The Vibe Is Rotten

I am a middle aged woman crying at old emails. My dog is at my feet. My kids are my kids plugged into their Nintendo Switch.

The emails say things like:

“Hang tight and let the tears flow until they stop. Lots of questions to be answered in the future. Just know that I love you.”

“Physically I am fine, but overall, I am not ok. I'm scared, I'm exhausted, and I'm sick.”

“After grieving non-stop for a week, I'm now down to about an hour a day, plus some spontaneous outburst that last only minutes. I just wish I were there!”

“I've been trying to get through to both you and Wendy, but the phone's (sic) are still impossible.”

We were so young. We were so concerned and hopeful and sincere. We were so confused and distraught. We were all these things together and together we were all these things.

---

I am also a twenty-six year old redhead wearing jeans and a black tank top. It is Monday 10 September 2001. I am out of work, but up early. The day is already blue and clear and sunny. My friend, Harvey, got a travel stipend and is paying me a hundred and fifty bucks to drive him from Brooklyn up to Woodstock for a recording gig. I scoop him from his pre-War Park Slope apartment around 7AM. It is cool in the morning light and the day is ahead of us is promising. We rumble through the cobblestone streets in Williamsburg and pick up some gear from a friend who lives on Kent and Metropolitan. He looks like we woke him up, a little disoriented, but happy to see Harvey. There is some drama with this friend who is storing the gear. His wife has lost a baby, perhaps? Or they are breaking up? Or maybe they are just getting their kid ready for daycare?

We grab some coffee and pop over the Manhattan Bridge, head South around the Battery because Harv had a gig there days earlier and believes the traffic will be lighter than if we cut across Canal. Or maybe I get in the wrong lane and we are shunted south because of traffic? We pass World Trade at about 9AM and we crane our heads to try to see the top while we are stopped at a light. Then we head up the West Side Highway hoping to make it upstate before lunch.

We talk lot about the world and about life and love and sex and addiction and all the things we enjoy thinking about including his prejudice against snowmobile culture. Harvey is English and tells marvelous stories that make me squeal with laughter. He has a dark and wry take on life. I’d met him when I was invited backstage at a gig he played with a famous jazz musician. This happens to me often when I’m young. I love the attention. I am vain. Harvey and I became friends because he was gallant that evening and walked me to my car and never scoffed when I started my piece of shit car and it was so loud the parking garage shook because my muffler had near fallen off the ass end. He waved me off, smiling gently and emailed soon to connect. Email is a new art form then and to master it early on requires quick, punctive missives alternated with lengthy, earnest Fitzwilliam Darcy level heart dumps.

Harvey is a gifted short form writer and sends me tiny, savage emails that make me smile for days:

I've spent the last two weeks up in Shitstock recording with me old spa J--- M----. It went well but i came back with a gothic chest infection so now i'm recuperating.

And this:

Dost thou wish to come over, eat chinese food like students and get square-eyed?

Early in our correspondence, he tells me lovely things I will keep to myself and refers to us as “nervy existentialists.” Name a person who wouldn’t love that.

We see movies together. We take long walks. We hang out at the diner in Park Slope with photos of the Park Slope Plane Crash from 1960 on the walls. My father was supposed to be on one of the planes, but managed to hitch a military flight home for Christmas. The photos look antique, but they are only forty years old. Harvey smokes and smiles and listens well.

Harv is a bit older than me, sager and plenty mercurial. I adore him. Getting together is a struggle, and we often miss each other because of rehearsals and gigs. This summer is no different. He was on tour out in LA, and I just ended a small tour where I was juggling teaching and performing. I burned too hot and finished the run disappointed with myself. My head was filled with all my little failures lined up in a row played endlessly on loop. For his part, Harvey has his demons, and they keep him well occupied.

He writes:

My sweet,

sorry i haven't been able to hook up.

THE VIBE IS ROTTEN,

REALLY ROTTEN.

I'm on my way out of this.

If i can i'll call to elaborate. If not lets get fucked up on heroin together when i return.

love,

H xx

And this:

the shows are at 12 noon and 1pm.

