by Dolan Morgan

“How do you know it’s not raining because of me when it rains? Huh? Prove it.” She swings her arms and beats her hands on her hips.
“I’m hungry,” I say. No response. She might evaporate into a long list or dance alone into an alleyway, I think. We continue walking, stopping at crosswalks.
“I want to talk about Phil,” she says, touching the knob on a stranger’s door.
I want to say or do something terrible but end up with just, “Me too.” Phil is probably the reason we took this walk after all.
“But not right now,” she says, her double chin folding like a smeck of cookie dough in a pan.
I’m silent for a moment. “Yeah, like I said, I’m hungry.” She leads me to her favorite sandwich shop. We eat in silence. Our mouths chew a secret conversation that neither of us can understand. Having mentioned him, it feels less likely that we will talk about Phil.
“Are you going to get a new job?” I ask when I finish eating. I see beer in the store’s cooler but think better of it for the moment.
“No, I’m going to try being homeless for a while. Yes, I’m going to get a new job.”
Rethinking the beer, I grab a 22 of malt liquor and crack it open. Overhead, I hear the sound of helicopters. Some newsworthy event must be taking place. Or perhaps just the afternoon traffic report.
“I’m probably gonna have to go back to Ohio,” I tell her.
“Yeah,” she says.
I turn toward the television. Home video footage of a house. “Terrorists have hijacked the American Home,” the headline reads.
“You see that?” she mumbles, her mouth full of food.
I look at her, then at the TV. I’m not sure what to make of the television.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Across the street from my plot of land, they were cutting down trees, big tall oaks, making way for an unknown development. Saws and bulldozers broke apart the timber and pushed it into large bins of shattered wood. Just beyond the branches of the last few trees, I saw her – milky shutters, that provocative siding. I watched her. The driveway stretched mockingly from her to me, and I wanted to talk to her. But I couldn’t.
For starters, I’m small. I don’t have a guest bedroom, and my garage is too stuffed with junk to hold even the worst of cars. My septic tank collapsed on itself recently, leaving an unattractive hole gaping in my yard. And my insides at the time were sad: they lay in bed and cried, screamed and threw hairspray at one another. I could feel spiders in the walls. Yet across the street, she stood so pristine — her blue curtains tightly, symmetrically arranged, her doorway and front steps jutting out voluptuously. When she spoke, a happy child ran through the yard. When she laughed, the flowers got watered. She kept her stone walkway manicured to a crystal sheen. But I could only watch the facade through the trees — and for all I knew, 124 Flat Iron Road was just a beautiful, homely face.

