by Dave Eggers
As soon as I got out of that room, something in me just triggered. I told myself, "I'm done. I'm tired. I am not going to go through this again." I told my lawyers, "I want to sue these motherfuckers" and so we filed a lawsuit against Attorney General Eric Holder.
About a month later, we finally received a letter from James Kennedy of the DHS Traveler Redress Inquiry Program, but it didn't tell me anything. It didn't tell me why I wasn't allowed to board my flight at LaGuardia or what would happen if I tried to fly again.
Around three months later, my friend gave me a ticket to go to Chicago on November 12, 2010 as a gift. I didn't know if I could fly, but I didn't know how to find out if I could without trying again. It was LaGuardia again. This time, I walked up to the ticket machine. I punched in my name, and it said, "Go see a ticket agent." I said to myself, "I'm not going to be able to fly."
I gave the ticket agent my name, my state ID, and he printed the ticket. I looked at him and said, "You printed it?"
He said, "Yeah."
"And it went through?"
"Yeah."
When he gave me my ticket, I started to cry. He was just looking at me, like, is this girl nuts?
I Want to Live My Life Now
I grew up too fast. I experienced some things that a lot of people around me haven't, so it's hard to talk to my peers. I've never gotten to escape. All my friends went to college, and, now, four years later, they've all graduated, and I'm just like, "Wow, they're graduating college and I haven't even got there yet."
I have a bigger picture of life. But I feel like things are not changing as quickly as I want them to. I want to be done with school already, I want to have my own car, I want to be in my own space. I want to live my life now. I don't mind taking care of my family, but for once, I want to do something for myself: I want to go and do something overseas. I want to be a traveling nurse. I want to help people, I want to educate.
Even though everything is said and done, I still live in constant fear of federal agents taking me or any of my family members. They did it when I was innocent, and they could do it again. I have so much to lose, including my family. I remember the look of helplessness on their faces the day they took me and my father.
Still, the U.S. is home. It's the only place I know. I am hopeful for this country, because of people like me and my siblings. We know how it feels to suffer, so we can change things.
Now, I study Islam on my own. At the end of the day, I still believe in God, because I feel like things could have gotten worse. I could have been in Guantanamo Bay. I still have my family, I still have my health. So, in a way I know there is still God. There has to be something you have to believe in at the end of the day.
The Women
Tom Barbash
FROM www.narrativemagazine.com
A WEEK AFTER MY MOTHER DIED, my father and I went to a series of holiday parties. We lived in a sixteenth-floor apartment just off Central Park West, and in our building alone there were four different gatherings at which you could see my father surrounded by an infield of swooning women. He had become, in the wake of my mother's death, desirable real estate, a handsome fifty-eight-year-old with money. He was testing the waters, and you could see it bringing him back to life.
One of the women he met brought him to her personal trainer; another took him clothes shopping to stores like Kenneth Cole and Hugo Boss "to raise his spirits." He returned home weirdly pleased with himself, as though he'd regained fluency in a language he hadn't studied since high school. I'd borrow a new leather jacket of my father's when I went out for the night and I'd find business cards in the pockets, or a napkin with a phone number. Before long the women were dropping by our house, and I'd see them late at night drinking coffee in my mother's kitchen, moving in or out of the bathroom or my parents' bedroom, where they'd often stay over.
There'd be a scarf or a purse left out on a chair. I'd hear a woman whispering as she snuck out, for my sake, early, before seven. My room was next to the front entryway, and I was having trouble sleeping in those days.
For the first few weeks of February, my father dated a chatty frizzy haired woman named Leanne who worked at the mayor's office scheduling press conferences and talking to reporters. They ordered in Chinese food, and they'd leave the half-empty containers lying out on the counter. They watched movies in his room, and then at some point his door would close. I pretended a few times that it was my mother in there, that she'd slipped in without my knowing, but usually I put my earbuds in to keep from hearing anything.
One night toward the end of that month, he brought home a woman from Los Angeles named Chloe who owned a string of boutiques and wore sparkly eyeliner, low-waisted jeans, and a belly button ring, in winter. She flirted with me when he left the room, quizzing me about my personal life and once touching my knee. She gave me her business card, which listed the address of her New York store. "Come by sometime," she said, with a predatory softness in her eyes. When my father walked back in, there was music I knew he hated booming from the study.
"This okay?" he asked.
"Oh, Steve," Chloe said, "we can do better than that." She went and turned the tuner to some kind of lame diva dance music. She started grooving on her way back.
She was about forty, I'd say, but she tossed her hair and gyrated like an extra on a music video.
My father glanced at me and raised his eyebrows. I wrote ABSURD on a piece of notepaper and flashed it quickly so she wouldn't see.
"Both of you come here and dance," she said from the dining room.
She looked misplaced vamping next to the long oak dining table and under my grandmother's crystal chandelier. My father moved his shoulders tentatively to the beat. Chloe yelled, "Show your father how to dance, Andy."
"He does just fine for himself," I told her.
