The Guardians Read online

  A woman near me screamed, Oh my God, oh God, oh my God, oh my God, and whole lives passed before I understood that the tower was falling. I watched its hundreds of glass windows shimmer to the ground.

  The roof fell neatly downward, erasing floor after floor, like an accordion, but I remember this only because I remember thinking shimmer and accordion.

  Of course there are several films of the buildings falling down, and I could go online right now and watch them, but as far as I know none was taken from Kent Avenue, where we were standing.

  Harris walked me home, his left arm around me. All the subway trains in Manhattan had stopped. Some of the stations were filled with corpses, with fire.

  We walked to Greenpoint and rode the G train to Long Island City, and rode the Long Island Railroad to Jamaica and then to New Hyde Park, where Harris’s mother fetched us and drove us to Great Neck.

  She cooked steaks and opened a bottle of American wine, and we ate candy and watched Manhattan on television.

  The next day Harris and I went to the beach with a couple of friends staying nearby with another set of parents. The waves were enormous. I lost my sunglasses and was thrown ashore. A red bruise swelled on my hip.

  The act of war occupied the reported news all day, just that one story, so we swam through the gale. On a different day we’d have noticed the water was too choppy to swim.

  And of course the whole memory of that morning has been written over with what has happened since: My friend, who stood with me and helped me, who hugged me as we walked back toward the city from the river shore, is dead.

  * * *

  Two days after the attack, I went home to Brooklyn.

  I dropped off my bags and went to the video store around the corner from my apartment. So many people had rented movies, there were no more boxes to hold the cassette tapes. I carried a cassette home in a plastic bag.

  It rained hard that night. The bodies started decomposing faster. Fighter planes cut through the sky at all hours.

  * * *

  Built in 1912, the New York City General Post Office building’s long cornice reads Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

  I seldom had time to wait in the long lines at the main post office, so when I needed to mail something in that neighborhood, I usually rode the escalator to the top floor of Macy’s, where there is a postal depot, as I did on September 14, 2001.

  Partway up, the door opened and a weeping woman entered. She wasn’t wearing shoes. I pressed the button for the top floor and she screamed at me to send the elevator to the lobby.

  Macy’s was being evacuated. The area had been patrolled closely for the past two days by police, bomb-sniffing dogs, and fighter jets flying above the avenues.

  We went outside, the woman screaming behind me, and all Thirty-fourth Street was filled with people. In the midst of it, people sold American flags on the sidewalks of almost every block.

  I ran downtown, away from Times Square, calling my mother in Massachusetts from pay phones every few blocks, asking her to turn on the television and tell me where the bomb was, because no one seemed to know, but it was a false alarm.

  * * *

  One month after the attack, while I rode the subway to the office of the New York Post for my first day of work on the night shift, the United States and Britain launched air strikes in Afghanistan.

  I didn’t work on the cover story, whose headline was Tali-BAM!

  I was assigned the article about the Franciscan rite of the blessing of animals, which also happened that day. All the depressed rescue dogs were brought to the church and taken up to the altar.

  At St. Bartholomew’s, a bald eagle led the procession, followed by the police and rescue dogs. The article accompanied a picture of a bloodhound named Chase sitting at the altar to receive his blessing, so I wrote the caption Heavenly Hound.

  Six weeks after the attack, at the site no one spoke. The crater was still smoldering, and its poison smell filled the air. Some people wore gas masks and some didn’t. They walked among each other like the uniformed members of opposing teams.

  Some of the stores in the neighborhood were open and clean. Others had been abandoned. Makeshift bars crossed a lingerie shop’s broken windows, the panties in the vitrines scattered and covered with an inch of fluffy gray dust. My black coat and shoes were gray, too. The fire trucks drove the streets unwashed and covered with red names drawn in the dust with a finger.

  After the press conference when he was asked How many? and he answered More than any of us can bear, the mayor assumed the charisma of a movie star.

  The fire burned until February, and by then the Stars and Stripes had sprung up all over the city, a tricolor weed nourished on ambient fear.

  * * *

  A few months later, Bacillus anthracis, the bacterium that causes anthrax, was found in postal sorting facilities in New Jersey.

  A tiny literary magazine in Iowa, where I used to work, stopped opening its mail, but at the New York Post, business continued unchanged. I worked at the news desk on the sixth floor. The Op-Ed department, on the other side of the floor, had recently been posted one of several bacteria-laden letters.

  The powdered bacteria, still on the floor where it had fallen out of its envelope, was covered by a plastic sheet that an EPA representative had put there. The EPA had judged the granules neither light nor fine enough to float in the air and be inhaled, so everyone returned to work and just avoided walking near the plastic sheet.

  Only one person in the whole company had anthrax, and she was the assistant who had opened the letter. On her finger, a lesion wept. I asked the copy chief whether he or the other copy editors were on Cipro, the antibiotic I’d heard about on all the news programs.

  No, just Op-Ed, he said.

  * * *

  The city was wrapped in a paper shroud. Handmade flyers depicting the thousands of the missing covered its lampposts, phone booths, and walls. Within a few days they were streaked and soggy, and within a few weeks many were pulp, but people kept hanging fresh layers.

