September 11

To most people, the 11th of September is a day of remembrance, the day thousands of people died when the Twin Towers collapsed in New York. My little brother, whom I vaguely remember as a buoyant, springy creature, died on that date. I was but a child myself when it happened, and the significance of his death escaped me almost entirely at the time, and still does to a large extent. 

My parents got divorced a few years later, at the worst of time, if there is such a thing as a "good" time for divorce. Since I was getting into my teens, I do hold very vivid, detailed memories of that period. I quickly understood that a large part of what drew my parents apart had to do with "him" (that's how my little brother, whose name became taboo, was now referred to). 

Strange as it sounds, I grew jealous of "His" absence, so that I wished he would return, for my parents  
hardly paid attention to my presence in their slowly dissolving lives as a married couple -- either too busy fighting over who was responsible for his accident, or just too sad, shrouded in a veil of perpetual mourning. 

I was also angry with "Him" for being so careless, for the truth is that no one was responsible; he'd crossed the road after several oranges fell from my mother's bag and rolled down the pavement. A sudden impulse, having to do perhaps with the color, shape and motion of the fruit rolling away, had propelled him into the wheels of a driver's car. The driver wasn't speeding yet had no time to swerve, left powerless in the face of what we call Fate when we wish to explain away the absurd nature of contingency. 

I must have been five or six years old and my little brother about four, and was told Jason (the last time I've heard again my parents pronounce his name) had "gone off to a better place" and wasn't expected to be back "soon". How soon this would be, they wouldn't say, though I realised it was indeed for the better that he'd gone. Every night I would hear, piercing through the thin walls of my room, the loud whisper of my parents' night quibbles. In my bed at night, I'd imagine the place he'd gone to be a child's heaven, where kids were left to their own device, and where adults and their troubles played no part in a child's destiny. 

I hardly knew what Heaven meant. My parents weren't faith believers so that I must have heard the word at school, and when at dinner one evening I asked, "Can I go see Jason in Heaven?" I saw my father's face, usually so equanimous in his righteousness, turn white like a ghost -- like the ghost of my brother which from then on would hover aimlessly over our lives.

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Time went on. Soon enough I would grow out of my teen, but the haunting thought of that little-known brother of mine, whose face and voice I had by then but forgotten, did not grow out of me. It's as if his premature death, by interrupting what may (or may not) have been a prosperous, long, happy life, had interrupted my own growth in the process. I wasn't the thin, pallid, sick-looking girl I used to be, yet I remained smaller than most girls of my age, my body still belonged in most respects to that of a sexless toddler. I had neither breasts, nor hips, nor butts, that would have allowed me to claim for myself the title of "woman". 

I met (and slept with) my first boyfriend as I entered year 2 at uni, when most girls of my age were either talking "mariage" or "babies", were going "steady" with their partners, or collected "fuck buddies" in the same way that one is inclined to collecting stamps. I'm not much of a collector, more of the romantic type, courtesy of being such a latecomer into the game of love, and having to pay in kind for not knowing the rules. 

My first boyfriend was what you'd call an "asshole", although looking back on it, he simply became known to me as "the dude who I lost my virginity with." Losing one's virginity's like a rite of passage (that much I understood), yet little did I know about the possible implications of it -- Aids for one thing, falling pregnant for another -- but that, I'd learn later. My first sexual intercourse I hardly recall. The sex was insipid; it would always be so. 

It did not matter: whichever men I slept with, each time I felt inside of my body a constitutive lack that no attempted intimacy with another human being could offset. I hardly ever talked to, or saw, my parents at all and there were no friends -- by this I mean no real friends -- that could be counted of as part of my acquaintances. 

I must have felt a little lonely when I asked the-dude-I-first-slept-with whether he'd ever thought about the infinitesimally minute chance of his path crossing mine in the whole universe, and of the  possibility that he'd been born a generation before or ahead of mine, in a different town. He must have freaked out and thought this was a love declaration, for I never saw him again. All I'd meant, in a rather candid fashion surely, was that the probabilities of our meeting again were all the thinner as a result -- which in the end was right.

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When the first plane crashed into one of the towers of the New York World Trade Centre, I was in the middle of my first class of the day, already struggling to keep students on task. I'd just begun as an English teacher in a high school in some obscure, nameless suburb, not out of vocation, but from resignation mostly, after a year of "soul searching" following graduating from uni and wondering why on earth I'd chosen to get a degree in education. 

At the time, I was sharing a tiny dingy flat with a drug addict who mostly kept to himself in his room (which used to be our room) unless he needed me to feed him. It was one of those many failed relationships I'd been having with men. We'd fucked once or twice, and having nowhere to go I'd moved in to his place, but we hardly had any money left, and I knew that I would have to leave him sooner or later. 

