A few minutes passed, and then Kristy got up, called the airline place, called a cab, and flew to New York. The next day, though, she flew back, and the rest of the week in Florida was very calm and sunny. They went canoeing, saw fish the size of legs through algae-gauzy water. Garret’s mother made a cake. “To Garret and Kristy, with Love: Long and Happy Lives,” said the cake. They watched a lot of TV, the three of them on the sofa. Terrorism, polls showed, was now believed to be the largest threat to human safety, ahead of cancer, heart disease, suburban gangs, piranhas, and swimming on a full stomach.
Back in Brooklyn, the new fear was that the terrorists could live inside walls, were maybe already living inside walls — cells of them, entire families, with flashlights, plotting and training, rappelling down the pipes.
Garret began to say things like, “Without coffee I am nothing,” and “Terrorism Schmerrorism Berrorism Schlerorrism,” which he said mostly for the torpidity of it, the easy mindlessness of it. He felt that the bones of his jaw and skull were growing, felt the fatty pout of his lips, the discomfort of bigger bones behind his mouth and face. He stopped going to classes, and applied for jobs in Chinatown. He tried not to think. He tried just to love. Anything there was, he tried just to love. It didn’t work that way, though. It just didn’t. Love, after all, was not sold in bundles, by the pound. Love was not ill-lit, enervated, Chinatown asparagus.
Though if love was an animal, Garret knew, it would probably be the Loch Ness Monster. If it didn’t exist, that didn’t matter. People made models of it, put it in the water, and took photos. The hoax of it was good enough. The idea of it. Though some people feared it, wished it would just go away, had their lives insured against being eaten alive by it.
Late one night, Kristy got up to use the bathroom.
“What’s this on it,” Garret said. “Kristy, why are you slamming the door?” He had just had a dream where he walked to a deli and ordered a bagel with cream cheese, but instead received a bagel with something else on it; he couldn’t tell what — and then the sound of a door closing.
“I had to use the bathroom,” Kristy said.
“Please don’t slam the door,” Garret said. “Be more considerate.” He shifted his head. His hair against the pillow made a loud, prolonged noise — a noise that, before it stopped, seemed as if it might go on forever.
They rarely made love anymore, and only in the mornings, when one of them would wake up, knead against the other, and then start grabbing in that direction. Their heads would be floury and egg-beaten, operating on a kind of toasted, bakery lust, and they’d have sex like that — faces turned away, mouths closed and puffy and hard, eyes scrunched shut.
Afterwards, Garret would feel masturbatory and boneless.
He attended another anti-war meeting. There was another war that was going to happen soon. People stood up and said things. One person said, “People are going to seek happiness. People need to understand that other people are going to do what they think will make them happiest. So people need to just back off, let this happen.” She had a ring in her nose, like a bull. The ring was a pale piece of bone. “Revolution is from the inside out,” she said. “It’s over,” someone else said, “the world is done for, doomed — and I say oh well, oh, well,” then stood and walked briskly out of the room, jumping to slap the top of the doorway on the way out. There was a long moment of nothing, and then a heavy-set, kind-faced man sitting adjacent Garret said loudly, at the ground, “Fuck war, fuck, war.” People gathered around and patted his back. Some of them, confused and tired, or else just lazy, patted Garret’s back, patted anyone’s back. There were, again, sign up sheets against the wall. Garret signed up for three different things. He walked out into the city. Drunk people were moving slantly across the sidewalks and streets, though it was only Wednesday.
Garret thought that he might go back to Florida. Maybe get a job on a golf course. He once had a friend who drove one of those armored carts around, vacuuming up golf balls on golf ranges. Maybe he’d do that.
“Come home,” Garret’s mother said on the phone. “You can take a semester off. Kristy can too. Both of you can come live here and be safe.” She said that the terrorists were planning to take hostage the entire island of Manhattan. She had heard on talk radio. They were going to attach outboard motors to Manhattan and drive it like a barge into the Atlantic Ocean. No one knew what the terrorists would do after that, though. Maybe have a cruise around the world, a caller said. Low-key, with virgin pina coladas. Maybe start their own country, another caller said, to legitimize and their terrorism, make it humanitarian and moral and—
He was cut off there.
Kristy had an appointment made to remove her wisdom teeth. She asked Garret to accompany her, but Garret said he had a class that morning. He would meet her after, though.
Kristy’s face became lumpy and hard after the operation. “I feel like a monster,” she said. They went into an ice cream store, and she began to weep. Garret thought about getting up to hug her, but then just put a hand on her head, across the table. “You look fine,” he said. “It won’t last, anyway.”
Kristy went to her sister’s place and Garret went back to Brooklyn.
They didn’t talk for a week. Then Garret called her. She said she hadn’t called because her face was swollen. She didn’t want Garret to see. Garret said he didn’t care. They agreed to meet for a movie that night at nine. She said that things would change from now on. She wouldn’t be late anymore. They’d go ice-skating.
She came running up for the movie at 8:59. Her face was red and blue on one side; it looked a little bludgeoned, or else diseased.
Garret had the tickets ready and they went in. They watched the trailers and then Kristy reached onto Garret’s lap and held his hand. Garret leaned over and whispered, “Come outside a minute, I have to tell you something.”
Outside, Kristy smiled at him, and then Garret wasn’t sure, but he said it anyway: “If a terrorist said to you that if you were late he’d kill you and your family, would you be one minute early? You wouldn’t; you’d be half the fucking day early.” He had rehearsed in his head.
“What the hell are you saying, Garret?” said Kristy. “Are you kidding me? Don’t do this. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
But there were things that you had to worry about, Garret knew, that you had to care about. If he didn’t say anything, then she would be 20 minutes late, then an hour, then she wouldn’t show up at all. Or she’d show up and throw a pie in his face. You had to keep your life under control. Preempt it. You had to let it know that you were not happy. Though maybe you didn’t. Maybe it was that you should let things go, be tolerant and easy-going and not ever worry. Ease yourself towards acceptance and quietude, towards, what though — death? No; that didn’t seem right. You were supposed to resist death.
“Yeah I do,” Garret said. “I’m talking about you shouldn’t be late all the time. It’s inconsiderate.”
“Will you realize what you’re saying right now? I was early this time.”
“I know, but you ran here,” Garret said. “You could have easily been late.”
“So what? I was early.”
They stood there for a long time. All the moody emptinesses inside of them swelled and joined, and then ensconced them, like bubbles, and there, inside, they floated — the qualmish, smoked-out bodies of them, stale and still and upside-down. People around them drifted in and out of cars, into stores, across streets and over sidewalks.