Who can you trust? I’d fallen for a house earlier in my life. She wasn’t a beautiful house by any means, but we’d been built at the same time, and she was always beside me. We shared people back and forth, and so far as I knew, we loved each other. She still lives just two houses down, at the bottom of the hill, but she changed. She definitely used to be like me, small and unassuming, but as the years went on, she started to be different inside. I could catch glimpses of it through the windows. Plastic on the couches. Exotic lamps. Confidence. She was transforming from the inside out. And then the trucks came and the painting and the construction. She grew a pool and a deck, a bocce ball court and a gazebo. We stopped sharing detergent around the same time the tall shrubberies went up. I didn’t move or speak in resistance, just watched. To me, at least, there was no warning, no previous inclination that this would happen. I go over memories in my mind: was she often looking into the distance, staring with longing in her walls? I can’t tell. Everything looks the same. Perhaps it’s cynical, but looking back on it, now that she’s gone, I have to feel that all that talk of love and of being meant for each other amounted to mere timing and luck — a coincidence of design.
“I mean, it’s like we were made for each other,” she would say to me.
“Yeah, we match so well — the trim of your windows and the engraving of my banisters. As if they were carved with the other in mind.”
And it’s true, we did share these things, did have complimentary parts. Her paints really did shine well next to mine, and the curves of her plumbing did fit comfortably against my own. But I’m not sure that really means anything. When people sleep together, their bodies slipping together perfectly, there’s no guarantee on meaning, and it’s the same with houses. I suspected that our complimentary attributes were not the designs of love, that the hand that etched these things upon us might have had altogether different intentions. What these intentions were or are I have no idea. Why would we be made to have such similar and strangely connected attributes? We looked good on this street together, but does that translate into love? The facts didn’t add up. So I was cautious with 124. It took me a few days of stammering in the wind, of opening and closing windows, of creaking and moaning, but eventually I built up the courage to say something: “You always sit there?” A terrible joke. I regretted it immediately.
“Afraid so,” she replied, uninterested, offering a forced laugh, the sprinklers kicking on briefly.
“So,” I stammered, then let out a terribly embarrassing emission, an elaborate and dramatic fart. My door burst open and a man walked out, stopped at the end of the driveway, head in hands. He stood there between me and this gorgeous house just weeping. A woman followed after him, stopped halfway toward him, sat down on the ground and laid her head in the gravel.
“Ha!” I laughed weakly, as if this were a cute and endearing moment I wanted to share. “Whadaya know?” Inside I felt a teenager turn on the television, felt the sudden rush of energy through me. My phone rang. “It’s hot out, isn’t it?” I asked, still stubbornly trying to believe I could pass off the scene spewing from me as something normal, something common to every house, but there was no hiding it.
“Don’t come back, okay?” the woman said, standing up from the gravel. The man turned slowly around, looked at her with a half smile and watery red eyes, and nodded. He just walked down the street, no car, no nothing, stopping every now and then but never looking back, and eventually disappeared around an ivy laden bend in the road. The woman collapsed into herself, her hair falling over her face, and sobbed, back heaving, head shaking. The boy came to the front door and stopped, looking out at her.
“The TV won’t work,” he said, lying. She sniffled and looked at him and smiled much the way the man had just smiled at her, a knowing and sad smile.
“So, what are you doing tonight?” I asked 124, but she didn’t answer, just sat there. Were I wearing a tie, I would have tugged at it nervously. But I’m just a house, and houses don’t wear ties.

In time, all the trees in 124’s front yard were uprooted, pulled from the ground, wood wires dangling. Where do trees go and what do they do when they get there? I’d never really seen a tree do too much other than stand and wave at other trees. “Hello,” they’d say. “Hello!” another’d reply. “Hello again!” the first’d exclaim. Then they’d probably sit and think about sunlight and soil, birds — or whatever it is that keeps trees busy. When they were carted away, a few branches timidly waved, “Goodbye – bye, bye,” the others waving, “Hello!” as the truck pulled down the street. Good luck, tree.
And so nothing separated us, but I still didn’t talk. The backyard trees and shrubs were more articulate than me. Though silent in the field behind her, the backyard trees would reach out, rub against her, tickle her gutters and panes. Some days she’d sprinkle back with water and laughter. Other days her little insides would come out and climb all over the branches, entangling them. At first, it felt a little shameful and sad to stare, however well I may have hid it. Over time, though, I came to look forward unabashedly to the half-lit afternoons and evenings when they would do their dance there on the lawn. The sad part never really went away, but that was something I could look forward to as well.
I never did talk to her again, only watched, yet her presence came to be something that I relied upon. All the reliances I’d made previously were reluctant necessities: I could barely function if I didn’t have at least a cursory relationship with the wires and poles loitering about the neighborhood, and I was pretty averse to loosening my grip on the caverns of pipes beneath me, for hygienic and personal reasons.
Now, though, I felt a need I had no precedent for, one that sprang right out of the air and manifested as a new sense of distance. Until then, distance had been a concrete idea, limited to how many shingles from one end of a roof to the other, how many mailboxes from here to the bend in the road, how many houses from here to the big woods. But distance changed. I could sense the space between me and 124, but what I saw in front of me didn’t match. I had always known distance as a “how many” affair, but suddenly, after watching dusk after dusk fade quietly away and never getting any closer to her, distance became more a matter of how long — of time.
Everything around me was an infinite distance away on this new measuring stick, all points impossibly unreachable. And thus I began to truly long for 124 Flat Iron Road, sitting just across the street playing with the leaves and branches, and to love her in spite of an impassable and infinite barrier.

