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Past EditorsIssue # 42 Spring 2020
Prose
Edited by Dorian Gossy
Introduction from Dorian Gossy
Readers of & contributors to literary magazines may wonder if editors put stories & essays in a particular order or if the arrangement is random. I can’t speak for all editors, but in fact I do give thought to any larger set of ideas that seems to emerge as I read submissions during a given reading period. This is not to say that I have a secret theme that I’m waiting for, or that writers have to guess what I’m thinking. If I did have a specific interest, obviously it would be much more efficient to announce that in advance. Rather, I pay attention to any patterns that seem to emerge from the prose I’m drawn to.
That being said, I can tell you that the six prose pieces here seem to gather into three preoccupations: 1. The unpredictable nature of romance & love; 2. The singularity of lives & life in New York City; & 3. Consciousness itself, as it manifests in sleep & alternative mental states.
Romance first, as it’s one of humankind’s first preoccupations. In the first story by John Giordano, “Together Forever,” a hasty courtship turns spooky & dangerous for the man involved. In the second story, “The Art of Almost,” Natascha Graham follows two girlhood friends who confess their passion for each other only much later in life, when options for them have dwindled.
True tales of Gotham follow. E. J. Meyers’s two personal essays, however specific to New York City, “9/14” & “My Lunch with Trump,” will resonate with readers well beyond the city’s boundaries.
It seems fitting to close with brain & dream. Caroline Sutton’s essay, “Into that Good Night” takes on the sheer weirdness of sleep across many species, including H. sapiens, & Eleanor Levine’s story “Algorithms in the Garden” flies us low over the liminal zone between awareness & madness.
Maybe this makes a little sense. More to the point, with this introduction, I hope I can put to rest the idea that if a given work is last in a sequence of stories & essays, it does not mean that the editor considers it weakest. It’s the gathering of insight & intelligence that matters to me, the way I feel redeemed when I absorb the ideas as a whole. I hope you feel that way, too.
Joe Giordano
Together Forever
Until her twenty-ninth birthday celebration, Violet’s flaming red hair matched my passion for her. I’d booked Sibyl’s Restaurant, a white table cloth special evening out, inviting her parents. Her stepfather arrived past 8.00 p.m., kept late by his boss on a critical project. Violet tore into him loud enough for surrounding patrons to fidget uncomfortably. Early in our relationship, she’d confessed to feeling abandoned when her father died, and she resented her mother remarrying. After she berated her stepfather, conversation chilled. Her mother attempted a bright façade, but the veal saltimbocca I’d finished churned in my stomach. We’d been together six months, long enough that marriage had crossed my mind, but cruelty was a side of her that I hadn’t seen. Lust blinded me to her true nature. She asked what was wrong.
“Nothing,” I said, but the turmoil in my head distracted me. The image of her angry face as she attacked her father snuffed the flame of love within me.
When I dropped Violet off at her apartment, I blamed rich food and indigestion, begging off what would have been a torrid evening in bed.
The next week, I couldn’t shake my ill feeling about the shabby way she’d treated her stepfather. I cut short her phone calls, blaming work. Angst caused me to postpone telling her we were finished. Thankfully, a business trip took me out of town for a week.
The evening I returned, she waited at my apartment door.
“Peter, why won’t you talk to me?”
“I’m sorry. I’ve been busy. Can’t we take this up tomorrow?”
She neared. I allowed her to caress my cheek.
“I know I acted badly at my birthday dinner, but I’ll make it up to you.”
At that moment, my brain forgave her, but my heart didn’t. Another evening in bed would’ve been a lie. I said, “I need sleep.”
“You need proof that we’re destined to be together.”
I consulted my watch.
She implored. “Please, come with me.”
“Where?”
“Trust me.”
I should’ve told her that we were through, but I imagined tears and recriminations into the wee hours. The coward in me dropped my bag inside my apartment door and followed her. She’d summoned an Uber, and we entered the car at the curb.
I asked, “Where are we going?”
“When you wouldn’t speak with me, I realized the mistake I’d made exposing my anger at my stepfather. I ruined the wonderful evening you planned at great expense. Afterward, I didn’t know what to do. My mother was no help, so I consulted Mala, a Gypsy woman, a psychic.”
“What?”
She beamed. “As soon as I sat for the reading, Mala asked, ‘Would you like to know the name of the man who’ll be with you forever? He has brown hair, a cleft in his chin, hazel eyes, and his name is Peter.’ My heart leapt.”
“Oh. Please.”
“I’m not joking. Mala said it just like that.”
“Fortune Tellers are fakes. What did you pay her?”
“Please keep an open mind.”
“Is that where we’re going?” I huffed.
The Uber dropped us off at a boardwalk. In the light of a full moon, white-topped waves curled like plane shavings, lazily rolling forward, then churning into foam on the pebbled shore. The wood-treated scent of the boardwalk crinkled my nose. The briny, winter air was cool on my cheek. I brushed away a forelock. Violet’s red hair billowed in the salt breeze like licking flames.
I wondered if my cool attitude caused her to anticipate our break up and she concocted this psychic story as a means of putting me off. We’d entered strange territory.
She led me beyond the wood planking.
As my dress shoes sunk into the sand, I said, “It’s dark. We’re in the middle of nowhere. Who knows what sort of shady characters we’ll encounter sleeping on the beach?”
She pulled my hand. “Come on.”
Tucked into the shadow of a sandy mound we came upon a roughly built grey shack. The wooden slats rattled in the stiff gusts. Above a door with rusty hinges, a sign painted in red was barely readable, ‘Signora Mala – Psychic.’
My eyes widened in disbelief. “You came to a hovel for enlightenment? Building a shanty on the dune is illegal.”
Violet was undeterred. “Her light’s still on.”
“This seems rather eerie. What are we doing here?”
“She’ll do a reading for you.”
“Are you serious?”
“If you believe in God, you must believe in the supernatural.”
I said, “Belief in the supernatural opens many doors. Not all good.”
“You’re afraid?”
I reddened. “Of course not.”
“A glimpse of our future for just a few dollars awaits us.”
The door creaked open. Violet took my arm and led me inside.
The single room was bathed in a hazy red glow from glass encased candles arrayed in a wrought iron stand. A woman slumped face down over her arms at a wooden table. When we entered, she lifted her head as if awoken from a trance. Young, with penetrating blue eyes, she was exotically attractive. A large golden ring pierced her left nostril, and she wore a black headdress with red accents over long dark hair. The tattoos on her arms were writhing serpents. Two chairs faced her at the table. She said, “Violet, how nice to see you again. I recognize Peter.”
Naming me. How theatrical, I thought.
She gestured, and we sat.
Masking my attraction to Mala from Violet, I coolly asked, “How much for a reading?”
She gave me a small smile. “Pay what you like. Please sign the ledger book.”
A wooden fountain pen lay beside a blue-lined journal. I signed my name. Oddly, Violet’s name wasn’t written on the page.
Mala picked up a deck of tarot cards. Her shuffle was the only sound.
I fished out my wallet and placed a twenty-dollar bill on the table. “Is that enough?”
The shuffle continued. The nails on Mala’s hands were polished jade green. A tattoo of a dagger adorned her middle finger. She wore silver and gold cobra bracelets on each wrist.
I glanced at Violet. She nodded approval.
Mala’s eyes didn’t waver from the cards. “You must tell me when to stop.” Her accent was Eastern European.
I swallowed. “Okay, now.”
She placed the deck down. “Tap the table three times.”
I rapped the table like a door. With each knock, Mala cut the cards until there were three piles.
She clasped her hands. Her eyes rose. “Are you sure you want to proceed?”
“Yes, of course. Why?”
“Some revelations should remain secret.”
I gazed at Violet. She let out a nervous giggle. “Please continue.”
“Remember. You insisted.”
Mala slowly revealed the top card from the first pile picturing a castle tower struck by a bolt of lightning powerful enough to decapitate the crenelated battlement. Fire raged, visible through arrow slits. People hurled themselves to the ground to escape the flames.
Mala’s voice had the monotone of a chanted mantra. “Your beliefs will be shaken. What you think true, is false. A lover will betray you.” For a moment, the psychic’s eyes flickered onto Violet.
I sat back. “That’s not funny.”
The woman spread her hands. “I say what the cards reveal.”
Violet stiffened with concern. “My goodness. You told me that Peter and I would be together forever.”
Mala said, “We haven’t finished the reading.”
I smirked. “You can’t have many satisfied clients if you tell couples they’ll betray
each other.”
Violet rose. “I’m not sure I want to hear more of this.”
I put my hand on her forearm. As I was about to end our relationship, I knew that Mala’s ‘together forever’ prediction had been rubbish. Better that Violet listen to Mala until her illusions about the psychic were dispelled. That way, our breakup conversation would be a tad easier. I said, “Let’s see another card.”
Reluctantly, Violet sat.
Mala turned the card from the center pile. A man with a yellow, glowing face hung upside down from a tree by his right foot, his left leg tucked behind. His hands were bound
Mala tilted her head. “You face conflict. Your suspense is uncomfortable. You argue; it’s unpleasant.”
Violet’s voice cracked, near tears. “I came to you for hope.”
Mala shrugged.
This was going better than I hoped. I said, “Please turn the last card.”
Mala snapped the third card off the deck, then hesitated before placing it onto the table. A naked man and woman faced each other under a bright sun and the gaze of an angel. The words written at the bottom were, ‘The Lovers.’
Mala said, “The two of you, together forever.”
Violet wiped a tear. “I knew it.”
My enthusiasm sank. I became indignant. “This is what charlatans do. You give a reading that can be interpreted any way we like. Violet hears we’ll be together forever, and I hear betrayal. Which is it?”
Mala’s eyes rose to meet mine. She sighed.
I said to Violet, “We’re leaving.”
As we stood, Mala’s voice took an ominous tone, “Beware of a green car.”
I threw up my hands. “You must be kidding.”
Mala said, “The reading is over.”
What crap. I almost pulled Violet from the shack.
As we walked, she asked, “You found Mala attractive?”
“Nonsense,” I said, but Violet’s face remained dubious.
Violet had cell service and ordered an Uber that waited for us when we stepped off the boardwalk. A green Ford Focus.
She grabbed my forearm. “A green car.”
“Oh, come on.” I said and opened the rear door for her. I ran around and slipped into the other side. “I’ll drop you off at your apartment.”
She said, “I believe Mala.”
“Which, betrayal or together forever?”
“I admit your reading wasn’t as clear as mine.”
Although my gut soured at the thought, now was an opportune time to tell Violet that we were quits. The driver’s presence could tamp down her outburst and the trip time limited how much arguing would ensue. As I turned toward her to speak, the Ford’s breaks squealed, and we were both thrown forward as the Focus slammed into the back of a black Toyota RAV4. Violet’s seat belt held her safely, but my head smacked against the side window.
“Shit.” I grabbed my forehead. A bump had already risen. No blood.
Violet said, “Oh my God. Are you all right?”
I winced. “Fine.”
“Should we go to a hospital?”
“I’m sleeping in my own bed tonight.”
“Peter,” she said, “Mala told us to avoid a green car. We ignored her with potentially fatal consequences. Now do you believe?”
“I can’t explain what just happened.”
“Exactly.”
“I’m sticking with coincidence.”
Violet grimaced her disapproval.
The driver apologized, but I was too livid to care. We gave our names as accident witnesses to the Toyota driver and grabbed another Uber. When we arrived at her apartment, Violet asked if she should stay with me.
I assured her that I was okay and after receiving a peck on the cheek, I left for home. The next morning, I was thankful that the headache I suffered derived from the bruise on my head, not from a breakup argument.
At work I stewed. Mala assured Violet we would be together. Our breakup confrontation might be easier if Mala recanted. Perhaps for enough money?
I left the office and Ubered to the beach. Wispy clouds stretched on a blue canvas that blended with a glistening turquoise sea on the far horizon. I walked to Mala’s hovel and entered. She wasn’t surprised to see me.
“Another reading? Please sign my ledger.”
I scribbled my name into the journal as I said, “You’re a psychic, you should’ve known that I’d fallen out of love with Violet and planned to leave her.”
Mala acted unphased by my statement. “You two will stay together.”
“Why are you sticking with this fraudulent prediction when I’m willing to pay you to change your story?”
Mala displayed a wry smile. “You won’t leave Violet.”
“Really?” I stormed from the shack.
I intended to head straight for Violet’s apartment. I called her from the boardwalk but received voicemail. Damn. At my flat, I paced. Finally, I drove my red Camaro to Violet’s, intending to wait at her door if necessary. On the way, I resolved to quickly cauterize the wound. I’d tell her that we were finished. No more postponement. No more temporizing.
I knocked, and Violet immediately opened the door.
“Darling, I was expecting you.” Violet greeted me with a pink negligee and freshly applied red lipstick. Obviously, she had a different idea of my visit’s purpose. I gulped.
No way this was going to be easy.
I said, “Mala’s a fraud.”
Violet’s smile faded only slightly. “Forget about her.”
“Her fortunes are like Rorschach tests. You see in them what you want.”
We were interrupted by a loud bang on the door and two detectives, middle-aged, looking haggard undoubtedly from uncounted, gruesome murder investigations.
“Are you Peter Lewis? Come with us.”
“What’s the problem officers?”
“Based on the ledger we found next to Mala the psychic, you were the last person to see her alive. We need to talk to you at the station.”
My head turned toward Violet.
She said, “Go with them darling. Everything will be all right.”