I went and hid in my room. When I ventured out an hour later, his door was closed, and I saw her satin jacket and a shiny red purse draped over the reading chair in the living room.
Later that same week, I watched my father pick up the widow of one of his business partners during the intermission of Into the Woods. They were sharing notes about the New York Ballet, and she said she had no one to go with, did he know anyone with extra tickets? She came back with us for drinks after the show, and my father put on an old Billie Holiday record my mother had loved.
The widow's name was Patricia Hobson. She was an interior decorator and good looking in a preppy, older-woman way, with attentive eyes, a long thin nose, and a long wiry neck. I kept staring at the cords on her neck as she spoke.
"New York is a fabulous place to be a boy just out of college," she said.
"How so?"
"Well, the ratio is entirely in your favor. There are so many gorgeous, stylish women in the city. I see them absolutely everywhere, and they're all single. My lord, Andrew, they'll eat you up. what's your type?"
I shrugged.
"He likes tall ones," my father said, because my last girlfriend had been my height.
"Well, my daughter is five-five, but she can wear heels."
"I'm pretty sure I'd be a disappointment," I told her, and she glanced over at my dad and smiled kindly. "I doubt that very much," she said.
She started to size up our apartment then, commenting on the arrangement of the chairs and sofas and the artwork on our walls. "This apartment has so much potential," she said. "Give me a few hours some Saturday afternoon, and I'll show you what we can do."
"Let me show you something," my father said. He poured her a Scotch, and they stepped out on the terrace to look out at the lights across Central Park.
"Oh, boy," she said, which is what everyone said when they saw our view.
"This is my favorite spot in the world. If you look through the binoculars you can see people jogging around the reservoir."
"I run around that reservoir four days a week," Mrs. Hobson said.
"Let us know next time so we can watch for you," my father said. I thought he was
joking until I saw his face.
"I will," she said. "We can wave to each other."
***
I slipped out later to get drunk with my high school friend Jonas, but the whole time I was picturing my father and Mrs. Hobson ransacking our underachieving apartment, taking our keepsakes down to the storage lockers in the basement of our building. There were legitimate grounds for my fear: In the last week two framed photographs and four drawers of clothes had vanished. I think my father wanted to disperse my mother's ghost discreetly and respectfully. But every couple of days something else was missing, most recently a picture of my mother and godmother as teenagers, resting on a hammock like lazy goddesses. In its place now was a blank spot on the wall.
It's got to stop, I thought.
Jonas tilted his head, puzzled. I guess I'd said it aloud.
"He's not cheating on her," he said.
"Because she's dead, you mean. I suppose that's technically right." We chugged our beers, then Jonas went to the bar to refill our empty pitcher.
"I have a friend who wants to meet you," he said when he returned. "Actually, she's a little obsessed about it."
"What did you tell her?"
"This and that. You just come up in conversation, and then it's all she wants to talk about."
"She must have an exciting life."
"She does, actually. She's really smart."
"Good looking?"
Jonas paused, as though I'd asked a trick question.
"Sort of. She kind of hides it. She doesn't do much for me, but maybe she would if I didn't know her so well."
"You told her about my mother dying?"
He nodded. "When I told her she cried."
"That's just too fucking weird," I said. I reached for my father's jacket, which was on the floor next to me, and rested it on my lap.
"It wasn't." He put his cigarette out and lit another. "Anyhow, get comfortable, brother. You're not getting anywhere near that apartment for another couple hours, you got me?"
When we finally made it back we saw her coat on a hanger in the vestibule. Jonas ran his hand across Mrs. Hobson's scarf and then bent over to smell it.
"Your dad is outstanding," he said.
I took a tin of sour candies from her coat pocket, just to do it, really, not because I wanted anything of hers.
Both my father and I were in therapy then. He went two mornings a week to an animated man named Bergman who had a book-lined office on the Upper East Side, and on Wednesday nights I saw a woman named Dr. Helendoerf down in the Village. Bergman and my father started meeting shortly after my mother was diagnosed—at my mother's urging. When my father left therapy he seemed uplifted, which was far from the case with me. He and his therapist talked about my mother, probably, but they also talked about art and politics, even sports. Bergman was constantly finding his way into our breakfast or dinnertime conversations. "Bergman thinks the Mets should trade Piazza," he'd say. Or, "Bergman gave me a list of Polish films for us to rent." They were friends. I once saw them walking down our street together, which seemed like a violation of the patient-therapist relationship. I asked Dr. Helendoerf about it. I asked her if she would ever take a walk with a patient.
She tilted her head slightly to the right. She wore a neutral pashmina that resembled the ones my mother wore.
"Is that something you think you would like to do, take a walk with me?"
"No," I said, too emphatically. "I mean, not especially."
She allowed a long awkward silence.
"Why do you think you asked then?"
I didn't have an answer. I began to hear a buzzing sound like a halogen light turned too high or low.
"Do you think perhaps you're disappointed sometimes when the world doesn't respond to you the way it responds to your father?"
"That's probably true," I said.
