Chapter 14

"Ineed to get out of New York City, or I'm gonna end up throwing myself in the East River," Alex told me over the phone a few months after I left the city. I knew he was serious. He'd been experiencing something similar to what I had after the towers fell. He needed visual stimulation as a designer, even if he was working as an assistant. An intrinsic need to be around other creative people guided him.

Before I was old enough to remember, and even into my twenties, New York pulsated with creativity and edginess and a weathered beauty that could only be seen by the few that dared to look for it. It was as if the subway lines that ran below the island of Manhattan were its twisted arteries and the people in those train stations were its life, singing and dancing and making beautiful music with random objects found on the street. The trains that pummeled their way through those dark, damp tunnels were like paintbrushes, splashing bright, permeating color onto a decaying canvas as they screeched along, sometimes jostling and jolting along the way, stippling and splattering. The city had character.

The towers crumbling to the ground didn't erase that character. That had been happening for years, a mayoral promise to clean up the city by forcefully removing the creativity: the paint, the music, the grit. It was stripped to the studs and reconstructed using the most basic materials, those that added no interest, no personality, no creative flourishes. The colorful graffiti that gave us inspiration disappeared as shiny condo buildings ascended higher and higher and the big-box stores moved in. Rents doubled, then tripled, depending on which neighborhood you had been relegated to. Parties got shut down left and right. Even the clubs weren't safe, falling victim to quality-of-life.

Whose life? How was quality being measured?

Our playgrounds, the darkened salons of the creators, pulsing with bass and brimming with color, faded away as Westchester and Bergen counties sprawled inward. Manhattan became Montauk by way of Paramus, moneyed elites and real estate developers glad-handing one another over the return of civility, livability for those who could pay.

By the turn of the century, good drugs were as hard to come by as cabaret licenses. The towers falling was nothing more than icing on the cake or, depending on how you looked at it, the cake exploding and covering the walls in eggshell and beige. It was a scapegoat for the exodus that no one much cared about. It was the final straw, the one that broke the proverbial camel's back for some of us.

We would later be told by weathered tenement dwellers that we simply couldn't hack it, the dark days or the epic tragedies that lifelong New Yorkers prided themselves on taking in stride. But it felt like the city had moved on without me, kicking away my favorite parts, leaving a trail of them behind as it poured itself into a new outfit, one that was clean and shiny and could be charged and recharged and connected to anything and everything that New York wasn't. It felt as though the city shook off its past and started a new life, leaving an ex-boyfriend that had been holding it back. Maybe I was that ex-boyfriend. Maybe we were all that boyfriend, the club kids and the ravers and the children of the night. I wasn't ready to move on when it left me behind.

When I go back now and walk the streets of Manhattan and take in the juice bars and the broom-clean streets and the endless parade of sterility that now lines Sixth Avenue, it feels like a whitewashed version of itself, a sad empty canvas that has been intentionally left blank. Some remnants of the city I once knew still live: rusted fire escapes and greasy pizza joints named "Sal's" and piles of garbage bags on corners that you have to hold your breath to walk by without gagging. The twisted grid of streets in the Village still baffles me and the iconic peak of the Empire State Building can still be seen jutting above rooftops from different neighborhoods, but good luck trying to find sex for sale in Times Square or skateboarders getting high and doing tricks in Washington Square Park. That was my childhood. That was the life I knew. And it feels like it was taken from me.

Alex was dealt an unimaginable blow around that time. His mother was working downtown that morning, part of the janitorial staff in the North Tower when it got hit by that plane. I never met his mother, but from what he told me about her, she seemed likely to be the one shuffling people out the door and down the stairs rather than trying to get herself to safety. The story he eventually told me about his morning that day in September will forever haunt me.

We were hanging out on the balcony of my first apartment in Atlanta just a few weeks after Alex had moved down. He was still sleeping on my couch, in search of work. The summer air was thick, and it was one of those rare nights we hadn't gone out, leaving Avenue to fend for itself with other bands of revelers. Instead, we got takeout and drank at home—a "down night," we called it, a remedy for thinking too much, for getting so caught up in one's emotions that one can't see the good decisions from the bad.

"Do you think we party too much?" he asked, bringing a tumbler full of vodka and tonic water to his lips.

We sat next to each other in those patio chairs that would become more like well-worn living room furniture, that small table in between us a meeting spot for cocktail glasses, beer cans, empty wine bottles, and the occasional makeshift ashtray used for depositing the remains of a burning joint. The sun had set hours earlier, and we were just tipsy enough to engage in unfiltered real talk. Alex and I rarely kept anything from each other even when we were sober, but there was a certain ease that set in when alcohol began taking up space in our bloodstreams, carrying words and truths and confessions with it as it traveled through our systems and, eventually, out of our mouths.

