by Gae Polisner
fruit falling like polka-dot rain.
A rumble of thunder,
loud enough to rattle things…)
I bolt upright and walk to the window
(A cherrywood casket under a blue sky…)
A red velvet curtain comes down.
“Uncle Matt.”
His head bobs up when I open the bathroom door.
This is the worst part, seeing him like this, wiping his ass. I do it fast, pull up his sweats, and hoist him back in his chair.
I wash my hands and his with a warm soapy washcloth, noticing the bottles on the counter.
“Hey, Uncle Matt, are you supposed to take any of these?” There must be ten different kinds of painkillers, anti-inflammatories, and muscle relaxants, but I know some of them have been here for months. I remember Mom saying one of the medications is to prevent clotting or something, so he doesn’t get an embolism from sitting.
“… Jus … four … Advih is … guh for … now.”
There’s a plastic cup on the sink with a straw. I help him take them and wheel him back to the living room.
The long-haired boys
watch me.
“Hanson. MMMBop,” it reads above them.
I tap the bottle through the flannel,
run my fingers along
the feathery edge of the wings that hang
from the back of the desk chair.
(Words slip in, echoing and distant:
embôité,
attitude devant…)
I pull out the chair, and sit,
(… tombé … piques…)
wait for them to pass.
“So, I have to tell you something,” I say, once I have Uncle Matt situated in the living room. “You want the TV on?”
“Yeah. Buh … fay’ing … win-oh … kay?” It takes me a second to decipher: a request to turn him to see out the window. I reluctantly wheel him around to face the thick plumes of brown smoke that stream up over lower Manhattan.
A vacuuming sound comes from the back of his throat, his breath catching at the sight.
“Yeah, it’s really bad,” I say. “Way worse than it looks on the news. It felt like I was in some Die Hard movie or Air Force One when I was running across the bridge. Speaking of which,” I add quietly, “on my way across, I saw something and, well, I didn’t realize what it was. Not at first, but then I went back and, uh, I sort of found this girl.”
He makes another noise, and his neck twitches as if he’s trying to turn his head. But he can’t, which, at this moment, is better for me. It’s easier to talk if I don’t have to look him in the face.
“I don’t know who she is, or what she was doing, but there was no way to turn back. So I brought her here. She’s, like, my age. I couldn’t leave her there alone.”
He doesn’t say anything, so I babble the rest of the story rapid-fire, going back to this morning, Mrs. Bright’s classroom, the first plane hitting. To how we thought it was something minor—a car backfiring, or maybe a gunshot, at worst. How, when we realized it was a plane, we still thought it was only an accident with a small plane.
“Until the second plane hit,” I say, “and then we realized. We knew. In some of the other classrooms, the kids … they actually saw it fly in. And, after that, there was an announcement, and they sent us all back to homeroom, and we were evacuated. When the south tower went down, our whole freaking building shook.”
It’s weird to recap the story, staring at the aftermath out our window. At least I’m home safe. I hope safe. Homeroom seems like forever ago.
“I swear, Uncle Matt, I think they were worried the whole city was going to blow … Anyway, one of the teachers took us—the few of us from Brooklyn—to the bridge. Everyone else went uptown instead. But I lost everyone once we got on the bridge.”
Uncle Matt sort of nods. Encouraged, I keep going. “When I reached the pillars, I thought I saw … something…” I leave out the wings, and thinking the girl was a bird, which seems dumb now. “And so I went back. And there she was, all crouched down. She was a mess and no one was helping her, so I brought her here…” I trail off, also leaving out that she didn’t want to come, and how she was leaning out over the edge.
“She was covered in ash, Uncle Matt. I’m pretty sure she must have been at the towers. Anyway, she’s in Kerri’s room now, showered and resting. She seems okay, but I’m not sure what I should do with her. I guess I can take her down to the precinct on Gold Street.”
“You … don … go … ou … yeh. You nee call … Mih-sing Per … suhs…” he says.
“I can try, but I won’t get through.”
“Try … la-yer.”
“Okay,” I say. “I will. Besides—” I pause for a minute, trying to figure out how to phrase this last part. “I’m not sure exactly what to tell them, Uncle Matt. I don’t know her name. And she doesn’t, either. I don’t think she knows who she is.”
In the desk drawer:
pens, markers,
hair ribbons.
A diary:
PROPERTY OF KERRI ANNE DONAHUE.
I touch the small plastic lock.
It doesn’t require a real key.
I wait for Kyle to return with water,
the bottle still squeezed in my hand.
I leave Uncle Matt in the living room and go to my room to lie down. I know I have shit to do, but I just need a minute to rest. I am suddenly completely wiped out. But when I try to close my eyes, they pop open again, a thousand worries bouncing in my brain.
I pull out my cell phone and hold it over my head. No new messages. But now I realize why I didn’t hear calls coming in before. Idiot. My phone is still set on silent from school.
