“And then, of course, I was a complete ass**le to you,” Jasper says.
“No,” I say. “You weren’t. That’s how you’re remembering it, but you weren’t. When you say things like that—” I stop.
“What?”
“When you say things like that, I wonder if we’re here now because you feel bad. You know, about the first date. That you’re only doing this to be nice.”
That gets a laugh. “I think that’s the first time anyone’s accused me of doing something just to be nice.” He moves forward so that his knees are touching my knees under the table. “I promise you, this isn’t about then. It’s about now.”
I press my knees back into his. “Fine, then.”
“We have an understanding?”
“I believe we do.”
We talk about how strange it is to be away from New York. We both called our parents this morning, as if it were Mother’s Day or a birthday. There wasn’t much to say, except to acknowledge what we should already know.
“I remember on that day,” I say, “one of the city officials—it wasn’t Giuliani, but someone else—anyway, when he was asked what people should do, he said that everyone should go home and give their kids a hug. And while I understood why he was saying that, part of me wanted to say, dude, you should always go home and give your kids a hug. It shouldn’t take the World Trade Center falling to inspire that.”
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.