A Girl's Guide to Missiles

by Karen Piper

  “I know, I know,” he said, but we got across.

  A year later, he was stopped at JFK International Airport and sent back to Heathrow after we had spent a glorious summer hiking the Cornish footpath. My parents and sister even met us there to see my dad’s Cornish past, including the hotel where he was boarded during the war. In it, there were pictures on the walls of soldiers who had stayed there, but not of my dad. My mom even paid for us all to go to Sweden after Cornwall, though not for Keith. “I’ll pay for him,” I insisted. “I’m not going without my husband.” It was on the trip that my dad wandered out into the streets of London. He returned, while Keith did not.

  “I forgot to take off my ring,” he said sheepishly when Border Control detained him at Heathrow. They rushed me through as he stayed behind, growing smaller and harder to reach. “Don’t worry, I’ll sort it out and be back in no time,” his small voice shouted from his shrinking face. If the world had ended, there would be no borders.

  It was only the third and fourth times that I’d had to admit there was a problem, that maybe he did not want an American visa. Or an American wife. The third time it happened, his friend had to drive four hours south from Nelson, Canada, to pick him up at the Canadian– U.S. border in a barely running VW van in the middle of the night. It had all started with syringes, which I was carrying in my luggage for my allergy shots. When the U.S. border guards found those, they proceeded to tear the car apart while drilling me about my alleged heroin connections in a fluorescent-lighted room with a government gray metal desk like at home. The whole thing took around four hours.

  Outside, two Canadian border guards, who had been watching the ruckus from a distance, ran across the empty two-lane highway from their post to ask if we needed help. I politely said no, wondering what they could do. Were they suggesting I claim asylum in Canada? It was late, dark, forested, and miles from anywhere. Then I realized those nice guards were probably offering to take us in for the night. Maybe we should just have run, dropping our bags and heading back across the border for a nice cup of tea in that Canadian border post.

  Finally, while still rifling through the car, the U.S. bully-guards found a bottle of Flonase nasal spray and acted as if it were a brick of cocaine. One shouted out, “Hey, where’s the prescription for this?”

  “I didn’t bring it with me,” I shouted back, cold and tired.

  He huffed over, held the bottle in my face, and said, “I can arrest you for this.” I started to cry, wondering what they did to brown people at the border.

  Next, they found another gold mine: Keith’s wedding ring. It seems his visa was still marked “Student.” His ring was in the glove compartment. Of course, Keith actually was a student in fisheries and wildlife, but the problem was that you could not be both a student and a spouse in the United States. Being a spouse invalidates being a student, or at least the visa, it seems. America was too confusing for me.

  The air smelled like forests as I climbed into his Ford F-250 and watched him disappear into the darkness in my rearview mirror. I wanted to be on the other side with him, even as angry at him as I was.

  Keith’s fourth and final border trouble came in the U.S. mail. I once thought “being deported” meant the sheriff came and dragged you away, putting you on a plane to who-knows-where. Now I know the mailman can do it. The letter, which looked so flimsy and frail, simply said he had to go. We both knew by then that a sheriff or a SWAT team was somewhere behind that letter, waiting to jump out at us.

  Strangely, Keith never seemed to mind his deportations or barred reentries, which began to make me worry. When he finally got his spousal visa, our fate was already sealed in a cycle of doubt that only the end could stop. It was too late. As I was busy adjusting to the problem of getting tenure and all the fear and work that it implies, Keith was becoming a global exile, the opposite of a “citizen of the world.” He did not know where he belonged; maybe getting kicked out solidified his self-image.

  “I’ll move wherever you want,” I once said, “but only if you find a job there first. I don’t want to quit my job unless we have something else.”

  “Why don’t you find something else? Just quit and move with me. You can find work wherever we choose to live,” he replied. As my brain spiraled into a hole of incomprehension, he quietly added, “Or we can both go on welfare.”

  Canadians think differently from Americans.

