The Enterprise - 40

We think words mean things. But they really mean ideas. This is by design—this is how we want them to behave. If we don’t like something, we can change its name. Or pretend its name means something else. We’re in control. But the thing is: we don’t live in truth. We inhabit a brokered, dubious realm, situated in the gaps between words and what they represent. We are insulated by language—most of the time. What happens when it fails to protect us?

A few of us were going to the game on Monday night. Kevin, Rob. Maybe Peter, Jimmy. Maybe Steve. It was going to be Yankees-Red Sox, Roger Clemens. But a hard rain started in the afternoon and didn’t let up. After work we went to the dark bar around the corner to wait and see if the game got called. In the cozy barglow we felt a little lazy, like we were playing hooky. But on TV we saw the tarp get rolled out over the infield. A few intrepid souls in garbage-bag ponchos huddled in the stands. We began to drink in earnest then, shooting pool, insouciant. Outside the rain was grim and unforgiving.

The following morning I awoke later than I wanted to. As usual. Coffee, shower. The whole routine. At my bus stop all was quiet and serene, the sky a limpid blue pierced by a column of black smoke from some building on fire downtown. As the bus progressed along Fifth I had that thought that everybody has: I wonder if it’s my building that’s on fire.

It probably wasn’t. Hundreds of buildings down there. Thousands. But still.

“The last stop on this bus will be Fawteenth Street,” the driver suddenly announced. “Fawteenth Street will be the last stop on this bus.”

There was a French couple near me, young, eager to see the sights. Qu'est-ce qui se passe? she asked him. What’s going on? He translated the thing about 14th. That’s all anybody knew.

A fire engine passed us and one of the firemen, in a rear-facing window seat, leaned his head out, looking back. He bore the smile of a man who knows exactly where he’s going and what he has to do.

I got off at 23rd, the smoke still far away. The building super, an older Hispanic man, was sweeping the little foyer by the elevator. He stopped and looked at me, resting his hands atop the broomstick. He seemed a bit alarmed to just be clearing out the dust.

“The towers!” he said. “Plane hit towers!” He made a swooping gesture with his hand by way of illustration. “Twin Towers! Yes? Plane!”

“Really?” I replied. I tried to strike an appropriate posture of concern. “Wow.”

“Two!” he added, eyes wide, holding up his fingers in a V. “Two plane hit!”

“What?”

“Two plane hit towers! Two!” he insisted.

It seemed like he’d doubled the number in dissatisfaction at my response. What on earth could he actually be talking about? I imagined a little prop plane wobbling off course, bonking into the side of a building; another somehow following suit. (Didn’t a bomber do that after the War? Stick into the side of the Empire State? Then a giant ape came along and tore it out?) I tried again to pitch my voice to the urgency of his outlandish assertion.

“Two planes?!” I said. “That’s incredible!”

I got off the elevator to find most of my coworkers on the other side of the sculpture and the plant, staring dumbfoundedly at the television. The same plume of smoke was on the screen, bigger and closer, a little less real. Newscasters were gravely reciting the facts as they were known: airline names, flight numbers, emergency response activities. Origins and destinations. Times to the minute. Speculations as to the dead and injured. Each of the twins bore on its face a crooked maw with a tongue of fire inside, vomiting torrential sheets of slate-gray smoke into the sparkling, baby blue sky. Down below, safe in the valley of shops and streets and sidewalks, many stared up at the conflagration with hands over their mouths. Police waving stand back, stand back. Nothing to see here, folks.

A blizzard of documents—reports, charts, memos, contracts and faxes—animated the air and fell, confetti-like, upon the living. There went our paperwork. There went our records.

The rest of the office looked normal. The same walls and floor, desks, lamps and chairs. Yesterday’s coffee mugs sat upside-down in the rack beside the sink.

Were we now living in a new world, different than the one before? A world of smoke and death, where nothing can be trusted?

Neil paced between his office and the TV, murmuring a word or two of consolation when it appeared to be expected. He suggested we all go home if we like. This is so bad, you don’t even need to do your jobs. Brett embraced Julie in a comforting, older-brotherly fashion, his leather jacket muffling her sobs. It was like we were in high school and a friend committed suicide. It was hard to say what it was like.

I wandered over to my desk and placed a call to Melissa. She was up on the roof with her binoculars. While my voice was worried, tense, aggrieved—all the things it was supposed to be, I thought—hers was weirdly calm, detached. Like it always was, in fact. Why shouldn’t it be?

“I can see it from here,” she said. “I can see it really well.”

