Another November come and gone and scarcely five thousand words written. There was a promise I made to a girl that I'd keep on writing. But it seems i keep swapping old promises for new ones. I feel like a captain who turns for port every time I'm surrounded by open water, and I'm sorry if any passengers are left wanting. There was a flurry of thirty year storms to contend with. The anticipation and disappointment of saturday night games. And not least of all, a seven day slice of Asia, complete with ten and twelve course meals -- which make me very sleepy -- to occupy my time. It seems all a poor excuse though; I know people far busier that have completed the journey and survived to tell the tale.
Ironically, neglecting my writing duties have given me ample time to improve my Mandarin. Which is not the same as saying that my Mandarin's improved, mind you ... just that I've been given the opportunity. By way of explanation, one of the reasons I can't seem to grasp my somewhat native tongue it the abundance of meanings in Mandarin that require two words. For example, the words that convey "recently" in English is the combination of "most" and "near" in Mandarin. And so a phrase that begins "Recently ..." will begin exactly as a questions "Which is nearest?" will end. Another gem, the concept of joking around or making fun of someone is expressed as "open" "play" "laugh." Somehow this is all very easy for other people. I guess I should just get used to it.
And speaking of language, I was thinking this morning of a conversation that I had while in Taiwan. The topic of the island's political status came up and I was questioned as to what I believed should be. My allegiances have always been towards independence by I proffered this, that Taiwan and China should be economically unified (like the EU) if not politically. Perhaps this is naive, but I think it would work. That lead me to thinking, this morning, that eventually all small countries will have to ally together or with larger similar states to form coalitions in order to survive a global market. When I used to read a lot of sci-fi, the idea of mega-corps, corporations that essentially replaced the function of governments was fairly prevalent. And so, driving into work, I was thinking of the growing similarity between patriotism and brand loyalty, and wondering if language is a significant barrier to either of these. Some one should do a study I think.
A thin strip of light crosses through a high silver of window in Jarrah's otherwise dark cell. It is a concrete box perhaps eight feet square and twelve feet tall with a door on one wall he calls south. There is a stainless steel toilet and a sink on the opposite wall and a thin mattress on a slab of concrete protruding from the West wall with a threadbare blanket he calls his bed. The heavy, humid air of some summer month seeps in along with the early morning light and he is on his knees praying toward the light, toward the direction he thinks is Mecca. This perhaps bothers him as much as anything about his imprisonment, that the guards will not tell him which direction is Mecca. He assumes it is East and points his prostrate body slightly to the south assuming that he is still somewhere in North America.
A moment before Jarrah finishes his prayer, he imagines every detail of his surroundings. With his eyes closed, he can recall every crack and every stain. Sometimes the light plays a trick on him and he thinks he has found something new, but a moment later he looks again it is again the same grey wall, the same grey floor that he has known since they brought him here. He no longer knows what month it is; lost track more than a year ago or so it seems. His morning prayer concluded, he thinks about the family he left behind, the family that was taken from him that fateful moment now years ago. They had ask him to wait a moment. Then they had asked him if they could ask him a few questions. Those few questions became many. His concern about missing his connecting flight turned in to concerns about ever seeing his family again.
He stands up and immediately lays down on his bed. In those first months of captivity, he had done push-ups, sit-ups, and stretches. These small affirmations had been a measure of hope. A hope that he would be free again one day and that all these moments in between would not have been wasted. In those first months, they had woken him up in the lonely hours of night to ask him questions he had not known how to answer. Sometimes they had played loud, American music to keep him awake long, shone bright lights on him for days. And there had times when they had drenched him with cold water and had taken away his clothing. And then there were times that they did much worse.
They haven't touched him in many months, probably years. There are now no more questions. He has given up his hope, he does not know why they have kept him all this time, he thinks he probably never will. He knows now that all these years of his life here -- in this concrete box graced with a single window, as single bed -- have been a waste. Those many years ago, he was a man of twenty five, husband to a beautiful wife, father to a young boy and another in the womb. Now he is a man of nearly thirty with a long series of blank pages where a life should have been.