Free. Outdoors at the base of the twin towers.

Sorry you're sick.

H xoxox

“This” is his manic depression and, no, Harvey doesn’t die in this story. There is no heroin. Harvey still is. But the Twin Towers are not.

Here is what happened. On 5 September 2001, I email him:

H~

Are you busy Friday night? I'm ridiculously low on funds until my grant

checks come through (all the illusion of being paid, none of the cash),

but crouching around a fire in a garbage can can be fun if the company's

good.

B

Our stars aligned and Harvey whisked me out for dinner and a long twilight walk and plenty of dark conversation. He heard all my out-of-work woes and made me an offer to drive him north. A fine mixture of business and pleasure, money for a friend who needed it and transportation for his tremendous amount of gear. It was gentlemanly and generous, a mensch-move that affords us this small road trip together. I am happy for our adventure, a bit sad to drop him off and watch him disappear into the studio as I back down the dirt drive. I'm also a smidge jealous he gets to devote himself to making music all week. I drive into Woodstock, wander the shops and read the flyers stapled to the telephone poles and bulletin boards. I treat myself to lunch and re-read A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a café that smells like lavender and wool and barley.

Harvey once told me you know how a relationship will end within ten minutes of knowing a lover. You see the exact weakness, but choose to ignore it because of your optimism and attraction and the promise of sex.

I entertain a life with Harvey.

Maybe we would run off to Berlin or Tokyo or Reykjavik and build a lean, viciously artistic life. Maybe we would move to a moody seaside town where I would run a café-bookstore and barter with friends for bread and car repairs while Harvey clanked around in the studio we built in our garage. Maybe we would go to Costa Rica and do nothing but eat mangos and surf for a good long while. In no scenario I game play does it end well. We fight. My remaining youth is spent on his caverns of despair. I never see my family again or there is too much nicotine or he discovers my real secret: I am a selkie and cannot be kept from the sea.

Each vision of a future feels out of body, adjacent to my real life. Though I have fiery veins, I am cautious about men I really like. And I really like him.

My life is dedicated almost singularly to art. My art, not his. I am just getting started after years of training. My voice is strong and clear and practiced to cut through the air over subway cars and traffic. I want to make magic and change heartbeats; occasionally, I get it right. Text spools out of me, faces and words and emotions and moments from the past line up dutifully in order and are ready for me grab at will. That’s what I do. That's my work. I read the play quickly. Though she be little, but little she is fierce! makes me cackle. I make notes. I see the future. Then I drive myself back to the city.

I draft some emails and check in with my temp agency. A minor news item from late in the nightly news catches my attention: Ahmad Shah Massoud has been assassinated. I take a moment because I understand him to have been a fierce and elusive warrior admired by many. I’d spent precious money on the National Geographic Adventure profile on him written by Sebastian Junger earlier that year. Another name from that article tickles my memory from my time in Scotland when Americans abroad were alerted to keep a low profile. I think to go grab the magazine, but I have other shit to do.

This is the last day of peace in my adult life. The last day without war.

---

Like you have heard in story after story, as you saw with your own eyes: the morning of September 11th was stunning, clear, perfectly blue. As if it happened in the rain it would have been any less shocking.

A friend says there’s never a good day for a funeral, and he is right.

My phone rings a little before 9 in the morning. I roll over and pick it up expecting a call from my temp agency. Instead, it is my father, relieved to get to me, to hear my voice. He tells me to get to a television.

“They hit the Twin Towers.”

My roommate, Jennifer, already has the television on and is on the phone with her parents. We don’t know what has happened. There has been an accident, of course. This is a tragedy. I start to focus on the screen to try to make sense of what I am seeing – a bomb? a what? – and before I understand, another explosion occurs. We scream we scream we stare and move around the room in a burst of adrenaline. Our windows face a courtyard, we can’t just look out the window to confirm. We are swearing and crying and the normal sounds of the city mutate around us. We still do not understand. It is a dreadful pair of accidents.