  Right after the planes hit the buildings, it was assumed that thousands of victims were staggering uptown from the site or lying unidentified in hospitals, but the last survivor was found on September 12.

  The living choked on pulverized cement, asbestos, and ash.

  A school in Connecticut was rumored to have lost forty fathers.

  It was easy to find someone to go to bed with, do drugs with, or leave town with.

  On September 19, the subway map was reprinted with an empty space downtown from Franklin Street to Wall Street. Nine stations were closed. More than a year passed before any of them reopened.

  In all the bars were stacks of blue cards reading New York Needs Us Strong, with a toll-free number on the back. If you need to talk, help is available.

  I found my roommate’s sister sobbing in my studio one day and thought—maybe this is it, the moment that New York needs us strong! I called the toll-free number on the back of the card and handed her the phone. The person on the other end asked her if she’d had to miss work because of stress, trauma, depression, grief—I don’t know which words she used.

  My roommate’s sister was a poet. She modeled for art students when she needed cash. The person on the phone didn’t have anything to say to anyone whose grief wasn’t further damaging the economy of a grieving city. The conversation ended.

  Even during the summer of the blackout, two years later, the city was hungover from the attack. I walked from Chelsea to Bed-Stuy, four hours in wet heat. In the East Village I saw a woman lying facedown on the sidewalk, screaming. People stood by her, looking exhausted, looking away.

  At night I could hear gunshots on Atlantic Avenue and could see the two beams of blue light at Ground Zero from my little studio in the back of the apartment.

  * * *

  I was in my apartment, absolutely alone, when I heard of a fa
mous writer’s fatal jump from the Staten Island Ferry, and I got up and stood in a doorway, holding myself up by the door frame. I remember wondering when I’d arisen and walked to the threshold. With the writer’s drowning I’d advanced one lurid death closer to my own.

  I wrote my obituary soon after my college graduation. It seemed as necessary as knowing my Social Security number. I edited it from time to time, adding the names of books and towns. I also wrote the note that would be found with my corpse. For years I saved it in my file so it would be there when I needed it, but I don’t need it anymore. Now I save it to remember how far I have traveled from that place where no help comes.

  Last year a colleague of mine, someone I’d been out to drink with more than once, someone I’d talked to about his poems and my own, put the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Afterward I felt an echo of that old feeling—that the line was moving, that I was now one death closer to the threshold—but it was a faint echo. I’ve felt insulated from my death since I began taking this new medicine. I am no longer moved to write poetry, but I traded poetry for a longer life. I knew I was doing it.

  I used to believe that death would come when I was ready to walk through the last door. When I was done with suffering, I’d just open the door and walk through it. I still believe it, but now I believe that someone or something else will open the door.

  * * *

  Harris and I sat in McCarren Park on a sunny afternoon. Maybe we’d bought ice cream. It was very hot, so hot that I was wearing only a dress and rubber sandals. I carried my house key and nothing else, just walked up Bedford to meet my friend on the dusty lawn.

  We lay on the grass until it was almost dark and Harris mentioned a dance party in Queens. I couldn’t go because I didn’t have a sweater for the air-conditioned train or proper shoes or my wallet or anything. It was so hot, I wasn’t even wearing underwear.

  Harris convinced me to go with him to the party, that he’d take care of my subway fare and anything I needed. Our friend Victor had just died. I felt sad, but most of all I felt safe. Now that Victor was dead I could ride the G train at night without underwear. Now that Victor was dead, I would never die. We were done dying, we who had spoken or written to Victor the week he died. We were twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty. Victor had exhausted our tragedy quota. It would be a long time before anyone else would have to die.

  * * *

  When Harris was accepted to graduate school and had to move from New York to California, he phoned me, desperate.

  In his file drawers I found a mash of bills, old mail, receipts, paper napkins, concert tickets, books, letters, shoes, and packets of crackers. We sorted it and packed it. I cleaned the sink and the toilet and the tub. He let me sort his tax documents, love letters, and everything one finds in a drawer if one takes no care to keep anything in particular out of that drawer.

  He had a lot of drawers in that apartment since he’d replaced his wooden furniture with lateral file cabinets. The drawers were big and deep, and they contained everything he owned. I’m glad to report there wasn’t much perishable food, or not much that hadn’t already perished completely.

  I remember the moment in the dark gray light at the end of the day, as we finally tied up the mouths of the black garbage bags, when I knew Harris would ask me to lie down with him.

  That night I lay down with Harris and he held me. I counted to five and got up and went to the sofa, and on that night we became brother and sister.

  * * *

  I stood right in front of a boy with a white guitar at a house concert in a Massachusetts town before I was twenty. He played his guitar and looked down at his fingers and looked out at the room and didn’t look at me. He gave me the gift of being allowed my longing. I needed to enjoy it, to suffer it, as I did.

  Lust howled in me. It howls everywhere, that delighted rage. It was like that, what the boy with the white guitar did for me.

  It is a comfort to know that the other will always love you more than you love him. If it continues long enough, something peculiar happens—you start to love the other more for loving you more.