  “You want me to quit a tenure-track job to go on welfare?” I said.

  * * *

  —

  One day, Keith said we should go to his grandfather’s cabin at 100 Mile House for Christmas break. It was one room with no plumbing, electricity, or oven. Named for being one hundred miles from anywhere, 100 Mile House is actually a postal stop, not a town. There is also a 200 Mile House. I pictured that long drive back to Missouri alone again and hesitated. “I think it would be good for us to get away,” Keith said. “We can use it for free as long as we want.”

  “I’m not moving there,” I said. “I don’t care if it’s free.” I had been there once, a spot deep in the woods where Keith’s grandfather’s hand-hewn cabin had sat closed up for years, collecting dust, bugs, and mouse droppings.

  “It doesn’t even have plumbing,” I argued. “We can’t live there.”

  “No, it does. Remember the toilet in the corner?” I vaguely pictured a toilet bowl covered in dirt with no lid or doors around it. It looked like a prison cell toilet. “It’s stopped up, but Grandpa told me how to fix it. There’s an outlet in the lake that can be easily unplugged. It’s marked by a plastic milk jug.”

  “But it’s December. What if the lake is frozen?” His insistence was starting to seem bizarre. Was he finally leaving me? Keith’s face was unreadable.

  “I always do everything you want me to do . . .” He raised his voice. I knew this was turning into the argument we always had. “Why won’t you do this one thing for me?”

  “There’s no plumbing!” Clearly, I was not being unreasonable. Or was I? We were descending into an argument that was by then too painful to go through again, so we focused on the toilet instead. It was unfixable, but we had to go. If we did not go, it could never be fixed. That was the question of our marriage.

  “Are you coming with me or not?” I did not answer.

  I knew Keith was angry because I had turned down a job offer in Toronto. There had been a blizzard when I visited, the teaching load was too heavy, and I thought Keith would leave me anyway by then. I did not want to be stuck in what I imagined would be a permanent blizzard, knowing no one, and having to teach all the time. All I wanted to do, as ever, was sit in a room of my own and read books. There was too much uncertainty and cold in Canada, besides a salary cut, which sent my mind into a tailspin until finally I said, “No.”

  He could not forgive me for that. It was my act of treason.

  Yet now that it seemed he was really leaving, I was tempted to simply quit my job and throw in the towel. Then would we finally be fixed or were we simply unfixable? One hundred miles from anywhere in a cold cabin, alone. Keith off chasing the bears. Not coming home. For years, I agonized over these kinds of questions. In the end, I chose myself. I chose my job. Because despite my whirlwind of marital despair, I was actually starting to like it.

  There was no way around the toilet then. Keith began to pace while pantomiming how easy it would be to fix it. “All I have to do is cut a hole in the ice, dive in, and find the plastic bottle . . .” His voice was getting louder, his arms raised in a dive. “My grandfather has done it a million times. If I pull on it, it will unstop the toilet. It’s a very simple mechanical fix.”

  “I can’t go,” I said firmly.

  “Well, I’m going,” he said, equally firm.

  After he left, all I could do was wait by the phone, hoping he was not dead and that he could find a way to let me know. But the only person who called was my mo
ther.

  “What’s up, Mom?” I asked a bit too curtly.

  “Oh, nothing important,” she replied. “I just thought you should know that Christine is pregnant again.”

  “No!” I said, even somehow knowing that she would.

  Eventually, I got an email asking for a divorce. As we had begun, we ended in cyberspace.

  Touché.

  After that email, Keith would not pick up the phone or respond to my panicked questions online. For ten years. I simply got the divorce papers in the mail with an ultimatum to sign. “I’ll take the house,” he wrote on a Post-it note, “if you do not sign. The settlement arrangement is fair.”

