Leyla, in the Ruins
The Short Story Series on Extraordinary Women Who Disappeared Continues...
Editor’s Note: This is part of an ongoing series, be sure and check out the previous installments “Miranda, on a Night of Rain,” “Lavinia, Into Mexico,” “Sharon, in the Snow,” and “Serena, Eros”.
Somewhere in the ruins lies Leyla Hayek, or perhaps she does not. No one knows. Replete with secrets of her own, she is now the final secret of the catastrophe that shook the world. When the planes struck on the day of a luminous sky, a thousand mysteries were created. Very few remain unsolved. Against all odds, Leyla has defied this interrogation. So, it is proper that she became, in her way, an icon of the ambiguity of horror.
Certain tentative but incompatible hypotheses have been offered, and various parties are dedicated to them with near-religious fervor: The police, her family, her aggrieved husband, even the great investigative bodies. Each party chose which of the successive revelations they preferred, which were most convenient for them to believe, and which they considered lies, absurdities, and slander. They followed their convictions to the logical end, and at the end of logic lies madness. So, they created for themselves the Leyla they required. In life, she was singular. In her absence, she became a multiplicity.
What we do know is mere fragments. It is certain that Leyla left the Spruce Street apartment she shared with her husband Harold Carlyle in the late morning. She worked her shift at Bellevue Hospital and returned home in the early evening. She appears to have showered and changed her clothes. She then left the apartment before Harold returned from working late at Goldman Sachs. Harold presumed that she would return at dawn, as was her habit.
There is security camera footage of Leyla at the Spring Street subway station around 2:30 am. At 3:17 am, she withdrew money from an ATM ten blocks from her apartment—a suspiciously paltry sum of $50. A clerk at a just-opened Starbucks some three blocks away reported that a woman who answered Leyla’s description made a purchase at around 4:45 am. She stayed long enough to read the New York Times, the headlines of which would be obsolete within a few hours. She left around 5:50 am. Insofar as anyone has been able to ascertain, this was the last confirmed sighting. What transpired in the two hours between then and the conflagration remains unknown.
At 8:45 am, the first plane struck the North Tower. What followed belongs to the world, and need not be recounted. There was fire, dust, and death; the city shuddered and the nation froze for an instant—a terrible fate for a nation that never freezes, never stops, never pauses. Ten million people found themselves coated with a layer of ash composed in part of other human beings.
Each of those 10 million had a different story to tell. We do not know which story Leyla might have told, but Harold has told his a thousand times—to friends, family, the police, the courts, the media, and someday, one imagines, to historians. He was in his office at 200 West Street when the initial impact occurred. For some time, he stood on the roof of the building with his colleagues and watched what was believed to be an accident. At around 9 am, when the second plane struck the South Tower, a sinister pall descended on the day. The euphoria of watching a spectacle out of a Hollywood disaster film turned to the realization that one was in mortal danger.
When Harold and his colleagues evacuated, he ignored the pleas of his co-workers and headed for the Spruce Street apartment despite its close proximity to the unfolding events. He was almost there when he heard the titanic roar and was enveloped in the vast cloud of pumice, concrete, dust, debris, ash, and cremated remains; swallowed up by what seemed for a moment to be another Pompeii.
For some time—he could never remember how long—he crouched in a doorway, his eyes burning. A fireman with a water bottle helped wash them out, and Harold went on through the dissipated and now navigable cloud. He reached his building sometime around 11 am. The electricity had been cut off, which made the elevator unserviceable, so he clambered up the seven flights of stairs. When he reached the apartment, he found that the windows had been blown out and the entire apartment coated with detritus. In general, however, the damage was minimal.
He called his wife’s name in a hoarse voice, but received no answer. He searched the rooms and found no trace of her. He cursed that fact that neither of them—those were ancient days—had invested in a cell phone. The landline, however, still worked, so he called Bellevue on the off-chance that she headed there when she realized her skills might be needed. He was told that the hospital was deep in emergency preparations for a mass casualty event, and his question could not be answered at this time.
He then realized, like so many that day, that there was nothing he could do for now. Over the next four hours, he went door to door to help his neighbors—many of them elderly—evacuate the now uninhabitable building. Around 3:30 pm, he borrowed a cell phone from a neighbor, but discovered that no service was available. It had been knocked out either by the attacks or the sheer volume of calls that followed. In the end, he sat on his front stoop in a state of collapse and watched as, one by one, a parade of ashen zombies, drenched in gray, made their way, one by one, each in their own direction, toward home. Perhaps Harold waited for Leyla, though his mind, by that time, had reached its limits, and whatever his true intentions may have been, they were, in that moment, a mystery to him.
At 6:45 pm, as the darkness gathered, Harold walked several blocks to a friend’s apartment. Offered accommodations for the night, over the next several hours he called every phone number he could remember in search of his wife. He spoke to her mother and father, her three brothers, and several of her friends. No one had seen or heard from her. He called the hospital again, and was surprised to get an answer. He did not know that there had been very few major injuries as a result of the atrocity. People either escaped the Towers intact or died in the collapse. The casualty wards stood empty and there was little to fill the morgues, as no one had yet begun to pull the bodies from the molten wreckage. Nonetheless, the hospital staff could tell him nothing. No one at the nurses’ station or anywhere else had seen Leyla that day or had any idea where she might be.
Harold spent the remainder of that bloody evening in a stupor. For years, his memories of that night would be fragments of news coverage: The impact of the planes, the president’s speech, various reporters and public figures who lamented the day, stock footage of Osama bin Laden, and then a blur of shapes and colors—orange for the flames, black for the smoke, gray-white for the ash-covered streets. Around 11:30 pm, he descended into sleep as the television flickered before him. He dreamed of burning mountains and gray clouds.
