Towers: A Work of Historical Fiction Based on True Circumstances, Both Public and Private

By amirawilcoxpierce, September 9, 2014

Towards the end of summer before my last year of college, there was a boy I dated for a few weeks. We were eating, we were drinking, we were enjoying each other’s company. We barely knew each other and yet we enjoyed each other, hung out with some sense of purpose, impossible to decipher now, this far into the future.

I would say it to myself, mainly, and also sometimes to my friends: “He is fantastic. This guy is great.” But I had no idea what I meant.

We met up late, after days full of things that had nothing to do with the other. We talked around easy topics, like the weather or how much we hated the president. And without warning he would reach towards my shoulder. His hand felt cold, as he pulled whatever shirt was covering it that night to the side, and then warm, as he fondled the strap of whatever bra I was wearing, dragging his fingers up and down it, again and again. The conversation would continue slowly, and the excitement built inside of me, below the place my breath caught, at the top of my stomach. His hand would trail intently down to my waistband. And when my hand went out to his waistband, that was when he would end our talk with his mouth on mine.

Ben talked about my Arab-ness in brief, obsessive fits. I explained that, sure, I had been born in Lebanon, but my mother and I flew away from that small country twenty-six days later. Yeah, and I went back for brief visits most years of my life, but I would always be “the American cousin.” And he would say things like, “Your eyes are like a gypsy’s. Must be in your blood.”

The one time we ate out, we went to an Arab restaurant at his suggestion. As we began to eat, he jabbed a shard of pita bread at me, asking, “Your people eat with their hands, right?”

I looked down at my plate, not sharing what I remembered about family dinners in Lebanon, where we would sit crowded around a table covered with steaming platters, brimming dishes, bottles, glasses, dozens more rounds of a similar but far superior bread, and a pile of forks and spoons.

I only said, “Sometimes.” Then I mustered my desire for him and reached under the tablecloth to rub my palm against his denim-clad thigh.

And one night I told Ben that my favorite word in Arabic was mish-mish, which means “apricot.” It was in between him kissing me, and he said, “Will you speak Lebanese to me all night, baby?” I couldn’t answer because my mouth was busy with his neck. A week later he said it to me again—“Will you speak Lebanese to me all night, baby?”—when I mentioned that mouzeh meant “banana,” a word sometimes used to catcall a girl. As he was turning my body around and taking off my underwear, he said, “It’s ‘Arabic,’ not ‘Lebanese,’ right? I meant to say ‘Arabic.’”

I nodded. My eyes were closed and I dragged my nails down his back.

“Talk Arabic to me all night,” he said.

But I never did, and when it was over we’d lay there in the afterglow of it, warm against each other like two folds of skin inside a deaf ear.

Ben and I lay in his bed one day, eating grapes, and I thought to tell him about the morning when I was seven and visiting Lebanon and we stood on my grandmother’s front balcony and watched a tank roll down the village’s main street. We were eating grapes that day too. But putting words to a memory like that can be tricky, since it comes in a flash of color and sound, and then, just as quickly, it is gone.

Most mornings, I would wake before Ben, recline by his sleeping form, edge my body up beside him just to feel the sharpness, and then the warmth, of my skin on his.

And even though Ben had a face, one that I had kissed every part of, when I would lift myself and look at him, he struck me as a stranger. Even now it’s hard for me to recall what he looked like. Our relationship didn’t involve cameras, but in my mental photographs, Ben’s hair is dark and curls a bit over his ears. His features are heavy and distinct. Slight body, with broad shoulders. And when I knew Ben, my hair was a lot shorter than it is now, and I think my face was different somehow, maybe softer.

Ben knew me when I was softer.

Ben’s room had nothing on the walls, and everywhere on the floor were piles. Most prolific were the piles of magazines, but there were also piles of compact discs, mounds of dirty clothes, stacks of unopened mail. In the mornings, I usually woke up first. Carefully, as not to wake him, I would rest my arm on his naked skin, and slowly breathe into him, looking out at the piles on the floor of his room, lit up as if buttered by the morning sun coming through the dingy windows. And I thought that the piles resembled towers in an ancient city where I was queen.

It was on one of those mornings—after watching him, then kissing Ben’s waking form goodbye—that I saw the confetti. It took a while to notice it.

I was sitting in the back of a bus, rolling up the eastern edge of Brooklyn and looking out at the water, barely aware of the mass of Manhattan’s buildings in the distance, remembering the warmth of skin from the night before.

