East Hastings Rain

Dense rain clouds canopy Vancouver, tonight, and a perpetual rain shimmers in the East Hastings air, falling so lightly that it seems to hang in suspension like a damp gossamer curtain. Cars blast up along the street every so often, their headlights glistening across the dark pavement and their tires tearing up the stagnant water on the road and spraying it in an arc onto the sidewalk. I take a cautionary step back but my efforts are unsuccessful; wet denim clings to my shins. My dinted sneakers are soaked through, squishy water caught in the pockets between my toes. The bangs of my hair are a cold mass plastered to my cheeks. A carryout cup of coffee procured from a gas station two blocks up rests cradled between my frigid, dripping h ands, a far cry from Starbucks but warm against my palms and in my belly.

The flickering glow of a malfunctioning Bic lighter illuminates my peripheral vision, East Hastings’ very own self-extinguishing distant star for a brief moment before it disappears entirely. Buster stands to the left of me, a few steps back, those large rough hands of his I know so well tucked protectively into the pockets of his too-small faux brown leather jacket. His hair, curly on a good day, has turned into a tangle of frizz in the humidity, raindrops hanging throughout the mass like dew on a cobweb. A cigarette burns slowly between his pale, frigid lips. When he notices my eyes on him, he affords me a fleeting smile. Thick blue smoke billows from in between his lips and dives into his nose. This little trick of his reminds me of burrowing worms and I get a weird mental image of Nicotine as a fat fly nested in his brain, feeding on his grey matter and laying eggs that hatch beneath the protection of her large, iridescent bottom.

He quirks a bushy eyebrow in reaction to what must be the disgusted expression on my face and I shrug helplessly in response. He laughs, taking a step toward me and throwing an arm around my shoulder in a brief, sort of detached show of affection. It’s about as intimate as he gets. I rest my head on his chest, savouring the moment before he pulls away and removes the cigarette from his mouth so he can spit, turning his head away from my direction and firing a cloudy gob of saliva that splashes and disintegrates into a shadowy puddle at our feet. I scrunch my nose and he apologizes mechanically; spitting disgusts me, he knows that, but he’s compelled to regardless. I once asked him why he spat so much while he smoked and he responded simply, “Cigarettes taste disgusting.”

Buster’s relationship with smoking isn’t much different from his relationship with me. Habitual, bogged down in negative aspects and yet endured regardless. A lot of people smoke despite the known effects on their health and well-being, but they generally have reasons to overlook those effects: they like the taste of cigarettes, they have someone to impress, the nicotine calms them. With Buster, though, the usual benefits are moot points, inconsequential. His reasons for smoking (besides plain old addiction, I mean), are hidden somewhere in the annals of his mind, beyond my reach.

He drops the butt of the cigarette, not bothering to grind it out with his foot like he usually does, instead allowing the puddle to swallow and extinguish it. He takes a seat on the bus stop’s wooden bench, eyes scanning over the graffiti decorating the plexiglass walls of the shelter we’ve been standing beneath: accusatory statements with a vegetarian bias scrawled in black marker. At some point during their existence, some prankster decided to mess with the message of them, scrawling and replacing words so that the original statement, “if you want to live a life of love, don’t eat meat” now tells us “if you want to live a life of hatred, don’t eat pussy.” I exclaim my appreciation of the sentiment and Buster acts insulted as though the graffiti and I have touched a nerve. I sit beside him, ignoring the pools of water on the bench that soak into the seat of my jeans. I’m wet everywhere else, after all.