One week she stopped responding to the trees. Some unkind whispers must have been exchanged over there because she emptied right out. Her insides just up and left in a large van, rushing around and taking everything with them. Nothing remained. And still the trees casually pawed at her, and still, when the mood struck, they aggressively groped her, up and down her siding, across her vents and frames. She hadn’t stirred since the insides dispersed — just sat there, letting them molest her, letting them squeeze, prod, and pry her. Watching this was difficult, of course, but what could I do?
Once, and only once, the small boy inside me crept over there to see what he could see. As if stepping on hallowed ground, he moved quietly and with caution around her, peeking into her, nervously touching her locks and knobs. Unlike 124’s own boy, who used to slide into the trees without a care, my inside kept a constant watch over his shoulder, waiting for something that never appeared. Eventually, he got comfortable, settled into her portico steps. It amounted to some sort of vicarious contact for me — watching the boy sit calmly on her, an almost-part-of me skipping rocks across the driveway. The feeling crept over my walls like a blanket, a warm snow. And then the boy stood up and unzipped his pants.
He pissed right onto the brick behind her bushes. He’d done it to me before, but this? This was different. Sure, I never believed I had total control over my insides, but I always believed that I exerted at least some influence over them. Even if it was only an instinctive, innate feature of me, I believed that what the insides did was somehow related to who I am. The scope of how much of my world I would now have to rethink, in light of this event, undid me. I could not reconcile this piss with anything I believed about myself — yet there it was in plain sight: my insides defacing her. There was no point of comparison for this type of betrayal. Was it even possible to do such a thing to myself? Apparently it was. These insides were me. And if not, then who the fuck were these bastards?
It’s at this point that I seriously lost track of what it really means to be a house.

If I had a chimney, I would have used it, would have made it push everything inside of me out and up, far away into tiny ripped and scattered black fibers. But I didn’t have one of those. I had been invaded, infiltrated by persons who don’t believe in ventilation. Rather, they let things stagnate, let them fester..
Though they lived inside me, my insides had become, to me, more like the trees and the grass — outsiders, or even worse, for their deception. “Home is where the heart is,” the woman in me would say, as if somehow she and I could possibly share a heart. “I’m trying,” she would cry on the phone, “to make ends meet,” but, though the phone was connected to both me and her, the connection belonged to neither of us. These ends weren’t meeting.
Once, the boy had taken a blanket, thrown some socks, pants, and toys into it, wrapped it all up and walked out the door. He only left for twenty minutes, but the possibility was there. For me, though, there was no blanket to wrap things in and nothing for me to wrap; my reach was as long as the edge of my walls. The exact nature of my boundaries was blurred at best — based on the unknown length of my piping or the degree to which my foundation had eroded and mixed in varying densities with the soil — but frankly, I counted squarely on the fact that I was always me, boundaries be damned, and therefore the boundary-crossing, “sometimes-me” insides were clearly something else. Outside things remained constant in their not-me-ness, but these insides, they flowed like liquids pumped by unseen forces, in and out: me, not-me, me, not-me. Unlike the tree in the yard, which perhaps, despite being clearly outside, could have been tangled in a pipe or rooted in my tanks, these people’s half-me-ness (going away in a car or bus daily, returning to sleep) was what in fact separated them so distinctly from me.
Whoever these people were, I could no longer empathize with them. I had been holding on tight for them, keeping things together, but my devotion waned swiftly after the piss. For years, they’d been spilling water from the shower onto my tile floor, the mold and mildew creeping into the grains of wood, microbes, tiny parasites corroding me. Always, I’d clenched together the dead weight of those boards and held up the floor beneath them, but not after what they had done.
I let go.
I collapsed inward, letting the floor fall. Given my misgivings about who I was and wasn’t, though, part of me suspected that I actually did not let go of the bathroom floor, that perhaps it wasn’t my choice to let it slide to the basement like soggy newspaper. Maybe I just couldn’t have held it anymore and only felt as if I had spitefully showed my insides a thing or two. Anything was possible now that people were acting of their own free will and not solely as the instruments of houses.
Within a day, the builders arrived, pulling up boards, sawing, slamming me against hammers. The woman ran a finger along my walls, the framing hammer dropping again and again, and I began to think about things moving back and forth, up and down. Who were these gentlemen inside me? Gruff, thin, fat, tall – an assortment of figures, all paraded into me for one purpose and from a remote location. Somehow, I had gotten closer to them. If distance was a matter of time, then motion, it appeared, was a matter of waiting. That is, though I had resolved myself to the fact that an infinite patience would be the only thing that brought me any closer to something else, here were these men, these men from far away, now inside me. And why were they here? Because of me. Something I had done, or at least may have caused. And they had come running with the specific intention of remedying what had been done. If this bathroom incident could summon specific people, could there be other gestures to attract anyone? It might be a lifetime of waiting before I got any closer to someone, but perhaps I could influence, as I had with these builders, how long it would be before something else got closer to me?
124 sat across the street, empty, dilapidated, her grass overgrown, but she was no less wonderful. Sunken foundations, scratched paint, rusted hinges. I toyed with what inside of me might affect her, bring her closer to me, even in some small way. Frantically I flickered lights, slammed doors, groaned pipes, flaked plaster, backed up water, and blew fuses, but nothing seemed to interest her as much as it did the bundle of men who came running to help my insides get things back to normal. I learned the secret codes to the motion of men, felt confident in my ability to control at least some of them, calling them to me, sometimes for fun, sometimes out of anger or boredom, but always, always I watched her as they pinched, stapled and rewired me.
I can’t be sure if all my attempts were to blame, but a few weeks in, the trucks came, lined up alongside her, and men poured out, tools bared. I heard them say that it would take only a few days, that “the contractor” wanted a quick job. The door to their trucks read: “Perfect Contractors, Inc. New York City.” The bulldozer revved up, men unloaded large machines from a truck while others stood aside, hammers and saws at the ready.
The woman in me pulled a curtain aside briefly, looked on almost without interest. I felt her breath on my panes. When the first hammer hit, you could hear it. You could hear it slam against 124’s wall, a saw powering up at the same moment. She didn’t even blink, her shutters undisturbed. The hammer hit again, and the saw touched wood, the sound dulling against the grain. “Are you hungry?” the woman asked the boy, and the bulldozer inched toward the garage, raising and lowering its plow against her. The wall began to buckle, and that’s when I got up.
I got up so fast, they barely saw me coming.
Pulling shreds of piping and concrete, I dragged poles down, barreling toward them. The woman inside me screamed, holding the fridge, and I flew head on into the closest workers, crushing them with the underside of the kitchen. Swinging around, I bore my basement hatch into the bulldozer, knocking it over with the momentum of my weight, swinging the telephone poles and laying waste to the pickups sitting helpless in the drive. Those I couldn’t crush, bouncing furiously along the yard, ran into the street and out of sight. Soon the only sound was my slamming blindly into trees and flipped trucks, snapping limbs and driving my pipes deep into the dirt.