The cops shoved me into an unmarked, black car smelling of vomit. At the station, they sat me at a gray metal chair and table in an interrogation room amidst a miasma of stress sweat. One of the detectives mirandized me, and I agreed to cooperate. Stupidly, I didn’t stay silent and immediately request an attorney. They grilled me repeatedly about my movements of the last day until my brain fogged. In frustration, I raised my voice. “I’ve told you the same story ten times. I want to consult with an attorney.”
The two cops looked at each other before one of them said, “You’re under arrest.”
They shoved me into a cell with a steel bed alongside a toilet with no seat. All night men moaned or yelled, punctured by the occasional slam of a cell door. In the morning, I’d slept little and wondered when my lawyer would bail me out.
About 11.00 a.m., the arresting detective appeared like a wraith at my cell. “We traced your movements from work to the Fortune Teller, then back to your apartment.
After that, your girlfriend swore you were with her.”
I gulped. Violet lied for me.
He said, “I didn’t believe her, but she held up better than you under questioning.
With the psychic’s time of death later that evening, your girlfriend’s alibi puts us in a quandary. I believe you returned to the shack and murdered Mala.”
“I’m innocent.”
“If profession of innocence were proof, our jails would be empty.”
“What’s my motive?”
“The psychic tried to split the two of you. That’s what your girlfriend said.”
I didn’t tell the cop I intended to leave Violet, so that couldn’t be my motive. I said,
“That’s a ridiculous reason to kill someone.”
“I’ve investigated shootings over a stick of gum. Anyway, the D.A. ordered me to cut you loose pending our discovering further evidence or a witness. I’m releasing you, but I’m starting a novena this evening that you give us an excuse to slap you back into a cell. I’ll have my eyes on you. In the meantime, your girlfriend has kept you out of prison.”
When I arrived at my apartment, Violet waited at the door. She was radiant. After my jail experience, I drooped like a dead vine.
She kissed my cheek. “Thank God you’re free. What a nightmare.”
“I’ll say.”
I ushered her inside my apartment lest anyone hear our conversation. “You lied about my being with you.”
“I love you.”
“Until they find the real murderer, I’m the cops’ prime suspect.”
“You can trust me not to betray you, despite what Mala predicted.”
“Violet, when I signed Mala’s ledger, your name didn’t appear from your earlier reading.”
Violet smiled slyly. “Lucky for both of us. Had I signed, the detectives might’ve viewed me as a suspect, not an alibi.”
My face went bloodless.
Violet sighed, and she squeezed me close. “You’ve got me, babe. Together forever.”
Natascha Graham
The Art of Almost--1983--
“Gillian!”
One,
two,
three…she counted in her head, like reverse hide and seek, counting down her last few seconds of freedom.
She kicked her heel into the ground, kicking up dust, grit, and the tuft of dry, twisted dandelion leaves.
“Gillian?” There it was again.
She looked up. Squinted from beneath a fringe that had grown too long over the summer and hung in her eyes. Thin hair somewhere between brown and blonde, curly and straight, shoulder and jaw.
“Gillian!”
Boots crunched, and there was the thwack of a stick through dead brambles before Teddy rounded the bend and found her against the wall.
“Fuck, Gillian! Been calling you fucking ages.” Teddy was thirteen, and he swore for effect, thought it was grown up.
“What you doing?” he asked, when she didn’t reply.
She squinted, looked right past him to where the tilt-a-whirl undulated against a bright blue sky.
“Couldn’t think with that racket.” She nodded in the direction of the fairground.
“What you got to think about?” His tongue and the inner edges of his lips were stained blue.
She looked back down at the dirt, shuffled the toes of her converse into the dust and rubbed a hand over the back of her neck like she’d seen cowboys do in the movies.
He started talking again.
“Rich got one of those massive bears…won one for that girl on the shooting range.”
“Wow.” Her sarcasm was missed. A pause, a beat in the air, smothering and hot.
“What girl on the shooting range?” she asked finally.
“He won it on the shooting range.” Teddy pushed his hand into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a crumpled box of Lucky Strike cigarettes and a pink plastic lighter.
“What girl?” she tried again.
“Meg—something—our year, the blonde one?” He twisted the end of the cigarette.
“Want me to win you one?” He asked, lighting it and ramming the packet back into his pocket.
“Piss off.” She laughed, looked at the ground, watched a line of ants split in two around a bottle cap.
“Where’re they now? Everyone?”
“On the Ferris wheel. Rich wants to spit off the top.” He exhaled smoke into the air between them and Gillian screwed up her face.
“Twat. And you’re a twat for smoking that’n’all.” She snatched the cigarette from between his thumb and forefinger and crushed it into the ground with the toe of her shoe, just like she always did. And he didn’t complain, just like he always didn’t.
“Let’s go find them.” He turned to go, ignoring the way she screwed up her nose and turned her face up to the sky, squinting against the sun.
“Think I’ll stay here for a bit.”
He turned back around and let both of his arms raise slightly and clap against his thighs at the same time. A trait she recognized from his mother.
“Why?” he asked.
She shrugged, let her head fall to look at him again, sun-blind this time, only seeing a negative white blinding version of him against black grass. But she couldn’t tell him why, couldn’t tell him that she preferred to be alone, to slip unseen between everybody else, so she pushed herself away from the wall with her elbows, and followed him without another word.
“Her name’s Margaret. Her real name.” He carried on talking as they neared the fairground.
David Bowie was in the air and Let’s Dance came louder and quieter, and then louder again, blurring momentarily with the clunking nightmare music of the carousel and the bubbling whooping noise of the slot machines.
“Who’s real name?” she shouted.
“Meg. It’s short for Margaret. Rich told me.”
A bell sounded from somewhere, a gong, the hiss of hydraulics.
“Oh. That’s… oh.”
She walked behind him a good two steps. The sun was on her back, her vest top sweaty and her arms were brown and lined halfway up from wearing the same t-shirt all summer long.
They cut the queue for the Ferris wheel. Rich – tall for his age, with sun-bleached blonde hair, and a toothpaste commercial smile was, despite the heat, wearing his trademark denim jacket sewn all over with patches and badges. Gillian picked out her favorites, the ones that always seemed to catch her eye whenever she found herself behind him in the school corridor - the bright blue and red lightning bolt, the acid yellow and red of KISS, and the others: The Beetles, Queen, Genesis…
An oversized brown bear was slumped against his right leg, a bright red bow around its neck, head flopped down, nose touching his belly like a sad, flaccid old drunk. Meg was next to him, blonde hair tied back from her face in a neat ponytail. She had her back to them, gesturing with her hands to the girls around her – all girls in Gillian’s year; Anna, Vanessa, Josephine…easy prey, Gillian thought as they approached, for Rich and his wolfish grin.
Teddy clapped Rich on the back, shook his shoulder and leaned into him, pushing his way into the group.
Gillian stopped on the outskirts and wished again that she was there alone like she’d had it planned, like she did every year. She’d walk down the track from the farm, tell her granddad she wouldn’t be late.
She’d jump the fences—the quickest way to Horne Hill—scuffing her knees and the inside of her thighs on dry-stone walls and splintering stiles. She’d run as fast as she could up the hill, just to see if she could still make it to the top without stopping. And when she got to gates she’d climb the half-rotten apple tree and drop down on the other side without paying.
She knew the fair, knew the stalls, the rides, the tricks to get another go-round for free, and which vendors sold the biggest sticks of candy floss for the cheapest price. She’d got it all worked out.
Bumping into Teddy hadn’t been part of that plan.
“You coming on, Gillian?” Teddy called.
She smiled, shook her head, and watched as the mention of her name made Meg and the others turn to look at her. Josephine had dyed a streak of her hair cerise pink, almost the same color as her sunburned face.
“Think I’ll go and see what else there is.” She tilted her head in the general direction of everything else.
“Don’t be silly, we need one more anyway.” At thirteen Meg already had that way of speaking that made her the voice of authority, of reason.
“There’s six of you, two in each.” Gillian pushed her hands into the back pockets of her jeans. She wasn’t that stupid.
“Rich has his teddy bear.” Meg lowered her voice.
Gillian glanced to Rich who was laughing too loudly and wrestling with Teddy and another boy from the group ahead.
“All right. Once. But I’m not stopping. Told my granddad I’d not be late.”
Meg regarded her for a moment, arms crossed, a paper cup in one hand. She drew in a breath and smiled, but before anything else could be said the Ferris wheel slowed to a halt, gears jarred and grated, the metal chain on each swinging seat clattered open and Gillian slunk closer to the edge of the queue, following the line of kids, two by two, filing into metal pods painted with chipped ceramic swirls of color.
“Meg!” Rich had the bear by its neck under one arm, gesturing with the other to the seat next to him as he swung in, faded blue jeans stretched tight and tucked into loose brown boots.
Meg shook her head and smiled that sweet smile, her lips the color of the candy floss Gillian was missing out on.
“I’ll take the next one with Gillian.” Was all she said, looking away, turning and ignoring the throw of Rich’s hands and the “what the fuck!?” as he shoved the bear into the seat next to him while the man running the wheel tightened the slack metal chain around him, fixing him in place. He shot Gillian a glare and mouthed something she couldn’t make out.
The wheel turned slowly, clunked, stopped again, and they stepped gingerly into the next seat, Meg moving side-ways, hands smoothing down the front of her yellow sundress as Gillian lumbered in behind her, clutched the guard rail, wobbled, and sat down harder than she had meant to.
“He’s not happy.” Gillian nodded to the back of Rich’s head in the seat in front.
“He’ll get over it.” Meg edged closer to let the Ferris wheel man clip them in, her thigh against Gillian’s.
“Think he was trying to impress you with that bear…” She said, more for something to say to break the silence than for anything else.
“Not interested I’m afraid.” Meg laughed.
“Are you not?”
Meg looked surprised, turned to look at Gillian, leaned back a bit to regard her with raised eyebrows.
“You thought I would be?” she asked slowly.
“Dunno. Most girls I know seem to like him.”
“He’s not my type,” she said simply, unblinking, and Gillian felt the creep of embarrassment deep in the pit of her stomach, and time seemed to stretch uneasily between them.
“What is your type, then?” she asked finally, though she wasn’t sure she even wanted to know.
Meg looked down at her hands in her lap, the smallest of smiles twitched at the corner of her mouth.
“Do you like him?” she asked, avoiding the question entirely.
Gillian laughed out loud, a sudden ‘Ha!’ of a laugh that she regretted immediately.
“No!” She paused, felt the jolt of the wheel turning and the drop of her stomach as it rose.
“I’d rather be with the sheep….” She hesitated again, “not in that way. I don’t mean… I mean, my granddad has a farm, I live with my Grandad…a sheep farm.”
Another pause.
“Swaledale's.”
Meg looked up from her hands.
“Oh,” she said.
--1987--
“Why don’t you wear a bikini, like everyone else?” Ted asked, watching as Meg and Josephine came back out of the house wearing candy-striped bikinis and carrying plates of food.
It was the end of summer, the last day before they were scattered across the country, to university, to work, to sheep farming, and somewhere along the path to adolescence, Ted had grown his hair, lost the last two letters of his name and swapped the Lucky Strikes for joints that made his speech slower than it already was.
“You’re not wearing a bikini,” Gillian said pointedly, stretched out on a deck chair, enjoying the warmth of the sun on her face and the burn of orange-red through her eyelids.
“Fuck off. You know what I mean.” He flicked ash in her direction.
“Anyway, why should I?” she asked, shielding her face with her hand so that she could open one eye to look at him.
He shrugged, grunted, pulled a face, and swore at the wasps that buzzed around his hand and bumped against the neck of his beer bottle.
Summer stretched out behind them, a seemingly endless summer culminating in today; a somewhat melancholic gathering of friends, some old, some new, at Meg’s parent’s house, where people lay on the lawn by the pool, making the most of the bushfire summer friendships that had already begun to fade, and summer romances that had already turned wistful, whilst, from somewhere, Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” played in between the hollow tinny beat of a basketball on hot tarmac.
They were on the porch drinking pear cider out of plastic cups. Meg had baked a lemon cake and the smell of it was in the air, on her clothes and in her hair, warm and tart and yellow.
She waved a hand over it, batting away lazy flies. She was wearing a sun hat, big and floppy, and it cast tiny sun flecks of trapezoid light all over her face, just down to the very tip of her nose, and she sat on the wooden decking, her back to the garden, her silhouette framed by the pinks of peonies and yellow roses, the reds of poppies and vivid blues and purples of delphinium.
Josephine smoked a menthol cigarette, inhaling long slow drafts and exhaling ribbons of white smoke that faded into the clouds.
“Gillian doesn’t do bikinis,” she said, late to the conversation, voice strained before releasing the last draw of smoke as she shifted in her seat, leaned forwards so that the sheer fabric of her kimono rippled about her arm and reached for another slice of cake, and Gillian wondered just how Josephine knew what she did or didn’t do.
Meg cast her a sideways glance.
“Gillian can wear what she likes.” A moment of acerbic rarity from Meg left the conversation immediately abandoned.
Meg’s moods had become a feature of the summer, her frown of deep thought already leaving a permanent line between her eyebrows. She seemed to flutter between groups of people and conversation as easily as she did between her role as the popular girl with the face full of sunshine, queen of quick-witted remarks, to an emotionally detached, vague sort of creature haunted by her own thoughts.
Gillian twisted in her deck chair, but Meg wouldn’t make eye contact. Instead she studied the rough edge of her flip-flop, where the rubber was beginning to fray.
*
The afternoon light was hazy and dreamlike, the sun was low and hot, and from somewhere the whisper of autumn seemed to hesitate around the edges.
