal amount of larceny and greed that make human beings interesting even under the best of circumstances, created all kinds of new concerns about potential fraud, theft, and breaches of confidentiality. I had a list of fourteen problematic holes in company procedures. Holes to plug, or at least to watch through independent double-checking and random sampling.

I knew the drill. My whole FBI career was about following paper trails in response to sudden or unanticipated events—some mundane, some catastrophic. In twenty-six years with the Bureau I had never gone undercover, rarely done stakeouts, and only twice fired my pistol outside a firing range. One of those occasions ended the life of the bank robber who was so foolish as to take a shot at me. The other time had almost ended my own career. With those two memorable exceptions, everything I had done all those years was much the same as what I was doing now for twice the salary.

But not what I would be doing if I were still in the Bureau. I retired as Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the New York City office; earlier I had been an Acting S.A.C. in Minneapolis. Although they weren’t going to tag me for S.A.C. of New York, I was in line for that level somewhere else—maybe Northern California, after all those years of Sandra nagging me to get a transfer out there. Wherever it might be, I’d have been playing a key role today in the most urgent, complex, worldwide investigation the Bureau had been charged with since the Second World War. The President called it a War on Terrorism. Like Hoover’s obsession with Communism—only this time the menace was real. During my career, it never bothered me that I was interviewing defrauded investors and paper pushers while my colleagues spent cold nights on their bellies in mud, with automatic weapons and bullet proof vests, staking out violent criminals. Now, however, the war against Al Qaeda and other terrorists would involve everyone in the Bureau. I would have been Special Agent in Charge of an office in a revitalized, empowered organization. There was a war on, a real one, a valid one, and I was as well trained as anyone to help wage it.

I’d actually thought of offering to go back in, though I knew they didn’t work that way, not when you were fifty six years old and especially not when you’d gained forty pounds after finally being released from the two hundred thirty pound limit they’d held you to all those years. Not to mention how Sandra would freak out. It was just a fantasy. But I hated reading about the FBI this and the FBI that every day, knowing which stories were likely true and which not, imagining what else was going on that the New York Times didn’t even guess at, or couldn’t report if they did.

The ringing telephone was a welcome interruption to those thoughts. Sandra herself didn’t fill me with warmth and delight, but at least she was a distraction.

She’d been calling once or twice a day, as she couldn’t do during those years with the Bureau. This was her new, post-Nine Eleven self, the Wife Who Almost Lost Her Husband, a person I had never seen before and whom I certainly didn’t understand.

I’m afraid to drive, she said.

What do you mean?

It’s crazy, I know, but I drove a couple of blocks, I was going to a meeting, the one in Orange that I told you about? I just turned around and came back.

Maybe you just didn’t really need to go. You went yesterday, didn’t you? The meeting was Al-Anon, which she attended because of our son. I had gone with her only once.

"I wanted to go to the meeting, but I was afraid to drive. This has been happening to me, I get these panic attacks the last week or so. I’ve never been afraid to drive in my life. I drive in Manhattan traffic, don’t I? This was only Bayonne, Kennedy Boulevard."

Panic attack? Like Tony Soprano? Couldn’t breathe, sweating, about to pass out?

Not that bad, thank God. I just couldn’t pull out into traffic. I needed to get out of the car.

Well, good for you, you did the right thing. Silence. Don’t worry about it, it’s just temporary.

How would you know?

I mean it’s normal, it’s understandable. All over the country, people are scared, agitated, sleepless—especially around here.

Especially if they almost lost their husband in the World Trade Center, she said.

Yeah. The more she said that, I felt the almost revealed disappointment that she hadn’t. Lost me. She seemed to have forgotten what she told me a year ago: that the only thing keeping her in the marriage was the money. She’d been furious, out of control, reaching for any way to lash out at me, and we both knew that what she said made no logical sense. Yet there was a bit of truth in it: We