We spend the next hour on our phones, calling every single person we know, the busy signals haven’t started to jam us up yet. I frantically call Wendy’s office, but she isn’t there. I get Tony on the line who, to calm me, recites over and over that she will be fine. She is not there, but was not expected to be, she will not have randomly ventured downtown. But her aunt? No no no, her aunt no longer works there. Maybe she does? Neither of us remember. She will be fine fine fine. He is not blasé, he is kind and worried but not ready to entertain the unimaginable.

I call Greg who is safe, but otherwise not in the habit of speaking much. Rob and I speak in the pitch of it all. He is in Pittsburgh and safe. I get Elise on the line, and she is fine, but there is chaos on the island, bomb threats and word of explosions where there weren’t any. Later I phone her parents in Israel to let them know she is ok.

And then word comes in about the Pentagon.

We understand.

We are under attack.

Neither Jenn nor I make a run for our cars. We don’t pack our things or grab our toiletries. We don’t know when the next attack will happen or where it will be. Brooklyn Bridge? One of the airports? A train? Too much anchors us to the apartment. Our fear, our friendships, the riveting news. We can still connect to the internet and start email chains, identifying who we’ve heard from, who is safe. We begin relaying messages to friends moving around the city who have no actual intel. It is an island of rumor, an 8 million person game of Operator.

We do not understand what we are seeing when the first tower collapses. We think there is enormous loss of life, but we are watching a rescue. People are falling, jumping. We see it. But we think that will be it. We think against reason the helicopters will swoop in above the heat and rescue people from the roofs. We think people have time. It is a fire. It's just a fire.

Jennifer and I climb up to our roof to see with our own eyes. We are watching when the second tower falls. Neighbors on other rooftops fall to their knees, there is keening and howling. All those people, all those people. We determine the number to be 25,000. That is the number of people with think we just watched die. We don’t understand any of it. Not really. Our number would prove to be a dumb guess, a nothing number. Do we cry? Do we scream? Do we make any noise or only noise?

But we can feel the people, do you understand? We think of them as individuals with families and futures. We can feel the psychic explosion. Death on that scale is not just physics.

The plume makes its way to us and the smell of fire starts to seep into everything. Another tragedy blasts over the airwaves. A plane destined for San Francisco crashes in a field in Pennsylvania. I don’t know what we do in the afternoon when the phones stop. Someone says there were school children on the plane that flew into the Pentagon. We try and try and try to get through to people. Someone says they were talking to people in the air via cell phone before the PA crash. My parents have a message from me. In the message I am distraught and even though they know I am “safe” they also know I am nothing like safe. When do I do this? I call them and don’t get through? Do I really? But people on a plane that is crashing speak to their families? On those shitty back of the chair phones with the swipe cards? The hijackers let them use those phones? It's a dumb detail to cling to, but I can't stop thinking about having to swipe a card while some jacked-up, froth-mouthed, sweaty mother-fucker paces the front of the cabin like a feral cat.

By noon, all the planes in the sky have been grounded.

Eventually, one of us goes out for milk, maybe we both do? Jennifer who grew up weathering hurricanes thinks about things like water and batteries and satisfying junk food. But what do I buy? A diet Coke? A box of pasta?

The subways shut down. Shops close. No one is getting in or out of the city.

The phones are truly down by midafternoon. No internet, no telephone. Just relentless busy signals. There is nothing to do but watch the news coverage. A local reporter has broken into World Trade 7 with a cameraman and is doing a live shot Geraldo-style. It is batshit crazy to be where he is and it serves us no actual information. Just some guy with TV anchor hair impressing himself. The building collapses at 5:20PM, but that jackass manages to get out.

Who did this? Why would someone do this? There are no pundits telling us what to think. All the key villains immediately deny responsibility. A name tickles in the background. A Keyser Söze from my time in Scotland, a wealthy evil mastermind who seems almost fictional, but who hates Americans. Some reporters say some things, but no one I am listening to says the actual name.

It is all real time.

