Jasper shakes his head. “I’m not sure my dad would’ve
gotten the message anyway. But you know what? I’m okay with that.”
I know I should be planning the next thing to say—I know I should be trying to tap into all the relationship politics, the signs and signals, that could be at the table. But instead I just talk and listen. And he just talks and listens. Maybe in the end that’s all we need. Talking and listening.
At the end of the meal I say, “Hey, do you want to come back to my dorm room and watch
Cabaret
?”
He pushes back his chair in surprise and says, “Whoa, this is so
Sliding Doors
.”
“I actually think it’s more like
Groundhog Day,”
I reply. And then I explain: In
Sliding Doors
, the whole idea is that every choice you make, and every single thing that happens to you, changes the trajectory of your life, and once you are put on that trajectory, there is no way back. But
Groundhog Day
—which, I tell him, also happens to be a much better movie—says the opposite. It says if you mess up or make the wrong choice, you just have to keep at it until you do it right.
“So we’ve been stuck in the same day for a year?” Jasper says. And I know what he’s thinking—that the day in question is September 11th, which would be somewhat lunatic, because that day is about much, much more than our date going right.
So I shake my head. “No. The fact that it all happens in one day in
Groundhog Day
is a comedic conceit.”
“Oh, sorry. Silly me.”
I swat at him with my napkin. He fends me off with his water glass. Water spills everywhere.
“What I’m saying,” I continue, “is that the trajectory can loop around. If we want it to.”
He leans into the table and presses his knees against mine again.
“Do we want it to?” he asks.
And I say, “Hey, do you want to come back to my dorm room and watch
Cabaret
?”
This time, the TV stays off.
This time, we sleep in the same bed.
“You have a little more body hair now,” I say.
He kisses me, then whispers in my ear, “No, I don’t.”
MARCH 19, 2003
Claire
It’s a similar dread, a similar fear, a similar sadness, only in reverse. Instead of reaction, the dread comes in the anticipation. Instead of aftershocks, the fear comes from the assemblage. Instead of the devastating After, the sadness springs from the devastating Before.
I know we’re going to start a war. I know it as soon as the president starts talking about it. I know it as soon as they start linking Iraq to 9/11. I know it when they start conjuring doomsday as the alternative.
It’s a similar helplessness, only in reverse. It’s not that I can’t undo what’s happened, but that I can’t stop something from happening. We have our protests, but Dick Cheney doesn’t care what a hundred thousand people in San Francisco have to say. We hound members of Congress, but our money doesn’t talk as much as that of the other forces. We argue with our friends, but our friends are powerless, too.
I don’t want to watch it happening, but I have to. I have to turn on the television and read the papers, because we all need to be witnessing. I thought, for a time, that we understood that
we are a part of the world. And many of us do, just not the people in charge of our government, the people who less than a majority of us voted for. We are losing the human scale.
The night the war begins, I cry more than I did on 9/11. Jasper and Peter are home together for spring break, and they come over and try to cheer me up by reading me things from the paper that show me that humanity is alive and well. Animal rescues. Families reunited after fifty years. A town of four hundred people chipping in to save its fire department. I love Jasper and Peter when they do this, and I love those people in the world. But still I despair.
We keep waiting for the next attack, and then we go and make the next attack.
I wish someone had taken George Bush and made him spend the night in Union Square, surrounded by the candles, surrounded by the dead. I wish there was a way to make him feel the depth of that loss. I wish he had been forced to spend a night in Baghdad, talking to the people there, before he bombed it.
There were lessons
, I want to tell him.
Don’t you understand?
It’s a similar sleeplessness, only in reverse. I used to wander at night to connect myself to the city. I searched desperately to find out what I could do. It was never enough, but it was something. Now I still want to know what I can do. It’s never enough, and it feels like nothing.
An eye for an eye. Blindness.
I believe we’re better than this.
Jasper and Peter stay up with me. Together we head into
the West Village, then cross over to the East Village. I know so many more people now, but it feels right to be with them. I hold them dear like I hold my mother and Sammy dear. I know I can count on them—meaning, they are as reliable as the simple sequence of 1-2-3.
“If I hadn’t met you,” Jasper says, “I probably wouldn’t even know there was a war happening.”
“If I hadn’t met you,” Peter says to Jasper, “I probably wouldn’t even know what the songs meant.”
“And if I hadn’t met you,” I say to them both, “I would’ve wondered if it was all in my head. My whole life, in my head.”
