It was a testament to my respect for Peter that I actually found a clean shirt and a relatively clean pair of jeans to wear for our night out. The truth was, I wasn’t remembering much of what he looked like or what we’d talked about at Mitchell’s. I remembered thinking he was cute, if a little young. But that was enough. I also sensed that he was as trapped in his house as I was trapped in mine, because I would get emails from him like
jasper—
only 8 more hours! i will be the guy in the brown tshirt and the levis. also, i will be the one ringing your doorbell. if that is not enough to recognize me, i could also have a tulip between my teeth. or behind my ear, if you would find that more aesthetically pleasing. i have both a florist and a dresser on standby, awaiting your answer.
see you soon (say, seven hours and fifty-five minutes?)
peter
Seven hours and fifty-five minutes later, he was at my front door. His T-shirt really fit him well, and he was boyish in a Ewan McGregor kind of way, albeit without the brogue.
I took him to Olive Vine—I knew there was a chance of bumping into some of the people I’d been dodging, but I figured that would be a risk anywhere. It’s not like anyone was leaving the neighborhood. Flags were starting to pop up everywhere, along with the MISSING signs. It was like we’d cleared away all the papers that had blown over and were replacing them with our own.
I was relieved, because clearly Peter wasn’t a closet case, and he seemed to know what some of the dating rules were. Not that I was seeing it as a date—more as a diversion. It’s not like I was going to put him in my pocket and take him up to college with me. And he didn’t seem like the random-hookup type. (A shame. Or maybe not.) I asked him all the things I felt I should ask, like where he’d been when everything happened. He told me he was waiting to buy a Bob Dylan record, which I thought was pretty funny. “The times, they did a-change?” I said, but his laugh was more polite than anything else. I chalked it up to the fact that you had to be twisted like me to find the humor in the situation.
Usually I treated dates like they were chess matches, trying to plan my moves a little bit ahead, carefully deciding which conversational pieces to deploy, willing to sacrifice pawns of small talk if it would get my opponent to fall in love with my king. But this was a different kind of board, a different set of rules—almost like all the pieces had been knocked off, and we were both trying to agree on where they’d been before. I wasn’t having any fun with it, which wasn’t his fault. Fun was included in the piece of me that had disappeared.
He talked about seeing things happen, about being near, and while he expressed a momentary jealousy that I hadn’t had to go through that, I think we both knew that it was better to be an unharmed witness than the guy who slept through it and still had to deal with the aftermath. One of the things the terrorist attack has done was to send us all into these Sliding Doors scenarios—all these what ifs. What if I’d gotten up earlier that morning? What if I’d decided to go to Battery Park for a run? I’d done that once … in 1998, before the SATs. What if, along the way, I’d taken the spot on a crowded subway car that some guy who worked at the World Trade Center was supposed to take, so the doors slid closed on him and he ended up getting to work late enough to be saved? Bullshit—all of it complete bullshit. And you couldn’t help but wonder why your mind went there anyway—was it to exert control or to find comfort in the fact that there wasn’t really all that much control, after all?
By the time I tuned back in, Peter was talking about crying because people at Starbucks were being extra nice. The fact that he could be so moved only reinforced my own emptiness. When he asked me how I felt, I didn’t lie—it didn’t seem like the kind of thing to lie about. And I found myself telling him—or at least trying to—about how the emptiness worked, how you withdraw from something and you feel the distance inside of you as well as outside of you. But it was clear he wasn’t really understanding, and that made me wonder yet again why I’d agreed to meet up with him. Clearly, there wasn’t much I could give him, and there wasn’t much he could give me.
“So you just withdraw?” he asked me. And I couldn’t convey to him the extent of it, so I just said, “Not totally.” Then, since that didn’t seem like enough, I added, “I mean, you can’t let it get to you.”
“Because if you let it get to you, then the terrorists will have won?”
I wished it were as simple as that. But it wasn’t.
“It’s not about them, really,” I said. “It’s just about me.”
