The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

  Irina shrugged. “Jude can have it. That award sure didn’t seem to make her very happy. And Lawrence was so devastated when it wasn’t me that—I almost felt as if I’d won. Even at the reception, he couldn’t stop singing my praises to other people. I tried to remind him that it was déclassé to brag about your own partner, but he was so proud that he wouldn’t listen. It hit me over the head last night—that I already had exactly what I’ve always wanted: a smart, funny, loyal, handsome man.”

  When they were parting, Tatyana cocked her head. “I still don’t get it. You just missed out on this huge prize. But you’re glowing!” She seemed annoyed.

  IRINA’S REVELATORY GRATITUDE FOR what she had in the first place was sadly short-lived. For if she ordinarily took for granted the architecture of her personal life, even more so did she take for granted the literal architecture of the city from which she hailed. Granted, history lends itself to the conclusion that pause is rare, that any respite is as merciful as it’s bound to be brief, that the very nature of existence is unstable and it is therefore best to be prepared for just about any catastrophe lurking right around the corner on any arbitrary morning. Thus the only real surprise should be those single sunny awakenings on which there is no surprise. Yet in defiance of all we know in theory, it remains common psychic practice to assume that world affairs will keep bumbling along the way they’ve been doing, much as from day to day Galileo himself would have persistently perceived the spinning globe on which we hurtle as standing still.

  Thus what Irina would later rehearse about that Tuesday morning with weak room-service coffee in the Hotel Esplanade was its regularness. The before by its nature never feels like before. Irina was out of bed for forty-five minutes while September 11, 2001, was still just another date on the calendar, and had no way of knowing how precious they were.

  Accordingly, she would squander them on feeling peeved that Lawrence had insisted on getting up so early, when she’d have liked to sleep in. The unexpected exhilaration of Sunday night had subsided, and it was beginning to sink in that she’d lost the Lewis Carroll. There would be no headlong rush to buy her book at Barnes & Noble, no embossed medallions feverishly applied to remaining stock, no “Lewis Carroll winner” in succeeding flap-copy bios. It was unlikely that she’d have a chance at such an imprimatur again, and abruptly there seemed little to look forward to. No wonder Ramsey had been so frustrated with his status as perpetual also-ran. Americans in particular made such a stark distinction between winning and losing, no matter how close you got—didn’t that judge say that she missed by a hair?—that runner-up and nobody blurred to the same thing.

  Lawrence’s despair on her account had peaked, and was no longer quite so moving. At their dinner at Fiorello’s last night, she had enjoyed his reprise on Jude’s crummy book (which, having skimmed it, he now decried as a Bible for anorexics), along with a riff on what a pill the woman was, how appalling was her acceptance speech (his imitation was hilarious), and how insane Ramsey must be to ask for a second dose. But this morning Lawrence was once more buried in his laptop; his mind had clearly moved on to the presentation he’d to give tomorrow about Chechnya. Uneager to see her mother that night, she worried that Raisa would only take the news of Ramsey’s engagement as a challenge; her head swam with the nightmare of her mother rocking up with loads of luggage in Borough, insisting they get that lovely snooker player round for dinner. Her own brush with Ramsey at the Pierre vibrated in Irina’s head like a plucked guitar string. Despite her epiphany about having in Lawrence everything she’d always wanted, it pained her that her parallel-universe fancy man, The Chap She Almost Kissed, was getting remarried. The Esplanade was dumpier than the Pierre, with none of the shoe-shine sponges and aromatherapy face-wash frippery that Irina would never use but compulsively slipped into her carry-on, and it made her feel like a chump to pay five dollars for a small bottled water.

  “Huh,” Lawrence grunted over the screen, as she gazed out at West End Avenue feeling sorry for herself. “AOL says a plane ran into the World Trade Center.”

  “Well, that sounds careless,” said Irina irritably. “I know those pilots in private planes sometimes get off course, but Jesus, the Trade Center is bigger than a breadbox. You’d think maybe he’d turn wheel before busting into it. The sky is clear as crystal, too!”

