The moon shone through the gaps in the trees, its light silvery and scattering over the creek’s black surface. She identified an image of herself in this, in the interplay of blackness and light. The gurgling of the creek was louder at night, she discovered—its sound as if echoing off the larger silence in the woods. She took off her shoes—felt the pebbles and soft ground giving against the soles of her feet—and then she stepped into the water.
Every senior at Gustav’s had to complete an honors project to graduate. Judith had written about the Jewish conception of time. Since her trip to Israel the summer after her sophomore year, Judaism had become more central to her study, to her thinking. There were even days when she toyed with the idea of becoming a rabbi. (And who knows, she sometimes thought later—maybe she would have.) In her honors project, she’d written about how the narrative of the Hebrew Bible was linear—how each event led to the next, and in all these events there was a progression, of genealogy and of history: God’s promise to Abraham, the redemption of his descendants from Egypt, the gift of the Ten Commandments to Moses, and on and on and on. This notion of linear time contrasted with time as it existed within Jewish ritual, which was not linear but rather circular, cyclical, built around holidays that recurred every week, every year. These two kinds of time came together, she had written, in the life of every observant Jew, which was organized around the observance of key life-cycle events: circumcision or naming; bar or bat mitzvah; marriage under a chuppah; the circumcision or naming of one’s own children. “Every week ends with Shabbat, the day of rest,” Judith had written in her conclusion, the text of which had been heavily adorned with laudatory check marks by her teacher. “This gives every week the same shape, the same character, the same themes. In just this way, Jewish life-cycle events, from birth to death, give every life the same essential structure. Each life, whatever the differences in its specifics, is guided by the same essential story, across the generations, and all throughout time.”
When she’d written these words, she had believed them—the concept of bullshit was anathema to Judith Klein Bulbrook. But she had believed them on the level of fact, of reason—she had not considered them as having a deeper truth—a truth the words themselves could only fail to articulate. She did not feel them as she did now: standing to her ankles in the cold water of the creek, a few feet from where she had lost her virginity—on her last night living in the only town where she had ever lived. She saw in her mind’s eye an image of ascending spirals of every color—felt herself a part of this image—safely held within it. Time was not a chaotic tumble forward, nor was it a steady dwindling into death, she thought. Time was ordered, it was governed—it was Godly.
She knelt down, her hands and her knees now submerged. If the water had been deep enough, she thought she might have submerged herself fully, stripped naked—to feel herself, as much as possible, a part of it. “I offer myself to this,” she prayed. “God, make me a part of your story.”
She remained in this reverent crouch until she started to lose feeling in her toes and fingers, until her arched back began to ache. Then she straightened, and made her way carefully back to shore. She put on her shoes, tied the laces, returned to the car. She drove herself home, and went to sleep. The next morning, her parents took her to college.
* * *
Judith’s parting from her parents was, in the end, fairly subdued. Her mother had made her bed in her dorm room; they had all met Milim Oh, who was as polite and agreeable and reserved as Judith was when she met Milim’s parents. Then Judith walked David and Hannah back to the now-empty station wagon, hugged each of them goodbye—and that was that. They had all had so many crying jags over the last few months in anticipation of this moment, maybe they were relieved the moment itself had finally come—and to find that it was actually so manageable, could have the features of any other goodbye. They would be seeing one another again in only a couple of weeks, as well: Hannah, in support of her new book of poetry, would be giving a series of readings, one of which would be at an independent bookstore in New Haven. Her parents would have dinner with her before continuing on to Boston and then flying to California for a string of readings at schools on the West Coast. Academic life would offer them many such opportunities to get together, they all knew.
Judith had several days of orientation events before the upperclassmen arrived and classes started. She met with her adviser, heard speeches by various deans and administrators, ate lunches in the courtyard with her residential college. The school was unembarrassed in its attempts to inculcate its new students with the idea that, yes, this was the finest institution of higher education in the country, and, yes indeed, they were now among the academic elite—the elect. Predictably, Judith was unembarrassed in her embrace of these notions: They were more or less exactly what she’d been looking for in attending the school.
