I need that.
GROUND ZERO
Jasper
When my parents finally made it home, twelve days after 9/11, my mother grabbed hold of me and wouldn’t let go. After all the nights of thinking they were going to come through the door without warning, I ended up meeting them at the airport. I stood in the sea of sons and daughters, craned my neck over the fathers and mothers, witnessed the procession of jet-weary travelers wheeling their carts from baggage claim. For once, the car-service drivers with their wipe-off name cards were in the minority. Family was here to see family return.
I had forgotten how small my mother was. Somehow, over the phone lines, I started seeing her again like I had when I was a kid. Had you asked me if I could fit in her lap, I would have said yes, of course. But now her head fell under my chin as she hugged me and hugged me and hugged me. Then she let go, and my father offered his hand. There was something misty in his expression, and even if he couldn’t bring himself to embrace me in public, I was sure that he was glad that my mother had.
I wanted to pause us there, that faint triangle of bodies at the foot of an escalator. Because I knew it was inevitable that once we left that spot, one of us would say something stupid, and we would be annoyed with each other all over again.
They’d flown into Newark, so we had a long cab ride ahead of us. My mother asked me how the city was doing, as if it were a dying relative, and I asked how my grandmother was doing, and found out she wasn’t going to die quite as soon as we thought. There wasn’t much for me to tell them that I hadn’t said in my mother’s daily phone calls—there weren’t many lengths of the censored version left to explore. I didn’t tell them how, knowing that they were coming home the next day, I’d gone with two school friends to Splash the previous night, which ended up being a bad, bad idea. Splash was a tacky tourist gay-gay go-go bar on the best of nights, but on this particular night it was particularly gruesome. Some guys were sputtering around in a somber daze, like they’d just found out that p*rn wasn’t the cure for cancer. I wanted to slap them for bringing us all down. But then there were the other guys, the ones whose heads were full of helium, who were prancing and dancing and romancing like this was the Best Week Ever, and they were having the Best Time Ever, and I wanted to slap them even more, because it didn’t seem to be human to be having such fun. One of the guys hit on me—swooped right in, high on the drug of his choice, and he was like, “Hey, what’s your name?” When I wasn’t forthcoming with that particular piece of information, he followed up with the immortal “I love Asian men.” And I was all, “What the f**k is your problem?” and he came back with, “Hey, man, I was just trying to have a good time.” I hated him at that moment—deeply—and part of that hate was raw envy. I wanted to be that oblivious. And sure, I drank enough that you would’ve thought I’d have gotten there, but the thing was, I never really drank to make myself happy. I only drank to match my sadness.
None of this was a story I wanted to tell my parents. So I let them give me the update on all of my Korean relatives. The narrative only stopped when we rounded a curve on the Pulaski Skyway and the Manhattan skyline suddenly came into view. My father saw it first, and without a word, he started to cry. A few one-at-a-time tears down his cheeks, quickly blotted away. My mother gasped, held her hand over her mouth. The smoke was gone. The fires were out. So what they were reacting to was the absence, the space. Because no matter how many times you saw it on TV, it was much more real when you looked out the window and saw it, just like you’d looked out the window so many times before and saw them there.
“Oh,” my mother said. “Oh.”
She held my father’s hand, squeezed it, and he squeezed back.
I wanted to ask the cabdriver if this happened every time he hit this spot. If he was used to it now. If you ever got used to it.
It wasn’t until my mother had let go of my father’s hand that she reached for mine. As if she knew the three of us holding hands would be too much. As if we’d never be able to look each other in the eye after that.
I had seen the Twin Towers my whole life. But my parents had come here just before they were built. They had seen them rise. I wondered if that made a difference.
We went through the Holland Tunnel, then cut across on Canal Street to get to the Manhattan Bridge. Canal Street seemed to have returned to normal, with all the bargain stores selling knockoff purses and one-dollar batteries. I think this was the second shock to my parents—that things could have already resumed. They expected everything to have been altered. I didn’t know how to explain to them that even if the stores were open and people were back on the street, something had shifted. We saw each other differently. I looked out of the cab window now at these strangers in a different way than I had looked out of the cab window at strangers before. I saw the g*y boys at Splash a little differently. I saw the people on the subway ride home differently. Maybe it was just me who had changed, but I didn’t think it was that. I thought it was everyone.
“I wish we had been here,” my mother said, her voice reduced to a whisper.
I looked to my father, to see if he would nod, if he would agree. But he just stared out the window as we crossed the bridge, silently looking downtown, the latest in a long line of mourners.
The house was spotless. Like a Martha Stewart–sponsored archaeologist, I had managed to excavate the rooms, restoring them to what they once had been, before I’d laid my layers of insomniac sediment on top of them. Even my own room was clean, the bed made, the papers I had gathered on 9/11 safely collected under a paperweight on my desk. It had to look like their home when they came back, not my home.