I knew how monstrous that sounded—I knew September 11th wasn’t about me. But my reaction to September 11th—that was entirely about me.
Peter quickly switched the subject to my parents, and I gave him the update. I was totally running out of steam until he drifted off and then, when he came back, said, “If we stop having sex, then the terrorists will have won.” Normally, when someone says something like that, it’s a total bad pickup line, but it was obvious that wasn’t Peter’s intention, and I liked him more for it. He asked me about school, and I told him I had no idea when it was going to start—yet another thing I had no idea about. Like any high school student, he had this fascination with college, and I found myself getting nostalgic—if September 11th was really going to be this big before/after dividing line in our lives, I was sorry that I didn’t have at least a bit of high school in the after. High school actually seemed longer ago now because of what had happened.
I tried to imagine Peter up at school with me. I tried to imagine us as boyfriends, and it felt about as realistic as me dating Sarah Jessica Parker. I knew what I had to do: get the check, say goodbye, send him on his way. But one of the missing parts of me made a slight guest appearance, because I also felt this strange fondness for him, like he was a stray and I had to take him home and give him a bowl of milk. That, and I didn’t particularly love the idea of going back to the house again and spending another night in the company of the TV set. At least Peter wouldn’t expect the same things from me that my parents or my friends would.
So I found myself asking him over, and he seemed up for it. It was a little weird at first, because having him in the living room made me realize what a shitheap it had become, like I’d let objects fall from my hands whenever I was done with them, my very own sculpture garden of a ruined week.
“Sorry, sorry,” I said. I almost added, “The housekeeper is in mourning.” But that was pretty awful, so I added, “I never did get that housekeeping merit badge.”
“You were a Boy Scout?” he replied, totally interested. And I didn’t have the heart to tell him that no, I wasn’t—somehow the scouts filled their gay Korean Brooklynite quota without me. So I nodded, and I lied, and while I lied, I decided to make myself an Eagle Scout.
Hoping to make my way back to being a good host, I offered him a drink, and clarified what kind of drinks I was offering when he seemed to want water—which is acceptable if you’ve just run a few miles, but not really in a social situation. Since the local bodega owners would only laugh if I showed them my fake ID, I had to resort to my parents’ stash of Korean beer, which was probably great if you’d never left Korea and had never tasted any other beers, but was pretty damn unexceptional if you’d ever kept the company of Mr. Samuel Adams and his brethren.
Peter sipped the OB politely and declined to make the usual OB-GYN jokes about its name. We watched the news for a while, and I pretty much confessed my crush on Peter Jennings. And maybe it was all the talk of Peter Jennings, but suddenly I was like, Why am I here on the couch with this seventeen-year-old Ewanish boy and totally keeping my hands to myself? Was it him or was it me that was stopping us? I figured he’d be into it, but I didn’t want to freak him out if he wasn’t. I decided to turn the flirtation up a notch, remembering that I’d said we were going to watch Cabaret. Once I put the movie on, I asked him if he liked the lights on or off—clearly code words for “Do you want to sit here like we’ve been sitting or do you want to start making
out?” He said he could do either, which was no help whatsoever.
The movie started, and I wasn’t remotely interested in it. I slid a little closer to him, but it was a completely missed signal. After a while I realized how late it was getting, and I wondered if Peter was planning on going home or staying over. Finally he pointed out that it was almost midnight, and it was really clear in his voice that he wanted to stay. I thought of him trying to get the subway all the way back, and I knew I couldn’t do that to him. But I also didn’t want him to think he had to stay, because I knew I was going to crash pretty soon. When I asked him if he was going to get in trouble with his parents, he told me he’d already made up an alibi for them. This got my attention—he was playing a little more of a game than I’d pegged him for. Still, he didn’t make a move. I figured we could start making out during the rest of the DVD, so we restarted it, and I realized too late that even though it has music, Cabaret is a fucking downer of a movie, as most things that end with the Holocaust tend to be.