  Over Irina’s objections—she hated the yammer of television in the morning; it made her feel dirty—Mr. Newshound had to see it for himself. He mumbled something about finding a local station, but the building was smoking on CNN.

  “Oh my God, that hole is huge!” said Irina in consternation, shoving her coffee aside and walking closer to the screen. “Lawrence, that could take years to fix. What a pain in the arse! It’s the kind of repair that will have Wall Street covered in that depressing scaffolding over sidewalks forever—”

  “Looks too big to be a private plane. I wonder if it was a commercial…? That’s hard to believe. What pilot could be such a moron?”

  “That fire looks terrible. If people were already at work—!”

  “Shsh! I want to hear this.”

  But at the very moment that Lawrence shushed her, the commentator stopped talking. The camera veered to the other tower, and though this same footage would replay all day, and all week, and sporadically through as many years to come as years remained with video technology, there was a first time, and it was different.

  “Lawrence, what’s happening?” Irina shrieked. “Two freak accidents in the same morning, the coincidence is impossible!”

  “It’s not a coincidence,” said Lawrence levelly. “It’s terrorism.”

  The most proximate “terrorists” to London were those IRA goons who ran about hugger-mugger in balaclavas, and frankly looked ridiculous. Though she had never said so outright, since the sentiment might sound hurtful, hitherto Lawrence’s professional specialty had always about it an almost comical little-boy quality.

  “But who would do such a thing?” she screeched. “This is insane! What’s the point?”

  The CNN commentators and “experts” hastily contacted down the line would soon cast a wide net regarding the identity of the culprits, from white supremacists to Saddam Hussein. But Lawrence didn’t hesitate. “It’s Osama bin Laden.”

  “Oh, who’s that?” She was furious.

  “He was linked to the first Trade Center bombing, the USS Cole, and the embassy bombings in East Africa. You haven’t been paying attention.”

  Under ordinary circumstances, Irina might have taken offense. But she did not. He was right. She hadn’t been paying attention.

  She didn’t even mind when he told her to shut up. She shut up. He turned up the volume. Two other planes were reported hijacked. One of them plowed into the Pentagon. The fourth crashed in Pennsylvania. For the first time in history, every single airplane in the United States was ordered to ground. Irina and Lawrence remained standing. All of her interjections were obvious: This is awful. It was already apparent that for some time to come whatever you said would sound dumb. But the events of that morning had already grown so eclipsing, and in comparison the two of them and what they said and thought so small, that it was almost as if they didn’t exist at all. Thus Irina had no opportunity to rue the fact that she had ever wasted a moment’s anguish on some trinket called the Lewis Carroll Medal, because as bodies began to drop from upper floors, the award, her entire career in illustration, her frustrations with her sexually competitive mother, and her seditious attraction to Ramsey Acton withered so rapidly that these once monumental matters never even had the chance to seem puny. They simply vanished.

  Much as it’s worth recalling that for whole years of World War II no one knew whether Hitler might win, it would soon behoove Americans to remember that for a few hours on that eleventh of September no one knew if more planes might be out there, if the White House or the Empire State Building might be next, if the very government were about to topple or the island of Manhattan to upend into the sea. Now
that the spinning globe on which we hurtle was clearly not standing still, anything could happen, and anything did.

  As the tower shrank from the sky like a dusty, stepped-on accordion, for the first time in her life Irina knew the true meaning of horror. In a few thick seconds, a skyscraper that had prowed the tip of Manhattan since her adolescence and that she had never much cared for was no more. It hadn’t seemed to fall down so much as evaporate. In fact, the empty shifting billows defied the rules of physics, whereby energy is neither created nor destroyed. The erection of that 107-story tower had required a great deal of energy, and all that energy had been destroyed.