I laughed in response as I sipped from a can of light beer, rattling it between my fingers to draw his attention. "How do you party too much?"

"Nah," he clarified. "I mean the drugs."

I had to think about it for a minute. I partied much less than I used to, and Alex hardly indulged except for an occasional hit of Ecstasy. There were nights in my past, like the night Alex found me unconscious in the subway station, that I'd taken far more than my fair share of stimulants, depressants, and hallucinogens. I didn't discriminate when it came to taking myself out of my feelings and creating a reality better suited to how I wanted to experience life. Even when I first met him, Alex took drugs solely to party. I took drugs to escape. Over the years, we took different paths with our partying, decreasing the amounts and types of chemicals we ingested. My path was a little longer than his, winding its way around, over, and under his more straightforward ascent out of that club drug candy land, but they both ended around the same spot. That would be years in the future though.

"I don't know. Maybe," I answered as candidly as I could. "Why? Do you think we party too much?"

"Sometimes. I mean, we're not junkies or anything. We never binge. We don't party for days on end. But sometimes I feel like I only know how to go out in an altered state. Like, if I tried to go out without anything in my system, I don't know if I could do it, you know what I mean? I don't know if I'd want to. You ever feel like that?"

"I guess. Sometimes. It all fits though: the music, the lights, the dancing, the drugs. I mean, it's not like we ever got into freebasing or shooting smack. But if I'm being honest, I don't know if I could spin around with a sweaty drag queen, makeup running down her face in the middle of a dance floor, without taking a bump or two beforehand," I joked.

Alex laughed with me. I understood what he meant. I just couldn't imagine walking into a nearly blacked-out Avenue at two o'clock on a Sunday morning, the bass pounding into me and crowds of people gyrating against one another without a hit of Ecstasy whispering in my ear, telling my brain that I should be in the middle of that hot, sweaty group of a thousand guys, dancing, laughing, sweating along with them. I wondered if a few drinks alone would be enough to give me that same feeling. Could I do it sober? Would I really want to?

I continued as Alex and I faced each other. "I guess we could try sometime though. Next weekend?"

A tired, lazy laugh continued between us as we pondered a sober night out.

"Baby steps," Alex said. "Maybe a half tab instead of a whole one."

A lull dotted the conversation as we sipped our drinks, the sound of crickets chirping in the distance more pronounced as we relaxed. A light breeze blew through the neighborhood, rustling the leaves on the trees, starting as far south as we could hear and ending just as far north. From our vantage point, it was only a couple of blocks in either direction, and due to the fullness of the trees that lined the street in front of us, our sightline only ventured half as far. That breeze provided a quick fit of relief from the heat and humidity and turned the page to a new chapter of the book we were writing for ourselves. It was almost like the wind broke the ice. One minute, we were skating along a lighthearted dialogue about recreational drug habits, and the next, we were treading water in the heavy current of another, more consequential topic.

"Do you think you did the right thing leaving New York?" Alex asked me, point-blank. "Did a new city fix your problems?"

I wasn't ready for such a loaded question, one that would force me to look inward. Who could say if the wounds inflicted by the dull blades of the past were mending? It had only been seven months since I'd relocated, hardly enough time for deep lacerations to heal, especially when I was still busy getting my life together in a new city, in a new job. There would always be scars.

"Nah. Not all of them. But I had to leave. If I didn't, I would have killed myself. Either with drugs or with something else. At least here, the scenery is different. I don't feel like I'm stepping into a disaster area every time I walk out my front door. I mean, New York wasn't the problem. The situation was. The aftermath of all that quality-of-life shit and the clubs closing and the city turning into fucking Disney World. And the World Trade Center shit, y'know, it just… changed everything. In the space of a few years, everything went from being fun to everything being a struggle, everything being less than what it was before. That's what I had to get away from. The empty space. I don't know if shit's gonna be any better here, but at least the shit's gonna be different. I think we just have to give it time."

"Yeah." Alex nodded. "I get that."

There was another pause in our conversation before Alex spoke again. "I don't think I ever told you the whole story of what happened that day."

