LIMBO

Jasper

I felt there was a piece of me missing, a piece that had become so unnerved that it fell away without me feeling it. I didn’t even know what piece it was—I just felt the gap, and knew that whatever it was, it must have been important.

I didn’t really leave the house. This wasn’t all that different from my original plan for when Mom and Dad were gone, only now there were people calling all the time, checking to see how I was, asking me if I wanted to meet up. It was like some mass email had gone out, and everybody was going out of their way to prove to me that we still lived in a caring universe. But I didn’t want any of it. The good thing about everyone’s post-disaster catatonia was that nobody wanted to be intrusive—they’d express concern or issue an invitation, but they were more than understanding if you said, “I just want to be alone right now.” So that’s what I did. I didn’t rant like a crazy person. I didn’t tell them to f**k off. I didn’t ask them what the point was. I just said I wanted to be alone. And then when I was alone, I ranted like a crazy person, told the world to f**k off, and wondered what the point was.

The only exception I made was this boy Peter, because he was so persistent it was almost surreal. He made it seem like us getting together was a belief he had. So finally I told myself what the hell. I made him come out to Brooklyn, because there was no way I was going into Manhattan until it had straightened itself out. My initial impulse to go save it was gone. The more footage they showed on the news, the more horror stories we heard, the less I wanted to be there. I would just stay in Brooklyn and listen to my Moulin Rouge soundtrack on repeat until the happy times were here again. Or until I had to go to school—whichever came first.

Mom was calling two or three times a day—it was probably costing them more than their plane tickets to keep in touch. She wanted to come home as soon as possible, but I kept telling her I was fine, that she and my father should stick to the original plan and take care of my grandmother and let all the other people who were stranded in Korea get home first.

It was a testament to my respect for Peter that I actually found a clean shirt and a relatively clean pair of jeans to wear for our night out. The truth was, I wasn’t remembering much of what he looked like or what we’d talked about at Mitchell’s. I remembered thinking he was cute, if a little young. But that was enough. I also sensed that he was as trapped in his house as I was trapped in mine, because I would get emails from him like

jasper—

only 8 more hours! i will be the guy in the brown tshirt and the levis. also, i will be the one ringing your doorbell. if that is not enough to recognize me, i could also have a tulip between my teeth. or behind my ear, if you would find that more aesthetically pleasing. i have both a florist and a dresser on standby, awaiting your answer.

see you soon (say, seven hours and fifty-five minutes?)

peter

Seven hours and fifty-five minutes later, he was at my front door. His T-shirt really fit him well, and he was boyish in a Ewan McGregor kind of way, albeit without the brogue.

I took him to Olive Vine—I knew there was a chance of bumping into some of the people I’d been dodging, but I figured that would be a risk anywhere. It’s not like anyone was leaving the neighborhood. Flags were starting to pop up everywhere, along with the MISSING signs. It was like we’d cleared away all the papers that had blown over and were replacing them with our own.

I was relieved, because clearly Peter wasn’t a closet case, and he seemed to know what some of the dating rules were. Not that I was seeing it as a date—more as a diversion. It’s not like I was going to put him in my pocket and take him up to college with me. And he didn’t seem like the random-hookup type. (A shame. Or maybe not.) I asked him all the things I felt I should ask, like where he’d been when everything happened. He told me he was waiting to buy a Bob Dylan record, which I thought was pretty funny. “The times, they did a-change?” I said, but his laugh was more polite than anything else. I chalked it up to the fact that you had to be twisted like me to find the humor in the situation.

Usually I treated dates like they were chess matches, trying to plan my moves a little bit ahead, carefully deciding which conversational pieces to deploy, willing to sacrifice pawns of small talk if it would get my opponent to fall in love with my king. But this was a different kind of board, a different set of rules—almost like all the pieces had been knocked off, and we were both trying to agree on where they’d been before. I wasn’t having any fun with it, which wasn’t his fault. Fun was included in the piece of me that had disappeared.

He talked about seeing things happen, about being near, and while he expressed a momentary jealousy that I hadn’t had to go through that, I think we both knew that it was better to be an unharmed witness than the guy who slept through it and still had to deal with the aftermath. One of the things the terrorist attack has done was to send us all into these Sliding Doors scenarios—all these what ifs. What if I’d gotten up earlier that morning? What if I’d decided to go to Battery Park for a run? I’d done that once … in 1998, before the SATs. What if, along the way, I’d taken the spot on a crowded subway car that some guy who worked at the World Trade Center was supposed to take, so the doors slid closed on him and he ended up getting to work late enough to be saved? Bullshit—all of it complete bullshit. And you couldn’t help but wonder why your mind went there anyway—was it to exert control or to find comfort in the fact that there wasn’t really all that much control, after all?

By the time I tuned back in, Peter was talking about crying because people at Starbucks were being extra nice. The fact that he could be so moved only reinforced my own emptiness. When he asked me how I felt, I didn’t lie—it didn’t seem like the kind of thing to lie about. And I found myself telling him—or at least trying to—about how the emptiness worked, how you withdraw from something and you feel the distance inside of you as well as outside of you. But it was clear he wasn’t really understanding, and that made me wonder yet again why I’d agreed to meet up with him. Clearly, there wasn’t much I could give him, and there wasn’t much he could give me.