Jarrah thinks of his wife, a lovely woman with luxorious black hair, the kind that one thinks of when imagining Cleopatra bejeweled and scented with oils. Though those were false fantasies he held; they were poor people, poor now that he has been gone so long. He imagines that she has been waiting for him to return all this time. For the first couple of years he had been certain of her fidelity. But doubt has a way of finding it's target. Even though, Jarrah does not know where he is, and doubts that anyone he calls friend does either. Doubt has found him. Through these heavy grey walls, or perhaps through the cold, rough floor, but most likely through that thin slice of sky, doubt has taken him. Certainly, no one could be expected to wait so long without knowing.
And then there is his son, Benamar, only two years of age when Jarrah had last seen him. The day he had left his son, he had his baby boy in his arms, held him up against the brillant blue Algerian sky and taught him how to fly. Jarrah remembers that look of joy on his son's face. The kind of pure joy that only a child who knows nothiing of the terror in the word can give. He thinks though that before this, he too had no true idea of the terror and torment that could lie beneath the calm surface of the world. He hopes that his son has grown up with a love of the sky and a fondness for flying planes just like his father. But then, it is that fondness that has lead him here to be at the end of five wasted years.
In the days to come, Hannah would often work her way back through memory and time to that precise moment, as she stood in the lobby of Stuyvesant High watching a stiff eastward wind blow rain sideways across the glass doors fingering the cell phone in her coat pocket, why she hadn't called a car to take her home that night. There were more than a few students who had private car pick them up from the school everyday, regardless of weather. Hannah wasn't one of those, but her parents were well off enough that they had told her to call for a car in cases like this, or if she had to stay late. In fact, they preferred her to do that. They didn't like the idea of her running around lower Manhattan in the night and in the cold. The majority of the students, however, hopped on the twenty or twenty-two bus on there way deeper in to the maze of public transportation.
She would never be able to pin it down to one thing, but whatever the reason was, she followed a small crowd of teenagers out into the downpour and on to the twenty-two bus which had just arrived.
On sunny days she didn't mind riding the buses, often taking the long route of making bus transfers rather than dropping down into the station to wait for an A-C-E train that would take her straight home. Of those, there were precious few day that that weren't sweltering or bone-chilling and when they came she would often stop by the stores in the Meatpacking District and Chelsea to window shop, before making her way the rest of the way up to her parents apartment in the Upper West Side. On a day like this though she, along with everyone else headed uptown, hurried down the damp steps of the Chambers Street Station, past the steel stiles to wait in the damp tunnels for a train. In was Friday afternoon and with the rain and the chill in the air, the station was crowded. Judging by the number of people that had amassed, she had no doubt that the train was running late and that people would be crammed in there like sardines. She leaned over the edge of the platform and peered down into the unfathomable darkness.
Nothing. It was the blessing and curse of New York, sometimes things worked so well, you might step out of a bus and run right on the an express train and then you might catch a local right after that and you could be anywhere in the city in a few minutes. Sometimes things went so well you why they couldn't always. But there were too many variables and too many solutions to this equation she didn't like.
Hannah sighed and turned to pull a book from her bag and as she did, she spied a bright orange spot on the tracks. She blinked and looked again. The tracks were already wet and small pools of murky water had already formed between the ties. There, in an impossible location, was a small goldfish. "How could it have gotten there?" She thought to herself, "How strange." It was a small, unexpected surprise, and she wanted to share it with someone, but when she looked up she found herself in a sea of strangers all minding there own business, all too busy to notice a goldfish living a subway station. And when she looked back the gold fish was gone. Her mouth fell slightly open, "Where could it have gone? Was I imagining it?" In the corner of her eye the far end of the tunnel glowed with a tell tale sign, like a will o' wisp. Suddenly everything felt a little more surreal, she imagined the train approaching like a bright barracuda, the air around her was so damp she could swim in it. She wondered if she could swim all the way home, riding on a riptide current. The moment was shattered by a roar and a rush of air, and Hannah's dream spilled out. She could barely hold on to the notion that something very strange had just happened as she squeezed into the car and rode it all the way to her stop on eighty-first. The entire ride home she had a feeling that the world was suddenly filled with strange possibility.
