Sarah/Sara. Jacob Marperger Paul
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the car jammed in the shaft and came to a halt. They were bruised and in the dark, her, another woman, and three male coworkers. Abba said that they managed to pry the doors open, all the while terrified that doing so would loosen the elevator and they’d fall again. When the doors were open, they realized that they were between floors. The men didn’t think they could fit into the tiny space through which they’d have to drop down so they sent the two women first. The first woman dropped through, but when she landed, she twisted her ankle badly. Then the other woman, our protagonist, dropped through, this time guided by the woman who’d gone first. She hurt her wrist and got banged up a bit dropping, but not too bad. Then the elevator did fall. Later, she assumed that the men died in the fall. They certainly died at some point. They were not among her company’s survivors. She and the other woman helped each other down the dark waiting area for the elevator bank. At its end was a stairwell. They were on the 14th floor. Inside the stairwell, other evacuees helped them walk down. On the mezzanine level, two firemen led them out to West Street to an ambulance. There, an EMT began doctoring their wounds. All of a sudden, as a rumbling began, he threw open the ambulance doors and yelled, “Run!”
This woman who was the daughter of my father’s boss’s friend started running through a massive cloud of grey dust as Tower Two began its fateful descent. She clung to her friend’s hand, but her friend fell and so she kept running without her. She was barefoot, but hardly noticed. She was training for a marathon and ran her race through a grey cloud of soot, through falling pieces of building of furniture of people. Dark shapes flitted through the anti-light, shadows of ghosts, polygons of longing, vehicles, screaming. She was coated with detritus but felt nothing. She kept running. She broke through the cloud but couldn’t tell for sure, her face covered in grey and other things. So she ran on in her serge suit dress, her beige silk sleeveless top, her silk hose long worn through at the feet; she ran. She ran from the death behind her, the viscerally understood but yet unacknowledged demise of her three colleagues in the elevator, the EMT who’d sent them on their way but bizarrely stayed, briefly contemplating the bravery of a sinking ship’s captain before debris relieved him of choice, the woman she’d made it so far with, ultimately ripped from her hand either by a blow, her ankle or some other incident, whichever, whatever, dead. And so this woman my age, my generation, a marathon runner ran for seventy blocks, to Hell’s Kitchen, straight up West Street.
I never asked my father why she wasn’t stopped earlier, and he didn’t tell me, so I don’t know. But in the fifties, a couple stopped her. Apparently she was covered in other people’s blood and dust. They forced her into their west-side apartment. She must have been the same size as the woman, because after sponging her down, after listening, and on that day believing and respecting, her incessant and solitary demand to keep moving, to run—“I have to run.” They dressed her not so differently than I dress to paddle, lent her shoes and sent her on her way. She ran to the Queensboro bridge at fifty-ninth street. She ran across it and through Astoria until she reached her aunt’s house, some seventeen running miles from where she began. I don’t know when she began to speak again. But at the time my father heard the story, three weeks later, over coffee at the Red Cross tent on a shift he shared with his boss, she’d still refused to return to her apartment in the city. Family members had gone and collected her clothing, some essentials. She was staying in Queens.
I’m not like that. I’m resilient. I will return to Yerushalaim.
July 24
I did battle with charging waves of anxiety today; drinking is not my friend.
I cursed the sun last night. I asked it if it wanted to fight. I ripped a small willow tree out of the ground, cutting my hands. Its roots splayed broadly through layers of ancient peat. They were as thick as its branches. I howled and bit its trunk. I screamed. I threw stones at the water. In truth, without resorting to fire, without destroying my own chances of survival, it is fairly difficult to leave a mark of anger on the landscape. The sea absorbs thrown stones effortlessly. The stubby trees are too difficult to pull in any quantity. There’s really not much of anything to kick or punch. If there were grounded geese where I was camped, I might have killed one, covered my face in blood and a mixture of molting and new feathers; but there were none. If there were musk-oxen, I might well have been my own undoing. I did manage to get into my tent, knocking over the vestibule on the way in (fortunately, nothing was damaged), and then thrashing against my sleeping bag through the night.