“You can see the towers?”

“I can see the smoke.”

“You can see the smoke?”

“I can totally see the smoke.”

I told her I’d probably head up to her place in a little while. I called my sister and my brother. Then I wandered to the TV just in time to see. It came as a surprise, at least to me. How does a burning building crumble to the ground?

I returned to my desk and watched the calamity as it was haltingly presented online. I expected some reassurance from the words arrayed in different sizes on the screen. Not from the words themselves—the words were UNDER ATTACK, TERROR, STUNNED—but from the fact that they were words. Our words. We had typed them into a machine. The machine displayed them back to us. This was still the world as it should be. Was it not?

Instead I felt a greater unease, almost nausea. The words, the phrases, they only pointed feebly—cravenly—toward the meanings that they would contain. I perceived the awful intrusion of something raw and powerful—something unnameable—into our insular domain.

“Oh my God,” I heard Lucy wail across the divide. “Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.”

“What?”

“The second tower just collapsed.”

TROOPS

and my clumsy movements

The Enterprise - 39

I was beside myself, what to do with Melissa. All I could imagine was her disappearing. And me grasping at the space where she had been. She’d been a little quiet lately. What was up? I made mental lists of things to say to her. Little jokes to make. As though to appease some insatiable beast.

Still, our relationship persisted. I shuffled fearfully to her apartment every couple of days, convinced she’d send me right back home. Instead, we’d order out. Watch some old movie. Fuck. Wake up and brush our teeth and that was that.

I began to make a tally of the good days and the bad. I took her out to dinner for her birthday. That was good. I got her drunk enough so she forgot my apprehension.

We planned a vacation. A trip out west. A visit to a friend of mine and to a friend of hers. Hotels, wineries, a drive up the coast. Carmel and Monterey. Some camping. I hated camping. I would have done anything she said.

There appeared a warning light on the dashboard of our rental car and I called the 800 number that was provided in our pamphlet of materials. Ignore it, they said. There’s no problem with the car. There’s a problem with the warning.

The first few days were fine. She liked to get high. As long as we were smoking pot together, everything was all right. That’s what I thought. We sat on the windowsill of a motel room in Santa Monica, blowing smoke into the shaft. Little sparks flew up into the darkness.

The night before it was all over we were staying at an extremely expensive inn overlooking the rocky Pacific shore in Big Sur. We got high on our patio. I sucked each papery hit deeply and held it in as long as I could, drawing every last bit of intoxicating smoke into my lungs in little bursts, trying not to cough. Then we walked the path to the restaurant perched over the foggy cliffs.

We were offered a table facing an angry orange fire; for a moment it seemed lovely and then my hands and knees and face heated intolerably and in my hazy state I felt the thing was ruined and the whole world was sure to end.

"Ask the Maitre d' for another table," said Melissa quite reasonably, so I did, and we were promptly seated at a table by the picture window looking out to sea.

We ordered white wine and oysters and California caviar and when it came we set the oysters between us and slipped them off the shells into our mouths, and everything was fine as gray turned to black outside, and far below us the foamy surf that beat upon the shore receded into darkness too.

Suddenly there was a man standing behind her, his nose to the window. He had wound his way around nearby tables and chairs and appeared to be examining the glass with intense curiosity. His fingers walked upon the surface and its ghostly, gold reflections of faces and hunched bodies, chairs, tables, plates and softly glowing candles. He probed it timidly, hesitantly, like an explorer who has discovered a new world far more mysterious and wonderful and terrifying than he could ever have imagined.

"Sir?" said Melissa.

After a beat more puzzled fumbling he broke out of his trance.

"Oh! I… I thought that was another room!" he said, and pivoted back among the real things from whence he came.

As we watched the lost man and debated the meaning of his behavior—was it some kind of joke? Was he very drunk? Senile?—I became convinced I wasn’t me.

We drank more in the restaurant, got the check, wandered through the parking lot and smoked some more. We tried to break in to the swimming pool, the fancy one that’s in the pictures in the travel magazines. Someone with a flashlight saw us and yelled something. So we went back to our room, drank some more. Fucked in the tub. When I awoke in the morning she was not beside me and I knew right then it was over. It wasn’t my own thoughts that told me. It wasn’t my own voice. It came from outside of me. It had the authority of the other. It’s over. I knew there was nothing I could do. And like an idiot I still tried.