“So you just withdraw?” he asked me. And I couldn’t convey to him the extent of it, so I just said, “Not totally.” Then, since that didn’t seem like enough, I added, “I mean, you can’t let it get to you.”

“Because if you let it get to you, then the terrorists will have won?”

I wished it were as simple as that. But it wasn’t.

“It’s not about them, really,” I said. “It’s just about me.”

I knew how monstrous that sounded—I knew September 11th wasn’t about me. But my reaction to September 11th—that was entirely about me.

Peter quickly switched the subject to my parents, and I gave him the update. I was totally running out of steam until he drifted off and then, when he came back, said, “If we stop having sex, then the terrorists will have won.” Normally, when someone says something like that, it’s a total bad pickup line, but it was obvious that wasn’t Peter’s intention, and I liked him more for it. He asked me about school, and I told him I had no idea when it was going to start—yet another thing I had no idea about. Like any high school student, he had this fascination with college, and I found myself getting nostalgic—if September 11th was really going to be this big before/after dividing line in our lives, I was sorry that I didn’t have at least a bit of high school in the after. High school actually seemed longer ago now because of what had happened.

I tried to imagine Peter up at school with me. I tried to imagine us as boyfriends, and it felt about as realistic as me dating Sarah Jessica Parker. I knew what I had to do: get the check, say goodbye, send him on his way. But one of the missing parts of me made a slight guest appearance, because I also felt this strange fondness for him, like he was a stray and I had to take him home and give him a bowl of milk. That, and I didn’t particularly love the idea of going back to the house again and spending another night in the company of the TV set. At least Peter wouldn’t expect the same things from me that my parents or my friends would.

So I found myself asking him over, and he seemed up for it. It was a little weird at first, because having him in the living room made me realize what a shitheap it had become, like I’d let objects fall from my hands whenever I was done with them, my very own sculpture garden of a ruined week.

“Sorry, sorry,” I said. I almost added, “The housekeeper is in mourning.” But that was pretty awful, so I added, “I never did get that housekeeping merit badge.”

“You were a Boy Scout?” he replied, totally interested. And I didn’t have the heart to tell him that no, I wasn’t—somehow the scouts filled their g*y Korean Brooklynite quota without me. So I nodded, and I lied, and while I lied, I decided to make myself an Eagle Scout.

Hoping to make my way back to being a good host, I offered him a drink, and clarified what kind of drinks I was offering when he seemed to want water—which is acceptable if you’ve just run a few miles, but not really in a social situation. Since the local bodega owners would only laugh if I showed them my fake ID, I had to resort to my parents’ stash of Korean beer, which was probably great if you’d never left Korea and had never tasted any other beers, but was pretty damn unexceptional if you’d ever kept the company of Mr. Samuel Adams and his brethren.

Peter sipped the OB politely and declined to make the usual OB-GYN jokes about its name. We watched the news for a while, and I pretty much confessed my crush on Peter Jennings. And maybe it was all the talk of Peter Jennings, but suddenly I was like, Why am I here on the couch with this seventeen-year-old Ewanish boy and totally keeping my hands to myself? Was it him or was it me that was stopping us? I figured he’d be into it, but I didn’t want to freak him out if he wasn’t. I decided to turn the flirtation up a notch, remembering that I’d said we were going to watch Cabaret. Once I put the movie on, I asked him if he liked the lights on or off—clearly code words for “Do you want to sit here like we’ve been sitting or do you want to start making out?” He said he could do either, which was no help whatsoever.

The movie started, and I wasn’t remotely interested in it. I slid a little closer to him, but it was a completely missed signal. After a while I realized how late it was getting, and I wondered if Peter was planning on going home or staying over. Finally he pointed out that it was almost midnight, and it was really clear in his voice that he wanted to stay. I thought of him trying to get the subway all the way back, and I knew I couldn’t do that to him. But I also didn’t want him to think he had to stay, because I knew I was going to crash pretty soon. When I asked him if he was going to get in trouble with his parents, he told me he’d already made up an alibi for them. This got my attention—he was playing a little more of a game than I’d pegged him for. Still, he didn’t make a move. I figured we could start making out during the rest of the DVD, so we restarted it, and I realized too late that even though it has music, Cabaret is a f**king downer of a movie, as most things that end with the Holocaust tend to be.

Soon Sally Bowles’s party was over, and it looked like ours was going to follow suit. I could barely keep my eyes open, and every time I yawned, Peter would echo it with another yawn. I tried to feel some kind of sexual current in the room, but came up with more yawning. Maybe my receptors were out of commission. I told him it was probably time to call it a night. And I realized that there was no way we were going to sleep in the same bed—that would lead him on too much, and I didn’t want to lead him on. The right thing to do was to leave him alone.

I could hear the rain outside, and I opened my window and breathed a little of it in before I got the sheets for the couch. I could’ve given him my parents’ room, but I could imagine them making a late-night arrival at JFK, then cabbing home to find a complete boy-stranger in their bed. (It would be even worse if they found him in my bed … with me.) I knew I should have explained this to him, but I was too tired even for that. I figured he’d just go with it, and it would be fine.