He awoke the next morning to an upended nation. F-16s patrolled the skies, air traffic was shut down, people either spoke of nothing or spoke of nothing else. For some time, Harold was trapped in an innocent paralysis, uncertain as to what, if anything, he should do next. He knew that a world had ended and the fine and quiet place where he had lived for his entire life no longer existed, consumed by a moment in time, a matter of no more than two hours.
It had been a beautiful American world he had never known he loved, and he wanted it back. But he now knew, in the stark light of the first morning of the new era, that something irreversible had happened. People were dead and great structures had fallen. He and everyone else, he felt, would now walk through life amputated, their wounds a constant and ever-present reminder that a few minutes, a scant number of seconds, are sufficient to change everything.
Harold was lost in these thoughts for some time. But then he remembered that he still did not know where his wife was; or even, he dared to think for a second, whether or not she was still alive. Americans, perhaps because they are a practical people, generally presume everything will be fine, and they are often correct. The numbers, after all, are on their side. Disaster is a rare thing, at least in America. But the last 24 hours had been nothing but a cascade of disaster, so Harold was not able to overcome the urge to action. He could not sit and wait for Leyla to find him. The search would also give him something to do, and Americans put great stock in having something to do.
He had no coherent plan of action. So he began with the easiest option: He went back to the telephone and made the rounds once again, with the same results as before. No one had seen or heard from Leyla and no one had the slightest idea where she might be. Helpless again, Harold decided to return to the apartment. This time he brought several of his friends in tow. They scoured every inch of the place, but found nothing.
Then, at long last, the adrenaline began to wear off, and Harold felt something like genuine fear. He took several pictures of Leyla from the bedside table and, with his friends, began to wander the nearby streets and show them to random passersby, an uncanny number of whom were doing more or less the same thing. This tactic proved unsuccessful, and one of Harold’s friends suggested that it might be more effective to put up posters and hand out flyers.
This presented certain logistical difficulties in what was still a low-technology age. It took them over two hours, at a brisk pace, to find a copy shop that was intact and open. They found it, moreover, packed with people at the same dismal task as they. It took over three hours, but in the end they departed with a pile of flyers that bore Leyla’s image, description, last known location, and other useful details, along with the relevant contact information. For the rest of the day, with the aid of enormous quantities of pins and scotch tape, they adorned every available vertical surface with them.
By 6 pm, as the sun began to set on the second day of the great trial, the group limped back home, where they again watched the news, which was still nothing but fire and smoke and the billowing cloud. Harold fell asleep, once again, before the images.
Early the next morning, after he made the round of phone calls to no avail, Harold called the police. He could come down to the precinct and file a report, they said, but they were, to say the least, overwhelmed, and there were no resources available to search for a single missing person—in particular when so many members of the department were also missing people. They suggested several measures Harold could take in the meantime, all of which he had already tried.
For several days after, as the last embers of what was now and forever known as Ground Zero were extinguished, Harold and whatever friends were available kept a lonely vigil in the area around the site. They distributed flyers to anyone and everyone: rescue workers, policemen, cleanup crews, local business owners, and often other groups of people carrying their own flyers. Each were, in effect, bartering tragedy, exchanging irreversible burdens. But since the burden was inalienable, they all found, in the end, that they were alone, and had only managed to confound matters.
Nonetheless, Harold and his comrades kept true to their charge, even as they began to feel that they could take no more shaken heads, brief embraces, and expressions of regret that, no, they hadn’t seen her—not that day or any other day. Then, of course, they told him how sorry they were that this was so.
On September 14, Harold had his first opportunity to speak to the media. The local ABC affiliate was after a story on the search for missing loved ones, and Harold’s group was picked at random by the news crew, along with several others nearby. Harold showed them the flyer, gave a description of his wife, and made the requisite plea to anyone with information to come forward. Then the camera turned to the next tired, frightened, and grief-stricken relative, and the thing was over.
In that moment, Harold felt sympathy for the ancient superstition that the camera stole your soul. As he watched the lens turn away from him, he sensed its ruthless indifference, its utter lack of remorse that it had recorded him in his moment of greatest desperation. He knew, above all, that the camera did not care; and, for the first time, he began to entertain the possibility that his wife might be dead.
On September 16, Leyla’s parents Yasmin and Joseph flew in from Los Angeles and took up residence with Leyla’s brother Maroun and his wife. They were determined to aid in the search, because they were determined people, and had been made determined by history. Part of the great Lebanese diaspora, they were of the Maronite Christian sect, founded by a fourth-century monk whose name they had given their son. The Maronites suffered from a dire history of centuries of persecution and disputation, yet they had remained in communion with the Roman Church, and despite the efforts of Islam, were still stubbornly there, albeit in diminished numbers.
They had bequeathed this heritage to their children. Indeed, Leyla was the physical embodiment of her Levantine origins. With jet-black curly hair and luminous brown eyes, she stood only five-foot-three, but was sturdy, strong, and beautiful. There was a quality of immovable granite about her; but when she smiled, all of that disappeared, and she appeared luminous and fluid, like the Madonna her parents still venerated, though she herself did not.
Leyla was born and grew up in Los Angeles, where her parents had fled when Lebanon descended into civil war in the 1970s. Her childhood was, to all appearances, utterly normal, even banal, with only her family’s immigrant origin and membership in a tiny denomination to distinguish her. She showed an early love of photography that resulted in a room plastered with portraits and studies, and several teachers pronounced that she possessed more than a little talent.
She wanted to attend art school after graduation, but her parents refused to pay for it. They pushed her instead into the secure and reliable profession of nursing. The world, they noted, would always have sick people and require nurses long after photography had been forgotten; as, with the pessimism endemic to those of their faith, they were certain it one day would be. So, for Leyla, photography became a mere hobby, or perhaps an avocation, and finally a discontent. Her parents, one regrets to say, had made a mistake, though they would not know it until it was too late.