I sat next to her, unmoving. The other houses in the neighborhood stared silently, their insides creeping slowly out front doors, but 124 didn’t move. She didn’t say anything. Had she died today or long ago? I nudged myself against her, the woman and the boy passed out within me, and waited for my nestling to provoke her back to life. If I snuggled warmly against her for long enough, I could make her come back, could wake her up. I lined my walls up with hers and slid against them, waiting for her. All distance erased, and still I waited. I could have waited there, silent and still against her forever, but the cars started coming, dozens of them, with flashing lights and screaming men.
I realized then that the men would just keep coming until they could tear her apart. So, wires twisting and sparking, I curved up against the canopy of trees, and swung hard — with all the weight of the months and hours and minutes and seconds spent watching and pining — into her lifeless walls, tearing her apart, splinters of her sticking to my foundation.
You can’t touch her.
And then I left, thinking: who is this contractor and where is NYC? I will grind them both into the ground. And where can I get a goddamn tie?

I flew on and on, but despite the drastic changes distance went through as I flew farther and further, despite everything, it still essentially amounted to the same thing it had always been: an impossible traversal. I could fly around as far as I wanted, in any direction, crossing great lengths of space — but that I didn’t reach anything of consequence, just tree after tree, was pretty much the same as not going anywhere at all. I couldn’t seem to get any closer to where I wasn’t, and thus it seemed that, without direction, distance was the only thing that existed. Everything around me rolled off to nowhere. I had the whole map to navigate but nothing to get to. No destinations, just the spaces between.
Rocks, open fields. Pools of water, stretches of old road. I had flown from the only destination that mattered to me, tore away from her remnants faster than I knew how to understand. All other scenery looked so similar, monotonous — and maybe that’s all a place is. Maybe a place is only how it looks, so the boring places are always right next to each other, no matter where they are.
I circled and spun, knowing that the distance to where I wanted to be — yesterday, long before, watching and waiting for now — was a place I could never get to. Stopped, high in the air, above the nowhere beneath me, I realized I was still moving away from it, farther and farther with every passing moment of standing still. Waiting distance: motion. I took a sharp dive toward the ground, wanting everything inside me to fly out in a shower, pushing through my walls and shattering me, making me look a little more like her, if only to be just that much closer.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

