9
On the sunniest of September mornings, Tawnya Peltonen steps off the train and hears a splatter.
She’d spotted the smoke in the sky from across the river in New Jersey as her train into the city headed into the tunnel, but she didn’t really think anything of it at the time. After all, this was New York, and anything could happen in New York. And besides, Tawnya was preoccupied. A woman at the office had remarked about her shoes the day before, saying her heels were too high for work, and whispering that she must have been trying to pick up a man because of her recent outfit choices. Rumors morphed and picked up speed and slinked across the office, and by nightfall, Tawnya was officially and forevermore known as the office tramp. Anger burned in her, demanding to be acted upon. And when she arrived at work later this morning she was intent on marching right into the office and telling the gossips just which bodily cavities they should insert their opinions into. She didn’t care if she lost her job for her outburst, and she didn’t care if she was headed to battle with small-minded people who were below her in every way, shape, and form. She wanted revenge.
But when the train pulled into its downtown terminal, she walked down the steps and looked up – and there was no escaping the chaos erupting in the skies above. Nobody knew for sure what was going on, but several people claimed planes from LaGuardia were hitting the Trade Center, one by one. The buildings themselves were split open like a plane or something bigger had flown directly into them, jagged edges revealing the burning blackness within. The sun was blocked by whirls of grey smoke, the air was poisoned by the terrible, acrid scent of burning gasoline and melted metal and something else that smelled, sickeningly, like burnt flesh, and aluminum sheeting and business files careened throughout the air, a ghastly confetti. And the strange splattering sound she was hearing every thirty seconds: it’s humans, she realized with a sickening feeling that dropped into her stomach like hot molasses. People were jumping. They were jumping from a hundred stories in the sky.
Tawnya tried to run, but there was nowhere to go. The bridges were closed and the trains were being emptied out onto the streets and soon there was nothing to do but watch. As hell opened up and the towers burned and then fell to Earth in vast clouds of ash and stone and metal, Tawnya’s mind was visited by the office issue, and suddenly it struck her: who in the hell cares? Thousands of humans were plummeting to their fiery deaths right in front of her, and yet there she was, lamenting over idle office gossip spewed by a bunch of irrelevant people she neither knew nor cared about. How had Tawnya let herself become this person? How had she let her world become so small?
September 11, 2001 was the day Tawnya Peltonen stopped caring. I came across the memory while Dreamskipping, and it burned itself into my soul forever. What will your day be?
I met Tawnya after she died of a heart attack and moved into my building. She showed me this memory a few months later to convince me to stop watching Cooper, but – surprise! – I ignored her. Because soon something happens that draws me right back in again: Cooper starts writing poetry again. The Muse is readying him. It is not a book, but it is something, and Rome wasn’t built in a day. (It was built in several thousand. I would know.)
It started one quiet morning. He likes to listen to the music of our summer together – I don’t know why, but he does it often. Is he remembering the love we shared, or reveling in the pain? Inserting the knife and twisting it? Even when I’m not with him, I can still hear the music as he listens, too, sense it, feel it, riding up over our three months of glory and devastation together, filling in the silences and seeping into the cracks between us like hot glue:
I could love you
That’s what I thought when I first saw you
But now that I’m drowning in you
I’m wonderin’ why you didn’t banish all my blues
You are my only god now
My Stars and Stripes, the thunder in my chest, pow pow
The star of my show, take that bow
But now that I’ve fallen into you, why’s it feel like we’re doomed somehow?
I listen to the song with him as he writes a poem in his journal. I watch him, smiling down, this is true, but I also like to read what he writes – it is an interesting prism through which to see his thoughts. Imagination is the gold ore of a species, and I love to watch it at work:
I always got the sense that she was restless
she wanted more
she wanted
the thrill of the city
the glory of seeing her name in lights
the quiet whisper of a lover’s touch
this world just couldn’t contain a magic like her
she needed to kiss the sky,
see what was on the other side
I wish I would’ve known
how horribly right I was
I don’t know whether to smile or cry. The poem is brilliant. Writing it makes him happy, and this makes me happy, too. That’s something else I’ve noticed: all the trauma of the past few years has made him a better and more thoughtful writer. How ironic, that my death made him better at the thing that makes him feel most alive.
