Tarnished Gold of Souls

“God, I need a sign. I’m watching and listening.”

The question asked, I open my eyes and raise up off the pillow, today’s meditation officially over. Out my open window, we join a perfect New York morning already in progress: Warm, clear blue with a tingle of fall. Reconnecting with the external, I look down the bed to see my own baked brown legs, igniting a near-sexual flush of a thousand little fires across my chest, lips, forehead, a rush of filmed highlights featuring the fragrant clatter of endless midnight cafés, Antonio Gaudi castles that appear designed by the children of potheads, heat-wobbled knots of ancient streets flowing into elegant boulevards and honky-tonk ramblas, briny olives and anchovy swimming beside rivers of warm red wine, my sun-baked extremities have become an organic time-and-space-machine, a free ride back to un mamsasita caliente, un atractiva paella grande, La Barcelona.

“We’ve been talking about opening an institute in Stockholm, but we don’t have anyone who’s qualified... ” 

Gabriel, my former spiritual teacher and Barcelona host, his sweet, smart Swedish wife, Kiki and I sit beneath a shade tree in an afternoon blast-furnace 10 steps from where we stood last night.  The proprietor of this sprawling mountain-side retreat approaches our table, speaks of two dozen chickens killed the night before.

“Perros salvajes”, she hisses.

Wild dogs. 

Down the hill, two old men shovel dirt into a dog-dug trough below bent fence. 

And 10,000,000 scattered matchsticks flash-form an intricate parquet: Gabriel's out-of-nowhere email inviting me to teach in Spain, his refusing to allow me to pay for my own lodging – an unheard of first. And then, of course, last night’s Grand Event: The Castanadian psychic mind-fuck we both pretend didn’t happen.

Yep, Gabriel, now a Euro ex-patriot, is still at it , I guess.  His coy e-vite hovers like a cartoon anvil frozen in the swelter between us. I can’t look at him, instead chaining my eyes to the old men down the hill, smiling, nodding, feeling my atoms, my molecules, my entire being re-arrange.

Before I’d returned to New York, Gabriel finally asked outright if I wanted the directorship of the Stockholm institute. My first thought: That’s never going to happen. Why would I leave New York? And give up with out a doubt the greatest life I’ve ever known?   

Of course, this isn't something I'd actually say to him.  Instead, I say I’ll do what’s he taught me to decades earlier:

“I’ll take a look at it.”

Psychic Spiritual Master-speak for, “I’ll meditate on it.” 

And here, 21 days later, I sit at the edge of my bed, firmly grounded to the island of Manhattan.  Though I have no desire to change a single damn thing, I’ve  stayed true to my word, capping each morning's meditation with a request for direction, for signs indicating a move to Sweden. Just in case.  Just in case it’s what I’m really supposed to do (can’t be). Just in case Gabriel’s invitation wasn’t some psycho/psychic manipulation, but a divinely inspired memo from Management that I’d be insane to ignore (ridiculous). I’m not going anywhere, after all, because God obviously wants me in this grand city – right here, right now – spending as fast as I make more dollars than I’ve ever (legally) amassed . Nope, I'm stayin' right here in downtown Manhattan. Lowtown, my town, U.S.A.. 

I blink away the tan-induced images and stretch, relaxed and energized by today’s session, about to swing onto the floor and start rolling, but the sound’s getting louder and closer, so close the loft vibrates a little as the first of two jets crash into the tall buildings 10 blocks away.

Any sign at all, God.  I’m looking and listening.

•

Yeah, I know how this sounds, me asking God for a sign and ka-boom. If someone used this in a movie, I’d be brutal, i.e., “I’m sorry - that scene where he asks God for a sign and the planes hit? What kind of bullshit was that?” Yet it’s exactly what happened.

But nudge the perspective a little.  Move just one seat over, and “Bullshit” becomes, “Huh… no shit?” All you need to do is add a voice-over: “Was I the only human being below Canal St. (or in New York/on Eastern Seaboard/in the entire U.S.A.) requesting a divine sign at 8:52 am?”

•

The way sound bounces around Manhattan’s artificial alps, I think I’m hearing a plane go down somewhere in midtown, maybe 30, 40 blocks north.

I call the actress warehouse a floor above me.  Kirsty, the Aussie, answers. 

“I think a plane just crashed uptown.”

“The radio says it’s at World Trade.”  She’s rasping, either choked-up crying or still asleep.

“Meet me out front.”

A warp in the rules of New York culture occur in times of real trouble: Strangers start conversing without hesitation. No preliminary hand shakes or awkward self-introductions, it’s as if a previous conversation had been picked up mid-sentence. You might have thought the group gathered on Hudson Street to watch a 110-story building burn had, if not shared a sofa at a party, maybe temped together a few years ago:

“Musta run outta fuel, right?”

“Sheila o-ways said, ‘Dem taowas is a magnet fa air-o-planes’.”

“Do you see any clouds? No. I don’t either. No clouds, no fog. It just doesn’t make sense.”

Now elfin sweet neighbor Kirsty’s beside me, tear-streaked and silent.  Though not really close, something primal and protective involuntarily moves my arm, pulls her into me, absorbing the shivers,  then – BOOM! - a Michael Bay exploding fireball blows thru the top quarter of the second tower.  From our perspective, none of us saw the second jet, just the explosion.

Like sheep catching the scent of coyote still miles off, the energy shifts in our huddle, scattering half of us.

“That was no plane, that was a bomb, yo”, the Afro-Latino kid announces, but instead of being repelled, he starts south, toward the pyre.

