When You Were Older (retail) Read online

  ‘It’s like this,’ I said. ‘I just have this … aversion … to her. Since … you know. After what happened. It feels like one of those places you go to stop smoking, and every time you reach for a cigarette, they zap you with electricity. No. That’s not a good analogy. Because that’s a lot of little things. This is one big thing. It feels like when you eat a whole bunch of a certain kind of food and then get sick. And maybe the food didn’t even make you sick. Maybe you ate three plates of fettuccini Alfredo, and then got the stomach flu. And all night you’re up, throwing up fettuccini Alfredo. You’ll never eat it again. Guaranteed. It’s knee-jerk. So don’t give me more credit than I deserve.’

  We stared out the windshield a while longer. It was light now. It was officially morning.

  My driver was chewing up one end of his toothpick. I wasn’t sure how he could even see the road through all those bug splats.

  As if reading my mind, he said, ‘I’ll have to stop at the next filling station. Clean the windshield proper. Won’t help to put on the washers. That only makes it worse. Smears it. Damned inconvenient.’

  ‘Not as inconvenient as it was for the bugs.’

  He laughed, one little snort.

  ‘Good point.’

  ‘I lied to her.’ I was in full-on confession mode. And we both knew it. ‘She told me to go get my telescope. I have this telescope. A guy at work gave it to me. It’s not so much for astronomy. You can’t see much of the stars in the city anyway. For him I think it was a peeping Tom thing. I used to use it to look at the towers. Mostly the North Tower. My tower, I used to call it. It was such a dream for me … to actually work there. I used to find the one-hundred-and-fourth floor with the telescope, and then find my actual office window. It was just a thing I liked to do. At the beginning. I hadn’t done it for a while. So Kerry knew I had this telescope. So she told me to go get it. We were talking on the phone. She was watching on TV, and I was watching out my window. I live in Jersey City, right across the river from lower Manhattan. We watched the second plane hit. While we were talking. And we were, like … this is not happening. So she said, “Get your telescope.” And I did. And I told her I couldn’t see anything. Just smoke.’

  Silence. I think he was waiting. In case I’d restart on my own.

  ‘But you saw something more.’

  ‘I watched somebody jump.’

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him quietly cross himself.

  ‘And I kept thinking, how hot does it have to be? In your office. How hot does it have to get? You’re more than a hundred floors up. And the certain death, well, that goes without saying. Obviously. You know you’re going to die, one way or the other. But just to be able to push off. Or even let go. Just to override that hard-wired survival instinct. How hot does it have to be in your office? And that was my office. I mean, not the very person I saw. But it was the same in my office. And I knew Jeff was up there, along with just about everybody else we knew. So I told her all I could see was smoke.’

  More bug hits. I wondered if thousands of bugs were meeting their death in eastern Illinois this morning, and if the bug community would mourn. If their friends and relatives suffered trauma. Were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Yeah. It was that bad inside my head.

  ‘You’re never going to see her again,’ my driver said. ‘Are you?’

  ‘Nope. And I’m not sure that’s a good thing. She needs comfort. And I don’t have any for her. And we were friends. I mean, above and beyond anything else we might’ve been, we were friends. And she needs a friend right now. So it’s not noble. I’m falling down on the job. I’m failing.’

  ‘You’re being too hard on yourself,’ he said.

  But not all that vehemently, I noticed.

  ‘No. I don’t think so. I think I’m being just hard enough.’

  He let me off another forty miles up the road, because he had to bear farther north than I needed to go. I never found out where he was from. And I still don’t know his name. And he doesn’t know mine.

  I really think it’s better that way.

  12 September 2001

  IT WAS THE day after the towers fell, and the interstate though central Pennsylvania was lined with sign after handmade sign. About one every mile. In some stretches, more. They all said the same thing: ‘God Bless America’.

  They were beginning to get on my nerves.

  Now, in retrospect, I see I should’ve kept my mouth shut about it. At the time, I saw nothing. Except the signs.