He hadn't. And I hadn't asked. I knew it was painful for him to talk about. I picked up on details here and there, but it had been less than a year since it all went down, and I wasn't sure how long he needed. As we sat in the quiet of the neighborhood that night, only an occasional car or a chatty group of guys on their way out interrupting the stillness of our surroundings, Alex spilled about his experience, his nightmare, his trauma. All I could do was listen as the pieces of the puzzle I had been trying to find for the last year started fusing together.

He was working at a design firm in the Garment District and arrived at the office with coffees—one for him and one for his boss—around eight thirty in the morning. It was a Tuesday, so he and the other assistants would have to set up the conference room for the weekly staff meeting. A little before nine, all the phones in the office started ringing incessantly. He remembered thinking it was odd because normally, the phones didn't start ringing until after nine. He picked up the handset at his desk, and there was a frantic woman on the other end screaming and crying, asking him where Cheryl was. At that exact moment, Cheryl ran into the office, stilettos clacking against the tiled floor, barking at Alex to turn on the news before she scrambled to her desk and took the call from her mother.

There was a small, wall-mounted television in Cheryl's office. I remember that because Alex used to talk about how he could sit at her desk and watch soap operas while he worked—filing or updating spreadsheets or ordering fabric—when Cheryl was out of the office. He hurriedly grabbed the remote control from the top drawer of his desk and ran into her office to switch on the TV.

The first thing he saw was thick, black smoke billowing from the top of a tower that he recognized. At first, he couldn't process what he was looking at. There was a tower that was on fire; he could see that much. But what did that mean? As the seconds, then minutes rolled by, it finally struck him that the tower he was watching smoke pour from was downtown, just three short miles away, and that his mother, his best friend in the world, was probably in that tower. The wrenching in his gut suddenly became apparent, more than he could withstand, and he fell to his knees and threw up his breakfast into the wastebasket beside his boss's desk.

Once he was able to stand and steady himself on his feet, he rushed back to his desk, grabbing the phone, pressing the nine button to signify an external call, and punching in the number of his mother's new cell phone, the one she was incredibly proud of. He got no answer, probably because she turned it off when she was at work.

He bolted from the office to the elevator, repeatedly pressing the button to call it. It was taking too long, so he ran for the stairwell, clearing five flights in a matter of seconds, rushing through the small lobby and meeting the outside world with the urgency of a woman in labor for the first time.

The hordes of people on the sidewalk were frantic, but for once, it wasn't due to busy work schedules or some embellished sense of self-importance. Everyone was rushing this way or that, desperately trying to get out of their offices and away from the narrow corridor that was Thirty-Seventh Street, views blocked by pre- and post-war office buildings.

Alex ran down the street toward Seventh Avenue, stopping at the corner to look downtown. That same black smoke he'd just witnessed on the news was now in front of his face, turning the sunny sky gray with ash as it hovered above the city.

Without thinking, he ran toward Penn Station, intent on jumping on any downtown train that might get him close enough. He made it to the station, but just before hitting the stairwell to head down, he heard a crash in the distance that shook him. Everyone around stopped and again looked down Seventh Avenue. At that point, no one really knew what was happening other than having a vague understanding that the World Trade Center had caught fire. Alex, however, knew from seeing the news that a plane had crashed into the side of the tower; the fire was simply a result of that incident. But that muffled crash that stopped everyone where they stood, even all the way up in Midtown, felt ominous.

A few cops rushed to the entrance of Penn Station from the corridor inside after their radios lit up with chatter, up the steps, and out onto the sidewalk. Morning commuters followed them at a brisk pace, quicker and more urgent than normal, spilling out onto the street, some with worried looks on their faces, looks that conveyed fear without context.

A shiver ran down Alex's spine as he stood in front of Penn Station, watching the city's weekday routine grind to a halt, thoughts a blur, intentions tangled in a web of uncertainty. He didn't wait around. He couldn't. He simply ran as fast as he could down Seventh Avenue, pushing past people, knocking over bystanders as he catapulted by them. He ran for a mile, then two, sweating through his blue button-up shirt, complementary blue-and-gray plaid tie blown over his shoulder. His outfits were always color-coordinated back then.

The sidewalks became clogged with people the closer he got to downtown, and when they were too dense with bodies to quickly glide past them, he ran in the street. Taxis idled along the avenue with their blinkers on as the smoke to the south became thicker. The sky grew dark, and it became harder and harder to breathe as Seventh turned into Varick and he passed Houston, then King, then Charlton.

By the time he made it to Canal Street, the picture of what was going on was in full view, clear as day even in the dust. The tops of both towers bled smoke as cops barricaded the streets leading into downtown. Still a half mile away, he squeezed through the barricades as a couple of cops half-heartedly tried to stop him. What were they going to do? It wasn't like there was protocol for this sort of thing. It wasn't as if anyone even realized what was happening.

