I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This by Nadja Spiegelman Page A

multicolored handprints of paint. Why would anyone pray for
us,
we wanted to know. We did not want pity. The smell of death was all around us but I knew no one who knew anyone who haddied. We were fine. We were not damaged. This seemed very important to prove. When tourists began to ask the way to Ground Zero, we told them to walk to the river and jump in. When tour buses passed and pointed at our school, we threw our empty soda cans at them. When the subway stopped in a tunnel without warning, we gripped the poles in silence but did not acknowledge why. It would take me years to realize that not everyone had nightmares about bombs and planes.
    In those nightmares, I was not afraid. I was in the cool lucid place beyond fear. In all of them, I had a small child with me. In one, I drove us through a road filled with land mines. In another, I hid us in a basement while men with guns shot anyone who moved. When the shooting stopped, I crept out and found us water. My dreams were not about death. They were about survival. They diminished in frequency, but they never stopped. One morning in my late twenties, I awoke with the realization that I was also the child. The building had fallen and split me in two. The world moved on too quickly for me, looking back before the moment had even passed. Part of me had stayed frozen, floating above the West Side Highway. The self that had kept walking, had found water, was a different me, profoundly altered.
    I avoided all media related to the event, until avoidance became a deeply ingrained habit. Footage of the towers falling never ceased to feel like an assault. It felt obscene to watch.
    On the one-year anniversary, I came across a magazine on our kitchen table. On the cover was a glossy photo of people standing in the windows of one of the towers, poised to jump.
    â€œMaman?” I said.
    â€œYou didn’t know?” she said, surprised.
    Even a decade and a half later, I would find it intolerable thata memorial had been built, and a new tower. How dare they reconcile that event into an ordered past. It was still happening. It was still incomprehensible.
    The morning it happened, my parents had gone out to vote in the mayoral primary. They had just left our house; they were on our street. My mother saw a plane fly low overhead. She followed it with her eyes. She watched it leave a hole in the tower.
    My mother counted the stories. The tower had been breached. The top might fall. She saw it in her mind’s eye, falling. She saw the radius around it, saw my school. My father had gone upstairs to check the news. My mother screamed his name in the street, wild with fear. Onlookers stared. She called his cell phone frantically until he came downstairs. She dragged him into the heart of the chaos that others were already fleeing. For nearly an hour, my parents searched the school building for me.
    It is posed as a theoretical question, whether a mother would run into a burning building to save her child. It is not one that many people know the answerto.

chapter three
    R ecently, an old schoolmate of my mother’s sent her two class photos. Blown up to well beyond their original size, they were grainy and unfocused.
    â€œIf I hadn’t seen these,” my mother said, “I would have told you that I was always like this.” She pointed to the first photograph. “That I was always shy, invisible, a little girl. Miserable.” In that photo, she sat with her legs crossed at the knee, hands in her lap, looking up at the camera sweetly. But in the second photo, her eyes locked confidently with the camera. Her shoulders were thrown back and her spine was straight.
    â€œYour father found me right away on the second one. He said, ‘Oh, you were already yourself!’”
    â€œWhat happened?” I asked.
    â€œI don’t know,” my mother said, and paused, her finger lingering on the paper. “I suppose I became myself.”
    â€”
    I N THE SUMMER