I want to have faith in strangers. I want to have faith in what we’re all going to do next. But I’m worried. I see things shifting from United We Stand to God Bless America. I don’t believe in God Bless America. I don’t believe a higher power is standing beside us and guiding us. I don’t believe we’re being singled out. I believe much more in United We Stand. I have my doubts, but I want it to be true. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we really came together, if we really found a common humanity? The hitch is that you can’t find a common humanity just because you have a common enemy. You have to find a common humanity because you believe that it’s true.
It’s getting cold out, and I don’t have a jacket. I was only going to walk around for a few minutes. I just needed to say good night to the streets before going back to my room. I know I won’t be able to keep doing this. I know the streets don’t care. But I need to do it.
I shiver, and Jasper puts his arm around me. Not like a boy who’s after a grope, or even a consoling parent. He just draws me a little into his body, making us a shelter for a time.
“I don’t want to go,” he says. “I mean, I can’t stay in my house, and I’m sure school will be great, but at the same time, I don’t want to go.”
“The city will still be here, I promise,” I say.
“But will it be the same city?”
I shake my head. “It’s never the same city. Your city isn’t even the same as my city, I bet.”
“I guess.”
“And that’s not really the problem,” I say.
“Then what is?”
“You don’t want to deal. With life. With other people.”
“You should’ve warned me you had a photographic memory.”
“Can you have a photographic memory for things that are said? Wouldn’t that be something else? And it was only a few minutes ago. Don’t give me too much credit.”
The funny thing is, I want to talk to him as much as he wants to talk to me. And I have been dealing. I’ve been going to school, doing my work, volunteering as much as I can, trying to get other people to volunteer, too. But I guess it’s just as easy to get lost in the dealing as it is to get lost in the avoidance.
“Do you remember Mitchell’s party?” Jasper asks.
“It seems like ages ago,” I tell him. “But yes, I do.”
“Tell me what you remember.”
It’s easy to know where to begin. “You were the life of the party,” I say. “I mean, there wasn’t a song you wouldn’t dance to. Even the sappy ballads, you were swaying. I think you were wearing a blue shirt. I remember at one point you sat on Peter’s lap. You were such a flirt. And he had such an instant crush on you.”
“What else?” His eyes are closed, like he’s a kid and I’m telling him a fairy tale.
“God, I don’t know. I wasn’t even going to go, but my friend Casey really wanted to go because she thinks Mitchell’s brother, Bill, is really hot. So we got there, and it ended up that Bill was away wherever Mitchell’s parents were. So Casey wanted to leave immediately, but I figured that since we were there, we should stay. Mitchell was always one of my favorite people in school. And, let’s see, that night he was wearing a Nelly Furtado T-shirt, but he’d crossed out the Furtado part, so it just said Nelly. There might have even been some sequins involved. Am I right?”
Jasper nods, eyes still closed.
“And—I don’t know—we were all really happy, weren’t we? I mean, school had started, but the real part hadn’t started yet. This was like the one weekend when we didn’t have to worry about homework or colleges or SATs or anything. It was just a big welcome back. And Laine Taylor had cut all her hair off, and Greg Watson had grown his long, and Aiden Smith couldn’t stop talking about this guy who was a counselor with him who he’d fallen head over heels in love with. And Jill Breslin—God, poor Jill Breslin—she was drunk off her ass. On Bud Light! She was still really tan from the summer. She had on a necklace I really liked, although now I couldn’t tell you what it was. Only that I liked it.”
I want Jasper to chime in, but he just says, “What else?”
“What else?” I think about it. “I tried putting on some Tori Amos, but Mitchell said it wasn’t party music and switched it back to Christina Aguilera. I asked him if he had any Ricky Martin. I was joking, and he said, ‘Yeah, I have some Ricky Martin … in my bedroom.’ Oh God—and then there was the fight that Greg and Lauren got into, about what time she had to be home. And he was saying they were seniors now, so her parents needed to let her stay out later than eleven on a Saturday, and somehow it became about how he doesn’t understand her at all, and she was crying, and he was asking her what he did wrong, why she was acting like this, and the rest of us were like, ‘There’s no way I’m going anywhere near that.’”
“Good policy.”
“I know!”
“What were you wearing?”
“I don’t remember.” I say that, and then I do remember. Not because I can picture myself wearing it, but because it was waiting for me in the hamper when we finally got back to the apartment. “Wait—it was a Sleater-Kinney T-shirt. And jeans.”
I want Jasper to say he remembers me, he remembers the shirt. But it’s clear he doesn’t.
He opens his eyes. “I want to remember it more,” he says. “The party. Because, you know, that was the last time.”
“The last party of Before.”
“Exactly.”
I tell him I want to know if that girl—the one who was wearing the Sleater-Kinney T-shirt and (I remember now) flirting with Eric McCutcheon—is really all that different from who I am now.
“I have no idea,” Jasper says.
“Well, neither do I. Obviously.”