People are still trying to get home, to wash the ash off their faces or trying to get in to find their loved one or to donate blood. Some have stopped at bars and have gotten blasted and are having numb sex in the bathroom stalls. We all think there are going to be hundreds of survivors, thousands even. There are going to be so many survivors and they will have defied the odds! They will fill the hospitals and need blood! People line up for hours to give blood. St. Vincent’s is prepared. Their staff converges. They are ready for the worst day of their lives. But no one comes. It is silent. All the blood donations are for nothing.

At sunset, we climb back up to the roof. F-16s circle the city, there are no other sounds. No trains, no subways, no cars on the Belt Parkway. The sunset is spectacular, the red-orange light cutting through the particles in the air, the smoke. The sky burns salmon pink and we are so deeply sad. A little flicker shines light at us an adjacent rooftop. We think it is a floating piece of debris despite the total absence of sense it requires to justify drifting, airborne metal. It twinkles, them flits towards our roof. We are curious and do not trust our eyes. It flits again, quickly, against the air current. And then we see another one – a little spinning metal hexagon. These little metal objects jet across our roof and dance around us for a several minutes before moving on. They are like little mechanical hummingbirds. We tuck this away as just another inexplicable part of an inexplicable day. We go downstairs and somehow fall asleep.

The next morning, the same light greets me. The crystal blue sky and crisp sunlight. I am happy, but midway through a stretch, I remember our new reality. I look out my window and envelopes and paperwork drift by the window. Some is charred, but most of it is intact. I curl into myself and don’t want to face the day.

I sit on the phone for hours tethered to Wendy. We have so much and nothing at all to say. We are only a few miles away from each other, but it could have been continents. We replay events and talk about the people who we think must still be trapped, we also say nothing for long stretches.

That night, my roommate has her co-workers over from the restaurants where she hosts. They arrive and arrive and arrive and play their unfamiliar music and drink their shitty beer and get increasingly more naked and frenetic. The energy is off. It is frantic. There is sex dripping from their pores. I make myself small and escape to my room. I lock myself in and push furniture up against the doors and fall asleep to Jeff Buckley on loop repeat on my Discman. I wake up at 3AM when the batteries finally die. Our guests are at long last gone.

---

Wendy and I are at a pub in Edinburgh. Is it midday 16 August 1998. We are eating fish and chips with mushy peas and nursing pints of beer. The televisions are blaring news from Northern Ireland, cast aside newspapers carry headlines about the bombing in Omagh. Our theater company is performing a play called Apocalypse Not Now, I Have a Headache at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Folks are grieving and nervous. Scared. Scared, scared to ride buses, scared of parked cars. We are sad. The news is shocking and graphic and hideous.

Everyone is disappointed peace didn’t hold. (Spoiler, it kind of did despite this event.)

In the days following, we are alerted as Americans abroad that we should "maintain a low profile, vary routes and times for all required travel, and treat mail from unfamiliar sources with suspicion."

We find out about these alerts through the radio and newspapers and phone calls back home to our families in the states. We have been spending our time performing our play and partying in old warehouses at night with strangers who make art out of old vacuums and musicians who play traditional music before doing tons of blow and fucking strangers in dark alleys. We don't do that. We are kind of innocent, really. The dead opposite of edgy. We start to soften our voices when we go out. We let people think we are Canadian.

We occasionally pick up newspapers or glance at one left on a table at the pub. Nairobi is far away. Dar es Salaam? We have never even heard of it before. The Serbs are in Kosovo and the term “ethnic Albanian” is starting to rev up on news broadcasts. There is some tension in Iran and Afghanistan. Iraq is pissed about UN inspections. We are not so foolish to ignore war – it is the subject of the play we are performing -- but we do not fixate on it.

One particular warning stands out amid all the last names and place names, villains and allies: we are told a man named Usama bin Ladin has claimed responsibility for the embassy bombings and that he has threatened to kill American nationals outside the United States.

---

Wendy goes back to work Thursday, 13 September. The trains are running again. I meet her for lunch.

Please put that into perspective: we do not bother to take a full week off or even the rest of the week off from work or life. We take a single day to process this. Wall Street must trade! We must show the terrorists! Commence All Commerce!

