“It’s going to be all right,” my mother keeps telling me. And I want to tell her what she says is impossible—there is no such thing as all right. The lie is in the word all.
There are more cars on the streets now—nothing so busy that you’d call it traffic. In fact, most of the cars are empty cabs, as trapped in the searching as we are. The people out right now don’t want to take cabs. We just want to walk. Our legs need to move to keep our minds from collapsing.
I wish there was somebody I could call. I wish there was somebody who I could wake up at whatever time it is and say, “I need you to come to Union Square and be with me right this minute.” But my best friends aren’t that close—not in terms of distance to Union Square, and not in terms of closeness to me. They’re friends I could call at six at night, but not at six in the morning. If I had a boyfriend, maybe I could call him. But I don’t, so it’s a stupid thing to think about.
Here’s what breaks us: Even though we know better, we still want everything to be all right.
I think about Marisol and wonder how she and her sister are doing. I would never call her at six in the morning. I don’t even know her last name.
I think about Jill Breslin and how her father is dead—the school sent out an email telling us, confirming it. What I’m feeling is nothing—nothing—compared to what she and her family are feeling. It makes me feel safer, but also smaller.
As I’m crossing Park Avenue, about to get to the square, another downpour hits. I didn’t bring an umbrella, so I just let it batter me. I feel the sinking cold, and I can’t help but wonder if there are ashes in the raindrops. I picture them there—a little filament of ash in each tiny upside-down bulb of water. I shiver.
There are a few people in ponchos on the square, and a few police officers. It’s nothing like it is during the day—the crowded museum of sadness and pain is largely closed for the night, making us the night watchmen. There isn’t an empty railing to be found; they all have wreaths and posters and photos of the missing, who we all know are dead. One piece of paper says TERRORISTS: WE WILL FIND YOU AND KILL YOU. But mostly people want to commemorate the lost. There are testimonials to the firefighters, the NYPD officers, the Port Authority police. There are flags, so many flags. There are kids’ drawings on oak-tag paper, the Magic Marker smudging now, so the towers have become gray moats, the Statue of Liberty has melted into a puddle. So many people saying thank you, and it’s all wet and ruined. Messages that will never be read. Gifts that were given too late.
The worst is the candles. They’re all out. They stand there blankly, more crooked than upright. They were left to fend for themselves, carry their own vigil, and they failed. They’re just sticks of wax. They have nothing.
Suddenly I’m crying. I can’t stop crying. This is just too much. The enormity of it is crushing me. Because I am still foolish enough to have believed I would find something here that could help me, that I would wander out into the night and find something that would make me feel better. What a small, almost petty thing to want—to feel better.
I sit down on a bench, even though I don’t feel I have any right to sit on a bench, here among the dead and the missing and the remembered. In small letters, someone has written NEVER FORGET on one of the slats. I know it’s supposed to be a pledge, but it feels like a curse. Don’t we have to forget some of it? Don’t we have to forget this feeling? If we don’t, how will we live?
I want to kneel down to every photograph. I want to stop the ground from turning to mud. I want the rain to dissolve me instead of the notes that people have left on the grass. I want one person—just one single person—who is missing to still be alive.
Breathing is hard. When you cry so much, it makes you realize that breathing is hard.
People walk past me. They leave me to myself, which is different from leaving me alone.
I look over to the south side of the square and see this one woman lighting a candle. She cups her hand over it, even though the rain is now just a drizzle. She leans in with a lighter until the wick takes hold of the flame. Leaving her hand there for a second, sheltering it. Then moving her hand away.
She’s wearing a raincoat—a formless green raincoat—and it’s still darkish out, so it’s hard for me to tell anything about her, except that she has long, dark hair. She looks once at the candle and the framed photo behind it, then moves on to the next candle. Again, she cups her hand. Again, she flicks her lighter. Again, she waits for the flame to catch.
I watch her for a minute. It’s like we’re the only two people in the park, and I am afraid that even by watching, I am disturbing her. But then she lights a third candle, and a fourth, and my crying has stopped, and I feel foolish again. But at least it’s the kind of foolish that will get me to do something.
I stand up from the bench and smooth out my shirt. I walk over and get within ten feet of the woman before I hesitate again. She is so intent on the candles that I’m afraid I will startle her. I look back at her work—the second candle she lit is out again, but the rest are still flickering.
“Excuse me,” I say.
She looks surprised. While I’ve been watching her, she hasn’t noticed me at all.
“Can I help you?” I ask.
She is not expecting this. I see now she’s about my mother’s age, and her hair is wet enough to make me think she’s been doing this for a while now. All through the night, even.
“I only have one lighter,” she says apologetically.
“I could use that,” I say, pointing to the candle she’s just lit.
“Here.” She reaches over and picks it up. We both look at the photo it was sitting in front of, a man in his fifties. There’s no MISSING or HAVE YOU SEEN ME? or even a name. It’s just a framed photo that somebody left. I can easily imagine it sitting on a mantelpiece or on a desk. Or on top of a casket at a funeral. There are going to be so many funerals at once.
