The Twins

The city was quiet, at least as quiet as it could be on a weekday, with the cabs fighting the cars fighting the buses fighting the bikes and the pedestrians and the dogs and the kids on their way across town on 6th avenue. As I sat in the coffee shop, slowly calming myself, my hands wrapped around a bowl of latte, I savored this return to normalcy. The vacation was finally over, I had left the twins at school and somehow managed to tear myself away from them in record time.

It was their first day of first grade. At six years old, they were still full of fears, and as I had attempted to leave them to the care of Mrs. Paul, had clung to me as if I were the last lifejacket on the Titanic. This was not new: when faced with a new experience, they revealed themselves as clinging, crying babies who didn’t seem to trust me when I repeatedly told them I would be back in seven hours. Even though, from the moment of their birth, I had never been late! To people who told me, while I was pregnant, that twins were good because they relied on each other for comfort, I could oppose this ever-repeated image of me having to physically pry myself away from two 35-pound girls whenever I wanted to go to the bathroom.

I had tried everything, read all the books I could find. When they were 4, after I realized I could teach a class on fear of abandonment but could not reassure my own children, I even consulted a child psychiatrist who, after meeting them, simply told me that the twins would outgrow their insecurities when they had “sufficient experience” of me returning when I had said I would. I asked, What is sufficient? He shrugged. I didn’t like the shrug. I resented it. I thought a doctor would have something to offer, tips, exercises. I was willing to accept any blame coming my way to explain my children’s behavior. Maybe I ate too much fish while pregnant. Or didn’t drink enough water. Or didn’t sing enough songs while they were infants. He shrugged again, simply suggesting that my children may have suffered a small trauma while in the womb. Or they were experiencing vicarious trauma, for something I had not properly dealt with in my own life. I could think of no such thing. Nothing “significant” enough to explain why two 4-year olds needed to be hand-held for every single activity, even when their play dates couldn’t run fast enough from their own parents.

I left the doctor’s office none the wiser and attempted to weather the storms.

I had now lived through 6 years of this dictatorial regime, condemned to pee with a child on my lap, to sleep knowing that the smallest noise, even a snore, could unleash the two-head monster that had bunk beds in the other room, 6 years during which I scarcely had a moment to myself because no babysitter would come twice. After going through an alarming number of undergrad students to look after my girls, I realized quickly that the babysitters had even started speaking among themselves and none would dare answer to my calls for help. So after all this time, I had come to the realization that nothing I could do to make my children feel safe and secure would be enough. I would, always, come short. Always, or until they had, how did the good doctor put it, “had sufficient experience” of my faithfulness to my word. I still stayed with the babysitter until the girls were starting to wander around the room. I still worried about what I would find when I returned, or the report I would get from whomever was in charge. But I had, somewhat, come to terms with my failings, and understood that it would take time. And that the best I could do was, aside from being a good mother, to make sure that no adult left with my girls suffered too much. So this morning, the fact that it took me only 20 minutes to settle the girls well enough for me not to feel guilty for leaving them with their teacher made me feel like celebrating. It was getting better. All summer I had seen small improvements, brief moments when the girls forgot to be scared and enjoyed themselves.

I entered a coffee shop and sat down with the students and the artists working at the other tables. I could not do this often; it implied having free time, which had become scarce since Chuck had left us. That lack of time, or relief, was the only downside to our separation. Ever since we had found out that I was expecting twins, Chuck had been an asshole, as if that extra baby that Mr. Planning could not foresee had pushed him back into his adolescence. He left after their first birthday party, simply telling me it — meaning the kids, the noise, the lack of downtime, the burden of responsibilities —would only get worse.

As I sat drinking my coffee and eating a pastry, I smiled at the private joke: it was finally getting better, and I alone would get to enjoy it! Chuck had decided to see the girls only in family gatherings, where he could dump the care of our daughters on his mother, sisters, sister-in-laws; even his brothers where better at this than him. I had his guilty conscience to thank for the fact that he paid, however, his child-support like clockwork, and very generously, I might add, and did not want to formalize our separation by a divorce until either one of us needed it. It was, therefore, the best of both worlds: I didn’t have to move or find cheaper babysitters, and he was free of the care of our children. Free moments, like now, were nevertheless few and far between. Soon, I would have to go back to work. But, I still had an hour.