As he finishes, though, he suddenly starts to cry. I close the eyes I don’t have and look away. I want him so much. But not like this. I can’t get to the bottom of his writer’s block, no matter how hard I try. He is simply stuck, being bogged down by something. And for the (un)life of me, I can’t figure out what that is.
His dating life is moving along well, though. Or as good as can be expected, at least, for someone who is haunted by the summer. He and Lily go on walks to ice cream places, they meet at bars, they meet for dinner more and more. He seems generally happier now, so there’s that. Sometimes he looks like he is anywhere else in the world but with her, and I can’t figure out exactly why, or where he is. But Lily doesn’t seem to notice, or at least she pretends not to, and their relationship is going fairly well nonetheless. She has breathed new life into him, and I am growing so appreciative. It is still jarring to see him with someone who is not me, but she is so glamorous, and so unlike how I was as a human in every way, that I am usually too blinded by her star power to care for too long. (Up here I met a fallen Mexican singer who’d been murdered before her time, and let me tell you: with a certain kind of person, you are usually too dazzled by their presence to think about anything other than how transfixed you are. And Lily Taubman has transfixed everyone in her life – including me.)
One strange thing about their connection: it is extremely physical. As time goes on, the sex becomes constant. It is this that breaks me open. They escape to the dressing room in a mall, the back of her SUV, even the restroom at Lynches, his favorite bar, to make love to each other. Soon he is almost the Cooper I know again – he laughs, his throws his golden hair back, he loves her. But he drifts, too. When he goes away, when his eyes shut down and go cold, she takes him by the hand, and I know exactly where she’s going – somewhere she can bring him back to life by having him pump his life into her. I leave them for their sessions, and when I come back he is bright-eyed and alert again. He is sad, but still, he is Cooper again. And I am grateful to Lily for reviving him. So grateful I could kill her.
During times like these, it is the little things about our love together that stick out to me the most. As I watch him appear to sink into love with Lily I wonder how big those details of our summer together really are to him now, how much they stick out now that he is moving on. Does he remember the funny little remnants of my time on Earth? Does he remember that Pepsi he spilled all over me at the dirty little pizza place in St. Augustine after we visited the oldest schoolhouse in America, can he recall how I was mad for a moment and then I gave into the laughter as the ice-cold soda dripped down my shirt and pooled in the seat of my wheelchair? Does he remember the humidity the night of our fight in the garage, the way the Florida heat seemed to slam into us when we ran outside and confronted the world? How much of my summer of everything means nothing to him?
Sometimes the worst thing is when he is happy. It is only then that I realize I almost want him to grieve again, I want him to stay miserable. These thoughts horrify me, make me feel like an enraged adolescent. But I can’t stop. Selfishly, I start to notice annoying little things about Lily that I don’t like, and note to myself all the ways in which she is wrong for him. I disgust myself with the ugly direction of my own thoughts, but I can’t halt them. Cooper and Lily are flaunting their love all over the town where I’d loved him, walking hand-in-hand past benches where we’d sat together, driving past restaurants where we’d eaten. They were desecrating holy ground, and I wanted nothing to do with it.
“She’s wearing a Doors shirt,” I might laugh to myself one night as I watch them get chocolate-vanilla swirls at Rita’s Italian Ice despite the winter chill. “He hates that band. And did she really just put sprinkles on his ice cream? He hates those. I would’ve known that.”
“And look at the way her face turns all weird and pointy when she laughs,” I’ll say during another date. “And is she really wearing that skirt?”
And the worst thing is this: I am powerless in my judgment. He is drifting into her, and all I can do is watch, locked in a state of silent horror.