Dishes, napkins, and glasses were collected and taken inside, yet still nobody mentioned leaving. The day was too precious, there was too much to be said, too many goodbyes to say and too many promises to make.
Meg stood in the kitchen, hands on her hips, looking at the piles of dirty dishes.
“I think I’ll leave it,” she said, more to herself than to anyone else. “I can do it tomorrow.”
“I can help?” Gillian offered, but Meg shook her head, she had made the decision.
“I want to enjoy the sunshine.” She stopped. Looked at Gillian. Really looked. “When will I see you again?” she asked, and The Three Degrees started up in Gillian’s head.
“Christmas, I suppose, if you’re coming back?”
Meg nodded slowly. She was going to Oxford to study English, and all of a sudden Oxford seemed a long way away. Christmas seemed a long way away. School would be forgotten, friendships would be left to die a slow, long, painless death, and memories would no longer be remembered, but left forgotten, replaced by the people and moments that would suddenly seem like so much more.
“You’ll still be here?” Meg asked, though Gillian had no idea why. She had no plans to leave, no wish to leave.
“I’ve got the farm. My grandad’s getting too old—”
Meg cut her off, caught up with her own trail of thought, “It’s funny, thinking of you shearing sheep.”
“Don’t think I’ll be doing much of that.” Gillian laughed, pushed her hands into the pockets of her shorts and made her way back to the open door. “You can visit me in spring. Help me with the lambing?”
“I’d like that,” she said vaguely, beginning to follow Gillian out of the door.
“Actually,” she stopped, half in and out of the kitchen.
“Actually, can—can I talk to you?”
Gillian flicked a glance her way. The pavement was almost too hot to stand barefoot in one place for too long.
“Yes?”
She imagined at this bleary point in the afternoon Meg just wanted to talk more about lambing, university, or some obscure book she just read but couldn’t remember the name of.
They stood by the side entrance to the house between the door and the porch where the last few roses of summer were thick and sweet-smelling and turning brown at the edges.
“I want to talk to you. I wanted to talk to you about.” She stopped, made to restart and stopped again. “I wanted to—” She gave up. Almost laughed, and then, in a moment of madness, grasped Gillian’s wrist with one hand, the back of her neck with the other, flinched at the muffled squawk of surprise, ignored another protesting syllable, lost her balance so that she inadvertently had Gillian up against a hopefully not-too-hot wall, and kissed her.
But this sudden, attention-grabbing flourish quickly transformed into something deeper, slower, more sensual, something that got better and better, an ardent give-and-take that defied expectation. A thousand kisses condensed into one, a book of a thousand pages fluttering to conjure the beauty of a single word, a thousand sensations distilled into one moment: the sun-warmed wall at her back, Meg’s hands pulling her closer, and a sweetness like biting into an overripe fruit, and that thousand-page book was on fire, everything must be rewritten, reworked, retold because the fire, this fire, consumed it all.
Meg was the one who pulled back first. Blue eyes wide. She took another step back, flexed her fingers, and folded her arms tightly across her chest.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered too quickly. “I’m sorry.” Her voice suddenly stronger.
Gillian opened her mouth to speak but found she had nothing to say, her lips felt too hot.
This feeling had been growing inside her for years, alongside their friendship, but she had never dared name it. Now, standing in front of Meg, it was too big to bear, an ever-growing ache inside her chest. If Meg smiled, she couldn’t help but smile too. It wasn’t her body she wanted, the way Rich and the other boys did. It was the way she tucked her hair behind her ear, the way she laughed, the way she was quiet until she wanted to say something, and then said it supremely well.
“Meg!” From somewhere back by the porch Josephine was calling for her, and Meg flushed, hesitated, didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands.
“We’d better—"
Gillian nodded in agreement, all too aware that she had yet to say anything at all.
*
Time passed slowly, the day long and slow, like a dream in the sunshine. Conversation passed easily between them, in fits and lulls, between silence and laughter. Ted and Gillian played cards, Josephine slouched against the chest of a boy Gillian couldn’t remember the name of, and Meg cut more slices of cake than were needed. She passed one to Gillian, wrapped up in a pink and green napkin, waited a moment too long whilst Gillian cupped her hand to take it, her palm warm against Meg’s fingers, a red flush beginning to creep from Meg’s chest all the way up her neck.
“Maybe at Christmas, when we are all back, we could meet at Gillian’s. At the farm?” Josephine asked, as if she had overheard their earlier conversation.
Meg looked at Gillian, knew what she would see before she saw it, the strain of a smile, a noise of something noncommittal, and Gillian rearranged herself on her deck chair, tugged at the dying tuft of grass nearest her and couldn’t seem to think about anything other than the slowly rotting floorboards and missing tiles above the fireplace back home.
It was Rich who saved her from explanation. Rich who appeared from the basketball court, sweating, his hair down to his shoulders and pushed back from his face, his white T-shirt smudged with dust and grey dots from the rubber of the basketball.
“Hey.” He was talking to Meg but he ruffled Josephine’s hair so that she spilled tobacco into her lap. “Anymore of that cider? We’re beat after the game.” He gestured with his thumb to the basketball court.
“In the fridge. In the kitchen.” She started picking at her flip-flop again.
“Yeah? Want to help me? I might get lost.” He slouched over the porch railing and flicked the edge of her sun hat.
“Twat.” Gillian said under her breath, almost without meaning to.
“What’s that, Gillian my friend?”
“Sure even you can make it to the kitchen and back without getting lost.” She looked at him, stared him out until he laughed.
“Dyke,” he hissed.
Ted squinted across at him, eyelids heavy, ready for whatever macho crap Rich was about to pull. “You better fucking watch it, mate.”
“All right! Just stop it.” Meg got to her feet. “Rich?” She tilted her head in the direction of the kitchen and started to lead the way before he had even had a chance to respond.
They watched them go, Gillian, Ted, Josephine and the boy Gillian couldn’t remember the name of.
“You’re not often right, but I’ll tell you one thing, you’re right about him.” Ted relaxed back down again and took a swig of his beer, forgetting it was empty. “He is a twat.” He scowled at the bottle.
“Get me a beer, G?” he asked, reaching out, letting the empty bottle swing between his thumb and forefinger.
She looked back at him, silent for a moment. His words were getting slower, more slurred, his eyes were half closed, and he smiled a wavering smile that made her want to slap him.
“Get one for yourself too, looks like you need it.”
Still she said nothing, merely took the empty bottle and stood up, walked barefoot to the house. The kitchen was hotter than outside. The air was stale and heavy. Flies swarmed around the hulled-out bowl of a watermelon left on the table, and the fridge door was ajar.
She opened it, looked inside. Found nothing but the blinking fluorescent light and a bottle of coke, but as she turned to go back outside the flicker of something caught her eye, and there, through the back window on the far side of the room, on the other side of the glass, were Rich and Meg, thrust together, Meg’s back hard against the wall, her face flushed, her hair caught in his hand, and he was kissing her. Kissing her like it was exactly what it was. The last day of summer.
She stood there for what felt not an eternity, but rather more like a very long Joni Mitchell song. Her breath seemed to come too short and too long, she felt hot and light-headed and all of a sudden full of rage.
Breathless, she rushed to the bathroom, thought she might throw up, but instead she slapped the wall with her hand so that her palm stung with a satisfactory flare. She screwed her eyes shut tight against tears, and, with both hands, she held onto the rim of the sink, tried to breathe properly before she looked at herself in the mirror above the taps. Her cheeks were red and blotchy, her eyes unfocused, wisps of hair stuck to her wet cheek. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, mascara smearing. In her recent life as an emotional wreck, she had gotten rather skilled at remaking herself with a trembling hand. In every trembling smudge of her fingers beneath an eye, the art of self-deception. In every fragmented gleam the art of almost.
She left without a word to anyone. Left her shoes, left Meg with Rich, Josephine with her cigarettes and Ted wanting another beer.
She went home on the bus. The sunlight was flat. The fields no longer floodlit with sunshine. Rabbits didn’t bound but loped lazily, and the air inside the bus was suffocating, warm, and smelled of sweet rotting fruit and too-hot plastic, and somewhere a blue-bottle buzzed and butted the same window pane over,
and over,
and over.
--2009--
Gillian’s leg jittered. Her knee hit the table and her grandad’s pint jumped, slogging lager over his side plate.
“Gillian!” He tutted at her whilst she scrambled for a napkin, scattering cutlery. Dessert spoon clattering oh so close to the edge of the table. She apologized, and across the table Gladys, her grandad’s new beau, leant back, eyebrows raised, holding her orange and lemonade like she was afraid to put it down.
“Sorry—sorry, Gladys—sorry.”
“Whatever’s the matter with you?” Her grandad’s voice was low.
“Sorry,” she said again, caught herself, touched the very tips of her fingers to her lips briefly.
“I don’t really know.” She cleared her throat. She seemed to be unravelling right here in the Kings Head.
“Family gatherings—social occasions, aren’t really my—" She paused, looked down at the way her fingertips were pressed white against the edge of the table “—thing.”
“Not much is your thing, is it.” Gladys sighed, finally setting her drink down but keeping a loose hold on it just in case.
“What’s that supposed to mean?!”
“Gillian.” Her grandad’s warning shot.
Ted was coming back from the bar. She recognized the unsteadiness in his gait out of the corner of her eye.
“Tell her to enjoy herself would you, it’s New Years’ Eve.” Her granddad gestured with his pint to Ted as he grasped the back of Gillian’s chair to steady himself before sitting down.
“Gillian? Enjoy herself? Fuckin’ hell, Gillian hasn’t smiled since 1987.” He laughed, wrapped an arm about Gillian’s shoulders and squeezed, pulling her close so that the stubble of his chin scratched her temple and she could smell his sweat through the rancid stench of cigarettes and alcohol.
She pulled away, feigned a smile, glanced once again from her granddad to the table, then up, to the sound of the great oak door of the pub opening, the rabble of voices from outside growing louder suddenly, then quieter.
She watched a group of people move from the doorway to the bar, shedding coats and gloves, faces flushed from the cold. A man laughed and the woman next to him shook her head, and turned, and for a moment, only the briefest of moments, Gillian couldn’t place her, then all at once something dropped, heavy, inside her, her chest squeezed tight, and it was Meg shrugging her coat from her arms. Meg greeted friends at the bar with flurried kisses, scarf flailing and catching on her arm as she gestured and laughed, and grasped affectionately at the shoulder of a very tall man wearing an appalling shirt.
She felt hot and sick and cold all at once. Everything seemed loud and too quiet, bigger than anything she had ever seen and then tinier than she could bear.
She stood up.
“I just have to—” she began, but her voice was swallowed by everyone else’s and nobody seemed to notice as she stood for a moment, behind her chair, glancing between faces, waiting for somebody to look up.
She left her coat on the chair, and pushed her way between people to the back door, and out.
She stopped. Stood in the shadows, arms limp beside her, the murmur of the pub behind her, and looked up at the sky, endless black, starless, the whisper of the road and the soar of a plane overhead. She could breathe. Despite the cold air tight in her chest, and she was free, if only for a moment.
“Gillian?”
She started at the sound of her name, flinched, turned. Meg was in the doorway, half in and half out, blonde hair whipped into her face across her mouth.
“I thought it was you!” She stepped out into the cold, arms wrapped around herself, the neck of her pale grey jumper rolled up against her chin.
“Meg.” It was all she could say. She looked older, there were faint lines around her eyes and her mouth that had never been there before.
“I was worried you wouldn’t remember me.” She moved closer.
“Of course I remember.” She spoke through an exhale, her breath blooming white between them.
There was a moment's pause where neither of them seemed to know what to say.
“You’re wearing a dress!” Meg’s exclamation seemingly unexpected by both of them.
“I do that sometimes.” Gillian looked down at herself, suddenly self-conscious in her old black dress and cardigan. Somewhere at the back, beneath her left shoulder-blade was a penny-sized hole she had meant to sew up.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in a dress before.” She paused, the flicker of something passed behind her eyes, and she cleared her throat again. “You look lovely,” she added.
Gillian paused. A beat in the air too long.
“Thank you.” She looked down at her feet. “Who’re you here with?”
“Oh. Just old friends. Friends from uni—”
“No Rich?”
“Who? Oh. No. I haven’t seen him in—years.” Meg rushed.
Gillian nodded, pushed her hands into the pockets of her dress, hunched up her shoulders ,and rocked back on her heels like she was seventeen again.
“Rich was never—he wasn’t—who I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.” She cleared her throat and even in the dark Gillian could see the creep of that tell-tale blush begin to creep up from her jaw. “He kissed me, you know. I don’t know if I ever told you that. I didn’t—invite him to. And we never—” She huffed out a breath. “I saw Ted, over by the fire. That’s why I thought it must be you when I saw you.” The subject change jarred in Gillian’s head.
“I heard you married him?”
The air smelled of bonfires and burnt wood, smoldering pine needles and damp earth. Electric. Magic. Fraught with possibility and the faraway dream of someone else.
Gillian nodded slowly, “ten years next year.”
Meg was quiet, just watching her so intently that Gillian had to look away.
“Are you married, or—?” she asked, looking down at the toes of her shoes again. Black high heels, scuffed, battered and tired with the soles all but worn away. The perfect metaphor for her life, as it happened.
“No! No, not yet, anyway, we’ve only been together for a couple of months.”
“The man with the—” She gestured to her chest. “Shirt?”
“What? Oh. No. Actually, I’m—she’s called Serena.”