“Mr. Donohue, if a tree falls in the forest, but no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?”
I rectify that, hoping more messages might come through, but they don’t, so I toss it on my night table and grab my backpack, fishing out the small white paperback I shoved in there with all my other stuff this morning when we fled from Mrs. Bright’s classroom.
Salinger’s Nine Stories. We were discussing one of the stories when the first plane hit. Mrs. Bright says all of his stories are like Zen koans.
I thumb through pages, reading the titles to distract myself: “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut.” “To Esme, With Love and Squalor.” All the ones we’ve read so far are weird. The Bananafish one, for example, which takes place after World War II.
It’s about this guy named Seymour who’s on vacation in Florida with his wife. His wife is shallow and self-absorbed, only talking about her nails and clothes, all while Seymour is having some sort of nervous breakdown.
Before the story starts, Seymour has left the hotel room and gone out to the beach, where he meets this little girl named Sybil who creepily flirts with him. They go for a swim, and Seymour tells her how it’s a perfect day to catch bananafish, which he says are a type of tragic fish because they eat bananas until they’re too fat to swim out through the holes in the coral caves. So, they get stuck there, and starve and die.
Instead of the girl telling Seymour that there are no such things as bananafish, she says she’s seen them, too. Then she leaves, and Seymour goes back to his hotel room and shoots himself in the head.
Mrs. Bright says the story is a metaphor about war and materialism, a Zen koan about people’s inability to communicate.
I shut the book and sit up.
Here’s a Zen koan: If there’s a girl down the hall and I ignore her, is it like I never met her and brought her home?
FUGUE
I slip the diary out.
Prying, but whatever.
None of it means anything to me.
Turn to the first page:
IF YOU ARE NOT ME, DO NOT READ THIS.
Flip to the next:
HEY, WHY ARE YOU READING?!?!!!
I can’t help it and
smile
(… promise me you’l
l smile, Papillon…).
Ms. Lansing says to set goals.
Goal #1: By the time I turn 15,
be a television star like Jennifer Aniston.
On a hit TV show like Friends.
Her name is signed in curlicue script underneath:
The dot over the i is a heart.
The washer has stopped again. I pull out the girl’s stuff, hold her shirt to my nose, and inhale deeply. Much better. Nothing but fresh, soapy clean.
Shit. I never brought her the glass of water.
Then again, I guess she could’ve walked to the kitchen herself.
The diary falls open,
a photograph wedged in its center:
The boy, Kyle, with
a young girl.
Her face is his, but with freckles,
her hair way redder than his.
They’re in front of a waterfall.
The girl is nine or ten,
in a pink bikini top and denim cutoffs.
She sits on his shoulders.
He’s laughing.
Her hands are covering his eyes.
BASH BISH FALLS, July 2000,
she’s written,
BEST BROTHER IN. THE. WORLD.
I shut the book,
close my eyes.
The shadows creep in.
My eyes shift to the top of the dryer where her bra is. I reach out and run my finger along the still-damp edge.
None of your business, asshole.
I turn the dryer on, then flip the tag anyway and squint at the faded label.
CALVIN KLEIN BARE. 32B.
I walk toward the stage again,
to where the burgundy curtain hangs.
Heavy,
as if in a trance.
As if sleepwalking.
I bring a glass of water to Kerri’s room. But when I knock and open the door, the girl is sleeping, so I leave it on the desk and head back to the kitchen to make lunch. I’m not hungry, but we need to eat.
I put three mini frozen pizzas in the toaster oven, set the timer, and sit at the table, willing the phone to ring.
It doesn’t. The only sounds in our apartment are the drone of the television and the quiet click, click, click of the toaster marking down time.
From the living room, I hear a reporter say that U.S. airspace is clear of all flights going in and out of the country. And that a bomb threat has shut down LAX.
Why hasn’t Mom called again?
I go back to my room and pick up the Salinger book, but I’m way too distracted to read. Instead, I turn on my computer. When it boots up, I open the web browser and type amnesia into a search engine.
Anterograde.
Retrograde.
Transient.
Turns out, there is no shortage of types of amnesia.
Hysterical or “fugue,” that last one in quotes. “Fugue.”
Fugue amnesia is a rare phenomenon wherein patients forget not only their past, but their very identity. A person could wake up and suddenly not have any sense at all of who they are—even if they look in the mirror, they do not recognize their own reflection. The details in their wallet—driver’s license, credit cards, IDs—are all meaningless to a person experiencing a fugue state.
I scroll down to the part labeled triggers:
This type of amnesia is usually triggered by an event that the person’s mind is unable to cope with properly. In most cases the memory either slowly or suddenly comes back within a few days, although the memory of the trigger event may never return completely.
I glance at my clock. It’s almost one, and I still haven’t heard back from Dad. In the kitchen, the timer goes off.
The curtain lifts and music plays,
faint at first
then swelling,
louder and louder.
On stage,
the lake shimmers.
