You went right, but left, at the exact same moment.   

Could have been one of those pointless riddles we told each other as kids, back when we were always together, two halves of an endearingly nerdy whole. Flashdance high turtlenecks and friendship necklaces. Dragons & Dungeons and Chess Club.  

Then the teens. You were cuter and thinner, which gave you more than half of the whole. An older person’s riddle: less was more. “Girl Most Likely to Still Look as Hot in Jeans as in a Little White Dress in 20 Years.” That yearbook superlative thrilled you. Don’t deny it!    

**

Everyone called me on September 11. 

I watched, incredulous, from a 54th floor window at my law firm, and then from the Yuppie chaos of Midtown East, people sweating in their suits, smoking. Who knew. So many people still smoked.

A recent cell phone adopter, I was surprised to be so easily reachable in spite of it all.  I’m ashamed to say this made me expect the calls and notice absences, like we were in some opposite world where I just gave birth.  

You, and only you, also called early the next morning. In answer to your questions, of course I would do everything the same. Walk to the subway, check. Grab a weak but sweet coffee from a cart on the way, wondering why I don’t just make my own and save the cash, check. Enter the subway.  Go to work. Take a beat. Check. 

“Glad my best friend is modeling sanity for the world,” you said, from a medical residents’ break room in the hospital. “Here not so much.”  

“How so?” I was curious what was happening in the Midwest, or your little part of it.  

“Oh,” you said airily, “The same doctors who think our patients and most staff are hysterical are themselves already halfway on their way to becoming survivalists. Like anyone’s targeting the north shore of Chicago anyway. Drama queens.”  

**

 I looked for ways to help in the immediate aftermath. My particular talents—shuffling paper, what some called “practicing law”—turned out to be useful to make the deaths official.   I told you how they needed lawyer volunteers to also act as notaries public.  

“Normally, when there isn’t a physical body,” I explained, “it takes basically forever to get a pronouncement of death…” I paused to remember what the trainer said. I think the time period was seven years. Like Biblical Jacob working for his beloved Leah, only to work and wait seven more for Rachel, but maybe it was four or five. Something long.    

“I’ve seen this in movies, I think. Anyway, now it’s automatic?” 

You were always so fast.   

“Yep. If the family can show the person was at Ground Zero. I ask the questions and write up the… narrative, I guess it’s called, and stamp the papers with a notary stamp.”  

Paperwork. Affidavit. Stamp.  

Missing. Presumed dead. Dead.  

I could’ve stopped there, but for the millionth times in our lives, talking to you made me see something under the surface. “It’s so old-fashioned, this actual stamp. So dumb. This isn’t an Ivory Merchant film, like stamping hand-written letters the butler takes down the street to the fiancée. Plus, they’re acting like having a notary stamp is some honor, an incentive to help. They’re making any lawyer who helps an emergency notary public for all purposes. Maybe after this is over I can, like, verify your mortgage next time I see you and charge you two dollars.” 

“I can forge your signature anyway, ha-ha. But it’s weird you’re so bugged. Who cares.  Those are just the rules.”

 “It’s just… annoying that the organizers acted like we needed to get something out of this, especially something less useful than a free toaster, to help.”  

“But you are getting something out of this,” you said, “the ‘good person’ thing, the making-a-difference thing.”

“Shouldn’t we be doing something?” 

“My biggest fear is nothing will happen because all the liberals will worry about how they look. There needs to be pay back, and fast.”

This was new, surprising.  

“What does the opposite of ‘nothing will happen’ mean to you? Cancelling civil rights? Destroying the world?” I braced for something I might not want to hear.

“Relax, CLUA, maybe people will snap out of their stupor—gotta go—I’m being paged.” 

“Hope it’s not an all-nighter. And stay safe.” I kept my tone light. I was, as you well knew, a card-carrying member of CLUA, the Civil Liberties Union of America. 

“Stay safe,” you responded. 

Stay safe. That phrase now loaded. Following one of those free-floating ‘be careful’ lectures at the middle school auditorium, it became our ironic parting at our side-by-side lockers in our gentle and snug small town high school, before one ambled off to a class to learn about things that happened to other people, and the other went to gym, or vice versa. Then our phone sign-off at our respective suburban campuses, before you went to med school and me to law school. Twin halves of the conventional professional whole.  