We are in another part of the city, in another part of another year. Our thoughts, I’m sure, travel to different things—how difficult long-distance relationships are, how scary war is, how close the summer is already seeming, how amazing it is that friendships can become so full that you can’t imagine what your life was like before them. We talk and we talk, and then we talk some more, until we are back in my dorm room. My roommate is home in Ghana for the break, but even though the second bed is open, we all lie on my bed, Jasper leaning into Peter, me leaning into them both. There’s no way for them to take away my sadness, but they can make sure I am not empty of all the other feelings.
“I honestly thought we were going to be better,” I tell them. “After what happened. As a country.”
“I don’t know if you can change a country,” Jasper says. “You can only change the people.”
And here we are, so different from who we were on September 10th. And also different from who we were on the 11th. And the 12th. And yesterday. Sometimes you see the before/after. And sometimes it’s as soft as saying hello.
It is so comfortable, just the three of us on our bed in our room. It would be so easy to want to confine us to this. To unplug the TV. To turn off the computer. To only look at the sky whenever we looked out the window.
But that’s not the way we live now. Every day, we choose not to live that way. Instead we have each other as we try to navigate the world.
We fall asleep in my bed, a tangle of three. It is the sweetest feeling, to be nestled between the two of them, their smiles fading into sleep, their arms enfolding me and each other. This is the antidote.
The next morning, we go to get breakfast together. As we are walking through Washington Square Park, Peter looks downtown, at the empty space.
He doesn’t have to tell us to wait. We all stop. The sun is newly in the sky, and the city is like a quiet house, still ours.
For ten minutes, we keep watch over the sky and the skyline.
This is what a memorial is:
Standing still, staring at something that isn’t there.
Author’s Note
Some of the phrases in this book are taken directly from emails I sent to friends on 9/11 and afterwards. I was in the rooftop cafeteria of my office (roughly twenty blocks north of the World Trade Center) for most of the events of 9/11, but every now and then I felt the need to go back to my desk and write everything down. On that day and immediately after, I never would have thought I would someday write a novel about what was happening; words seemed an inadequate way to capture it, and facts dwarfed any attempts at fiction. It was only years later that this book began in earnest. I approached it with much trepidation, but was fueled by the fact that there haven’t been as many novels about this time as I’d imagined there would be, and also by the fact that as time goes on, readers (especially younger ones) will have less and less firsthand experience of what it was like to be in New York in those hours and days and months. I genuinely can’t imagine forgetting any of it, but I also have come to realize that history moves on, and while the meaning of that day changes in the context of what happens afterwards, the experience of the day needs to be preserved with as much immediacy as we can give it. For me, it is still one of the most harrowing and inspiring days I’ve ever lived through. Harrowing for what happened, and inspiring for how we held on.
There’s no way to acknowledge all the people who factored into this book because I’d have to retrace all the people whose paths I intersected with in those hours and days and months, from the people who were in 555 Broadway with me to the friends who took me in when I couldn’t get home to the people I saw days later in Brooklyn to the friends I marched in an anti-war rally with four years later. So many conversations went into my thoughts about 9/11, and I’m sure I drew on many of them here. In particular, the line that Claire’s mother says about not being able to comprehend something like 9/11 was actually something said by my friend Karen Nagel on that day. Thank you to Cindy Bullens for letting me borrow her song.
This book was written in many places, including my apartment, my parents’ house, my friend Eliot’s apartment, and my friends Mike and Mireia’s house on Cape Cod. Thanks to all of them (and not just for their dwellings). Thanks as always to my family and friends for supporting me in ways big and small. And thanks, too, to my niece Paige and my nephew Matthew, whose ages on 9/11/01 (twenty-one months and not yet born, respectively) helped make me realize why it’s good to write these things down.
Once more, I owe thanks to Allison Wortche, Melissa Nelson, Noreen Marchisi, and everyone at Knopf. Most of all, I owe thanks to my editor, Nancy Hinkel—I am ever in debt to your twisted point of view and your questioning eyebrows. I couldn’t have written this book for anyone else.
About the Author
David Levithan has spent most of his life one river away from New York City. He grew up a suburban New Jersey kid whose parents would take him into the city all the time for museums, shows, and family visits (something he shares with the characters in his novel
Are We There Yet?)
. In high school, he’d take the train into the city with friends, not unlike the characters in his novel
Boy Meets Boy
. After college, he discovered that there was more to the city if you didn’t have to get home by the last train—a discovery that certainly informed his two books written with Rachel Cohn,
Nick &
Norah’s Infinite Playlist
and
Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List
. He was working in New York City on 9/11, and in the weeks and months and years after, which is really where this novel,
Love Is the Higher Law
, comes from. His other books include
The Realm of Possibility, Marly’s Ghost
(with illustrations by Brian Selznick),
Wide Awake
, and
How They Met, and Other Stories
. He currently lives just outside New York City. You can see the Empire State Building if you stick your head outside his bedroom window and look right.