BOOK ONE : LISTENERS AND READERS

:: SUMMER 2001

A friend of Jakob's in Brooklyn sends out this e-mail:

Thanks for asking; I'm fine; everybody I know is fine. Just rattled is all.

On Tuesday classes were canceled so Jennifer and I went out to Prospect Park. We just wanted to be around trees and grass, or at least be somewhere where we could be away from the TV. Two guys were playing Frisbee; that was weird. And we were sitting there and we saw these bits of paper floating around in the sky; one blew near us and I chased it down. It was a fax, it had come from some office in the towers, a breeze had carried it all the way over to Brooklyn, into my hand. And I suddenly felt this like electric charge connecting me to the buildings, these buildings that weren't buildings anymore. I'm standing there looking at the name and address on this fax and all of a sudden I'm trying to figure out whether this person is still alive or not.

It was that detail that finally seemed made the collapse of the towers seem real to Jakob. He couldn't get his mind around the hole in the skyline, even the new photos of Manhattan he's seen just seem like computer fakery, but a single piece of litter snowing down onto the city, that he can envision. And from the piece of litter it is not hard to infer the wastecan it was dropped into, and the human beings that handled it, and the office that held them. An office now erased out of the world.

Jakob and Freya are walking along a street in Chicago on a cool night in near-autumn, and Freya sees a sheet of paper skirling about in the laundromat parking lot, and she thinks of Jakob's friend, and for a moment she imagines that this sheet, caught now in some invisible eddy, has come to them from Manhattan, having spent the last eleven days traveling from East Coast to Midwest, carried only by wind and luck.

Luck: she could use some. The recent events have brought her down. For days she couldn't turn on the TV without seeing some white male in full alpha mode, trotting out all the usual macho patriotic bullshit. She hadn't heard that particular variety of bullshit for a while; she had even begun to harbor hopes that it might be fading from this world at last; to see it return at top volume disheartened her. Going out to Arlington Heights over the weekend to see her family didn't help: she'd been hoping to try to sort out some of the tensions between her brother and her mom, but she only had maybe twenty minutes alone with Tim in his room, and he shrugged off the whole matter of the family conflict, preferring instead to talk about the terrorist attack. His take was mostly limited to those buildings looked pretty fucking wicked going down and an assertion that the ban on state-sponsored assassination, which he'd learned about in his Civics class this week, was ridiculous, bordering on incomprehensible. Then it was time for them to huddle around their respective pork chops, tense, miserable, as wordless as they could manage.

Clark had her annual birthday party tonight, and neither Freya nor Jakob were feeling particularly festive, but neither of them see Clark very often, they mainly know her as a friend of Fletcher's, and they felt like they should go. But before too long the conversation turned to politics, Bush's speech to Congress fresh in people's minds, and by the time Clark began saying to say that this is a fight of 'freedom against fear' doesn't mean anything, it's completely politically cynical, they had both begun to feel fatigued, and decided to head out, leaving Fletcher to pump the keg by his lonesome.

But it is thinking about the party that causes Jakob to remember that Clark was there when he first met Freya, at the Rainbow, it was Clark and Fletcher and Freya and him, and he remembers that that was right when the fall semester started last year.

—Hey, he says to Freya. He is slightly drunk. —Hey, do you realize we've known each other for a whole year now?

Freya stops. The sheet of paper blows towards them, and Freya stoops to pluck it from its vector. She looks up at him. He's kind of a goofy-looking guy, with his lanky frame and wiry hair. But she loves his grin, the way his mouth crooks up wryly at one corner, animating his face. She can see it now.

—Here, she says. She hands him the sheet of paper. —Happy anniversary.

He picks it up and examines it. It seems to be a love poem, written probably by someone in high school:

I feel you holding me / warmth ripples down my spine / like the dissipation of an ink drop in water / wrapping your arms around me / my arms wrapped around you

It is gawky and awkward, the kind of thing that he would normally make fun of. But tonight, he is glad to have this message carried to him. Someone else out there, some kid, is thinking sincerely about someone they love, and he cannot help but find this heartening, inspiring.

And so without thinking he blurts it out.

She looks at him, then, smiling, looks down for a second—a surprisingly demure gesture for her. Then she looks up at him again and says: —I love you too.

I love you. These are old words, and they have survived with us, and, even now, even in the thick of the city's noise, amongst talk-about-the-weather and party chit-chat, platitudes and rhetoric, advertisements and magazine covers, headlines and signs, even amongst all these millions of competing messages, these old words can be spoken, without irony, gloss or packaging, and can still be heard. On this street there are two people, and they stand still for a moment, creating meaning for one another, out of the thin air of the present.

Further Reading ::
Information Prose : A Manifesto In 47 Points ::

A manifesto, outlining some of the aesthetic goals behind Imaginary Year, can now be read here.