Chapter 8

Friday, September 14, 2001

From the parking lot of Shae's apartment building on Staten Island, it was possible to see the cloud of smoke still emanating from the ruins of the World Trade Center as Dave and Shae said good-bye to Emily the next morning. He could hardly stand to look that direction, much less at the smoke cloud, and worried about how he was going to feel about getting closer later in the day.

It had been very good to see Emily again; she, Dave, and Shae stayed up until late, talking about the old days in Bradford, about friends, and what had happened to them. Dave felt it was a shame that Emily had to be heading back; it would have been fun to have her around longer, to get to know her a little more. Even more than Shae and Eve, she was a connection to the old days, when things were simpler, great things seemed possible, and life had much promise. Maybe someday, he thought, when things had settled down a little, he could go back to Bradford for a few days and try to catch up on some of those people they had talked about the night before.

It was with trepidation that he went back upstairs to change his clothes. He really didn't think he was ready to deal with Manhattan yet, but there were issues there to be confronted sooner or later, including checking with the police and seeing if he could get into the Battery Park Village apartment. At least today, he could have Shae with him for those chores, to lend him strength and support in case he felt he couldn't manage it himself.

It felt strange to be putting on his suit. For the last two days, he'd just been wearing the sweats Eve had bought for him at K-Mart, but Shae had thoughtfully had the suit run through the neighborhood dry cleaners without telling him about it. Even wearing the suit reminded him of Tuesday, and it was made more ironic by the realization it was the only thing he owned that he actually had access to. Depending on how the apartment had survived -- and there was no telling -- it might well be the only physical thing he owned in the world.

Then there was no putting it off any longer. Normally when Shae went into the network offices, in the same general area where Dave was heading, she'd take the ferry. However, the ferry docks were closed due to the damage, so she decided to use the same tactics she and Eve had used Tuesday night -- go to the studio in Brooklyn and take the subway from there.

Both Dave and Shae knew better than to drive, since even at the best of times, driving was a pain in the neck, and parking was a nightmare. Having lived on Manhattan since just months out of high school, Dave had never owned a car -- he and Julie had rented one on the rare occasions it had been needed. He was not a confident driver in heavy traffic and was perfectly willing to let Shae do it.

While the subway service in lower Manhattan was still reportedly spotty, getting to midtown from the studio was not an issue. Still, the drive across the Narrows Bridge meant a clear if distant view of lower Manhattan, an even more chilling sight for him. Fortunately, once into Brooklyn, it couldn't be seen.

After some discussion, they'd decided Dave should do the meeting at Rob's apartment first, before they headed to lower Manhattan -- mostly because he had no idea of how much he might be shaken if they went to the damaged area first. At the station nearest to Rob's they split up, with the agreement they'd meet at the network later.

Rob's apartment was crowded, even though far from the full staff was there. There were many more people than chairs, so people stood here and there, sat on the floor, or whatever. Perhaps eight or ten people were there from editorial; only he and Michelle were there from the SF department, which was actually the biggest single editorial department. Melissa Schaedler, another editor, had been missing when Dave had called on Wednesday, but had turned up uninjured not long afterward; she'd volunteered as a helper at an evacuation shelter and had just been too busy to think to call in. There were people from accounting, sales, shipping, and so on, mostly management level but a few other key players, as well. There were several people absent who Dave thought might have been there, but a quiet question revealed most were still pretty beat up or in the hospital. It had been a very near thing in the office when the World Trade Center went down, and it was just luck that no one in the office had been killed.

Ronna Goldberg was there, looking shaken and white; the two of them shared a hug and condolences over their mutual losses. With Ronna present, Dave suspected the real reason they'd been invited was to give them a show of support from management and staff, and that was what happened; everyone was supportive and offered condolences to them.

To a great extent, Dave's co-workers were the closest friends he had in the city. It was good to see them again, good to feel their concern -- but somehow, in some disquieting way, their friendship seemed a little more pro forma than the genuine warmth he had received from his old Bradford classmates, Shae, Eve, and Emily the last couple days.