Cattails and swamp grasses grow tall and wild all around.
As I move closer, the music grows sharper:
Danse de fançailles.
Allegro, tempo guisto.
You appear on that far shore.
and I press through the muck-matted grasses
to get to you.
But my boots sink in,
weighted and sticking,
so that my legs can’t move forward,
and the shore where you stand
recedes farther
and farther
away.
I cup my hand to my eyes,
squint to try to see you,
but an alarm sounds,
and the air fills with the smell
of
burnt things.
The pizza is black.
I set it on broil instead of bake.
I chuck it in the garbage, put three new pieces in, and try Dad’s cell phone to no avail. Then I stare at the phone, telepathically willing Mom to call. To let me know they made it out of LAX.
Tired of that, I go back to the bathroom. The dryer has a minute left, so I sit on the toilet and wait.
I hear it again: something clinking inside its drum. A definite pinging sound. I open the door and reach in, pull out the girl’s things, shaking and folding each piece. Shirt, pants, sweatshirt, underwear.
I unfold the underwear and slip them beneath the pants with her bra, my ears growing warm just touching them.
With everything out, I feel around inside the drum and quickly find the source of the noise: a small key chain in the corner. Not a key chain, exactly, but a clear plastic card sleeve tied to pink ribbon, knotted to a small enamel charm. The charm is shaped like a ballet slipper. The toe shoe kind with the crisscross ribbons that go up the leg, like my sister is learning how to use.
The card sleeve looks like what you might keep a monthly train ticket in, or a photo ID. I keep my school ID in my wallet, but some of the kids at Stuyvesant wear theirs like that, tied around their necks or to their backpacks. I search for more loose things in the dryer but come up empty-handed.
I shake her pants from the top of the pile and feel around, thinking maybe something is still in one of the many pockets, but I don’t find anything there, either.
I slip the sleeve with the charm into my pocket, refold the pants, and walk to Kerri’s room, leaving the pile of clothes next to her boots.
Confused,
I sit up.
My eyes dart about the room.
Brooklyn Heights.
The boy.
The bridge.
Before that?
Nothing.
Edges that fade into
blackness.
But wait:
On the desk, a glass of water.
He must have left it there for me.
I drink it down fast
trying to quench my endless thirst,
then stop,
remembering now,
and saving the last few sips for
the pills.
The timer dings, and I fork out the three pizzas, cutting Uncle Matt’s into fish food–sized bites. Setting his aside to cool, I put the girl’s piece on a plate and carry it to Kerri’s room.
Shake the pills into my palm:
not a lot, but enough.
My gaze shifts to the window,
to the desk and the drawer
with the diary.
BEST BROTHER IN. THE. WORLD.
I take a deep breath,
bring my hand to my mouth
glancing once more at the plaid pajama pants,
the blue T-shirt,
with the yellow planet on the front.
The boy has been nice,
trying,
but I can’t—
Everything feels too precarious.
One wrong move,
and the eye floaters will rush in like a deluge.
I’m the dork in the middle of a disaster, listening at my sister’s door with a plate of toaster pizza in my hand. Her pile of clothes sits untouched next to the boots.
In the living room, the news drones on about more bomb threats, and a third building that’s gone down somewhere near the Twin Towers. About the president being moved to a bunker, about more hits that might be coming soon. About the rising number of estimated dead.
And, suddenly, I’m glad the girl is here. Someone else, at least, who can walk and talk and hang out with me, while I wait for the phone to ring.
I knock gently. No answer.
Screw it. The pizza will get cold.
I knock again, and open the door.
II
NOT A PLANET
The girl lies facedown, dead to the world.
Whatever has happened to her, I’m not waking her for a stupid piece of pizza.
I walk out, gently closing the door.
Maybe when she gets up, she’ll remember everything. We’ll figure out, then, how to get her home.
The door opens and
closes.
I sit up,
open my fist,
stare at the sweaty pills stuck to my palm.
I scrape them back into the bottle,
glancing down again at the shirt he gave me,
at the yellow planet.
The planet is not a planet but a lemon.
Bright and happy-faced,
smiling up at me
like a
promise.
Tuesday, Late Afternoon Into Evening, 9.11.01
ACT OF TERROR
Dad doesn’t call, yet another building near the tower goes down, and, as far as I know, the girl sleeps through the rest of the afternoon. Uncle Matt, too, finally dozes off in his chair.
I sit on the couch and stare at the TV. They say the president is calling it an act of terror.
I tell myself Mom is off at some hotel and can’t get through in the chaos, and Dad is okay, too, just too busy rescuing people. He’ll call me as soon as he can. I tell myself over and over, but I’m having a hard time believing it. If he were okay, wouldn’t he have checked in by now?
Then again, the reporter had said something about the cell towers there being down. Still, it’s hard not to let my brain run away with fear, not to imagine him dead and buried beneath the burning rubble of the buildings.
