An American Holiday

Written by Jessica Mehr

Moving

A procession of flatbed trucks passes underneath my sister’s window, vibrating the floors as jackhammers alternate on and off. They are hauling chunks of building away, mounds of twisted steel mingled with purses, shoes, and paper. Every now and then I think I see discernable sections, debris that resembles a wall or a window, like pieces from a Lego skyscraper kit.

My sister is finally moving. My job is to pack her bedroom, still dusted in a thin layer of ash that reminds me of fingerprint powder at a crime scene. It clings, revealing the greasy smudges on her coffee table, the minute fissures cracking through the cushions of her leather sofa. Jennifer’s apartment was one of the closest residential buildings, a big selling point when she moved here from New Jersey a few months ago. She left her window slightly ajar at the time, and a pile of laundry below it was ruined, designer sundresses and khaki shorts that I sweep into a garbage bag. I strip her bed down to the bare mattress, folding her sheets neatly before throwing them away. The moving men walk in and promptly take away her mattress and bed frame. They look at me hopefully, as if something is being accomplished.

Jennifer is locked in the bathroom. My mother speaks to her through the closed door. Honey, just let me in, she repeats, but my sister has made a home in there, has been avoiding her bedroom altogether. For the past two weeks, she has been sleeping on an air mattress beside the shower, an effort to stifle the noise and smell by clinging to the core of the apartment. She stuffs a towel into the crease below the bathroom door. It keeps everything out but her dreams. In them, she is surrounded by things that spontaneously explode. She tiptoes around land mines disguised as sidewalks, cars, and bicycles; she looks out windows for fiery objects hanging in the air. She wakes up thirsty and sore from constant movement, as if she is running on a hamster wheel, a rush of smoke behind her that clouds the streets and nips at the back of her shoes. She stretches her arms out forward, grasping for the clear, sunlit city in the distance.

My mother looks tired and daunted as she paces, clutching a Styrofoam cup of Chardonnay. It took over three hours for the National Guard to let the moving van through, and I don’t think she has given any thought as to how we will leave the city. Outside the Holland Tunnel they wait, trigger-ready, their guns pointing at no one and everyone all at once.

The world has become much more bordered. My parents believe that it is unsafe to travel overseas. I graduated college in May and have spent the summer working nights at the Outback Steakhouse, collecting my tips in a manila envelope labeled, “London.” My best friend and I were approved for six-month work visas, but she is afraid to go now.

Last week, I announced an alternative to fleeing the country, a plan I’ve been perfecting for weeks. Our entire family will move to Iowa, and I will request a transfer to the Outback Steakhouse in Des Moines. We will rent an apartment (they cost nothing there), and ride things out until they return to normal. My parents laughed at me. If this were a disaster movie, I explained, the audience would be wondering why we hadn’t left already. The planes from Newark airport struggle over our roof each night, and there is nothing holding them up anymore. I tell my mother that I cannot imagine a place more unsafe than our own home.

I turn on the television in Jennifer’s room, and sit down on the hardwood floor. Christina Aguilera is dressed like a French prostitute on MTV. I have seen this episode of Law & Order half a dozen times. On CNN, a group of old men are discussing Afghanistan. They blink and point fingers, referring to everyone as “Mister.” Mr. Bush. Mr. Blair. Lately their debates have been making me cry for no apparent reason, as do photos of abducted children and certain episodes of The Simpsons. A picture flashes onto the screen. It is a young, male journalist standing on a mound of yellow. They have chosen this spot at random, outside a city I cannot pronounce. It is where something might happen, if and when something does happen. The reporter speaks fervently, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief as they grill him with questions. Finally, the studio men cut away and leave him alone there, panting.

The moving men unhook the television. They stomp across the living room and remove the couch and end tables, leaving my mother with her cup of wine and closed-door conversation. Jennifer runs the faucet for a moment and then opens the bathroom door; her eyes are swollen but her makeup is remarkably intact. I throw the bedroom’s remaining objects into a cardboard box and walk over to the window.

It is not summer anymore. The air is heavy and cool. I hang over the edge of the windowsill, estimating the drop to the ground.

Two nights ago I bought myself a plane ticket to London. Three hundred and fifty dollars. One way.

An American Holiday

In Dublin, I spend most of my time drinking expensive shots of Bacardi and keying in credit card applications for the Allied Irish Banks. I managed to get a temporary Irish visa after my six months in London expired, and I now have just twenty-six days before Ireland forces me to leave too. Don’t you miss America? my mother keeps asking. I am starting to think it is my profound love of America that makes me want to escape. It has become like a solar eclipse and I try not to stare directly at it.