It was later believed by some that it was when she entered nursing school that Leyla began to display certain aspects of a secret and second life. It was a life with other people in other places, so that Leyla became that small percentage unsubmerged, the vast bulk of herself kept safe in the darkness of the deep.
At that point, few close to her noticed any great or profound change. This was because Leyla was skillful. To her parents and oldest friends, she appeared to remain as she was: demure, dutiful, even somewhat shy—in short, that terrible thing known as “the good girl.” To her fellow students, newfound friends, and others who had not known her before, she was different: extraverted, mercurial, energetic, manipulative, unpredictable, and even devious. Many, in fact, found her unnerving, yet at the same time quite attractive. Once separated from her family and friends, Leyla acquired a certain charisma. Its origin was unknown, but the effect was immediate and apparent. Leyla, for the first time in her life, became the center of attention.
Though no one realized the extent of it at the time, this charisma included a marked sexual element. Colleagues began to note a subtle but constant flirtatiousness in her manner, directed toward both men and women. With her eyes, lips, and ever-shifting postures of her body, Leyla seemed to be engaged in a constant attempt to seduce both sexes, to secure the desire of whomever she met.
For some time, this was put down to the normal eruption of promiscuity undergone by most people when they leave home for the first time. But salacious whispers nonetheless abounded: an affair with a senior doctor twice her age, a disappearance at a party with two fellow students, rumored attendance at lesbian bars, compulsive masturbation in staff bathrooms.
The reports always seemed to come at second- or third-hand, however, which led many to attribute them to simple prejudice. Leyla’s feminist-minded fellow students saw her as a wronged woman, unfairly maligned by outdated and misogynist stereotypes. To a few of them, she even became something like a role model, admired for her outspokenness and candor in any and all situations.
For Leyla’s parents, it was a blow when she announced her intention to pursue her residency in New York City. They knew that it was the American way for children to break away from their parents and go their own way; to forge an independent path free of unchosen roots. But they were products of a more venerable and restrictive tradition, and felt nothing good could come of this, and they would later believe they had been vindicated by events. Nonetheless, Leyla was 20, and whatever unwritten restrictions might have existed in the old country were impotent in the new, so they had no choice but to acquiesce.
In America as it was then, and indeed today, a great many important things tended to happen in bars. Americans, for some reason, require libations in order to become their true selves, and without the therapeutic or detrimental effects of drink, they seem unable to confront the dread terror of things as they are. As a result, many of life’s most fateful events occur in drinking establishments: friends are made, lovers acquired, strangers met, old enemies encountered by chance, fights started, bones broken, and sometimes even death occurs unbidden.
In Leyla’s case, the fateful event was to meet the man she would take as her husband. What drew Leyla and Harold together is unknown. Perhaps it was, as Harold claims, no more than an inadvertent locking of eyes across a bar. Leyla never spoke of the subject. She was not a romantic.
What is clear is that, within two weeks of their first meeting, she had moved into Harold’s apartment on Spruce Street, and the two were as inseparable as it was possible to be, given the enormous demands on their time. Leyla’s nursing studies kept her occupied for up to and sometimes over 12 hours a day or night, and as a corporate lawyer, overtime was a requirement for Harold. There were weeks, sometimes months, when they would see each other for just a few moments in the early morning or late at night.
But they were young, and when one is young, time is presumed, as is the surety that, once life’s preliminaries are got out of the way, things will “slow down.” This, of course, is almost never the case, as American life has now reached the point that all of life is preliminary. Those with the power and authority to demand it have either decided or come to believe that the enormous efforts common to the preliminary state of things ought to carry over into the remainder of one's life. Thus, the famous treadmill is created, on which everyone stays fit but gets nowhere. For most Americans, in fact, life has become no more than the mad rush to secure the benefits of old age—which is, ironically, the time when it is hardest to enjoy them, and in many ways the time when it is hardest to live at all. That all of this is bound to create untold despair is both obvious and at least unconsciously known to all who participate in it; but no one has any better ideas, so the thing goes on, and does not change.
Leyla and Harold married when she was 24 in a Maronite ceremony in Los Angeles. Her parents chose to be joyful even though Harold was a lapsed Methodist, and photographs of the ceremony and the celebration after show nothing but happiness on the part of all involved. It is true that, by American standards, Leyla was a young bride, but she was old enough in her parents’ tradition, and they were pleased that their daughter would not go down the dark path of so many of the native-born—the constant shuffle of partners that ends in a barren loneliness.
Why did Leyla marry so young, despite all her efforts to free herself of the strictures of her origins? Perhaps it was out of inescapability. Leyla had been born into a clan, one in which she was never alone, and however she might have struggled to break free, something in her coveted that safety and serenity. It is clear that, perhaps more than anything else, Leyla was terrified of being alone. As would later be discovered, Harold was, in effect, her backup plan. However far she might stray, which proved to be very far, she knew he would be there, a safe retreat when the outside world failed her. Harold could not have known this at the time, but one imagines that, even if he had known, it would have made no difference.
The first sign of discontent was, perhaps, the couple’s failure to immediately produce offspring. Leyla’s parents, of course, expected to be presented with a substantial brood of grandchildren as soon as possible. But three years went by without the slightest indication that anything of the sort was in the offing. For a year or so, the hapless parents said nothing, but afterwards would begin to drop hints and then more than hints, and then straightforward questions. Harold deferred to Leyla, a strong indication that the decision not to reproduce for the moment was hers. Leyla would cite a series of practical considerations such as employment, finances, and various future endeavors like a tour of Europe she and Harold wished to undertake.
Viewed with the hindsight of years, however, it seems clear that Leyla did not want children, and perhaps never had. Whether she would have changed her mind at some point in the future must remain unknowable. Harold claims that, by the time of the disappearance, she had, in fact, changed her mind, but given Leyla’s ability to obfuscate her parents, there is no reason to think she did not do the same to her husband. In light of the facts revealed by later investigation, this seems to be the most probable scenario, and we must regard Harold’s testimony as, at best, an expression of the naiveté to which he was often prone and suited Leyla so well.