It didn’t happen suddenly. A murmur started in the coffee shop, and it took a while for it to become strong enough to reach me. A young man stood up, and said in a shaking voice that the World Trade Center had been hit by what was believed to be a plane. I asked him what kind of plane. Where on the tower. Which tower. He didn’t know. He knew nothing, in fact, aside from the small fact that an object hit a tower on a day where you could see for miles. In the back of my mind, I figured either it was a joke, or it was not an accident. A joke, in this oh-so-politically-correct time, seemed unlikely. An accident would have made much more sense had it involved one of those tourist planes over the many midtown buildings concentrated on a small block. Or way downtown, close to Wall Street, in those old streets. But… but no, there was no way that a pilot could forget or lose track of the towers. Not those big monsters. I left $10 on the table, took my bag and left.

I made my way onto the street. There was a hush on the corner of 12^th street and 6^th avenue, even with the screeching of the fire and rescue trucks going downtown. I stood on 6^th , looking at the smoke pouring from the tower. I could not see much, I mean aside from the smoke, and the faces of the other onlookers as we stood there. Around me, there were a few cries, and yet most of us where mostly curious. A plane, there. Why not crash in the river, instead, if a crash was inevitable? I started walking down 6^th, planning to get closer, to get a better view. Somewhere around 4^th street, the vibrations of a sound above me made me, instinctively, crouch. It happened fast, too fast for me to even register it, as if the sound and the vibrations had lingered in me longer to allow me to associate them with the sudden explosion of reds and blacks and white feathery papers that filled the sky.

Now I knew. I knew it could not have been an accident. And I was not alone in the understanding: all around me, the chattering that had united dozens of bystanders stopped and was replaced by a cry, a gasp, and a few curse words. My mind was blank, still inhabited by the vibrations and sounds and papers, still filled with the sudden knowledge that something had shifted, some quiet balance that had kept the world at bay and protected us from the bombs of the others. It had not been peace. Nor had it been, after all, our might. It had, only, been a truce.

I started backing up, unwilling to look anywhere else, yet aware, deep in my mind, that getting away from the buildings could possibly be something along the lines of sanity. I kept bumping on people who merely mumbled instead of the rude words I would have normally received, had I attempted this delicate maneuver on any other day. People were sobbing now, frantically dialing on their cell phones, pointing at the towers. The voices were coming back, hitting higher notes, as the people related to newcomers what had happened. I could not see their faces, as I walked backwards, yet I envied the new guys: they didn’t know. They could still live in that time before the end of the truce, they could still delay the realization. We couldn’t. We, the people who saw, could not tear our collective gaze from the smoking guns ahead of us. I suspected that the images had been seared onto our retinas.

Suddenly, as I was expecting something else to happen, I thought of the girls. I had forgotten them, for a few minutes, and it appeared like an unforgiveable act. If my going to the bathroom scared them, what would this do to them? I turned away from the towers and started running, my bag hitting the crush of people still gathering on the street corners, my mind suddenly filled with one thought: getting to my kids before… I didn’t know before what. I couldn’t finish the thought. Something else, something even worse could happen, would happen, was happening, right now, and I had been stupid enough to attempt to get closer to the buildings, forgetting I had responsibilities, two lovely, so lovely girls.

I saw the streets run by me, 7^th, 8^th, 9^th, 10^th, and finally found myself in front of the school. I was not alone there. Parents where arriving from every direction, talking nervously to one another. Most had been on the subway when it happened, or making their way towards their desks. A few, like me, had seen it from a street corner. Others had just arrived at the school with their excited children, expecting a normal day, protected, by some magical enchantment, from the knowledge that united all the others. I didn’t know these people. My kids were only starting first grade, so I had not made many friends among the parents. Yet, as we stood waiting by the doors for our sons and daughters, knowledge created a bond, however fraught by the differences in understanding and witnessing of something that lacked, at least for now, a distinct meaning. We didn’t know, aside from the little that we knew and could fit in one sentence (two planes hit the towers of the World Trade Center), what it all meant. Was it over? What was happening, high in the towers?