  For years, I kept having this recurrent dream in which Keith was reaching for something underwater that I could not see, something he was trying to untangle from a fishing line. Slowly, he realized that the fishing line was my hair, and the more he struggled, the more his entire body was entangled and unable to move. Slowly, he grew still as algae swirled around him and his blank eyes watched a carp swimming by. In my dream, I do not know if he is alive or dead in the end.

  In real life, it was only my dad who died, not him.

  It was after the Twin Towers fell.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Falling Buildings

  When the World Trade Center was hit, my first thought was that it was a missile. I could not imagine a plane, but no one knew what to think at first. It was like when people get lost in the woods. They will bend reality, trying to fit it into where they think they are before accepting they are lost. Someone might insist that the sun sets in the east rather than admit being lost. We could fit anything into those first few seconds after the plane hit. A multitude of nonsensical thoughts emerged simultaneously in people’s minds for those first few seconds. For me, it was that a missile had gone off course.

  It was only when I saw the plane on TV that I accepted the facts. Others, to this day, refuse to accept them, insisting it was an intentional demolition, or a missile, or the many other things that people say when their minds have not yet adapted to that feeling of being lost. The sun is still setting in the east for them.

  It happened in the morning as I was getting ready to go to class. My friend called and told me to turn on the TV, as so many people did that morning. Phones were ringing all over the world like that. Keith was already gone. On ABC, the World Trade Center was burning from an apparent hole in the center. I did not have time to think. I was late for class. I turned off the TV to get dressed, not knowing the whole world had stopped.

  On the way to class, I turned on the radio as Peter Jennings said, “We now have . . . what do we have? It may be that something fell off the building. We don’t know, to be perfectly honest.” He cut to Good Morning America’s Don Dahler, four blocks from the towers, to figure out what was going on.

  Don said calmly, as if he were in shock, “The entire building has just collapsed. . . . It folded down on itself and it is not there anymore. It has completely collapsed.”

  “The whole side has collapsed?”

  “The whole building has collapsed,” Don said as they were both adapting in their minds before admitting they were lost. One, two, three seconds . . .

  “The whole building has collapsed? My God.”

  Two buildings burning. One gone.

  All those people, I kept thinking. How many people are in there? The news said fifty thousand. It took seconds for the buildings to fall.

  One, two, three, four . . .

  Fifty thousand, I kept thinking. Crumbling, falling, one by one. Slowly, that number started going down since the workday had not yet started. It ended up at under three thousand: 2,753. I knew there would be more, the victims of wars to come, as well as the victims who breathed in the dust of dead bodies and buildings that day.

  In class, I told the handful of students who arrived that the World Trade Center had been bombed “or something.” I still did not know it was a plane. Even after I did, I had a hard time switching to “attacked” and kept saying “when the World Trade Center was bombed.” No one knew how to talk about this new strange thing, how to comprehend what was happening. Then I said, “Go home.”

  People wandered the streets of New York City in a daze, covered in the dust of dead bodies. Vice President Dick Cheney went down into a bunker to prepare for nuclear war and later said he had wanted to ensure the “continuity of government” after nuclear war. At the same time, President George W. Bush was finishing the book about the goat that he had been reading to schoolchildren that morning. For some reason, he insisted on finishing that book even after hearing about the attack. He was lost. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld went missing around the same time. He was found wandering around the Pentagon lawn, trying to help survivors of the plane that had crashed there. He was lost. He had forgotten that he was supposed to save the country, not pull lives from the rubble. We all waited for more planes to fall from the sky. We all prepared to run. For a few hours, no one seemed to be in charge.

  Later that day, I wandered the streets of Columbia in a daze, feeling the need to be outside and look at the sky. A local reporter stopped me to ask how I felt. I replied, “I’m scared, because I know we are going to bomb someone, and I don’t know who it will be.” I was on the news that night. I wondered if other people felt that way, or if only I was in terror of the war to come, already mourning for the victims.