  My driver was fortyish, maybe older, in a BMW sports car. Maybe the car was an instrument of his midlife crisis. I wasn’t sure. I was busy enough with my own crises.

  ‘That bugs the crap out of me,’ I said.

  ‘What does?’

  He had a brusque voice. And gravelly. Like a smoker. Though neither he nor his car smelled like smoke.

  ‘Those signs.’

  Long pause. Long and … not good.

  ‘You have a problem with “God Bless America”?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘It’s not self-evident?’

  ‘Not at all. I can’t imagine. So explain. Enlighten me. Please.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, not even sure where to begin. ‘It’s God. If there’s a God, he has to be for everybody. How can you ask God to take sides?’

  ‘Nothing wrong with asking him to be on the side of right.’

  His voice was tightening at each turn. And I heard it. And I recognized what it meant. But it was too late to stop.

  ‘Fine. Let’s ask him to be on the side of right. Let’s say, “God bless all the peaceful people of the world.” How about that? That way we’re blessing the victims and not the perpetrators. But this idea that America is always on the side of right is laughable. They don’t hate us because we’re free. They hate us because we armed the Afghani rebels against the Russians and then walked away and let them get slaughtered. And a hundred other bad foreign-policy decisions. I just can’t get behind asking God to take care of us in some kind of exclusive sweetheart deal no matter how we behave.’

  ‘That’s a pretty unpatriotic bunch of sentiments,’ he said.

  ‘And that’s another thing that I don’t get. Patriotism. And that doesn’t mean I hate America. Or even that I don’t like it. I like it fine. But I live in New York City. So why not God Bless New York City? Or state? Plus we also live on planet Earth, but there are no boosters for planet Earth. Why is it just the national boundaries we’re so passionate about?’ I literally couldn’t stop. Even though I could tell I was pissing him off. And he was my ride. ‘I’ll tell you why. Because planet Earth doesn’t have an army. And neither does New York. It’s just a safety move. Buddying up to a power structure to feel less vulnerable.’

  ‘You’re full of shit,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sure you’d feel much safer if I was.’

  I felt the bumpiness of gravel under the wheels, and suddenly realized we were off on the emergency shoulder of the interstate.

  ‘Out,’ he said.

  I sighed.

  I opened the passenger door and stepped out, and he gunned it back out on to the highway before I could even close the door. He swerved sharply back on to the pavement, and corrected, and the veering motion slammed the door for him.

  And then he drove off with my pack.

  ‘Hey!’ I screamed at him. ‘My backpack!’

  I jumped up and down. Waved my arms, hoping he’d catch that in his rear-view mirror. He didn’t.

  I sighed, and began walking west with my thumb out, my back to traffic. Not the most effective way to get a ride.

  ‘No more editorializing,’ I said out loud. ‘Keep your damn feelings to yourself, Russell. Idiot.’

  About a quarter of a mile later, I found my backpack tossed into some weeds by the shoulder of the road.

  Later in my morning of walking and not getting another ride, my cell phone rang.

  It was Kerry.
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br />   ‘You’ll never guess who just called me,’ she said, her voice bouncing between strangely upbeat and dangerously hyper. ‘Not Jeff. Unfortunately. But guess.’

  ‘I have no idea. Tell me.’

  ‘Stan Harbaugh.’

  ‘He’s alive?’

  ‘He’s alive!’

  ‘He got out?’

  ‘No, he never got in. He was late to work. You’ll never believe this. He was just stepping into the elevator. I mean literally. He’d just picked his foot up to step into the elevator, but he hadn’t put it back down again, and the plane hit. And he just ran out again. Along with everybody else. He asked me to give you his cell phone number. Do you have something to write with?’

  ‘Just tell me. I won’t forget.’

  ‘Oh, that’s right. I forgot you don’t forget.’ She read off the number. ‘So, listen. See? Weird things happen. Miracles happen. Nothing is definite, you know?’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘You never know.’