Time passes and we get onto the subject of our parents. Buster talks about his father with a queer mixture of love, admiration and hatred that’s not unlike my own attitude. My father is an overweight middle aged accountant who spends his days balancing the books of trucking companies despite the fact that his real passions are singing and teaching. He uses the internet to cheat on my mother with women who flicker darkly on the screen via webcam. His life is a warning to me of what happens when a person abandons their dreams for security. “My dad should have been the Marlboro man,” Buster tells me of his own father matter-of-factly. I’m a little confused as to his reasoning but then he continues: “he’s done all the traditional guy jobs. He’s been a construction worker, a miner, a farmboy, a ranch hand. . .” As he speaks, he counts the jobs off on the fingers of his thick-knuckled hand, looking nostalgic and homesick and disgusted and delighted all at once. I don’t know how to react to this bombardment of emotions on his part, so I rest a noncommittal hand upon his closest knee. My fingers fasten and unfasten the multiple safety pins that hold the expansive tears in his jeans closed, my anxiety causing me to fiddle. I examine the profile of his face, gaze lingering on his European nose and the angular line of his jaw covered in rough stubble.

A voice reaches us through the curtain of damp air, invading our secular bubble of consciousness. “That father of yours is a real man.” An old native man stands drenched in the rain beneath the busstop signpost, his hair hanging in his eyes. He has a friendly, world-weary smile upon his round features that curves his mouth, lifts his cheeks and seems to glitter in his eyes as though he were some sort of ethnic Santa Claus. He speaks with a familiar accent that, in our generation, one only hears from natives with strong ties to the reservation.

“Yeah,” Buster responds, though his voice trails off at the end of the word, making me wonder whether he agrees with the statement or not. My guess is that he isn’t sure of that himself. He surprises me by continuing unprompted. “He always worked really hard, but then, he had four kids to take care of.”

The native man relates to this. “I’ve got three of them, myself. Born and raised here in Vancouver. The oldest is about your age,” he tells us. The statement feels more like it’s directed at Buster than me, which is well enough since I’ve never been one to be able to carry on conversation with strangers anyway. I busy myself with alternating between watching for the bus and staring at my own knees while Buster and the native man talk about their lives. A car speeds past and the native man says in that deliberate accent: “Life’s what you make of it though. If you want it to be shit, it will be, but if you want it to be great, well then. . . boom!” At this, I squeeze Buster’s hand. I wonder if the advice has managed to seep into his mind past the barriers erected by pessimism and depression that my own words have been incapable of penetrating thus far. Buster’s expression yields no answer.

Later that evening, we’re alone and Buster has a referral for a construction job here in the city. Our wet hands are interwoven between our shivering bodies. “I know you don’t like it,” I start tentatively, looking at him with pleading eyes as though I’m asking him to make love to me, “but you can at least work construction until something you prefer becomes available. Get a foothold in the city.” I wonder pessimistically to myself if this approach will be more effective than my usual lecturing and demands. We fight a lot about his lack of a job. It’s driven a wedge in our relationship and I hate to bring it up. Here in these curtains of suspended rain, things between us feel at least part way mended and I don’t want to disturb that. I want to pretend our troubles don’t exist and curl up like a child in the warm security blanket of ignorance. But that sort of attitude doesn’t really solve problems, only masks them and allows them to fester, sort of like covering a wound with a bandage without cleaning it first.

To my surprise, Buster looks at me with conviction rather than exasperation. “No,” he says determinedly, brown eyes catching my own. “I need to stop whining and do what needs to be done. I’m good at construction. I can do that.”

The rain falls.

Not Unlike Escargot

Gaberielle hadn’t yet arrived when I came to sit at our usual table in the far corner of the cafeteria. I set out the Tupperware containers of lunch I’d made for the both of us and then folded my hands in my lap, determined to wait for her before starting to eat, myself, even though my stomach was protesting the delay. I examined my hands, freshly washed and still fragrant, nails trimmed just this morning. I wondered if maybe I could recite bismillah while I waited, seeing as Gaberielle didn’t take part in that ritual, anyway, but decided against it. She had her own prayers to say before eating, and I wouldn’t want to start before her, anyway.

