Streams of Babel (41 page)

He has since provided the details of how he came to find Tyler and me in time. He had been late to meet Roger at the hospital the day that Tyler and I went there because he had been
tailing us the whole way. Perhaps USIC meant it when saying they didn't have time to check up on us, but Hodji made the time.

Seeing our direction, he reasoned that I wanted to see the sick youths and waited in his car to see what we would do next. He called in a "hunch" After Roger took that call from Michael outside, the one that made me flee in haste, he called Hodji, telling him with many explosions that USIC would haul our bad behavior to the local juvenile detention center and book us. If Hodji had done that immediately, he might never have found Catalyst and PiousKnight, who was Manuel.

Hodji's instincts are good. He followed us again and put two and two together that we were on our way to Astor College. He was able to get a raid organized in twenty minutes. If he hadn't followed us and done all that, we would probably be walking around with scratches, wondering at our "luck," that Catalyst had tried to scratch us like a small child instead of saw off our limbs. Hodji, Susan, and Michael had said that these men were dangerous beyond our wildest dreams. And in my wildest dreams I never pictured a man who would load up his own flesh and sacrifice his life to meet an end.

Had it not been for Hodji, Catalyst might be with Omar instead of dead. Things worked out slightly better this way, but I cannot help but say my thought—about being scratched in the face, and playing host to an ugly germ in the sixth day of a ten-day gestation period.

"This entire situation is absurd," I report.

Roger and Dr. Briglianni say nothing.

CORA HOLMAN
FRIDAY, MARCH IS, 2002
12:21
P.M.

JEREMY IRELAND LOOKED at me with affection, patted my hair, and said, "No."

It was not as easy as usual to hide my emotions. I had never been completely convinced he was my father, but to hear him clearly say no, he was not, sent me into some emotional freefall. My jaw trembled, my lips trembled, and I tried desperately to focus on my fingers, how my nails needed filing.

"I'm gay," he went on.

I didn't exactly see the problem with that. There were gay men all over the planet who had been married or had had kids.... The answer irritated me. It was too cut-and-dry for a complicated situation.

"What I mean by that," he said, "is that your mother and I never..."

I guess that was evidence enough that he wasn't my father, but it left before me many mysteries, the least of which was
Then, who is?
I decided that if he knew, he would certainly have said as much—even if he didn't feel comfortable providing a name. Pictures formed in my head of Aleese, drunk after a hard photo shoot, flirting with one guy after another in some journalists' bar. If my roots were that loveless, I was not ready to hear it.

"But ... you loved her," I said. "So much..."

"I worshipped her. I still do." He stood and put on his jacket.

He left me numbers in London where I could call him if I needed anything—anytime. I needed time alone right now, my usual diet, to digest my life under these new terms.

Unfortunately, after Scott got out of intensive care, he was moved in with Owen, and I now had Rain in the other bed. She came in, pushing an IV and grumbling. She'd become more quiet these days. She wasn't her usual vivacious self, and she even offered no opinion when her father mentioned that they were sending us to a rehab facility fifteen miles from here. I would have thought she'd collapse, but all she'd said was "I'm still going to the prom ... I don't care how I do it."

"Did you see that stack of homework our teachers sent over in case we were bored?" Rain grumbled.

Before I could answer, Owen followed her in a wheelchair being pushed by Dobbins. Owen immediately dropped himself into her bed, and she said, "No dibs! I'm tired."

The room was a convention when Dempsey followed them, holding up an envelope filled with papers. He dangled it by two fingers, implying it was the dreaded homework we'd heard was coming.

"And get this, Cora," Rain grumbled on. "Mclntyre sent us an essay to write for history. And he just gave us the same one as everyone else. He wants us to tell him what it means to be an American in 2002. How in the hell do
we
answer that?"

No one noticed my tears until I tried to answer. My "I hadn't heard" trembled.

She came over and lay down beside me, and Dempsey sat at the foot of the bed. I could feel Owen watching me. Dobbins took a seat beside Owen. I was utterly surrounded.