“Oh!” A prickling feeling crept up from the base of Meg’s scalp and her chest felt tight. She folded her arms tighter and frowned down at the gravel.
“Gillian, I—” she began.
“Gillian!”
The door bumped open, the glass shook in its frame, and the door handle squealed against the weight of Ted’s hand.
“Meg.” He was squinting at her, his mouth hanging open like an idiot. He didn’t give Meg a chance to reply, “We’re going home.” He could barely hold himself up.
“It’s not midnight yet!” Meg laughed.
“Don’t. It’s fine.” Gillian hushed.
“Home.” Ted was blinking too much; his face was red and sweaty and there were globby white triangles of spittle in the corners of his mouth.
“I’m coming. It’s fine. I’m coming.” She skirted around Meg, who reached out for her.
“You okay?” Gillian squeezed Meg’s forearm.
“She’s fine.” Ted rattled the door on its hinges.
“I’m fine.” Gillian whispered, momentarily covering Meg’s hand with her own. “It was nice to see you.”
*
“You made me look like a right idiot,” he hissed, thick and slow between belches.
She’d driven home, paid the babysitter, and now they stood, opposite one another in the sitting room, the light dim, the curtains drawn with a crack in the middle where the great white full moon shone through.
“How?”
Even in his drunken state he was surprised she had replied. He shook his head, as though she should realize herself how stupid she was being, and laughed that slow sick laugh that made her feel as though she was falling.
“What were you doing out there with that bitch anyway, huh? Telling her how shit your husband is? You think she’s interested in you? Well, she’s not. No one is.” He was distracted mid-flow by the mugs on the coffee table.
“Who’ve you been having over?” The sudden change in conversational direction threw her.
“What?”
“Who. Have. You. Been having over?” He leaned forwards, his breath hot and vile on her face, and he gestured with a finger that pointed everywhere but at the mugs.
“The babysitter. I made h—”
“Yeah, right.” He cut her off. “Who’re you shagging now? Not that anyone would have you. You couldn’t get anyone if you tried.”
“Yeah?” She stopped, suddenly knew exactly what to say. “Well, maybe I will start fucking around. Just like you.” She was giddy and made brave by the cider and the thrill of seeing Meg. “Maybe I’ll—”
It was so quick a hit that for a moment, as she lost her balance and made a grab for the dresser, she didn’t know she had been hit at all, but he was looking at her, holding his hand, breathing heavily, waiting for her to react.
Her nose felt hot, then her lip. She opened her mouth to speak and her skull creaked, her jaw grated, and there was the bloody, hot, metallic taste of blood on the back of her tongue that made her gag.
“Get in the shower,” he said.
And she did. She showered. She let the water beat against the blooming bruise of her nose and mouth, then sat, waiting, on the edge of the bed.
It didn’t take him long. It never did. She could be glad about that, she supposed. He flexed and peacocked, some sort of narcissistic routine to get himself in the mood, and she wondered, whilst he did so, was there any reason to her being here at all?
She’d faked every orgasm with him from the very first time. Convincing herself it must be her, there must be something wrong with her. Sometimes she even lied to herself about it. There must have been once, or twice, maybe? The odd occasions where she had been drunk, perhaps?
And then, of course, she would have to time it right, otherwise he’d start up again, tell her he could tell she wanted more.
Then he left to go back to the pub with only a grunt goodbye, and whilst the midnight fireworks started up somewhere close by she was left, sitting up against the headboard with her knees pulled into her chest, left in this house, this broken home. And all she heard when she pushed the heels of her hands into her ears and screwed her eyes shut was the beat of her heart. Quickening, quickening. The throbbing muffled thump of it, the blood in her ears, the pulse in her eyes. There was nothing. She had nothing. She had shed blood in every room of this house and now she was dying.
It would be easier to die, she thought. It would be easier to die than to leave.
But then she thought of her son. She thought of the way his hands curled and reached out for her whilst he was feeding, how his milky blue eyes searched for hers.
She was trapped, by her own child, in a life she had no wish to live.
“Help me,” she whispered to the house, and screwed her eyes closed tight. “Please,” she whispered, to the beat of her heart. “Please—”
--2015--
The house had been full of ghosts since Ted had died. Cards from the past dropped through her letterbox daily, people she had all but forgotten sent bouquets of sweet-smelling flowers, and the neighbors bought over a casserole that she’d given to the dog.
Everyone was sorry. Sorry that Ryan had lost his father, at only six years old. Sorry that she had lost her husband, sorry that he had died. Now she had a mantelpiece full of cards from people whose surnames she didn’t know, people who had no idea about her life, or her, or how it had been, and that actually, the fact that he had been knocked down and killed by a Land Rover whilst staggering home from the pub had been one of the best things that had ever happened to her.
And now, she was standing in the kitchen, looking out of the window, the glass fogged up with steam from the kettle boiling on the Aga. She stared at her own reflection, sullied and blurry, hair all over the bloody place, curling about her jaw, slipping out from the French knot that she had attempted at the nape of her neck. Her hair, an unremarkable colour at the best of times, but in this steam bleached reflection it was even more limp, even more of a non-colour - an insipid pale brown with more than a fleck of grey, and her eyes, staring back at her, like the eyes of another more recognizable ghost, almost too pale to see, almost the same colour as the sky.
It was the end of February. She wouldn’t change this light for the world. Early spring light that breathed a thrilling sense of possibility through the house, this silent house, as sullen and creaking as she was, but beautiful, with its own charm.
Evening, the cool air, everything dull, and tinged with grey, blue and gold, the time of day when everything seemed to slow down to the beat of a heart.
Slowly, slowly, she arranged mugs on a tray, and from behind her the door opened, and she was roused from somewhere between deep thought and daydream, by Ryan, who stopped short of the edge of the doormat too quickly, remembering his muddy boots, and teetered for a moment between doormat and floor.
“Auntie Emily dropped her glass and now she needs a brush and dustpan.” His words were breathless and rushed and fraught with urgency and his cheeks were pink from running from the barn where the wake was being held, to the house.
“It sounds like Auntie Emily might need to slow down on the old wine front,” he said more to herself than to Ryan.
“What?” he asked, pausing mid-turn.
It has been said that the past is another country; in Gillian’s case, it is more than that. It is an enemy combatant. Any object, or indeed person, such as Ted’s sister Emily, that could possibly function as a passport into this hostile territory runs the risk of emotional high treason and as such would be verbally hanged.
“Nothing.” She smiled, looked at him. He had her pale blue eyes, and her pale brown hair. “I’ll bring it out,” she said gently, and watched as he ran back outside, letting the door bang on its hinges and bounce back open.
*
She took her time walking from house to barn, the brush and dustpan loose in her hand, bumping gently against her thigh.
There was the quiet call of sheep from the fields, the distant squeak and bang of the front gate, the latch blown clean off in an air rifle incident, and the gentle panting of the dog as he paced hurried laps around his run.
Meg, in her white button-up shirt and charcoal linen trousers, stood talking to Gillian’s Aunt Jean, just outside the barn door, wine glass in hand. She smiled as Gillian passed “You’ve done a beautiful job,” she said, interrupting Jean, who in turn, shifted, smiled, and reached out to squeeze Gillian’s forearm, and gushed, “You’re coping just marvelously,” as Gillian nodded, hummed a murmur of thanks, and gestured with the brush and dustpan.
“I’d better just…”
In the barn, it appeared to be summertime. A picnic was spread across makeshift tables with yellow-and-white checkered clothes, jugs and bowls of flowers were here, there, and everywhere, filled with the scarlet tulips, yellow goldenrod as bright as the sun, and the blue of forget-me-knots as blue as the sky, turning what appeared to be a wake to everyone else, into a celebration of a life saved instead.
She crouched unnoticed by the leg of a table, swept up the glittering shards of glass into the bowl of the dustpan, and made her way back out, to where Meg still stood by the door. Meg, with a frown of concentration as she nodded and listened to whatever it was that Jean was saying. But then, as she caught sight of Gillian she smiled again, unable to help herself. Meg was beautiful in that moment, with the sky behind her the color of a bruise, her hair almost white blonde in the milky blue light of the first whisper of spring, with the ivy that covered the west side of the barn curling out to touch her shoulder.
Meg was always beautiful, whereas she was standing in a fine mist of rain in her old boots, losing hair grips in the mud. But that one smile was all it took to remind her of why she was still here. Meg. When she thought about it, it had always been Meg.
*
Back at the house she sat on the dry-stone wall with a bottle of beer she had begun sipping an hour ago and forgotten about. Now, she sat looking out at the hills disappearing into a lavender mist where the land met the sky. Meg was behind her. She’d known that she would follow when she left the barn, and if she had had this moment over again, if she had somebody to retell this moment to, she would have said that she had smelled her before she saw her. Perhaps that was what had made her turn: a murmur of her perfume in the air, a hint of orange and jasmine and the memory of summertime. Perhaps it was the vibration of her presence, or perhaps, worst of all, it was just meant to be.
“Mind if I join you?” she asked, waiting. Gillian shook her head, raised her bottle of beer.
“Of course not.”
“Your grandad not here?” she asked, as she sat down next to Gillian, carefully and elegantly as always, adjusting herself on the wall.
“He’s dead. He died.”
Meg widened her eyes. “Oh, I’m sorry.”
“You’re all right. He’d have been a hundred now anyway.” Gillian held the beer bottle by its neck and watched the sunlight turn the dead moss and brick a brilliant emerald green through the glass.
“Oh. I suppose he would have. Sorry.” An easy silence stretched between them. “I tried to find you,” she said eventually.
“Did you?” Gillian looked back up at her.
“On the internet. On Facebook.”
“I’m not on Facebook.” The familiar rise of panic began to bleed out inside her, a feeling she had come all to accustomed to. She drew in a slow breath, letting the feeling begin to fade before continuing; “too risky, when Ted was alive.”
“Oh, yes, of course.” Meg frowned down at the half-drunk glass of red wine she held, resting on her thighs. “Was it really that bad?”
Gillian looked at her then looked away, down at her hands in her lap.
“Yep.” She looked up and squinted out across the fields, could feel Meg waiting for whatever more there was. “I wanted to die.” She watched a V of ducks flying in the far distance. “I wanted to die, and for it to be over. But more than that. More than—I wanted the pain of dying. I wanted the peace of death. I was angry at him, I was angry with myself. I was tired of living.” She braved looking at Meg. “Sometimes, when he was asleep, I’d get up, I’d go into the kitchen, I’d get a knife out of the drawer and I’d run the point from here, to here.” She ran her finger from her wrist to her elbow. “I thought how easy it would be to kill myself, and I’d hold it, point against my stomach, handle against the countertop, and I’d wish for the courage to step forwards. There was nothing of me left to take. He’d taken it all. And what’s worse was I had let him. I was already dead before I realized dying wasn’t an option.”
Silence hung between them.
“Have I shocked you?” she asked, her voice quieter this time.
Meg shook her head ever so slightly. “No.” She said, paused, tapped her index finger twice against the bowl of her wine glass. “Why did you marry him?”
Gillian smiled. Almost laughed.
“Because he asked!” She straightened her back, looked up from her hands across the fields, otherworldly in a lemon-yellow fog. “Didn’t reckon I’d get a better offer. Thought marrying my best friend was better than being alone for the rest of my life.”
“I wish I’d known.”
Gillian shrugged. “Nothing you could have done short of running him over yourself.”
“No, but I could’ve—” She let the sentence tail off.
“Could’ve?” Gillian prompted.
Meg inhaled slowly, steadying herself.
“Vita and I broke up,” she said, all in one breath.
Gillian raised an eyebrow. “I thought her name was Serena?”
“Yes. No. I mean, Serena and I never lasted more than a couple of months. Vita—we were together for three years. We had a house.” She paused. “In London.”
“What happened?”
Meg just looked at her. Her cheeks and nose were pink from the cold and her mouth trembled ever so slightly in that way that it does before you say something you’ve kept hidden for over three decades.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about you.” There it was, shuttling between them, over and over, and Gillian didn’t seem able to hear anything except the crackling foggy beat of her heart in her ears.
“Sods bloody law I end up buggering something up without even being there,” she said quickly, quietly, tensing.
“Gillian—”
There was a warmth in the air, unnatural for spring.
“I couldn’t stop wondering about you. Where you were, what you were doing. You know I’ve always liked you.” She stopped abruptly, felt the words form in her mouth, cleared her throat and tried again. “—more than liked you.”
Gillian shot her a sideways glance. Swallowed the last mouthful of warm beer from the bottle and half-coughed-half-laughed.
“That’ll be the wine talking.”
Meg smiled down at her glass.
“No.”
She didn’t look up, but she knew Gillian was watching her. Those pale blue eyes wary and afraid.
“You hitting on me at my husband’s wake?” Gillian laughed, shifted, tucked her hair behind her ear and then untucked it again.
“Sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“No! It’s fine, it’s—”
“I’ve made you uncomfortable.”
Gillian looked out across the fields, squinting against the low sunshine, the clouds sugar almond pink shot through with gold.
“Think I knew...deep down.” She spoke more to the sky than to Meg.
“Did you?”
“But I’d convinced myself it was all in my head.” She watched the clouds move above them.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—my timing is—appalling.” Meg sighed, and Gillian smiled, tilted her face up towards the sun and sighed.
“What?” Meg asked.
Gillian shook her head.
“What is it?”
“Nothing!” She puffed out a breath, gestured with a hand cast haphazardly about her head. Gave up, let out a breath and looked at Meg sitting there next to her on the wall. She could feel herself cracking, like ice in spring.