We were a bit of an anomaly, as far as the stereotypical way of things was concerned. On the one hand, you had me, a Muslim immigrant from Iraq and therefore an outcast in the tiny religious town we both lived in. Gaberielle, on the other hand, was the eldest daughter of the town’s most prominent family and as such considered to automatically be a devout Catholic. In truth, Gaberielle was more than a little bit disillusioned with the idea of religion, but this reality was well masked by her mother’s careful efforts to appear to be the perfect Christian family. That Gaberielle was having doubts was none of her mother’s concern; it only mattered that the outside community thought of things. As though it were other men, fallible and ignorant, who were the judges of faith, rather than God Himself. The idea of it left a bitter taste in my mouth.

Not to say that I didn’t doubt religion myself, sometimes. It was hard not to blame Allah when things I felt or saw were unjust. It was hard not to be tempted into believing Science and religion were incompatible and in competition. It was hard to see the terrible things carried out in the name of Islam and wonder why Allah had allowed them to occur even though they were blasphemous. It was hard to endure taunts and teases as a child and later, accusations of allowing myself and all womankind to be oppressed, because I chose to wear the hijab. It was hard to be thought of as the bride of terrorists. Unlike Gaberielle, though, my mother didn’t ignore my doubt just as long as no one else saw it. My mother loved me, understood that even if the community was oblivious to my doubt, Allah saw it, and that it was His opinion that mattered, not theirs. She valued my happiness, the happiness I could only get by worshipping Allah, over some selfish happiness for herself that could be gained by having the approval of some community. And that was why she nurtured me, guided me, held me when I cried, prayed with me and for me and showed me to where I could find the truth in the Quran but also in the world around me.

The scrape of a chair being pulled out from the table and the audible thud of someone sitting in it caused me to look up from my thoughts, smiling gently in the way I always did when Gaberielle arrived. She was tense all the time, but I found merely smiling at her, offering her food and saying nothing, would often cause her to relax enough that we might share polite conversation. We were both private girls, and the grittier parts of our friendship, her issues with her mother and possible eating disorder, and my constant battle with the roll I forced myself to play (the shining Muslim girl—quiet, polite, conciliatory—even though I was, beneath the surface, quite stubborn, even brash) went largely unspoken. We dealt with our problems not by discussing them with one another, but rather by simply being around one another, accepting and supportive.
When I looked up, however, it was not Gaberielle sitting across from me. Straddling the backwards chair was a male classmate, leaning onto the table toward me and smiling in a way that made me bristle. I instinctually reached for the loose portion of my tan hijab that normally draped around my neck, pulling it up with one hand to shroud my nose and mouth. It took all my effort not to glower or shout; I managed to control myself enough to settle with an arch expression of distaste. Men smiling would never offend me, usually, but this one, a lolling half smirk, smug and assuming, reminded me too much of a cartoon drawing of a wolf trying to seduce a sheep.

“Are you a transfer student?” he asked, unhindered by my reaction and still smiling, leaning closer, even. He had an accent. . . French?

“No,” I replied briskly. I almost added a ‘why do you ask?’ but decided it would be better for my temper if I didn’t engage him in unnecessary conversation.

He ran a hand through his perfectly-coiffed blond hair, arching a carefully plucked eyebrow at me in silent invitation. “Then why haven’t I seen you around?” he purred. His expression, though, asked a different question: ‘Why haven’t you thrown yourself at me yet?’

I chose not to respond. My stomach was churning. I wanted to make a scene, embarrass him, tell him off, swear at him, spit at him, push his face away with my left hand. Instead, I sat very still behind the shield of my improvised veil, wishing, as I often did, that I had a crass older brother to defend me at times like these.

“Don’t talk much?” he prompted, and then shrugged and continued before I could respond, “That’s okay. Most girls who spend time with me find they don’t need to.” That disgusting smile.

My patience ran out. “You’re obscene,” I hissed. His blue eyes flashed, and for a moment he looked taken aback at the thought that a girl was able to refuse his charms, but then he smiled dismissively, leaning back with a shrug.

“I’ll be around, Princess Jasmine,” he offered over his shoulder as he walked away.

“Thanks for the warning, Iago,” I muttered behind my veil, glowering at his back as he disappeared into the crowd of students, though truth be told the annoyingness of a squawking parrot didn’t do him justice.