The house began a quick drop, as if it had just realized that houses cannot fly, and we raced for the ground, the furniture rushing to the ceiling. I’m going to die, I thought — but our plummet seemed cushioned by a momentary pillow of indecision. Everything flopped gently back to the ground.
I stood up. The house was at a full stop, resting. The mess had become messier in the descent, my mother no longer propped so much as tossed in the corner. Sun came in through the windows, and outside I saw a large field of grass. I walked out of my room, down the hall, and out the door, feeling a warm breeze blow through my t-shirt. In the distance were some woods, a hill of grass behind me. Further off I could make out the glimmer of a lake. A few birds flew overhead.
I sat down on the grass, relieved, exhausted. Turning around, over my shoulder I saw the house. My house. The house I grew up in. Here in a field by itself. The true absurdity of it hit me for the first time and I laughed. Honestly, it looked so innocent. How could I look at my home and see something sinister? It was here in this huge, open field, sitting silently, still, and peaceful — just like me as I looked to the sky.
And then the house got up again.
It rose, about ten feet, just hovering above the ground. There, hanging from the front door, was a tie, loosely strung about the knob. I hadn’t noticed it before, but there it was, a breeze carrying it back and forth. The house moved forward, over me, and I stood up quickly, stumbling backwards. It was too quick for me though, overcoming any movement I made to get out of its shadow.
And then from its underside, something cracked, and water poured out, soaking me thoroughly.
But it wasn’t water, it was something else.
Piss. Urine. My urine, most likely.
And as quickly as my house had pissed on me, it was gone, my mother with it.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Having pissed on my insides, I felt pretty good. I was reminded of what I was doing, why I was moving. I had to settle a score, put things to rights, and I felt more comfortable moving forward. Though I didn’t know how or when, I felt confident I would reach my destination eventually and kill that goddamn contractor. Keep moving, that’s all I had to do.
Looking around, there were more houses on the horizon and hundreds beneath me. Somehow they must know something, I thought, and decided to approach a group of them. They were shiny houses, all very similar in build, and didn’t know much. They argued a lot, calling each other strange names, but they did all agree on one term: highway. It didn’t mean much to me, of course, and none of them could agree on what it meant, but it was information nonetheless. I left them arguing amongst themselves, their insides running around all about them, pointing and screaming at me, as if trying to vie for my attention. I felt a whole step closer to NYC and even to 124, without having made a single move in the right direction.
By the time I headed for the highway, there must have been a thousand people underneath me, ten helicopters all around me, and strange little airplanes whizzing by far above me. As I moved toward New York City, these helicopters followed, some ahead and some behind. My escorts, I suppose, given to me no doubt by those beneath me who understood what must be done to the contractor. I was thankful, and filled with hope as the green slowly cleared beneath me, giving way to the spread of more houses and roads. In every direction, buildings reached farther and farther out, uncertainty falling away with the grass and the trees. I liked to imagine that it was the helicopters that morphed the land beneath us, thunderously demanding the ground to transform as we moved. Or perhaps we were just standing there, my great knowledge of direction simply willing the city to us. Either way, it was comforting to be accompanied as I headed into the unknown. I could only hope that the insides of New York would be so generous and dedicated to justice.