“I’ve been in love with you since I was thirteen,” Gillian said finally.
Meg pursed her lips and gave the tiniest nod of her head.
“I know,” she said eventually, when the wind had stopped blowing the grass flat. She waited, gently tilted the bowl of her wine glass so that the last drop of wine slipped this way, then that, in the bottom. “What do we do now?”
Gillian narrowed her eyes, took in the world before her, the whisper of the wind, the birds, the incredible distance between her and the sky, then she turned back to Meg. Meg with the sun setting behind her, and for the first time in years she was able to say what she felt, and really mean it.
“We take it slowly,” she said.
E.J. Myers
9/14History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
—James Joyce, Ulysses“I’m back in the Land of the Living now after a night in Hell,” I wrote to a friend the morning after, “truly one of the most bizarre, appalling, and moving experiences of my life.” The night in question had begun on the evening of Friday, September 14, 2001, and had ended before dawn on the 15th. This was the night I spent as a volunteer EMT when the Maplewood (N.J.) First Aid Squad contributed a duty crew to emergency services present at the World Trade Center three days after the 9/11 attacks. To my surprise, the shift had proved uneventful, so my referring to it as “a night in Hell” was melodramatic and self-indulgent. I had visited a hellish landscape, however, and felt deeply shaken by the experience. To the same friend I wrote that my shift at the WTC had been “one I find difficult to think about without emotionally imploding, one I've managed to talk about only once so far, and then only blurtingly and haltingly. In many ways, nothing happened. At the same time, just being there hit hard on so many levels, and in such complex and contradictory ways, that I'm still reeling and struggling to sort it all out.”
One day later, I attempted to record my experience at the WTC while the sights, sounds, smells, and other impressions were still fresh; and, to the degree possible at the time, to make sense of what I witnessed. Quoting now at length and almost verbatim—correcting only typos and unclear phrasings—here’s what I wrote.
I. Notes from Ground Zero
On Friday, at around 1:45 p.m., Maureen Power, the Maplewood First Aid Squad’s lieutenant, left a message on our phone machine to determine my availability for a crew that would provide emergency medical services in the WTC area. Edith and I sized up the situation and decided that it would work out for me to take part. We both felt ambivalent about this decision, and during my absence that evening Edith felt still more so, but overall we concluded that I could contribute some time now with less disruption to our family than if I had gone in earlier this week or if I went in later. I personally felt that I should participate in the effort at some point, and that doing so now would work as well as anything. The weather was pretty good, too, and the previous night's heavy rain had apparently cleared the air to some degree in Lower Manhattan. That was a real plus—I had worried a lot about the toxic smoke down there. So, given the auspicious circumstances, I called Maureen back and said I would go. Maureen asked me to show up in about half an hour.
Shortly after I reached the Maplewood squad house, Maureen and I headed off to Newark in an ambulance driven by Scott Kalick, one of my Wednesday night shift buddies. The reason for going to Newark was to join a convoy of other crews that would enter NYC together. Also, we got a briefing at Rutgers University in Newark, which included a request to stock up on medical supplies, clean clothes (socks, underwear, etc.), and food/beverages that we would drop off for the crews doing the extrication and excavation at the WTC site. The campus building we visited teemed with activity. Dozens of companies and nonprofit agencies have donated matériel of various sorts for this recovery effort. Basically we just grabbed whatever we thought we could find useful—band aids, gauze pads, Visine, face masks, gloves—and loaded everything into the ambulance. I felt somewhat odd about this phase, as I couldn't quite imagine how and where we would disburse all this stuff while attempting to do EMS [emergency medical services] in the field. The sheer quantity of supplies got obstructive quickly. But those were our instructions, and we assumed that they bore some connection to reality. Another odd aspect of the situation was the relentless effort by volunteers at Rutgers to ply us with food. Hot food, cold food, junk food. . . (Were they fattening us up for the slaughter. . . ?!) Despite my usual healthy appetite I didn't feel much like eating, as I worried that doing so might not be wise if our work included some of the gruesome tasks that we believed we might be asked to perform.
Around 3:15, an EMS supervisor rounded up all ten participating crews and gave us a brief speech about what we would be doing. The supervisor's emphasis was, predictably, on safety: step carefully, move slowly, and think constantly about what you're doing. He also said, "You'll be seeing things you wish you'd never have seen," and he urged us to support each other and stay in contact with field supervisors at all times. All very sobering. Then a minister came out and gave another speech, thanking us for our efforts and offering a prayer that focused on unity, serving others, and—nice touch—staying out of danger. His words moved me and to some degree unnerved me. Then we headed off.
Our convoy drove through Newark and some of the neighboring cities. Police blocked traffic all the way. We were a disruptive, noisy procession, with sirens blaring, but we went ahead without any mishap. Traffic all along proved to be heavily congested; I'm sure our passage made matters far worse. About halfway to the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, our crew had an annoying mishap: our siren died. This failure of equipment wasn't a disaster, but it wasn't a good thing, either, and it seemed inauspicious. After all, we didn't know what we would be doing for the next 12-18 hours, and an ambulance without a siren in NYC isn't in good shape. But we couldn't do anything about the problem. We just proceeded.
It was strange and eerie to enter the Holland Tunnel without the usual crush of congestion. The only vehicles present at that time were the vehicles in our convoy. We drove through and arrived in Manhattan about ten minutes later. Then the strangeness continued: the neighborhoods below Canal street are closed to normal traffic, so that the only other cars and trucks we saw were fire department and police vehicles, NYC sanitation vehicles, and National Guard trucks of various sorts. Manhattan appeared to be an occupied city. The four of us in our crew—Maureen, 22; Scott Kalick, 49; Kier Bowers, 35; and I, the grand old man of the crew at 51—talked excitedly and nervously about how "this was it." We were on our way into what had been labeled the Hot Zone and perhaps all the way to Ground Zero.
Yet our convoy then turned right instead of left, heading north instead of south, and drove a couple of miles to a place called Chelsea Piers, which is a recreation area (driving range, gym, marina, etc.) right on the Hudson River. There we looped through the neighborhood and parked on West 17th Street in a queue of about fifteen other ambulances.
What followed between around 4:00 and 7:00 was a classic example of hurry-up-and-wait. Although we checked in with a supervising medic, we couldn't get a clear sense of how long we would be there before we got to do something. Some of the crews we chatted with had been waiting right there since seven that morning! The gloomy thought occurred to us that we might end up cooling our heels there all night, then get ordered home. When the four of us discussed the situation, we all felt frustrated. We couldn't do much about it, however, and so we figured we would just try to stay patient and take events as they happened. We soon learned a little more about our mission, however: we would be assigned to Advanced Life Support (ALS) medics (we are Basic Life Support emergency medical technicians, or BLS EMTs). The medics would answer medical or trauma calls that we would assist. That seemed fair enough. Yet even this seemingly important role was good news/bad news. It would be great to support an ALS team; on the other hand, we might get assigned elsewhere in Manhattan—some neighborhood uptown, perhaps—and thus never get near the WTC area at all. All of us felt pretty mixed about what we would be doing.
Soon we met the medics. They were a two-person crew based at University Hospital in Hackensack, N.J. The man, Don, seemed affable and pretty open to our presence. The woman, Paige, struck me as depressed, withdrawn, and unfriendly. I chalked up her attitude to stress and fatigue at the time. Later, I started to wonder if she might be suffering from something more serious, perhaps post-traumatic stress syndrome, which is common among career medics. I couldn’t tell one way or the other. In any case, her manner didn't seem important at the time and didn't really cause any problems later.
The hours we spent at Chelsea Piers weren’t a bad situation except for our eagerness to get going. A large area at the Piers—big as a single-floor parking garage—housed 50-75 volunteers who were amassing supplies for rescue effort personnel. They had stacked huge quantities of food, beverages, supplies, and clothing that they then invited us to take. Some of these people (mostly twenty- and thirty-something New Yorkers) were earnest about having us accept what they offered. Long tables of food had been set up with trays of lasagna, ziti, chicken parmesan, and other hot dishes, as well as salad, macaroni and cheese, and desserts. I also saw piles of cookies, chips, bagels, brownies, and all sorts of other stuff. Young women plied us with any kind of food they had available. They also urged us to stock up on packaged foods. Everything was free. The same held true for clothing, including sweaters, jackets, T-shirts, even underwear. Kier and I felt concerned about how chilly the air had gotten even since our arrival, so we took several extra layers. We also walked off with three or four raincoats. The whole place had a festive, energetic atmosphere. More and more volunteers showed up over the next few hours. Piles of food, beverages, and other goods arrived in panel trucks. At one point I even saw National Guardsmen unloading pallets of dog food. (Dog food!) Somehow the scene at Chelsea Piers made this phase of the disaster seem as much a picnic as an emergency.
Then, abruptly at seven, we received word that we would be moving out shortly. We tracked down Don and Paige, got our equipment ready, and soon joined a southbound convoy.
We felt both excited and anxious to be en route to what we perceived as our goal. The three of us Maplewood crew members in the back of the rig talked animatedly about what we expected of the shift. Scott drove. Don sat up front with Scott. Paige, the dour medic with us, listened without much comment and occasionally teased us about our naiveté, or else made veiled remarks about what we would encounter. I realize that many medics have seen so much action that they've become thick-skinned, and many have a decidedly dark sense of humor, but this woman's gloomy attitude started to weigh on me. Once again, however, there wasn't anything to be done about it. Maureen, Kier, and I just looked out the windows to see the sights around us, and we talked about what we saw and what we thought about the whole scene, and I, at least, tried to ignore Paige as much as possible.
I should mention that off and on that afternoon, the other Maplewood EMTs and I had discussed our present situation and our reasons for taking part. The specific question was why we felt so driven to volunteer our time and effort in the city—specifically, why we wanted so much to get posted at the WTC. All of us felt ambivalent about the situation. As we kicked this topic around, however, we came up with a general sense of why we were there. I can speak only for myself, but some of the others expressed similar feelings. There was no single reason, just a jumble of reactions. One was a genuine desire to Do Something. We wanted to make a difference, if possible, to the people who had suffered this calamity. Another reason was a misguided desire to Do Something—that is, an effort to make a contribution that might, in fact, not be that helpful. The comparison I would make is to the surge in blood donations following the WTC disaster. New York City doesn't need 600,000 pints of blood right now. The hospitals need blood for the long haul, but a glut of donors is more of a problem than a solution. Perhaps we EMTs ran a similar risk by offering services that were now overly abundant. Yet another reason was that we wanted to be part of a major historical event. Finally, we all admitted to an element of voyeurism. We just wanted to see what had happened. These weren’t necessarily the right motives, or pretty motives. . . Still, I guess it's better to 'fess up than to pretend otherwise.
We now plodded along on the West Side Highway, moving at perhaps five to ten miles per hour in a dense column of ambulances, police cars, and a few fire trucks, with some huge empty cargo trucks thrown in for good measure. I found it difficult to see much around us. The rig's side door has a small window, but it's hard to see out through it, and Paige ordered me not to open the slider. Perhaps she had good reason: we could already smell the acrid odors of the WTC fires. By looking through the passageway that connects the patient compartment to the front of the vehicle, we could see ahead occasionally and spot the massive slant of smoke—now illuminated by lamps to a bright white—and we could also see the silhouettes of some buildings and some sort of arch-like bridge in the eerie light. Then we took a couple of turns—left, then right—and headed south to circumvent the WTC area.
The first real shocks came as we drove down Broadway. At the intersections with Dey and Cortlandt Streets, we caught two views of the towers' wreckage: a three- or four-story piece of the south building's skeletal facade, then, one block further down, another enormous shred of metal, this one a massive parallelogram, perhaps four stories tall, pointing straight up. Both views were backlit by dazzling spotlights, and smoke shifted behind and in front of them, intensifying the sinister mood. The scenes also revealed great numbers of workers and pieces of heavy equipment—cranes and claw-like machines—near the wreckage. We saw incongruous other sights, too, such as a cluster of three Franciscan monks in their brown robes standing on a street corner staring at the workers and machinery. Another odd religious touch: we passed Trinity Church, a New York landmark that's beautiful in its own right and famous for having the oldest cemetery in the city. Edith had been worried about reports of the cemetery's destruction, as she is fond of this peaceful place and its history; from what I could see, the church is largely intact and the cemetery isn’t destroyed, at least not on the east and south sides of the church. But it felt strange to look across the gravestones toward the ruins beyond.
Within a few minutes we proceeded down Broadway, then ended up at the corner of West and Battery Streets. This is right along the river at almost the farthest-south point in Manhattan. We parked the rig and got out. Seven or eight other rigs had parked nearby. At this point it was a relief to get out of the crowded patient compartment, but I felt mixed about what would happen next— concerned about how long we would be there and keyed up simply to be in such a strange and eerie place. The view up West Street revealed a dark corridor with abandoned buildings on both sides, a roadway crowded with construction vehicles, and a brilliantly illuminated work site overhung with a sky-high slant of white smoke. I could see vast cranes, dangling cables, and the indistinct heap of WTC rubble. The air was acrid but not unbearable. Fortunately, the wind had shifted to the east, taking much of the smoke away from us. We stood around for a while adjusting our equipment—face masks, goggles, and hard hats—while awaiting word of what to do.
