by André Aciman
Self-Storage
By the time the Manhattan skyline comes into view toward the end of our summer weekend, the feeling in the car is a cross between cabin fever and combat fatigue, underscored by the dread of being back too soon and the mad, persistent anxiety that the wrong turn might forestall the moment when we trundle into a stuffy, unlighted apartment and unload duffel bags crammed with memories, leftovers, and laundry.
The cranky look on our faces declares the long weekend officially over.
Our home looks exactly as we left it in our last-minute dash to flee the city: unfinished work now glares from my desk, while patched-up arguments, tactfully defused three days ago, are ready to erupt again. Even the food, having come all the way back only to head straight into the garbage, looks tense and baffled. Everyone is tired, sunburned, parched: the least spark, the least harmless quip between one son and another, and the whole family catches fire.
What I want, more than anything now, is a solitary corner to put myself back together again before life picks up where I last left it. But there’s never enough time for that, and next weekend and the next after that are already spoken for. I need an extra day; yet the earliest possible one shimmers dimly from faraway October.
I’m sure none of our friends feel this way. Our neighbors at 9A or 9D and the other bright and cheerful families I’ll run into will describe their weekends with a spirited grrr-eat, which springs at you like an overconfident handshake or a muted growl. And when they’ll ask me, I too will try to come up with an exuberant grrr-eat, though perhaps a touch less cocksure, if only to suggest I’m merely underplaying the peerless excitement of our weekend. I keep putting the thought away as we look for ticks before washing the children and let them watch their favorite TV show, and as we improvise a makeshift dinner and finally take up the books we’d once started to the sound of a distant foghorn and a crackling fireplace.
But the thought springs back again once I open our door and barefooted take the garbage to the chute at the end of the hallway. Only then does it hit me that this is the first time since Thursday that I’ve had a moment to myself. Five days, and aside from shaving I haven’t even had time to look at my face.
I drag out the walk hoping not to run into any neighbors. I catch myself almost envying the people of 9F and of 9G and their weekends that seem so serene and underwhelmed compared with ours, and how music from 9H and dinners at 9J always sound grrr-eat-er than our own. Am I the only person who wishes he could escape his own life for a few hours?
Walking back from the chute, I know I’ll stop and wonder about 9I again tonight—9I, an apartment that does not actually exist. Relishing every step of this precious walk, I’ll feel as you do in the countryside when a cloud passes in front of the moon and you let every muscle in your body slacken as you beg the clouds to still their course, to hide the moon awhile longer, and in that instant suddenly realize how wonderful it is to be so thoroughly alone.
With imaginary stealth and imaginary keys, I’ll enter my imaginary 9I. The place is a mess, of course, because house rules are entirely mine. An old couch has miraculously turned up from my undergraduate days, and next to it are piles of Russian novels I’ve been meaning to reread, some of them standing partly opened in upside-down formation like tents bivouacked on a weather-beaten rug, the whole room cluttered with things that don’t mind the dust, the mess, or the crackling patter of an old recording of the Goldberg Variations on perpetual replay.
This is my universe, no one else’s. And in this stupor I’ll lift the curtain, look out onto an emptied side street in Manhattan, and, staring blankly at the moon, seek out the one person whose friendship I always neglect and take for granted: me.
With that self I want to spend an entire day each week, an imaginary eighth day that begins when I take out the garbage and ends when I’ve returned—no one even suspecting that if I look so chipper or am whistling something by Bach or am dying to discuss Russian masters with my wife, it’s because, like the moon, I temporarily vanished. I spent a whole day in a sealed, air-conditioned bunker where I’ve slept late, vegged out, paced about, reread Oblomov, brewed coffee, downed all manner of high-cholesterol snacks, thought of no one, missed no one, caught up with the paper, my life, my work, my self, and am now ready to return from an imaginary day off to a world that may never understand that if I end up saying grrr-eat to those who’ll ask about my weekend, it’s because, for a few imagined seconds, and just when I thought Monday was almost upon me, I was finally able to run away from those I couldn’t be more grateful to love.
The Buildings Themselves Have Died
On the Upper West Side, the day couldn’t have been brighter, and the view toward Riverside Drive, as I rushed to pick up my twins from school, presaged yet another of those clear, sunlit late-summer mornings unique to Manhattan.