Upon arriving, his height clinched it: the tallest building, having the best view of the city, was the one to speak to. I flew right up to him, high above the other buildings, to ensure I got his attention. My entourage of helicopters probably helped as well.
“Hello,” I said. “I’m trying to find the Perfect Contractors.”
Startled a bit, he answered, “Hey, oh my, who are you and what are you doing here? Have you come to kill me?”
“Oh, shut up, you old coot!” another, smaller building chimed in. “Stop being a diva.”
“That’s easy for you to say, shorty. A plane couldn’t hit you if it tried. You don’t know what it’s like,” he whimpered, then raised his voice. “None of you do!” Whatever this strange building was upset about, I rationalized, I probably couldn’t help him with it, so I continued my line of questioning.
“So, have you seen any contractors from up here? I’m not sure exactly what it looks like, but it’s perfect apparently. And it destroys houses for fun.”
“What on earth are you talking about, boy?” He sniffled a little, apparently crying, streaks of cleaning fluid washing across his windows.
“Well, sir, you happen to be very tall, so I figured that maybe you — ”
“Oh, why must everyone belabor my pain! Did you come here specifically to crush my spirits?”
“Sir, I – listen, I — ”
“No, you listen. Listen to my poem.”
“Oh, come on, stop it already!” The other building yelled up. “No one wants to hear your lousy poem again.”
“Perhaps this young house does? Perhaps he has a taste for the arts?” Saying no probably would have ended our conversation, and therefore his help to me, so I agreed to listen.
“Thank you, my boy. I’m sure a high-minded fellow like yourself will enjoy it.” He let out a breath and then recited:

“In The Wake of September 11th”

The Empire State Building is drunk
Weeping in the flowers
His tie askew, his windows fogged.
He always drinks too much.

The MetLife building is at the coffin
Thinking of his own mortality. “I promise,”
He says, “To be better at who I am.”
He doesn’t know it, but he’s lying.

The Flat Iron Building is holding
The hand of the BQE, both sitting
Waiting politely to leave, Thinking of
Business that needs, as usual, attending.

Battery Park is by the refreshments
His jacket off, just a white shirt
Arguing with the West Side Highway
About money, where it’s gone.

Grand Central Terminal signs the guest book,
Sees the list of names, Looks around
The room and thinks, my god
Nothing’s changed.

“Thank you,” he said, choked up. “My name is Empire State Building. Thank you again, thank you very much for listening.” Though I didn’t really understand it, I made sure to tell him I enjoyed it very much.
“Oh, you don’t need to lie to him, kid. Everyone’s hated that poem since he wrote it years ago.”
“I became a poet on that day, that day I saw my own death foretold.”
“Get over yourself, you old coot, there ain’t gonna be no planes for you, though everyone knows that’s what you want.”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s right, you’re jealous! You can’t figure out for the life of you why you didn’t get hit.”
“Well, first off, I could have withstood it. That’s why they didn’t hit me.”
“Oh, Mr. Tough Guy, huh?”
“Leave him alone, Met,” another building interrupted. “He’s not hurting anybody.”
“Oh no?” Met retorted. “Then what do you call this old coot constantly reciting a poem in which I’m an asshole?”
“An asshole?” The Empire State building balked “You’re trying to be a better person in it.”
“Yeah, but according to your silly poem, I can’t seem to do it, thank you very much.”
“Oh, you’re being ridiculous.”
“And lamenting your ‘imminent death’ before it happens isn’t ridiculous?”
I was too curious to keep quiet, “Excuse me, but could I ask exactly what you are all talking about? How do you know you’re going to die?”
“He thinks he’s gonna get hit by some airplanes.”
“I’m very tall,” the Empire State Building insisted. “They only go after the tall ones.”
“Why are airplanes attacking you?”
“They aren’t, kid,” Met laughed. “They did many years ago and now this guy thinks that -”
“They’re terrorists. The airplanes are. They want to destroy us and they’ll kill themselves doing it.”
This all seemed a little silly to me. “Really, why would airplanes want to kill buildings?”
“No, not just any buildings, kid.” The Empire State Building got very serious, his voice almost too quiet to hear under the roar of the helicopters. “Only the tall ones. We’re in their way.”