Alex breezed past people running in the opposite direction, some crying, some confused and looking on at the burning towers behind them. Sirens blared past him in the distance, both a block east and a block west of him. If he could just make it to Broadway, he thought, it would be a straight shot down to the towers.

He made it to Broadway, then as far as Chambers, but was stopped by a wall of cops, unable to push past them. People were allowed out, but they weren't allowed in, they explained. He tried to haggle with them—he'd go in and search for his mother and come right back out—but they wouldn't listen. He had no choice but to frantically pace up and down the sidewalk, occasionally asking others standing around what they knew.

Out of breath, nervous, and crying, he eventually gave up and just watched the gruesome scene play out in front of him. After he saw a body plummeting from one of the upper floors of the North Tower, tumbling through the air and pummeling through the blanket of smoke, almost graceful in its peril, Alex turned to walk away. He knew his mother often staffed one of the upper floors, repeatedly telling him how beautiful the views of the city were from that height.

Questions plagued him in that moment, none of which could be answered. He wasn't sure what to do with himself. He could try to find another way in, to fight with the waves of cops pouring into the neighborhood, a sea of black and blue growing larger and larger, flashing lights forming a haphazard perimeter with no rhyme or reason. He could stay and watch as the flames grew higher and more intense, as the smoke turned the sky black. He could scream or cry or throw up, none of which would fix whatever it was that was happening. There was simply nothing he could do.

Instead, he walked. He walked and walked and walked, not even sure where he was heading. But he had to move—he had to do something to stop the churning that ripped his stomach apart.

By the time he made it to SoHo, both towers had collapsed, taking any hope he had of seeing his mother again with them. Aimlessly, he wandered around the city as people ran by him and cried at the horror that had just taken place, that was still taking place, until he stopped in Washington Square Park, sitting numb on the edge of the fountain, clothes stained with sweat and soot. The park was empty except for a homeless man sleeping on a bench, the desolation an odd sight to behold.

Sirens continued to roar in the distance as time stood still, the city a shell of what it had been just hours earlier. Occasionally, people would poke their heads out of open windows in buildings across the street from where he sat, trying to see something, anything, deathly looks of loss on their faces. It was a beautiful fucking day outside, and everyone that would normally be out jogging or skating or studying in the park had taken shelter somewhere else. The sun was bright and the trees green, providing shade to no one.

A thin layer of dust and ash hung overhead. It was hard to breathe; the haze of smoke in the air tingled and burned while branding the city's lungs with sickening memories. Every time we walked by a barbecue, every time we smelled campfire, every time we encountered the aftermath of a blaze, we'd remember that moment with fear, with numbness. The pigeons didn't take notice, or maybe they did, but scraps on the ground were suddenly scarce, and they seemed to wander about aimlessly or simply bathe themselves by the fountain, bored and oblivious.

Alex was frozen where he sat, his feet buried in the concrete, hours of his life wasted by that fountain. His youth was gone, violently punched out of him by an airplane flying into a building. Again, nausea overtook him, and he bent over to vomit on the ground in front of him, no wastebasket to catch his sick. In an instant, New York City was nothing of what it was. It had changed. Everything had changed.

By late afternoon, Alex managed to make it back to his mother's apartment in Spanish Harlem, where her best friend, Silvia, was sitting on the sofa crying and waiting for anyone to walk through the front door as footage of the day's events splashed across the television screen. When she saw it was Alex, she stood and walked to him, wrapping her arms around him tightly until he broke down into tears, both of them falling into a heap on the parquet floor as they sobbed.

Alex is an only child, never knew his father. He and his mother were close, like siblings, and suddenly, Sunday dinners and Friday night wine parties with her and her friends ceased, just like that. Evening phone calls and holiday shopping trips on Fifth Avenue simply stopped. Alex's existence in the city he called home came to a jolting halt with the imagined details of his mother's death being broadcast on the daily news amidst a real-life backdrop of the horrific scene of the incident. Every time he walked outside, he saw something that reminded him of his mother or her death, whether it was a swing set she used to push him on at a playground or a theater they went to once to see a movie.

Alex slept at my apartment for weeks after that awful day. He cried on my shoulder nearly every night, sometimes making it to work the next day and sometimes not. Work absences were common in the city around that time.