But on Broadway, when we joined the human stream headed uptown, the atmosphere was surreal. An endless procession of people was straggling along the sidewalks, all silent, everyone wearing the purposeful look of zombies who have taken to walking not because it was too beautiful a day to be wasted indoors but because walking is what one does when one is thoroughly numbed. One walks. As I and my children walked.
Holding each boy by his hand, I remembered an identical moment on just such a walk with my mother as we hurried home during a sudden blackout in Egypt in 1956 during the Suez crisis. I wanted to think of how she had handled the moment, wanted to think of the layers of ironies involved now, as I remembered that the same anti-Western and anti-Semitic forces that finally ruined our lives in Egypt would, once again, wearing the vestments of anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism, touch my life.
But I couldn’t focus. Other images raced through my mind, images of people being hurled or hurling themselves out of the Twin Towers, while others huddled on windowsills, the whole thing blending with clips of jubilant Palestinians, clapping in celebration.
I held my boys’ hands more tightly, for the reason I’d held their hands when we crossed the Brooklyn Bridge once: because it was I who was scared.
From where we stood on Broadway in the West Eighties, there was not a sign, not the slightest trace of what was happening downtown. It would take at least twenty-four hours before the smell of smoldering rubber would finally bring reality home to 110th Street. Meanwhile, disbelief is our way of not seeing more than we are able to take in, our way of inhabiting another world, of allowing versions of a different truth to work their way out of the numberless alternatives fate holds in store for us. Besides, did the word collapse really mean collapse, or was it just a metaphor, a media buzzword?
As I walk with my children, my mind turns back to another blackout reported, not by the networks, but by Herodotus, when the Athenians emptied their city and massed in all manner of ships and boats, while the Persians who had invaded the abandoned city put the Acropolis to the torch, burning what Athens was most proud of, because in burning it they were torching something in the Athenian soul as well. Those who saw the fire watched in silence and horror, no less helpless than those who watched the repeated images of the airplane boring into the second tower, of the collapsing towers, of the billowing smoke that spelled the end.
And perhaps this is what hurts the most about the fall of the World Trade Center. Not only that so many thousands have died but also that the buildings themselves have died, and that in dying, they have taken away a part of the city, a part of the landscape, and therefore a part of ourselves: that part that looks and gropes around and finds its bearings and knows who it is because of how it carves the earth around it.
I am still thinking of the stunned Athenians the next morning when I take my sons for a bike ride down Riverside Drive. School is closed, and exactly as had happened in my own childhood during the final days of 1956, there is an uncanny air of a miniholiday.
As we ride downstream toward the reconstructed jetty on Sixty-seventh Street, I know what we’ll all be looking for. A small crowd has quietly gathered th
ere, everyone straining their eyes toward the island’s southern tip.
We are drinking water from our bottles. We still have a long way to go before reaching the reported barricade on Fourteenth Street. A French tourist with his wife and daughter, overhearing me speaking in French to my boys, asks where did the towers stand. Surely he knows, but he asks all the same, the way I am asking myself the same question, just in case we’re both wrong and, in our haste to think the worst, had simply overlooked them.
I point to a blotch of white smoke in the distance. “Là-bas.”
That’s what he feared, he says. Then he confides that they had arrived yesterday. They had planned to take pictures from the observation deck. Now they are taking pictures of a cloud.
And finally I realize why I too am staring at that cloud. I am trying to tell myself that nothing lies behind it, absolutely nothing, but I also know that as soon as this cloud clears up, two large towers will once again stud the southern tip of the island. They’re just hidden, the way death hides behind the respirator. We need the illusion of a presence for a while, any presence, even a cloud, before things are taken away from us.
Only then do I begin to suspect what really disturbs me. Our buildings are not even markers for us to know what or where we are. They have something we don’t have. They have longevity and timelessness burnished into every steel post. They are built to do one thing: to outlast us, to bear witness, to give us the ultimate illusion that we can parlay our way down generations to come. As a father who lost his son in one of the towers said on television, it’s wrong for sons to die before their fathers. It’s wrong for our monuments to crumble before their builders.
For an instant, I imagined myself in ancient Greece, asking an Athenian the question the Frenchman had put to me. Where would the temple have stood? Pointing to the Acropolis, the man would have indicated a smoldering mound overlooking his town.