Apparently the plan was for us simply to wait there until called to provide medical care to injured or sick workers. The likelihood of treating a survivor of the WTC collapse itself was small at best. Four days after the disaster, the odds of finding survivors had diminished greatly. The far greater chance was that we would be treating a site worker who had cut himself on torn metal, twisted his ankle, gotten grit in his eyes, or suffered smoke inhalation. In a more extreme scenario, we might be treating someone who had suffered more serious trauma—a fall into the wreckage, perhaps—or perhaps a work-induced cardiac problem. Whatever my personal unease toward Paige, I felt confident that she and Don would be proficient medics. I felt in good hands at least in that sense, which is significant, given the difficulty of caring for severely ill or injured patients anyway, all the more so in unfamiliar surroundings. Also, I felt reassured that we Maplewoodians would be allowed—in fact, ordered—to stay together as a group; there had been some speculation about our ending up mixed in with another squad. Perhaps most intensely, I felt relieved that we wouldn't end up assigned to one of the bucket brigades extricating body parts from the wreckage. I've been around severely injured people before in my hospital jobs, as well as dead bodies, and I've witnessed all sorts of trauma, including dismemberment, but I had little interest in being part of the extrication detail four days after the disaster. This option now seemed out of the question.
What followed was about six hours of waiting and wandering. We did not have any EMS calls. As far as I was concerned, our idleness was entirely a good thing, as it meant that none of the workers at the WTC site had suffered any distress serious enough to require our attention. My understanding is that many workers at Ground Zero suffer minor accidents, and many experience respiratory irritation and eye irritation from the smoke, but those people all end up taken care of by BLS crews. Since we were an ALS crew, we wouldn't attend to those relatively smaller emergencies. The result: we ended up free alternately to stay in the ambulance and to wander in the area. One of the rules meant that at least one EMT had to stay with the rig at all times. We could be in radio or cell-phone contact with each other, however, so the others could prowl about and see the sights.
All told, I took three walks up to Ground Zero that night. The first didn't go very far, as we stopped short of a cordon manned by National Guardsman. They were cordial but firm about not letting us through. On the two later walks, however, we talked with the guards, presented our squad i.d. cards, and got waved through. This allowed us to go right up to the final barrier at Ground Zero, which NYC police are staffing and which only construction workers, police officers, FBI agents, and a few others can pass. Still, we got really close. I would say we were within about thirty yards of the close edge of the rubble and about fifty yards of the North Tower heap that rises to maybe five stories above the ground.
The sight is difficult to describe. In recent days, many journalists have invoked Dante and Hieronymus Bosch in attempting to write about the WTC site. These comparisons sound like clichés but are impossible to avoid. There's something truly hellish about the site—its strange mix of starkness and complexity; the harshness of the light; the depth of the shadows; the pieces of wreckage angling every which way; the blank flat, pale, gray-tan silt covering every surface; the fires burning here and there, some of them as large as rooms yet tiny compared to the heap itself; the palls of bone-white smoke angling off the heap; the sheer deadness of the whole mass. Add to that two or three hundred tiny figures, each with a tiny white, yellow, orange or blue hardhat, all these tiny bodies swarming together on the lower surface of the wreckage and it's almost impossible not to perceive the scene as unearthly, sinister, infernal. All the while there's horrendous noise, with huge trucks coming and going, heavy machinery picking up and dropping girders and tangles of wreckage, jack hammers pounding, and front loaders grinding around in the dirt carrying supplies. The intense klieg lights intensified the air of unreality, drenching the whole scene with almost blinding white light. At Ground Zero, other buildings rise all around, many of them not visibly damaged, but since they're entirely dark, they have a stony, tomb-like appearance rather than one that seems part of the living world. Underfoot is a strange, pale brown slimy mud, a mix of dirt, pulverized concrete, and ashes.
I watched this sight for a long time, both during the first walk and the second, and felt both drawn to keep watching and eager to leave. What made it bearable was the presence of so many people clearly intent on doing what they came here to do: police officers, firefighters, FBI agents, construction workers, and National Guardsman. Despite all the variety of their roles and appearances, there was an odd unity to these people. All had come here to join the same effort. It's easy to rattle on about the virtues of this communitarian effort, but it was a stirring sight, too, and greatly admirable for what it says about all these workers' generosity of spirit. (We learned earlier of crews that had driven from as far away as Maine, Texas, and North Carolina just to offer their services.) Still, the place itself offers such a chilling vision that I personally felt as much repulsion as attraction; after watching for a while, I would quickly feel the urge to get away.
One of the most appalling sights was a heap of wrecked vehicles about half a block from Ground Zero. This heap rose about two stories tall and must have been at least half a hundred feet long and perhaps fifty feet wide. My guess is that all the wreckage there had been pulled away from the WTC area by heavy-equipment operators and stored there for the time being. Among the vehicles I saw were at least a dozen cars, some of them smashed almost flat, others twisted; a New York Fire Department ladder truck that had been twisted almost a full quarter turn, so that the front end was upright but the back end was on its side; and two ambulances, one of them with the patient compartment ripped in half, the other flattened from side to side. I have no idea how many vehicles rested in the heap. My guess is perhaps thirty or forty. Later, when we ventured elsewhere, I saw another stack of cars, many of them flattened, including a yellow taxi cab that looked about two feet tall from roof to floor.
Other strange touches:
Paper everywhere—pages of spreadsheets, calendar pages, pages of reports, pages of computer printouts, pages of hard copy e-mail, page and pages and pages. Some were shredded to confetti, but most were intact, lying on the ground but also plastered against buildings, matted against chain link fences, clogging the railing along the deck of what used to be the South Tower, caught up the branches of trees, scattered everywhere.
Belongings: a busted open suitcase; men's clothing—socks, pants, a sports jacket; an umbrella; a pair of running shoes.
Wreckage in odd places: stuck in the fire escape of an old building along Greenwich Street, a fifteen-foot length of steel beam.
Graffiti: right along the windows at the base of the South Tower—the panes inexplicably unbroken—I saw "Kilroy Was Here"-type comments scrawled in the dust. "South Amboy Rescue Squad." "Little Falls First Aid." "FDNY Ladder No. 134." Dozens of others, too, crowded each other into illegibility. Some cries-of-the heart as well: "God Bless America!!!" and "United We Stand."
We retreated to our ambulance, chatted with other crews, and rested a while. The two medics showed up for a while and sat up front. Scott spent some of his time outside talking with EMTs from East Hanover, N.J. Maureen, Kier, and I hung out inside the rig, each of us finding a place to rest on the stretcher, the side bench, or the floor. We talked off and on, mostly about what had seen; Maureen made calls to her family and friends; I dozed briefly. During this time the wind must have shifted, for the air quality deteriorated and the acrid smell intensified. I started to wonder if our face masks—intended to filter particulate matter, not fumes—would really prove adequate. My nasal passages, throat, trachea, and lungs started to hurt more than before. I also worried that my beard was compromising the mask's efficiency, since facial hair would let bad air to slip around. When I would take off the mask, however, I would notice at once how much worse the air smelled, so the filter must have been making a big difference after all. I kept the mask on throughout most of the remaining time we spent there.
Somewhat after 2:30, we decided to go for another walk. This time Maureen, Kier, Scott, and I hung out at the Ground Zero final barricade for a while, but then, as a group, we ventured east on Liberty Street, worked our way around a lot of workers cutting fallen beams apart with acetylene torches, and turned left onto Greenwich Street. There we confronted a sight that was in many ways the most horrific of the whole night. This was the ruins of the South Tower. First of all, we managed to get much closer to the rubble than had done earlier, perhaps twenty yards or so. Second, we got a closer view of the workers sifting through the wreckage. The whole area was, in fact, teeming with workers. We had arrived at a change of shift: eighty or a hundred workers, equipped with hard hats and respirators and clad in coveralls (or, in some cases, pale blue Tyvek biohazard outfits), walked out of the excavation site; another large phalanx of workers marched in. Their actions seemed matter-of-fact, their demeanor tired but not as bone-weary as I had heard from news accounts. To some degree they looked little different from a contingent of miners leaving after a long day's work while another contingent showed up for the next shift. Among this crowd I also saw dozens of police officers, fire fighters, FBI agents, and others of uncertain identity. We were the only EMTs present. We stood near a long cargo truck and watched a work crew lower a thirty- or forty-foot length of twisted steel beam into place by means of a crane. On our left stood several dozen rows of stacked ten-gallon plastic buckets, each stack about ten or fifteen buckets deep. (These are the buckets used for collecting body parts.) At a few dozen yards' distance, teams of people picked through the debris. A vast pile of rubble—beams jutting out of its surface—rose to our left. (If I had wanted to, I could have walked just ten or fifteen feet and touched the nearest edge of this pile. There must have been bodies within a few yards of us.) Palls of smoke rose from the heap ahead of us. Somehow the most frightening sight, however, was the backdrop to this scene: a triangle of WTC facade rising at least five or six stories straight ahead, its vast metal ribs resembling part of the torn ribcage of a massive beast. The smoke shifted now and then, fully revealing this piece of skeleton at times, then shrouding it, then revealing it again, a taunting, threatening apparition.
What struck me just then was that if there's ever a nuclear war, these sights will be what the world will look like. We'll have a world in which life diminishes almost to nothing and death becomes almost everything, in which what little remains of life consists of survivors' efforts to pick through the ruins.
We didn't have much to do but stare. Staring felt helpless, almost pointless, and in some ways pitiful, but it seemed important anyway. It's easy to invoke the role of bearing witness; it's tempting to find solace in it; and it's risky to believe that doing so is a sufficient response. At the same time, I still think there's a need to take the opportunity, to stare, and to attempt to make sense of what we see. So that's what we did. The four of us stayed at the South Tower site for about twenty minutes, watched, handed out some face masks to personnel who didn't have any, then retreated. It seemed time to clear out. We also wondered—I did, anyway—about the possibility of our being ordered to leave, since we didn't really have any specific role right there at the time. Anyway, we left. We retraced our steps, walked down West Street to our ambulance, and hunkered down again.
Shortly after that—around 3 a.m.—central command dismissed us. Our crew and the two medics left the Battery Park area, drove north, and headed for Chelsea Piers. On the way out we saw more the same clusters of soldiers, the convoys of rescue and construction vehicles, and more National Guard transport units. Their number diminished as we passed Canal Street, however, and we soon started seeing more normal sights. Korean produce stores. All-night delis. Newsstands. Clusters of young people hanging out on street corners. People walking their dogs. This being New York City, lots of folks were out and about even at three a.m. What struck me, though, was how normal these sights seemed—how blessedly ordinary. A young woman rollerblading on the avenue. Some boys eating pizza in front of an Italian joint. A couple out for a walk. A woman listening to music or news on a Walkman. I found such ordinary sights astonishing, moving, and reassuring, for they refuted the state of mind I had entered while at the WTC—that life had withered away during our time in the ruins.
Just a short while later, once had reached Chelsea Piers and helped Paige and Don move their equipment out of our rig and load it onto their own, the four members of our crew headed out of New York. Even at three a.m. we saw people along the West Side Highway who cheered us and waved their hand-lettered signs ("We Love You," "Thanks for Your Support!" "God Bless the U.S.!!!" "Thank You!!!!") as we passed. Some Guardsman checked our documents and waved us on. One last touch that would stun anyone accustomed to New York City traffic: we were only vehicle in whole length of the Holland Tunnel.
II. THE 9/14 CATECHISM; OR, WHAT PEOPLE HAVE ASKED ME
Q: So, how did you feel about all that?
A: How do you think I felt? I was exhausted, unnerved, and scared. My family and I lived eighteen miles from lower Manhattan. For many days after the attacks—for months, actually—neither we nor anyone else had any idea what might happen next. Seeing the scope of the damage up close on September 14th made it impossible not to worry.
Q: Why is your account so unemotional?
A: We were too busy staying alert to feel most emotions. Even at the time my fellow-EMTs and I admitted to one another that we felt depressed about the attacks and scared about being present at The Pile. But we focused on paying attention on what was happening around us and on being ready to offer assistance is anyone among the personnel on site got injured or sick. This approach is typical of what I had experienced throughout my years of EMS work, as well as during my ten years of working in hospitals. Some degree of disengagement goes with the role. Some degree of dissociation, even. I’m not saying that this reaction lacks drawbacks, but it’s a standard experience for EMTs, emergency department staffers, firefighters, police, and soldiers.
Q: Is it true that nothing much happened after 9/11?
A: The answer to that question depends on what you mean by “nothing,” “much,” and “happened.” First of all, someone in New Jersey began mailing anthrax-tainted letters starting a week after the 9/11 attacks. Five deaths resulted, as well as seventeen non-fatal injuries. One of the affected post offices was just five miles from our town. While it now appears that the anthrax incidents resulted from domestic terrorism, not from jihadi actions, the situation wasn’t clear as it unfolded. (Many months later, investigations clarified that the anthrax attacks unrelated to al-Qaeda or other jihadi groups, but it’s still not clear who might have been the perpetrators.) Then, on November 12th, American Airlines flight 587 crashed off Queens, New York, prompting fears that terrorists had caused the accident. 260 people died. I was skeptical even at the time that these incidents were necessarily related to the 9/11 attacks, but, like everyone else, I couldn’t help but wonder. Investigations into the accident concluded much later that the plane crashed as a result of combined pilot error and equipment failure, but what I witnessed on the night of September 14th certainly made it easy to feel paranoid about any number of incidents that took place during 2001. At least in the New York metro area, this paranoia didn’t ease for several years,
Q: What were you expecting?
A: Not any specific event. I was just hedging my bets. First off, my wife and I worried, like many or most Americans at the time, about a second wave of attacks. This concern prompted Edith and me to stockpile food, water, and other supplies in case we had to hunker down. Even absent actual attacks, we figured that the widespread fear of attacks, especially if fear led to outright panic, could have made the metro area dangerous. It doesn’t take a real attack to cause social upheaval. For this reason, we prepared for trouble. We decided, among other things, that we might have to evacuate to New England, where a friend offered to take us in.