Indeed, it must be said that, as far as can be ascertained, Leyla never told the truth to those closest to her, and it was always strangers or perhaps secret intimates who received her deepest confidences. And how can she be blamed? A woman who does not want children—even today, when we consider our minds so open—is considered an aberration, and Leyla had long since learned never to confront disapproval head on. Instead, she tricked it, avoided it, ran past rather than through it, took evasive maneuvers, and thus, in the end, exhausted her opponents. Then, she could do what she wanted to do.
This may be either the most tragic or the most triumphant thing. Leyla wanted her freedom, but did not know how to take it; though it is just possible that, in the end, she did take it; or perhaps disappeared into a different but no less onerous slavery. None can say.
After two weeks, the active phase of Harold’s search for Leyla came to an end. At the epicenter of the catastrophe at One World Trade Center, no one recognized or remembered her, and it was clear that, if she was there, she was beneath the mountain of wreckage that had not yet ceased to smolder. For quite some time, Harold could do nothing but supervise the cleanup of their apartment, the repair of the windows, and other arbitrary tasks.
This was complicated by the fact that, as the cliché goes, Leyla seemed to be everywhere. There was her face in the photographs that littered the apartment, her clothes and shoes in the closet, her spare set of keys in the bowl next to the door, her books on the shelves, her scent still on the bedsheets. These remains perplexed Harold, because he had no idea what to do with them; so, as people do in such situations, he left them as they were, and put his faith in inertia.
The first break, which would be one of very few, came on September 30. A Starbucks on Broadway had been unable to reopen until the 28th, and when, two days later, a certain employee came in for his first day of work since the catastrophe, his eyes fell upon a flyer that had been taped to a telephone pole nearby. Five minutes later, he was on the phone with Harold, and a half-hour after that, the two were face to face.
The employee, however, was able to tell Harold very little. Leyla had come in near dawn on the day in question, paid in cash, stayed for an hour, and left. Beyond that, he knew nothing. Harold asked if security camera footage was available and was told to return around 5 pm. He did so, and was shown a very blurred black-and-white video of a woman who did look very much like Leyla. The woman entered the café, stood at the counter, made her purchase, sat down, read a newspaper, and departed. He felt grave disappointment. He now knew that Leyla had been in the vicinity of both their apartment and the catastrophe just a few hours before the first plane, but that was all.
Still, Harold would later admit to himself, it did cause a small tremor deep in his chest, because it meant that Leyla had been close, very close, on that dark morning that turned to a blazing blue sky—so close that he felt he could have touched her had he tried. But she had not come home, and thus far, he did not know where she had gone.
He asked for the tape to be played again, and then again, which was when it struck him that, as she exited the store, Leyla turned and walked west—toward the disaster. He knew this proved nothing. It was not knowledge. But it made him shudder again. He asked whether he could have the tape, and though the staff felt it inappropriate, they bowed to the special circumstances and gave it to him out of pity.
As he walked home, a scenario began to take shape in Harold’s mind for the first time: Leyla had arrived at the Starbucks from whatever unknown place she had been the night before. She left an hour later and walked west toward an equally unknown destination. Wherever she was at 8:45 am, she had seen the first plane and then the second, and had rushed to the scene of the catastrophe to help attend to the wounded—she was a nurse, she would have done that—and then…
He could think of only two conclusions to this chain of events: Leyla had seen the towers fall one by one, seen the bloodied victims and the bodies that plummeted from on high and exploded on the ground, and was then enveloped by the great cloud. Though uninjured, the sights had deranged her mind, and she wandered off in a delusional or amnesiac state, and was now sequestered in a mental ward, or perhaps still wandered the streets with the mad vagrants of the city.
The second scenario was simpler and darker: Leyla had seen the planes and rushed to the scene to render aid. Then she was crushed beneath the collapsed behemoth, or felled by debris or one of the fallen bodies. This was a horrific possibility, of course, but with a pang of guilt, it occurred to Harold that it had a silver lining. It meant that Leyla had died a martyr, or even something like a hero.
The next day, Harold marched into the Fifth Precinct and showed them the video. Perhaps the load had lightened in the weeks since the tragedy, because the police agreed to open a missing persons case, but warned Harold that if Leyla had died in the conflagration and collapse, he would not have an answer for a very long time, if at all. Even at this early stage, human remains had begun to be pulled from the wreckage, but the process of identification was difficult. With DNA still in its relative infancy, and the number of remains high, there was no doubt that it would take years, perhaps decades, before the names of the dead would be fully known.
Even then, the police noted, there might be no remains at all. Jet fuel burns at over 400 degrees Fahrenheit, and the fires set off by the crashes burned still hotter—more than sufficient to incinerate the human body within minutes if not seconds. Moreover, fires just as hot still burned in the hill of the dead at Ground Zero. It was unpleasant to say, but his wife could well have been among the ashes that coated the city that day. If this was the case, Harold would have to live with not knowing.
Although they already sensed Harold’s nascent monomania on the subject of his wife’s potential martyrdom, the police posited another scenario, perhaps the most painful of all: His wife may have disappeared because she wished to. It is rare, they admitted, but not unheard of for unhappy people to one day decide that they no longer wish to be unhappy. They sometimes begin to think that elsewhere, with other people in other places, where they would be unknown and thus unjudged, it might be possible to be happy.
It is not, of course, an easy task to disappear, they said, especially today, when so much of our lives is taken up with things that can be tracked and recorded. Once upon a time, it was simple—there was the great open West to escape to. But there is no frontier now, and to survive, one needs social security numbers, credit cards, health insurance, bank accounts, resumes, tax returns, telephone lines, passports, cell phone accounts, internet services, IP addresses, and numerous other means of identification and authorization. The trail we now leave is so immense as to be almost insurmountable.
