A Hard and Heavy Thing

by Matthew J. Hefti

  “Both of you,” she said, “can stay here and watch if you’d like. Or you can go home. Or you can do whatever you need to do, call whomever you need to call.” She reached back and grabbed the doorknob, stopping to address the practical items. “Of course, whatever you decide to do, don’t forget to clock out. I, for one, will be using sick hours because this makes me sick.” She sucked in her breath as if something dawned on her. “Oh, I need to call my daughter. Her husband is in the army.”

  Levi backed slowly toward the door, looking back and forth between Jane and the emptiness where Doris had stood. “Jane, what about—”

  Jane lifted a hand and waved him off without taking her eyes off the screen.

  Levi ran down the stairs two at a time. He pushed through the double doors into the lobby. When he reached the exterior doors, it dawned on him that he didn’t punch out. “Screw it,” he said aloud as he continued down the sidewalk at a jog on his way home. He had to turn on the news to see where those flights came from. He had to figure this thing out. He had to get home to check the e-mail itinerary his brother had sent him. He had to—

  1.4 [ . . . ]

  [You know what? Forget it. How can I write about this when all I did was sit on the couch and get high? I had five tense minutes as I ran home and waited for the modem on the computer to hiss, pop, groan, and screech as it tried to connect to the Internet. If I’m going to be honest, all dramatic tension dissipated when I looked at my brother’s itinerary in my e-mail and saw that he wasn’t due to fly until the next day.

  How can I write about all this when I wasn’t in any danger? When no one I knew was in any danger? When I was just an eighteen-year-old kid who was far far away? When I spent the day in the safety of my living room? What right do I have? And what purpose would it serve?

  After all, you saw what I saw.

  Or did you? I don’t know that I’m as intuitive as most people. I think you’re better at grasping the gravity of things.

  You probably placed yourself in their shoes. You did this because you have empathy. You probably imagined yourself at a desk in a cubicle full of people. Maybe a New York Yankees souvenir pennant hanging on the wall and a picture of your gray cat, Nuggets, tacked up above your computer. Type. Input data. Click. Verify. Repeat. Take a sip of coffee. You look over your shoulder to see if your coworker is watching. Do an AOL search for “readings in the village this weekend.” Minimize that screen and bring back the data entry program. Glance over at a window to see a passenger plane coming right at you.

  Did it all happen in slow motion? Did the pilot have fear in his eyes or was it resignation? Did you, from your desk by the window, see the maniacal grin and the hatred in his eyes? Did you duck for cover by instinct or did you instead drop your coffee mug in slow motion and stare at the plane head-on? Did the mug shatter into pieces on the floor in similar slow motion while the plane made contact, sweeping you away into ashes on the way through?

  It’s possible, even probable, that you took a moment to imagine what it felt like to be those men holding those box cutters against the rough whiskers of another man’s neck. Knowing you—you who have learned to live with such common sinners as us—you probably tried to feel what they felt, to learn what drove them to it. You would grasp at any illumination like a man falling down a cliff reaches for grass. You’d take hold of any reason to forgive, wouldn’t you?

  You saw more than I did. You had to have seen more. It affected you differently because you’re good. You can see that people—other people—are hurting, and you can feel for them. You love. Which is more than I can say for myself most days.

  You knew before we ever went anywhere and did anything that there was a whole world out there. We lived somewhere; but other people lived somewhere else; and other people lived in entirely different countries—which may as well have been different worlds to me—but to you, people were people; and everyone else was just living, like we were living; and now, for reasons completely unknown to me, people were literally dying on live television right before our very eyes. Yet, you knew things about the world without having been told, because you understand the nature of things.