Q: Wasn’t that rather alarmist?
A: Again, it depends on what your use of the word means. What constitutes being “alarmist”? In October, the regional Office of Emergency Management alerted all the Tri-state EMT squads, including ours in Maplewood, N.J., of information concerning a plausible threat to the New York area. A jihadi in detention at the time claimed that members of his cell had smuggled a “dirty bomb” into Manhattan. Later, this claim proved to be bogus. But the possibility that someone might detonate a weapon of this sort, killing hundreds or thousands of people and rendering much of the city uninhabitable, wasn’t something I felt ready to brush off. I would call my concern alarmed, not alarmist.
Q: And then?
A: Nothing much happened on a local level. But the United States invaded Afghanistan, achieved some initial victories, then eventually bogged down in a quagmire that has continued for seventeen years so far. In 2003, the Bush administration used the 9/11 attacks as a pretext for invading Iraq, overthrew Saddam Hussein’s regime, established a nominally democratic government, but also triggered a sectarian conflict that continues in Iraq to this day and that spread to neighboring countries, destabilized the Middle East overall, gave rise to the Syrian civil war, and greatly increased Iran’s influence in the area.
Q: How did the aftermath of the EMT shift affect you personally?
A: Nothing dramatic happened, but the overall situation wasn’t positive. Most of the effects were psychological. Some were physical, however. Although I spent less than eight hours on duty at the WTC site, I coughed for weeks afterwards. I kept smelling an acrid, foul odor for a long time, too, as if particulates or chemicals had embedded themselves in my respiratory system. When I commented about the coughing and the smell to a local friend—our town’s fire chief at the time—he said, “Well, you got yourself a snoot full of smoke.” True. But more than just smoke. Studies undertaken after the attacks indicate that the WTC site’s air contained particles of cement, steel, gypsum (from drywall), building materials, cellulose (from paper), fiberglas (from insulation), glass particles, human tissues and hair, and synthetic materials (from cubicles and rugs), as well as vaporized jet fuel, benzene, and as many as perhaps two or three hundred other toxic chemicals. Few of the personnel present in the aftermath wore respirators. My fellow squad members and I used only N-95 masks—the kind you might use during a basement cleanup or a woodworking project—as protection. It’s not surprising that we hacked for months from what was later dubbed “the World Trade Center cough.” In 2003, after many bouts of bronchitis, my physician ordered me to undergo a full pulmonary workup to see if I’d suffered significant damage. The results of diagnostic tests were reassuring. But the pulmonologist who reviewed the data told me, “We’ve never studied patients exposed to a mix of so many chemicals, so we don’t really know what the long-term outcome will be.”
Q: Were there any other aftereffects?
A: Lots of nightmares and periodic flashbacks. That being said, I’m aware that I got off easy in every possible way. I was present at the site for only a single shift; I didn’t go through the hardships that so many personnel did during their much longer and more numerous rotations into the site. I didn’t witness the horrific sights that so many first responders and iron workers did. That said, the hours I spent there definitely got under my skin. I still think about that night. In addition, my shift created some marital tensions. My wife had given me her go-ahead to volunteer for that shift, but she didn’t really want me to participate. She’s still not happy that I went. The fact that even my ordinary shifts on the Maplewood squad entailed more risk day after day is probably beside the point. My reminding her that firefighters, police, soldiers, and others spent much more time at the WTC site wasn’t and hasn’t been persuasive.
Q: What else?
A: It’s impossible to have that kind of experience without it darkening one’s mood about everything. The 9/11 attacks and their consequences were an utter waste. The attacks accomplished nothing positive. In addition to killing 2,996 people on September 11th, (in Manhattan, Washington, D.C., and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania), the attacks led to two ill-considered, destructive wars that have done nothing to improve the world—that have, in fact, killed at least half a million people and have made the world a far more dangerous place. The events that took place on 9/11, as well events in the aftermath, seem altogether pointless.
Q: So, what do you feel that you yourself accomplished that night?
A: Not much. Maybe nothing.
III. FogI had always disliked the towers. Ever since moving to the New York area in 1982, I considered them a soulless monument to corporate arrogance. Nothing about them drew me forth. I had gone inside the buildings only twice: first, during the early 1990’s, when my wife’s English cousin James took us for drinks at Windows on the World, the WTC’s 106th-floor restaurant; and a few years later, when Edith and I hosted out-of-town visitors for an excursion to the observation deck. Although I found both events memorable because of the impressive 360-degree panoramas that the tower provided—during the first visit, a limitless sea of lights; during the second, an essentially aerial view of the New York megalopolis as far as the eye could see—neither occasion prompted me to feel any affection for the World Trade Center itself.
However, I had one other experience of the towers that lingers in my memory. One early-winter evening during the late 1980’s, during my brief employment as the staff writer for a Midtown engineering firm, I went down to the World Trade Center after work. I can’t recall why I happened to be in Lower Manhattan. I might have attended a meeting somewhere in the area, or I may have been present following an art class I took in Soho for several months. In any case, I found myself at the WTC plaza around dusk in rainy weather. Darkness had fallen. A lid of heavy clouds had descended on the city. I strayed onto the plaza, probably looking for the subway entrance as I worked my way back to Brooklyn. The plaza itself was mostly empty as other people headed home after work. I looked upward to see an unnerving sight. The towers, fully illuminated from the ground level all the way up to the 40th or 50th story, started to diminish beyond that, kept fading floor by floor, then vanished altogether into fog.
E.J. Myers
My Lunch with TrumpSome years ago I had lunch with Donald Trump in the Trump Tower’s private dining room while negotiating the late phases of a deal.
This sounds like a lie but isn’t. It sounds like a joke, or the setup for a joke, but isn’t. To be more specific, however: over twenty years ago, I sat back-to-back with Donald Trump while I discussed a book project with an editor whose company owned office space in the Trump Tower. My interactions with The Donald never went beyond a mutually dismissive glance when I entered the room and, after lunch, another glance when I left. The editor, her assistant, and my co-author, Aleta, had a clear view of Trump and his three lunch companions—by all appearances models or starlets—while the four of us bookish folk discussed our project. My associates kept monitoring Trump. Perhaps they were intrigued, puzzled, or offended by the spectacle of the celebrity developer schmoozing with three dolled-up young women simultaneously. I resented how the pretty-boy developer distracted my colleagues; even so, I too felt sufficiently intrigued that I couldn’t help trying to eavesdrop. I knew nothing about the man beyond what I read in the New York papers. Trump’s career in the mid-1990’s preceded the heyday of his TV show “The Apprentice”; news reports focused on his 1992 divorce, his subsequent romantic relationships, and his various construction projects. I considered him little more than a rich playboy, an impression I now found confirmed by my observations that afternoon in the Trump Tower dining room.
Our meeting proceeded. Aleta and I discussed our book’s concept with the editor and the editor’s assistant. The four of us answered one another’s questions, conjectured about aspects of the project, and chatted about our backgrounds and interests. The meeting went well. Both at the time and afterward, Aleta and I felt positive about working with this editor; we sensed her enthusiasm about us and about the book; and we reached an agreement in principle to work together. In short, we clinched our deal.
And Trump? What was he up to? Simply enjoying flirtatious conversation with three young women? Even at the time it was common knowledge that The Donald, though remarried, habitually surrounded himself with beautiful young women, and rumors circulated about adulterous affairs. I caught only wisps of their conversation. I heard a lot of laughter. I scolded myself for feeling annoyed: these interactions were none of my business. I felt contemptuous anyway—toward Trump for his obsession with glamorous companions; toward the women for feeling drawn to a vacuous playboy. But my contempt, like all contempt, was fundamentally judgmental, hence shallow in its own way. What did I know about these people? Almost nothing. Perhaps they weren’t as vapid as I assumed. Who knows, perhaps they were meeting that afternoon to found a charitable foundation for Balkan refugees or a school for gifted children in the South Bronx. Perhaps the women were the partners in a top-drawer architectural firm consulting with Trump on his latest project. Perhaps they were a minister, a rabbi, and a Zen roshi conferring with Trump about the importance of interfaith dialogue. I struggled to reign in my judgmental attitudes and to focus instead on my thoughtful, collegial lunch companions and our project.
We ate our meal and explored the book’s issues. We concluded the meeting and got up to leave. I made two observations on walking out. One was that as when we entered, Trump glanced toward us without interest or acknowledgment. The second was that near the dining room’s door stood a huge man, a dour, heavily muscled Latino. He was clearly Trump’s bodyguard. With his arms folded across his chest, so much the better to puff up his biceps, he, like his boss, gave our party little more than a derisive glance. I felt a sudden temptation to speak as one Latino to another: “¿Qué haces, trabajando por ese pendejo?”—What are you doing, working for that asshole? But I didn’t. Along with Aleta, our editor, and the assistant, I simply walked out and left Trump to continue his colloquy.
The four of us said goodbye in the Trump Tower lobby. We agreed that the meeting had clarified the book project and had created a sense of common endeavor. We shook hands and congratulated one another. Aleta clearly felt as excited about the book as I did. I was dismayed, however, when my lunch companions doubled back on our having crossed paths with Trump. They exchanged comments and exclamations—none of them positive, fortunately, but in my view still unnecessary. I couldn’t restrain myself: “Who cares about Donald Trump!” I exclaimed. “He’s just a spoiled playboy who builds garish office towers and apartments. He’ll never amount to anything.” The conversation spun itself out. We thanked one another once again and went our separate ways.
In the years since then I’ve recalled my lunch with Trump, especially in light of his ascent (if that’s the right term) into the Oval Office. Among other things, I’ve reflected on my comment that Trump was just a playboy and would never amount to anything. This prognostication either is or isn’t accurate, depending on how one defines “amount to” and “anything.” During his first two years as president, Trump has triggered a global trade war, rolled back dozens of regulations protecting the environment, withdrawn the U.S. from many longstanding international treaties, taken impulsive actions in the Middle East that have worsened regional tensions and risked open warfare, fostered a social climate encouraging racism and sexism, praised avowed white-nationalist and nativist groups, tweeted vile comments about many people of color, fostered a tax bill assisting the hyper-wealthy while leading to an additional $1.5 trillion burden on the federal deficit, appointed underqualified or unqualified family members and other cronies to governmental posts, insulted many of this country’s closest international allies, offered praise and given comfort to authoritarians throughout the world, cozied up to a foreign leader whose government engages in clandestine efforts to undermine U.S. institutions, undercut branches of the government through criticism and underfunding, overreached in ways that violate the constitutional separation of powers, engaged in personal financial dealings that violate the constitution’s emoluments clause, vilified non-white immigrants to the U.S., set up internment camps for migrant children separated from their parents, and continued to lie, dissimulate, and spread falsehoods on a daily basis—all of which are actions that probably “amount to” something.
If I could have somehow known back in 1995 that Trump would attain the presidency and would perpetrate these bizarre deeds, would I have acted differently than I did in the Trump Tower dining room? Would I have (for lack of a better term) taken action?
The American mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz coined the phrase “butterfly effect” to explain certain aspects of chaos theory; and references to Ray Bradbury’s 1952 story “A Sound of Thunder” brought the phrase to widespread attention. In this story, a time-traveler accidentally kills a butterfly while visiting the Late Cretaceous, a mishap that triggers a cascade of changes through the eons and results in a much-altered world in 2055. Is it possible that in keeping with the butterfly effect, I could have made a tiny choice in 1995 for which the consequences might have cascaded forth and somehow prevented Trump’s election to the presidency in 2016? If I had stopped by Trump’s table to chat with The Donald and his girlfriends, for instance, could my visit have changed the future? Not likely. How else might I have caused more impact? What if I’d attacked him with the demitasse spoon that came with my espresso earlier? But I don’t attack people with demitasse spoons or anything else. How, then, might I have altered history to prevent a presidency that imperils civil society, American democracy, the global environment, and perhaps the world’s survival?
I mentioned earlier that Trump’s massive Latino bodyguard stood by the doorway. Other than the two lunch parties and this hired thug, nobody else was in the dining room. Perhaps the bodyguard was my best chance to alter the course of history: on leaving, I could have sidled up to him and whispered, “Oí a tu jefe decir que eres hijo de puta." (“I heard your boss say you’re a son of a whore.”) But I don’t speak to people like that, or about people, so I didn’t.
Trump lived to see another day. His career as a developer survived its self-inflicted wounds. The rich playboy attained fame for his reality-TV shows. He somehow gained attention as a cultural arbiter and, inexplicably, as a politician. Now we’re stuck with this man in the Oval Office.
Thinking back on my lunch with Trump, I see now that it’s all my fault.