After our lunch, we hug and hug and hug and then I wander from Court Street to the Promenade and land on a bench in Brooklyn Bridge Park. An off-duty police officer is also there. He asks me if I knew anyone and, no, I didn’t. Like everyone else, half the people I know could have been there, but weren’t. My uncle didn’t get on the plane, my cousin wasn’t riding the train from NJ, my friends were further uptown. You can’t get south of 14th Street. I ask about him about his losses and he tells me he still doesn’t know who was and wasn’t there. I don’t think we cry, but we take enormous comfort in talking to a stranger and being kind to each other. We stand close. I will never forget him.

I go back to my apartment. I talk to my college sweetheart’s mom, Mary. She is kind and happy to hear my voice. When I finally get in touch with Skid himself, he is perfect. Alive, for starters. Righteously angry, full of heart and compassion. He is like Henry V, as ready to scathe as he is to comfort and offer soft words. We hadn’t really talked in years, but he is someone I can sit silently on a phone with taking turns crying. We are glad of each other. It takes energy not to go out the door and walk to him.

I end the week in Massachusetts. I drive to my parents. I have no memory of getting there. I attend Mass at St. Michael’s Cathedral. I feel so alone. All the falling people. We are all too close to each other singing to God. I get what will be the first waves of claustrophobia that will snag me for the next decade. I have to leave. The sunlight is too raw when I walk to my car. I stop talking to God outright after this. What do my words mean if it is all inevitable anyway? I know where God is and God knows where I am and it'll just have to be like this for a while.

The emails I write in the following weeks are all about the deep slumber into which I fall. I sleep constantly. Endlessly. Weeks from now, I shake off the great sleep enough to walk to the ocean, but a block from the boardwalk an elderly man falls from his second story window while removing the air conditioner. A nurse is walking just ahead of me and rushes to tend to him. He dies in her arms. I call 911 and the sirens break my nerves. I turn to go home as the ambulances race down the street. I go to my room and don't wake up for another twenty hours. As the season wears on, I pull myself out of it every day for rehearsals, but each trip out of the house is so animal adrenaline skin hair scalp stressful, I need to sleep for fifteen hours a day to balance out the shock.

Already friends are talking about joining the military. Already, terms like "ground zero" seep into the vernacular. Already people are protecting synagogues with armed gunmen and brown people are being killed for seeming Muslim. But New Yorkers are less keen on any of that shit. Our city is still on fire. We huddle together head to head in bars and talk quietly about the things we saw. Who did you lose? Where were you? Did you lose someone? How close were you? I arrive at rehearsal one night and three of us know of a new suicide since the day before. We hope people will leave the city, that the rents will go down.

I work a twelve-hour shift at St. Paul's Chapel. There is so much death and grief and survival. Wendy scoops me up after her Ayurvedic eye appointment and we find a pub where the Irish bartender, Cass, smells my trauma. He gives me free beers and kisses me all night and purrs to me in his Irish accent, whispering the most sinful things. Wendy has the good sense to not let me wander off home with him though he damned near prevails several times. She has a zero sum total of his bullshit. Instead we hit the Broadway diner in Astoria and I am sober by 7AM.

Who did you lose? Where were you? Did you lose someone? How close were you?

We all lost someone: the person we were before that day. The person we were going be before we were redirected. Listen to me. We were going to be different people. We were going to have different lives than the ones we have now. This thing happened, and we became new people with different trajectories than the ones we were riding.

On loop, please hear me: life wasn’t supposed to be like this. Me sitting on a porch in Minnesota with my giant dog waving to my daughter as she bikes to the library. This is a sweet by-product of my new timeline. This marvelous child. The other one running around naked and playing with Legos inside.

But there are other realities of this timeline that make me certain Usama bin Laden got exactly what he wanted. Angry lunatics refusing to sit their asses down and take a number during a pandemic. Be-horned half-naked organic-only circus goons breaking into the US Capitol to deliver earnest prayers in the name of Christ on the House floor like their misguided words and deeds have sanctimony and honor. The Taliban riding roughshod back into Kabul in 2021. The vibe is rotten, to quote an old friend. This was war all these years, this was war. And damned if we knew it even a fraction of the time.