It was during orientation week that she got drunk for the first time. Two boys on her floor managed to get cases of beer and a plastic bottle of vodka, and held an impromptu party in their room. Judith had done a little bit of drinking before: had snuck sips from the liquor cabinet at friends’ houses during sleepovers, had drunk a couple of beers at parties during her senior year. But she’d never had sufficient will to get drunk to overcome her dislike for the taste of alcohol. Tonight, though—with the abandon of any freshman who’d just left home—she had the will. They played a card game that involved chugging and doing shots and ordering other people to drink, all the while listening to Wagner’s Die Walküre. Later they played another game, called I Never, which afforded Judith the opportunity to impress her classmates with how sexually experienced she actually was. By midnight the party collapsed into what would colloquially be called a shit-show: nineteen-year-olds throwing up in the hallway, tearfully calling their long-distance high school boyfriends or girlfriends, Milim passed out on the couch in the lounge. Judith ended up in the bed of a soccer player who lived two floors above her—kept her underwear on and enjoyed herself just fine. The next morning she ran the perimeter of the campus until the skull-throbbing headache of her hangover (which she was even a bit proud of, recognizing it as the first of her life) had subsided, then spent the next three hours choosing her courses for the semester. As she walked among the stately cream-stone buildings to bring her adviser the appropriate form—the leaves of the trees on New Haven Green giving the first hints of their autumn colors—she realized she was in love with college.
By the time she had dinner with David and Hannah a few weeks later, this love had taken on the dimensions of near ecstasy. She told them about reading Proust in French, about her brilliant Philosophies of Religion professor. Hannah and David just smiled and nodded at this unusual bout of verbosity from their daughter. This dinner, David told Hannah that night in their hotel room, was the moment when he saw that their daughter really had graduated from high school—from their care.
At the end of the meal, as they were saying good night, Judith began to cry. “What is it, honey?” Hannah asked her. Misunderstanding the tears, she said, “You’ll see us again for Parents’ Weekend.”
“No, it isn’t that, it’s just … I just want to thank you for giving me all this,” she told them.
“We didn’t give you anything,” David said. “You earned it.”
“No, I know, but…” Judith began, not quite sure how to articulate the nature of the gratitude she felt. She looked at her two parents—and felt she saw them, maybe for the first time, not only as her parents, but as people: a married couple getting toward the end of middle age, visiting their only daughter at college; her father’s hair now closer to entirely gray than black, the deepening creases of his face giving him a sort of durable, late-in-life handsomeness; her mother, her hair having a touch of frizziness of its own, dressed with understated elegance in a light dress with a purple shawl wrapped around her shoulders, because it was chilly that evening. They had a long drive ahead of them that night to get to Boston for their flight to
California the next morning. They had sacrificed a far easier trip to make time and have dinner with her. “I feel like everything you ever told me was true,” Judith said.
The next day Judith woke up at 7:15 A.M.—went for a run, then sat at her desk in her dorm room, reviewing her Philosophies of Religion assignment for that day, sipping green tea. Milim’s alarm went off at 8:30—the roommates said a brief good morning, and Milim went to the shower around 8:45. A few minutes later Judith went to take a shower herself. When she got back to her room she noticed that Milim wasn’t there—but didn’t think much of it. She might have heard some shouting in the courtyard outside her window as she got dressed at 9:15. Someone ran by her door as she was putting her books in her bag. She opened the door to go to breakfast just as Milim was coming in—towels wrapped around her chest and hair, her face wet beneath her glasses. “They crashed planes into New York,” Milim said. It was several moments before Judith could decipher the meaning of this.
