Lately, when I close my eyes at night, my thoughts strangely tunnel back to 2001 and one particular fireman. It was September, I was 22 years old living in New York and the world around me had turned to powder. Not the delightful dander of snow globe souvenirs or storybook Manhattan Christmases, but the dust and the ash, the gray and black debris, of a page in history that was burning even as it was being written. A week or so after the Twin Towers were brought down, Ground Zero was still an open wound. It would be that way for a long time, I mean the smoking rubble. The smoke hovered everywhere above and around us. Even where we lived in Washington Heights, way uptown, we could smell what we assumed was burnt metal and charred flesh. A friend and I felt like we needed to go downtown to where it happened. To see it for ourselves; to stand at the epicenter. When we got there, parts of the devastated site were still closed off, but we reached the center, and it was a deeply chilling monochrome. Storefront windows were cracked and smashed by the blast of flying shrapnel. There was a shredded comic book in one of the windows, smudged Superman and Batman figurines, a picture of Gotham covered (like our Gotham, I mean New York) in cinder, while the store’s owner tried to wipe the heroes clean. Ash was everywhere and the air was thick, but we didn’t cover our faces. We let the cells and souls that lingered, suspended, hit our lungs. Yanik and I breathed it all in, probably stupidly, but we thought that if the first responders were down there, day in and day out, digging for any remains of the massacred, then we could for a few hours, in some kind of dumb camaraderie that made sense to us, also become one with these souls. That same night, after we trudged through the dust, Yanik and I went to a bar called Hogs & Heifers, where, it turned out, some of the firemen and first responders would gather and get understandably stoned out of their minds, so as to drown out what they had seen, as if that were possible. The place was packed. The firemen were still wearing parts of their uniforms, their faces full of smudge, like Superman’s in the damaged window, and their arms too, but their hands were clean. Not their fingernails: their fingernails still held the day’s, the week’s, dark particles — those might be there forever, a new DNA code tucked into the nailbed, telling its story. But the rest of their hands were crisp, as if each of them had sung the alphabet or recited a prayer under tap water and soap, over and over again, until the soot of the catastrophe washed off. Hogs & Heifers, usually kind of chilly and known for having a bunch of bras hanging from the ceiling, was thick with breath and humidity — bodies cramming up against each other, hot, even though it was cold outside. I was drinking gin and tonic, which felt clean for the same reason it was called “tonic,” and, though I wasn’t much of a dancer, Yanik and I started really moving, our bodies just letting go, until a fireman came up to me and asked if he could dance with me. This is the fireman I can’t stop thinking about lately. I said yes. He got really close. The dirt from his uniform got all over me, changing the color of my clothes, and my heart started to beat fast and hard, thinking about what that dust actually was — all over me, all over us. “Baby,” said the fireman, “I wanna take you home with me.” “Let’s just dance,” I said. What I didn’t tell him was that I was a virgin and wasn’t going home with him; this was most definitely not the way I was going to “lose my virginity.” He was looking for something else that night and I was not it. Except that, in the end, maybe I was. “Okay,” he said. “But don’t leave me, okay?” He whispered this last part into my ear and held me tight; he gripped me, as if for his life. “I won’t leave you,” I said, as a surge of emotion ran up to my throat. Embarrassed, I put my head on his shoulder and let a tear fall quietly, where he couldn’t see it. I let him put his hands under my shirt. We both went hard, my nipples and him inside his pants. We felt each other firm beneath our clothes, and that was comforting somehow, proof of a common surviving pulse. Then he took his hand out from under my shirt and touched my lips with his sweaty thumb and I traced his eyebrows. I wanted to kiss him but I didn’t. We just danced in that devastated reality, back and forth, the two ends of a rope pulling and yielding. And then, all of a sudden, the National Anthem started to blare. It came out of nowhere. And everyone stopped dancing, frozen in their tracks. Even those who were rocking out on top of the bar froze. Every single person stood still and put their hands on their hearts and sang. O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light, what so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming. Tears made new roads in the black marks of those men’s faces. My throat ached as I sang, what I was trying to hold and what I was trying to release fighting inside me and rising to my lips. Never in my entire life had I sung so deeply. Not loudly, just profoundly, about the land of the free and the home of the brave. Which, after all, was mine — the place that had taken in my refugee parents, that had given my grandfather a
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