It looked like confetti at first, like bits of paper some celebrant had tossed into the sky to proclaim that there was a party going on. When I looked more carefully, I noticed that the paper was white and in full sheets. They had come from a pile somewhere, likely an office. I liked the idea that some disgruntled young employee had purged herself of them minutes before, holding a large stack of paper to her chest and throwing it in fistfuls out the window of a Manhattan high-rise.

And I watched those same papers vaguely trace a bus’s windshield in downtown Brooklyn, innocent like leaves.

It was a miracle, a momentary miracle interrupted by a voice from above us announcing a municipal emergency. “Downtown service limited!” it proclaimed. Like my fellow-riders, I looked up, towards the voice. Then we were a wave of heads turning, forward towards the driver, who offered nothing else, but did say “God bless you,” when I thanked her as I got off at my stop to catch the subway.

On the train and things seemed the same as always except for more announcements, and a tremor of excitement or anxiety shot through everything. Emerging from below ground, I found a friend on the sidewalk. He said something about a plane flying into some high rises downtown. We couldn’t see anything from where we stood. We were both late for class. We shrugged and went our separate ways, our parting paths tracing the angle of a street corner.

My class was “War and Morality.” The professor was short, heavy-browed, and loud. As I walked into our lecture hall, a girl with long, wavy brown hair giggled from the front row as he growled, in his New York drawl, “Don’t worry, kid. The apocalypse is at least a few decades off. Certainly not in my lifetime.” He wore faded jeans and a pale pink shirt with rolled cuffs, and shrugged a theatrical shrug.

The girl flipped her hair behind her shoulders and looked at him with big eyes. As I found a seat a few rows behind her, the professor’s voice boomed past her, and he remarked that the room felt empty. Briefly, he speculated about what was happening a few miles south of where we sat. Before we had much time to think about it, he launched into his lecture, tracing the events that spiraled into World War I, that monstrous conflict that began with the gunning down of a man and his wife. Each conspirator in the crime had a lethal dose of cyanide on him, which the six had agreed to ingest if caught, so as not to risk any chance of exposing their shared secret.

Out on the street after that old story, the people passing by me were different now, their faces open like moons, looking for answers. Everyone was looking south, where the two tallest towers on the skyline were bleeding a dark cloud of smoke. It looked like one of them had fallen. I breathed in the inexplicable air, and each inhalation ballooned my fear and my doubt. People were crying, people were shouting, talking, whispering. No one sat still.

I tried my cell phone. I called my parents and then my roommate Laura. Both times an electronic voice bleated into my ear: “Circuits are busy!”

I tried again. No connection at all this time.

The sound of nothing as I tried one call after another.

Then the thought of Ben. For the first time since the bus, I thought of his dark eyes and his wandering hands. And it occurred to me that he might rescue me, like Prince Charming, from the vacuum and the void, from the scurrying strangers.

But the call to Ben failed, too.

Snapping the phone shut, I squinted my eyes, concentrating on the yellow bursting over the blackness and pulsating under my lids. When I opened them again, a tall man in a black trench coat walked by me. “The satellites are down,” he said, gesturing towards my phone, not slowing. “We’re being attacked.”

The three words didn’t seem like words at all. We’re being. Attacked being, being we’re. I repeated them to myself and mixed them up as the black coat got smaller and farther away. It was when the black splotch disappeared around a corner that I realized I should go and find Laura. I could use the landline at her desk to call my mother, and then we would go somewhere together, like back home to our apartment.

Laura’s office was just a few blocks away—a few hundred steps of concrete sidewalk, crossing the asphalt of four ominously car-less streets and one car-less avenue, thirty-five steps up, and finally seven or eight strides across the office-grade carpet to the desk where she worked.

Her face was red and tight with grief. She hugged me, holding me tighter than she ever had. Maya was already there, and it was hugging her that made tears pool at the bottoms of my eyes, after she said, “Shit, we were worried about you.”

And then I rubbed the moisture away as she said: “You went to class?”

They told me they watched it through the floor-to-ceiling windows in the temp agency on the seventh floor.

“How did it feel? How did you feel?”

They both looked away.

“This one woman screamed,” Maya murmured.

Laura nodded, staring at some spot on the carpet. Her face trembled as she sighed. “I wanted to go up to her, but I couldn’t move. Some other woman held her arms out to her, but she just left.”

“And then we watched CNN on big-screen until we couldn’t anymore,” Maya said. “It was worse than the real thing.”

I used Laura’s phone to call my parents. My father had gone out to buy bananas, and my mother was happy to hear from me, but after her initial “Are you ok?” she turned cool, and then she asked what I’d seen, and explained what she thought and what she knew. When I told her I should go, she said, “Be careful, habibti. Stay close to your friends. Get home soon. Eat something. Be careful.”