I had left the girls at school less than an hour ago. During that hour, I had seen planes and papers doing things that made no sense. All I wanted was to hold my kids, and promise that I would never leave them to deal alone with all that. I expected them to be scared, troubled, even traumatized by the sounds of the explosions and the sudden change in their routine caused by my arrival at school around 9:30. I expected them to punish me, in a way, for that. I expected them to cling even closer to me now, and it made sense, after all. I suddenly welcomed it. I may have been 36, but if my mother were alive, I would hide on her lap, with her hand stroking my hair, the other one on the small of my back, her voice soothingly telling me that everything would be ok, that we were safe. I wished my mom was still there, because she would have taken us in, my daughters and me, and hugged us until the images of the plane being swallowed by the tower receded from my burnt eyes.

But I was the mother now. So I walked into the school, and stood in front of Mrs. Pauls’ first grade class, expecting to witness some unrest in the classroom. Surely, they had heard. Or at least felt the turmoil that was taking the city. Yet, all 25 kids were sitting in a circle, listening to Mrs. Pauls read a story. Julianne and Katherine were not even side-by-side. Katherine was giggling in the ear of some blond little girl, while Julianne, sitting between a redheaded boy and a sturdy girl, had a serious frown on her face. Mrs. Pauls stood up when she saw me in the doorway. She walked towards me, and though my girls saw me, they didn’t move an inch, simply looking at each other. She asked if I was sure I wanted to “disrupt” the children. As if my coming there to rescue my kids and bring them to safety was more disruptive than what was going on downtown! I was gearing myself for an argument when we heard some yelling. Mrs. Pauls, ever so stoic, walked slowly in the hallway, towards the sound. The principal was standing in front of a TV screen, his hands on his mouth. He turned to face us, and simply said “It’s gone”. What could be gone? “The tower, the other tower. It disappeared.”

As if what I had seen so far made sense, this new level of impossibility struck me to my knees. Where could it have gone? I looked at the images, attempting to decipher the dust and the cloud of debris. Surely, something would be left, at least half of the tower, the one half that wasn’t touched by fire. Mrs Pauls had put her hand on my shoulder. Quietly. If that tower can go, she murmured, then the other one will too. You can’t leave. The children can’t leave.

And so we waited. I sat in the girls’ classroom, watching them listening to Mrs. Pauls’ stories, Katherine and Julianne, giggling girls who now looked nothing like the crying babies I had left 2 hours before. They didn’t even come to sit with me; they stayed in their place, Katherine beside the blond girl, Julianne with the redheaded boy. Until the parents of the other children came, we stayed. And then, around 2 or 3 in the afternoon, when it became somewhat clear that the worst was over, we left. The twins asked for ice cream: it smelled too bad to eat outside, so we bought it and walked home. There, they ran to their room, unfazed by the sounds and smells, and left me alone in the living room. I offered to read them a story, to play with them. I asked if they needed to talk about their day. They shrugged.

They didn’t even realize it when I stepped outside, on the landing, to discuss the day with the neighbors.

Une question de structure

Depuis quelque temps, un peu avant que Ginny ne rencontre Leah dans l'escalier de la tour nord, je me demande si mes nouvelles ne sont pas autre chose que des nouvelles. S'il n'y a pas là quelque chose comme une trame narrative plus large. Je ne dirai pas un roman, il m'aurait fallu y penser avant. Mais... Mais je ne sais pas. Dans le cas de plusieurs des textes les plus récents, je sens que le texte arrête, qu'il a besoin d'une pause, qu'il a besoin que je passe à un autre personnage avant de revenir à lui. Je me rends compte que sans nécessairement tous se rencontrer, mes personnages s'imbriquent dans quelque chose de plus large.

