the first day of fall

all the news channels, every channel really, is broadcasting people reading all of the names of people who died on september 11th, because today is the fifth anniversary. i'm up at 8 because its my first day of work, and all i want to know is how warm it is outside, whether or not i should wear a little blazer, or maybe a cardigan. i have neither of these things, not in the proper sense, and i am beginning to get worried about my clothes in general, and if any of them are clean or dignified enough to wear in an office, where people are making important decisions that affect the lives of the homeless, where people are actually earning a living. not even cnn is showing the news. just a person, a person who lost someone i'm assuming, reading aloud the first, middle and last names of a group of people who died. then another person gets up to the poidum, the bluest sky behind her, so many flags everywhere- flying from poles, beaming from peoples dignified lapels- and reads aloud another group. it was a sad day, i remember september 11th, but everything that has come since has been so much sadder that its difficult for me, at 8 am when im naked and nervous, to muster the sentiment that everyone else seems to leak. i put on a tivoed episode of i love lucy, and forget to turn it off when i leave the apartment.
i get off early from work. it being a not-for -profit there isnt anywhere for me to sit yet, and for the time being i just need to get acquainted with the services, the initiatives, the funders. its 2 o clock and the most beautiful day since the last most beautiful day- cloudless, penetrating, breezy. i call sophia on my long walk home and tell her im coming to her apartment, since she doesnt have class until evening.
on my way there, past the fluttering tablecloths and sunglassed tourists, i listen to my messages. one from tim, about a benefit we're supposed to attend tonight, one from my mother, and one from my best friend, who still lives where we grew up in alabama. her voice, tentative and deliberate, is clearly a prelude to bad news. she does this, with bad news, she tells me that everythings fine, she doesnt want to upset me, but she thought i should know, and then in her factual, almost plodding tone she reveals to me the details of whatever tragedy she has just learned about. someone's parent is sick, someone had to go to the hospital. today she says, "i just thought i should let you know, and i wish i didnt have to tell you this on your answering machine, that clint jones killed himself yesterday. i dont really know the details, alice called and told me, and we're going to the funeral tomorrow. so call me when you get this."
clint jones had a huge amount of dark curly hair atop his head, so much so that his otherwise gynmastic looking body was overwhlemed by it, mocked by it. he never wore a back-pack, just carried his books in his hands as he feverishly power walked through the poorly lit halls of our high school, he was a year older than we were, and for an awkward year we took piano lessons back to back from the same woman, a thirty year old single mother who smelled perpetually of crumbs. if i got there early i would have to sit on her lazy boy and wait for them to finish, listening to him say remarks that i assumed were precocious, evidence of an effort to fit into a sterotypical outcast. he could be normal if he wanted to, we would say, as if the overwhelming desire to be alone and separate, not normal, wasnt enough to justify his behavior. my best friend, who prefaces bad news, used to have a crush on him. on a science fair field trip to atlanta in middle school they were inseparable; they listened to the smashing pumpkins and nine inch nails on the roof of our Days Inn off of the 400 highway, and when we returned to school they never hung out again.
im in front of sophia's apartment, and im not sure how i should be feeling but im ashamed to admit im feeling nothing. i call her back and we say, how strange, how sad. on september 10th. the day he just couldnt take it anymore, she says.
sophia and i smoke pot on her balcony and laugh about the weekend. we laugh so hard that tears are streaming down my face, and i let myself cry a little bit too. we walk to a tiny french restaurant on waverly and eat out in the garden, the light hits the translucent green canopy of leaves above us and we eat cheese and bread and olives and baby tomatoes. i tell her about clint jones, and we talk about september 11th-- where we were the day it happened, how neither one of us, though at the time we had never met, understood the gravity of it until we saw other peoples reactions. sophia, going to high school in san diego at the time, had never heard of the world trade centers. i, in my second week of college classes, was woken by my hysterical roommate and watched as the second tower fell. it was graceful almost, like when you were a child and would grab onto a side of a giant sheet, and everyone would raise their arms to inflate it, and then drop their arms to watch it drift down, so many tiny motions that make up one unfathomable one. i called my mother and wondered how it could have happened, how could it be real. but then i went to class, and found i was the only one there besides the teacher who said i should take time to grieve, to really absorb whats happened. on my way back to my dorm i ran into a girl i had met at orientation, her body lurched forward like she was desparate for help, her blue eyes wide and searching. "can you believe it?" she said. "can you believe it?"
sophia and i wander around, buy two cupcakes each and eat them in washington square park. there are groups of families walking around, their hands held behind their backs, wearing tiny white ribbons. it was death, it wasnt any better or more heroic or any worse or more tragic than any other death. and thinking that made me feel unpatriotic, cold. someone i love dying, unexpectedly, or not unexpectedly, is the horror i steel myself against. it is the skeleton of my dreams, the archetecture of my thoughts. the thought of losing someone that way is excrutiating, as is the thought of losing someone because of a selfish curtain of a war. the horror of loss is just as real as it was on september 11th as it was the day a man covered his dead mother with a blanket on a sweletering day in new orleans because no one came for her. its just as sad, just as mind numbingly sad, to lose someone because of a terrorist attack as it is to lose someone because of an anuerysm, or kidney failure, or cause of death unknown. but i saw then, that family walking past with their hands behind their back, their white ribbons, they werent the ones who claimed it wasnt. they know death is death is death, and the fact that they heard his name read on national television doesnt help a goddamned thing.
"do you think we should have been less happy today?' sophia asks.
the wind surges and tuck my legs beneath me on the wooden bench. i think about work, and how i guess i just need to buy some new clothes.
i look at sophia and shake my head.
"i dont think so either."
and she takes the empty cupcake wrapper, turns it inside out, and starts licking whats left over.