Yet it can be done. It is not impossible to efface oneself. There are those who do not wish to be found and are smart enough not to be found. And it sounded to the police, based on Harold’s own testimony, that his wife was a very intelligent and resourceful woman. He should prepare himself for the possibility that her departure was willful and permanent.
None of this made the slightest impression on Harold. As the police walked him through these various scenarios, he barely heard them. A narrative, a mythos had formed in his mind. He knew, as sure as he had ever known anything, that his wife had not been unhappy, and would never have had the will or desire to undertake the enormous task of disappearance in a world in which one cannot disappear. She was there, amongst the twisted steel and incinerated bones. If they looked, they would find her, or at least some sign of her.
The police were not in need of fantasias. So, they proceeded along the usual lines. They began with formal interviews of Harold and Leyla’s family and friends. For the most part, they painted a picture of Leyla identical to the one already described by Harold: a decent, hardworking, beautiful girl who was close to her family, loved her husband, and was kind and generous to her friends.
There were, however, a few anomalous revelations. Maroun mentioned his sister’s mercurial personality, which did not jibe with the image of scrupulous stability described by others. Several friends also noted long periods of silence, when all contact with Leyla was lost, only to resume suddenly and with no warning.
In particular, the police were struck by Harold’s admission that he had not seen his wife at all on September 10 and did not know where she had been that night. He further confessed that this was not unusual. His wife often stayed out all night, and sometimes did not return home for several days at a time.
The world contains all kinds of marriages, and New York more than most, so the detectives made no particular judgments; but they noted this fact because it was a disparity, a contradiction; and detectives, in many ways, do nothing but search for disparities and contradictions. Still, it brought them no closer to the discovery of Leyla’s whereabouts, and they decided the search would have to be expanded.
So, they moved on to Leyla’s colleagues, who, in many ways, confirmed the detectives’ inchoate suspicions. This was not unexpected. Bound by love and loyalty, families and close friends are often the worst possible source of hard information. Loved ones prevaricate, cover up, construct convenient narratives, obfuscate, and sometimes outright lie to preserve the pure and preferred memory of their beloved. Strangers, on the other hand, tell the truth.
The truth these witnesses told was an odd one, and often at variance with previous testimony. They spoke of an attractive young woman given to intense mood swings and vivid fantasy who was often socially and sexually inappropriate, propositioned colleagues both male and female, and exploited her beauty and charisma to rescue herself from ridicule or rebuke. She “lit up the room,” they said, but there was also the vague sense that she was a repository of great secrets, the nature of which was a mystery.
Above all, the witnesses testified, Leyla was intelligent, and they expressed doubt that she would have remained a nurse. She was destined for bigger and better things, they felt. Perhaps she might have moved up and studied to become a doctor, or pursued something unrelated to the medical profession. One or two of them even hinted, and perhaps more than hinted, that if anyone were capable of disappearance in this omniscient age, it would be her.
For now, however, the detectives wished to eliminate more prosaic possibilities. A voluntary disappearance struck them as both far-fetched and too well-timed. The odds were very much against it. They stowed the possibility away for the moment, and chose to focus on the practical and provable.
This should be no surprise. Contrary to popular belief, policemen always begin with the details, the smallest of confirmable facts, and through the accumulation of these facts, they hope, a picture of the whole begins to emerge. They are, in effect, scientists of the unusual and extreme, and therefore suspicious by nature. They are not prone to empty speculation or epic visions of the improbable—at least not the best of them. They follow the diktat of William of Ockham, and do not multiply entities without cause. So, amidst the mass of contradictory testimony, they turned to the one question that, thus far, had not been answered: Where had Leyla been that night?
They began the search by the easiest method. They asked family and friends for a list of Leyla’s favorite nocturnal haunts, and worked their way through several upscale bars, restaurants, and clubs. But none of the employees or habitués they interviewed remembered seeing Leyla on the night of the 10th, and all were certain that they would have remembered. With that avenue exhausted, the police turned to local taxi drivers, who might have ferried Leyla across the city that night. But the cabbies kept no records of names back then, everyone paid cash, and they did not remember anyone of that description; although, they admitted, faces begin to run together over time.
The detectives then began to examine what CCTV and security camera footage they could find at the nearby subway stations. There they found, at last, a sign of Leyla. They determined that she had disembarked from a southbound A train in the early morning hours of the 10th. They began again the slow journey from bar to bar and club to club in the vicinity of the relevant stations as they worked backward along the route in question. It was in Greenwich Village near the Spring Street station that they found what they had hoped to find, and it was, in some ways, not unexpected.
The club Masque was located in a basement on Canal Street. It was unmarked, and knowledge of it had to be acquired by word of mouth or personal invitation; but it had a liquor license, and was therefore not difficult for the police to find.
The Masque was composed of a series of interlocking rooms, each painted and lit a different color, ending in a chamber that was a deep, intense crimson, in accordance with the club’s obvious namesake—Edgar Allen Poe’s famous tale “The Masque of the Red Death.” To add to the eerie atmosphere, every vertical surface was covered with drapery the same vivid color as each of the respective rooms, and square windows at the approximate eye level of the average person were set into the walls.
In each room was a varied assortment of constructions and instruments. In particular, twisted pieces of furniture that approximated the contours of the human body in various positions, adorned with a plethora of variable restraints, from leather belts to steel chains. In some of the rooms, whips and masks of numerous kinds hung from great wooden hooks. The red room, which served as the culmination of the labyrinth, contained six mattresses and, at the extreme end, a condom dispenser.
Manhattan police detectives are used to almost everything. The purpose of the establishment was clear to them at once, and they were neither shocked nor scandalized. The BDSM subculture was well established, even venerable, in the city. The detectives had been in such places before, and seen several that contained instruments of a far more extreme and uncanny variety. As a result, they questioned the proprietor and employees as they would the staff of the most innocuous bistro or coffee shop.
