Love Is the Higher Law

I tell him I did get an email from Jasper717 the next day, apologizing for being so scattered, for “sending mixed signals.” But he didn’t offer to make it up to me, and I was glad.

“So that’s that,” John says.

“Exactly.”

We switch back to talking about music, and how the rumors are true that the CMJ Festival has been canceled and that most acts are pulling out of shows for the next few weeks. It’s too hard to get here. Or maybe they’re just scared. I can’t say I blame them. Even though we New Yorkers have been hitting the streets and the stores and the restaurants, I can’t say any of us has had much desire to go to the top of the Empire State Building or spend much time in Times Square or gather by the tens of thousands in Madison Square Garden. In other words, we feel like if we stick to the quieter places, we won’t be targets. It’s a hard thing to get over.

“Think Travis will cancel?” John asks me. We’re supposed to go together.

“Probably,” I say. “I mean, wouldn’t you?”

John shakes his head. “No, I would not. I would play, man.”

And I think, of course he would. And I wonder why I thought I wouldn’t.

We check the website. We call the theater. We listen to updates on the radio. The day comes, and the concert hasn’t been canceled. The band has made it to town.

I meet up with John that night and I’m nervous about going to midtown. Which is insane—it’s pretty ridiculous to imagine Osama bin Laden in a cave in Afghanistan telling his minions, “We got the World Trade Center, we got the Pentagon, we missed the White House, but now we’re going to get … Travis!” But I guess the thing about fear is that it defies the laws of rationality. It creates its own laws instead.

“What’s wrong?” John asks as we get close to Radio City. “You didn’t forget the tickets, did you?”

I pull them out of my pocket and wave them in front of his face. “Not this time, Suedehead.”

You can see the neon name of Radio City from blocks away, and it’s something of a comfort, its simple existence. Last week my parents and I went through our photo albums, looking for pictures of the Twin Towers. We only found one, a blurry shot taken on the Staten Island Ferry, with me and my cousins in the foreground, horsing around. My aunt and uncle—in town from Florida—probably took many more shots of the skyline. It’s an irony we’re only now realizing—that out-of-towners probably have more photographs of the big things than we do. My first impulse when I see the red Radio City lights is to take a picture of them. Just in case.

We wait on line for security—something we’re no doubt going to have to get used to—and then push into the crowded lobby. If you listen only to the noise, not the conversations, it’s like nothing’s happened. But when you get close enough to see the faces and hear the words, you’re back in the post-9/11 world. It’s only been a few weeks, but we know we’re in a post-9/11 world. This isn’t one of those changes when you wake up and wonder when it happened. We all know where the line was drawn.

It isn’t until we get to our seats in the balcony that it becomes apparent that this sold-out show is not going to be a full one—there are hundreds of empty seats scattered around. People who no doubt didn’t want to come into Manhattan. Or people who are afraid to be at Radio City, however improbable the threat.

We’re a nervous, somber crowd. Then the lights go down, and our concert instinct kicks in. Because there’s still the undeniable thrill of the silence before the opening chords, anticipation turning into intensity, awaiting release. I am feeling an energy I don’t fully understand, something that’s been missing these past days and weeks.

The band comes on and launches right into “Sing,” and we all rise to our feet and start singing along. John looks at me, and I look at him, and even though we both have awful voices, we shout our parts. And then there’s “Writing to Reach You,” and Fran Healy is singing, “My inside is outside / My right side’s on the left side,” and it’s my favorite song of theirs and there is something so pure about a favorite song, and while it’s always been a song about loving someone and will later be a song about loving someone, right now it’s a song about confusion, and I am relating, because yesterday I used the word “tomorrow” when I meant to say “yesterday,” and it made sense that I could feel that turned around. The whole crowd is relating, and it only escalates when the song ends and Fran shouts out, “Hello, New York!”

Three simple words, and there are tears in my eyes. He asks for the houselights to be turned on so he can see our faces, and even though he’s way too far away to see mine and I’m way too far away to see his, it’s still like I’m included. He says the band had discussed canceling the show, because they weren’t sure anyone would come out for it. But they didn’t cancel it, and they’re here, and we’re here, and we’re all cheering, and then he says the thing that does me in, which is that there are six thousand of us here tonight, and I look around the room from the balcony and see all of the people here, and that number is just too painful, because right now, that’s the number of people they’re saying died in the World Trade Center—six thousand—and it’s like suddenly Radio City Music Hall has been turned into a way station for ghosts, because I’m imagining all the people who died sitting in our rows, from the front row of the orchestra to the last row of the third balcony, and because of the gold-plated walls and the glowing lights and the red velvet chairs, it’s both indescribably depressing and inexplicably magisterial. So many people. And after that flash of the dead, suddenly the crowd is the crowd again, and it’s not the six thousand people who died, but six thousand other people, randomly joined by an affinity for this Britpop band, and I understand the energy I felt before but didn’t have a name for—it’s the energy of gathering, and the reason it’s so striking is that none of us have gathered like this since 9/11, none of us have been a part of a crowd, none of us have acted out in unison in this way. We six thousand are cheering together. Standing together. The next song starts, and we’re singing together. We all understand that this is just music. We all understand that these songs were written Before—there is no way the band could have known how we would hear them After. But the songs ring true. When Fran gets to “Side,” he talks about how the globe is a sphere and has no sides. Introducing it, he says, “We all wake up in the morning, we all take a shit. It’s just a few dickheads who f**k things up for the rest of us.” And we’re all clapping and yelling because in all the coverage we’ve been watching, nobody has said it so simply, and then backed it up with a song. When they get to “Why Does It Always Rain on Me?” we’re laughing, because the woe-is-me lyrics have always been undercut by the jauntiness of the tune, and now we’re realizing that the lyrics themselves have become more innocent. We’re not afraid of rain anymore.

