But that was all I could remember. It was pointless to try to remember more. I remembered looking at the skyline and seeing them there. So tall, and yet still reflecting the given light of day.
I wanted answers. Not to questions like How could this happen? or What could’ve been done to stop it? No, more like What am I supposed to do now?
I knew I had to get back, but I couldn’t move.
“Hey,” a girl’s voice said to me.
I turned and saw this short-haired blonde in a white T-shirt and jeans. She looked vaguely familiar—but most city girls do.
“This is random,” she went on, “but you were at Mitchell’s party, weren’t you? Right before?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Hey.” I still had no idea who she was.
“I knew you looked familiar. I’m Claire. We didn’t actually talk much at Mitchell’s—I just remember people from parties. It’s one of my hidden talents.”
“I’m Jasper,” I said, afraid I’d told her this at Mitchell’s party a million times and was now making a fool of myself for repeating it again. I could remember Peter pretty clearly, but this girl … not even the glimpse of a memory.
“Hi, Jasper.” Her voice completely friendly.
“Hi, Claire.” I tried to sound friendly back.
She looked like she was having the same kind of night I was having, following the same arrows. She looked like she hadn’t slept well in weeks. It didn’t make her less attractive, but made it a more detailed attractiveness, like an older woman’s.
“So, you live around here?” she asked.
I shook my head. “Brooklyn. Park Slope. I’m leaving for school tomorrow, so I decided to … you know …”
“Check it out before you left? Makes sense.”
At this point we were both looking Zero-ward, not at each other. Seeing the workers yell to each other. Seeing them drink from thermoses, wearing jackets too heavy for the temperature.
“Do you live around here?” I asked.
“Yeah. About ten blocks away. We weren’t allowed to come back for a week. It was pretty bad. But not, you know, the worst.”
“Do you come here often?”
She actually laughed. “I bet you say that to all the ladies.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“I know. Plus, I know you’re not into the ladies. You were all over Peter at the party, if I remember correctly.”
Oh, man. Here it was—the reckoning.
“You know Peter?” I asked.
“Yeah—he and I were on the paper with Mitchell before he graduated. That’s why we were at his party.”
I was guessing that she wasn’t that close to Peter, or she would’ve known to stay far away from me.
“Look,” Claire said. “I know it’s almost midnight, and you probably have to get back to Brooklyn, but do you want to walk for a little? I should be home, too, but if I go home now, I’m going to be up half the night. If we talk, I’ll probably be able to clear my head enough to go to bed.”
I found myself saying, “Sure,” not really knowing why.
As we headed off, a tourist asked Claire if she’d take a picture of him and his wife in front of the wreckage.
“Sorry, no,” she said, and moved on.
We were silent for a couple of minutes, and I wondered what the point was, if we were going to be silent. Yes, it felt different than wandering alone. But it only added awkwardness. It was like I’d agreed to go on a blind date and found out that we were going to only interact using cue cards.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked.
“Battery Park?”
“Sounds good.”
“Isn’t it amazing how Century 21 is still here?” she said as we passed by the department store. “I mean, it was right across from the towers—isn’t it incredible how the building could collapse without hitting the building right across the street? Of course, if it had been damaged, maybe they would have rebuilt it with dressing rooms. A store like that should have dressing rooms. Anyway—sorry—that was totally uncalled for. What’s your story? I mean, where were you that day?”
So we shared our stories—me at home, her at school, looking for her mother. By the time we were done, we were at the water, on the edge of Battery Park. The Statue of Liberty gleamed at us, putting her green-metal stamp on the lights and darkness. I tried again to remember Claire from Mitchell’s party, but couldn’t. This was probably because I definitely look at boys more than girls. But it wasn’t just that. I imagined that while I was busy flitting around, she had stayed solidly in one place. I would never remember someone like that.
But here we were, and as she talked, I found myself liking her. She reminded me of people I liked—friends at school who were unafraid to meander, who never did the mean things I expected from other people. In New York City, where openness can be offered so pretentiously, so deliberately, there was something unplanned about Claire’s voluntary kindness, her need to walk and talk. I usually avoided people like this, because I didn’t feel I could give them what they needed. But something about this night, this time, made me want to stay. It made me want to play my part, and not have it be playing a part at all.
“What happened when you got back to your apartment?” I asked. “I mean, was it okay?”
Claire nodded. “The only thing wrong, really, was the air. On the first day, we lasted an hour, and then my mom said we had to go back uptown for the night, that we couldn’t be breathing it in. I couldn’t believe her—but then I thought about my little brother, and him breathing in whatever was in the air, and I had to give in. They said it wasn’t poisonous, but it smelled poisonous. So we waited a few more days, and when we moved back in, Mom put in all these air purifiers.”
“God, I can’t imagine. It was bad enough in Brooklyn.”
“And what did you do during the day?”
“I did nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
“I can’t imagine that,” Claire said. And it wasn’t like she was disputing the fact that I had done nothing. It was just that it was the opposite of what she’d been doing and feeling.
