Excerpt of Under the Manhattan Bridge by Irene Marcuse

IT ALL SEEMED TO COME at once. I brought my best friend,
Barbara, to the hospital the night before the planes hit
the Trade Center Towers. Her funeral was on September
twentieth. Eleven days later, I found the body in the
vacuum press.

Benno was the one who made the 911 call.

I was alone in the finishing room when I found it. I think
I went into some kind of shock. I walked up the stairs to
tell my husband. When I got to him, I seemed not to have
any words whatsoever at my disposal. I tugged at his arm
until he followed me down to see what was wrong.

If it had happened a week earlier, my husband could've
summoned a cop by opening a window and hollering down to
the street. Since September thirteenth, the cross streets
between his woodshop and a Con Edison generating plant
that occupies a quarter-mile stretch of Brooklyn
waterfront have been blocked off by hulking green
sanitation trucks. At each intersection, a squad car and
two uniformed officers kept watch.

The trucks were still there on October first, but the
human presence had been reduced to a command post three
blocks upriver. Security, I know, but it didn't make me
feel any more protected. What were those barricades going
to do? Prevent a truck bomb from blowing up Con Ed — sure,
by allowing it to explode right in front of our door.

And where were the police when the body got itself into
our vacuum press?

For two decades, Benno's cabinetry shop was located on
Canal Street. Courtesy of a building owner eager to
convert the light-industrial loft spaces to residential
units, he was forced east across the river this past
January. Linearly, it was less than three miles from
Tribeca to Dumbo — Down Under the Manhattan Bridge
Overpass — in Brooklyn. Financially, by the time the new
space was fixed up with machines, lights, outlets, and a
dust-collection system, well, you don't want to know.

When I first started working with Benno, he treated me
like any apprentice, and I sanded my little hands off.
What I'd wanted was a respite from social work, a chance
to use my hands rather than my heart; learning the fine
art of woodworking from the basics up wasn't what I had in
mind. Eventually the boss let me try spraying, his least-
favorite part of the job. Turned out I could keep up a
steady flow and lay a light, wet coat of lacquer on even
the largest cabinet door. It's an art, finishing, and I
was surprisingly good at it.

Apart from the toxic fumes that meant I had to wear a
heavy-duty vapor mask and filter apparatus, I liked the
work. It was rhythmic, peaceful, challenging enough that
my mind was occupied with what I was doing but not so
demanding that I lay awake at night worrying over how to
approach the next set of cabinet parts. A relief from the
sometimes insoluble problems of my former clients.

After September 11, we were extremely grateful to have
moved when we did. The building where Benno's shop had
been, although structurally intact, was off-limits inside
the frozen zone for several long weeks. Thanks to our
former landlord, we watched the disaster from the safety
of Brooklyn, our main worry being how to get back onto the
island where Clea, our twelve-year-old daughter, was in
school.

All the bridges and tunnels into Manhattan were sealed
off. Stunned pedestrians flowed steadily out of the city,
but no one was allowed in, not even on foot. In the end,
it was the subway that got us home. God bless the MTA; by
three they had trains back up and running.

I'm drifting away from the other thing, the body in the
vacuum press.

The main shop occupied the entire three-thousand-square-
foot fourth floor of the former Peerless Paint building on
Plymouth Street. We also rented half of the third floor —
my domain, otherwise known as the spray room. When I first
noticed the odor, I attributed it to the air blowing in
through the open windows from lower Manhattan.

Even though I was working with lacquer, I closed them. The
chemical fumes smelled better than what was outside. After
the weekend, however, the stench of organic decay was
unmistakable — sweet and rotten. I figured there was a
poisoned rat decomposing in the walls somewhere.

I only uncovered the vacuum press because I thought I
heard the motor cycle on. Just a faint hum, easy to miss
if you weren't standing right next to it.

A vacuum press is exactly what it sounds like, a machine
that sucks the air out of a bag and presses down on the
bag's contents. Benno kept his downstairs in the spray
room because of its size. Basically, the thing is a sheet
of plywood inside a heavy-duty, clear plastic bag with a
sort of reverse-vacuum-cleaner motor attached by a hose.
You insert whatever you're gluing, seal the bag at both
ends, flip the switch, and the motor sucks all the air
out. It's a wonderful tool. Exerts a steady, even
pressure, two thousand pounds per square foot.

The press was covered, first by a blue wool electric
blanket that regulated the temperature while Benno was
gluing, then with a stack of thick, quilted furniture
blankets. I'd thrown a piece of plastic sheeting over the
top to protect it from random drifts of sprayed lacquer.
Mostly I ignored the thing. It took up half the far wall,
tucked into a corner, a rarely used object. The suction
could have been cycling on for weeks without me noticing.

I bent down to switch the motor off, and noticed a fan-
shaped mark on the wall. When I touched it, the tip of my
finger came away stained dark red. Rather than hitting the
button to stop the suction, I rocked back on my heels and
tried to figure out what was going on.