The Crossing Guard on Eighth

The crossing guard on Eighth is a nice woman about my age, an old maid already, maybe. Always says g’mornin’ in her Brooklyn accent. She chats with the moms and their kids, catching up on gossip. flattering the girls: Don’t you look beautiful today! With her coffee in her hand and her back to the traffic, the cars and trucks are an afterthought. She knows they’ll stop.

Food Day in Brooklyn - 3

The Thai food—sausages in buns with cilantro and a trace of sriracha sauce—was very good. But they took a minute and a half to eat. We went back up the hill, toward the entrance, hoping to find some stands with shorter lines. We circled a log cabin-like structure that had vendor windows on all four sides. Bagel halves were on display under cheese bells, each draped with a limp and pallid blade of lox. Around the corner two women stood at a bakery counter. All they had left for sale were sticks of salty bread. I was so surprised that a vendor with something in stock had no line before it that I bought some. The women seemed more surprised than me.

We got some sweets in the dessert sector—those were not hard to obtain. After a wait in two lines—one line earned you permission to stand in the other, essentially—we got duck hot dogs created by a particularly famous restaurant. The cabbage topping seemed, weirdly, to be mixed with orange zest. I popped a piece of Orbit gum.

Frustrated, defeated, we walked to a little hill beside some trees and lay down for awhile. The cool grass felt good against my neck. On my palms. I gazed serenely at the sky through the gaps of the branches looming over us. It was still a beautiful day. I began to feel good.

Suddenly something fearsome and raw violated the idyll. KRANGG!! It was a ferocious chord from an extremely loud, distorted guitar. CHUGGA-CHUGGA-CHUGGA KCHANG KANG CHUGGA-CHUGGA it went, again and again and again. A jolting expression of id to cast a damning pall on the gentle afternoon.

We arose blearily, as though hung over.

“It’s a Van Halen cover band,” observed Sara.

It did not seem possible to me—they sounded more like death metal. But sure enough, they were playing “Panama.”

We gravitated toward one of the exits, at the south end of the park. To get there we walked past rows and rows of portable toilets. Something seemed strange about them—an incongruous, dreamy quality. I’d never seen these objects in quite this way before. Then it occurred to me what it was: there were no lines.

Observed Through the Drugstore Window

A man stood in the window of the Rite Aid on 42nd Street, having just passed through the checkout. His white plastic bag lay open on the sill, and in it sat a torn little box from which he’d withdrawn a Styrofoam and metal finger splint, which he now placed gingerly over his index finger and wound around with gauze.

Food Day in Brooklyn - 2

The scene seemed idyllic at first. Pavilions, stands and stages across a hilly expanse. But then we looked a little closer: you couldn’t buy beer with real money. You needed special money. You were supposed to trade your real money for the special money first.

We traveled a little further and found a beer stand that took cash. But you needed a bracelet. I gazed back up the hill. I saw neat rows of food stands with extravagantly painted signs. People. Trees. No indication as to where one might obtain a bracelet.

We toured the natural amphitheatre. Around its rim, vendors fed lines of people extending from the amorphous pit like a hundred hungry tongues. Employees stood at vague points on the hill with signs that read, “15 minutes to go!”

Down on the lawn some people had food. Some people had beer. Some had food and beer. It was difficult to imagine what they’d endured to obtain it; or perhaps into what privilege they had somehow been born.

Onstage someone bellowed a perfunctory welcome: How you all doin’ today? Soon a dixieland band struck up, its jaunty counterpoint bleating incongruously over the proceedings. I thought about the woman on her hands and knees.

We found the shortest line—Thai food—and so there we stood, and stood, and stood. I took a break to try to find the bracelet place. I reached the side of a beer tent where a worker was chatting with a customer. I asked the worker where to get a bracelet. He shrugged. Like he didn’t know what I meant. Certainly he didn’t care. I asked the customer.

“How do you get a bracelet?” I ventured. “How do I get a bracelet? Like the one you have.” I pointed to his. “There.”

“Over there, by the entrance,” he replied, pointing at a shroud of trees. Then he swiveled uncertainly. “Or over there. I dunno. There’s two entrances,” he said.

“Over there?” I asked, pointing where he had pointed first.

“I think so. Yeah. I think.”

I found the ID booth. There was a line snaking away from it, around a tree, and back out of view. Hundreds of people all shifting foot to foot. I turned away and walked back to find that Sara had made a little progress up the hill.

Food Day in Brooklyn - 1

We went with the others across the park, through the fields and the woods, against an equal current of those returning. It was a bright-blue day, hot. The sort of day when nothing can possibly go wrong.

I scrutinized the faces of those passing us. Some bore wry expressions. Others seemed perfectly content. But it was hard to tell the former from the latter. We continued.