What else did I expect? I spent a night writing to—writing to whomever—my plea against unorthodoxy, somehow wrote the story of a woman who fled from an unstoppable death. I don’t even know how to write it convincingly: her near death. This journal was meant to log the arctic for my parents in Shamaim who I must assume watch over me. Instead, I document the touchstones of despair, the neat, clean anecdotes of spiritual collapse, of death, of failure, of misery, in painless bite size chunks, swallowable whole. At a minimum, if I must dwell in the perpetual shadows of all of these stories, I want to capture in writing the pathos I feel. I can’t. My parent’s death brings personal gravity to everything I hear or imagine, but I can only access my own despair, the truth of my emotions, in the drunken rages that inevitably pursue my written declarations of resilience.
I woke early, head hammering, tent a stinking mess of alcohol-sweat, unwashed body, foul condensation. My mouth was glued shut with dried phlegm as were my eyes. I crawled out from under the flapping vestibule wall whose collapse had eliminated any ventilation in the night, made my hovel into a plastic shopping bag of human moisture. The sun wasn’t any higher or lower on the horizon, due south, but it was right in my eyes, just neutral enough through all that atmosphere to tempt me, in my fuddled state, into staring right at it a moment. I coughed and saw thousands of black suns ringed in orange when I shut my eyes. At least I will run out of alcohol soon enough.
I pulled off my orange fleece, already well-funkified even before I’d passed out in the steam bath wearing it. The left arm was matted with something sticky and sweet, soaked in whatever deep enough that my arm hair was similarly matted. I cursed before remembering I didn’t curse. I put a cooking-gas-flavored finger in my mouth and rubbed my teeth. When I took it out, where I should have seen a water ring of white plaque, an image of beating out a mad rhythm on the hull of Abba’s kayak flashed in my head. I cursed again, and then cursed myself for cursing, and then just decided to give up and ran over to my boat. Sure enough, I’d managed to turn it upside down. Turning it back upright, I discovered how beaten my hands were, are. I have to be smart out here. This is stupid. It’s a good way to get myself dead. The other thing I discovered in turning my boat back over was just how much my pits stunk. It was time to wash.
I’m a basically modest person. And I’m an orthodox woman. And I’m shomrei n’giah, which means I have no physical contact with men I’m not immediately related to if I can at all help it (I make reasonable exceptions, especially on business trips, though it’s not as much an issue in Israel, where men are accustomed and conditioned to behavior like mine). I carefully looked up and down the beach, though really, I knew no one was there. Everything looked endlessly the same and horribly, terribly beautiful, as it always does: barren, broad, unending. Then I pulled off my tank top and undid my sports bra, which I had to hold at arms length afterwards. I rolled down my red rowing shorts. I couldn’t remember, can’t remember, the last time I felt a breeze on my bare body, the sun on my breasts. It’s cold; goosebumps spread from my pale chest out onto my brown arms. My nipples hardened. I tiptoed over to the tent, shells biting into the soles of my bare feet. Clothing stowed, I ran my hands down my butt, over my thighs, my calves, along ridges and lines, crisscrosses and circles, the contact with goosebumps and new skin sending shivers back up my now spare body, along the sides of my torso, my teeth chattering. I steeled myself, hammering head and freezing body, and walked into the sea.
I’d lost sensation in my feet before my breasts reached the water. It felt like they’d been slapped with a pincushion. I forced myself to dunk my head, eyes open, and stare at my own bubbles rising the through the green ocean murk. Then I was racing for shore, blue, shivering uncontrollably. I grabbed my orange fleece and used it to squeegee the water off my body in long wet ripples, my hair plastered around my ears, numb in the light breeze coming down from the mountains, rolling out across the water. I felt