“I don’t think he’ll mind,” the woman says gently, nodding at the man in the photograph. She reaches the candle over to me, and I take it from her. For a moment, both our hands are on it. She’s watching the flame, willing it to stay alight.
“Thank you,” I say.
“It’s nothing,” she tells me. “Thank you.”
This, I think, is how people survive: Even when horrible things have been done to us, we can still find gratitude in one another.
I decide to go back to the first candle she lit and move in the opposite direction around the path. Before I do, I look back and observe again how she does it. When she pauses before each one, I look to see if her lips move, if she’s actually saying a prayer. But whatever words she’s thinking are kept to herself, or sent directly to whoever she believes can hear her thoughts, deity or deceased.
I can’t think of anything to say. I don’t know these people whose candles I am lighting. So instead, as I light each one, I am sure to read the names out loud, if there are names. I am sure to look each photo in the eye, if there’s a photo. I cup my hand over each unlit candle, then raise my own candle to it. They touch, and I leave a small flame. Sometimes it doesn’t last, or it doesn’t work at all. Sometimes I have to wipe off the water that’s pooled in the hollow of the wax. Sometimes I have to backtrack when my candle goes out, and relight it on one of the candles I lit only moments before. Every now and then I look to see how the woman in the green raincoat is doing. Two other people, a couple, have seen us and are now using their own lighter to save more candles. It feels like the right thing to do, even though the light we make doesn’t change what’s happened. We are making our own temporary constellation, and it doesn’t spell a single thing.
I keep going. The rain returns and becomes more insistent. I guard my candle, and when it runs too low, I borrow another one. I don’t try to relight the ones I’ve lit that have gone out again. I just keep going. At certain points I’m aware people are watching, but then I go back to reciting the names, lighting the candles. There are so many of them. I have to keep going. What separates us from the animals, what separates us from the chaos, is our ability to mourn people we’ve never met. I light candle after candle after candle.
It’s pointless, but it’s the only thing I can do.
THE DROWN OF THINGS AND THE
SWIM OF THINGS
(Part Three)
TURN
Peter
I’m brought back to life by Travis. Not a guy named Travis. No—the band Travis. Musically, they may be a blip on the Britpop radar—but in September 2001, they are big enough to sell out Radio City Music Hall. The only question is: Will the concert actually happen?
It’s not looking good. In the week after 9/11, New York City becomes something it hasn’t been since the days before the steamship: isolated. Even after the bridges and tunnels and airports open again, most of the people who are using them are making a return voyage. The tourists disappear. Bands do not show up. Concerts are canceled left and right. Museums are empty. New York is full of … New Yorkers.
Nobody knows what will happen.
School starts again on Monday, six days after. It starts with an assembly and a minute of silence for Jill Breslin’s dad and all the others who lost their lives. Then we’re told that we need to try to go back to normal, or as close to normal as we can get. Classes will resume. Activities will resume. Life will resume for the living. Counselors are available if we have problems with that.
Because I wasn’t here when it happened—because I was skipping study hall to stand outside Tower Records and didn’t show up until after everything had been destroyed—I wondered if it would be weird, like there was something I wasn’t going to share with everyone else. But now I see that’s not true. Because I did see most of my classmates that day. And even the ones I didn’t, we were all here, we were all a part of it. And suddenly I’m feeling this—I guess you could call it tenderness—for people I never even liked before. It’s yet another unexpected aftershock—that I can look at Carly Fisher chewing her gum, rolling her eyes, and even though I have never been able to muster up anything more than annoyance when it comes to her, suddenly there’s this base level of caring. And the people I care about, suddenly I care about them a little more, in this existential way. Like my best friend, John, who actually went to Tower on the twelfth and bought me a copy of Love and Theft instead of just burning me a copy of the one he bought for himself. Or Claire, who is telling everyone they should go out and volunteer—not for one of the 9/11 charities, but for all the other charities that are going to be hit hard because everyone’s going to give to the 9/11 charities now. Or Aiden, the first boy I kissed, who probably went clubbing this weekend and managed to forget everything that happened, if only for the length of a song. I am full of this wide gladness that they’re all okay. Flawed and miserable and sleepless. But alive.
It doesn’t feel like normal, though. It’s not just caring that’s been added—there’s also fear. Every time there’s a siren in the street. Every time the PA coughs to life, even if it ends up being the announcement of a food drive. Every time we remember, which is constant.
At lunch, John asks me how the date with Jasper717 went, and I tell him I can’t even begin to explain it. It feels like it was all some kind of twisted dream, the kind where your bedroom door leads to Paris and your mother doesn’t remember you’re her son, so she insists that you have to run a marathon underwater.
“Sounds like fun,” John says.
“Like kissing a steamroller,” I tell him.
I’m still—I don’t know—impressed that John asks me about my dates and everything, because he’s straight and he doesn’t really have to. I never thought I’d lose his friendship over the whole g*y thing, but I also didn’t think he’d be very interested.