My job at the bank is dull and repetitive, acquainting me with local salaries and the odd pronunciation of Irish names.

Aofe Moles, County Clare, 15,000 Euros.

“Afe?” I ask Kate. I lift my face up over the wooden barrier that separates our cubicles.

“Eefa,” she yells back. “You really are impossible at Irish.” Kate stops laughing and ducks her head out of view.

“Do you girls not have enough work to do?” Caroline asks us. As she moves her lips I stare at her left eyelid. It is red and puffed to the size of a marble by some chronic infection; an oozy, yellowish crust sticks to the base of her eyelashes.

Be careful, I text message Kate. The Eye is always watching.

The bank is an electronic sweatshop, an assembly line in which everyone is assigned one rote task. Beside me, Kimlani stamps the date on forms with a monotonous thump. Stamp, move. Stamp, move. She will do this the entire day. My job is to key in the handwritten data from credit card applications. It takes roughly three minutes to do each form, but I stretch it out to at least seven. Today is a lost cause. In the past three hours, I have keyed in five forms.

It is September, 2002. At 1:46 p.m., an older woman in an AIB blazer comes walking around the room. It is an American holiday. A moment of silent please.

I close my eyes. I am on Greenwich Street, outside of a parking garage crammed with mangled, unclaimed cars. I hand a fireman a steak sandwich and he hands me a thumb in a bag.

It is a dream I’ve been having a lot lately, although sometimes the thumb is a toe or an ear, and the bag has my sister’s name on it.

I can hear Kate across the divide clicking the keys on her mobile phone. Each tap runs up my spine and stiffens the muscles in my neck.

“You know how America is,” Kate said yesterday at lunch.

No, I thought. I really don’t know.

“Warmonger bastards. They think they run the world.”

I picked up my tray and left the canteen but nobody cared or asked why.

Today they seek me out, their voices filled with compassion. In New Jersey, the gap between our house and downtown Manhattan is an ocean. Jennifer is alive. My grief might seem credible to everyone here but I know I am trespassing.

There is something wrong with me. A few weeks ago, my boyfriend and I went to see a Tom Clancy movie starring Ben Affleck. A nuclear bomb explodes at the Superbowl and I explode from the theatre. “You read the book!” I screamed at Nick. “You knew. How could you not have warned me?” He stared down at his shoes, realizing it was best to stay quiet. I am twenty-two years old and Ben Affleck movies makes me hysterical. This is who I am now, the kind of person who cannot separate fiction from reality.

The moment of silence ends and I watch the cursor blink on my computer screen. I want to call Jennifer, but I don’t know what I can say. I’m sorry that I hit you with a golf club when I was seven. It’s been a year and I haven’t said anything. She has found a new job and moved back to the city, into a plush, Tribeca apartment even bigger than the one she had on Greenwich Street. I remember hoping that we would get her body back. Now she has banana bread candles and clocks that chime on the hour; she has plastic over-the-door hooks and six hundred channels of Digital T.V.

I cannot stop thinking about Khalid Shahid, a boy I never met. His younger brother, Jaffer, sat behind me in high school Biology. I didn’t know him either, but I picture him getting drunk in his kitchen that morning, like we did, waiting for the phone to ring. For a few hours, we were equals. I don’t know if his family got anything back. I imagine they got an American flag, folded with great pomp and ceremony, then handed to them like a parcel.

I hear fingers snapping, and I realize that Kate is peering over the wall at me.

"You need a pint my friend.” I look up at her and blink. “I told The Eye we’re leaving early. Come on. I’m dying of t’irst.”

Six hours later, we leave the pub broke and restless. Kate, Kimlani, and I wander through the winding streets of Temple Bar. We eat chicken kebobs and drip yellow sauce down our blouses. We weave through the crowds and instinctively move towards the River Liffey, the border that separates the North and South sides of the city. At the top of the Millennium Bridge, Kimlani hands me a soda bottle filled with several inches of Bacardi.

“I smuggled it out of the pub for you,” she says. I take my drink and walk to the railing. The river below me is opaque, slime clinging to the steep cement walls. I drop to my knees and slip my head through the metal slits, and for a moment I think I see a body floating under the water. It is close and familiar. I could touch it if I wanted to. It reminds me of a portrait I once saw of Shakespeare’s Ophelia. She was frozen in time like a plastic doll; her fingertips hung beneath the water’s mossy surface as if on strings.