Gaberielle approached, just then, turning the chair around carefully and seating herself. She noticed the expression in my eyes, the hiding of my face behind the veil, and smiled a sort of lopsided smile.

“That’s Luc Fourcade,” she said in an uncharacteristically easy voice, smoothing out the wrinkles over the lap of her long black skirt. “He considers us religious girls to be a delicacy. Shall we say grace before we run out of time to eat?” She gestured toward the food I’d brought and I lowered my veil, nodding.

Remembering Tadpoles

My hands on my belly
frame a picture.
In the depths
a tangible shadow
slippery, suspended
with webbed hands and protruding
amphibian eyes.

When we were young
we caught tadpoles,
up to our shins
in a stagnant pond.
They burrowed in the mud, tails flicking madly
but sometimes
we watched them writhe in our hands.
We kept them in buckets,

submerged in backyard hose water,

were distraught when they died.
I tattled on a boy--
grubby and curious, a young Mengele--
who smashed his, squirming, under rocks
and poked at their glistening insides.
Mine merely floated belly up,

translucent and gray.
I dreamt of them often, dead tadpoles.
But I didn’t wake until morning.

Terrorist

In my last year of junior high, I managed to get myself on the bad side of a couple of skinheads. Not because of anything I could control, really, besides breathing. Skinheads don’t need much reason to be angry at you beyond you having a level of melanin in your skin above ‘Aryan’ and your, well, existing. And I, being of the same racial stock as one O. Binladen, well, I’m sure you can guess how I made them feel. They cornered me on the path through the woods that connected the school’s baseball fields to a residential area, two of them approaching me from either direction on the path. I wasn’t looking for a fight; I raised my hands in surrender, weakly tried to reason with them, averted eye contact and pleaded in a slow, clear voice, “C’mon now, you don’t really want to do this. . .”, treating them like a pack of vicious dogs. I guess I shouldn’t have spoken, because after I pleaded with them, they didn’t even bother with laughing at my cowardice, instead becoming enraged at the accent that tinged my voice. They unleashed the whole range of slurs on me, from ‘Towelhead’ and ‘Cameljockey’ right through to ‘Sand Nigger’, gnashing their teeth and circling me, closer and closer like bloated buzzards. They asked me patronizingly if I wasn’t going to ask Allah to save me, and I didn’t bother answering. I’d never really believed in Allah, not like Mom and Dad had, but I figured they wouldn’t believe that answer. How could I be a terrorist if I didn’t believe in the terrorist God? And there was no way I could be Arab and not a terrorist, certainly. I considered fighting back but realized I was outnumbered and outmuscled, the four of them having an average of about seventy pounds of advantage over me. I dropped my backpack, thought about running, but found my escape largely obstructed by the treacherous trees of the forest.

Even as I was trying to plan out a route of escape, the first punch collided with my jaw, sending my head reeling with an awful crack that resounded all the way down my neck from my ears. I righted my head again just in time to receive a second punch, this time to the nose. I felt the blood running down my face and shut both eyes, shielding myself with my forearms even as I took a blow to my stomach that doubled me over and dropped me to my knees on the muddy path. I wanted to cry out, to beg them to stop, but steeled myself instead, hoping that maybe if I didn’t fight back, they’d give up on the whole thing out of boredom and find a Chinese or black kid to beat up on for awhile. After a knee to the side of the head, I curled up on my side in the dirt, arms over my head, feeling a little bit like a caterpillar playing dead after being prodded by a child’s grubby finger. The four of them seemed to be losing heart at this point, kicking me listlessly at random and muttering allusions to September Eleventh in annoyed voices. Back in a safe corner of my mind, disassociated from the pain, I wondered if they’d actually even lost anyone in the attack, even mourned when it happened. I had.