bow and arrow

he is gone this weekend, but not for good. it will be for good soon, in a matter of months that seem eternal and unreal, a point in the future marked with a red tack. he is gone this weekend to chicago and you are pretending like this is it, like hes never coming back. you are trying it on, to see just how bad it will be, just how lonely and amputated you will feel, but whats making you feel even worse is that you know there is no way to know. there is no way to gague the hollowness you'll feel when its the real thing, when youve survived the dress rehersal and then youre placed on stage in front of piercing eyes, forgetting your lines and sweating your makeup off. its a holiday weekend so many of your other friends are out of town too, leaving you to scramble and clutch to people you havent spoken to in weeks, months. you cobble together a couple of them who have never met before, and go to the weekly dance party at the museum in queens. you woke up early that morning because your curtain has fallen in the night, exposing the snobby garish sunlight, causing your sheets to stick to your sweaty skin. he isnt beside you, you realize. and even though hes coming back on monday, even though you still have months of dinners and making love and getting drunk and watching cartoons, there will be a day when he has to move back to his home, when his visa will expire and you will be left with the relics, left with the bones of your relationship, left to peice and glue them together like an archeologist reconstructing an extinct thing. or you wont, you will leave them there under years of dust and rubble, and you will never wonder what the leftover parts look like.
you take the E with anne to 23rd street, and you make small talk about books and mutual friends. you dont think about last weekend, or the one before that, when you rode the same train with them, a flask on gin in both of your pockets and your leg draped over his. you and anne buy beer tickets and wander around until you meet up with brian, and slowly the patio fills up with people in shorts and bathingsuits and summer dresses and chunky jewlery from exotic places. you run into some of his friends and are so relieved to have a sliver of him, to be reminded that he exists, that hes still yours. one of his friends leaves to go buy vodka and by the time he is back you are feeling less sharp and more like the blurry colors you become when youre with him. you dance and laugh and everyones taking pictures and youre thinking, this isnt so bad. im having fun, anne and brian are getting along, we look just like everyone else here.
you go into the musuem to go to the bathroom and stop to look into a room of art. there are still photographs of people vomiting, still born children, a carved up thanksgiving turkey. there is a smaller room with a video being projected onto one of the blank walls and you walk into it. it is soundless and there is only one other couple watching it. at first you cant tell if it is a video or a projected image, because the people arent moving at all. in front of a totally white background there is a woman, dressed in a long sleeved black shirt tucked into a floor length skirt, holding the curved part of a bow right below the tip of the arrow. across from her is a man in a white shirt tucked into a pair of dark pants, holding the other side of the bow with one hand. both of them are leaning back, being supported by the weight of the other. if the man were to let go of the bow, the arrow would puncture the softest, middle part of the woman's throat. they are looking at each other with no real expression on their faces, and the only movement is the sight of their chests rising and falling, and the almost imperceptible quiver of their muscles. the couple watching it walks out of the room, their arms around each other, and you stay there, waiting to see what happens. minutes pass and their muscles begin to shake more, though neither one of them moves their feet or their arms. neither one of them looks for an instant away from the other.
you consider crying. it would be one of those cries that has no reason, one of those drawn out sobs that is for every wrong done against you, against every person; for everybody thats dreaded losing someone. tears fill your eyes as you stay there watching the video, and even though you havent decided yet whether you are going to, you know exactly what kind of cry it would be. because you didnt speak for the first 4 years of your life and everyone thought you were autistic, because of the film you watched in class last week about mentally ill people in prisions. because of solitary confinement and war. because of your teddy bear, raggedy and worn, that you found face down on the floor yesterday. because he is leaving, and he may never be back, and this may be the end and you have no idea, none at all, if youre going to be able to survive it or not. if youre going to be able to mourn and move on, or not.
you blink back the tears and decide that you arent going to cry, not that kind of cry or even the kind that has only one reason. the woman and the man are still being supported by each other-- her by the fear of being killed, and him, by the fear of knowing he can.
not a tear has escaped and you walk out of the small white room, knowing it doesnt matter if the tape rolls forever or if the arrow kills her swiftly. either way, anne and brian have probably run out of things to say, and your beer cup is empty.