**

Pier 60 at the Hudson River was the makeshift volunteer center, retrofitted as federal government property. A United States flag. National Guard. President Gore’s portrait, stern and suddenly young-looking; Vice President Lieberman, looking like an affable uncle; Secretary of State Holbrooke, looking pissed.   

Another quick training. One form for demographic information, and another for the family’s affidavit of why the missing person must have been there on that morning.  There was less overt grief and sadness than I expected. Could be the muting effect of the cavernous pier, or maybe stoicism – like everything else – was contagious. I saw spouses, wives in the main, many supported by another relative, there was always a brother somewhere. I read that people who lost a twin had a singularly exquisite sort of pain, from the flip sides of the same womb, but I didn’t see any twins.   

The families were justified in believing their relatives were at Ground Zero.

Affiant One’s spouse was a managing director at one the banks who without fail ran a weekly senior leadership team meeting that landed on that morning. Without fail. 

 Affiant Two’s sister quit her job in financial sales to “find herself” (she always used the quotes; what, really, was there to find?), and quite purposefully stayed in the financial district to cement her ongoing agreement with her own decision, walking her dog around the area of the towers before heading off for a jog in the opposite direction, wearing her sweats, grabbing dog treats from the lobby of one of the towers. She might have been unemployed, but the discipline that made her successful, though unhappy, stuck. Her routine was inviolate. 

Affiant Three’s younger son was determined to get that promotion, having been passed over before. He was going to work earlier and earlier to compensate for the lack of quantitative fluidity that came so easily to his older brother, for whom finance was a boon to get the entire family out of the lower middle class. Lest anyone think they started out loaded. Not that there was favoritism. The younger son, God rest his soul, had other gifts that never fully blossomed.  The older son was late to work that day, luckily, but the younger boy was there plugging away, because that’s who he was. He was at his terminal, plugging away.  

Affiant Four’s cousin first confirmed that whether their family was documented didn’t matter. His younger cousin handled breakfast deliveries in the World Trade Center, those large, plastic covered plates of tight grapes and quasi-desiccated muffins and bagels that people always thought would taste fresher than they did. Even hard-nosed masters of the universe were suckers for the elusive sweetness of the breakfast plate. He couldn’t afford to miss work, and he never, ever did.

Other than my galloping fear when encountering older parents alone, without emissaries of the younger generations to help them (nothing is worse than losing your kids, as they say), the whole thing quickly felt routine.

**

The third day of volunteering, a set of parents told me I gave them the wrong forms. 

“We need the other forms. From the other place.” 

I was befuddled.

“I’m sorry – ‘other place’? There are a few facilities, but the forms are uniform, so you don’t need to start over. I’ll just check if you started somewhere else. Don’t want to make you repeat yourself.”  I was rambling, shuffling, afraid of anything the clients would say outside the four corners of the interviewing, when all I had to do was witness and parrot.    

“Our daughter is dead.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“No one here will pay. We need the form to go to the place where everyone will pay.  This place, this seat, this girl—that’s you, honey, or another like you—but the other place.”

Shit. They looked so normal, soldierly. Did grief make them crazy? Can crazy people sound so emphatic? Or were crazy people always so emphatic? They wanted my supervisor.  Thank God.

He came over. His name was something like Marc Jameson or James Marxson—it’s a blank.  

They explained that they needed a different version of all of this. They knew it existed, the other, it must, they felt it. 

Mirror-image-named supervisor sighed, nodded, told the couple to wait, and brought me to a space behind a divider.  

 “We have to move quickly,” he started, demonstrating by pulling papers together at lighting speed, briefly pausing to wince from a nasty-looking paper cut and suck his finger greedily.  When he removed it, a touch of blood remained on his tooth. “Take a look at these forms for their preparation, make sure the pagination is correct, and then these folks can look at them for their waiver.” 

The documents he handed me were warm, as though having just come from a printer.  The first was a Supreme Court opinion that got it backwards, like that famous newspaper header about Dewey and Truman. Bush v. Gore, read the title, and it was long and confusing, just like the real version of the opinion, but opposite. Instead of requiring a statewide recount, the opinion stopped the statewide recount. Justice Souter, who wrote the majority opinion in the real version, wrote the dissent in this hot version I was holding in my hand. In this version, Bush won and Gore lost.  