"We'll keep this brief and try to avoid getting tied up in petty issues," Rob told the group as people settled down. "I know not everyone is up to speed, but here's the situation. We can forget about the old offices. They have structural engineers surveying it to make up their minds whether it can be saved or whether it'll have to be dropped. If it's the latter, we may be able to get in and recover important materials, and we may not. Even if we are allowed in, it probably won't be soon, and anything we can save will have to be carried down the stairs by hand since we probably won't have elevators, and probably no power, either. That's fine, fixtures like desks would be covered by insurance. Computers, though, that's a different story. Maxine, you have your hand up?"

"We don't need the computers from up there," the accounting department manager said. "From what little I saw, they probably took a beating anyway. As far as I can tell, everything's available from the backup site, except for the business we did Tuesday morning. We didn't get much done then. There might be a few key hard drives it would be worthwhile to recover if possible, but we wouldn't need the whole computer."

"True," Rob agreed. "From what we've talked around, there's paper files that would be inconvenient to lose, but we can make do without. Given the fact that we have the backup files, I'm thinking we might as well plan on not having anything from the old office. If we should be able to get something at some point in the future, it might be useful, but I don't think we'd better depend on it."

"I know a few things from my desk I wouldn't mind having," Melissa agreed. "But nothing worth climbing thirty-four flights of stairs to get, especially in a building where there's a danger of it collapsing." There was a general murmur of agreement around the room.

"OK," Rob said after a moment. "I guess that's pretty much agreed, we're not even going to concern ourselves with that issue. Now, that leaves the big problem, which is, where do we go? Office space downtown was at a premium even before this, and we're not the only ones in this bind. What little is vacant is going fast. Bluntly, we haven't found anything as big as we had, whether we could afford it or not, and there's bigger outfits trying for the same space."

There were some murmurs and some pained expressions around the room.

"It's not totally hopeless," Rob continued. "There are some options. One of them is to find a place out in the suburbs somewhere. We've got some leads on that. Although I'd rather be downtown, do we absolutely have to be?"

"We really need to maintain an editorial presence downtown," Dick Steward, the editor in chief, said. "We have too many people we have to meet with who have offices downtown, agents and reps and others. If we're out in the suburbs, we're going to lose business because we're out of the information loop."

"That's pretty much my thought," Rob agreed. "Being plugged into the gossip has brought us a lot over the years. It wouldn't be a big deal to keep a small editorial office downtown and move the business functions elsewhere. I hate to split us up; it's going to cause problems. But, we could struggle through for the short term. Now, there are a couple possibilities with that. We have enough space out at the warehouse; it wouldn't be prime space, but we could sort of camp out there for a while. But no one I've mentioned that solution to is real crazy about it."

Dave joined a crowd of other people shaking their heads. In the years he'd worked for Dunlap and Fyre, he'd only been out to the warehouse twice. It was in the South Bronx, and not even the nicest part of that. It was located there because of the company getting a big neighborhood redevelopment grant out of it, but it still was a crappy and dangerous place.

"Yeah, that's about what I figured," Rob agreed. "The next possibility is downtown, the Ford building. I've got a friend who's CEO of an insurance company there. He feels the space they have is way underutilized. He says he can squeeze things together and sublet us a fair amount of space. I was up there this morning. The location isn't ideal, but could be a whole lot worse. The thing of it is it's not going to be big enough. We could get the business functions in there, no problem, and there would be some room for a core editorial staff office. Or, we could move all of editorial in there, and move business somewhere else."

"That beats the hell out of the warehouse," Steward nodded. "But I'd really like to have everyone close together, at least from my viewpoint. I have to do enough with the business side that it would be cumbersome, otherwise."

"Unfortunately there's just not enough space," Rob pointed out. "And worse, we're going to have to jump on this quick or we lose it, so we really can't stare at our navels on this one."

"I've got an idea," Michelle said. "What if we go with your first option, business staff and a small editorial office?"