I only had two more days before I would be going back to school. The next morning, my father left for work before I got up. Because of everything that had happened, I strangely imagined him putting off the office for my last day home, even though I had no idea what we would have actually done with that time. Would he have gone school shopping with me and my mother? Would he have taken us out to lunch? Asked us if we wanted to see a movie? It was hard to picture, and even harder to picture wanting, but I still resented his cereal bowl, waiting in the sink for my mother to clean it. I resented that it probably hadn’t occurred to him to stay.
My mother and I retraced last year’s pre-college shopping, even though I already had most of what I needed. Shopping had always been something we could do together, much easier than sitting across a table and talking. Every aisle we walked down, there seemed to be at least three different things she said she could buy me. I wanted to tell her that there was no need to pay me off for leaving me alone on 9/11, no need to buy me things so I’d remember her when I was away. I love you more than that, I wanted to say, but there was no way to say it, because that wasn’t the kind of thing my family said. It was all understood—or maybe it wasn’t understood at all. There was no way to know.
All it took was three hours of shopping—of her insisting I get new sheets, of her asking if I wanted to get a haircut, of her telling me I needed to get “some good shirts” (the implication being that I had plenty of “bad shirts”)—for me to be thoroughly exasperated. But the perverse thing was: I loved it. Because I realized that this had been one of the things I’d missed—this everyday feeling of having a family.
At lunch, my mother caught me looking at her.
“What?” she asked, touching her hair as if I was about to tell her it was out of place.
“I’m just glad you’re back,” I said.
She started to tear up.
“Aw, Mom,” I said.
She wiped her eyes with a tissue.
“I’m glad I’m back, too,” she said. “I just wish you were here longer.”
I honestly couldn’t imagine being around much longer. My college was notoriously one of the last to go back, so most of the people I knew had already gone back, once the roads and flyways were deemed safe again. Even the stores were acting like I was running late, displacing the back-to-school items for Halloween displays. (My mother had, in fact, asked if I wanted to get my costume now.)
I don’t think it hit me until later that afternoon. My mother was napping off the time-zone shift and I was starting to pack up my bad shirts. I thought about turning on the news, and suddenly I wasn’t thinking about it in terms of leaving for school—I was thinking of it in terms of leaving the city. And that felt wrong.
It nagged at me through dinner. My father, who had not napped and had found the usual incompetence at the office when he returned, was in a grumpy mood. My mother was trying to compensate for it. And I was paralyzed because all I wanted to talk about was what had happened in the days since 9/11, but I couldn’t really talk about it with them, because they hadn’t been here. And I realized that it would only be worse back at school, where I’d be surrounded by people who hadn’t been here, who wouldn’t understand. Or even if they had been here, like Amanda, they wouldn’t understand what I’d felt, what I’d been through. The emptiness was returning, and nobody around me had the words to fill it.
I made it through dinner, but barely. I made excuses about having to pack, and I was released to my room.
Packing didn’t really take long, since I’d left a lot of things in storage up at school. I wanted to go out, but not in a Splash sense. I felt the urge to wander, to walk the streets all night, to show up back on my doorstep an hour before my train was going to leave. I was caught in a fit of restlessness, but unlike most fits of restlessness, this one had a direction. I was denying it, but there was definitely a direction. I just didn’t know if I had the courage to follow the arrows.
I waited until my parents had said good night—my father with a nod, my mother with a kiss. I waited until their light was out and the house was quiet. Then I grabbed my keys, left a note, and took the subway into Manhattan, getting off at City Hall and walking west. The streets were fairly empty; Wall Street was closed for the night. But as I got closer, there were more people.
Ground Zero was lit like a movie set. These gigantic spotlights were covering it all as people worked around the clock to sift through the debris. They were no longer looking for survivors. Now they were looking for clues—clues to what happened, clues to who was in there. DNA from the dust. Confirmation of what we already knew.
There was a fence up, and NYPD officers everywhere. There were tourists, people with cameras, snapping away. I wanted to tell them to stop. I wanted to tell them this wasn’t an attraction. They were like spectators at an execution. I didn’t care how far they’d come. There was no way a New Yorker would take pictures of this.
The New Yorkers were quiet. Some in clusters, some alone. We hung around the parameters, helpless. We knew we wouldn’t find what we were missing here. We would only find something that was missing more.
There were still shards of the towers’ exterior jagging from the ground, broken shell pieces, walls for nothing. I stared at the biggest piece and tried to picture the towers, tried to see how far back I could remember them. And it was like in order to do that, I had to become a kid again, because that’s the World Trade Center I saw, the one that a seven-year-old would see when he stood at the base and looked up, those endless metal-stripe walls reaching for the sky, the top of the building impossible to see. I remembered waiting on line in the lobby. I remembered the elevator ride making my ears pop. I remembered a family birthday we had at Windows on the World, and how the windows were so narrow. I remembered searching for my house from the Observation Deck.