Soon Sally Bowles’s party was over, and it looked like ours was going to follow suit. I could barely keep my eyes open, and every time I yawned, Peter would echo it with another yawn. I tried to feel some kind of sexual current in the room, but came up with more yawning. Maybe my receptors were out of commission. I told him it was probably time to call it a night. And I realized that there was no way we were going to sleep in the same bed—that would lead him on too much, and I didn’t want to lead him on. The right thing to do was to leave him alone.
I could hear the rain outside, and I opened my window and breathed a little of it in before I got the sheets for the couch. I could’ve given him my parents’ room, but I could imagine them making a late-night arrival at JFK, then cabbing home to find a complete boy-stranger in their bed. (It would be even worse if they found him in my bed … with me.) I knew I should have explained this to him, but I was too tired even for that. I figured he’d just go with it, and it would be fine.
But he looked disappointed when he saw the sheets, and even though I told him the sofa was really comfortable, I knew it wasn’t the sleep that he was worried about. I felt like my blood was venom now, for ruining this kid’s night like this, but I wasn’t in the mood to be with anyone. At least not until I was back in my room with the door closed, trying to go to sleep. I’d made the mistake of hugging him good night, and it was odd how that stayed with me. It wasn’t meant as anything but friendliness. But I started to imagine him in my bed, us just holding each other, and that started to sound good to me. Outside, it was all thunder and lightning—real spooky-movie stuff. I could hear him shuffling around in the living room, watching the TV on low, trying to fall asleep to the news that was keeping us all awake. I had no idea what I wanted, only that I wanted something, which is the worst kind of wanting. I sat up in bed and stayed like that for a good fifteen minutes. Finally I decided I’d just go and check on him, and when I did, I found him completely awake. There was no place on the couch to sit, so I just sat lightly on his legs.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello,” he said.
Little simple words.
“Isn’t the couch comfy?” I lifted myself a little so I wouldn’t crush him, then eased back down.
“I guess,” he mumbled.
I was still going back/forth, yes/no, leave/make out.
Finally I pushed it.
“But why are you sleeping here?” I asked, falling back on flirtation. When I didn’t get a response—yes, he was a little miffed—I stood up, gave him my hand, and told him to come on. I was still searching for that current—or maybe I was trying to manufacture it. But even as we walked to my room, holding hands, I felt the voltage start to diminish. We veered toward the open window and stood there silent for a little while. Even on a regular night, hard rain like this would have made us notice. But now it seemed almost biblical in its appearance. Wash us clean, maybe. Or drown us all.
I’d let go of his hand without really meaning to. It’s just hard to hold a hand for that long. But then he made this completely obvious move to take it back, and I thought he was finally going to push me into something. Instead he backed away.
I goaded him. “Aren’t you going to kiss me?” A line I’d used before.
And it worked, because almost immediately he was leaning into me. And it didn’t work, because the emptiness came back.
It made me angry. Mostly at myself. And also at him. For his stupid innocence. For making me think I could be woken up by a kiss.
I found myself saying, “Is that all?” Goading him again. Pushing him harder. Letting it be like that.
And he heard that. He kissed me again.
I wanted to feel something. But I couldn’t get to it. Maybe with someone else, someone yet to be found. But not with him.
“What’s going on?” he asked. Like I knew. Like any of us knew.
“I guess it’s raining,” I said, wanting him to find me on his own, because I couldn’t find myself.
And I got that disappointment again.
“That’s not what I meant,” he said.
What did I feel? Something between sleepwalking and defeat. Something between victim and victimizer.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “This was a bad idea. I should have left you alone.”
This was not what he wanted to hear.
“I’ll just go back to the couch,” he said, already moving to leave.
“No,” I said, trying to stop him. “You can stay here. We can just sleep.”
Not sex. Just us next to each other.