"Your dad leave?" Rain asked.

I felt like I was being thrown out of a truck. Or maybe it was that the truck was roaring up my throat. But I could feel myself snapping and cracking, and finally some sobbing alien stepped out of me and took control.

"He's not my dad. I kind of doubted he was my dad, but I wanted to find out. I have no idea who my dad is. I don't have any relatives and ... I don't have any friends, either."

Their reactions amazed me, though I don't know why. It was filled with, perhaps, the last thing I would have wanted to hear them say, but I could not have predicted the amount of sincerity with which they would say it.

"...and we're chopped liver?"

"...we're your friends, Cora..."

"...your friends..."

"We're your..."

"...friends."

And on and on. I didn't know what to say, but I knew "thank you" was wrong. It was a harmony—off-key, but humming.

Owen ended it with "Come over here and I'll hug you. But you have to come over here. I'm
not
having a four-star day."

I almost went to him. But in keeping, I took a tissue from the box Dobbins held out to me. I blew my nose rather hard, and didn't realize until I tried to use two hands that Rain was holding my one hand. I didn't try to pull it away. It felt very normal.

After a minute, she said, "You know what we should do? We should all try to keep a diary. Bet we could get out of a lot of English and history homework by promising that instead."

Owen laughed at her. "
You're
going to keep a diary? I'd like to see you write more than three sentences in your life without getting distracted."

"This is serious, though," she said. "It's, um, stirring my need to be lit'rary. To keep a record, at least."

"It's a shame you can't punctuate," Dempsey giggled.

"I'll say it all into a tape recorder," Rain countered. "Don't some really important CEOs keep their diaries that way? Maybe when all of this is over, we'll find a famous editor who can type it out for me."

"I'll type it out," I said. "I'll edit." It sounded like a
me
project, and if I was to be their friend, I would long feel a nagging need to repay the debt somehow.

I sat among them, and let them do all the talking, but it was the first time since Oma died that I felt something akin to relaxed. Despite an IV, despite the surroundings, and despite an unpredictable future.

Life is a mystery, but that's nothing new to me.

WHAT IT IS LIKE TO BE AN AMERICAN TODAY
By Rain Steckerman

HISTORY 4
MARCH 15, 2002

HI, MR. MCINTYRE. You know I hate writing essays—I hate writing anything, in fact, but I also know you are nicer than Ms. Curcio, who won't let us start our English papers with anything but a totally boring introduction. I know you won't be counting off for saying the truth from the start, right?

It is hard for me to think about being American. I am busy thinking about what it is like to be here in a hospital.

You've heard by now what happened to us, I guess. My dad held a press conference this morning. Bet you had the TV on in the classroom, like you always do, but this time the scenery and the names were a little more familiar. Anyway, these terrorists opened a discount shoe store over in Surrey and pretended to run it, and on December 28 they poisoned the water.

They only poisoned five streets, but I live on one of them, and so do the Ebermans and so does Cora Holman. The Holmans and the Ebermans drank tons of tap water, and so did I cuz I was always over at Owen's house (no, we do
not
go out, though I know that has been a rumor for some time among people who don't really know us. All I ever did over there was drink the water—honestly. Back to my story). So now, we have this germ that the Centers for Disease Control is calling Q3. We are very glad they caught those men, but I don't like to focus on them. It arouses our puke factors, let's leave it at that.

Right now we have Q3 in our blood and in our bone marrow, and they can clean it out of our blood, but it just comes back from the bone marrow. Doctors are working hard in all these very kewl cities like Vienna and Sydney and Minneapolis to figure out how to get rid of it. I'm guessing they will figure it out soon.

The worst to get hit of us kids was Scott. He had an aneurysm both in his heart and in his head. I got so scared he would die. He got lucky because there was one easy surgery they could do if the aneurysm near his heart was the right shape and size, and it turns out it was. They cauterized it with a microscopic blowtorch. If it had been a rip-open-your-ribcage surgery, he'd still be in that coma, unable to go through that much trauma. Sometimes I wish he was still out of it, because he is very pissed and he can get very mouthy. He needs to take an anger management class.