I thought I heard fragments of dejected speech. Almost mocking in tone.

When we arrived the line was hundreds long and wound along the semis parked on the service road. Over the fence and beyond a wall of trees were assembled the multitudes. You couldn’t see them yet. No music was audible at the moment. But you could tell they were there.

The line was moving, but not so fast that you could see it move. It moved like a minute hand. Like the burn of a cigarette.

We commented on the youthfulness of the crowd.

I spotted Joe and Maya walking our way down the line.

“It’s a complete disaster,” proclaimed Joe, smiling faintly. Maya concurred.

They were just describing the scene—long lines for everything, no way to get a drink—when we came upon a woman on her hands and knees, vomiting spasmodically onto the pavement. A man—her man?—stood a few paces away, discussing the matter with a cop. We were struck by his lack of regard for her immediate needs—don’t you hold her hair back when she’s puking? Tell her it’ll be all right?

We parted ways with Joe and Maya, telling them we wanted to go in just to see.

Upon entry we were each handed two packs of Orbit chewing gum. Spearmint and peppermint. The gum lady’s emphatic gestures, her vendor’s tray packed with rows of cellophaned packs, her saccharine little getup—these all belied the scene we were to witness.

IMO

One woman is walking away from the kitchen area, ending a conversation with another who’s lingering by the microwave, watching her lunch rotate in the amber light.

“A rolling stone gathers no moss!” she says over her shoulder. “In my opinion.”

Buzz the Buzzer and They'll Buzz You In

In the rush-hour crowd at the 14th Street station this morning I wheeled Sophia to the emergency door and found it locked. Usually it gives way like a magnet separating. Sounds the alarm.

“Buzz the buzzer,” a portly black woman beside me said. “And they’ll buzz you in.”

I pressed the button and peered through the bars at the woman in the booth. She gave a little glare and I felt the door release.

TROOPS

The walk, six miles each way, was a tiring slog

Sugar in the Raw: A Very Short Play About Something I Saw Today

CHARACTERS

Man: A man in his late thirties.
Woman: A woman in her late thirties.

TIME

The present.

SCENE

The kitchen of a corporate office. The Woman is stirring a cup of tea on the counter, by a rack displaying a colorful variety of sweetener packets. A cup of coffee and a gallon of milk sit on the counter a few feet away. A few feet farther still, the Man stands holding a second gallon of milk which he has just removed from the refrigerator.

Man (holding the milk and staring at the other milk on the counter): I already took out milk.

Woman: Hmm?

Man: What am I doing? I already have milk. I am losing my mind. (Opens the fridge and puts the second milk back on its shelf.) Donna, can you get me one of those Sugars in the Raw?

Woman: Sugar in the Raw?

Man (closing the refrigerator door): Um-hmm.

Woman (as she hands the Man a packet of Sugar in the Raw): My cousin’s husband designed the logo for this.

Man: Sugar in the—?

Woman: Raw. Yup.

Man: Raw. Wow.

TROOPS

When he was 19, in 1926

TROOPS

remained crouched behind some leafless bushes

TROOPS

Tom stared into his empty glass

TROOPS

You spend too much

Q&A: Where You Can Find Me

Q: Where can I find you?

A: You can find me down the hall. Past the Pre-Action Valve Room. Pre-Action Valve. Past Rocco’s office. Past Rico’s.

Q: Past Rico’s office? Past Rocco’s office?

A: Rocco’s, then Rico’s. Go past Rocco’s. Go past Rico’s.

Q: And then the Pre-Action Valve Room?

A: Pre-Action Valve comes first. Pre-Action, Rocco, Rico.

Q: And then where are you?

A: I’m at the end of the hall.

What Do You Remember?

I remember the old College Restaurant, or the Campus Restaurant. Whatever it was called. Downstairs and full of smoke. A crowded forest of corduroyed legs.

I remember going to her German class. The teacher scary. Jet-black hair tied back. Wire frames and bright red lipstick. I might be making this up. We watched a slide show. Rolling Bavarian countryside.

And then what happened?

I don't know. We went home. I can only imagine we went home.

TROOPS

Toward the apex

Jesus, Like I'm Gonna Do That

It was one of those stations where you still get reception, if you’re not too far from the stairs. Late, late at night. A woman paced near me, her phone clutched to her ear. This is what I overheard her say:

I still want to see you and I'm so pissed right now.

I'm an honest person!

Wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute wait wait wait wait wait wait wait—

Jesus, like I'm gonna do that.