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

In the abandoned building, deep in the industrial park, we make our way through the dusty office, climb onto a duct, and up to the highest point. Sitting there in the concrete courtyard, our legs dangling above the plants beneath, plants pushing up through desks, filing cabinets and scattered gears, we can see the Manhattan skyline. And there is a house just floating there, high above the streets. Fighter jets whiz by overhead in formation, hundreds of helicopters dotting the blue sky.
“This is a strange kind of terrorism,” she says.
“Yeah, I don’t know if we can really call it that anymore.” I second guess myself, though, when the Empire State Building begins tilting to one side.
She puts her hand to her mouth, “Oh my god. Shit. Oh god. They bombed it.”
But it doesn’t fall. Rather, it floats.
It rises, slowly but surely, up and up into the sky where it stops and rests motionless with the house.
There’s nothing we can say, so we sit quietly and stare. There are no clouds in the sky. There is no breeze. In the distance there are sirens, but everything else is quiet. I imagine that the whole city is hushed, waiting for someone to speak. She does: “Do you think they’ll shoot it down?”
“The Empire State Building? There’s people in there. Thousands.” I’m relieved to talk, as if perhaps I never would again.
“So, maybe it’ll just float like that forever?”
“That’d be something.”
I light a cigarette and offer her one. Smoking, we sit quietly, watching the sky dim a little. She leans back and says, “You know, it was kind of nice that day. I’ve wanted to go back to it so many times.”
I don’t say anything.
“Yeah, it’s hard to explain,” she says. “Everything stopped. Everything went away. The whole city emptied out. There was an urgency to it that felt really good. There were even free movies and popcorn.”
“I used to stare out my window when a hurricane was supposed to come. I’d be really disappointed when they didn’t.”
“Yeah,” she said and took a drag. “And I had this Boy Scout manual, too, that I took from my older brother. It described all these scenarios that a kid should be careful of. People at the door. Predators in the bathroom stalls. Vans with candy sticking out. As much as I feared all this, you know, I just as much wanted to be admitted into the secret world they described, just for a little bit. Here was the real world, waiting to pounce from behind the bushes, I thought. Once, I even tested out something it said to do if you got lost in a store, just so I could feel it a little. I must have been four years old, no older, and I hid behind the racks in the sporting goods section so that my father couldn’t find me. My stomach knotted up and I felt like I had to poo, and then I ran to the desk and had him paged over the intercom. When he arrived, he was running, his face covered in tears. I thought I should never do it again, but in one way or another I think I do it all the time.”
Though the Empire State Building floated there, it didn’t move. In a way, it seemed more still than when it was stuck in the ground.
“You think we’re going to die today?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Probably not.”
“Yeah. Weird.” There was a buzzing from inside the building, some wire still connected to the city’s power supply. You have to wonder how much energy is lost in abandoned buildings.
“Look,” she says and points toward downtown Brooklyn. In the distance, there are little dots rising up into the air. The wave of ascension moves closer to us, the little dots getting larger as more and more continue to rise.
“What is that?” I ask.
And as if to answer, the water tower on a building maybe twenty blocks away slides off its hold and into the sky, water dripping from it into the streets. Closer and closer, they continue to pop up like bottle rockets, spraying the city beneath. The water tower on the abandoned building next to us creeks and moans, shaking and jostling, and then wobbles upward, dirty water spilling out of its sides. In Manhattan, the same pattern follows: water, against the backdrop of the sunlit sky, falling across the whole city.
“I told you I could do it, ass,” she says. “C’mon, let’s not just sit here. Let’s go play in the rain.”
She grabs my hand and pulls me down, dragging me out onto the street. The water towers float above us aimlessly, drenching everything they pass. She runs and skips. I walk.
As we get closer to her neighborhood, there are more and more people in the street, some upset, some calm. Children splash in the puddles while other families rush into their cars, moving down the street toward the jammed highways and bridges.
“They must have planted rockets underneath,” I overhear. And: “It’s a symbolic attack, just like the Twin Towers.” And: “How will they get those poor people out?” It’s the only comment that seems to matter because everything else is speculation.
We sit down on a stoop, next to a Dominican family with umbrellas. They offer us water. Drinking it, I do get the strange feeling — one that I immediately feel guilty about — that it would be nice if every day were like this.
“Look, look, the Empire State Building!” a man yells to us, to anyone, as if he’s only just realized.
“We know. Everyone knows,” I say to him amidst the sound of the crowds — but the screams make me look. And there it is: the Empire State Building, no longer still, but swinging wildly, swatting airplanes from the sky.
Subtly, when no one is looking, I adjust my pants.