  I didn’t feel like I should have felt for all those people who were dead and dying. My own grandpa had just died. Instead of imagining these people a thousand miles from our home in Wisconsin, I imagined Grandpa in some freezer with a toe tag. I imagined the mortician sitting over some small TV on his desk, caring more for the dead people on the news than for the dead people in his array of freezers with the roll-out trays. I could tell early on that it affected you more. I could tell as soon as we had huddled on the couch in the living room, even before we had watched the second tower fall. Eris sat between us. She and I passed the little bong, green-and-blue hand-blown glass (remember that?). While the two of us took big pulls and sunk into the cushy flower-patterned couch you got from your grandmother, you were glued—like, hard, two-part epoxy glued—to the little black box in front of us. Eris tried to pass you the bong a few times, but you pushed it away. You leaned forward on the couch and you turned up the television.

  Meanwhile, I looked over at Eris to admire her magical and mysterious teenage pulchritude. The way her lips plumped up when she slowly blew the smoke out. She made eye contact and smiled when she passed the bong back over. We were young, we were listless, we were stoned, and we were blissfully dumb.

  When they went to Jamie McIntyre at the Pentagon to announce that it, too, had been hit, you moved your hands to your head like you do. You knew before we did that everything had changed. That we were no longer children in a safe world. You opened your mouth and I thought maybe you would finally say something, but then you closed it again when they cut to Aaron Brown at the New York site—at the site we have all come to know as Ground Zero. They didn’t cut quickly enough for us to see it happen, but the reporter described the chaos, explosion, smoke, and falling debris with painstaking impromptu detail. “But just look at that,” he said. And in the pregnant silence that hung in the room, we did look. We looked at the smoke that rose up to the sky, high above the North Tower, which we could see, and then down through what had to have been miles of city blocks below. Aaron could not tell us what was behind the North Tower, because there was no longer anything at all. After he had gathered himself, Aaron told us, “That is about as frightening a scene as you will ever see.”

  You still said nothing.

  I, for one, thought about the rhetorical nature of that statement. I thought, Isn’t it kind of assumptive for this guy to assert to an audience of millions that some grainy pictures on TV will be the most frightening thing they ever see?

  Perhaps if I’m being honest with myself, if I’m making any effort toward realistic self-assessment, I would admit that these are the only conversations in which I feel comfortable: Yes, the ones in my head, but not just that. The arguments. The back-and-forth over semantics. The little digs, the baseless opining about anything, the straw men, the false feeling of superiority that comes with the territory, the emotional stuntedness that keeps me from directly addressing any issue in any sort of real and meaningful way. Growing up, I trained well for these diversionary conversations. Perhaps it’s genetic: the need to press, deflect, then litigate.

  Don’t get me wrong, I was horrified, but the attacks horrified me in an existential and detached way. The event seemed important, but it was not an importance I could grasp, though I tried. It didn’t touch me in the same way as, say, Bobby Withrow killing that guy over at the Conoco in Holmen by hitting him over the head with a forty-ounce bottle of Mickey’s. Remember? We took that trip to the prison for our American Government class and I saw him there. The guard escorted us through a hallway lined with thick security windows, which overlooked a common area filled with octagonal steel picnic tables bolted to the epoxied concrete floor. Several groups of inmates crowded around televisions suspended near the upper corners of the large room, but Bobby sat alone at one of the tables in the center of the ro
om. He was playing solitaire, moving the cards from one pile to the next, straightening each pile as he went. When he shuffled, he looked up at us. All of us high schoolers, just like him. I swear he made eye contact with me.

  The chilling thing was that Bobby held the eye contact, and he wouldn’t look away. The guard had warned us not to lock eyes with any of them because they were like animals and it was a dominance thing with them, but you know, I didn’t see any hatred, malice, or ill will in his eyes; he only had this kind of loneliness and forlorn sadness. I can still remember every detail of that moment. That was the year my parents threatened to kick me out; I had gotten that minor-in-possession charge, and it was after my second time totaling the Caprice. I remember thinking, “Damn, dude. That could be me.”

  But this? This was a grainy 19-inch television screen. This was the wreckage, the smoke, the flames—this was the apocalypse that wouldn’t look real in a movie.

  You made a guttural sound in your throat.

