“You’re insane,” I said.
“No—let me finish. I’m not saying it wasn’t unfathomably tragic. It’s awful. Completely horrific. It keeps me up and leaves me feeling totally inadequate to face it. But if you think about how everyone reacted—if you read the paper about everything that happened in reaction to the tragedy—you can almost find the beauty of it. The terrorists—those nineteen people, with hundreds or maybe thousands behind them—did the worst thing that you can possibly imagine. But tens of millions of people did the right thing. Not just the people who helped at Ground Zero and all the firefighters and police officers and first-aid workers. Not even the people in the city who took people in or helped them out or prayed. Or the people around the world who took in stranded travelers and also prayed and acted nicer to the people around them because everyone in that moment felt so vulnerable. Even more than that. I think that if you were somehow able to measure the weight of human kindness, it would have weighed more on 9/11 than it ever had. On 9/11, all the hatred and murder could not compare with the weight of love, of bravery, of caring. I have to believe that. I honestly believe that. I think we saw the way humanity works on that day, and while some of it was horrifying, so much of it was good.”
“That’s totally f**ked up,” I said.
Claire squeezed my hand. “Maybe it is,” she said. “But maybe it isn’t. Didn’t you feel it on that day? It was like everyone suddenly knew what mattered. Money didn’t matter. Politics didn’t matter. Tabloid news didn’t matter. No—compassion mattered. Calm mattered. Respect mattered. Did it really take something of this magnitude to make us realize this? Yeah, I guess so.”
I wanted to believe her. But I wasn’t sure I could. Because, ultimately, isn’t your belief in human nature a perfect reflection of your own nature? If I expected the best from people, wouldn’t I have to expect the best from myself?
“Usually I’m the f**ked-up one,” I said.
“There’s more than enough of it to go around,” Claire assured me.
A family of six passed by, looking like they had gotten up seven hours early for the first Circle Line tour. The youngest boy—he couldn’t have been more than six—had Mickey Mouse ears on.
“You should talk to your friend Peter,” I said. “I’m sure he can tell you stories about me.”
“Why?” It was clear from her face that she had no idea.
“We were supposed to go out on 9/11,” I explained. “But we rescheduled for later in the week. It didn’t go well. I was a mess.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t that bad.”
“It was. That bad.”
Usually I could compartmentalize a bad date into a two-minute anecdote and eventually forget it had ever happened. But this one was haunting me more. Not because I felt Peter and I should’ve hit it off—even under regular circumstances, I don’t think it would have gotten that far. But I guess I regretted it had been such a clusterfuck.
“Have you talked to him since?” she asked.
“We’ve emailed a couple of times. None of his emails have started with ‘Dear Antichrist,’ so I guess that’s a good sign.”
“I haven’t noticed your name carved in his arm, either.”
“Another good sign.”
I was about to ask her if she was seeing someone when there was a noise from behind us. Nothing too dramatic—probably just some machinery being moved. But we were both startled for a second, then felt silly for it the moment after.
Or at least I felt silly. Claire just looked wistful, facing the lights at Ground Zero.
“I guess it’s a choice we make,” she said.
“What’s a choice?” I asked.
And she said, “How much of the world we let in.”
CATCHING BREATH
Claire
“What do you mean?” Jasper asks.
I don’t know what I mean. I’m just talking. Words to find words. Words searching for words.
“I think it’s something we all do,” I say. “Not consciously, all the time. But we choose how much of the world we want to let into our lives. Both the beauty of it and the horror of it. There has to be a point of insulation—but some of us insulate real close, right down to our very selves, and others insulate wider, let more of the world in.”
“And now?”
“Well, now the world has forced its way in. And once it retreats, we have to decide whether we put the insulation line in the same place or whether we move it out or in. I think I want to move it out. I want to include more of the world, even though I’m scared to.”
I expect him to dodge what I’m saying—I sense he’s an expert dodger—but instead he says, “I think I’ve been trying to draw it tighter. Not the world—the insulation.”
“That’s a natural enough thing to do,” I tell him.
“I guess. If you want to be an a**hole.”
It is so strange to be here, to finally be saying all these things out loud. Some of them are things I didn’t even know that I knew. And others are things I’ve wanted to pull people aside and say, but it was never the right time. My mother is on edge enough, trying to figure out our apartment and her job and whether living downtown is going to kill us. And maybe one of my friends at school would get it, but I haven’t found which one yet. So here I am, with a near stranger, who John told me had hurt Peter’s feelings, but not too bad.
“I want to tell you something,” I say. And I’m not even sure what I’m going to tell him. I want to find the thing I most don’t want to say, the thing I am the most unsure of, because I don’t know if I’m going to have this chance again.