She went on. “There’s the drown of things and the swim of things, I guess. I’ve been going back and forth, back and forth. I feel the weight of it. And this bewilderment—how can something that doesn’t have a form, doesn’t have a definition, doesn’t have words—how can it have such weight? And yet, there’s the need to swim.”
“Life goes on,” I offered.
“Yeah, but you see, Life goes on is a redundancy. Life is defined by its going on.”
She walked over to a bench, and I sat down next to her. The tourists weren’t going down here so much, so it was almost like we had the whole area to ourselves. The Staten Island Ferry shuttled back and forth as we watched, so empty that it was almost like it was traveling just so we could see it and mark the time by its passage.
“Have you talked to people about this?” Claire asked me. “I mean, about what happened? I’ve tried, but it never works. I don’t know what I want from it, but I’m never satisfied. I can’t talk to my mom about it. And even my friends are strange to talk to, because they’re all caught up in their own versions, and every time I bring it up, they make it about them. I even tried talking to this girl in my class, Marisol, who was with me that day, but it was like that was all we had in common, and she didn’t really want to talk about it.”
I almost forgot she’d asked me a question. Then she paused, and I said, “Oh. Me? I haven’t really talked to anyone. I mean, most of my friends were already back at school. And even the ones who were here—I just wasn’t in the mood. I mean, what’s the point?”
This wasn’t really a question meant to be answered, but Claire looked out to the water and gave it a shot.
“I think the point is to realize you’re not alone.”
If you were quiet, you could hear the waves. In Manhattan, you forget you’re surrounded by water, because you so rarely see it or hear it or feel its pull. But
right at the edge, the air gains the current and the undertow. The water is black, but it carries any light that crosses it.
I don’t know if it was because I was leaving the next day. I don’t know if it was because I knew her without really knowing her. But for whatever reason, I followed her then. If you’d asked me if I wanted to talk, I would have said no, I didn’t want to talk. But she didn’t ask. And suddenly I was talking.
“It doesn’t feel like ‘alone,’ though,” I said. Not looking at her, looking at the ferry as it receded from Manhattan. “Solitary, maybe. I don’t know. I just didn’t want to deal with people. Even when I was around people, I didn’t want to deal with them.”
“And when did it stop?” Claire asked.
I looked at her. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, when did you start dealing again?”
“Right now? This minute? I don’t know.”
It almost sounded like a line, as bad as Do you come here often? But Claire didn’t seem cynical about it, or even find it strange. She just kept talking.
“Do you know what I want to know?” she said. “I want to know why this is such a part of me. I want to know why this thing that happened to other people has happened so much to me. I keep looking for the lesson.”
“The lesson?” I asked.
“I don’t mean that God made this happen to teach us something. Or to teach me something. How monstrously selfish would that be? I just mean that if we go through this thing and it changes us so much, you have to hope that it changes us for the better, right? If goodness can’t come from bad things, it makes bad things unbearable.”
I didn’t know what to tell her. I didn’t believe in good coming from bad. If it happened, that was great. But I couldn’t believe in it.
“And the worst thing,” she continued, “is that there are moments when I look around at everybody, at the way we’ve been acting since that day, and I wonder if maybe we needed to be hurt. I don’t mean that I wanted it to happen, or that it should have happened. But I think we were walking around like we were invincible. And maybe that’s a bad way to live your life. Because you’re not invincible. Nobody is. And maybe now that we’ve learned that, we’ll be better.”
“Or we’ll bomb the shit out of Afghanistan,” I couldn’t help but say.
Claire nodded sadly. Then she turned to me and put her hand lightly on my leg. “I know,” she said. “But maybe we won’t. Maybe there’s a way to keep us in this moment. Not the sad part. But the coming together part.”
I had to tell her, “It’s not going to last.”
“No,” she said, taking my hand now. “But what if it did? Because if you step back from it—think about it—the past couple of weeks have been remarkable. I mean, what if September 11th, 2001, ends up being one of the most inspiring days in human history?”
“You’re insane,” I said.
“No—let me finish. I’m not saying it wasn’t unfathomably tragic. It’s awful. Completely horrific. It keeps me up and leaves me feeling totally inadequate to face it. But if you think about how everyone reacted—if you read the paper about everything that happened in reaction to the tragedy—you can almost find the beauty of it. The terrorists—those nineteen people, with hundreds or maybe thousands behind them—did the worst thing that you can possibly imagine. But tens of millions of people did the right thing. Not just the people who helped at Ground Zero and all the firefighters and police officers and first-aid workers. Not even the people in the city who took people in or helped them out or prayed. Or the people around the world who took in stranded travelers and also prayed and acted nicer to the people around them because everyone in that moment felt so vulnerable. Even more than that. I think that if you were somehow able to measure the weight of human kindness, it would have weighed more on 9/11 than it ever had. On 9/11, all the hatred and murder could not compare with the weight of love, of bravery, of caring. I have to believe that. I honestly believe that. I think we saw the way humanity works on that day, and while some of it was horrifying, so much of it was good.”