My mother’s flesh was in my bones and she had led me around the world. On the phone that day she was still leading me. She was saying that the thing had happened. There was nothing to do but carry on.

Hearing there was a need for blood, Laura, Maya, and I walked to the nearest hospital. We stood in a line out on the street, wrapping around the block, like the line outside a Friday-night rock show in the same neighborhood. When we were nearly to the door, full capacity for blood storage had been reached, and they made us leave.

What could we do? We walked, south this time, and all the smoke made it seem like dusk was already falling, or maybe it actually was. Laura and Maya each took one of my arms. We never walked like that and for a moment it felt forced, but then it didn’t. We didn’t speak, and I couldn’t say that somehow this all felt like Lebanon, where bombs went off a lot, and buildings often fell, and bridges sometimes collapsed, and people usually died. I didn’t say it because how could it feel that way? We were in Manhattan, which was hulking and immutable. We were in America, walking down Broadway in New York City, and I thought of being a child and sitting in the back seat of an old European sedan on the road south from Beirut, painfully slow with the checkpoints every few miles. We’d pause before each fresh-painted shack, in front of it a young soldier who would peer in and nod us on, ask to see papers and wave us ahead.

And as my friends and I passed darkened storefronts and people sobbing on the sidewalk, I thought of the walks my sister and I took with my mother in Lebanon. A half mile from the house she grew up in there was a street-front where telephones separated by flimsy pieces of plywood lined the walls, and my mother would pay a man at a counter so that the three of us could crowd next to one of those phones and talk to my father who was oceans away.

The three of us settled in a bar near Houston Street where we drank three pints each, eating peanuts, dropping the shells on the floor. CNN called out to me from behind Laura’s head, looping the same footage over and over, of towers falling like some simulation, of ash-covered people walking ash-covered streets, and stricken faces across the universe.

Subways had stopped running, and the bus we caught back to Brooklyn was empty. We stood up near the front of it, close to the windshield, staring through the smudged glass at our city sailing by.

We got off the bus close to the water and went out to a cement pier and watched it. There was a hole in the skyline where. We could only imagine the catastrophic heap at ground level from this distance, but a thick column of gray-brown smoke billowed up into the black sky telling us something immense was still burning. The water between us and Manhattan shimmered, like always. The water reflected millions of city lights.

At our apartment, we shut windows that we’d left open all summer against the newly disagreeable air.

Cell phone service was disrupted by the tragedy, and most of my friends only had cell phones. So it took a week or two of trying, but, one by one, I collected the people that I knew.

Ben was the hardest to reach. I tried calling him every day at first, probably more desperate to see him than know he was ok. After all, I had a perfectly good fuck buddy who lived a few miles away, in a room of towers, near the park and I was sleeping alone.

Maybe he had fallen in love with someone. True love. He could have met her on September 11th, found her on an ash-covered street. A large, heavy object had fallen on her leg and he heaved it off and looked meaningfully into her eyes and that was it. He saved her and then she saved him.

Or maybe he had been crushed in the rubble of the towers, or maybe he had never even existed at all.

The day that Laura and I finally put the television back in the closet and ventured beyond the neighborhood, I remember we were both bundled up since it had started getting colder, and she stepped on part of a tuna sandwich that someone had just left right there, in the middle of the sidewalk. I helped her find a stick to clean the gunk out of the grooves of her boot soles and as she said thank you, she started to cry, and a giant sob rose in my chest, but I suppressed it with a breath I held tight inside me.

“This is so weird,” she said, tears sliding down her face as she looked towards downtown Manhattan, even though we couldn’t see any part of the new skyline from where we were standing, our view blocked by a tall brick wall topped by barbed wire coil.

I traced the stick against the bottom of a telephone pole and stared at the ground. I stared through it, imagining a city populated by two thousand freshly dead corpses below the concrete crust. They were piled together, one in another’s lap. I imagined skeleton faces and dried out flesh, like on the mummies we’d seen in museums, dry like the potpourri in the dish on top of our toilet bowl.

Laura was standing in front of a flier duct-taped below the bus schedule. In fading ink, it read: “The people of Red Hook, Brooklyn support the Arab shop-keepers and residents of our neighborhood through these trying times.” There was a line drawing of the two towers below the text. My head began to ache as I wondered what recent events meant for “Arabs.” And wasn’t I one? Should I be?