When she got to the lounge, half the students on her floor had gathered around the television. Many were crying; those from New York came in and out, trying over and over to call cell phones that didn’t work. There remained, for Judith, something plausible—comprehensible—about the disaster as it unfolded on television. She had heard of buildings being on fire before. It seemed to her it was really a problem of engineering, of logistics: How do you put out a fire ninety stories up? She imagined that helicopters might be useful. Then, at 9:59 A.M., shrieking filling the lounge, filling the courtyard outside, the first tower collapsed.
It had been reported by then that one of the planes had departed from Boston, headed toward Los Angeles. But only when the tower collapsed did Judith walk to her room, and open her email, reread the itinerary her father had emailed her the night before. She saw that her parents had been booked on American Airlines Flight 11. She supposed they’d missed it. She looked at her watch, and saw that she still had a little time before she had to leave for her Philosophies of Religion class. She sat back down and finished going over the assigned reading.
As she walked across campus, the sky was incredibly clear, the campus incredibly bare, empty—the bright green grass and bordering stone buildings as if having been shaken free of people. But Judith was aware of a kind of frenetic movement at the edges of this blankness—as though just beyond her field of vision, people were running this way and that. When she got to the classroom, it was empty, the lights off. She checked her watch. She had arrived a few minutes early, she saw. She looked over the reading again. Finally a campus security guard came in and told her she had to leave: all classes had been canceled, all campus buildings were being closed.
This seemed wholly irrational to Judith—“hysteria unworthy of a school of Yale’s caliber” was how she decided she’d phrase it in her letter to the Yale Daily News. She’d been thinking about becoming a columnist for the YDN. Maybe this letter could be part of her writing sample.
Milim was still in the lounge when Judith returned to her floor. When Milim saw her, she jumped up and ran after her as she went into her room—Judith could not quite close and lock the door in her face.
“Judith!” Milim said to her. “Your email—people are calling.”
“They missed the plane.”
“They missed the plane?” Milim stared at her worriedly—began to shake her head very slowly.
“Of course they missed the plane,” Judith said furiously. She was finding breathing difficult. She had the sensation of falling. Where was God? she asked herself. Where was God? “Of course they missed the plane.… They must have missed the plane.…” She was wheezing—she saw Milim and her bed careen up toward the ceiling—on television, she had seen people jumping—Where was God? She closed her eyes. She felt something constricting in her chest. An EMT was in her room. The phone was ringing. A dean was there. She was in and out, in and out—God—Hannah and David—Mom and Dad—. Where was the world she knew?
* * *
As she made her way blankly through the next days, it was remarkable to her that there were things to do. It turned out there was no one else to do them. She had never noticed before how small her family was. She had to return phone calls. She had to talk to lawyers. And all this activity seemed preposterous to her, given that David and Hannah Bulbrook had been murdered where they sat—burned alive in an instant, if they were lucky—or, if they were unlucky, their bodies crushed and compacted by steel, bones and skulls cracked by what was harder than bone or skull. Or else they had fallen. She could not help herself from dwelling on these possibilities—her mind unable to resist the habit of considering all possibilities. And still—there were phone calls to return. According to the email her father had sent, they had not had seats together: Hannah was in 27A, David in 16B. No one could tell her whether they’d changed seats—whether they had been apart, at the end, without even a hand to hold. Yet she was expected to sign her name. She was expected to talk. Some people were deluded enough to believe that talking remained necessary—that it remained worth doing. They sent her cards, they wrote her emails, they came to visit. They seemed to misunderstand, seemed unaware in some way that Hannah and David Bulbrook had been killed against the side of the World Trade Center. How foolish they were—how stupid—and how stupid she had been. How stupid, she thought at the funeral, looking at the pair of coffins before the bimah—how stupid, as she listened to the rabbi, and accepted what passed for condolences, and allowed herself to be hugged by all the same people who had hugged her at her graduation party. She watched it all as though from behind the pale mask of her face, and as she said the mourner’s kaddish at the first shivah of her life, she realized now, at last—she had a secret to surpass all others. Her parents had been liars, and she had been a fool.
