After a psychology lecture, Garret asked a classmate out for lunch. The classmate frowned a little. She had been poking Garret in his shoulder and smiling at him all semester. “Hmm,” she said, “I don’t think so.”
Garret went into the park, where the trees were all leafless. Their petrified-gray branches clawed at the air, like rakes. There was a cemetery wind, dry and slow and slabbed as marble. Elephant graveyard, Garret thought. He sat on a bench and called Kristy. He asked if she wanted to see a movie tonight. She had just gotten out of class, but had another one. “I’ll just meet you back at the apartment then,” Garret said. He didn’t want to see a movie anymore. “I have to study in the library anyway.”
“I’ll meet you at the library, then,” Kristy said.
“I’ll just meet you at the apartment. I have to study.”
“I won’t be late this time,” Kristy said. “I’ll just meet you at the library.”
“No; that isn’t it. I just have to study.”
“What isn’t it?” Kristy said.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Kristy said. “Fine then; bye.”
Garret went across the street to the library. There was a hole in the sidewalk the size of a bathtub. Construction was being done, was always being done. It was the journey that mattered, Garret thought woozily, the getting-there part. The mayor, and then the president, had begun saying that. “And where are we going?” the mayor had asked. “When will we get there? What will happen to us once we get there?” He really wanted to know.
A woman with a red bandana stepped in front of Garret and gave him a flyer for an anti-war meeting. It was vague to Garret these days what was happening in the rest of the world. He found it difficult to comprehend how large the world was, how many people there were. He would think of the Middle East, of strife and mortar, then suddenly of Australia, and then New Zealand, giant squid, tuna fish, and then of Japan, all the millions of people in Japan; and he’d get stuck there, on Japan — trying to imagine the life of one Japanese person, unable to, conjuring only an image of wasabi, minty and mounded, against a flag-white background.
Garret saw Kristy coming out of a building across the street. He turned, went behind a pillar, and looked. Kristy was with a taller man who had a tiny head. She laughed and the taller man smiled. They went together into another building.
At the anti-war meeting, they wanted to abolish the words “we,” “us,” and “them.” Some others wanted to abolish the word “I.” They were frustrated. “We this, we that; us this, them that; us vs. them, no wonder things are the way they are.” They wanted semantic unity. They were going to make friends with the terrorists. That was their plan. An older man — a professor? — stood and made the case that the terrorists did not want any new friends, had enough friends already, too many, actually; that what they really wanted was romantic love. He was probably a graduate student. Another man stood and said, “Love is a thing on sale for more money than there exists.” It seemed an inappropriately capitalist thing to say, or else much too cynical, and the man was ignored. Finally, it was settled: whatever happened, they would just make friends. There were sign-up sheets, and then a six-piece jazz-rock band played. The drummer had six cymbals, four of them tiny. People eyed him askance. Was six cymbals, four of them tiny, appropriate for wartime?
Garret walked out into the night, feeling very dry in the mouth, and with a headache.
He stood around for a while, and then called Kristy.
“Kristy’s at her sister’s apartment taking a nap. She’s asleep now. I’m her sister.”
“You’re Kristy’s sister?” Garret said.
“Okay. So Kristy’s sleeping.” She hung up.
—
One weekend they got out of classes and flew down to Florida, to Garret’s mother’s house, for a weeklong vacation.
They went to Red Lobster. Kristy ordered the house salad with crabmeat on top.
“I found out I have arthritis in my hands,” said Garret’s mother. She was taking piano lessons from a young person. Her husband was gone, had found a truer love and was gone, about which she was sometimes jealous, though mostly she felt just sleepy, which she usually interpreted as contentment. She had bought four gas masks, to protect against certain types of terrorism, had wept after she read the instruction manual cover-to-cover, alone, late one night after bathing the dogs.
“Four gas masks,” she said. “I feel so stupid. I mean, why four? Why not five, then, or a thousand?” She started to laugh but then stopped and yawned. Kristy looked vertically down at her crabmeat salad. Garret’s mother smiled at Kristy’s forehead, then asked her son to consider transferring to a school in Florida.
Garret made a noise. He shrugged. He forked at his lobster, which looked mangled and too much like a large insect.
At home, the three of them together tried on the gas masks. They held their faces to the dogs, the two toy poodles, who turned away, went into separate rooms and barked at the walls. They were almost ninety in dog years.
“If I gained thirty pounds,” Kristy said in bed, “would you still be with me?”
For love to work, Garret believed, you had to lie all the time, or you had to never lie at all. “I don’t know,” he said. You had to pick one and then let the other person know which you had picked. You had to be consistent, and sometimes a little stupid. “I can’t tell the future,” Garret said. “Obviously. Can you?”
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.