I am dangling from a string. Kate pulls a blunt from her pocket and lights it, strolling ahead to the boarded walkway that runs along the North Side. I linger, thinking about the last time I saw my sister. She flew to London for a visit, and after a long night of drinking had a breakdown in my kitchen. Recurring nightmares. Company therapists. She cried on the tile floor and I looked around in a panic. Would she notice if I slid away quietly? There was no place to go this time.

Do you ever dream about it? she asked.

No, I told her. Never.

Sometimes I dream that Jennifer is a folded flag on our dining room table. A thumb sealed in a plastic bag.

Kate hands me her joint and I take a deep inhale, the hash burning its way down my throat. In two months I will be back in America, wrapped in responsibility and routine as if none of this ever happened. But here, here I am special. I stretch beyond myself and then snap back, a slightly looser shape than before. Here, I am sitting on a North Side bench, laughing and smoking, telling myself that it is not too late, and that the sun will never rise up over the smoky haze in the distance.

“I remember where I was last year,” Kimlani says. “It was my going-away party in Sydney and we were all pissed on cheap tequila. I saw it on television and I thought it was a dream.”

“It was a dream,” I tell her. I lie down with my head in Kimlani’s lap and she runs her hands through my hair.

Far away in New York, two blue columns of light are projecting into the clouds above Jennifer’s new apartment. They burn, still and transparent, too close for her to look away.

Above me, the Dublin sky moves at an enthralling pace of shades and patterns, smoke that swirls above my head like a funnel of time and space.

Jennifer

An explosion shakes the apartment. Jennifer is lying on the hardwood floor, legs pressed against her chest, when a vibration runs through her. It ripples over the pinched nerve in her back and shoots down her right leg. She is at the window. She opens it and leans out. On the street, a man looks up at her, dazed, and then points forward. Jennifer turns to the left, stretching herself out forward until she is, like him, mesmerized. Nobody moves; they stand in the street, coffee cups in hand, and stare at it, sheets of paper falling from the sky like thousands of floating feathers.

“And there was something beautiful about it,” she will admit later on. All of that metal. Those shiny flakes of silver hanging in the air, like little pieces of foil confetti catching the light of the sun.

On the Drawing Board

It is Sunday. After I finish work at the Outback Steakhouse, I volunteer to work the graveyard shift preparing food on Wall Street. I drive with two other servers across the Verrazano Bridge into Brooklyn, where we are escorted into Manhattan by the Brooklyn Police Department. There is a series of yellow tents erected at the base of Wall Street where it hits the East River. A chill blows off the water, overpowered by the heat of the grills and bright watts of generated light. There are fifty or sixty of us, from Outbacks all over the Tri-State Area. Everyone is quiet and kind as we form an assembly line, wrapping steak sandwiches and burgers, then labeling them for the rescue workers. Some of them wander down to the tents on their own, past the New York Stock Exchange and deserted office buildings.

“Do you have any orange soda?” a Con Ed worker asks me. I dive my arm into the cooler of water and partially dissolved ice, pulling out can after can of Coke, plunging my arm back in again, undaunted, as if orange soda will save the world if only I can get my hands on it. I run my frozen fingers across the base of the cooler until finally I emerge with a Minute Maid can and present it to the rescue worker, my arm red and pulsing.

They are not rescuing anymore, but cleaning up and searching for body parts. “Parts,” a cop says to me, not “bodies.” Jennifer is at my parents’ house. She is not part of that smell. What bothers me, more than anything, is that I cannot think of a reason why.

I walk to the outskirts of the tents and sit down on a dense cardboard box of ketchup, pull the lid off my fifth cup of coffee and watch the steam rise into the air.

“Get in the van,” a cop says to me.

“Excuse me?”

“We need one more,” he says. He hands me a paper gas mask and reflective jacket. I get in the van and we drive for a while, waved past checkpoint after checkpoint, finally emerging in another dimension.

First, there is only matter. A primitive world of jagged steel in stark heaps. Then shapes, in a slow series of crystallizing blinks, begin to form: a piece of wood that could be a door, a set of mangled blinds. I try to draw things together, to reconstruct, but it is an impossible puzzle; the forms merge and then recede, part of Mass A one moment and then Mass B the next. The entire landscape is comprised of, while at the same time covered with ash. This is the dust that remains when things are erased. I breathe it. The black air filters through my paper gas mask, and when I blow my nose later it reappears, drenching the tissue in soot.