  Identical twins often enjoy the same bond of long-married couples, and one half of the pair will languish when the other dies. Within the hour, perhaps the second tower followed suit out of sorrow—sitting with an eerie grace beside its sister as if giving up. Just as when the news came in that Diana had died in a Paris tunnel and Irina rued having so callously fired adjectives like vapid and saccharine at the poor woman while she was still alive, Irina wished with frantic superstition to take back every casually unkind slur she had ever uttered about the World Trade Center—her dismissals of the gaudy lobbies, her comparisons of its unimaginative commercial dimensions to a giant two-for-one offer on boxes of Colgate. It was as if someone had been listening and she hadn’t meant, no, no, she hadn’t meant that she would just as soon it went away. Maybe it was less important to like something than to be used to it.

  Lawrence put an arm around her shoulder while Irina cried. They were tears of another order than she had shed before—over her ineptitude at ballet as a child, jeers of “donkey face” in junior high, the falling-out with Jude, her loneliness while Lawrence was away. In retrospect, it was perplexing that she had ever wept on these measly occasions of distress, when all along full-scale tragedy—the malignant, sickening history of the human race—had been unfolding just beyond her doorstep. On CNN, one commentator after another was already saying that nothing would ever be the same again. But it would be. Too many things had already happened after which nothing should have been the same again. This was not the first time people had done something hideous, and it wouldn’t be the last.

  Today of all days it should have been possible to weep the whole day through, but it wasn’t. The fact that she had sobbed for entire evenings at a go over the loss of one boyfriend yet now found it too demanding to whimper over the loss of multitudes for more than two or three minutes was just one of those ugly facts about herself that Irina would have to live with.

  After blowing her nose, she rang her mother. No answer. “The whole world’s coming to an end,” Irina despaired over the receiver, “and what do you want to bet that Mama is exercising.”

  It seemed lunatic to keep watching events on television that were occurring eight miles south. “I have to see it with my own eyes, Lawrence. To make it real.”

  “None of the trains are running. And they must have blocked off downtown. You’re not going to get anywhere near it.”

  “Please?” She took his hand. “Walk with me?”

  So they made a pilgrimage, a hadj—threading down into Riverside Park, where on the walkway by the Hudson the curvature of the island obscured what lay smoldering at its tip. Only when they trudged to the end of the pier at 72nd Street was it possible to see the white cloud rising, a bland puff at this distance, but real enough. Irina associated disaster with clamor, yet no sound emitted from the park but unearthly quiet, oblivious birds, the odd shuffle of feet as they were joined gradually by other New Yorkers, making the same numb trek. Few people spoke, and then only in murmurs. Everyone was polite, orderly, even down the West Side bikeway, commonly the scene of mean-spirited competition between cyclists, in-line skaters, and prams. In defiance of urban convention, strangers met one another’s eyes. For the first time in her memory this felt like a unified city, a single place, and while much reference was made to its communities, the experience of feeling a part of one was rare.

  “I think I owe you an apology,” said Irina softly in the West 50s. Aside from the occasional race of emergency vehicles, the West Side Highway to their left, ordinarily bumper-to-bumper in midtown, was deserted, Mad Max. “Your work—I may not have thought it was very important.”

  “That’s all right,” said Lawrence, who had never let go of her hand. “Sometimes I forget it’s important myself.”

  They were not stopped until West Houston Street, where a police cordon was drawn. A large, respectful crowd had gathered in silence. The air stung with an acrid smell of burnt rubber and nickel, and the bikeway railings were collecting a fine, baptismal ash. Hands to their sides, everyone faced the funeral pyre rising in the distance, paying homage for perhaps five minutes, then turning quiet heel. Irina and Lawrence bore witness for their five minutes, and ceded their places to others.

  On the way back uptown, they walked inland. Even when the subways began working again around five p.m., neither made a bid to get on. You did not make pilgrimages by turnstile. In Times Square, with no traffic, they trudged up the middle of Seventh Avenue. The digital ticker overhead streamed, U.S. ATTACKED … HIJACKED JETS DESTROY TWIN TOWERS AND HIT PENTAGON… Bits of flotsam caught by the wind swirled over the empty roadway like the aftermath of a frenzied New Year’s Eve, after the ball has dropped, and the whole city is hungover. A few restaurants had opened, although any establishments that looked Middle Eastern had their shutters drawn tight.