I realize something then: It’s been at least a few minutes since I’ve noticed where I am. Which sounds like such a small thing, but lately it’s been impossible. New York City disappeared, and I was inside the conversation.
“Remind me again,” I say, “how the two of us ended up on this bench?”
I want to stay up all night talking. I want to start at Battery Park and walk a ring around Manhattan. But I know he has to go. I don’t want to ask him to stay, because I don’t want him to feel bad for having to leave.
So I’m the one who says it. I’m the one who says it’s time to go. I’m the one who gets us up from the bench, who unwinds our words back to the subway, who pauses there for the moment of parting.
“This has been—” he says. Then stops.
We hug goodbye. I watch him go. And after he does, there’s that brutal loneliness, that final period at the end of all the sentences. Then I step into the street, and another sentence. The loneliness lifts a little. If we’d talked at Mitchell’s party, it would have never happened like this. Something opened us. And we needed to find each other open.
I unlock my front door. I walk up the stairs. I open our apartment door and tread lightly on the floorboards. I am home. I peek into my brother’s room to see him sleeping. I listen to hear if my mother is awake, and silently say good night when I don’t hear anything.
I go into my room. I imagine Jasper heading back on the subway. I change into my pajamas and turn off the light. I look at the window, the clock, the pillow.
I breathe it all in.
HOLD DEAR
(Part Four)
LOVE IS THE HIGHER LAW
Peter
The best concert of my life so far?
U2. Madison Square Garden. October 27, 2001.
And it’s not like U2 was my favorite band or anything. I thought “With or Without You” and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” were incredible, mind-twisting, truth-laid-bare songs. But other than that, Bono had never really reached me. When All That You Can’t Leave Behind came out in November 2000, I loved “Beautiful Day” and liked the rest of the album. But it was just an album. I appreciated it, but didn’t need it.
September changed that.
The song I latched on
to most, the song that I would play ten times in a row because I needed to hear it all ten times, was “Walk On.” It was that unexpected, almost religious thing: the right song at the right time.
And it wasn’t because they were big rock stars. Instead it was the opposite of that. I think one of the reasons they’ve spoken to so many Americans right after 9/11 is because they know what we’re going through. They lived through Ireland in the ’70s and the ’80s. They know what it’s like to be bombed and threatened and afraid. They know what it’s like to walk on. They’re not just singing it.
Plus, it’s somehow more touching to have a band that isn’t American caring so much about us. We see Bono on the Tribute to Heroes concert, or touring around, and we know that people outside in the world care about us.
While I love “Walk On,” my friend Claire holds close to “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of”—
You’ve got to get yourself together
You’ve got stuck in a moment and you can’t get out of it
“That’s it, isn’t it?” Claire says as we head into the Garden. “That’s what it’s been like.”
“Walk On” and “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of.” One song for moving, one song for stasis. Both songs fitting the times.
I asked Claire to come to the concert with me because we’ve become much closer over the past month. Strangely, it was Jasper717 who pointed her in my direction. I mean, Claire and I were already friends. But one day, out of the blue, she came right up to me at my locker and said, “Let’s talk about what’s going on.” And at first I didn’t understand what she meant, but then she was telling me how she was having trouble sleeping, and she asked me where I’d been on the morning of 9/11, because she remembered I wasn’t there. Suddenly we went from being casual friends to being part of each other’s lives—I don’t know how else to explain it. Within a week, we’d made each other NYC Survival mixes—mine with “Walk On” and “Life Is Beautiful” and the Magnetic Fields’ “The Book of Love,” which isn’t about survival at all, but is about why we would want to survive. And she had “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of” and Dave Matthews performing “Everyday” acoustically and this song by a singer-songwriter named Cindy Bullens. I’d never heard it before, and I assumed it had been written about 9/11. But later Claire told me, no, it was actually from an album she wrote after her daughter died, and while it’s one of the most startling, grieving albums I’ve ever heard, it also gives a kind of road map for survival. The song—“Better Than I’ve Ever Been”—begins:
There’s been a lot of things said about me
Since that awful day
I’m not the person that I used to be
And that I’ll never be the same
That’s true—no doubt
But I know more now what life is about
I laugh louder
Cry harder
Take less time to make up my mind
and I
Think smarter
Go slower
I know what I want
And what I don’t
I’ll be better than I’ve ever been
It’s become a kind of shorthand for me and Claire. “Laugh louder,” I’ll tell her. “Think smarter,” she’ll tell me. And “love deeper”—a lyric from later in the song.
I know U2 decided to call their tour the Elevation Tour long before current events became current, but it’s still amazing how well it articulates what we’re hoping for as the lights go down and Bono takes the stage. From the very first song, we feel it—all twenty thousand of us feel it. As U2 tears through the anthems—there’s something in that word, anthem—we rise up to meet the music. We’re not just a crowd. We’re not just a gathering. We’re a congregation.
Then the band gets to “One.” As Bono sings, the names of all of the 9/11 victims are projected onto the backdrop of the stage. All of those names. And the song transforms into something much bigger than it is. And we transform into something much bigger than we are. We are crying and holding on to each other and singing along and reading, reading, reading.