The hose from the bag was equipped with an exhaust filter
to prevent the motor from being fouled by any dust and
moisture that might be sucked out. The filter spits what
it can't handle through a small vent. Thus, the splatter
on the wall.

But what was it? Red, damp. And the smell — I already knew
what came next would be bad.

The vacuum maintained, the machine cycled off. I let it be
and stood to pull the blankets off the table. For the
longest minute, my brain refused to process what lay in
front of me.

The shape of the thing was recognizably human yet subtly
distorted. The bag of the press had followed the contours
of the body even as it flattened them. The feet had been
forced straight down, unnaturally elongating the
silhouette. The nose, held in place from the sides as well
as above, retained more of its shape.

Apart from a sleeveless white undershirt the body was
naked, and clearly male. His skin was the mottled purplish
blue of a bruise. Streaks of vivid red drained from the
face and filled the creases between plastic, table, and
flesh.

That'll teach you to uncover things, I thought.

I had the sensation of my own bodily fluids being
compelled toward the surface of my skin, capillaries
rupturing from the pressure of liquid seeking exit from
every opening. Mouth, nose, ears, eyes, orifices leaking
life. I reached to wipe my cheek. Looking at my hand, I
expected blood but saw only tears.

For how long had I not known about this presence in my
space? How long had I been inhaling his spirit with the
very air I breathed?

But then, there were so many lost spirits floating around
us.

After the planes hit, when people on fire fell from above;
when the people inside were crushed by pancaking floors;
when the whole of lower Manhattan was obscured, what we
heard and felt in Brooklyn was the silent, searing
aloneness of those souls set wrenchingly free, drifting
across the river in a constant plume of smoke and ash.

In the aftermath of skies with no planes, streets with no
trucks, car horns not honking, the great exodus of people
on foot not speaking, I was still spooked. In that
silence, I heard a roar. Like standing on the rim of the
Grand Canyon, all that vast silent emptiness ringing in
your ears, except in this absence of sound there was no
peace.

The body in the press put me as close as I've ever come to
falling apart. Not another death, I couldn't bear another
death. Maybe without everything else, I'd've been able to
pull myself together. Maybe.

WE WAITED ON THE STEPS in front of the building for the
police to arrive. It was another in a string of gorgeous
blue days. When I closed my eyes to the sun, the color
inside my lids went red, and I had to open them again.

"Did you recognize him?" Benno asked me.

"No, did you?" I turned to study my husband. Handsomer
than ever, his face with the character lines of maturity,
hair still black and thick as the proverbial sheep's.

"No."

I settled back against his side. That's marriage for you,
the ability to let your thoughts drift off and know the
other will still be there when they land.

It would've helped to know who the dead man was. Exactly
what the Brooklyn cops thought. Not that any of them said
so much as a word to either Benno or me. We were made to
hover in the hall outside the spray room, guarded by a
uniform with muscle-bound arms.

"So do they have any idea who this guy is?" Benno tried to
make conversation and got a beefy-shouldered shrug in
nonanswer.

We gleaned a bit of information by listening while the
people in white jumpsuits with "Crime Scene Officer" on
their backs did their jobs. The pair of them pretty much
filled the room, taking pictures, putting things in
plastic bags, dusting other things with little brushes.

Like tea to China, I thought, adding dust to a wood-shop.
Although my area was relatively dust-free, what with the
need to — Shut up with the jokes, Anita, I told myself.

What I gathered was that due to the unusual condition of
being hermetically sealed in plastic, no one had a fast
answer about when the owner of the body had died, or how
long it had been in the press. More than a day, less than
two weeks, was the consensus on the scene.

As to identification, pending a lengthy process with
missing persons and/or the long shot of fingerprints or
DNA matching anyone they had on file, all they knew about
the guy was that he appeared to be in his late teens. One
of the techs noticed that the white undershirt had knotted
fringes in the corners, meaning it could be tzitzis, the
undergarment worn by Orthodox Jews, so there was a
probable on his religion as well.

After much discussion, they decided to take the entire
vacuum press with them — motor, table, bag, macabre
occupant, all in one piece. Better to unseal it in the
morgue, they thought, let the mess spill out there.

Much better, Benno agreed.

Then the detective showed up, and her familiar face
prompted my first smile since I'd uncovered the boy in the
press.

"Inez!" Detective Collazo used to be on foot patrol in the
Manhattan precinct where we live. Promoted, now she was
out of uniform and in a moss-green pantsuit with jacket
cut loose enough to drape nicely over the gun under her
left arm.

I hadn't seen her in years. This would be the third time
we'd met at the scene of an unnatural death.

After a look at the spray room and the body, she asked if
there was someplace else we could talk. "Upstairs," Benno
answered. We settled into the office in the main shop, a
raised room he built over a storage area for unused
lumber. I sat in the swivel chair. Benno brought stools
for himself and Inez.