  Her point being that Jeff might still be alive. Despite the fact that he’d called her briefly from the office a few minutes after the first plane hit. Despite the fact that he hadn’t called since.

  ‘I better call Stan,’ I said.

  I was hoping my anxiousness to get off the phone would be interpreted as eagerness to call Stan Harbaugh.

  I was not eager to call Stan Harbaugh.

  I stood right there by the side of the road and punched in the number. One ring. And then a car stopped. So I disconnected the call.

  The woman who stopped for me was probably eighty. Or maybe I’m flattering her. Ninety might’ve been a better guess. She was small, and her spine was bent, and I worried that she could barely see over her own dashboard.

  But I’d been waiting all morning for a ride, and she’d made it this far, so I got in.

  ‘Thanks for stopping,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t usually.’ I noticed a tremor. Her head jerked back and forth. All on its own, it seemed like. ‘But nobody can get around, so I’m trying to help. I can’t believe all this. Can you? Can you believe this really happened?’

  She pulled back on to the highway, and accelerated to about twenty miles under the speed limit.

  Maybe it was a toss-off question, but I didn’t treat it that way. I took it seriously. It was a hard moment in time to take anything less than seriously.

  ‘It feels like a dream,’ I said. ‘I still feel like I dreamed it.’

  ‘I never thought I’d see a thing like this happen in my lifetime. Nothing like this ever happened before.’

  ‘Well, that’s not entirely true.’

  The minute it came out of my mouth, I realized I was editorializing again. Just what I’d promised myself I wouldn’t do.

  ‘How so? When did this ever happen?’

  ‘Never mind. Sorry. Forget I said it.’

  ‘No, really. Go ahead and say. I want to hear what you meant.’

  ‘Well. Terrorism isn’t new. War and violence is nothing new. Look at the Middle East. Look at what happened in Rwanda in ninety-four. Look at—’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I meant here.’

  Of course she did. Of course she meant here. It’s always different when it’s here. To my credit, I didn’t say so out loud.

  I remembered something my mom told me once about Winston Churchill. Or at least, that’s the way she remembered it. Someone was arguing with him about the loss of nearly a million in the Second World War. And Churchill corrected the man and said the death toll had been more like sixty million. The man’s answer? ‘Oh, if you count foreigners.’

  I couldn’t help wondering why this was making everybody else more patriotic, and me less so.

  ‘I guess I should have counted those,’ she said.

  ‘I should’ve kept my mouth shut. I’m sorry.’

  ‘No. Don’t be sorry. You’re right. I should’ve counted those. I have to stop up here and get some gas. I need some more gas.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘I could use a quick rest stop.’

  While running for the gas station men’s room, I pulled up Stan’s number and hit ‘call’.

  He picked up on the first ring.

  ‘Stan?’

  ‘Russell. My God. I’m so glad you called. Kerry told me you might call. I was hoping you’d call. Did you try to call before?’

  ‘Yeah. Sorry. Something came up.’

  I didn’t know what to say next. And I needed to pee. So I just did, with the phone tucked between my shoulder and ear.

  ‘I think it’s just us, Russell. I think the rest of them are gone.’

  ‘Well, we don’t know. Don’t be too quick to say. I didn’t know you were alive until just now.’

  ‘But somebody did,’ he said. ‘I’ve been calling around like crazy, and the rest of them … nobody’s heard from them. At all.’

  A long silence, during which I made my way to the sink to wash my hands.

  I looked at myself in the mirror. My hair was a mess, and I had five o’clock shadow. I hadn’t shaved since the previous morning. My eyes were puffy and red, as though I’d been doing nothing but cry for a whole day. But I hadn’t cried. Or … just for a moment I doubted myself. Maybe I’d cried and I hadn’t even known it. But that was crazy. I’d have known. Right?

  ‘Kerry told me about your mom,’ Stan said into my left ear. ‘I’m really sorry about your mom.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, thinking I wanted badly to wash my face, but not sure how to do it without damaging the phone.