I thought about it when I was transcribing emails at work, my boss pacing back and forth behind me, and I thought about it as I walked the streets of Manhattan. I’d pass fliers proclaiming loved ones missing, sharing a memory, offering a reward. The fliers hung on telephone poles and in restaurant window, and the images on them trapped faces in a stillness that swallowed any thought.

One night, I wandered up to Union Square during a vigil. One of many slowly tracing paths lined with candles and shrines around bushes and lawns, I expected to see Ben’s photo among the others. But he wasn’t there. As I turned a corner, a woman stood handing out small packets of tissues from a large box she held in her arms. A request for donations was scrawled on the cardboard in magic marker.

A few nights later, Ben finally answered his phone and said my name as a question just before the line went dead. I called back right away, but there was no connection.

I remember the smell of the dusty carpet I kneeled on at the literary magazine meeting I went to afterwards. I was barely listening to the things being said around me but still know it was something about the merits of breaking a line here instead of here; the reasons a speaker knows this or that; what the author might possibly have intended. And I kept hearing Ben, his voice repeating my name.

In a silent lull, my phone shrieked its ring. I winced and grabbed for it, rifling furiously through my bag. It was him. I stepped over bodies and ran into the hallway.

“Hi!” I whispered.

“What?” he said, through static.

My stomach cloudy with butterflies, I repeated myself: “Hi.”

“I knew you’d be ok. You’re ok, right?”

“I’m fine,” I said, anxiously in earshot of the people I’d left in the room behind me. “Everything’s okay.”

“Great. Me too, I’m…”

“Do you want to…” There was a loud noise on his end, a crash.

I pictured him fiercely sucking on a cigarette, his floppy hair stirred by the pervasive wind-tunnel effect on the Midtown street where he stood, outside his office, eight floors of computer-lined rooms that I’d never visited.

“What was that?” I asked.

“It’s crazy on the street here. I’ve got to go. Take care of yourself. I’ll call soon.”

My phone seemed so useless in my hands. I deleted his number right then, “as a test,” I told myself, and I never heard from him again. I tried, but I couldn’t remember the way it felt to breathe his back. Internet searches only yielded links relating to some hockey star from Alberta who shared his name, and I thought I saw him in a few bars; a profile or a particular strut would spark it.

But it never was him, until one night a few months later when it was.

It was the middle of winter then. Laura and I had met up at our favorite Manhattan bar after work. We probably had four gin and tonics each, which was easy, considering how happy we were to have another numbing day behind us, and how cheap the drinks were at that place. Never mind the lingering smell of vomit, never mind that we were drinking rail gin.

All of a sudden Laura looked at her watch and realized she was late to meet a guy for a second date. Even though she claimed there was no real chemistry, she was in the phase of being excited about the potential of what knowing him might be, and I was excited for her. But there was a part of me that was jealous, and a part of me that was scared, of somehow losing my friend. And she squeezed my hand, and, smiling big, she said, “Wish me luck!”

“Knock him dead,” I said, which made her smile even more.

After she had left me, I slowly stirred the melting ice in my drink, and thoughts turned to Ben because that’s who I usually thought about at moments like that in those days. And there were quite a few moments like that. I wondered what would have happened to us if those two jets had not smashed into the World Trade Centers on September 11th. My head swirled, and I felt a hand on my back.

I turned.

It was Ben’s hand. And when I went to hug him hello, right away we were kissing, all tongues.

I know it sounds crazy that just when I was thinking of him, he appeared, but it’s true. These things happen sometimes–though much less often, of course, then when I’m thinking about someone and they don’t appear. The fact that he did appear right then and that we didn’t even think about it, we were kissing, made it very hard to do what I did next:

I pulled away.

His head moved towards mine again, but I moved back further still. “Let me buy you a drink,” he said, taking off his jacket.

We sat facing the rows of bottles behind the bar and had your standard catch-up conversation, until he told me he was sorry that he hadn’t called. “I tried a few times but it didn’t work,” he said, “and then I gave up…I just, yo know, they’re terrorists from where you’re from, the bombers, and I didn’t know what to say…”

He couldn’t find more words, and for a moment, neither of us spoke.

I didn’t look at him but at the bottles. It’s a good thing I ran into him. If I hadn’t I still might be pining for him now. I picked his hand up off my knee, as though it were a thing and not a part of him. “You’re not coming home with me?” he asked, with a laugh. I put my coat on and was gone. If he watched me go, I was swallowed by the cold, black night.

It wasn’t until the next morning that I realized I had left my hat and gloves, but I never went back to that bar again.

Categories: Ceremonies

Tagged: 9/11, 9/11 anniversary, new york, Twin Towers