Here, their efforts were, at last, rewarded. The employees recognized Leyla’s photograph immediately, though they had known her only as a dominant named “Fiona.” Fiona, they said, came on irregular nights—in accordance with her whims, it seemed—and was always accompanied by her submissive, who went by the no doubt false name “Annabelle.” Over the course of each night, Fiona would restrain, whip and pierce Annabelle, and their play always ended in the red room, where Fiona would penetrate Annabelle with various objects.
These scenes, the employees said, were always watched by avid groups of fellow patrons, to the extent that Fiona and Annabelle were, in many ways, the club’s star attraction. They drove the intensity and excitement of the nocturnal revels, and those nights they did not appear were often subdued and disappointing. And yes, Fiona and Annabelle had been there on the fateful night of the 10th. No, Fiona’s behavior had not been strange or abnormal in any way. Yes, Fiona and Annabelle had left together as they always did. No, no one had followed them.
The police had only two questions: Who was Annabelle and where could they find her? The answers from the staff were not useful. We don’t know her real name, they said, and if we did, we wouldn’t tell you. Discretion, the manager noted, was their lifeblood, their medium of exchange.
The police asked for a description of Annabelle, but were told that no one had ever seen her without the leather mask that was her trademark. All they could say was that she was tall, red-haired, pale, freckled, and had a prominent tattoo of a dragon on her left arm. It was rumored among the regulars that she lived in the area, but they had no idea if this was true.
The police left frustrated but unsurprised. They were well acquainted with the premium such establishments placed on anonymity, which was, in its way, quite understandable. Nonetheless, they consoled themselves with the knowledge that they had, at last, come away with more than they had going in.
They now knew where Leyla had been the night before her disappearance. They knew she had been in the company of a young woman who might live in the general vicinity of the club Masque and had an identifying tattoo in a place where it would be difficult to conceal. This was more information than they had been able to glean over almost a month of fruitless investigation.
Above all, they now knew that Leyla led the classic “double life.” At the time she chose, she became someone else. She became Fiona, and Leyla may have been, in the end, only one of Fiona’s many faces, the mask Fiona wore to the masque. Perhaps it was only there that she could, amidst the whips and the chains and the leather, with Annabelle spread below her fist, at last become herself.
The family, of course, would have to know, and be asked about it. The detectives were used to this too. Their job was to discover secrets, elicit confessions, uncover those things people prefer to remain entombed. The reaction was as the detectives expected: Disbelief followed by professions of ignorance. Harold insisted he was completely unaware of his wife’s second life, or that she had any sexual interest in women at all. The detectives believed him. They had long since decided that Harold’s strongest trait was obliviousness.
Leyla’s parents and brothers were even more shocked by the revelations, and her parents in particular were at a total loss as to how to respond. No, they asserted with considerable vehemence, they had not known any of this, and it must be a case of mistaken identity. Their daughter was not a homosexual. The police, they said, were wasting time chasing the wrong woman.
The police were by now quite convinced that they were not chasing the wrong woman, and while the family’s reaction was expected, it left them no closer to a solution. After all, due to the family’s ignorance of Leyla’s other life, they by definition knew nothing of a young woman named Annabelle who might prove to be the skeleton key to all the locked rooms of the Masque.
The detectives decided, therefore, that the search for Annabelle had to be their top priority. Their search worked outward from the Masque and began to fan out through the neighborhood. They asked anyone and everyone—residents, bodega owners, café employees, bus drivers, cabbies—whether they knew or had seen a tall young woman who might be named Annabelle with red hair, pale skin, and a dragon tattooed on her arm.
Hours became days, which became weeks, and finally a month and a half passed with no results. The search area was expanded, a description was sent to all precincts and broadcast on local television and radio stations, dozens if not hundreds of people were questioned—to no avail. Annabelle, like Leyla, was gone; and the detectives sometimes doubted that she existed at all, though they knew with absolute certainty that she did.
By the New Year, the detectives had admitted defeat. The search had begun to consume unreasonable resources, and there were more serious cases to consider—all the more so given that, as of yet, Leyla’s case involved no crime. All leads were exhausted, and the police believed that without some miraculous revelation, Leyla’s fate would remain a mystery.
It was possible a surprise witness would come forward, or Leyla’s body might yet be found amidst the ruins. Or she might simply reemerge. If she had disappeared of her own volition, pangs of conscience or even nostalgia might draw her back despite everything. Or she might tire of her new life, as she had grown tired of her old one. It was not impossible.
Leyla did not return. By mid-2002, her family at last began to assume the worst. But this worst was the one they found most amenable to them, a worst that would not include Fiona and Annabelle, a worst they could accept with something like pride: They decided for good and all that Leyla was a hero.
The family’s narrative was the same as the one Harold had begun to concoct some six months before: Leyla, they asserted, had been on the way home when the planes struck their targets, and had rushed unbidden to care for the wounded. Like so many rescue workers that day, she perished in the ensuing maelstrom.
For a family intent on the defense of the honorable name of a loved one, this narrative was understandable and essential; and was at least possible, perhaps even probable. The evidence that Leyla had been in the vicinity of One World Trade Center at the moment of impact was incontrovertible, and she was a trained medical professional with all the ethical obligations this implied. That Leyla had died that day doing her duty was as reasonable as any other scenario.
Nonetheless, this narrative was a narrative, and as such it suffered from its own flaws. In particular, it began and ended at the most convenient moments. It erased where Leyla had been the night before the first plane and what might have happened to her after the impacts. It explained everything and explained nothing. It worked without proof, only probability.
But probability was not enough, because when they declared Leyla a hero, her family had inadvertently entered into the vast and horrific web of municipal, state, and federal bureaucracy and all the attendant private entities in their orbit. The atrocities of that day were not just a personal and national tragedy, but also an official one, and the mechanism of the state and its proxies began to turn and assimilate tragedy into itself.
