It was a long time ago, a couple of years before the world changed. I was working in New York on a research job that took me from Fuji Bank’s offices in the World Trade Centre to the backwoods of New Jersey, Springsteen country, where it was pretty normal to slide a deer rifle into the rack in the cab of a pickup truck if you went shopping at Walmart. It looked that way, anyway, judging by the number of people doing it.
It was a high-stress job, not least because I had one of the worst colds I ever caught and discovered Duane Reed’s magic drug store, where they sold me some chemical warfare nasal swabs that got rid of every symptom of a cold in under ten minutes, along with your balance, short term memory and any idea of what the sentence you’d just started was supposed to be about. Given I was supposed to be interviewing bank officials about middleware integration and the client had insisted on being there, you can understand how that’s a little high-stress.
After the meeting, once the client had gone somewhere else, I went for a walk to de-stress and found the kind of shop I like, just around the corner, tucked away somewhere near Wall Street. It was a small shop for America, full of prints. These days I mainly buy 1930s stuff, but back then I’d buy anything I thought was interesting. Someone told me once that it’s the things you don’t do in life that you regret. This one was one of those.
It was a little picture, no age to it at all. Coloured, and it looked as if it was hand-drawn. It showed two teenage boys who’d climbed up under the arches of a bridge one evening, a place they’d found to be alone, where they could talk about their dreams and the lives they’d have. All the places they’d see and the people they’d become. They reminded me of the two boys in Not Your Heart Away. I didn’t buy the picture.
Four years after that meeting, I saw molten metal pouring out of the windows of Fuji Bank, for no reason anyone has ever adequately explained. They never answered the phone at the bank after that, and the buildings they were in weren’t there anymore. When I saw the Towers fall, even the one that fell down because an airplane didn’t crash into it, I thought of that meeting, and that little shop that would have been buried under the ashes and debris.
Four years would have seen those two boys in the picture have their final summer at home after school had ended for good. It would have seen them go to university if that’s where they were going, start a job if they were lucky, and to find it was in the Twin Towers if they weren’t.
They didn’t know any of that. They were just sitting up there on the iron trestles of that old railway bridge above the big river, looking out between here and tomorrow. They didn’t know the future. But from up there, under the arches of that old bridge, why, it looked as if you could see just about forever.
