Instead I tried for pragmatism, to say something that might at least help someone else. “You should know that your food aid does not reach the people it’s supposed to,” I said. “In the place where I stayed, there were no Peacekeepers, and the ?etniks stole the aid meant for civilians. If you drop the food and leave, you’re just feeding your enemy. We had guns, but they had more. Firepower is the only thing that determines who eats.”
Eventually I felt the telltale warmth of a person beside me and realized Sharon had returned and was waiting for me to finish. “Thank you for your time,” I said. The audience clapped more assuredly now; they were either intrigued by what I’d said or glad it was over. Sharon squeezed my shoulder, then transitioned into her segment on Serbian concentration camps. I looked over at the African boys, whose eyes were permanently reddened from too much rubbing or crying or coke, concealing some unidentified tragedy. I returned to my seat, relieved I had gone first. But when they got to the photos of the mass graves, I slipped out a side door and vomited in a potted plant. I didn’t come back for the rest of the presentation, not wanting to see someone I recognized.
2
I crossed the front grounds of the UN complex—a tundra of concrete and winterized fountains—and passed through the exit gate. Sharon and I were supposed to have lunch after the event, but I figured there was still about an hour left if the other boys were to speak, and I could no longer stomach the sight of the place or the memories it churned within me. I negotiated my way across First Avenue traffic and climbed the steps back toward Tudor Village. I’d have to stay nearby to make a quick return to meet Sharon. More than my debt to her, I was realizing now, the chance to talk to someone who’d known me even briefly in Croatia had been the real reason I’d come. Maybe she could tell me something about what happened to the people I’d left behind.
The late-winter air was still chilly, but at least it eased my nausea. I’d always found solace in Manhattan, felt secure among its buildings and streets crowded with strangers whose lives might be just as jumbled as mine. As far as university went, I’d chosen the city more than the school. Neither of the Americans I’d come to call my parents had gone to college, and I had only vague notions of what I might want to study. So with no other criteria I recalled Zagreb—its alleyways and trams, the autonomy and mobility that came with the compactness of a city—and set my sights on New York. But now, as I walked down Forty-fourth Street, examining this unfamiliar piece of Manhattan, I felt out of place. The street could have belonged to another city entirely, so different in aesthetic and purpose from the West Village, where I spent most of my time: clean sidewalks sparsely populated by people in ties and buffed leather shoes, black cars with drivers and diplomatic license plates idling curbside. I passed a string of UN Program offices and the UNICEF building, names that had meant so much hope to me as a child across the ocean and so little to me now.
I stopped in a bodega to buy a roll of breath mints. While digging around in my jacket for change I saw my phone flashing with a text message from Brian.
Mornin babe. Where’d u go?
I didn’t want to lie, so I wrote nothing and stuffed the phone back in my pocket. Brian and I had been dating for a year, but he didn’t know anything about who I really was. I’d told him, as I had everyone else at college, that I was born in New Jersey.
At first I was confident in the choice to keep my past life a secret. I could experience college and the city without the old sadness in wait at every turn. For a while, it worked. I made a few friends, met Brian, stayed out too late smoking and drinking and dancing, walking home wide-eyed and enchanted by the city lights. Slowly, in a place uncontaminated by the specter of childhood, I was learning to live a normal life. Then, at the start of my third year, the towers had fallen.
I was in an 8:00 A.M. chemistry class making periodic table jokes with my lab partners when a professor from a neighboring classroom appeared in the doorway. She let herself in.
“Hank,” she said, “you’ve gotta see this.” She searched through Dr. Reid’s desk drawers while he looked on, annoyed. She found the remote and aimed it upward with a shaky hand. The television, having been left in video input mode, produced a static growl. She turned to a news channel.
The fire was lurid even through the grain of the old set, startling in both intensity and size, but it was when the cameraman zoomed out that the entire class gasped in recognition. Professor Reid flipped the emergency switch to cut power to the gas line, deactivating our experiments, and we circled around the television.
“You are looking at obviously a very disturbing live shot there,” said the news voice-over. “That is the World Trade Center, and we have unconfirmed reports this morning that a plane has crashed into one of the towers.”
“Oh god, which tower is that?” said a girl in the back of the lab.
“What kind of pilot was flying that low over New York City?” a boy beside me said. “Fucking idiot.”
“My brother works in South Tower,” the girl said.
“What if it wasn’t an accident?” I said.