  Eris put her hand on your back, and I began fuming that she was apparently our new houseguest. I resented you for finding another best friend, albeit one with breasts and benefits. Or so I imagined. And the absolute worst part about it was that she seemed to know it. She made eye contact with those savage green eyes, and she smiled. She knew everything she was doing, and she mocked me.

  But that’s not true either. How could she not love you? You who have always been so good. Do you remember what you wanted to do? You wanted to drop out of school to drive to New York and help. You spent two weeks’ worth of pay on bottled water and first aid kits, and you packed up the Prizm to go. Nothing anyone said could convince you that quitting work, dropping out of school, and leaving town was a bad idea. Finally, your Uncle Thomas had to guilt-trip you into staying by telling you Oma needed you, which was a lie. That woman never needed help from anyone. And because Uncle Thomas is a Protestant minister, he made sure to remind you that you can’t be saved by your works.

  You agreed. What was it that you said? What was it that you fired back at him, nodding and snarling in a barely contained paroxysm of frustration? “Good works can’t save you, but they might save someone else.”

  The truth is, we should have let you go.

  No. We should have gone with you. All of us. Every last one of us should have gone and handed out water, food, and clothes. We all should have dug through the rubble to save the bloody, bruised, and broken souls trapped underneath the weight of it all. We all should have cleansed the hurting, rubbed ointment on their wounds, and wrapped them in the whitest of bandages. We all should have walked away from our paychecks for those who needed it. We all should have done what you would have done. We all should have given up what we had to go help in the search for the lost.

  We should have done that instead of what we did later, which was drive to the recruiter’s office to become part of the problem.

  You grabbed my arm and turned up the volume on the television.

  The top of the second tower fell.

  Aaron Brown once again spoke to us from New York. “Good Lord,” he said. The top of the tallest tower on the world’s greatest skyline kept falling and falling and falling until nothing remained but smoke and ash. “There are no words.”]

  1.5 I THINK ABOUT GOD A LOT

  Levi woke to a dark room, his mouth dry and sticky. His legs lay across Eris’s lap. The television’s blue lights flickered, still replaying The Attacks, but it was muted. Eris slept sitting up, her head back, her mouth open. She snored softly.

  Nick sat in the recliner. He leaned forward and looked at them both. “Do you think you could wake her?” he said. “I’ve been listening to that for hours.” It was not acrimony he displayed with his tone, with his posture, and with his gaze, but it was also not adoration.

  The telephone rang once, then stopped. Nick got up from the chair, picked up the cordless, and looked at the caller-ID window. “It was Oma.” He tried calling back, but no one answered.

  The three of them moped out in single file to go check on her. They took the slick black Altima paid for by Eris’s father. Nick and Eris spoke in low voices up front. Levi stared out the window at the river as they drove toward the freeway from downtown.

  When they pulled off I-90 in West Salem, still five miles from Bangor, Eris turned to answer the question he didn’t ask. “I have to drop my mom’s keys off at home real quick. It’ll only take a minute.”

  A tan Lexus sat in the driveway of the new split-level bungalow Eris shared with her mom. Eris pulled in behind it. “That son of a bitch.” She took a set of keys from her console and slammed the lid down before storming up to the house, leaving her door open and the ignition dinging.

  Levi thought of following her in, but Nick stayed put, so Levi stayed put. He wanted the least amount of drama. Eris had left the front door of the house wide open. He could hear yelling.

  When Nick didn’t seem to register that the car was dinging at them, Levi got out to smoke a cigarette. He only got a few good drags before he heard the house door slam. He turned and saw Eris storming toward their car, but she turned and went back to her house again. She opened the front door and leaned in. “You’re just helping him cheat on his wife,” she screamed. She slammed the door, and then she opened it and slammed it again.

  Levi flicked his cigarette out into the road and got in. Nick had turned sideways in his seat and was looking at Eris with respectful concern. “The guy with the ear?” he asked.