  That’s when I realized I was dangerously disconnected from the emotion of the conversation.

  And another thing that hit me as I stood looking into my own eyes in the filthy bathroom mirror: I really didn’t know Stan Harbaugh. I mean, I’d met him. I’d worked with him. But nothing that went beyond a thirty-second conversation in the elevator. He was a good twenty years older, a senior partner to my junior ad man. Not much in common. But now we were tied together. For ever. Like war brothers. When I was eighty, I’d still be getting Christmas cards from Stan. It was a bond that nothing would ever break.

  It felt weird to be irreversibly bonded to a relative stranger.

  ‘You wanta know the goddamn truth?’ Stan asked.

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  But I didn’t.

  ‘I forgot about the damn meeting. I forgot Sturgis asked us to come in at eight thirty. I didn’t think I was running late, I thought I was early. Even after I ran outside and all. It wasn’t until later that afternoon that it hit me. I was supposed to be in at eight thirty. If Sturgis hadn’t called that early meeting, they’d all still be alive.’

  ‘He did, though.’ What else was I supposed to say? What else could I say? ‘Take down my cell number.’

  ‘I’ve got it now on my phone.’

  ‘Oh. Fine.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Pennsylvania, I think.’

  ‘How are you getting around?’

  ‘On my thumb. It’s all I’ve got.’

  And, in that most benign of conversational moments, Stan Harbaugh broke down and began to sob.

  ‘Why not us, Russell? Why them and not us?’

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ I said, wanting out.

  ‘Do you think we have something important left to do in the world? Do you believe like that?’

  ‘Maybe. I’m not sure. I’ll have to think about it. Look, I have to go. Sorry. My ride is gassing up, and I have to get back there before she goes. She’s old. She might forget about me. She might forget she has all my stuff.’

  ‘Yeah, OK,’ he said, but he sounded devastated to lose me. ‘Call me later, OK?’

  ‘Yeah, we’ll talk,’ I said.

  And I clicked off the phone.

  I knew it would be downright painful to force myself to call him again. But I would. Or he would. Or we both would. In each other’s lives, we were an inevitability. The only two left standing.

  When I got back to t
he car, the old woman had just barely completed the process of authorizing the gas with her credit card. She didn’t look equal to the task of pumping.

  ‘Here, I’ll do that,’ I said, realizing I should have offered sooner. ‘Let me do that for you.’

  ‘Well, that’s very nice. You’re a nice young man.’

  Just for a moment, I wondered. I wondered if that was true.

  Later that evening, just before the sun went down, I got a ride from a middle-aged woman in a Volkswagen van. An old one. A real throwback to an earlier time.

  I should have known, just to look at the van, that I wouldn’t be ejected for lack of patriotism.

  ‘It’s terrible,’ she said, without even bothering to introduce herself, forcing me to tell my story, or making small talk. She had to speak up to be heard over the straining engine. ‘But what’s even more terrible is what we’re about to do back. We’re going to go in and bomb them off the map. Aren’t we?’

  ‘I would guess so. Yes,’ I said. Loudly.

  ‘I know we never will … I know this is idealistic. But I wish we’d just do nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘It would be an example for the world.’

  ‘Amazing,’ I said.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I guess that I met someone to the left of me.’

  ‘You don’t think we should do nothing?’

  I sighed. I was already stunningly tired.

  ‘I’m trying to imagine if I were in charge. Like, if my neighbor threw a fire bomb into my house. And I had to decide what to do. I don’t think I’d do nothing. Would you? I mean, if he was still out there. Probably planning to do it again.’

  She thought that over for a time.

  ‘I wouldn’t bomb his house and kill his entire family.’

  ‘No, neither would I. But I’d call the police.’

  ‘Yeah, but who do you call for this?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I still think there’s the concept of justice. In-between doing nothing and bombing them off the map is justice. We could find who’s responsible and haul them into The Hague and put them on international trial.’