The manager stood by the booth. “None of you have money?” he said. He was extremely tall and was staring down at Colin. “I believe that. I’m not self-righteous. Listen,” he said. He stared at Colin without blinking. “Okay. Listen. ‘From anyone who takes away your coat, do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you, and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.’ Listen; just keep listening. ‘Students of Buddha should not take pleasure in being honored, but should practice detachment …’ ” He continued on like that.
Colin’s eyes were very dry. He was staring back at the manager, wide-eyed, and when he finally blinked, both his contact lenses crinkled and fell out, onto his cheeks. He brushed them quickly off his face.
The manager stopped talking and affected a sudden, neutral expression. He stared at Colin’s contact lenses, which were on the table.
“Do you need something for those?” the manager said slowly. “Yeah. I think you need alcohol solution to clean them, now that they’re dirty.”
“It’s good to not wear them sometimes, for a change,” Maura said. “Once a year … week.”
They were all looking at the contact lenses, which were squirming a little, slowly unfolding.
The old woman was weeping and coughing very quietly.
Colin brushed at the contact lenses until they fell off the table. He was blushing hard and was sweating a little in some places. He rested his hands in his lap, and felt them there — light as gloves, gentle and dead as birds.
The manager took from his pocket a colorful wad of Monopoly money. He stuffed that quickly back in his pocket, then took a five-dollar bill from another pocket. “Here,” he said. He set it on the table, looked at it, flattened it out. “That’s five … real dollars.” He smiled and looked very happy. He smiled less after a while, then renewed his smile, then left.
“People can be so nice,” Maura said. She was looking at the woman. “Maybe you shouldn’t eat that freezing-cold … you’re shivering. You’re hyperventilating.”
The woman moved the McFlurry into the dark area below the jacket and the weeping noise stopped.
Maura climbed over the table and held the woman. She set the side of her head lightly against the woman’s back and closed her eyes. “I’ve wanted to ask about your friend Dana,” she said after a while. It was snowing very hard outside; snow was flying against the glass then vanishing, quiet and rescued as the tiny ghosts of baby doves. Everything else outside was a lucid and excited black. “What do I want to know?” Maura said. “I don’t know. Something.” She began to hum loudly.
Colin had been thinking about the week after September 11th, had been thinking about that for a long time — but wasn’t anymore. He wasn’t thinking anything anymore. He was the effect of some inception. There was the first thing, and then so on, all the rest being effect, and there was nothing Colin could do about that. If he was going to feel this way, then he was going to feel this way. Feelings were a part of the effect too. The effect was everything, and forever. It couldn’t be changed or gotten out of.
But Colin wasn’t thinking or feeling any of this, really.
It was all just there, in him — what he’d think or feel if he were to. It was a leaf, waiting for him. His heart was a leaf. A white leaf, inside a gigantic noise.
September 11th, that Tuesday, Colin had called Dana’s room and left a message. He called again the next day and left another. It was the second week of college and Colin didn’t know anyone. He spent that week lying awake in his room, listening to music, not eating barely anything. Mostly just thinking about Dana. Waiting for her call.
By Friday, Colin had convinced himself that Dana hadn’t called because she had left the city; a lot of people had — his roommate had. Though, really, he wasn’t sure, as he’d been thinking about when they last hung out. It had been different than the times before. They hadn’t had fun really — not nearly as much as at first — and hadn’t made plans. But then maybe she had just left the city.
It wasn’t until a few months later — after Dana met her boyfriend — that Colin found out she had been across Washington Square Park all that week; she hadn’t left, hadn’t called.
But that was later.
On Friday, Colin could still feel a little less lonely thinking about Dana.
That night they were showing movies for free at Union Square, and Colin went. There were many homeless people, all of them alone. No one wanted to sit by a homeless person — with their puffy, Godless coats; their animal largeness — but then every seat filled, and some people had to. Colin was a little dazed, watching this, and had stopped, for a time, feeling sorry for himself, but for everyone else — everything. The movie was very independent and very sad. Outside, the streets were closed to cars. People walked on them. Missing-person flyers were taped over ads and poles. It was very quiet without any cars. Colin felt vast and detailless and disembodied; it was the same tired and endless feeling everywhere, he felt, inside of him and out — in the stung and ashen air, the buildings tall and pale as apparitions, the strange and lowered sky. Colin didn’t want to go back to his room. He walked around for a very long time, looking down at the sidewalks and streets, and thought of the things he and Dana might say to each other if she were with him. And every once in a while he would catch himself smiling and laughing a little, and it was those moments right after — as, having lapsed into fantasy, there was a correction, a moment of nothing and then a loose and sudden rush, back into the real world in a trick of escape, as if to some new place of possibilities — that he felt at once, and with clarity, most exhilarated, appreciative, disappointed, and accepting.
Nine, Ten
People got a bit careless that year. Band-aids were forgone, small wounds allowed to go a little out of control — to infect a bit. Jobs were quit. People woke early-evening or mid-afternoon, fisted ice cream bars, wandered from their homes — only a little bit depressed — and walked diagonally through parking lots. They felt no longer in the midst of things, but in the misty aftermath of things, the quaint and narcotic haze of what comes after. A haze in which nothing, they knew, could ever fully, truly, happen. Anything there was could only yearn for itself, at a distance, behind barricades, could only long for the real self of itself. The core of things — of love and life, of any simple feeling or thought — could no longer be experienced center-on, could no longer be thought of or felt directly, but only in trying, in tics and glimpses, in ways holographic and fleeing.
And so people stayed inside mostly. Some disappeared. Others called up their local papers, phoned in their own deaths and, next day, read their own obituaries with a strange, hollow sort of longing, a real but feeble passion for their alternate, dead selves. They sat nights in bathtubs, whistling, blow-drying their hair—taking that risk. They began exploring their own houses. Moving things around and touching stuff, as they had begun to sense that there was something with them, unseen and poignant, something slightly alive and, they suspected, relevant, inside the walls or behind the furniture, a thing cloaked and shadowy that approached, in angles, and then vanished—their own lives, they came to realize. It was their own lives, living with them, playing games, tag and hide-and-seek, and — having hid somewhere good, somewhere unfindable, years ago probably — stubborn, wanting to be found, needing that resolution, but just rotting there, then, in whatever godforsaken hiding spot, like some mean, oversweet piece of fruit, spurned, finally, to a crisp — an apple chip.