Before the second tower explodes, I’m sure this is the number one most hallucinogenic accident in our history, already stacking stats against Hindenburgs and Titanics.

But two? No, not random.

My ‘Rican biker neighbor George walks up.

“Dude, can we go up on your roof?”

“Yeah, c’mon.”

Kirsty, George and me leave the thinning herd, climb up to that dangling, dangerous last staircase and back to the horror set in deep, endless blue.  From up here it’s closer somehow, more intense without all the hysteric torrent of emergency vehicles thundering by. And then it gets a little weirder: The roof is covered with rows of professional grow-troughs filled with tomato and sunflower arraigned to camouflage a core thicket of tall marijuana.

Standing three abreast at the edge, silent, it looks like the world’s largest air conditioning units burn and smoke. Ten million file folders have magically emptied out and released a sparkling confetti pre-commemorating the saddest, strangest thing that’s ever happened.

Soon, my optimism tells me, the fire department will put it out and we can do something else.  Until then, there’s nowhere else to go, nothing else to look at.  We’re hypnotized, enslaved by our collective mind’s inability to categorize, file away, make sense.  Every so often somebody says, “It looks like a movie”, because that’s as close as anyone can get to wrapping logic around what we see.

The spell is broken when my artist neighbor, Chet, appears, edgy and more superior than usual.

“I just got off the subway at Chambers.  You know, there’re people jumping.”

“No there’s not,” I deny, indignant. “I’ve been watching the whole time – I haven’t seen any people… ”

“There’s one”, he points out. “There’s another one.”

And thru the slo-mo rubble twister, I see them now, realize I’ve been watching human beings freefall a hundred stories for what seems like hours. And not just forms of humans. I can actually tell what colors they put on this morning, before they left their apartments, their children, their bodies.

Suddenly it’s no longer abstract and way too fucking intimate.

“I’m not watching any more.”

I start down to my loft, Kirsty and George following.

Back inside, I turn on the television. I’m worried about Kirsty: If there’s a look that says, “near-catatonic”, this is it.  Her family’s on the other side of the planet and she’s too thin, shivering convulsively. 

“Are you okay?”

“Got any smoke, Randy?” she asks in tiny Australian.

I dig out a stash I keep for friends and fill a pipe for her.  She’s shaking pretty bad and suddenly I wonder if I’m hallucinating, pretty sure I can see see thru her  clothes and skin, down to her skeletal structure, a panic-activated x-ray vision. 

Okay, yeah, tranquilization.  I open a bottle of white wine from the refrigerator. Macho George’s, “Thanks, man” is a little too breathy, nearly gushing. He pulls eep on the glass. So do I and pour us some more. 

Out my window, the sky is still perfect clarity, dotted with flurry of - what are they? Legal documents? Résumés? Emergency procedure manuals for offices filled with jet fuel and melting steel?

When the first tower collapses on itself, I have a dreaming sensation of watching something on television while simultaneously feeling it’s faint tremors radiate thru the paved earth below me, a small thunder passing into 200-year old brick.  An alien sorrow moves into my chest, my body a radio tower pulling in the single sound of every kind of person - man, woman and child, all ages and colors, all nationalities, all classes – joining in, a sound distinctly human, a spiritual shockwave, it’s origin in the wreckage 10 blocks south, it radios north, echoing up the streets, muffled yet unmistakably clear, it’s volume rising, the chorus now around our building, up the stairwell, my living room, into our bodies, embracing, pulling at our lungs and heart and now, involuntarily out our mouths, too, we've  now become transmitters too, passing it north, to Vestry, Debrosses, Canal, a harmonious moan that moves into SoHo, a tarnished golden cloth woven from human heartbreak, a single, necessary, congruent oral wound –

“Oooohhhh!”

- a release fired up from the gut, one shared wordless expression of painful, beaten, spent sadness and awe.

The sky fills with ash and plastic, dark smoke and more paper. Sharp chemicals are released that I taste. 

“Let’s close the windows.”

The phone keeps ringing: L.A., Bay Area, Europe, the Bronx, Florida, Upper West Side.  “Yes, I’m fine.” One tower still stands and already I’m feeling an awkward guilt, the side-effect of repeating the same epic tale that's yet to end, editing, honing, it becomes an oddly rehearsed version of a tragedy too big to know. Ever.

“I love you, too. No, I’m okay. Really. Bye.”

Christy Whitman says our downtown air is safe to breathe.  Adolph Giuliani morphs into Il Papa before our eyes. All flights are grounded, gridlocking the planet’s airspace. Now the Pentagon’s attacked, then a forth jet’s down – maybe shot down – out in Pennsylvania.  When the second tower goes, it’s terrible force cracks the seals on twin Pandoric ampules, releasing vapors more dangerous than imaginable: 

The first emits airborne ice vapors of sorrow and loss, resetting what was thought to be the American human’s capacity to endure.

The second far deadlier: a floral-scented stream of genetically engineered lies so sophisticated, it binds the atoms of fear (red), hatred (white) and death (blue) with the air supply, a subtle atmospheric infusion, an invisible cancer, infecting thoughts, ideals, morals and hearts, a new and potent vapor now a part of every breath on Earth.

•

“So, if your offer still stands, can we talk about me opening that school in Stockholm?”

Even 4,000 miles away, I don't miss a single nuance contained in Gabriel knowing chuckle, this one dosed with more than a few notes of that internationally recognized audio-smirk, a silent, “I told you so.”

“Yes! Fantastic! When’re you coming?”