I saw her write something down.
"But I don't want that kind of attention."
"Then why do you think it is that you're so angry?"
"I'm not angry," I said.
She didn't respond. She might have raised her eyebrows.
"I just don't get why he's so happy all the time."
She continued to study me. I was fairly used to these standoffs. In the silence the buzzing started up again.
"Do you hear that sound?" I asked.
She paused for a moment. "What sort of sound?"
It was faint now, and probably from somewhere on the street.
"I guess I don't either," I said.
When my mother was sick I was out of the house a lot. I'd go out to work—an entry-level job I'd talked my way into at a public radio station—and then I'd stay out until everyone was asleep. Once I stayed away for nearly two weeks without telling anyone where I went. I missed her birthday party. When I reached my father on the phone he was madder than he'd ever been. And then he forgave me, which was even worse. He said I was distraught, which was true, but for the longest time I just felt numb. He said people cope in different ways. He said he thought of leaving all the time, which I believed and didn't care to hear. I couldn't really say why I needed to be away, and really I was able to put my mother out of my mind most of the time.
Dr. Helendoerf said I was repressing my reactions to my mother's illness and "obfuscating" my emotional responses. And she said that was a big reason why I stayed in the house all the time now; I was trying to keep my family intact by staying at home. I told her that was bullshit, if not in those words.
I called my father to see if I should pick up dinner, and a woman answered the phone. " Aw, fuck," I said and hung up.
On my way into the building, I was spotted again by Mrs. Wiederman, a gaunt red-haired woman who, like four or five others whose names I forgot, invited me to dinner every time she saw me.
"I made a pot of stew you can keep in the freezer and heat up for your suppers," she said, whispering to protect my pride.
"We're eating out mostly," I said.
"Well, I'll just leave it outside your door, then," she said. Dishes in sealed Tupperware, aluminum pans, and plastic Baggies had been dropped off on our doorstep ever since my mother died.
"You know your mother would be so proud of you," she said as we rode the cramped and ancient elevator together.
I thought about the arguments my mother and I'd been having over my lack of direction.
"Why?" I asked.
She seemed confused by the question.
"Because you're a lovely young man," she said. She stepped toward me then, held my face in her cold damp hands. I smelled mouthwash and old-lady perfume. Then I felt the walls of the elevator shiver. She was actually going to kiss my face.
"Get away," I said, pulling back. "Did you even know my mother?"
She gasped, and then stared at me with her mouth open, as if I was dissolving before her eyes. "Oh..." she said. "Oh, dear." When we got to her floor she stumbled out of the elevator.
"And we don't need any more of your shitty dinners," I yelled.
I felt pretty bad about this later.
As we made our way across the park on a Saturday to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, my father told me I hadn't been myself lately. We were walking through the Seventy-ninth Street fields, by Belvedere Castle, and in the cold our voices came out in vapor. "I'm fine," I said. "And you?"
"I know you're not sleeping," he said. A man in a gray Columbia sweatshirt jogged by, with a black Labrador keeping pace.
"It's getting better," I said, though it wasn't. Whenever I dropped off I kept having a dream in which my mother was alive and the two of us had to go around convincing everyone we knew that she hadn't died. "Prove it's you," they'd say. She'd tell them their middle name or their birthday, and they'd tell her she had gotten them wrong. "It's a strange time for everyone," my father said.
We stopped on the path, facing each other. I smoothed a patch of dirt and stones with my foot. The buzzing in my ears was constant now, like the static on a radio station that only partia
lly comes in, or a wiring defect on a speaker you might eventually get used to.
"It isn't my business," I said, "but it might be easier if there weren't so many of them."
"You're right," he said, and sighed. "I need to slow down."
"What the hell, you're living," I said.
He considered this for a moment. Then he put his arm around me like I was twelve again.
In the track-lit lunchroom of the museum, my father was his old self again. He told me how he chased my mother to Europe. He talked while a waiter with a white shirt and black bow tie poured us Heinekens, tipping the glass to keep down the foam. He met her on a Memorial Day weekend when she was a waitress on Martha's Vineyard, then met her again when she was checking coats at a party in New York.
I'd heard this story so often I used to groan when he started, but not this time.
I wanted him to slow down and tell every detail.
"She'd rented a house with your godmother in Nice, a two-story cottage with a yard and a view of two churches and a bakery. I couldn't stand being apart from her," he said. "I took my three weeks of vacation and flew to France. She didn't know what to make of me. We barely knew each other, and there I was, on her doorstep in my shorts and T-shirt with the Michelin guide to Italy and Greece under my arm, like a college kid."
He took a sip of beer and cleared his throat.
"Two weeks later, in Venice, I proposed. She was probably the most beautiful woman I'd ever met," he said. "And far and away the most perceptive. It's like she'd lived a thousand lives because of all the books she read. It sometimes made me uneasy."
"How come?"
"Because I couldn't hide the way I could with other women." I could hear him breathing, heavy and slow.
He held my glance, then put on his glasses and studied the check.