The document wasn’t quite bulky enough to need a huge binder clip, but giving the job to a staple was ambitious. The last pages, from the dissenting opinion, were falling out.  

“Darn it to hell” snapped the supervisor, with more passion than I ever heard him use, as he struggled to re-affix the pages with the sole means at his disposal, the stapler, before finally getting rid of the last pages so the pile looked nice and neat. Then he pulled out other papers.  

From what I could read of that place, for those who wanted vengeance, or for those who tolerated (or wanted) the aftermath of vengeance, it was there for the taking. The Patriot Act, which I knew for a fact died in committee in the real world, was enacted into law in that one.  There were forever wars. If your grief is endless, perhaps this made sense. If a death affects you infinitely, and anyone is at risk, should there be infinite deaths to prevent that?  

“This wasn’t covered in the basic training,” he, Marc or James, explained, reading my palpable confusion, his voice returned to neutral and bureaucratic. “There are special circumstances for some. If they know about the other world, by definition they can pass through to it. Once the forms are stamped, of course. This other place is called the ‘Bush v. Gore’ world.” 

I had no idea what to say, and he just kept talking.  

“Between you and me,” he started, his stiff voice suggesting there was actually a lot in the space between him and me, “I don’t love the nomenclature. They considered trying to identify the first event that put that world on a different path, but the cause-and-effect discussion got too contentious and philosophical” –the word sounded uncomfortable in his mouth— “and there wasn’t time. The lawyers won, like always. Thus, the name of the other world is now reduced in shorthand to a court case, Bush v. Gore.” 

He didn’t think much of lawyers.

 This being the United States of America, I surely could have protested, taken a stand.  But I found myself focused on the smaller things, the band-aids and the binder clips. I didn’t know how to act in this makeshift place, and before I knew it the couple came in, heads high.

“You can’t come back if you go,” he told them, that’s ok, they said, rummaging through the papers with tight satisfaction. All I had to do was stamp. 

**

I didn’t tell a soul. Not the guy I started dating, much as I loved to jumpstart intimacy with over-sharing (as I’d been told in so many words). Not my parents. Not even you. I didn’t read anything in the news about disappearing parents, raising the troubling question of whether I made the whole thing up, whether my brain was capable of so easily dispatching inconvenient people.

The country grew more split; you, more disaffected. The decision not to invade Afghanistan, and focus on multinational negotiations, was not universally popular and not, at first, terribly successful. Another, smaller attack meant the 2002 mid-terms went badly for the Democrats. There was internecine squabbling. The revelation soon after of the role of Saudi Arabia in the attacks justified the initial caution, though the necessity of continued relations, while speeding up the efforts on alternative energy, was a bitter pill. Better than a war, in my view.

For your part, these events stoked your desire for revenge, your restlessness. Made me wonder what I didn’t know about you. Maybe there were harmed sides of you that needed to come out and fight. Maybe you were just sad. Maybe you were furious you dedicated years of your life to a surgical specialty you already were sick of, and that no longer paid as well. 

Or maybe you were unknowable to me, and we were riddles to each other, fundamentally different. Different wholes.   

In 2003, you came to NYC for a mutual friend’s wedding, upstate, and with your sharp memory, asked if I kept that notary stamp. I never told you about the other world, but somehow you knew.  

The day you left, to go right, I had a blurry dream about a version of chess where victory comes from checkmate to the King, not the Queen. Fantastical. Logical. Inevitable. I sensed you were there, safe in your way, with the world making sense to you, playing that version; me, in my place, safe in mine.

About the Author:

Rachel Geman is a lawyer, community mediator, and author. As  much or more worrier than warrior, she writes comedy about the mirthfully funny and speculative fiction about the mirthlessly funny. Her work has appeared in Points in Case, Games World of Puzzles, the Belladonna, the Bigger Picture, Jane Austen’s Wastebasket, and others. More about and by Rachel: here, here, and here. 

*Feature image by Jimmy Ofisia on Unsplash