I don’t think it hit me until later that afternoon. My mother was napping off the time-zone shift and I was starting to pack up my bad shirts. I thought about turning on the news, and suddenly I wasn’t thinking about it in terms of leaving for
school—I was thinking of it in terms of leaving the city. And that felt wrong.
It nagged at me through dinner. My father, who had not napped and had found the usual incompetence at the office when he returned, was in a grumpy mood. My mother was trying to compensate for it. And I was paralyzed because all I wanted to talk about was what had happened in the days since 9/11, but I couldn’t really talk about it with them, because they hadn’t been here. And I realized that it would only be worse back at school, where I’d be surrounded by people who hadn’t been here, who wouldn’t understand. Or even if they had been here, like Amanda, they wouldn’t understand what I’d felt, what I’d been through. The emptiness was returning, and nobody around me had the words to fill it.
I made it through dinner, but barely. I made excuses about having to pack, and I was released to my room.
Packing didn’t really take long, since I’d left a lot of things in storage up at school. I wanted to go out, but not in a Splash sense. I felt the urge to wander, to walk the streets all night, to show up back on my doorstep an hour before my train was going to leave. I was caught in a fit of restlessness, but unlike most fits of restlessness, this one had a direction. I was denying it, but there was definitely a direction. I just didn’t know if I had the courage to follow the arrows.
I waited until my parents had said good night—my father with a nod, my mother with a kiss. I waited until their light was out and the house was quiet. Then I grabbed my keys, left a
note, and took the subway into Manhattan, getting off at City Hall and walking west. The streets were fairly empty; Wall Street was closed for the night. But as I got closer, there were more people.
Ground Zero was lit like a movie set. These gigantic spotlights were covering it all as people worked around the clock to sift through the debris. They were no longer looking for survivors. Now they were looking for clues—clues to what happened, clues to who was in there. DNA from the dust. Confirmation of what we already knew.
There was a fence up, and NYPD officers everywhere. There were tourists, people with cameras, snapping away. I wanted to tell them to stop. I wanted to tell them this wasn’t an attraction. They were like spectators at an execution. I didn’t care how far they’d come. There was no way a New Yorker would take pictures of this.
The New Yorkers were quiet. Some in clusters, some alone. We hung around the parameters, helpless. We knew we wouldn’t find what we were missing here. We would only find something that was missing more.
There were still shards of the towers’ exterior jagging from the ground, broken shell pieces, walls for nothing. I stared at the biggest piece and tried to picture the towers, tried to see how far back I could remember them. And it was like in order to do that, I had to become a kid again, because that’s the World Trade Center I saw, the one that a seven-year-old would see when he stood at the base and looked up, those endless metal-stripe walls
reaching for the sky, the top of the building impossible to see. I remembered waiting on line in the lobby. I remembered the elevator ride making my ears pop. I remembered a family birthday we had at Windows on the World, and how the windows were so narrow. I remembered searching for my house from the Observation Deck.
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?”