And yet, I find something heartening in this. After the Persian invaders had left Attica, the Athenians rebuilt their temple and made it the marvel that still stands on the Acropolis today. We can and must always rebuild our monuments. As for the barbarians, we know what happened to them.
Empty Rooms
The doors to their bedrooms are always shut, their bathroom always empty. On weekends, when you wake up in the morning, the kitchen is as clean as you left it last night. No one touched anything; no one stumbled in after partying till the wee hours to heat up leftovers, or cook a frozen pizza, or leave a mess on the counter while improvising a sandwich. The boys are away now.
Two decades ago there were two of us in our Upper West Side home. Then we were many. Now, we’re back to two again.
I knew it would happen this way. I kept joking about it. Everyone joked. Joking was my way of rehearsing their absence, of immunizing myself like King Mithridates VI, who feared being poisoned and learned to take a tiny dose of poison on the sly each day.
Even in my happiest moments I knew I was rehearsing. Waiting for my eldest son’s school bus, standing on the corner of 110th Street and Broadway at 6:20 p.m. while leaning against the same mailbox with a warm cup of coffee each time—all this was rehearsal. Even straining to spot the yellow bus as far up as 116th Street and thinking it was there when in fact I hadn’t seen it at all was part of rehearsing. Everything was being logged, nothing forgotten.
When the bus would finally appear, the driver, an impatient Vietnam veteran, would dash down Broadway, either squeaking to a halt if the light was red before 110th or hurtling across to 109th to let some of the students out. The bus, from Horace Mann, trailed the one from the Riverdale Country School by a few seconds every evening, with the suggestion that perhaps something like a reckless race along the Henry Hudson had taken place between the drivers. I’d remember that, just as I’d remember the reedy voice of the beggar squatting outside Starbucks, or my son’s guarded squirm when I’d hug him in view of the schoolmates who watched from the school bus window.
By late November it was already dark at 6:00 p.m. As always, coffee, mailbox, traffic. Our ritual never changed, even in the cold. Together, we’d walk down 110th Street and talk. Sometimes we needed to buy something along the way, which made our time together last longer. Sometimes we made up errands to avoid reaching home too soon, especially after Thanksgiving, when all three sons and I would walk over to the Canadian Christmas tree vendors and chat them up about prices. And sometimes I’d tell my eldest that it helped to talk about the day when we wouldn’t be able to take these walks together. Of course, he’d pooh-pooh me each time, as I would pooh-pooh his own anxieties about college. He liked rituals. I liked rehearsing. Rituals are when we wish to repeat what has already happened, rehearsals when we repeat what we fear might yet occur. Maybe the two are one and the same, our way to parley and haggle with time.
Sometimes, in late fall, these days, when it’s not cold but already dark, and the feel, the lights, and the sound of the city can so easily remind me of the bus stop at 6:20 p.m., I’ll still head out to 110th Street and stand there awhile and just think, hoping it might even hurt.
But it never hurts. Partly because I’ve rehearsed everything so thoroughly that scarcely an unchecked memory can slip through or catch me off guard, and partly because I’ve always suspected there was more sentiment than feeling in my errands to 110th Street.
Besides, e-mail and cell phones kept my eldest son, in college, present at all times. And there were his twin brothers, who still lived at home and would continue to do so for two more years, shielding me from his absence. Together the twins and I still walked by the tree vendors on 110th Street and still put off buying anything until it was almost Christmas Eve. Things hardly changed. We removed one leaf from the dining table, my eldest’s dirty running shoes disappeared from our hallway, and his bedroom door remained shut, for days sometimes. Life had become quiet. Everyone had space. In the morning, on his way to class in Chicago, he always managed to call. A new ritual had sprung.
Then one day, two years later in September, the twins left as well. Suddenly a half gallon of milk lasts eight days, not just one. We don’t buy sausages or peanut butter or stock all manner of cereals that have more sugar than wheat. There is no one to rush home and cook for, or edit college applications for, or worry about when they’re not back past 3:00 a.m. No sorting though dirty socks, no mediating the endless bickering about who owns which shirt, no setting my alarm clock to ungodly hours because someone can’t hear his alarm clock in the morning, no making sure they have twelve No. 2 pencils, and not just two.
