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Why am I telling this story? I am, as I've said, a minor character, out of place in this narrative, but the major characters of all these stories from the first ten years of the epidemic have left. The men I wanted to follow into the future are dead. Finding them had made me want to live, and I did. I do. I feel I owe them my survival. The world is not fixed, and the healing is still just past my imagining, though perhaps it is closer than it was. For now, the minor characters are left to introduce themselves, and take the story forward.
When an artist dies young there is always talk of the paintings unpainted, the books unwritten, which points to some imaginary storehouse of undone things and not to the imagination itself, the far richer treasure, lost. All of those works are the trail left behind, a path across time, left like the sun leaves gold on the sea: you can see it but you can't ever pick it up. What we lose with each death, though, is more like stars falling out of the sky and into the sea and gone. The something undone, the something that won't ever be done, always remains unendurable to consider. A permanent loss of possibility, so that what is left is only ever better than nothing, but the loss is limitless.
I will never forget the classmate who said to me in workshop, about one of my stories, "Why should I care about the lives of these bitchy queens?" It angered me, but I asked myself whether or not I had failed my characters if my story hadn't made them matter to someone disinclined to like or listen to them - someone like him. A vow formed in my mind that day as I listened to him, which has lasted my whole career: I will make you care.
When I return from Maine, home again, I open the door to my apartment, afraid my roses will be withered, fainting dead. No rain for four days. I rush to the back, where I find them giddy, hurling color up from the ground like children with streamers at a parade.
I think writers are often terrifying to normal people - that is, to nonwriters in a capitalist system - for this reason: there is almost nothing they will not sell in order to have the time to write. Time is our mink, our Lexus, our mansion. In a room full of writers of various kinds, time is probably the only thing that can provoke widespread envy, more than acclaim. Acclaim, which of course means access to money, which then becomes time.
I have a theory of the first novel now, that it is something that makes the writer, even as the writer makes the novel. That it must be something you care about enough to see through to the end. I tell my students all the time: writing fiction is an exercise in giving a shit - an excuse in finding out what you really care about. Many student writers become obsessed with aesthetics, but I find that is usually a way to avoid whatever it is they have to say. [...]
We are not what we think we are. The stories we tell of ourselves are like thin trails across something that is more like the ocean. A mask afloat on the open sea.
There were moments before the memory's return when I experienced what I now understand as its absence as not a gap but a whole other self, a whole other me. [...]
[...] He had called the station from inside the first tower to describe what was happening. The host quickly thanked him for calling in and then said, in a bit of a panic, Why are you on the phone with me? Why aren't you on your way down?
You don't understand, the man said. The whole center of the building is gone. I can't go down. That's why I'm calling.
I don't know how to describe the feeling I had in the silence that followed, except that it was approximately the length it would take you to read this sentence aloud.
[...] The point of it is in the possibility of being read by someone who could read it. Who could be changed, out past your imagination's limits. Hannah Arendt has a definition of freedom as being the freedom to imagine that which you cannot yet imagine. The freedom to imagine that as yet unimaginable work in front of others, moving them to still more action you can't imagine, that is the point of writing, to me. You may think it is humility to imagine your work doesn't matter. It isn't. Much the way you don't know what a writer will go on to write, you don't know what a reader, having read you, will do.
I wanted to lead my students to another world, one where people value writing and art more than war, and yet I knew then and I know now that the only thing that matters is to make that world here. There is no other world. This is the only world we are in. This revisable country, so difficult to change, so easily changed.