Alors je me prends à rêver de pouvoir les dessiner dans les tours, les placer, physiquement, pour pouvoir les raconter, leur donner des points de repère, une chronologie. Comme si pour raconter le 11 septembre, il fallait redonner une prise au temps.

Les paires

Je relis le manuscrit, et me rends compte que presque tous les personnages viennent en paires, alors que, dans Autour d'eux, mes personnages étaient seuls. Ces personnages-ci le sont aussi, après tout, peut-on être autrement que seul devant la mort? Mais ce qui m'intrigue, c'est de me rendre compte que, pour écrire le 11 septembre, je suis passée par les relations des personnages avec ceux qui restent.

Ainsi, Ginny, seule dans l'escalier, croise Leah sans la rencontrer, et Leah, en retour, est transformée par la détermination de Ginny qui lui donne le courage qu'elle refuse. Phil existe dans le recueil parce que son frère le cherche, ne veut pas l'abandonner dans les décombres. Eileen, face à sa propre mort, ne voit d'autre possibilité que de contacter ceux qu'elle aime, et à défaut de rejoindre ses enfants et son mari, elle appelle son père. Ne croyez surtout pas que mes personnages voient leurs relations changées par le spectre de la mort. Ce n'est pas de cela dont il s'agit.

En fait, je ne sais pas ce dont il s'agit. Peut-être n'est-ce qu'une autre évolution de mon écriture. Peut-être est-ce seulement le sujet qui appelle cela. Peut-être aurait-il été trop lourd, trop décourageant, d'avoir une vingtaine de personnes seules, complètement seules au moment de mourir ou de souffrir.

Je sais ceci, par contre: je n'écris peut-être pas tant l'histoire du 11 septembre que l'histoire de personnages, l'histoire de Danny et de son frère, l'histoire de Melanie forcée d'expliquer à son garçon que son papa ne reviendra plus, l'histoire de Leah qui veut mourir et survit. Pas tant l'Histoire, que les personnages.

Piètre certitude.

À quoi servent les théories du complot?

David Ray Griffin était à l'UQAM lundi soir. Grand prêtre du mouvement des "truthers", il est venu nous donner sa lecture des faits. Et le mot important est "lecture". J'étais troublée par la foule qui a fait la file pour entrer dans l'auditorium. Tous ces gens, pour ce genre de discours? Déception, donc. Je nous croyais moins crédules...

J'ai été intriguée à un moment par les théories du complot, je l'avoue. Le film Loose Change a semé le doute en moi par sa construction argumentative. Loose Change, Griffin et les autres (Meyssan, par exemple) ont l'avantage de proposer une version séduisante des attentats qui, en contredisant la version officielle dénonçant l'impuissance des services de sécurité, des secouristes, des immeubles même, vient dire que tout était prévu d'avance, et non seulement prévu, mais planifié par les figures du pouvoir interne. Autrement dit, au lieu d'avoir à accepter l'inimaginable, à savoir que personne n'a pu les protéger, même leur gouvernement, les truthers décident de croire à une version où l'ennemi est intérieur, donc identifiable. "Le fait de croire en des choses irréelles nous aide à supporter la vie réelle", dit Nancy Huston au sujet de la foi dans L'espèce fabulatrice.

Les théories du complot fonctionnent comme les dessins à numéro de notre enfance: elles organisent, relient des faits bizarre afin de révéler un dessin/dessein caché. Elles abolissent le hasard, la fatalité, le chaos, en disant : regardez, là, là, là, voyez comme tout peut faire sens si vous acceptez de voir la vérité. Autant Chossudovski venu présenter les conférenciers que Griffin ont martelé que "les faits étaient indéniables", que la science ne trompait pas. Les tours du World Trade Center ne se seraient pas effondrées sans l'intervention d'explosifs. Les témoins ont entendu des explosions. Ils disent cela, nous répétant que voyons, la science, la science mes amis, vous voyez bien que vous ne pouvez pas nier la vérité. Mais ils négligent de parler de faits tout aussi indéniables: préparer des immeubles pour une implosion prend des mois. Des mois au cours desquels des ouvriers auraient placé des explosifs contre les colonnes. Comment faire cela pendant que 45000 personnes visitent les tours à chaque jour? Et les explosifs auraient été déclenchés lors des premières explosions, lorsque les avions ont heurté les tours. Mais alors, les entend-on presque suggérer, les explosifs ont été installés après les avions. En 102 minutes, donc, et beaucoup moins pour la tour sud? Difficile, d'un point de vue scientifique, d'accepter cette possibilité. Ok, ok, pourraient-ils admettre. Mais les explosions? Vous voulez dire le feu rencontrant par exemple des réservoirs qui alimentaient des génératrices, des sources électriques? Ok, ok, mais alors, les "puff" de fumées, lorsque les tours se sont effondrées? Vous voulez dire la force même de l'effondrement, qui a compacté les tours de 110 étages en 7 étages de débris, donc compressé à la fois le contenu des tours et l'air?