Owen is okay, good days and bad, but he floors me. There's a chapel in this hospital, and you're allowed to light candles in there. He lit four on one side and ten on the other.
The four are for us. Get this: The other ten candles Owen lit were for the bad guys. Bob Dobbins was all "He's totally lost it. Those guys should burn in hell." I agree, but I know Owen, and even on his worst day, he will not feel good about people going to hell. Here's what he said:

"Hell is a place for.." Wait a minute, he's right here. I will let him write what he feels, because he can say it better. (This part still goes toward
my
grade, not his.)

I just don't believe in passing judgment until you can put yourself in the other guy's shoes. I don't know if they're arrogant or confused or scared or stupid or ... I just don't want to eliminate any possibilities until I can understand. The thought of ten people burning in hell makes me feel less satisfaction instead of more. I believe that heaven and hell don't exist for what personally makes me glad or what personally pisses me off. I do think there will be murderers in heaven. Don't you? They can't just include "anyone except the one who came after my family," right?

I know that sounds really crazed and all, but I have to say, on the days when my head feels like it's going to explode, I want Owen near me.

It is not fun and it is not easy being here, and it is surely not fun to think that I have something that can't be gotten rid of tomorrow. I've never had anything before I couldn't kill with a good night's sleep and a couple of Advils. Sometimes I think Owen is crazy, and I want to go kill those guys myself, or at least get front-row seats for their trip to the electric chair. There's a lot of time to think in here.

But maybe this sort-of-essay does relate to the assignment anyway. Because yesterday I had the thought "Do I wish that I
had been born somewhere else? Do I wish that I had lived in Sweden? Or Finland? Or Canada? Or somewhere exotic like Polynesia? Do I wish I was something other than American, so that this would not have happened to me?"

We all have times when we wish we were more interesting and from some more colorful place—but it's not the right response when some terrorists come here, trying to shake up your whole universe. That makes me even more patriotic. Somehow. Maybe it's a pride thing. I told my dad this last night and he actually smiled (first real smile in a long time). He said he was in college toward the end of the Vietnam War, and almost everybody his age had long, shaggy, nonmilitary hair, and made loud statements about hating the government, and it was kind of trendy to dislike your country thoroughly. In this year of 2002, everyone loves our country a lot. It's more like things were right after World War II. Dad says that if he and USIC can keep the terrorists from hurting anyone else over here, that this, too, will blow over, and we'll return to normalcy—with everyone here and abroad nitpicking at what's wrong in America.

I don't know why his thoughts bug me; maybe they imply that if my dad and his fellow agents do their jobs really well, their big reward is that people will return to a state of lukewarm feelings about where we live, and who's in charge, and even USIC. That doesn't seem fair.

Maybe this is what it means to be a great American: You remember the good things about your country even when everything is going
well.
When things are
boring.
When your biggest problem is that you can't get your whole college tuition together for next semester and you don't know what to do.

I used to hate it when my dad would raise the question after some complaint fest of mine, but now I might start asking it to others: "How'd you like a one-way ticket to Namibia?"

And I think that's as patriotic as I can be, considering there are bigger questions in my face right now. I can't stop asking them. So, I might as well put them in this essay and help my grade along by using them to fill in space. They're not good for much else: Will I make it to the PROM??? Will I be able to go to college? Will I live through this? If I do, will I be able to have children? If not, who will want to marry me? What would it be like for my dad to have to bury me? Why is it that I'm still glad I didn't say yes, the last time my dad asked if I wanted a one-way ticket to Namibia?

SHAHZAD HAMDANI
SATURDAY, MARCH 16, 2002
NOON

HODJI AND I emerge from the cab a block from what is formerly the World Trade Center. I cannot see the disaster site from here, but I hear the echo of cranes and bulldozers even above the pitch of all that is New York.