I’m in the lazarette of the motor yacht Prelude on the morning of September 11. The compartment is tight. There’s raw fiberglass against my shoulder, the site of a future itch. A Tralfamadorian would know to go ahead and scratch it. I’m sweaty and hot in that cramped space, and it’s difficult to breathe or even move. I’m loosening the last bolt on the underside of a motorized winch when I hear the boom. I hear it and I feel it. The boat shudders, the fiberglass resonating, a hollow in my chest like standing too close to a tower of speakers at a noisy concert.
Someone’s in trouble, I think. Some jet pilot has just buzzed New York City, racing down the Hudson so low and so fast that a shock wave has been sent out to rattle tall buildings. I have an image from a film in my head, a hotshot pilot buzzing a tower, coffee spilled, a man clutching his tie and cursing. In my mind, there is nothing but exciting things happening out in the world while I work on this stupid winch. My best friend is visiting from out of town. All I want is a day off from work.
I squirm out of the tight space, leaving the ratchet set behind. I plan to come right back. I just want to see what’s going on. Up on the deck, Scott yells from inside the boat, asking me what that was. I tell him a pilot just buzzed the Hudson. Scott shakes and flaps his newspaper over to the next page, looking for something interesting. On the wharf behind Prelude, a crowd gathers. They shield their eyes against the low morning sun. I follow the dozens of gazes high up the North Tower and spot the smoke. That hotshot pilot who buzzed the Hudson is forgotten. Here is something new. The boom and the smoke—these two things are unrelated in my mind.
A fire. An office fire. The crowd swells. Many of these people are just off the ferry from New Jersey, were heading toward that very building—but now they’re not so sure. Many others gawk for the simple newness, for the absurdity of a smoking skyscraper. What is normally a thoroughfare of pedestrian traffic has ground to a halt. On a typical morning, this is a conveyor belt of moving heads, of swinging briefcases and purses, of ties flapping and dresses swirling, expensive shoes and high heels clop-clopping on concrete. Now it is a rumor mill. It is a game of Chinese whispers. A Cessna or some small plane has crashed into the tower. No, it was something bigger.
The windows high above glow amber from the flames trapped inside. The smoke and fire march across the building, spreading. There are sirens in the distance, a noise that is such a steady backdrop to this city that it often goes unheard. But this is different. An odd cacophony. A lot of sirens. A sense of urgency.
But the fires are not urgent. They move at a crawl, and the gray smoke drifts lazily into the cloudless sky, and I can’t imagine that anyone is hurt. They will get away. They will get away. There are sirens coming, and this is just some thing to gawk at.
Montana Wildhack has been on display for as long as she can remember. Trapped and on display for as long as she can remember. She was the first one in school with breasts. She was in sixth grade when her grandma took her to Penney’s to pick out a bra. Her grandma told her that she couldn’t run around like she was, that people were watching. This was right after a family cookout. Montana and her cousins swam in the mud-brown lake. Her uncle Chip showed her how to pitch horseshoes. The next day, after church, her grandma took her shopping. The bra was tight and pinched and was hard to get on and off, but her nipples stopped getting raw from rubbing on her shirts. And like a person abducted by aliens but in complete reverse, Montana appeared suddenly from out of nowhere. She went from unpopular to the complete opposite in the course of a single summer. A flash of hormones, and suddenly a stranger was in their midst.
She was asked to join the cheer squad. She was invited to sleepovers, where every girl in school wanted to brush her hair and try on clothes with her in the bathroom. She caught them watching her in the mirror after PE. People noticed her. Her grades improved, but only in some courses. English with Mr. Mayberry and history with Mr. Thomson, where she wrote in cursive and got large red A-pluses. In math with Mrs. Pickens, where she wrote in numbers, her grades got a little worse. At school dances, the boys lined up for her, giggling, while the same girls who brushed her hair looked on, unsmiling. Life was as good as it would ever get for Montana, for every curse begins with a blessing. This is a truth the Tralfamadorians know, for they see what follows right from the start. Montana had to learn the hard way. Gradually, the way a fire moves.
Her uncle Chip won $60,000 from a scratch-off once. Montana was in eighth grade and remembers the party he threw. Uncle Chip became suddenly popular. Even Montana’s dad, who hated his brother Chip, liked him just fine all of a sudden. And at the party, Uncle Chip took Montana for a ride in his new truck. He gave her a pair of earrings and told her not to lose them, that they weren’t fakes. Then he asked her to thank him with a kiss. Montana remembers his breath tasting like beer and his hand accidentally brushing against her breast. Back at the party, she looked everywhere for her grandma, but Granny had passed away the year before. Uncle Chip would be dead a year later, as any Tralfamadorian could plainly see. Shot himself with his brand-new gun in his brand-new truck, a year’s worth of scratch-offs under the seat and stuck to the mud of his brand-new boots. So it goes.
Breasts were a lottery ticket, Montana saw. One random girl in every school wins that first pair, and at pool parties, the boys laugh and tug at those knotted bows on sunburnt backs, like ribbons on Christmas presents. She can see it now like a Tralfamadorian, how each thing leads to the other. Dating. Obsessed with the boys who are obsessed with her. Ninth grade and not a male teacher on her schedule. Ninth grade a second time with the same results. Dropping out. But life was good. A boy who graduated the year before wanted to see her steady. He showed her the college campus and said they’d get married one day. She drank too much and danced at a party, and someone offered her money to take her shirt off. There was laughter, which eventually vanished, but the money stayed real. The air was cool in that house—so cold her nipples hurt like tiny fists. The money, though, was warm from sweaty palms. This was a thing, getting paid to dance. Montana never knew before.
Everything happens twice in your life. Often, it’s quite more than that. This is a thing Tralfamadorians know and humans ignore. It’s rarely enough to suffer a thing once, the Tralfamadorians like to say. Not when you can suffer it again and again.
I ran away to Charleston, South Carolina, more than once. The first time was to elope. I was nineteen. A girl I loved was leaving to take a job on a boat, and getting married would make sure that we stayed together even while we were apart. On Tralfamadore, they would laugh, knowing what happens next.
Less than a year later, I quit my career as a computer technician, packed what I could into a car, and fled to Charleston, an emotional wreck. A chessboard there saves my life. Fleeing to Charleston saves my life. I am twenty years old and will soon divorce. So it goes.
There is a café on King Street where chess players sit on coffee-bean sacks and move around six-inch wooden soldiers, soldiers we slam down with happy violence. My hurts disappear when I move those soldiers. A stranger is sitting across from me, as strangers do in that place. Names are exchanged. “Scott,” a man says, not looking up from the board. He must be a decade older than me. The woman beside him glances up from her magazine to smile piteously at her boyfriend’s next victim. But Scott is about to save my life. As most things go, he will do this more than once.