Grace (24 page)

There was no one inside except a handful of young guests and their chaperones, all dressed up for a birthday party, looking worried no one would make it out in the weather.

We were seated in a window bay, looking out from our perch over the emptiness of the streets.

“Aren't they just the best waiters in the world?” Sylvie asked, when our drinks arrived. “They are not playing at waiting. They are real, first-class waiters from a different time, when people knew to wait for things.”

“Which era was that?” I asked, and we played the game of choosing which epoch we would best like to live in, and drank our toddies, and decided it was the perfect time to be alive.

There were no cabs when we left, and it had begun to snow again, so we took the subway to Canal, which was barricaded, due to a blaze that had broken out in the apartment blocks along East Broadway, forcing us to walk through the snow-blanketed streets, which had turned to a wet, sooty slush.

As we trundled home the needles of swirling snow began to blind us, and everyone else around was coated in the falling flakes, which looked gentle where there was no wind but were ferociously sharp to the skin, reminding me of things that used to be.

Everyone's eyes were asquint, with scarves pulled around their noses and mouths for protection, as we maneuvered the confusion of the barricades, wondering which way to go. We clasped hands in commiseration, then shoved them in our pockets for warmth, nodding sympathetically at passersby who did the same, everyone afraid and confused and anxious to get home.

A water main had burst on Chambers, sheeting the street in ice, and snapping over the few spindly trees, forcing us to double back again with the crowd, willy-nilly out toward the river, as the ghostly snow fell over us.

Sylvie tucked against my shoulder and we leaned into the howling onslaught, miserable and frozen to the core, and it felt we would never be warm.

I was too cold to talk, but when we reached John Street I thought to get some groceries, so that we would not be forced to leave the house the next day.

The shelves were empty, and the cashiers stared at the flashing television screen for information, wondering how they would get home at the end of their shift. They looked like they had not slept at all, scanning the screens anxiously for information. The announcers in their hyperbole kept calling it the Storm of the Century, but had no more information than that, except that there was no longer train service, and no more taxis, and nothing moving into or out of or through the city at all.

“Look, you're all covered,” Mr. Lee said when we entered, handing us towels. We thanked him and asked how they were faring. “We all slept at the store last night,” he answered. “We may be here again. But we have food at least.”

We got what we could from the shelves, and stepped back out into the whipping gusts, until we finally reached the heat of the lobby, where we felt safe. The power in the building was out, so we climbed the stairs to the apartment. There was gas, so we made hot chocolate and lit candles and camped around the kitchen table.

It was still snowing the next morning, leaving the city frozen as the final ice age, and even the hum of white noise had disappeared into true silence, with nothing but winter all around.

“Look how easily even New York is made fragile,” Sylvie commented, looking down on the frozen city. “Just imagine what happens when a storm lands, or a drone strikes, in some place still half-made or half-defeated from being taken over.”

We stayed the next day in bed, under the comforter, reading to each other out loud, and only left the warm covers in the evening to cook.

“I will make dinner,” I said, going off to the kitchen. “Is there anything in particular you want?”

“Whatever you're in the mood for.”

“There is the roast we bought last night, and some parsnips.”

“It sounds like a fine winter meal, but a vegetable is also sometimes green. Why don't we make a salad of the fennel?”

Outside the power had not been fully restored, but the yellow sodium lamps glowed on the frozen snow, and beyond there were little flickers of light coming from the windows of the buildings with generators; but mostly there was darkness, the world reduced to the size of my apartment and everything beyond distant and meaningless.

“You know what this reminds me of?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Were you here?”

“Yes.”

“Me too.”

She did not say anything else for a long time after that, but simply stared out over Lower Manhattan into the storm. “You know, there are kids in grade school now who were not even alive then.”

“Time moves so fast.”

“And if we have children they will never know what it felt like here then. They won't know what it was like before, at all.”

“Before the murders.”

“I did not know you could be like that.”

“Like what?”

“So narrow with hate. Look at your face.”

“Neither did I.”

“But our children would not know any of it. Nothing except what they read in history. They'd never have to nurse from that shapeless fear and rage, neither ours nor theirs, or the knowledge of what we forged from our sadness and fear and tarnished with shame. They wouldn't know any of it. Wouldn't that be glorious?”

“Yes,” I said. “Except they will know, if only from the effects, or else they will know something from the same root. They cannot escape that.”

“No,” she shook her head. “I mean if they did not know anything like that at all.”

“Yes,” I said. “That would be glorious, but it's not possible.”

“I did not ask you to weigh it, just to think if we could make the world again. They would be brand new, and the world would be new for them. We could make the world again for them, and they would not have to know anything like that at all. Wouldn't that be divine?”

“Yes,” I said.

From bed we could no longer see the lights of the buildings in the distance, but watched whiteness cover the invisible city, and the people below, with all their burdens, and it just kept falling over us, like ash.

I accepted the assignment from Bea and we flew from winter back toward warmth, taking the PATH train from World Financial Center to Newark in the early evening rush. Our plane lifted and tacked out over the bay, then up the Hudson in harmony with the boats and the evening traffic along the West Side Highway and Midtown skyline. The entire city was aglow with activity, and the silhouettes of the buildings were a calming sight, and we fell asleep peacefully.

We woke the next morning with the Atlantic sun over the Netherlands, and changed flights in Amsterdam, where we stopped to buy buttery Dutch pastries, and the European papers. It was always refreshing to see the news from a perspective beyond the information firewall of America, and shocking every time to realize how thick that firewall was. Sylvie said much the same, as we scanned the papers from around the world in the free Dutch port.

“Which do you want?” I asked.