When they were finally beginning to lose interest, I heard footsteps approaching but was too scared to look and confirm whether the newcomer was my saviour or another skinhead. “Hey!” I heard him shout, the ‘h’ awkwardly pronounced. “Fuck off, you fucking Nazi fuckers!” Some cynical part of me, separated from all of this, commended him on his use of vocabulary. The other part of me was whimpering with utter joy at the fact that help had arrived. The skinheads responded to his jeer in kind, swearing and shuffling all around me. I received another boot in the ribs and wheezed, peering up to catch a glimpse of whoever had come to rescue me.

I was met with shined brown leather shoes, pre-faded tight jeans, a silk button-down shirt with its sleeves rolled up mid forearm. Perfectly coiffed hair.

Later, as we lay together on our backs in the mud, sniffling back the blood clots in our noses and watching the sky darken above us, he turned his head toward me with an awkward smile. “So, uh,” he began, expression nervous, unable to look me quite in the eye, “you’re not a terrorist, are you?”

“Of course not,” I replied, laughing, “If I was, I’d have reached into my jacket and blown those infidel mothers up for so much as looking at me!” He looked relieved at that, returned his gaze to the sky a moment before looking to me again.

“But uh. . . you can still put a Jihad on them, right?”

“It’s not a fuckin’ voodoo curse, man. You don’t. . .put a Jihad on a person.”

A minute or so passed and I listened to our rattled, laboured breathing, considered getting up but vetoed the idea after the mere thought of physical effort in my condition.

“I’m Luc,” my companion introduced, but through the congestion of blood in his nose it sounded a little bit more like “Loog”.

“Jeff,” I responded.

Ice, Ice, Baby

Cam was the hottest guy on the dance floor by far, the guy with the best suit, the best moves and a white tophat, (brand new, for purchase, twenty-five dollars extra), cocked over his left eye in the best imitation of music video style. The music was only the best in eighties hits, standard music for proms everywhere since this year's harvest of punk, punk and punk didn't do as well for dancing as it did for moping and writing bad poetry about one's life. All night the eighties pumped through the speakers and all night, Cam danced like only he could, soaking in the catchy rhymes and overused record scratches and recycled beats.

Eighties music, to Cam's ears, was the sweet serenading of angels above, blessed music that never, ever went out of style. As he danced, all the girls stood around him in a circle and he felt like a king, a modern day Michael Jackson before the nose incident or the accusations of pedophilia. When he pulled at the crotch of his white tailored pants as he'd seen Eminem do, the girls all shrieked and clapped in delight, their hands a white blur above the myriad colours of what Cosmo called the Season's Hottest Dresses. When he sidled up to one, grooving with the beat, she giggled and blushed and attempted to flirtaciously play with her hair, which was, as fashion dictated, cemented into a mass of goldilocks curls spilling from the top of her scalp. Under the guise of taking her as his dance partner, he took a quick assessment of her boobs, tiny and sort of triangular but perky with fantastic nipples that prodded through the flimsy fabric of her magenta dress. Bah, he thought to himself, mosquito bites, and was relieved when she refused his offer with an embarassed shriek. He gave her one last once over, regretful that she had such tiny boobs because she had fantastic legs. Following the music's lead, he returned to the centre of the circle for a few of his signature breakdance moves, soaking in the sounds of girls cheering. He swung in a circle, eyes lingering on pair after blurry pair of boobs. Perky, saggy, round, cone shaped, propped up by corsets or hanging loose, sporting cleavage or skin stretched over sternum. All small. He adjusted the level of his vision and out of the corner of his eye he saw their assorted dates and boyfriends huddled over the tables at the edge of the dance floor and couldn't decide whether they were jealous or thankful he'd stolen all their girlfriends' attention. He figured he'd know the answer to that after prom had finally ended.

With a round of enthusiastic applause and cheering that stung his ears, the song that had been his glory ended and he removed his tophat to take a dramatic bow. The DJ cheered him too, before announcing into the grainy microphone that he'd be "Slowing it down." The sounds of chairs shuffling as two hundred obliged boyfriends in matching drab black suits rose from their seats to disperse over the dance floor, pairing off with girl after Cosmo-approved girl in blue or pink or red or maroon. Cam stood waiting, still in the centre of the floor, for some lucky girl to be his partner. The music started, Aerosmith's infamous asteroid-movie love ballad. Everyone paired off, looped their arms around one another in the prescribed way and began to sway lethargically, traversing the dance floor slowly. Couples stared into each other's eyes, stared at other couples jealously, rested together with a girl's head on her partner's shoulder, kissed with sloppy tongues. Cam, his hands behind his back now, wasn't approached once.