One could not simply be one of the heroes of that day. One had to be declared a hero, recognized as a hero, and this had to be official, with all the authorizations in perfect order. Moreover, a compensation fund had already been set up, so money was now involved; and governments and their private agents always tread very carefully around money. For Leyla to be a hero, then, a great deal of work would be required.
Of course, Leyla’s family did not want money or benefits, but the process of recognition would be the same, and at times, one wonders why they pursued it with such tenacity. They need not have forced the issue. But they discovered that they did not just require their myth—which, after all, might be true—but they needed it confirmed and recognized. They needed to see Leyla’s name on the memorials and monuments, because then, at least, they would know where she was—upon the mosaics of the dead. Without this, they would remain ignorant or be forced to accept the Masque, and that was unbearable.
Their need would prove to be an onerous burden, because belief, faith, even conviction were not enough for the great apparatus aligned against them. The World Trade Center Memorial Foundation and the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund had very specific requirements and demands. Mere circumstances were not enough. They wanted physical proof, witnesses, video or audio evidence, concrete things they could look over and examine, and thus come to their conclusions by the venerable process of reason.
But the family realized that they had none of those things. There was no proof that Leyla had been at the scene of the atrocity, let alone died in its denouement. Leyla was a striking woman, yet no witness had reported seeing her at what was about to become Ground Zero that morning. As of yet, no body had been discovered, and though this might change as the cleanup continued and DNA testing improved, this was a matter of years if not decades, and in the meantime, the family would be in interminable limbo. As for video or audio evidence, almost all possible sources had been destroyed in the catastrophe, and what little remained—combed through by a private investigator retained by the family—revealed nothing. In the end, Leyla’s loved ones were forced to come to the relevant bodies with little except a confluence of dates and a firm belief.
The Memorial Foundation was not, as one might assume, a heartless bureaucratic tribunal. Its members, by and large, were sincere in their dedication to the memorialization of the dead and wished to provide their families some form of that amorphous thing called “closure.” This was, of course, a futile endeavor, because nothing is ever closed, especially death, and violent death most of all. The door of tragedy always remains open. Nonetheless, the desire to close it meant that the Foundation was well disposed toward the bereaved families.
But the Foundation also had another, sterner mission. They not only had to enumerate and commemorate the dead, but also sort them: to eliminate certain names and faces from the roster. They wanted no stolen valor. Only those who had been genuine victims were to be marked as such, and to include, by mistake or design, those who were not, would be a desecration of memory.
This dilemma is one faced by all such bodies, such as those that engraved the names upon the memorial to the war in Vietnam. It meant that, when the status of the dead came to be ascertained, there would be those who would be struck off, whose deaths would be found wanting, whether due to improbability, suspicion of fraud, or simple lack of evidence.
At first, when Leyla’s case came before them, the Foundation took no action whatsoever. This was due to the inertia that afflicts all bureaucratic institutions, but Leyla’s family took it as a calculated insult. They wanted their closure now, and all the more so due to the revelations of Leyla’s double life, which might now be effaced by the halo effect of official heroism.
The lack of response from the Foundation, which was, after all, faced with thousands of such claims, proved intolerable to them. They waited a month, and then made an unwise decision: They turned to the media.
Convinced of their mythos, because they had no choice, they contacted the New York Daily News, told their story of bureaucratic indifference toward the death of a beautiful young woman who had tried only to save lives on that horrific day, and offered interviews with Harold and Leyla’s parents. The Daily News was, of course, ever eager for a good story, and this was a good story, a moving tragedy with a beautiful woman at its center. It also knew that outrage at official bodies always sells newspapers.
Within a week, Leyla’s photograph was on the front page above the fold, superimposed on a photo of the Towers aflame. The headline read “A Heroine Denied: Why Is the 9/11 Foundation Refusing to Recognize Victim Leyla Hayek?” The story included the exclusive interviews. Harold extolled his wife’s talent, beauty, and selfless dedication to others. Leyla’s parents painted the picture of the bucolic all-American girl who was also an exotic immigrants’ child made good, and who, as everyone who knew her would have expected, rushed to save the victims of an atrocity only to become a victim herself.
The Daily News delineated the circumstantial evidence that Leyla was at the scene and concluded that she was now a victim twice over: First, of maniacal terrorists, and now of a heartless government institution. When would she have justice? From where would it come? And where, moreover, were the police, who were supposed to investigate and confirm Leyla’s martyrdom?
The public reaction, as the family and the Daily News had hoped, was one of immediate outrage. Letters and emails poured in to the Foundation and all the relevant municipal, state, and federal offices and elected representatives. There were even a few, it was said, addressed to the president himself; who, needless to say, did not send a personal reply. The mayor was even asked about it at a press conference, but declined to respond beyond assurances that he would see to it that the case was properly investigated.
So, for a brief moment, Leyla’s loved ones were certain that soon the world would clasp hands with them in their grief, and Leyla’s memory would be entombed with the glorious dead.
It was not to last. Three days after the Daily News exclusive, the paper ran a follow-up, and again put Leyla on the cover. But this time, it was clear that they had talked to the police or, at least, the police had engaged in a strategic media leak. “Hero Nurse’s Secret Life,” the headline read, and the article made it clear that, despite the headline, Leyla might not have been quite as heroic as the public had thought.
The article first outlined the paucity of evidence that Leyla had even been at the site of the collapse: No eyewitnesses had seen her, her image had been captured by no camera, and thus far those who combed the ruins had found no trace of her remains.
This, however, was not the worst of it. In a cruel and spiteful breach of privacy and professional ethics, someone close to the police investigation exposed everything the detectives had found: The nocturnal adventures, the club Masque, the mysterious Annabelle… The entirety of Leyla’s secret life was exposed before the public. Fiona, who was perhaps the most precious of all Leyla’s numerous selves, was revealed to the world, and Leyla disappeared into her shadow.
