Love Is the Higher Law Read Free Page A

were both still there.Just in the same way we imagine our own apartment is there, waiting for us, untouched. We’re not allowed to go home.
    “We are not supposed to comprehend something like this,” my mother says to me as we watch the latest update before she heads to bed. It’s a sentence that I keep repeating to myself. I even take solace in it. I cannot comprehend. I don’t want to comprehend. Instead I will try to remember what matters. I will do this as I wonder what happens next.
    Even though they tell me to sleep, I watch the news all night.
    I don’t want to know anything, and I want to know it all.

WAKE UP, IT’S OVER
Jasper
    I missed the whole goddamn thing. Slept late, woke up to the phone ringing, was completely oblivious. In fact, I was pissed that the phone was ringing, because it was before noon, and it was the house line, which meant it probably wasn’t for me. I had two weeks before I had to go back to school, and I’d been planning to spend those two weeks sleeping. And when I wasn’t sleeping, I was planning to nap. So I would’ve had the machine pick it up, only I’d unplugged the machine a couple of nights before when someone was leaving a message that I couldn’t deal with—something about getting out the vote, blah blah blah—and the only way I could think to shut it up was to pull out the plug. I was maybe a little drunk at the time, so it made sense then. But now the phone was ringing for the eleventeenth time and I realized if it was important and I didn’t get it, my parents would find out and I’d be wading knee-deep in the shit. So I stumbled out of bed in my boxers and yelled at the phone to hold on, I was coming.
    It was still ringing when I got there, and I was a little surprised when I picked it up and said hello and my mom startedsaying thank God it was me, thank God I was okay. My first reaction was, what the fuck have the neighbors been telling her, and did they really call Korea to let her know I was drinking so much? And then my father was on the phone, too, and he was saying they were watching CNN and it was just terrible, completely terrible, and it had taken forever for them to get through. I had to say I had no idea what he was talking about, and then, only then, did he say, “Did we wake you?” And I wasn’t going to lie—I said, yeah, they had, so this whole phone call wasn’t making much sense to me, and that’s when he told me the World Trade Center was gone—that’s how he said it, “The World Trade Center is gone,” and I honestly thought, Does he mean Grandma? because that’s why he and Mom were in Korea in the first place, but obviously I was wrong on that count, because Grandma was fine, it was just all these other people who were dead.
    As he was telling me this, I walked over to the window, and, Jesus, even from Park Slope you could see that something completely hellish had happened. There was all this smoke billowing up from downtown. And the Twin Towers were nowhere to be found.
    “Holy shit,” I said. “I mean, holy shit.”
    This was probably the first time I’d ever cursed while talking to my parents, but they didn’t reprimand me. Mom was saying she wished she could be with me, that they would try to get home on the first available plane. I asked them what else was going on in the city, and my dad couldn’t resist it, he said, “For oncein your life, turn on the news.” So I took the phone into the other room and turned on the TV, and it was amazing to see what was going on practically next door to me, and it was totally surreal that I’d slept through it all. My parents were telling me to go to the grocery and stock up on water and canned goods, like Brooklyn was going to be under siege at any minute. I said yes to everything they said, and then when my mother started crying, I told her I was going to be fine, that I knew how to take care of myself, which is why they’d left me alone here in the first place. This made her cry