Defeated, he took a seat at one of the now abandoned tables, fishing out an unopened can of soda from the pile of discarded purses and cameras. He opened it, drank a bit, found it to be lukewarm and flavoured, to his dismay, with aspartame instead of sugar. He watched as the couples broke away from one another, song ended, and the other guys returned to the tables with shuffling feet. When they noticed him, they simply scoffed and shuffled away squishing too many people into other tables in order to avoid having to sit with the night's big showoff and girlfriend stealer. The music resumed with the opening lines to Cam's favourite song, Vanilla Ice's narcissistic single hit, but Cam didn't feel like dancing. The girls broke off into groups of their own, for the most part standing in large, hollow circles of ten or so. A few broke off into lesbian pairs, engaging in gratuitously skanky dancing which the seated guys watched appreciatively. They didn't seem to miss Cam at all, which disheartened him even more.

The night went on with Cam slumped over his lonely table, song after song passing him by. The eighties music left a bad taste in his mouth. If he hadn't have paid so much for his tacky white suit, he'd probably have left during the opening lines of "Billie Jean". At long last, the night was drawing to a close and the DJ, purring into his crappy microphone, announced that the last song would be a slow dance. The couples, looking considerably more tired and bored, once again took to the floor. Even the girls looked like they wished the night would just end, but couldn't allow themselves to miss out on the customary last dance. The last song was Lifehouse, for some reason, despite their lack of popularity, and Cam assumed the song had been a request. The couples on the floor didn't seem to really care about the choice of music and swayed to it just as they'd done before, looking like mere shadows in the dim lighting.

That was when there was a tap on Cam's shoulder. He turned irritably, growling, "Whaddya want?" The girl who'd tapped him recoiled nervously at his tone, beginning to blubber out stuttering apologies. Her round face was flushed red, sweat glistening on her wobbly double chin. Her hairdo had flopped, hairspray-sticky red hair hanging in her face, and the mascara around her muddy eyes was smeared. Her expansive torso was strapped up in an ineffective corset and her green skirt exploded like a firework into multiple layers of tulle-- last year's style. Tammy Smith. One of the nerdiest girls in the school, the only one Cam had ever seen in the library playing Magic cards with the pimpliest guys. Cam didn't think she'd ever had a boyfriend, not hanging out with that lot.

"I," she stammered in a slightly nasal voice, "I r-requested this s-song just for you and me and I. . . I'd like if we could dance together to it." Cam looked up at her incredulously. Did she know who she was talking to, here? He wasn't the type of guy to just dance with anyone, especially not a fat nerd like her. He stood up, about to tell her off for being so presumptuous, when his eyes drifted automatically to her chest. He was greeted by a pair of double-d's, freckled and spilling out of the corset like a cup running over. He could prop up a flag in her cleavage. He froze, one finger up in lecturing position, mouth hanging open about to speak. She was wincing, apparantly bracing herself against the sound rejection she was about to recieve. She started to turn. He dropped a hand on her shoulder.

"I thought you'd never ask," he breathed.

The Death of Emperor Meiji

We’re in class, pens poised over looseleaf, fingers hovering over laptop keys, eyes turned momentarily from the professor to the projection of a sleek overhead sheet she’s laid out for us. Its heading, in neutral text:

DEATH OF EMPEROR MEIJI

We scrawl and tap mechanically while the professor stands, breath bated as though momentarily frozen in time, waiting for the movement of her students to cease so that she might continue her lecture with our full attention. At long last, a hush falls over the assembly. Suddenly unfrozen, the professor looks up at the screen she stands before and folds her hands behind her back, letting out a simple, thoughtful “hm.” In our ready positions once again, we wait now for the ensuing onslaught of information, the apathetic details on why this death would be significant to Japanese history. Most of us don’t give two shits about the life or death of this puppet emperor so revered; we’re here simply to engorge our scholarly mosquito brains or, even more detached, to continue our course to academic success by way of three hours credit.