Caroline Sutton
Into That Good NightAfter a few hours of staring at hyperbolic adult smiles or at toys dangled before her, being rocked and walked around the yard, three-month-old Ella cannot take life anymore. When her monosyllables get tremulous and slight furrows thread her forehead and she can no longer look at me, I lower her gently into a Baby Bjorn, make the straps snug, and head for the door. By now her wails are as continuous as a desert horizon. I tip her head slightly to put a pacifier in her mouth but she won’t hold on, won’t relent, though I hold it there, reminding her it’s there while her screams grow thicker, angrier, coming from her belly, deep and raw. Her eyes tighten, leaking tears, her face turns deep red as a plum. Her body is one flexed muscle as each exhale carries her frenzy up and down the street. I move the pacifier softly against her tongue but it’s all too petty for what is on her mind. She has to scream. I pick up my pace and she eases momentarily, taking in a shaky, staggered breath, letting go, and then another. She cries again, this one sadder, longer, this one from her throat, not her gut—she takes another stuttering breath, shudders, and sucks the pacifier as if it alone will sustain her, frantic little sucks at first, then the syncopation turns to steady eighth-note sighs and her eyes close. I keep walking, humming calypso tunes, feeling the knobby handle of the pacifier against my chest, listening to her even breaths, and hearing my own like a steady bass continuo beneath the thick padding of the Bjorn. One of her hands rests lightly on my arm, a crease at the wrist, the other scrunches under the sleeve of my T-shirt, her skin like a warm nectarine. Finally I sit down and lean back, her body rising and falling as I breathe. The neighbor starts up a leaf blower; I touch Ella’s plump arm, look down at her wisps of auburn hair. She doesn’t stir, doesn’t hear or feel. She needs to be without us.
But maybe she is not. In some form we enter her consciousness, we along with trees, chairs, flowers, motorcycles, light, water, an open refrigerator with milk cartons and ketchup bottles, things that as yet have no name or function but hit her brain throughout the waking hours. Humans need sleep to cope with the staggering maze of stimuli in the course of a day, whereas pelagic species, like bluefish and tuna, show no signs of resting because they swim in open water that is so monotonous they can process sensory input while awake. For us, the morass of known and unknown needs to slide from short- to long- term memory. The brain doesn’t close shop during sleep but instead takes stock, reorganizes, stores, like arranging soup cans on a supermarket shelf, or boxes of bran flakes and granola, though our dreams are not so orderly in a way we might define order, the surreal disconnect of images belying their purpose. We deceive ourselves in longing for sleep as a form of oblivion. It is survival, which Ella demands that I know, however counterintuitive her wailing to achieve it might seem.
*
While her psychic and physical growth depends on rest, many species’ survival relies on the opposite. Giraffes are ever vigilant, managing to sleep only a few hours a day, usually standing up, and making optimal use of five-minute naps. In South Africa I watched a giraffe gingerly advance from a hilltop to the edge of a watering hole on open land where he stood observing families of baboons drink, followed by herds of zebras and kudu, his head erect, checking all directions for excruciating hours before spreading his front legs wide and lowering his head for a sip—risking attack by a lion, hyena, or leopard. Mortality rates for baby giraffes is nearly fifty percent. Deer sleep only about three hours a day for the same reason, and ostriches sleep standing up, eyes wide open most of the time.
To watch for predators and keep from drifting with tides while resting, dolphins slip into slow-wave sleep, or unihemispheric sleep, in which one side of the brain stays awake while the other half sleeps. The active portion also reminds the dolphin to breathe. While our breathing is involuntary, marine mammals make a conscious decision when and where to breathe, so some portion of the brain has to be functional enough to guide the dolphin to the surface. After the left hemisphere and right eye rest for about two hours, the dolphin switches sides. Female dolphins after giving birth swim constantly for days, slow-wave sleeping often, while the baby, who doesn’t have enough body fat to be buoyant on its own, slipstreams behind and rises to breathe when she does. It will not sleep during the first month but shows no signs of stress, no rise in cortisol, none of the fervid urgency for sleep and paradoxical resistance that I witness in Ella.
Like the open ocean where tuna cruise without sleeping, the sky provides a low stimulus arena for the common swift that breeds throughout Eurasia and migrates to Africa—usually nonstop. Swifts spend ten months out of the year in flight, averaging 25 miles per hour and living till the age of about twenty, which means they fly the equivalent of seven round trips to the moon. The birds journey from Sweden to the Sub Sahara, for instance, using a flap-and-glide system and feeding on aeroplankton, a mix of insects and spiders that blows in the air. Amassing a ball of it in the back of their throats, they either swallow or feed it to their young en route; these high flying acrobats also copulate midair, like dragonflies. Twice a day, they climb to altitudes of 10,000 feet and catch a half-hour nap gliding on thermals in their descent. What innate trust in one’s being to wake up at the right moment; what fine tuning in an unconscious state to the temperature and thrust of air around one.
Flying 14,000 miles from their breeding grounds in the north seems absurd, but the birds take wing in mid-July when the supply of insects in the north begins to thin and, rather than waste time on the ground, they live alongside their food source. Because they rarely land, they scarcely have feet, or feet too small to sustain the bird to walk or perch, which leaves me wondering if nature is stingy, cruel, expedient, or pragmatic. Since the birds need to plummet three meters in order to take flight, they traditionally nested in sea cliffs and hollow trees, but with loss of habitat, have turned to nooks under eaves or roof tiles. It’s a gentle evolutionary give and take that goes largely unnoticed, as does the phenomenal endurance of a nondescript bird that happens to flicker by.
*
As Ella reaches five months, there are days when she slips easily to sleep, often when she knows it is not expected of her. She might be in a car or plunked in a bouncy chair whose movement soothes her unwittingly. Still, she is growing more conscious of fighting our expectation of sleep, which is strangely less desperate than her gut-wrenching, cat-howling cries to resist sleep itself, that restoration and reprieve on which she thrives. Or does she still cry at times because she doesn’t know how to reach it, doesn’t know how to shut down the effort to talk to us, the feeling of needing to smile back when we praise her or grin out of pleasure at her presence? Sometimes she instinctively returns a smile and sustains it for an instant before realizing this is not what I feel, this is too much, I can’t hang on, and gives way—her forehead creases and sorrow and anger pass over her face like a cloudbank erasing the play of sun on grass. Already she is faced with nuanced differences that ever so slowly need to be untangled, like a hillock of sea grass that leans and twists with advancing and receding tides. Her need to sleep, too, is rhythmic.
*
Nearly three thousand years ago Homer wrote about the paradoxical relationship between sleep and survival. Odysseus is often compared to a lion, a species like us at the top of the food chain that has the luxury of sleeping a great deal. Nevertheless, he is tantalizingly close to Ithaca when he dozes off, and his avaricious shipmates untie a bag of wind that blows him off course in time and space. He should have been a giraffe, ever wakeful, watchful, and untrusting. He goes on to wallow under a shroud of lethargy with Calypso for seven years, only semi-aware of who he is, until Athena finally tells him to get on with it. Wake up, live out who you are.
All the while Penelope the loyal is a self-described insomniac: “When night falls and the world lies lost in sleep, I take to my bed, my heart throbbing, about to break/ anxieties swarming, piercing—I may go mad with grief” (19. 582-4). In the pit of night when the same words spiral ever inward, cyclonic and insidious, what conversations does she imagine with the ghostlike memory of her husband, or what ploys does she concoct to beguile the suitors? How bizarre that on the night when Odysseus is thrashing about the main hall clashing swords and slaughtering suitors, when men are groaning and dying, on that night of all nights she claims, “Not once have I slept so soundly since the day/Odysseus sailed away to see that cursed city…” (23.19-20). This could not be coincidental. She is furious with the old nurse, Eurycleia, for waking her, for “interrupting my sleep, sweet sleep that held me, sealed my eyes just now.” Nor is this Homer’s attempt to heroize Odysseus and render Penelope useless; after all, he has made us admire her self-possession and fidelity for most of his tale.
Her deep sleep is sweet. It is not pure oblivion or ignorance but a reservoir where the being of one feels the being of the other like the movement of water after a body moves through, a slipstream where husband and wife sense the other and take comfort. Somewhere she knows he is doing what he needs to do because of who he is, as swifts trust the thermals on which they glide; in solitary wakefulness, he knows she is tranquil, safely away from the slaughter. In that nebulous medium the image of Odysseus interweaves wakefulness and rest, consciousness and unconsciousness as deftly as the threads on her loom create a shroud, for as Penelope remarks, “Odysseus. There was a man, or was he all a dream?” (19.363).
At this point she may be too world weary to trust her memory or her dreams, or too savvy to let him believe that she does. Restored by sleep, incisive, firm, and equipped to protect herself, she puts him to a test, a literal and physical one. She asks Odysseus to move the wedding bed that he built for her, knowing that only he would know it could not be moved without destroying the entire house. He is appalled by her lack of trust. His world and experiences have left him with more clean-cut though perhaps less accurate dichotomies. For her, the dream of a man woven through her days and nights might be the greater reality than the flesh and blood before her.
*
As Ella’s wails soften, as she gives herself over to rest in the Bjorn, her arms go limp, her face presses against my chest—she who knows no concept of trust or fidelity. Does she hear the ragged bark of a dog down the road and let it melt into a mélange of images of this person or that, the rubbery feeling of the globe she can now hold, the ratchety sound of a rattle, the smell of my sweat, or does it remain outside and beyond the brief, illusory orb in which I try to protect her? Shhhhh, I whisper, shhhhhh. Sleep a little more.
Notes
Davies, Ella. “What is the Sleepiest Animal on Earth?” BBC Earth, October 29, 2015
Gannon, Megan. “Can Any Animal Survive Without Sleep?” LiveScience, March 2, 2019
Landy, Evan. “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about the Common
Swift.” Animalogic, June 14, 2016.
O’Connell, Lindsey. “Who Needs Sleep Anyway?” Arizona State University. Ask a Biologist.
Common Swift Sets New Record. The Telegraph (UK). “Power Naps and Eating on the Wing—How Common Swifts Set 10-month Flight Record En Route from Britain to Southern Africa,” 10 October 2016.
Eleanor Levine
Algorithms in the Garden“My well-discussed ‘paranoia’ urges me to believe that some tiny segment of the NSA's parsing algorithm is finely tuned to my voice.”
–John McAfee, The Doobie Brothers
Facebook urges me to send a Christmas card to my ex-girlfriend’s daughter, Chloe.
I have not been in communication with Chloe or Kira, her mother, for several months, and have blocked Kira, so there is no way she can contact me.
In the process of blocking your ex, you don’t usually block her daughter or dogs. You always love them. You want to send them chicken t-shirts that appear on your Amazon account, due to the numerous algorithms whispering in your ear.
Facebook had not previously asked me to send anyone a Christmas card.
This was clearly a shout from Mother or daughter or algorithm to me among my art and anti-Zionist postings on Facebook. I was trying to live my life in the Occupied Territories and Georgia O’Keeffe, and just as soon as my even-keeled existence was established, that I had gotten over the ex and her mercurial powers, she or some inanimate entity wrote, “send Chloe Keating a Christmas card.”
Kira reactivates me lustfully or unconsciously; or her daughter, Chloe, who I once gave Salvador Dali’s illustrated Alice in Wonderland, emails me.
They are on my Facebook wall to rekindle that love or impede the interim where my soul is healing from the Antebellum period of being with her mother.*
We spoke in a dream last night.
They were standing behind me in a verdant conservatory, with hemlocks and sirens that spoke in digital verse.
I’ll give it a chance, I’ll let myself in, turn around, face them in real time, and see if she has caught my glimpse.
She has not. When I stare at her, she runs. The air in the balloon has escaped. The pastry burns—the good rugelach, not the cheap shit from Trader Joe’s for $3.99.*
I frequently ask myself, if all the military people in South Jersey can mate with their loved ones, why can’t I?
We could just talk, sit in the room, as I’ve never been a fan of sex, I mean, I like sex, don’t get me wrong, I love the beauty of sitting next to Kira, seeing that face breathe, speaking for hours on her lap.
We meditate in her arms, in my hometown, where we make love—a notch above God, just me and her, under the comforter; while my mother gives Chloe a dream catcher. It hangs in Kira’s house, among the few gifts from me to her. She never hangs the Andy Warhol cow painting, though I frame it myself, in the purple she loves, near the blue Converse sneakers, which I send during one of our silent moments, when we are in retrograde, fostering good health and absence.
*
I visit Chloe’s Facebook wall.
There is a video of her and her mom and 3 or 4 dogs in cages, in their car, driving to Hunter Mountain.
She videotapes Kira who resembles Alfred E. Neuman. Alfred, with her futile grin, belts out hellos to everyone. It is a bolstering hello, like a hardball coming out of a Bugs Bunny film in Yankee Stadium.
*
This happens in the course of one day: my dream, the Xmas card, the video of Kira shouting like a bear awakened from hibernation—a course voice that radiates my nervous system.
*
Everything is timed by algorithms: my dream, the card, and now this video, where Kira ushers in hellos.
Of course, in Kira’s squeaky and boyish voice, with luscious decibels that screech without grace, she is sending words to me.
It is only in the hellos, with Chloe smiling and a dog on her lap, that I feel her energy swaddle like a duck.
*
I want what all those natives of South Jersey have, the reason they are not exploding, the reason they feel the earth under their feet, the dynamite in their souls, the megastructure of churches on their wedding day, the culprit sitting in the car next to them.
*
The caged animals in Chloe’s video keep barking.
I delay blocking Chloe for another 24 hours.
This way I can hear her mother’s voice scream, “Hey everyone!”, and I can be the “r” in “everyone.”
*
But you know, sticking your hand through that inviolate space, trembling with your heart on your ear, it will only block your semi-regular state of life, now that you have gotten a new job, a freelance gig, that might lead to something permanent.
You have started going to the gym, after all, and they deduct $100 each month. Your life is starting to get normal again. You can travel on the Garden State Parkway without worrying about empty vowels lacerating you.*
You really, really don’t need to slam your hand in the drawer and call your ex when you can listen to BBC at 2 am. There are multitudes of disaster you can instead live vicariously through, though her capricious voice, in its insouciant sounds, still delights you.
Virgens de Guadalupe by Lynda Schor