“That’s totally fucked up,” I said.
Claire squeezed my hand. “Maybe it is,” she said. “But maybe it isn’t. Didn’t you feel it on that day? It was like everyone suddenly knew what mattered. Money didn’t matter. Politics didn’t matter. Tabloid news didn’t matter. No—compassion mattered. Calm mattered. Respect mattered. Did it really take something of this magnitude to make us realize this? Yeah, I guess so.”
I wanted to believe her. But I wasn’t sure I could. Because, ultimately, isn’t your belief in human nature a perfect reflection of your own nature? If I expected the best from people, wouldn’t I have to expect the best from myself?
“Usually I’m the fucked-up one,” I said.
“There’s more than enough of it to go around,” Claire assured me.
A family of six passed by, looking like they had gotten up seven hours early for the first Circle Line tour. The youngest boy—he couldn’t have been more than six—had Mickey Mouse ears on.
“You should talk to your friend Peter,” I said. “I’m sure he can tell you stories about me.”
“Why?” It was clear from her face that she had no idea.
“We were supposed to go out on 9/11,” I explained. “But we rescheduled for later in the week. It didn’t go well. I was a mess.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t that bad.”
“It was. That bad.”
Usually I could compartmentalize a bad date into a two-minute anecdote and eventually forget it had ever happened. But this one was haunting me more. Not because I felt Peter and I should’ve hit it off—even under regular circumstances, I don’t think it would have gotten that far. But I guess I regretted it had been such a clusterfuck.
“Have you talked to him since?” she asked.
“We’ve emailed a couple of times. None of his emails have started with ‘Dear Antichrist,’ so I guess that’s a good sign.”
“I haven’t noticed your name carved in his arm, either.”
“Another good sign.”
I was about to ask her if she was seeing someone when there was a noise from behind us. Nothing too dramatic—probably just some machinery being moved. But we were both startled for a second, then felt silly for it the moment after.
Or at least I felt silly. Claire just looked wistful, facing the lights at Ground Zero.
“I guess it’s a choice we make,” she said.
“What’s a choice?” I asked.
And she said, “How much of the world we let in.”
CATCHING BREATH
Claire
“What do you mean?” Jasper asks.
I don’t know what I mean. I’m just talking. Words to find words. Words searching for words.
“I think it’s something we all do,” I say. “Not consciously, all the time. But we choose how much of the world we want to let into our lives. Both the beauty of it and the horror of it. There has to be a point of insulation—but some of us insulate real close, right down to our very selves, and others insulate wider, let more of the world in.”
“And now?”
“Well, now the world has forced its way in. And once it retreats, we have to decide whether we put the insulation line in the same place or whether we move it out or in. I think I want to move it out. I want to include more of the world, even though I’m scared to.”
I expect him to dodge what I’m saying—I sense he’s an expert dodger—but instead he says, “I think I’ve been trying to draw it tighter. Not the world—the insulation.”
“That’s a natural enough thing to do,” I tell him.
“I guess. If you want to be an asshole.”
It is so strange to be here, to finally be saying all these things out loud. Some of them are things I didn’t even know that I knew. And others are things I’ve wanted to pull people aside and say, but it was never the right time. My mother is on edge enough, trying to figure out our apartment and her jo
b and whether living downtown is going to kill us. And maybe one of my friends at school would get it, but I haven’t found which one yet. So here I am, with a near stranger, who John told me had hurt Peter’s feelings, but not too bad.
“I want to tell you something,” I say. And I’m not even sure what I’m going to tell him. I want to find the thing I most don’t want to say, the thing I am the most unsure of, because I don’t know if I’m going to have this chance again.
He opens the door. “What?”
And I’m telling him.
What?
I’m saying
“I liked breathing it in.”
And he doesn’t get it. So I say
“That air. The air afterwards. I wanted to breathe it in. It felt right to breathe it in. Because we were breathing them in, weren’t we? And the buildings. We were breathing it all in. And I thought, there’s a part of this that’s actually a part of me now. I now have that responsibility. I am alive, and I am breathing, and I can do the things this dust can’t do.”
I think for the twelfth time tonight he’s going to tell me I’m insane. But instead he says, “I collected their papers. The ones that blew into Brooklyn. They were just there at first. I didn’t even know what they were. But once I did, I went all over the place, picking them up. I don’t know what to do with them. I mean, they’re meaningless now, but they still exist. You can’t throw out something like that. You can’t make them gone like that.”
“You did the right thing,” I say.
“For the first time in my life,” he jokes.
“Not really,” I tell him. “Not at all, I’m sure.”
I’m not just saying it. I know it’s true.
“Do you always have such faith in strangers?” he says.
“Only the ones who go out on really bad dates with my friends.”
Wouldn’t it be funny, though, if the answer was yes?