There are six of us, plus two policemen. We traipse around in hard hats and bright yellow coats that reflect under the lights of the generators. Our purpose here, as absurd as it seems, is to distribute steak sandwiches and cheeseburgers from two large, cardboard boxes. They are heavy and have no handles, requiring two people to carry each box awkwardly by its base. The sound of jackhammers and bulldozers makes it hard to speak without yelling, and it often takes a few moments to decipher what people want.

“Would you like a steak sandwich?” I yell down to a man working in a giant crater. I am still wearing my dirty jeans and unbuttoned Outback shirt, which is covered with pins that say Employee of Month and Hospitality Expert! The man looks up at me and laughs.

“I’d love one dear,” he says, climbing up. “Where the hell did you come from?” I tell him that I do not know. He opens up his sandwich and takes a bite. “This is a great thing you’re doing here.” He gives my hard hat a little knock. I am useful. We pick up our boxes and continue to wander around the site, roaming off trance-like into all directions until the officers once again collect us and move the group on.

I am thinking of an old Bugs Bunny cartoon I saw as a little girl, where the animator’s hand swoops down with a giant pencil and seamlessly erases things. Bug Bunny’s ears. The two tall trees behind him. All that remains is a pile of dust to be brushed away. Khalid Shahid is somewhere in this dust but Jennifer isn’t.

I do not know where I am in relation to anything. I want to tell my sister if her apartment is still standing, but there are too many landmarks missing. I keep mistaking buildings for hers, skyscrapers that look fine on one side but on the other are ripped open to reveal a cross-section of floors with mangled desks and chairs. Each time we pass a parking garage I think it is the one on her street. BMW’s and SUV’s are smashed under concrete beams, chunks of debris and broken glass resting on their dashboards. As we approach each garage I realize that I am wrong and turn in circles where I am standing. Is her street that way? Or there?

“Wow,” I say to one of our policemen. “Those people will be upset when they come back for their cars.”

He opens his mouth and looks at me, then pauses and turns away. He waits a moment and then looks at me again. “Those people aren’t coming back,” he says, and I feel the cheeseburgers I had at the tents rising up into my throat.

We have been out for over an hour now and are nearly out of sandwiches, but still we trudge on. The police officers seem frustrated, and it occurs to me that maybe they do not know where we are going—that they are lost, like me, but will not admit it. One of them pulls his mask up and lights a cigarette. Each exhale mixes in swirls with the dust blanketed air. Back on Wall Street smoke swirls up from the grills as volunteers flip burgers; blood leaks down into the flames so that they flash and burn more brightly. But we will never be back there. We are all destined to move like this forever, characters in an endless cartoon who wander through each charcoal frame thinking it will be the last, this entire scene just a drawing—a sketch that rests on an animator’s drafting board in the actual, untouched city.

I look up at the sky. It is 4 a.m. and the clouds above the generated light are smeared across the atmosphere in narrow charcoal bands. I pull up my mask and rub the sweat off my hot, sticky face. My hands are covered in ash and it runs across my skin like lines on a page smudged with moisture. One of the policemen looks back at me.

“Put your mask back on,” he yells, and takes another puff of his cigarette. I place the gas mask over my mouth and quickly glance back up, almost flinching.

I am waiting for a giant pencil to spiral down from the sky and erase me."

Sisters

We get Jennifer back on Thursday. I pick her up at the Elizabeth train station. Her face and hair are clean, but she is still wearing the same ash-soaked clothes, and when I see this, I get out of the car and run towards her, leaving my mother’s new Cadillac idling on the street, the door wide open.

That night, we lie in our twin beds and stare up at the ceiling, the room awkwardly full and silent. I try to remember all the times growing up I told Jennifer I wished she was dead. I want to say that I didn’t mean it, that I gave up on her much too quickly. I open my mouth to speak, but she starts snoring for the first time in days.

I leave for Europe in November. By then, Jennifer has lost her job as well as her apartment, and is living across the river in Hoboken with people she met through a newspaper ad. She goes to the gym at off hours and watches reruns of Little House on the Prairie. It is my mother’s idea that Jennifer comes to visit me in London; she pays for the entire trip.