All things slow down to what their pace had been two decades earlier. My wife and I are rediscovering things we didn’t even know we missed. We can stay out as long as we wish, go away on weekends, travel abroad, have people over on Sunday night, even go to the movies when we feel like it, and never again worry about doing laundry after midnight because the boys refuse to wear the same jeans two days in a row. The gates are thrown open, the war is over, we’re liberated.
Months after they’d left, I finally realized that the one relationship I had neglected for so many years was none other than my relationship with myself. I missed myself. I and me had stopped talking, stopped meeting, lost touch, drifted apart. Now, twenty years later, we were picking up where we’d left off and resumed unfinished conversations. I owned myself.
One evening, while preparing dinner with my wife, I went a step further and realized I had committed the unmentionable: I had stopped thinking of the three persons who are still dearer than life itself. I did not miss them and, stranger yet, hadn’t thought of them all day. Is the human heart this callous? Can out of sight, out of mind apply to one’s children as well? Really?
I was almost ready to pass the cruelest verdict on myself when I suddenly came across something I could never have foreseen, much less rehearsed. A young couple with twins in a stroller was crossing the street in a rush, precisely where the school bus used to stop after speeding to catch the green light on 110th. As I watched t
hem chat with one of the Canadians at the Christmas tree stall, I suddenly wished I was in the young father’s place with my own twins, ten years, five years ago, even last year. We’d buy something warm to drink across the street then rush to say hi to the tree vendors. Now it seemed I’d lost the right to walk up to them.
I envied the couple with the twins. And, as though to prod the knife deeper into the wound, for a moment I allowed myself to think that this is twenty years ago, I’ve just gotten married, my children are not born yet, and our new, three-bedroom apartment feels far too vacant for just the two of us. I stare at the couple and am thinking ahead for them, or ahead for myself, it’s not clear which, picturing the good things that have yet to come, even telling myself that the time for the 6:20 bus lies so very, very far away that it’s almost impudent to conjure it up just now.
And then I finally saw things for what they were: the time for rehearsing had already come and gone, just as the boys came and went this Christmas, as the tree vendors will indeed come and go each year—this is how it always is and has been: things come and then they go, and however we bicker with time and put up all manner of bulwarks to stop it from doing the one thing it knows, the best is learning how to give thanks for what we have. And at Christmas I was thankful; their bedroom doors were open again. But I knew, even as I welcomed the flurry of bags and boxes and hugs and yelps, that a small, sly corner of my mind was already dreading and rehearsing that morning in January when they’d all head back to the airport.
Rue Delta
After celebrating what was to be our last Passover seder in Egypt four decades ago, I remember watching all the adults in my family leave the dining table, make their way through a long corridor, and reach the dimly lit family room. There, as happened each year, everyone sat quietly, listened to music, played cards, and invariably put everything aside when it was finally time for the nightly news broadcast on Radio Monte Carlo. I never liked Passover, but this year’s, our last in Egypt, was different, so I sat and watched the adults. When it was time for them to converge on the radio, I came up to my parents and told them I wanted to go out for a walk. I knew they were always reluctant to let their fourteen-year-old boy roam the neighborhood streets alone by night, but this was my last time, and the walk was to be, without my knowing it, perhaps, my own version of an aimless, farewell stroll, when you find yourself walking not just to see things for the last time or to take mental snapshots for the benefit of what Wordsworth would have called the “after years,” but to get a sense of how something as intimately familiar as rue Delta, with its noises and odors and busy crowds and the sound of surf thudding nearby, could, in less than twenty-four hours, after having watched me grow up, forever cease to exist. It would be like taking a last, hopeless look at someone who is about to die or to become a stranger but whose hand still lingers—warmly—in ours. We try to imagine how we’ll live and who we’ll be without them; we try to foresee the worst; we look around for tiny reminders whose unsettling reappearance in future years could so easily jolt us with unexpected longing and sorrow. We learn to nip memory, like a weed, before it spreads. All along, though, we are no less puzzled by the loss, which cannot sink in yet, than we’ll be, decades later, when we land on the same street and feel that coming back doesn’t sink in either. No wonder Ulysses was asleep when the Phaeacians put him down on his native soil. Leaving, like coming back, is a numbing experience. Memory itself is a form of numbness; it cheats the senses. You feel neither sorrow nor joy. You feel that you’re feeling nothing.