That evening at dinner, Hannah didn't say anything of ride home. She felt very tired and went to bed early. In her dreams she was a mermaid swimming deep in the Sargasso Sea, lost among in the tall kept forests, playing hide and go seek with the seahorses and eels.
I still think of it, remember it as a day not long ago. I remember hearing the sound of a jet engine flying overhead. A gunshot. A gunshot would have frightened me, thrown me to the ground. A scream. A scream might have stood me up and race toward the window. But a plane? A plane was something I didn't have a reaction for – yet. In the days that followed there was just shock. People around me, people I knew well, were in tears. Sad tears, angry tears, tears of love and tears of hate. I don't know where it all came from. In those days there was just the emptiness of it. I stared out the window to where they used to stand, now grey, shapeless pillars -- a cruel parody of the stark geometry that used to be a symbol of the global community, in a darker shade of grey.
I don't know if I can say it surprised me. I know that in the days that followed, the day and weeks, turning into months and years – the words turning into action and the wars turning into occupations, I and people that I knew and would come to know, lost their way.
Hannah looked wistfully out the windows out at the park below. The days had grown so short and night wrapped its cold fingers down every alley of the city quicker than an express train. The trees had shed most of their leaves with the last autumn storm and winter was closing in. The forecast was for snow and Hannah looked at the park below and imagined it cover in a blanket of white. Mrs. Ferrara droned on about integrating logarithms. Hannah wonder how she might measure the falling snow, covering the rolling walkways of Central Park, filling the small stream beds, the cold turning the lakes to ice. Each snowflake was immeasurably small, count up each in orderly slices of where they fell and you could figure out exactly how much was under each sensuous curve. In a city where everything could be measured in an orderly grid with the occasional diagonal easily accounted for, and where the buildings were all known for how many floors they had, that the hardest thing to measure might be the snow in Central Park.
The holidays were always a hectic time for her family, this year more than most. She was nearly done with her college applications. Nearly done being a relative term as she had finished two of the dozen or so application that she would inevitably fill out and quit procrastinating on the rest. She received no end of grief from her parents during this time. They didn't seem to understand how busy school kept her, how she still had so much holiday shopping left to do. One night, not more than two weeks past, she had try to explain it in scientific terms. They were simply too Newtonian, she had said. They looked at her, puzzled. Didn't they know, hadn't they heard, for things that move faster, time moves slower, and since she moved so much faster than they did, she had all the time in the world. Her mother rolled her eyes, but her father, holding a stern glare for a moment, had suddenly burst out laughing. He explained then, that if time moved slower for her then it moved faster for everyone else and that the days left for her to finish her applications would be shorter. It was funny, if in a absolutely geeky way.
Hannah's father worked at a think tank in somewhere in Midtown, she was never quite sure where. Perhaps she was simply disinterested, or perhaps it was because they never seemed to have those, bring your daughter into work, days, but she never inquired much about his work. She had wondered more in the past year -- since the fire trucks first started screaming down the avenues making their way to their final destination, and since the heat, smoke and ash of all that had happen started falling all about them – what his work was. She knew before that his organization dealt with science and politics, but no more than that. Her mother never inquired about his work while she was around, but in the past year, Hannah had wanted to learn more, to know that her father wouldn't be one of those people who went to work one more and then never came back.
She had always thought of her father, a large jovial man with kind eyes and chaotic hair, as a mad scientist. Ever since she had become interest in science he had tutored her and helped her with projects. This was the way they bonded, discussing pointlessly which was better, covalent or ionic, or joking about the wisdom of noble gases (Did sucking on helium make you wiser? Did nobles speak in a high pitched voice?) After the twin towers came down, he started working late into the nights, and then into the weekends. For a while she feared for her parents marriage. Was her father secretly seeing someone else? She confided her fears to her mother late one night after Hannah though her mother had been crying. She had simply shook her head and smiled. "No, it's nothing like that. Nothing like that at all." Hannah remembered that moment, all the emotions she could imagine compressed into one instant, sadness, pride, and mirth, in that gentle arc of her lips the slight glisten in her eyes and the warmth of her cheek.