I didn't know what to do to help him. That's what killed me the most about his situation. His mother was his only family, his only blood connection to the city. She left Puerto Rico when she found out she was pregnant with him and settled in with Silvia, who had relocated from San Juan a few years earlier. Once Alex was born, it was just the two of them. His mother's friends looked after him when she couldn't, but from what I gathered, he and his mother were friends, leaning on each other for support during the best and the worst of times.

The hole left in one's heart after a coordinated theft of life like that may grow smaller over time, but it never disappears. You can assume the death happened, but you never really know. Maybe she was still out there somewhere, broken and memoryless, trying to find her way. If it did happen, you can hope that it was quick and painless—that she didn't see it coming—but you can't be sure. Remains can be uncovered and identified, but do bone fragments really help ease the pain? A femur is not a person, after all. The loss will forever be an open wound on his thick skin, not allowed to heal, the flesh constantly being ripped apart by anniversaries and news reports and documentary films and firsthand accounts translated into novels that sit front and center on dusty bookshelves in airport newsstands.

Other people will read about what happened that day and try to relate their own sad brushes with death to the stories of people that made it out of those buildings alive, but their thoughts and prayers will fall flat, as most thoughts and prayers do. They simply can't know what it was like for Alex. Just as I can't.

After I left the city, Alex stayed for a while, trying to forge a new life for himself. But sadness and depression overtook him too. Bombarded by despair and grief on the faces of perfect strangers as well as those he knew became suffocating. Every time he would run into one of his mother's friends or neighbors or even the clerk at the bodega, waves of "your mother was a good person," "sorry for your loss," and "keep your head up" would crash into him once again, leading him to resent the warm sentiments of well-meaning people. Those waves washed over him and beat him down, filling his lungs until he nearly drowned under a blanket of those thoughts and prayers.

He sold most of his shit and landed on my couch again, in a new city this time. He was broken but resilient, looking for work, hired by a design firm, and moving into an apartment of his own just a few blocks from mine within weeks.

He could have given in to the darkness that landed at his feet that year, leaving this painful world behind and me without my rock, my better conscience. I knew he thought about it a few times, asking me point-blank if I would be mad at him for leaving. I wouldn't have been. I would have understood. But I lied each time and told him that I would, that I wouldn't be able to make it through without him. That part was true. Without his presence, without his all-knowing guidance, I would have probably been dead within months, my heartbeat falling out of rhythm with the music, slowing far too quickly as I crashed to the ground, a muddled pile of oddly bent arms and legs in the middle of a crowded dance floor—or train station platform—flatlining as I faded motionless into the abyss.

Instead, he persevered and figured out a way to cope. I'm not sure what got him through that mess. Maybe I played a part. I hope I did. But Alex healed as we danced nearly every weekend, eventually meeting Calvin, a much-needed distraction from the heartache of not only losing his mother but the only home he ever knew. And not long after that, he met Patrick, for whom he quickly fell head over heels. I'm sure his focus shifting from moving to a new city to finding work to helping Calvin and, eventually, building a relationship played a part in his mending, but against all odds, Alex found the will to survive again.

Over the course of that heartfelt conversation on my balcony, he managed to share some of the most intimate details of the darkest phase of his life. I knew the facts, of course. I had been there. But the raw emotion that simmered inside him as he walked through that raging fire, the serrated blade of misfortune impaling him, twisting and turning inside him as he pressed on, I didn't always see. I could only infer.

That balcony, that four-by-six concrete platform that hung idly from the side of the building that housed my apartment, surrounded by that rusted iron railing and covered by that aluminum awning that seemed louder than gunfire when it rained was somewhat of a genie's lamp of conversation. Whenever I would sit down with anyone on that balcony, it was as though the lamp had been rubbed and the words simply appeared. Secrets would be uncovered as the lid of Pandora's box lifted without struggle. Story after story about the sordid affairs of one's past would be awakened, emerging like embers from a smoldering log in a dying fire being poked with a stick. It was like a cheesecake on the kitchen table for Blanche and Dorothy and Rose. That balcony opened a portal to the depths of our souls. And it wasn't just my friends. Tricks had opened up about being bullied in school and wetting the bed before realizing what they'd said, subsequently covering their mouths with their hands as though the words had simply forced their way out and they had to figure out how to lock them back in again.

Maybe it was the tranquility of the Garden District with its leafy old trees and ramshackle patchwork of dwellings that conjured the spirits of uninhibited communication. Whatever it was, there was something special about that space, old and familiar and lovingly neglected. And as Alex painted a raw, unedited picture of his wounds for me that night—black and blue and purple, still occasionally sinewy and red—I saw the genie appear.