In the best concerts, the band is as moved as the audience, and this is the case tonight. We all realize that this gathering is about much more than the music, and what we’re getting from it is much more than sounds. “I want to live in a world where I belong,” Fran Healy sings in “Turn.” Then, later on, “I want to live in a world where I’ll be strong.” Before when I listened to this, I would think about being g*y, or about needing to be there for my friends, or even about more general things like being the main character in my own life. But now I realize it’s even more general than that—it’s about life itself. Fran promises it won’t be very long, and we sing with him. Because we want to believe it. We want to believe the world will turn. We want to believe we’ll survive.

The band plays and plays. The guitarist wears a John Lennon New York City T-shirt and belts out Bowie’s “All the Young Dudes.” Then Fran announces that the band is giving all the proceeds from the night’s concert to the firefighters’ fund, and we all go crazy. John is actually standing on his chair, screaming his cheers. We’re all one voice now, this living gathering of six thousand. We are cheering, and we are speechless. We are happy, and we are crying. We are vulnerable, and we are strong. The band launches into a cover of “Happy,” singing “I’m so happy / ’Cause you’re so happy.” We are jumping and dancing and cheering so much we can’t see the empty seats. We can’t hear the silences. We’ve become a part of the music. Not only the music that’s being played. But the music of living.

I need that.

GROUND ZERO

Jasper

When my parents finally made it home, twelve days after 9/11, my mother grabbed hold of me and wouldn’t let go. After all the nights of thinking they were going to come through the door without warning, I ended up meeting them at the airport. I stood in the sea of sons and daughters, craned my neck over the fathers and mothers, witnessed the procession of jet-weary travelers wheeling their carts from baggage claim. For once, the car-service drivers with their wipe-off name cards were in the minority. Family was here to see family return.

I had forgotten how small my mother was. Somehow, over the phone lines, I started seeing her again like I had when I was a kid. Had you asked me if I could fit in her lap, I would have said yes, of course. But now her head fell under my chin as she hugged me and hugged me and hugged me. Then she let go, and my father offered his hand. There was something misty in his expression, and even if he couldn’t bring himself to embrace me in public, I was sure that he was glad that my mother had.

I wanted to pause us there, that faint triangle of bodies at the foot of an escalator. Because I knew it was inevitable that once we left that spot, one of us would say something stupid, and we would be annoyed with each other all over again.

They’d flown into Newark, so we had a long cab ride ahead of us. My mother asked me how the city was doing, as if it were a dying relative, and I asked how my grandmother was doing, and found out she wasn’t going to die quite as soon as we thought. There wasn’t much for me to tell them that I hadn’t said in my mother’s daily phone calls—there weren’t many lengths of the censored version left to explore. I didn’t tell them how, knowing that they were coming home the next day, I’d gone with two school friends to Splash the previous night, which ended up being a bad, bad idea. Splash was a tacky tourist g*y-gay go-go bar on the best of nights, but on this particular night it was particularly gruesome. Some guys were sputtering around in a somber daze, like they’d just found out that  p**n  wasn’t the cure for cancer. I wanted to slap them for bringing us all down. But then there were the other guys, the ones whose heads were full of helium, who were prancing and dancing and romancing like this was the Best Week Ever, and they were having the Best Time Ever, and I wanted to slap them even more, because it didn’t seem to be human to be having such fun. One of the guys hit on me—swooped right in, high on the drug of his choice, and he was like, “Hey, what’s your name?” When I wasn’t forthcoming with that particular piece of information, he followed up with the immortal “I love Asian men.” And I was all, “What the f**k is your problem?” and he came back with, “Hey, man, I was just trying to have a good time.” I hated him at that moment—deeply—and part of that hate was raw envy. I wanted to be that oblivious. And sure, I drank enough that you would’ve thought I’d have gotten there, but the thing was, I never really drank to make myself happy. I only drank to match my sadness.

None of this was a story I wanted to tell my parents. So I let them give me the update on all of my Korean relatives. The narrative only stopped when we rounded a curve on the Pulaski Skyway and the Manhattan skyline suddenly came into view. My father saw it first, and without a word, he started to cry. A few one-at-a-time tears down his cheeks, quickly blotted away. My mother gasped, held her hand over her mouth. The smoke was gone. The fires were out. So what they were reacting to was the absence, the space. Because no matter how many times you saw it on TV, it was much more real when you looked out the window and saw it, just like you’d looked out the window so many times before and saw them there.