I am also reaching for faults that are barely there. Lily is a good and honest person, and she would be a good partner for him. She supports his writing even on the rare occasions when it is bad, and she gives him space when he drifts out of himself and needs an afternoon in bed. That is the millionth worst part, that she can give him everything I cannot, like flesh and bone and sex and children. He is in good hands, and that is a happiness that breaks my heart. Wishing the best for him is breaking me apart. Which brings me to my ultimate fear: what am I going to do when he fully gives in to her and lets go of me? Am I wasting my second life on a lost cause?
Mostly I am an invisible observer. There is something I can do, though. There is the writing issue. All he’s writing is poems, and those never paid anyone’s bills. (Not until after they died, at least. Never was there a greater boon to an artist’s market price than their heart stopping.) Cooper is scared of even taking the next step with his career, as he has fallen so far off track. If you wait for your life to start, you will live in a perpetual tomorrow. But I want to nudge him. I cannot point him toward art – only he can do that. But I can push him towards commerce. Soon, a “friend” (aka me) sets up a series of interviews for him at the Florida Times-Union, a local newspaper looking for a junior writer. He has the resume, the talent, and none of the drive. He blows off email after email and phone call after phone call, but because a girl in Human Resources was in love with him during high school, they are still halfway pursuing him. But he is too scared to even open his email. Until I arrive, that is. I want him to write for a living, to wake up every morning and get to chase what he loves. So one morning, he sits at his computer and stares at the screen, too terrified to begin filling out his final application. But then I open my palm at the Earth, and his blood heats up. He fills with a strength he hasn’t experienced in ages, and he writes. And not just short stories, but application paperwork, too. It is no story that any genius could ever write or any scientist could ever explain, how high humans can fly when they actually rise to the occasion.
When he gets the news that he has been hired two weeks later, Lily walks up to him on the sidewalk by the stop sign, their usual meeting spot. Princess Diana finally died a few days before, and Cooper has been Lily’s only bright spot. (Up here, little Diana visits me often and comes to purr at my feet, and she is so sweet. Pets often wait in the grey area for their owners to die, just so they can move on to the next step together. Diana is no exception – she’s here, just biding time, licking her paws and watching. I even made a bed for her in my house. She seems to like it, but you can never quite tell with cats – the same goes for when they are dead, too.)
“Congratulations, Mr. Nichols,” she says as she grabs his hand. “You are now a professional writer.”
And up here, I smile, because my boy is one step closer to sending our story into history.
Cooper smiles down at the grass, and I want to pinch his cheek like a doting grandmother. “Listen, Lily,” he says as they start walking. “I just want you to know that I…appreciate you.”
Her face softens. “For what?”
“You know, for everything. For helping my mom with her bills, for dealing with my…sadness. The thing is…I kind of like you a lot, kiddo.”
She closes her eyes. Takes a breath. And right then and there, Lily gives him the one thing she knows deep down she will never be able to get back: her heart.
They walk her dog and then head back to Lily’s house. I soar away as they fall into bed together, tangled in lust. Because I remember. I remember all this like it was yesterday. And it is so hard.
Before I leave the realm of humans I take a walk on the moon. To watch Cooper and Lily together, and see the love that so clearly flows between them, is like being shackled to a burning radiator. Cooper’s love life is killing me a second time. The fact that I am getting jealous and angry at all this proves I have more work to do, and I have not yet been perfected, not by light years. If I am staying to help, I am going to have to change things. I am going to bend the rules. I am going to help other people, too, because I cannot deal with focusing all my efforts on him. I want to find my place in this second world, I want to cut myself and bleed, and hear my voice for the first time in both of my lives. I want to grow up, here in this second life I’ve been given. Because I feel like a jealous fifth grader, and I can’t take it anymore.
And I am about to start doing a lot more, for a lot more people. And so I open the arms I don’t have, say a prayer, and cast my net of love wide. It is time to start changing things.