The professor narrows her eyes. “Tell me,” she begins in that condescending voice of hers, to our complete surprise breaking from her habit of diatribe to pose a question, “How many of you have ever witnessed an event that, at that very moment, you knew was history in the making?”

A completely different kind of silence overtakes us. From the back of my mind and the usually hazy grips of memory comes the half-heard sound of a radio in another room, the cold feel of a spoon balanced in my hand, the fiercely unnatural light of my kitchen, the clock beneath the cabinet reading seven forty-eight am. My father’s TV in a dark room, my mother perched at the edge of her bed in her nightgown, face in her hands as the television flickers the same colours over and over again reflecting on her face. She is sobbing, swearing, praying for safety and for retribution all at once. I stand above her silent, tugging at the cuffs of a brand new navy shirt, overpriced. Numbers read by solemn voices rise, rise, rise, pulsing in my head like an oral thermometer under a fevered child’s tongue. Resolution not to cry, to be strong for her sake before a moment of realization that sends me hurtling, tripping down the stairs and throwing myself before the computer. A hastily typed email: “Hi. Where are you? I’m praying.” And then later, the dim cafeteria of my junior high, three hundred sets of eyes focused on a television that normally was reserved for music videos or cartoons. Utter silence. A paper airplane tossed in the hallway that swoops, spinning, to the ground, greeted by a plethora of horrified glances. In class, anger on my part at the normalness of things, the mimicry of routine. A screaming fight with a friend that ends with flight, crying openly now. A brisk walk home in the autumn air, a cup of tea in the bright kitchen, a quiet, apologetic phone call with the school secretary. Finally, a red and black instant message: “Hey. Yeah. Thanks for the email; I got a lot of them today. The skyline’s changed.” A brief sense of relief followed by a wash of sadness, another realization that this exchange will not be typical. Finally, the overwhelming comprehension that the world has changed.

“Well?” the professor prompts in annoyance. As one, her students blink back the glaze in their eyes, drawing in their awareness like a kite on a string and returning to current surroundings. There is no question as to the nature of the distraction. The professor folds her arms over her chest, tapping an impatient foot. For a moment, nobody says anything, not quite yet returned from four years ago to respond. Finally, a boy in the front raises his hand. He says what we’re all thinking tentatively, his voice fearful.

“September Eleventh.” It’s more of a question than a statement by the intonation of his voice, the way he leans forward in his seat to be more clear. It feels like everyone in the class breathes in all at once, treating his statement with reverence like some divine revelation. At the same time, the affirmation of our innermost thoughts feels intrusive.

“Yes,” the professor says, approving the answer. We all breathe out again as though we ourselves had been the ones who’d suggested the idea and waited for the professor’s affirmation of its validity. “Anything else?” she asks, surveying the confused faces of her class. We are mute, returning to the dragged up memories, each of us lost in visions of fire and crash and fall, albeit viewed through different lenses. “How about Watergate?” she prompts. The same boy in the front row replies to this, a small smile lingering on the corners of his lips.

“Most of us weren’t born when Watergate happened,” he notes with that smile making an obvious jab at the professor’s age. An uneasy chuckle ripples through the class in response to this and the professor puffs up her shoulders like an irritated cat, mouth twisted in helpless amusement at the undertones of the statement. The curtain of tension lifts somewhat.

“The death of Emperor Meiji signified, to the Japanese people, the end of an age.” Pens scrawling and laptop keys tapping, rushing to catch up, the lecture resumes its pace.

“It’s weird to drive over the bridge to Manhattan and not have them there,” said the instant message window that day. My own pen lashes across the page in barely legible script, three words behind and guided by a purely mechanical hand. Perhaps those events had signified the end of an age too.