  No one knew who had hijacked those planes. Fifteen out of the nineteen hijackers turned out to be Saudi and the rest Egyptian, Lebanese, and Emirati. In their last nights before blowing up the world for Allah, they had been acting like a bunch of sailors: watching porn, inviting call girls to their rooms, and hanging out in strip clubs.

  My dad did not care for violence on TV by then. It would make him start groaning, stand up to pace, and sometimes walk right out the door. My mom would have to change the channel to keep him at home. When the World Trade Center was hit, he began to rock back and forth while moaning, but my mom would not turn it off then. She needed to know what had happened. She needed to know if we were safe or if a war was starting.

  Then we invaded Afghanistan. Afghanistan? I thought. No one seemed to know where it was, but everyone wanted to attack it. These were bad years for my dad, who was deep in the “wandering” stage of Alzheimer’s, when they want to walk. No one really knows why. Some say it is because they have lost a sense of time and space and want to search for landmarks in an attempt to orient themselves. Others say it is because they have regressed to their childhood and are searching for something from their past.

  My dad would walk to the bank and demand the teller give him milk, thinking he was at the supermarket. He would go to church thinking he was supposed to be in a committee meeting on the base. Sometimes he would simply walk out into the desert until the police found him and pulled him in. Since everyone in town knew my father, they would simply return him to my mother like a coat left behind at a party. An old man in the desert. “Oh, there’s Earl again,” they would say, and call my mom. One time my mom got a phone call at four a.m. from a policewoman who said she was having coffee with him at Denny’s. Eventually, my mom put alarms on all the doors. The alarm would go off and she would run out in the street and drag him back inside, over and over again.

  After the Twin Towers fell, people began to ask, “Why do they hate us?” But I think they meant that rhetorically. Their real question was, “How could anyone hate us?” We believed we were essentially good and were horrified to realize that others disagreed. It takes a very long time, sometimes a lifetime, to admit the things you do not know. To ask for help. To adapt to being lost.

  Before he died, my dad wandered like those people covered in ash on September 11, not knowing where they were going, not knowing what to do. Around them fell mementos of their loved ones—a passport here, a sheaf of papers there. A body. A life.

  And then my
dad fell like the towers, crumpled up, and disintegrated.

  * * *

  —

  At the funeral, an American flag was draped over the bottom half of my dad’s coffin, which was open on top and lined with satin inside. My father was displayed in that same gold-and-turquoise room at church where ACE had shown all its movies, like A Thief in the Night, about the woman who wakes up to find everyone has left for the Rapture. That one had terrified me once, but now I did not believe in the Rapture, or in Heaven or Hell, or God. I did not believe my father had gone anywhere in particular. All that mattered to me was making it through the funeral without falling apart. I did not want that coffin to be open right then and thought I might run up and slam the lid. Later, I hoped it would never close.

  I was conscious mostly of my sister’s dress next to mine. Her velvety green skirt looked soft and brilliant in the sunshine streaming through the ceiling’s stained-glass windows. I was conscious only of where her skirt touched mine and where it did not. I was thankful, even if she was not, that God had not allowed her to get close to Heaven again, that she and her baby had both come out fine. My sister folded her hands in her lap the way my father used to do. I realized I was doing the same. The three of us—my mother, sister, and me—held our bodies in the same stiff, tearless position, heads down, as if to show we had all agreed to the funeral’s formality. We decided to be my dad so as not to scream, since he could not; with our hands and bodies, we were him.

  If I focused on my sister’s dress, I could stop thinking about my father’s body for a few seconds here and there. I especially did not want to think about his thumb, which looked as though it had not been embalmed properly. It was thin and flat as a piece of paper, with the nail hanging on weirdly. It looked as if it had not been filled up properly with the embalming liquid. It looked like those cartoon characters that get run over by steamrollers and end up flattened on the road but still alive. In the cartoons, it is funny precisely because they are still alive, but this was not funny. All my dad’s fingers were normal, but he barely had a thumb. It was the first thing I noticed.