The family, of course, was devastated. First by the revelations, which had deprived them of their myth, and then by the reaction of the great mindless horde called the public. Because people were not just shocked and titillated by the revelations, they were outraged. They felt, above all, betrayed.
For a brief moment, they had taken Leyla into their hearts, made her an icon of sacrifice, tragedy, and posthumous redemption. In her, they saw all the grief and glory of the catastrophe, and to love her was to love all the dead heroes of that day. And how they needed that then, when Ground Zero was still a fetid pit of decomposed flesh and burnt metal. With the revelation that Leyla was not who she appeared to be and perhaps never had been, the great mourning was stolen from them, and they wanted revenge.
The Daily News story was, of course, plastered across the local news and even some national outlets, and the letters and emails began to pour in again, this time possessed of incontinent rage. They demanded vengeance on the woman who had betrayed them. The Foundation announced a few days later that Leyla Hayek would not be listed among the victims.
In the storm of outrage, however, it was willfully forgotten that Leyla did not deserve such opprobrium. She herself had made no claims of heroism—indeed, by definition she could not, as she was not there to do so—and everyone, whatever their status as a martyr in the public mind, has the right to a double life. Leyla had deceived no one but her husband (by design) and her family (by omission). She was blameless.
In the face of this storm of hatred, the family did what families often do: They denied everything. They attacked the Daily News for exploitation and the police for betrayal of confidence. They repeated that Leyla was not a lesbian and the Masque sightings had been a case of mistaken identity. The media, they said, was corrupted by sensationalism and character assassination. If only the public knew the truth…
Like Leyla, they must not be condemned for this. They were deep in grief, compounded by ignorance—they did not know what had happened. At least, they knew nothing more than that Leyla, for the moment, was gone. They did the one thing it was possible for them to do. That it backfired was inevitable but unforeseeable. They had decided on a truth, and expected it to be believed, because it was the truth.
It took some time for the furor to die down, but in the end, the public moved on—as it does—to the next scandalous event, and thought no more of Leyla. There were wars and threats and malfeasances enough in those days, as there are now. But now the spectacle shifts so quickly that memory itself has been abolished. Had Leyla disappeared today, she would have been forgotten within 24 hours.
The family, however, showed remarkable resilience. A year after the media scandal, they refiled their request to have Leyla listed among the victims. They were refused, as expected, but were not deterred. They sued the Foundation in civil court and lost, appealed and lost again, and refiled when construction began on the official memorial. With trial pending in state court, the Foundation, at last exhausted, gave in. They settled the case with a pledge to include Leyla on the list of names. The family was, at last, able to celebrate a victory.
All except for Harold. After a year of litigation, he had removed himself from the case. Leyla’s immediate family remained the sole plaintiffs. Perhaps Harold had admitted to himself the truth of his wife’s betrayal. Perhaps he was exhausted by the perpetuation of grief beyond the necessary interval. Perhaps he wanted, as they say, to “move on.”
Whatever the reason, he stepped away and did not return. He pursued, in fact, only one legal avenue, which was the process by which, four years after her disappearance, Leyla was officially declared dead. The family, of course, registered no objection, since their entire case rested on the assertion that Leyla had died that day. The declaration was issued and, six months later, Harold married a psychologist he met on a company retreat in the Catskills. All contact with the Hayek family ceased.
In 2011, the Hayek family attended the opening of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum at Ground Zero. They saw Leyla’s name, wept, and left comforted. We must not begrudge them this small indulgence. It appeared, at long last, to sate the needs born of their grief. They sought no monetary benefits from the various victim compensation funds, and appeared unconcerned when Leyla did not appear in the memorial issue of the New York Times published on the tenth anniversary of the atrocity. Leyla’s name was there, engraved in bronze, perhaps for all time, and that was enough.
As for the truth, for what really happened, nothing more is known. DNA tests on human remains discovered in the ruins continue even today, but no trace of Leyla has been found. In 2012, a half-crushed skull that could not be identified was compared to Leyla’s dental records, but there was no match, and the skull was later determined to be that of a man. No eyewitnesses have come forward to confirm her presence at the scene, and no further video evidence has been uncovered. With the footage of the event exhaustively examined and catalogued, no more is expected. Annabelle, who might have revealed so much, has never been located.
It is this final detail that has remained the most mysterious. No one in the years after the case was closed has made any attempt to find this unknown witness to the hours before Leyla vanished. The family, of course, wanted to know nothing further of Leyla’s double life and perhaps troubled sexuality, and the police wanted to move on to other things. When Leyla was declared dead, Annabelle in effect became irrelevant. Whoever she was, she was safe.
Yet I cannot help but think that Annabelle means everything. She was no doubt the most intimate and intense relationship of Leyla’s life. She was privy to secret desires and secret thoughts. If Leyla was not a martyr, if there had been, in fact, some coincidental plan behind her sudden exit from the lives of others, it is very likely that Annabelle, and Annabelle alone, would have known it. Perhaps Annabelle, under her true name, still guards this secret as a pledge to the one she loved, and who loved her as Leyla had, perhaps, loved no one else in her life.
And then, there is the strangest possibility. Perhaps, that morning, Leyla witnessed those mighty impacts, and saw her chance. In the madness that followed, Leyla returned to Annabelle and, as they had long wanted, the two lovers took leave of their current lives and began another.
I do not say this is the most likely scenario, but it is perhaps the most hopeful and the cruelest. It may have made Leyla, at long last, happy; but it came at a terrible price to family and friends. Yet Leyla, it seems, was always loving and often cruel. And usually, she left it to others to pick up the pieces. Still, there are times when one must be cruel, and if Leyla is out there somewhere in the arms of Annabelle, she may believe that, in the end, it was worth it.
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