He opens the door. “What?”
And I’m telling him.
What?
I’m saying
“I liked breathing it in.”
And he doesn’t get it. So I say
“That air. The air afterwards. I wanted to breathe it in. It felt right to breathe it in. Because we were breathing them in, weren’t we? And the buildings. We were breathing it all in. And I thought, there’s a part of this that’s actually a part of me now. I now have that responsibility. I am alive, and I am breathing, and I can do the things this dust can’t do.”
I think for the twelfth time tonight he’s going to tell me I’m insane. But instead he says, “I collected their papers. The ones that blew into Brooklyn. They were just there at first. I didn’t even know what they were. But once I did, I went all over the place, picking them up. I don’t know what to do with them. I mean, they’re meaningless now, but they still exist. You can’t throw out something like that. You can’t make them gone like that.”
“You did the right thing,” I say.
“For the first time in my life,” he jokes.
“Not really,” I tell him. “Not at all, I’m sure.”
I’m not just saying it. I know it’s true.
“Do you always have such faith in strangers?” he says.
“Only the ones who go out on really bad dates with my friends.”
Wouldn’t it be funny, though, if the answer was yes?
I want to have faith in strangers. I want to have faith in what we’re all going to do next. But I’m worried. I see things shifting from United We Stand to God Bless America. I don’t believe in God Bless America. I don’t believe a higher power is standing beside us and guiding us. I don’t believe we’re being singled out. I believe much more in United We Stand. I have my doubts, but I want it to be true. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we really came together, if we really found a common humanity? The hitch is that you can’t find a common humanity just because you have a common enemy. You have to find a common humanity because you believe that it’s true.
It’s getting cold out, and I don’t have a jacket. I was only going to walk around for a few minutes. I just needed to say good night to the streets before going back to my room. I know I won’t be able to keep doing this. I know the streets don’t care. But I need to do it.
I shiver, and Jasper puts his arm around me. Not like a boy who’s after a grope, or even a consoling parent. He just draws me a little into his body, making us a shelter for a time.
“I don’t want to go,” he says. “I mean, I can’t stay in my house, and I’m sure school will be great, but at the same time, I don’t want to go.”
“The city will still be here, I promise,” I say.
“But will it be the same city?”
I shake my head. “It’s never the same city. Your city isn’t even the same as my city, I bet.”
“I guess.”
“And that’s not really the problem,” I say.
“Then what is?”
“You don’t want to deal. With life. With other people.”
“You should’ve warned me you had a photographic memory.”
“Can you have a photographic memory for things that are said? Wouldn’t that be something else? And it was only a few minutes ago. Don’t give me too much credit.”
The funny thing is, I want to talk to him as much as he wants to talk to me. And I have been dealing. I’ve been going to school, doing my work, volunteering as much as I can, trying to get other people to volunteer, too. But I guess it’s just as easy to get lost in the dealing as it is to get lost in the avoidance.
“Do you remember Mitchell’s party?” Jasper asks.
“It seems like ages ago,” I tell him. “But yes, I do.”
“Tell me what you remember.”
It’s easy to know where to begin. “You were the life of the party,” I say. “I mean, there wasn’t a song you wouldn’t dance to. Even the sappy ballads, you were swaying. I think you were wearing a blue shirt. I remember at one point you sat on Peter’s lap. You were such a flirt. And he had such an instant crush on you.”
“What else?” His eyes are closed, like he’s a kid and I’m telling him a fairy tale.
“God, I don’t know. I wasn’t even going to go, but my friend Casey really wanted to go because she thinks Mitchell’s brother, Bill, is really hot. So we got there, and it ended up that Bill was away wherever Mitchell’s parents were. So Casey wanted to leave immediately, but I figured that since we were there, we should stay. Mitchell was always one of my favorite people in school. And, let’s see, that night he was wearing a Nelly Furtado T-shirt, but he’d crossed out the Furtado part, so it just said Nelly. There might have even been some sequins involved. Am I right?”
Jasper nods, eyes still closed.
“And—I don’t know—we were all really happy, weren’t we? I mean, school had started, but the real part hadn’t started yet. This was like the one weekend when we didn’t have to worry about homework or colleges or SATs or anything. It was just a big welcome back. And Laine Taylor had cut all her hair off, and Greg Watson had grown his long, and Aiden Smith couldn’t stop talking about this guy who was a counselor with him who he’d fallen head over heels in love with. And Jill Breslin—God, poor Jill Breslin—she was drunk off her ass. On Bud Light! She was still really tan from the summer. She had on a necklace I really liked, although now I couldn’t tell you what it was. Only that I liked it.”