Je ne nie pas le fait que les États-Unis ont profité des attentats pour faire accepter une augmentation des coûts de la défense, une diminution des droits par le Patriot Act, ni même qu'ils ont utilisés les attentats comme leitmotiv pour contrôler la population. Mais après le fait. Oui, cela a servi leurs intérêts. Mais comment auraient-ils pu planifier la chose? Une telle planification aurait supposé que plusieurs milliers de personnes, au gouvernement tout comme dans les services de sécurité et les services militaires, auraient été au courant des attentats. Dans une ville comme Washington où, comme le disait je ne sais plus quel intervenant, les secrets sont impossibles parce que chacun court immédiatement vers les médias pour être la personne qui révèle le scoop? Quand même!

Les théories du complot interviennent lorsque a) l'explication fragilise la perception d'un peuple, entraînant une insécurité; b) l'explication ne dit pas tout, comme dans le cas présent, soit par peur des conséquences, soit parce que l'information manque, soit parce qu'elle ne dira jamais assez devant l'ampleur d'un événement. Les théories du complot jouent le même rôle, en fait, que la religion et les mythes fondateurs: parce que l'humain ne comprenait pas comment la terre avait pu être créée, parce qu'il avait besoin d'apposer un sens et un récit à des faits qui le dépassaient, il s'est inventé une histoire. À chaque fois que l'humain a peur, souffre, il s'invente une signification qui transcende la peur et la douleur: karma, destin, fatalité. "Tout cela aide effectivement les gens à vivre, à supporter la douleur de la perte, à faire le deuil, à renouveler leurs énergies pour le lendemain", écrit encore Huston. Cela ne veut pas pour autant dire que Jésus est né de l'immaculée conception, ni que Moïse a séparé les eaux.

La religion, tout comme les théories du complot, est un récit. Ce récit, il nous appartient de l'interpréter, de le considérer comme récit et non comme vérité. Et il nous revient, aussi, de nous méfier, lorsque la propagande s'agite et, au lieu de nous proposer une explication, nous incite à crier devant des faits qu'elle présente comme "indéniables". La seule chose qui est indéniable, lorsqu'il est question du 11 septembre 2001, c'est que les tours du World Trade Center n'existent plus, et ont entraîné la mort de milliers de personnes. Tout le reste peut être réinterprété.

Je suis allée voir Griffin par curiosité, mais aussi parce qu'il me semblait que je le devais. J'ai expliqué, avant la conférence, ma "théorie", ma lecture des théories du complot comme récit fondateur, remplaçant dieu pour comprendre l'incompréhensible. J'ai lutté tout au long de la conférence pour ne pas hurler, déconstruire au fur et à mesure le discours de Griffin, en ajoutant d'autres données à ce qu'il disait. Je ne savais pas, viens à peine de le découvrir, que Griffin, professeur retraité de théologie, enseignait jusqu'en 2005 dans une université très religieuse, et dans un département dont la fonction première est de former de futures prêtres. Je ne le savais pas, mais l'ai tout de même reconnu dans son discours. Il parle bien, Griffin. Il a un vrai talent d'orateur, il est convainquant. Cela ne veut pas pour autant dire que sa vision du monde, séparée entre le vrai et le faux, les bons et les méchants, tient la route.