On the last night of my sister’s visit, we go to a flashy lounge near my office in Covent Garden and order a pitcher of Long Island Iced Tea. A man invites himself over to our table and prods us into a conversation that neither of us wants to have. Soon he is belligerently claiming that his brother’s apartment was closer to the World Trade Center than Jennifer’s.

“You win!” my sister finally yells. “Your brother was closer. Is it a contest now?” My sister stands, knocking her chair to the ground. The entire bar is watching. I chug my cocktail and the two of us storm out with great commotion.

I don’t know how it started exactly, but by the time we get back to my Earl’s Court flat, Jennifer has exploded.

“You suck,” she screams at me. “This entire week has been horrible.” She says that I have done everything wrong, and for the first time in my life, I do not fight back. I do not hit her with a blunt object; I do not pour paint over her head or break the most valuable thing she owns. Later, when I am back in America, Jennifer will lose my favorite shirt and I will not speak to her for weeks. But here, the memory is still fresh. I sit down on the sofa and cry softly, until eventually Jennifer stops screaming and looks at me defeated.

“I’m wrong,” she whispers. She rounds the corner into the kitchen and collapses on the tile floor. She gasps for air in between long, gentle wails. I think about leaving her there and going to bed—or further, out the front door and to some other country like last time. Instead, I walk into the kitchen and stand over her as she lets out everything in semi-coherent fragments. In her dreams, she is perpetually running. Fire stalks her at coffee shops, chases her past the metal swing set at our old elementary school. She can still smell it on her sofa and rugs, finds traces of ash in the strangest places, jewelry boxes and the inside of books. There is something wrong with her; she is sure of it. I feel exactly the same, but say nothing.

Staring down at my sister, I am an awkward, lingering body. I slide down the wall onto the ground beside her, put my arm around her shoulder and then quickly bring it back to my chest. I pick up one of her balled up tissues and clutch its moist layers in my hand.

“Do you ever dream about it?” she asks.

“No,” I tell her. “Never.” I don’t know why I lie to her. Partly, I don’t want to upset her more, but mostly, I just want to stay out of this scene, not to admit that she is here and has brought that day along with her. I have a new life here in London—a world I do not want pierced.

Jennifer lies down on the floor and curls up into a ball. I sit there for a while longer, watching her breathe in and out, counting the tiles between us.

Outside, there is a rush of truck tires. The morning edition of The London Times crashes onto the sidewalk. It reminds me of the newspaper sheet tucked carefully in my suitcase, that black and white alphabet of names arranged in neat columns, the sensation that I should scan the M’s, just one more time, to be sure there is no mistake.

Now

It has been almost five years now, and still I have not told her. Each year, what I want to say grows vaguer and less vital. I grieve for a loss of grief.

Once again, I have left New Jersey, this time for Indiana. It is winter and the corn fields are nothing but dirt buried under blank snow, and I feel like the tallest thing for miles, my towering over the landscape. I still have not been to Iowa, and no one seems to remember the safe house I wanted to build for my family there, the five of us living in a cramped Des Moines apartment while I valiantly waited tables to support us. I like it here, but sometimes I miss confronting strangers who’ve cut me on line at Dunkin Donuts, the abbreviated skyline that floats in the Hudson River.

It is a Monday, 2006, and I cancel my classes to watch T.V. and cry on the sofa. The day oozes with silence and bagpipes and war, until finally they read his name over a microphone in downtown Manhattan. By nighttime, I am restless and go to a bar myself. The muted T.V.s have been turned from the news to VH1 to make the atmosphere less depressing. Spandex girls point painted fingernails at each other while I throw back Barcardi shots two at a time. After six or so, I get up the nerve to call my sister. The phone rings a dozen times before Jennifer answers, groggy.

“Are you sleeping?”

“Of course I’m sleeping. I work for a living, remember?”

I can hear the traffic outside her window as I apologize weakly. Of course, by the time she calls back the next day I have lost my nerve entirely. She is at work and is too busy to think about these things. Instead, we catch up on boyfriends, work troubles and school troubles. It occurs to me that forgetting is a luxury that I should be grateful for.

Jennifer whispers into the receiver, and for a moment, I feel like we are sitting together on the floor of my London kitchen. I move my arm away from my chest and lift it back over her shoulder. A soft, yellow light seeps through the layers of our closed curtains, spreading slowly across the tiles.

“I have to go,” I say to my sister. “I teach a class in twenty minutes.”

“Don’t be a stranger,” she says to me.

“No,” I tell her. “Never.”