  Then, when he dies, you’ll wonder how his death could have burned you entirely away—yet there you are, walking out of the fire in a form you no longer recognize.

  * * *

  Lost in California, driving fast, Harris called me in Brooklyn and asked me to navigate him west, out of Riverside County. As in the old story, the wanderer hears a disembodied voice that leads him out of the desert.

  It worked so well that for months afterward, whenever he was lost, he called me. It was always nighttime in New York, and I’d look at a road atlas under my desk light and tell him what was there.

  * * *

  Harris’s sister writes, You were indeed one of his closest friends. Almost like a sister, really. I should know! I once asked him why you guys never dated and among many mumbled excuses, he said he didn’t want to disturb anything.

  His mother writes, I cannot begin to express the depth of Harris’s feelings for you.

  Everyone else writes, What are you working on?

  I’m working on a book about a man who jumps in front of a train. I have no interest in hanging a true story on an artificial scaffolding of plot, but what is the true story? My friend died—that isn’t a story.

  * * *

  Harris painted some canvas boards with black line segments at right angles and colored in some of the areas red and yellow and blue. In the right light he had a pretty good collection of Mondrians.

  When splitting a bill with a group of three or more, he always threw in a dollar or two less than the rest of us.

  He forgot to flush the toilet when someone’s mother was visiting.

  He was concerned that he possessed a one-way refrigerator. He said, The thing is, I keep putting food into it, and then I forget about it and by the time I remember it, the food’s gone bad. It’s starting to cost money. Does your refrigerator have this problem? I told him my refrigerator was a two-way, that I hadn’t paid extra for it, but that he should specify to his next landlord that he would need a two-way refrigerator. This conversation is approximate. Imagine having it with a mental patient.

  Now imagine having it with a regular person, your friend, on the sunniest afternoon in the world.

  * * *

  After you have seen someone play the fiddle like a devil, it is hard to tell the devil to stop humming into his kasha while you try to have a nice dinner, particularly if he has been a reasonable participant in conversations for seven years or so.

  The devil took and ruined the thing that made my friend brilliant.

  Harris’s front teeth ground against each other and got shorter. Music possessed him. He hummed and whistled and sang and jerked his head and ground his teeth. He did it quietly, but it was never invisible. He had to do it.

  It came and went, the devil inside him. When it was gone, I wished it would never come back, and when it came back, I blamed Harris.

  * * *

  Far away in California, Harris had stayed up very late with friends, and he thought someone had laced his drink with a hallucinogen, but when he was admitted to the psychiatric ward, he reported having taken something on purpose.

  By the time he’d been released from the hospital, he felt quite sure he hadn’t meant to take anything. He tried to remember the order of events leading to his hospitalization, but he was unsure of too many details, and it’s hard to remember a story about someone else’s confusion.

  * * *

  Harris called one day to ask whether he should clean his toilet seat or just buy a new one. I told him to clean the old one, described with agitation a vision of a landfill occupied only by toilet seats, their owners having thrown them away rather than cleaning them, a mountain of cream-colored plastic rings flecked with dark yellow. I don’t know if he ever cleaned it. Why do I remember this?

  * * *

  The dictionary defines psychosis as the abnormal condition of
the mind, which doesn’t narrow it down much.

  The clinical definition narrows it down to a loss of contact with reality, but how does one make contact with an abstraction?

  The diagnosis depends on the report of a person whose reports are, by clinical definition, unreliable. Hallucinations and delusional beliefs may accompany unusual or bizarre behavior, difficulty with social interaction, and impairment in carrying out daily life activities.

  There’s nothing to measure, just judgments of what is unusual or bizarre, what constitutes difficulty and impairment.

  Another of my friends was eight years old when his father abandoned the family, draining his three sons’ college funds, leaving them bankrupt. For weeks afterward, my tiny friend hallucinated in his second-grade classroom, hearing voices that told him terrible things were coming.

  The dimensional approach to defining psychosis argues that full-blown psychotic illness is just the most extreme end of the schizotypy spectrum. The dimensional approach makes sense to me. My comrades in lockdown were the same as those I knew outside lockdown, but just a bit more overcome by sadness or confusion or fear.

  The distinctions between us and those suffering from psychosis may be whittled down to nothing, but the fact stands that we fear being what they are, fear seeing what they see, fear knowing what they know, and so we believe they are different, and so it is so.

  * * *

  In the last eleven years, I’ve taken many psychotropic medications and had very many side effects, some of them almost unbelievably strange. One of them, dyskinesia—often characterized by repetitive, involuntary, purposeless movements, such as grimacing, tongue protrusion, lip smacking, puckering and pursing of the lips—is a common side effect of long-term use of antipsychotic medication.

  For the last few months of the four years I spent on olanzapine, whenever I lied or said anything even slightly insincere, my right shoulder jerked up and my head jerked down to meet it. At a dinner party, even if I agreed with someone that I too had liked a book that I hadn’t really liked, my body would make those same involuntary movements. I couldn’t lie even a little, or my shoulder would try to give me away.