the view

I. my father rode a hot air balloon
they woke up early, my father in his burgandy flannel robe, shifting around the house in slippers too small for his feet, and my brother, tiny eyed and hollow. they had to drive out to where the balloon took off, my mother and i were staying at home. it was so early that it was dark outside. no one spoke as my mom fried eggs and cooked grits, the standard breakfast before a long day, but i needed to know more. how high would they go? was the balloon attached to the earth with a rope? or it just floated? how would they get back down?
i used to ask my mother where the sky ended and heaven began. she thought it was a great question but now it seems so obvious to me, so typical of a child. the answer is so easy. you cant get there by plane, or rocketship. if i had been told, then, that heaven wasnt a place. if i had been told then.
they had to drive the buick with its plush seats to montgomery, to a field somewhere in montgomery. there would be a hot air balloon waiting for them, and they would sit in a bucket that hung from it, and someone would steer it like a car or a boat.
how does it get up there? what if it pops?
hot air rises. it wont.
my mother went back to bed and i climbed in with her, next to her perfumed powdered warmth, next to her threadbare gown that i would put on decades later. i would put it on, alone, in front of my full length mirror, and look at the way my breasts hung, look at my nipples through the pale flowered cotton.

II. he tried to keep him awake with questions
our across the street neighbor, who lived with another man in a big faded brick house with the driveway so steep it scabbed the bumper of their car every time they pulled in, fell off of a ladder one saturday afternoon as he was painting their flowerboxes. my mother and i weren't at home. maybe we were at the western on highlands with her grocery list written in half upper case and half lower case letters. maybe we were shopping at stein-mart, buying clothes with red slashes through the brand name on the tag.
when we got home the buick was gone and my father didnt come home for hours. when he did there was blood on his t-shirt, the one that says "est es besser en den bahamas," the one that we bleached and that i still have. the one that i put my face in after he died, and inhaled, and said, just dont forget what it smells like. you owe him that much. like the musty inside of his dresser drawers, like weekends and old cars. the one that, even after being washed, even after accumulating whatever smell it is that i have, still smells exactly as it did.
he sat on the wicker stool in our kitchen and told us that "jim," the neighbor, fell off the ladder, and came across the street and rang the bell. not to either of his next door neighbors, my father said specifically. but across the street. and by the time he had answered the door jim was unconscious on the veiny marble floor of our front porch.
i shook him, he came to. i asked him the basics, whats your name, what year is it, where do you live. there was blood coming from his head but i didnt know exactly where, so i put him in the car and we drove to st.vincents.
is he ok? my mother asked.
i think so. mike, you know the man who lives with him, came to the hospital when i finally got ahold of him. jim remembered his car phone number, but he didnt even know who the president was.
my dad shook his head and gave a little laugh, as if he had known jim for years, as if that was so typical of jim.
his tone of voice was the same as when my mother and i were in savanah on a girl scout trip and our cat, who had been missing for 9 days, came back. if i hadn't been there, my father would say. and my mother and i would look at each other and bite the inside corner of our lips because we both knew, the cat would have waited.

III. in wedding pictures everyone looks perfect
my brother and i are sitting in my car with the windows rolled down, in the driveway of his new house in san francisco. my headlights are pointed straight at the garage door, and it is the week before his wedding. he says he is tired of talking about it, but he never wants to talk about the wedding, so i am telling him about my boyfriend, who i am afraid i am going to be with for the rest of my life. i am twenty years old, and i cant imagine ever being with anyone else, so i assume that means he is it. forever.
what if i only have sex with one person? what if i dont go on another date?
the only thing i know for sure, he says to me without turning his head from the blanked out garage door, is that you will have many romances.
really? but what about him? i dont want to lose him.
he shrugs. you dont have to lose him, but there will be so many hims.
you know what i found the other day when we were unpacking? he says.
what?
a video from the day that me and dad went on that hot air balloon ride. i was like, fifteen and i thought it was such a dumb idea. but this video...you have to see it.
we tiptoe upstairs to not wake diane, who does yoga every day and goes to bed early, and sit on the floor in front of his tv. the video is already in the VCR, and when he presses play the screen is instantly full of green. the only noise is the wind, but the volume is turned up as loud as it can go.
will it wake her, i say.
he shrugs again. the noise is the best part. listen.
we sit and watch the lush sparkling treetops, some of them turning orange with the coming autumn, the birds flying below, what seems like the whole of alabama spread spectacularly in front of them. and the wind. we watch for at least half an hour, we watch our father turn the camera on his son, who gives two sarcastic thumbs up.
this is my favorite part, he whispers.
and as the camera is sweeping over the landscape, over the endless reaching infinite view, our fathers voice, though its a whisper, pierces the wind: man. man oh man.
my brother is crying. i had totally forgotten thats what he used to say. how could i have forgotten.
and we watch the rest of it, the trees and the wind, on the floor of his new house a week before his wedding.