All of the names, as we’re told love is the temple, love is the higher law. Who can look at this list of names and not imagine himself or herself on it? Who can’t try to picture what that must be like for friends or family? Some of the names are familiar—not because I know the person, but because I know someone else with that name. And some of the names are familiar because every day I read the page in the New York Times that they devote to telling a brief life story of every single person who died in the attacks. A life is in the details, not the statistics, and every day I learn how one person who died met his wife, or how another who died chose the name for her son. It’s more than a list, because the details add the music. And now I feel I am actually remembering instead of simply memorializing. As accurate or inaccurate as that might be.
If you start the day reading the obituaries, you live your day a little differently. I have been thinking about the people in my life, and how much more I want them to be in my life. Like Aiden, my first boyfriend. I find myself struck with such fondness for our first fumblings, for the sureness that sometimes spills over into arrogance. I’ve talked with him more in the past few weeks than I had in months. Because he’s a part of my history, and part of my present.
And then there’s Claire, standing beside me. As “One” crescendos and we all leave our feelings bare, she and I are both crying. And while usually I’m embarrassed to cry in public, there’s no room for embarrassment here. I look at Claire and think, I want to know you for a long, long time. I want us to be able to share the details we find in obituaries, and the songs that cover the wide terrain of our moods, and the words that come easily, and the words that don’t. Because that’s what friendship is to me right now. What I share with this arena of strangers is one thing, and what I share with Claire is another. Both are essential. Both are part of that higher law.
We are face to face with enormity again, but this time we are going to make it through. It is a moment we can get out of. Together.
DECEMBER 4, 2001
Jasper
I went the whole day without thinking about it. Exams. Exes. Roommate issues—that’s what filled my day. I didn’t let the world in at all. Or that day.
Until, of course, the end of the day, when I realized I had gone the whole day without thinking about it, and wondered what that meant.
THE LIGHTS
Claire
The swim of things. Leaves falling on sidewalks like autumn garlands. Candy corns and the way the light turns crisp as winter approaches. Playground voices. Conversations about favorite movies, favorite books. Friends. New Year’s. A snowman on the sidewalk. Reading a story to your little brother before he goes to sleep.
Holding dear. Realizing the difference between things and possessions is that possessions are the things that are dear to you. Realizing, with this word dear, that things are dear to me. Discovering how dear life is. Same word—slightly different meaning. That twist of fragility.
The weight does not lift itself, although over time it lightens. Sometimes we need to push. And sometimes that is very hard.
It is still strange to see the skyline. I have never seen an absence that’s so physical. It’s possible I will see the absence for the rest of my life, even when there is something else there. Which is okay. The thing to remember when looking at an absence is that you are standing outside of it.
We still feel some things in common. And we still feel some things that are entirely our own. I can only say what I’m feeling, and even that is only the fraction that I can articulate at any given moment. I still have those childish moments when I wish with all my heart that I could wake up and find it’s all been a dream. I really have thought that. I have felt—stronger than grief, stronger than anger, stronger than despair—the profound desire to return to the netherworld of the safer past. There are still the flashes of unexpected sadness, the pauses that last longer
than they used to. The desire for retribution, the fear of retribution. Like a death in the family, like a personal tragedy, an event like this lays bare the complexity of our worlds, internal and external.
But you can’t live life in the shadow of all that. I think about the posters, how they went in a matter of days from posters of the missing to posters of the missed. Eventually they were taken down. Gone is not forgotten, but our lives cannot be a memorial. This city cannot be a memorial. This city has to be a city. Our lives have to be our lives.
The swim of things. I go on an airplane. I walk under the Empire State Building. I take the bus, and the subway, and am surrounded by strangers the whole time. I certainly have room in my life for caution, but I have no room in my life for paralyzing fear. There’s always a risk. There always has been. But I’d rather live my life than die of negations.
There is not one moment when that feeling of inadequate sorrow goes away. It just lessens and lessens, until it is mostly a memory of itself.
We live in the same apartment. I go to the same school. I apply to college. I get into college.
Somehow, six months pass.
I’m not at home when they light the lights.
I’m at school, finishing up our environmental club newsletter. I’m the last one there besides the janitors, and it’s dark out when I finally leave. It’s March 11 and I have been aware of the anniversary all day, but I still gasp when I look downtown and see the beam of blue light coming from where the towers used to be. I feel such a silence pass through me. Ghosts.
I know what I have to do. And suddenly it’s the opposite of that day. Because instead of walking away, I am walking toward. Instead of taking my brother’s hand and heading north of Fourteenth Street, I am alone and heading home. The towers have been resurrected as spirits, and I am going to visit them. In the chilly night-darkness, they are their own beacon. All I have to do is go down the street and face the right way. There they are. Alighting over the tops of the SoHo buildings. Hiding behind streetlamp glare, arching over our heads. I keep walking. I keep following. Past Canal Street. Past Duane.