So much was I submerged with grown-up worries, with the grim perspective of my finances nearing zero, of a parasitic boyfriend and a job I did not like but must keep for lack of alternatives, that I did not realise today was the annniversary of Jason's death. We would always keep a vigil for his anniversary. A truce would descend upon the shattered shell which our family had become. as if the memory of his absence had a cathartic effect upon us, temporarily filling the empty void within ourselves, which the rest of the year translated into petty feuds and long silences. 

My father had married again a couple of months only after divorcing my mother, to a woman who'd given him three more kids who I felt little or no connection with. My mother slowly drifted into a protracted state of depression. At first I had sympathy for her. I soon understood, however, that her depression was a complacent response she'd found to a situation which she had no control over. No one is prepared to the loss of a child, and my parents, pushed as they were to marry young by the conservative social milieu in which both of them grew up, seemed particularly ill-equipped. 

That day at school, the thought of Jason came back with a vicious force as my class was interrupted to announce that we were being attacked (by whom, they wouldn't say). As I watched on TV people jumping one after the other from the top of one of the Twin Towers with a surreal grace, something broke in me. A thought had crossed my mind: at last, the ghost of Jason was being acknowledged by the collective suffering, broadcasted worldwide, of innocent victims who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And through this acknowledgment, his tiny body was, at last, buried under a vast mantel of dust, debris and corpses. 

When I went home that night, Jack (my boyfriend/ flat mate / heroine junkie of a man) wasn't here. I didn't care where he'd gone, the world was in great turmoil. Sheltered in the bathroom -- the only place inside the flat where I still had some level of privacy and room for thought -- I took two resolutions. I would pack up and leave Jack for good the next morning as the man was starting to become violent. Then, I would resign from my teaching position at the end of the year, and travel. I would be traveling, not to "find myself" or some other psychologist's bullshit but because the world was drifting into chaos and I felt I needed to drift along with it.

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I travelled fast and far, hardly ever stopping over on my way for more than a night or two, exhilarated   by the sensation of motion for motion's sake. I'd been on the road for six months, living off my meagre savings, sleeping in cheap hostels and eating in cheap canteens wherever I found one. I was discovering the meaning of precarity, not that my parents had been particularly rich or that I'd never been in need (of affection for a start) either. Rather, it was that for the first time in my life, I was sufficiently detached from my social environment and had sufficient time to look around me. 

And everywhere I looked I saw just how fragile people's lives were: either because individual lives were too poor, too weak or too dependent on other lives for their well-being. I saw children beaten up in the streets by their father, hobbos too old to even beg for money, zombiing around for a place to die, prostitutes who'd suck for a buck, a man stabbed in the back for a cigarette, corrupt cops, binge drinkers, the jobless and the helpless. Ugliness was everywhere which no act of justice could fully rectify...unless human nature is pure, which I strongly doubt. 

The wanton nature of life, its randomness, was hardly comforting. Since there was no justice in this world, though, there must be no injustice either. Was it unfair, or a stroke of the dice, that the day Jason died I was sick with a cold and thus failed to be by his side to protect him, as every little girl, even of my age, should vis-a-vis their younger brother? Could the guilt that gnawed me, that gnawed all of us, my parents and I, ever be assuaged?

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Some thirty years later. I've become a mature woman on the verge of old age, and as I enter the class, I can feel the irony of the moment: that my first job, which I'd hated, should also be my last. I'd hated it because at the time I was looking for a sense of purpose, and thought teaching would make me grow into a full-fledged woman, principled, imbued with wisdom and the "mission" to "transmit" whatever "knowledge" I'd garnered out of my short passage at uni. Instead, it plunged me back into my teenage years, as I was confronted with 16 years old kids who failed to see what I had to offer them, what reading Shakespeare had to do with their daily routine or their future (which for many of them did not look too bright). 

However, the class I enter is, I know, different: it was created specially for freshly arrived refugees, who for many had to flee war, persecution, disease. They want to learn, I can see it on their face and in their looks, although I realise I have nothing to teach them. What knowledge could I impart on a group of boys and girls already so knowledgeable about the great dramas of life -- about pain, suffering, loss? It is the start of the school year, in early September, so I write the date, "September 11", followed by a question mark, on the blackboard. 

They do not speak English very well, but this fact alone cannot explain the embarassing silence in the class, in sharp contrast to the ruckus that could be heard in my first class, some thirty years back. Eventually, a boy with a long, milk-colored scar on his left cheek, with sunken eyes and a sallow-looking face, raises his hand to ask in a low voice: "Is yor birthday, Miss?" I surmise that they've never heard of 9/11, that it may not be part of their collective subconscious. Or is it, perhaps, that in the place they've left, there simply is no opportunity for mourning and remembering?

So I tell them about Jason, and they listen. Later, much later, will they speak up.