Invisible moon - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 6: Our Global Face
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Meera Atkinson
SHE IS SUDDENLY BOTHERED BY THE INACCESSIBILITY OF HIS LIFE. She has been granted no entry into his world. She pushes to go to his apartment but he resists, becoming aloof and making excuses to leave. It strikes her that for all their lovemaking and racing around town she barely knows him. Has she even seen past his veneer of weary sophistication, of agitated creativity? She has been foolish, has been wooed and won, both by him and his city, yet on both counts there is no trust, little real knowledge. But here she is, conquered, unable now to free herself.
He goes, returns, and goes again. While he's gone she manages to write a chapter of aimless reflection that struggles to find an angle. Every time she tries to think, the feeling of being immersed in something, of being – there's no other way she can put it – hooked, distracts her. This time his absence is a stabbing pain, a nagging doubt, an inexplicably deepening suspicion, but of what? He has grown evasive. He comes less often and when he does he seems remote and restless. The easy amor has been replaced by an edgy avoidance. She watches him sleep. His glittering persona shut down, she can now see his shadow. How is it she didn't notice it before?
He says he will be gone a week. Nine days slide by and still there is no sign of him. It's September already, hard to believe. The humidity has been sucked out of the air leaving the days a crisp azure blue. On the 10th he leaves a message on her machine, says he's delayed in LA, will be back in another week.
She is on a bus heading downtown. Great plumes of thick black smoke rise into the sky. The passengers look around at each other. A woman gets on and announces that a plane has hit the World Trade Centre. Passengers turn to one another. Someone says it happened once before; a small plane hit the Empire State Building. Even though it's close to 9am she hopes, irrationally, that the building is empty. Everyone stares at the ominous columns of smoke rising in the pristine sky. A man gets on and says the other tower has been hit. There is a scurry of people shifting in their seats, of hands raised to mouths. A woman begins to cry. She notices several others have tears in their eyes.
She hears the word "terrorists". Everyone quivers with a startling vulnerability. Her limbs begin to tremble as the bus continues down Amsterdam Avenue but her mind is blank, or at least she can't catch the thoughts. Fire engines rush past. The shrill wail of sirens floats like sonic ribbons on the wind. One engine pulls up beside the bus, the driver impatiently waiting for a clearing. As she looks out the window, a clear-faced young fireman sitting up front turns her way. For a moment their eyes lock. She feels like a child, wanting to be told it will be all right. What do his eyes say? Do they say it will be all right? Do they say he does not want to die? Do they speak of fear or of calm? She cannot tell what his eyes say.
She alights at midtown and walks to her appointment but the street is not normal. Everyone talks on mobile phones. She must be the only person on Manhattan who does not have one to her ear but then again she has no one to call. When she arrives at the reception desk the girl looks up from her computer, ashen-faced, and says simply, "The Pentagon has been bombed." She turns and leaves the building. She waits at the bus stop and watches a doorman wring his fat hands, his old Mediterranean face creased into a frown. A young man stands nearby talking on a mobile. He hangs up and says, "The South Tower has collapsed." She looks toward Wall Street and sees that the plumes have blossomed into a dark mushroom. The doorman looks left and right, still wringing his hands. She wonders if his wife works in the tower, pictures her, a short, heavy-set tea lady doing her rounds when the plane tears through the windows, or a cleaner perhaps with cloth in hand. She looks at the young man. His face is fixed in defiance. She envies him. She feels only twisting, sickening fear. She hears a girl say to her friend, "There are more planes up there." The girls look up. She looks up too, up at the Empire State Building in whose shadow they stand.
She imagines it will be next, that it, too, will crumble, interring them all. She wonders if this ironic disaster-movie-come-true will be her last day and if she will ever see home again. She wants to tell the doorman and the angry young man, "I shouldn't be here. There's somewhere else I belong." But what do they care while their city burns? She wants to be Dorothy, back in Australia with one click of her magical heels. There's no place like home. There's no place like home. Swarms of people stream uptown as she climbs onto a bursting bus. Back in her apartment she watches CNN while fighter jets circle the eerily shutdown city. She thinks of him waking to the news in LA. Why hasn't he called? She cannot sleep and she cannot eat and she cannot escape the stricken island.
IN THE DAYS AND WEEKS AFTER, THERE ARE BOMB SCARES, anthrax letters and terrorist alerts. The tally of dead rises and falls. She can think of nothing but going home. Australia feels as far away as the moon. On a clear night the moon can be seen, enormous and blond, but her country is an invisible moon. She hardly knows how to reach it. Finally she sleeps, a long, turbulent sleep. She dreams panic and she dreams of him. She wakes up crying, not a lone, sweet tear but guttural sobbing, heaving grief. He will not return, not to her, and there are many to mourn. The gravitational promise has released them. Details emerge and circulate, haunting awake and asleep: the child on the plane on her way to Disneyland, the mobile phone calls to say goodbye, the nauseating thud of bodies hitting concrete. Sometimes dread gives way to fury and then she walks far and fast. "Here I am," she wants to say, "to you a heathen and a whore. You can't kill us all. You can't kill us all."
American flags fly. The entrances of fire stations are plastered with portraits of the fallen, with children's crayon drawings and cards; the ground beneath is littered with flowers. She stops and looks for the eyes whose words she did not understand. There is a photo of a smiling young man in uniform at a station on 85thStreet. It might be her fireman. As she turns to leave, a red pick-up truck passes by, spiny with dozens of miniature flags. The flags make her feel lonely. She calls her mother. She thinks of her once-lover. She runs in Central Park. And then the strangest thing happens. She's on the subway to Park Slope, daydreaming like the rest, when she looks down the length of the carriage and sees him sitting there. It is peak hour and the carriage is full and she is able to observe him from behind a giant, chunky-armed girl. He does not see her even though she stares brazenly at him, and this is what is odd: she has no desire to be seen or to go to him. She feels utterly disconnected and wants only to look, and as she looks she realises she is looking for something, for some reason to think herself connected to him, to consider him other than a stranger. Yet none comes. He gets off before her and she is palpably relieved. The only thing she is sure of is that somehow a spell has been broken.
SHE GOES DOWNTOWN TO WHERE THE TOWERS STOOD AND LOOKS AT THE RUINS – mangled steel and pulverised bodies. A heavy grey ash covers everything. Clothes hang shrouded in store display windows. And the smell, the post-apocalyptic smell, is blown across the compass by shifting winds. Every few blocks there is a makeshift shrine, a wall of missing-person flyers, a line of candles and flowers. People stand around in vigil; the shrines are agonising, accidental art. She spends hours reading the posters, meditating on the photos, absorbing the faces of the dead, reading the words of their loved ones, the painstaking descriptions, the desperate, hopeful pleas. A dog, a black pug dog, is missing, having bolted off its lead and into the car park of the towers when the first plane hit. The pug, she knows, is buried in the rubble. The thought of this victim running toward its death, caught up in a human hatred it could never comprehend, is too much and she weeps. It is suddenly dark.
She is part of the bruised tenderness of the city. People look gently at one another as they pass and their eyes say what their voices do not speak: you, too, survived. She is one of them, a New Yorker now. They look gently at one another as they pass. It's a solemn night and the sky is empty. Home is an invisible moon. She sees it in her mind's eye. ♦