Her mother was a study in contrasts to her father. Where he was lumbering, she was graceful, his hair perpetually disheveled, hers perfectly coiffed, he often seemed constantly everywhere, she was pointedly there. By herself many might have been tempted to call her shy or quiet. But when they were out in public, she was the one that people remembered. The mother that Hannah knew could quiet a crowd with a whisper, be memorable and silent at the same time, be eternally lovely and ephemeral at the same moment.
In those days of worry she noticed that her father was evermore quiet about the things going in the world. Usually he was quick to offer a witty comment or a bad pun about the day's news. But as the rhetoric in Washington grew heated in those sweltering day in late September, he was more and more reserved and the worn on her mother's face every so slightly more concerned. On late, near October, she had asked him, "Daddy," chagrined that she didn't know the answer, certain though that she ought to, "What is it that you do? All these years ... and I've never really known."
He looked at her kindly then, thought for a moment, and said cryptically, "You're old enough to know now." And pausing as if to consider a crossroads in time, "That it is important enough to keep a secret."
"I can keep a secret. I'm old enough now. I'm an adult."
"That you are." He studied her seriously then. She put on her best pout. He smiled and said, "You know when you like someone ... a boy perhaps? And you don't want to tell anyone. Not your friends, not your family, not even the God in his heaven. And you say nothing, not even a whisper under your breath, for fear that the mere blasphemy of something so pure might make it suddenly go away? Do you know what I mean?" Hannah blushed at this, thinking that her father perhaps knew of the boy at school that she had been so fond of lately. "I see you do. Well, it's a secret like that, but it has to with science and many important people would prefer that it remain a secret." She remembered those words so clearly, as if they had just made a pact to keep their respective secrets. And she had nodded and given him a hug, as if to seal the pact.
Thinking of this, a minute more or less before the end of class, Hannah sat, looking at the absent skyline at a lack of shadow in the sky. A small shimmer of snow fell then, catching her by surprise. It shouldn't be cold enough. And as she wondered, the clouds poured in over the Hudson and buried the city in rain.
C. and I were on the couch watching "The Sixth Sense." At the end there, Cole tells his mom that he's ready to tell her his secret. She doesn't believe him, but he persists and tells her that grandma visits him often and that he has the answer to a question that his mom has been wondering for a long time. I get teary at this part of the movie every time. The set up is perfect. The answer comes first you think you know the question. The answer is, "Everyday," and you, the audience, you think you know that the question is. Because the question is always, "Do you miss me?" or "Do you love me?" But in a subtle, skillful twist, the writer changes it up. And then, just a quickly, it isn't about a daughter and her mother, but about the daughter and her son. And the real question is, "Do I make you proud?" You realize that it isn't love that was missing, it's pride. The curse becomes a gift. "Instead of something I want, can I have something I don't want?"
Five years ago today, I was woken up early in the morning. "He's gone." I walked into that room where my father lay and sometime minutes before, had left. I didn't know how to feel then; in some ways I think I still don't. In my heart I believe that if he could come back he would and if he could have stayed a moment longer he would have. In my heart I know many things, that he would have loved his grand-daughters so much and that he would have approved of C. But there is something I don't know, I don't know if he would be proud of me. It's been five years and I feel like I'm still not asking the right questions.
Once again I mark this November as another year to try my hand at writing. I thought to dedicate an entire month's worth of entries to this, but remembrance keeps me from it. Lately I've been reading articles on Wikipedia thinking of writing something in the genre of alternative historical fiction. Most of the articles I've been reading have dealt with European history, a subject I loathed in school. How surprising then that I should come full circle and find myself devouring these time worn tidbits. Today I found myself hyperlinked to the article about Guy Gavriel Kay whom I recall being recommended to me by a close friend in high school. Like history itself, I had dismissed the recommendation; now I find myself wonder what these alternative worlds were like and wondering then of that close friendship now unraveled by time.
Maybe it's procrastination, a common theme in my life that has dogged me with a persistence that I have sorely lacked. The bare truth of it is that I loathe to begin what I don't know how to finish. I have an unending need to know how things will end and to know, every step of the way, that I've done right. More likely though it is remembrance and as such, tomorrow's entry will not be fiction either. For now I must bend my thoughts toward the silent night and wonder how I will measure this coming Day of Souls.