  “I hate to sound petty,” said Irina at Columbus Circle. “But if it had to happen—I’m glad we’re in New York. If we were back in Britain, I’d feel left out.”

  “Well, I guess that is a little petty,” he admitted. “But what’s not petty now?”

  “I’ll tell you what’s not petty,” she said, stopping to turn him toward her. They were impeding the entrance to Central Park, but surrounding pedestrians were deferential, and gave them berth. Irina put her hands on either side of his face, and kissed him. Her cheeks tracked once more with purely private tears, but they were without shame.

  20

  AFTER SHE AND RAMSEY had gone at it hammer-and-tongs while oblivious to the single most catastrophic historical event in their lifetimes, Irina’s revulsion produced one positive side effect: her vow that she and Ramsey would never, ever fight again. Even Ramsey, for whom the newspaper only properly began in the sports pages, was nearly as sobered, and the promise she extracted to reform seemed sincere.

  For Irina, the penalty levied for such a gross sense of disproportion was banishment. From frequent phone calls with Tatyana, Irina inferred that in New York an insidious competition was already under way over ownership: who had loved ones die, who had escaped from the Trade Center just in time, who happened to be downtown that morning, who had seen the towers fall live rather than merely watched them on TV, who was having asthmatic attacks from bad air on 19th Street instead of breathing easy on the safe, unaffected Upper West Side. All the way out in Brighton Beach, and having missed even the first televised collapse of the towers altogether while picking up a few things on the Avenue, Tatyana’s local standing was little more privileged than it would have been in Idaho. Thus she seemed to enjoy regaling her sister with tales of shut-down subway lines, describing the eerie occupied atmosphere of Manhattan, with police and National Guard troops on every corner like an African republic after a military coup. Only in comparison to an expatriate an ocean away on 9/11 could she play up her position as an insider.

  For the attack would never belong to Irina. Not one whit. Her right to an opinion about what kind of structure might be erected in the World Trade Center’s place, or about the retaliatory invasion of Afghanistan, had been rescinded, and whenever such subjects arose in conversation she grew subdued. The cataclysm itself morphed into a personal reprimand, a disaster contrived to remind Irina Galina McGovern in particular of how dreadfully the outside world could go off the rails when your back was turned. It was certainly a reminder that there was an outside world, and f
orever linked in her mind with private disgrace. She even battled a lunatic superstition that had she not been bickering behind closed doors, had she been reading the newspaper, focusing on what mattered, her very attentiveness would have pinned those towers to the sky.

  That morning, Irina had accused Ramsey of “sabotage” in the Pierre Hotel; in truth, they were both guilty of planting bombs under their own car. Humbly they agreed with each other that to mar the perhaps twenty, at most thirty years remaining to them as a couple by going at each other’s throats was wasteful in the extreme, and after September 13, 2001, neither could be too kind, too tender, too sweet.

  Ramsey took Denise in to a man in the City, meant to be a miracle worker with snooker cues. But after a £2,500 repair job, Ramsey said he might as well have launched into the back garden and torn a branch from a tree. He searched far and wide, and spent several thousand pounds on a variety of flashy substitutes. Yet just as in romance, he did not need five not-quites, but one true love; he could no more replace Denise than Irina herself. He withdrew from the LG Cup, then the UK Championship, and for the first time began to contemplate retirement from the game.

  Irina was torn. She relished neither dogging him around the tour, nor waiting out still more nine-month seasons as a snooker widow in the East End. But she hated the idea of his bowing out on such a sour note, that vulgar, drunken final at the Crucible. At only forty-six and on the heels of winning the Lewis Carroll, Irina had no intention of retiring herself, and she was nervous that Ramsey’s pottering about with no structure to his day would put them at odds. He was already interrupting all the time, “Where’s my black jumper?” while she was scribbling feverishly to meet a deadline. She worried that without snooker he would be lost, and that something vital in her own heart might die as well. She had fallen in love with Ramsey Acton, world-famous snooker star. Ramsey Acton, former snooker star, didn’t have the same ring.