7. FOR YOU, LORD, HAVE DONE AS YOU PLEASED
As Jonah was overwhelmed by his vision, the tidal regularity of the city around him was no more disturbed than the ocean by the plight of a single fish. Shifts changed, happy hours began; on Wall Street, the markets closed. Buses made their weary way crosstown, uptown, and downtown, in their Sisyphean redistribution of commuters. Mailmen—with the dignity of the last American Indians—unlocked squat blue mailboxes and dumped the day’s contents into white plastic tubs. Tourists finished up at Liberty Island, or Ellis Island, or Ground Zero, and boarded trains to Times Square, because there were shows to see that night. And because it was summer, the Great Lawn in Central Park was dotted with blankets and Frisbees in flight and women sunbathing and softball games being played with a goodwill that was almost indulgent. Among those in the park was Becky, who had taken the day off work to celebrate her engagement—the princess-cut diamond on her finger glittering in the sunlight with sparks of red and purple and blue. She was reading the New Yorker in a skirt and a bikini top—more skin than she usually risked, but she was feeling proud and exuberant to be getting married. Meanwhile her fiancé sat at his desk, staring blankly at his computer screen, not really seeing the Excel spreadsheet before him, realizing that the anxiety of the weekend had not been escaped but rather made permanent. Subway turnstiles spun in click-clack, click-clack; automatic doors of clothing stores sighed open, sighed shut, offering New York shoppers the full spectrum—in color and cost and fabric, in attention to fashion, in extravagance and utility—of dress. Dolores walked down the sidewalk with a bag from Macy’s, full of the three hundred dollars’ worth of clothing she had bought on her boss’s credit card—since he was too disorganized and generally foolish to check his own receipts. In the office of the mayor, a union official was making mildly veiled threats that sanitation workers might go on strike if their wages were not unfrozen. Philip Orengo, listening to this, was having trouble suppressing a smirk, because he knew that unions existed in name only now. Meanwhile Patrick Hooper was ordering online a five-thousand-dollar Hermès baseball glove, then decided to order two. And Aaron Seyler, in an office on Vesey Street, was on the treadmill, pushing to get his three-mile splits from si
x minutes down to more like five-fifty. His energy did sometimes flag in the late afternoon, so this was when he tried to get his workouts in. As he ran, his brows were knit, and even he recognized something savage in his focus. Traffic was beginning to accumulate on the FDR, and at the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, and on both levels of the George Washington Bridge, and beneath the stately neo-Gothic archways of the Brooklyn Bridge. Taxis converged on JFK and LaGuardia and Midtown. Where Hicks Street ran parallel to the concrete carapace of the BQE, drivers locked their doors as the woman to whom Jonah had given forty dollars—this money now long, long gone—passed by unsteadily on the narrow strip of curb. She stopped every now and then to assess the progress of withdrawal in her body, the attenuation of the chemical warmth—her head tilted and held still, as though she were listening for a distant storm, though the sky overhead was clear, its light a late summer blue-gold that would last for hours, everyone knew: They decided to walk home from work; they made plans to eat dinner outside. Sylvia was feeling pleased, because the meeting of the Chinese investors and the American lessees of the oil field they were buying and the Angolan ministers who governed the country in which it was located had gone well. They had just taken a fifteen-minute break; she could hear the voices of the men in the hallway as she washed her hands in the empty women’s bathroom. And Zoey sat in her cubicle, pondering the naked body of the actress Katie Porter, displayed on the computer screen before her. Katie Porter, eighteen—crucially, from a legal perspective, not seventeen—had a cell phone camera in one hand, with the other she held her hair up behind her head, her mouth in a dewy, soft-core porn smile. The website for which Zoey worked had paid a thousand dollars for the image, with the promise of another four thousand if it proved genuine—and it was Zoey’s job to study it, and scrutinize it, and determine whether it was real.
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