They were gathered around the television set at Eliot House at nine in the morning. Just a few years ago, they were still children, gathering around the campfire at night, trading ghost stories. But now they were grown, and what they were watching was the ghost story to end all ghost stories, written by a tall man in a cave, a man who was an engineer by profession, for crying out loud, but whose audacity, depravity, and creative imagination put professional screenwriters to shame.
None of them had ever seen a building tear open like fabric, with a giant hole in its center. None of them had ever seen a plane slice into a building. None of them had ever traced the slow drift of bodies falling from the tallest buildings in New York or experienced the sickness that they felt at the sight. Many of them had visited those iconic buildings on family trips to the city; not in a million years could they have imagined that the towers, which had felt so sturdy and strong under their feet, could collapse like a child’s set of LEGOs.
It didn’t occur to any of them to run off to class, because they understood in their bones that attending lectures and seminars was meaningless in a world gone mad. A day earlier they had been glowing because Professor Skip Gates had grinned at a smart observation they had made or worrying about the paper on Shakespearean sonnets that they’d written for Professor Helen Vendler. Now they took in the scene before them and saw the future go up in smoke. What did it matter if they went to law school or not? Who cared whether Derek slept with Carrie or Joan? How did it matter whether Karen was gay or just confused? As the towers collapsed, their individual lives, full of ambition and promise, collapsed, too. Individual destiny, they realized, mattered as much or as little as the rubble they were witnessing. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Look where their trust funds, their titans of industry fathers, their Bryn Mawr mothers, their patrician grandparents, their fine sensibilities, their honed intelligence, their legacy admissions, had brought them—to helplessly watching their country’s demise.
Now the first rumblings of outrage, the first stirrings of patriotic feeling, began. The TV anchors were already calling it terrorism, an unprecedented act of horror. Nobody knew how many were dead, but estimates were as high as ten thousand. When President Bush appeared on TV at nine-thirty, they cheered, even those who held the stolen election against him. A few minutes later they groaned as a third plane plowed into the Pentagon.
“This isn’t terrorism,” Bobby Falk kept saying. “This is war, man. I’m telling you, it’s war.”
Ahmed, an international student from Pakistan, spoke louder than anyone. “I hope they hunt down and kill the evil bastards who did this.” They wanted to assure their friend, the only Muslim student present, but found their hearts weren’t in it. They wouldn’t rush to judgment, they wouldn’t succumb to jingoism, they were Harvard men and women, liberal, fair-minded, they understood their country had its own sins, they knew about Pinochet and Chile and the 1953 CIA coup in Iran and Iran-Contra and all that, but enough was enough. This was their country, and it had been attacked. Someone would have to pay. By fuck, someone would have to pay.
It was just then, when the initial shock was leaving their systems and adrenaline was rushing in, that they heard a female voice from the back of the room.
“This is it,” the voice said. “The chickens coming home to roost.”
They all spun around, furious, Anton among them.
And he locked eyes with the blackest, funkiest, most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Later, after he’d managed to get her the hell out of Eliot House and they’d walked across eerily deserted Harvard Yard and gone to Dunkin’ Donuts for coffee, after they’d sat there for two hours arguing about American foreign policy, after she had said things so outrageous and downright unpatriotic that, offended, he had gotten up to leave, after she had made a rueful face and apologized for her bluntness and then, after he had sat back down half-appeased, asked him why, as a black man, he was so eager to defend the white military-industrial complex and he had laughed, shaking his head at her, after he had told her about his adoptive parents, one of whom was now the governor of a neighboring state, after he had noticed that her eyes had not sharpened with interest the way almost everybody else’s did when they found out that he was the son of Governor David Coleman, after she’d told him that her doctor father was from Cameroon and her mother from Georgia, after he’d flirted briefly with the idea of telling her that his birth mom’s folks had been from Georgia and then dismissed it, after he’d instead told her that the combo explained why she was the most beautiful woman at Harvard, after she’d arched an eyebrow and said, “At Harvard? That’s not saying much,” after they’d both laughed and she’d looked at Anton and mumbled, “You’re pretty cute yourself,” after he’d blushed and changed the topic and asked what she intended to do with a degree in political science and she’d told him, after she’d asked why he was wasting money on a degree in English and he’d admitted that his real ambition was to get in to law school and somehow combine the two, and asked, “Are you always this rude?” and she had nodded, after his stomach had rumbled and he had declared that he was hungry, after they’d gone to Hong Kong and gotten two take-out orders of lo mein and sat on a bench on Mass. Avenue under a blue sky that bore no trace of the fact that the world had ended earlier that day, after he’d given her one of his shrimp and stolen a piece of pork from her order, after they’d eaten sitting on the bench feeling young and happy and sad and desperate, the cotton of his shirt occasionally grazing her bare arm, after they had finished and he had thrown away their take-out containers and then extended his hand to help her up and she’d placed her hand in his and he never gave it back, after they’d walked hand in hand through a strangely quiet Harvard Square and the Yard, they went back to Eliot House and into his room and got into his bed, and stayed there the rest of the day and night.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
What kind of an engagement ring did one give a girl who hated the sight of gold and who saw in every diamond the blood of the wretched who had entered the bowels of the earth to mine it? And how did you propose to a girl when your anniversary fell on September 11 and common decency demanded that this was not a day of celebration or for planning your future?
Anton had been grappling with both these issues for several weeks, ever since he had been seized with the idea of the proposal, even though common sense told him that it was much too soon. He even made a list of the arguments against such a step:
1.He was pretty young and didn’t want to get married until they’d both graduated from college.
2.After a year of dating her, he hadn’t yet introduced Carine to his parents.
3.He hadn’t met her parents, either.
4.He wasn’t sure that she would accept.
On the pro side:
1. He loved her.
2. She was the coolest woman he had ever known.