When you’re on this block, you have one thing in common with anyone else here: the moment, this moment. Some have lived in it for longer than you; others’ve just come into it. But you and they and I—are all in it, for the moment, for as long as we’re here.
Maybe you really do have to die to leave it. I don’t remember who told me that. Maybe Adam, maybe mother. Or maybe—like the question you know not to ask—I learned it simply from being here, just from being. That’s how Adam and mother left. And the man who fathered me. The lady whose name I never knew is still here, and Mrs. Littington, for all that she participated in the gossip, was never part of it because everybody knew she wasn’t staying. And of course, after today she’ll be gone again, having flitted into and out of the moment, the last mother and I will have.
Now, only now. I’ve been to lots of other places where people lamented some monument or edifice that once stood in their midst, in their moment. Then it was smashed, exploded or burned and something else was assembled in its place. Or maybe the place is left empty. The people mourn the passing of whatever’d been there before but they stop remembering it the moment it was gone. No one remembers the squalid squares in the old railway stations or the drab columns of office buildings, apartment houses or the local store. Somehow, in memory, whatever is lost rises into towering arches filled with the soft, smoky haze of sun through windows high near the ceiling. Anything—even the moment of this block—can dissipate in that light.
On my way back to this block, I passed by the onetime financial center of this city. Its most famous—tallest—structures were gone, leveled by what architects, engineers, scientists and those who wrote and spoke for them claimed their steel-girded glass boxes could withstand. I called mother when I heard about their destruction. Just making sure she was all right, even though I knew she’d never been anywhere near them. Everyone, it seemed, who’d ever seen a photo of the buildings was calling somebody. Other people’d had to wait hours to get to one of the phones on the street. Not me—Gail, whom I’d met while I was still cursing Vivian, slipped a cell phone into my bag. I didn’t realize I had the phone until the first time it rang. When the buildings fell, I broke her rule that I use it only to answer her, and called mother.
Now I use only cellphones.
I’m getting away from myself. Those houses of cathode ray screens and paper, built like a box of drinking straws with the middle straws removed, were gone. I noticed their absence only because nothing stood in their place. I recalled how they cast shadows over the streets, the people, even the other tall buildings around it. But the fall of those steel beams, and the glass panes shackled to the fluorescent space around them, did not flood the corners and alleyways with suddenly-unsealed sunlight. The skyscrapers that still stood spread over each other and stilted solar pulses through the channels between offices and cigar stores, the snakeskin-smoothed sidewalks and the coiled cables of the bridge between that part of town and the precincts around this block.
“The Towers,” as everyone called them, were gone. But apart from their general shape—breadboxes sliced on the ends and sides with serrated knives—I could recall nothing else about them. Not the details, scarecely visible on such tall buildings, yet present enough for the news reports to point out as metalworkers took apart what remained after the explosions. I vaguely recalled the view from the top, the end of some trip on a school bus and up a series of elevators with a bunch of boys who wanted to beat up a “faggot” and a teacher—a nun who would—could ‘--ve done nothing to stop them. I knew there was something called an ”observation deck” at the end of the elevator ride, but it could’ve been a milk crate for all that I could recall.
It’d been part f some moment long ago, which might’ve continued to today had I or the Towers not gone. But the fall was inevitable: the Towers’ moment wouldn’t, couldn’t, last into this one. Nor could that moment in which I lived through the births-- and the deaths I witnessed and helped to cause.
After mother’s buried, the moment—long as it was—of this block will end, at least for me. The lady whose name I never knew—I don’t know. No one else from that time remains here. Then again, the moment began before Mrs. Littington came to this block, before I was born, before she or mother were born. And it continued through the disappearance of the man who fathered me and the day when the police retrieved a body and gave it my former name.