“Let's take them all.” She gathered up a stack. “We can compare them and sort out for ourselves how much truth is in each and what's really going on.”

As we fastened ourselves in for the next leg of the journey I told her how much I was looking forward to the trip.

“That's nice of you to say, sweetheart,” she said, turning from the window. “I know you're only going to make me happy, and it does make me happy.”

“I have my own reasons, too. Did you ever wonder why us, though?”

“No. I know why.” She pulled her pashmina around her neck and leaned against me.

“Tell me what you think,” I said.

“A lot of it is stuff you don't believe.”

“Try me.”

“A shrink might say our neuroses match. A believer would say when we are open on the deep level the universe sends to us what we need, always. A pragmatist would shrug and say it is the causal outcome of a chain of factors we can never know completely, and probably shouldn't worry too much about. A traditionalist might say people like us belong together. A mystic, that it is only mutual submission to what is happening to us. The Greeks would say it is
éros
. But ask, is it also
philia
?
Pragma
?
Agápe
? My mother just wants to know if you are good to me. If I am good to you.”

“What do you tell her?”

“Yes.” She laughed with her eyes and kissed my cheek.

“And the rest?”

“I think if all those ways of looking at the question exist it must be rich and complex enough to sustain so many different ways of looking; the richest, most complex thing there is, which we know less about than we do the cosmos, so only a fool would think to say anything definitive. Maybe when gods walked the earth and showed themselves to us, there was certainty. Except they retreated from us, or we from them, and now—thinking that by knowing the laws of the universe we know the universe—we celebrate our reason as all there is, like little baby children who believe themselves grow. And still, it is there for us. And somewhere, I like to think, they are smiling, watching lovingly while we bumble about, claiming to know their intent, except it really is just a great mystery. So what do I know? I have given up on theories of love. All we can have is the experience and practice of it, allowing the rest to work through us. That is enough. We were willing and ready and submitted. That is what matters. Unless we decide to go all the way as seers do. But for us it is probably best to simply accept it.” She squeezed my hand.

I did not tell her I did not agree with all of it. I had no theory of my own, or anything more adorned than that she made me a better man. That was satisfaction enough, as we lifted through the sky, and fell asleep against each other.

When we woke again the Rift Valley had split open below us, ample and lush. We had a five-day safari planned. After that I would report my story, and eventually we would meet back in Farodoro. Beyond that we did not have plans.

“Where would you like to live?” I asked, as the plane descended.

“With you. Wherever you wish,” she indulged me, not too convincingly. “Let's just enjoy ourselves, and not talk about it yet, because if you wish to live somewhere I do not, we are going to have a fantastic little fight. You will begin with whatever argument you have readied in your mind, and it will be some kind of tautology or other, which I will tenderly deconstruct, for your own good, with actual facts, so there is no winning for you that way. Next, we will start psychologizing, and after that it will be all down to the emotions. You will throw up both your hands, and say, ‘Please. Just listen to me, woman.' Of course you will not say the last, because you are not stupid that way, but you will think it, honey, and I will overhear.

“I will calmly point my finger, right here.” She poked my chest playfully. “And say, ‘I heard you plenty. Is that the best you got? Cause if it is, you just see here, man.'

“Yes. It's going to be an exquisite little fight. I wish we could have it now, but I'm too tired, so just you wait. We'll argue, and eventually get through it, as soon as we agree. But in the end, you'll see you will agree with me, and everything will be beautiful again.”

“When I agree with you?”

“Yes. And you know why you will?”

“Tell me.”

“Because I would follow you—if you had somewhere to go with meaning for you, even if it was simple as, ‘This is where I truly wish to be right now.' You do not, though, and I do. But you are going to make us go through that awful fight first. That is fine, as I said. I'll win, and off we'll go happily ever after to make a real home for us.”

We had been going twenty straight hours by then, and were boarding our final flight over the dense, red valley and equatorial vegetation, then up into the spindly mountains, where the engines of the plane could be heard laboring to clear the peaks.

We landed on a narrow, old-fashioned airstrip beside a tin-roofed terminal, and made our way through customs behind locals laden with oversized suitcases and appliances brought back from the world beyond.

Whenever I arrived on the continent what I first noticed was not poverty, or the customs agent's thinly-veiled request for baksheesh, or even the heat. What I felt when we disembarked in Africa was the sense of ease I always re-encountered upon arrival. Where in other countries I always met, or feared meeting, some occluded notion of who I was, in Africa the things that clouded the distance between others and myself was more subtle. If someone who did not know you needed to casually question your intentions or intelligence or humanity, he would find a better reason than your skin. Where there was enmity it was over real resources, or judgment against a true offense caused by some legitimately fucked-up thing about you, or your tribe.

Beyond that I was expected to wear the mask of my social self as everyone did, understanding these were merely masks, and only those who took them too seriously, with no space between self and mask, were harmed. Everyone else knew there was an interior beneath the surface of everything. The outside mattered, but only just so. I observed the sense of release I felt as an invisible burden lifted. Then I noticed the heat, and soon after that my own foul temper.

We had emerged into the humid arrivals hall, where the air was oppressive as a truncheon, and I retrieved my mental list of everything that drove me crazy about Africa, all of which boiled down to the fact that generations after decolonization, the electricity still did not work. Maybe that's blaming the victim, or maybe it was a reasonable minimum standard for an international airport; in whichever case the air-conditioning and lights in the hall were out, and we were lost in the sea of people.

Sylvie's mood was undampened and I tried to keep mine to myself when I saw how invigorated she was by the new landscape beyond the glass doors. “It's so beautiful,” she said. “It's like an Eden.”