  Eris said nothing. She held the heels of her hands to her eyes and she cried. After a time, she slammed both her fists against the steering wheel and gulped, as if trying to swallow her own tears. She took a deep breath, and wiped the tears from under her eyes with an index finger. In silence, she backed out of the driveway.

  [And once again, my failure to get close to her was my own fault. I said nothing. I held my breath, scared to death of saying the wrong thing, when instead I should have just said something.

  This is always how things went. She had tried to make inroads with me, but I had failed to see what she needed. She had shared innumerable poems with me and asked me to look them over, to give her feedback. Literature was our one unique connection. I had read them all, sad confessionals chock full of abstract language and shadowy angst, each verse utterly devoid of any concrete images, but each line crying out for company, each word screaming out her loneliness and frustration.

  Utterly intimidated and ultimately apathetic, I had no framework with which to respond. What did I know of her life? What did I know of a parade of ergodic men marching through the halls of her home doing unspeakable things with her mother under the influence of God knows what? What did I know of the leers of her cousin’s friends, the comments and gropes and calls of the couch-dwellers and freeloaders who paid her so much attention? What did I know of a life in which my family wouldn’t notice if I came home or not, if my bed remained empty and no phone calls were made? The answer is nothing.

  Her life apart from us was foreign to me, and thus, her poems were foreign to me. They made me uncomfortable. They made her seem too vulnerable, and I didn’t like to see her as vulnerable. I liked the girl she projected—the street-smart punk, the general artist, the mysterious and aloof poet—but I could not grasp the girl she was with all her history and stark reality. And her poems were as unknowable as she was. I was terrified of saying the wrong thing, so I simply said nothing. I said they were great and asked for more. But I never responded. Not really. I never talked to her. I never asked the basic questions that showed I cared, because I was too afraid to sound callous. First, do no harm. Nothing ventured and nothing gained.

  And this is why you won. You turned the unknowable into the knowable. By talking. By asking. By listening. Ultimately, by caring. You saw her as more than the angsty girl next door; you saw her for what she was: a complicated, feeling, living, breathing, thinking, independent young woman who just needed a friend. It’s why you knew about the specific guy with the ear, whoeve
r that was, and it’s why I didn’t.]

  When Eris turned on the radio after a few minutes, Nick reached out and put his hand on her leg and gave her thigh a gentle squeeze.

  “No,” she said. “The guy with the neck.”

  They spoke in code riddled with subtext. Levi didn’t understand and he didn’t dare ask, though he wanted to be the one touching her. He wanted to be the one she leaned against to say, “You saved me.”

  [Don’t think I didn’t/don’t recognize that it wasn’t exactly fair or selfless—to put it mildly—to begrudge her the comfort that she needed in her state of emotional distress, preferring that she go without comfort rather than get it from my best friend. I only bring all this up to let you know how conflicted I was/am/maybe always will be in your presence, that is, your combined presence.]

  After a few moments with Nick’s hand on her leg she said, “You and me both, buddy. We got something in common.”

  “What’s that?” Nick asked.

  She patted Nick’s hand and then let it linger there. “You’re not the only orphan, Annie.”

  •••

  Uncle Thomas turned in his stool when the door jingled to signal their entrance. He waved with one hand and snuffed out a smoke in an ashtray with the other.

  “Well, now that you’ve got some company, I’m going to head home and get back to work.” He leaned down and gave Oma a chaste kiss on her cheek. He passed Nick and clapped a hand on his shoulder.

  As Nick hugged his grandmother and sat next to her, Uncle Thomas stopped in front of Levi and shook his hand firmly. “Long time no see, my boy.”

  “Yeah. It’s been a while,” Levi mumbled.

  “Been going to church with your folks back home then? Here in Bangor? Haven’t seen you in La Crosse with Nick.”

  [And I have to admit, this type of thing was not an insignificant factor in my latching on so quickly to your idea to sign up and skip town. Small towns = glass houses, and glass houses + everyone is religious = everyone guilt-tripping you all the time about everything.]