Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [15]
I’d walk into a room and somebody would say, “… and Megan just came home from Afghanistan!” and all the faces would turn and exclaim, “What was it like?” And I would look for words in a mouthful of air.
I drifted down to New York to see an old friend, Lisa. I was trying to stop feeling like a piece of wood, to shake the suspicion that I had one life and everybody around me had a different life, a different rhythm, bound together by implicit, inscrutable codes. I was still trying to get home.
Lisa had been a near-socialist, free-wheeling, hard-drinking international relations student when we were in college together, a smoker of cigarettes, an ingratiator of professors, a waster of hours and days. Then she’d gone off to a village in Burkina Faso for the Peace Corps and come back different, hardened, talking about God and MBAs and the bloody diamond trade. “There is nothing we can do. We might as well get rich.” She was alone for the holidays, and I wouldn’t have to explain anything to her. We drank wine, played with her cat, listened to songs from college, swooned on sofas. We cooked fish and drank more and finally we slept. I awoke in gray light on a futon, staring at pictures of Africa tacked to white walls. I tiptoed into Lisa’s room. “Coffee,” I told her.
“You remind me of the cat,” she muttered through her hair.
We drank too much coffee. Then we put on sweaters and trudged down 11th Street, crossed the West Side Highway to the Hudson River, and turned south toward the financial district and the remains of the World Trade Center.
“Do you really want to go?” Lisa said. “There are tourists.”
I did, but slowly. The Hudson was a sheet of steel. We sat on a bench by the river. Joggers bobbed past, heads swallowed in wool, legs in spandex. I was trying to explain how it seemed like a lot of dead people, dead Americans and dead Afghans and me stretched thin between them. The conversation was disjointed. We stood up and walked. The buildings reared up around us, swallowed the sky and the horizons. We were the only people in the entire city, walking between gray cliffs of downtown. In my memory, it is like that: a city hollow as a stage set, a place where we trespassed. “I used to run down there but now it’s all closed.” Lisa kicked a crumpled Coke can. The tin skittered ahead over the pavement. We followed its clunky dance down the street. I saw a poster, faded already and peeling from the side of a building: “These colors don’t run.”
“What does that mean?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “America is like that now.”
“But what does it mean?”
“You know, like red, white, and blue,” she said.
I looked at her.
“You know how colors run? They fade, they run?”
“Oh!” I said. “Oh.”
“Yeah,” said Lisa. “So, the colors don’t run, but also, Americans don’t run. Like that.”
“Okay,” I said, and laughed nervously.
“Yeah,” said Lisa.
We were drawing closer and I was feeling sick to my stomach. Cold was seeping through my jeans and the coffee buzz was fading.
“Forget it,” I said. “We don’t have to go all the way down.”
“We’re almost there.”
“I don’t want to anymore.”
Walking back we came across a group of tourists. They wore red, white, and blue sweatshirts and stared somberly at the buildings. Their cheeks were ruddy and chapped.
I met another friend during the gray afternoon, and the two of us stole into a bar. We sat in the flat winter light, the bar deserted around us. I was into my second glass of wine when it came to me that I had to get out. Immediately. Out of New York. Away from the big buildings, the tourists, and the somber, awkward mood. It was more than I wanted: September long gone, and the clump of people who fussed nervously over the leftovers of violence, looking for grief and meaning in a hole in the ground. “I’m going straight home,” I told her. “What do you think?”
“You should,” she agreed boozily.
On the curb I flagged a cab to Penn Station and bought a ticket on the next train to Hartford.