But he couldn’t see it. He insisted on returning to the couch, and I felt he was giving me my own punishment, one I deserved. I tried to hold him—I tried one more hug, tried to get what I needed there—but it didn’t last for long. The night was over. He stared out the window, and there was nothing to see—not Manhattan, just Brooklyn. Nobody working around the clock, nobody digging, nobody searching for a miracle. Just rain and lightning and darkness.
I could hear him after he left. Back on the couch, shifting from side to side. I stayed standing by the window. I had no idea what had just happened, and I knew he didn’t, either. I had never felt so much like my life was not my own, that I was just a vessel for things I would never understand. I didn’t want him … but if I didn’t want him, what did I want? I didn’t want to be alone … but if I didn’t want to be alone, then why didn’t I want to be with anyone else?
Limbo is the state where there are only questions.
That was as far as I’d gotten.
I CAN’T SLEEP
Claire
I can’t sleep.
It’s not just the sound of the rain outside. It’s not the unfamiliarity of the bed I’m lying in. It’s not my mother’s deep, uneasy breathing next to me. It’s the thoughts. They will not go to sleep, so I cannot go to sleep.
The bedroom we’re sleeping in was once Rana’s. Now it’s a guest room. You can only find traces of her in the folds, the corners no one cares about. Even though this is our third night sleeping here, I’m still not used to it. Nor am I used to sharing a bed with my mother. I can’t remember ever climbing into bed with her when I was a girl, not even after a nightmare or during a storm like this. She wasn’t that kind of mother, and I wasn’t that kind of daughter. I don’t think we’re about to start now. She looks older when she’s asleep, and this alarms me. She looks like the act of sleep is exhausting her as much as the act of living.
I wanted to go back to our apartment, but we were told we couldn’t. Three times, we walked down to the barricades on Canal Street and let the police officers know where we lived. Each time, they said it was still too dangerous. They asked us if we had a place to stay. “We just want to see it,” I said, even though I knew there was no point.
When I picture my room, I imagine everything covered in ashes. I know the windows are closed. I know the door is shut. But I imagine death as a fine dust that’s gotten in through the cracks, that covers my u
nmade bed, my clothes, my carpet. In my mind, it looks like a hundred years have passed, draining away all the color. The air itself has decayed and fallen to the floor.
I try to think of other things, but there are no other things. This is the only thing I can think about.
Every time I’ve walked downtown—every time I’ve looked downtown—it’s been the same. First the smoke. Then the source of the smoke. And the disappearance. How the other buildings, which once seemed so small in comparison, have now revealed their true height.
Gone. One of the words that’s hardest to fully comprehend. Gone.
I feel the urge to weep, the kind of weeping that feels like you are choking on a thick black cloud. I manage to keep it in, but barely. Walking back here tonight, right before dinner, a woman passed me, and she was laughing. A dancing, happy laugh. I can still see her. She was walking downtown—she could see the smoke, if she looked. And she was laughing at something her companion had said. And I thought, How can you?
It is unbelievable to see the city so shut down. It is unbelievable that there are no planes in the sky. It is unbelievable that none of us know the full impact yet.
I could take the leather-bound Little Women off of Rana’s bookshelf and read it in the bathroom, where the light won’t disturb anyone. Or I could go into the den, where Sammy’s asleep, and turn on the television, muted, looking for the one channel that will pretend nothing’s happened. If only I still had my faith in old books and reruns. They are among the things I feel have been taken from me, along with humor and hope and the ability to savor. I could go into the kitchen and steal some ice cream from the freezer, but it would only taste like cold on my tongue. I could put on headphones and listen to a CD, but it would only sound like disturbed airwaves, not music. So I stay in bed until the thunder stops and Mom’s sleep-breathing slows and my thoughts become so loud that I can’t take it anymore. Because after the storm there’s something even scarier outside—an astounding, uncitylike quiet. I don’t hear any cars going by, no voices. There are no clocks ticking in the apartment, no gusts of wind pressing against the glass. It’s as if the rain has washed all the life away, except for the water finding the openings in the pavement, seeping down.