It’s nearly two weeks now since the 11th. It doesn’t seem like that long; the size of that day makes it feel much closer. At the same time, though, it seems like much longer ago, like I’ve never not cried at hearing the national anthem, like I’ve never not trailed off mid-sentence to look out the window at a plane passing overhead and hope it would get out of my sightline in one piece — or just get out of my sightline, period, really. And now and then the 11th seems like a thing that never happened at all, a thing told to me, because what I remember from that morning still floats on top of my mind the way a drunken conversation might, or a nightmare. In college, library lore had it that, in the event of a fire in the rare books room, a mini-generator would suck all of the oxygen out of the room, and then all the windows and doors would seal off with impermeable steel like the big doors in WarGames. (Ernie and I often joked about luring our more frustrating exes into the rare books room somehow, then hitting the fire alarm.) Well, that’s what my brain appears to have done with the 11th, between the hours of ten a.m. and roughly midnight — locked it down and piped all the air out to guard against fire. Everywhere else in my mind, there’s the expected burnt edges and water damage, but that room is an airless kernel of nothing. I can’t seem to get in there; I don’t know that I ever will. It’s just as well, I guess. Doors like that don’t close for no reason.

I don’t cry as often. I did cry yesterday, during the national anthem at the Skydome. (Jays fans seated near me probably cried too. My singing voice, which even under the best of circumstances I could reasonably compare to the mating call of a sofa-sized piece of packing Styrofoam, is not exactly improved when choked with tears.) And I cried the day before that while looking at old pictures, snapshots from various spots on US 1, including one at the top of the Pulaski Skyway. It’s a very odd time to feel homesick, and the homesickness itself is different from homesickness I’ve had before — like, when I went away to college, I thought I felt homesick when actually I felt lonely. I missed my family; I missed my friends. The homesickness this time is mostly for the place itself. Of course, I long for the place I knew on the 10th, and the place I knew on the 10th is rubble now (not to mention a worn-out metaphor that the media can’t seem to resist).

But I miss New York anyway. Why? Because, in New York, I might have a snowball’s chance in hell of finding the kind of kitty litter that doesn’t clump. I do not want kitty litter that clumps. I hate kitty litter that clumps. The cats hate kitty litter that clumps. Even the clumps sit there in the box: “We hate ourselves.” Kitty litter that clumps tends to clump between the toes of the cats, you see, and the teeny little intra-cat-toe blobs of ossified cat pee wind up in my bed, and that’s another thing — kitty litter that clumps can claim until it’s blue in the face that it reduces “cat odors,” but it doesn’t. It just clumps the cat odors together so that they smell even worse, and then it tries to disguise the cat odors with a floral-derivative scent that also smells bad in its own let’s-live-in-denial-about-cat-poo way — I mean, it’s one of those smells, like Lysol in a nursing home, that can only mean other, ickier smells lurk nearby. And you can’t flush the clumps! You have to pick the clumps out of the litter box, put them in a baggie, put the baggie into another baggie, and put the baggies into the trash! Where the clumps continue to smell until you take out the trash! What an unbelievably stupid idea! And in other unbelievably stupid news, I cannot find any other kind of kitty litter anywhere! I have checked the supermarket. I have checked the convenience store around the corner. I have asked complete strangers on line at Tim Horton’s, and if there’s so much as a single solitary bag of regular old non-clumping clay litter in the entire city, apparently everyone’s on orders not to tell that crazy anti-clump American girl about it. I would give up an arm for a forty-pound bag of Hartz pH 5; I would drag it up all four flights of stairs to my apartment without a peep of complaint. No such bag exists within the Toronto city limits. So I burn a lot of incense.

Lavender incense, since you asked. It possesses calming properties that promote sound sleep, or so I read. I have nothing to do but read. The neighbors across the way like to play music really loudly. Last weekend, I inadvertently attended a rave until five thirty in the morning. I keep late hours, so that’s not a problem in and of itself, but at about five thirty-two each morning, the sun comes up, and the apartment has an eastern exposure and I hadn’t gotten around to buying curtains yet, so I had exactly two minutes to get to sleep before the cats would look over at the window, see sun, and decide that I had no excuse for not getting up and rolling their rattle mousie toy around the room for them. Needless to say, I did not fall asleep within the allotted time. Last Friday night, I got a front-row seat to a listening tour of the greatest hits of Mario Lanza. I did not want a front-row seat to that tour, or a back-row seat, or a seat in the same province. “Nessun dorma,” indeed. Mercifully, Lanzapalooza ended well ahead of schedule at about two in the morning. When silence fell, I peered out the window, unable to believe my luck, then sprinted to the bathroom while shucking off my clothes, brushed my teeth and washed my face at top speed, dashed for the bed, jumped in, and snuggled into the covers with three and a half hours to spare before the bright, evil sun began its merciless ascent into the sky. The cats hopped into bed after me. I turned off the light. I closed my eyes.

And then I opened my eyes again. And my eyes stayed open until four o’clock, because Unit 404 had brought the party back to their place. That’s fine. It’s Friday, after all. But the floors in the building creak like you wouldn’t believe, and twenty girls in platforms can create a veritable storm of creaking. And clomping. And, as it turns out, door-slamming. And slurring into cellphones (I guess Unit 404 does not get very good digital reception). And high-pitched giggling about a young man named Brendan, and about the fact that he’s, you know, super-sweet and stuff, but he totally needs to break up with Susan. Oh — did I mention that part of one of the walls of the apartment is actually a sealed-off door, but not a very well sealed-off door, because it lets in every sound from the hall? Because the girls didn’t know that, I don’t think. But I know that. I know it all too well. I also know a bunch of things about Brendan (uncircumcised, just for starters), and that Susan is a complete bitch, oh my God. Only sleepiness prevented me from stomping to the door, pressing my lips to the crack, and bellowing at them to send it to the Vine and shut up already.

At four o’clock, the Brendan powwow broke up, just in time for Unit 508 to begin yet another round of Insomniac Pacing Theater. I used the time to go over my budget figures for the month and see if I could possibly justify buying Unit 508 a carpet and taking it as a tax write-off. Unit 508 finally dropped off to sleep at five twenty-eight. That left me four minutes to get to sleep. Didn’t happen.

I don’t mind noise, generally. I make plenty, and so do the cats, and if I think back, I can recall sleeping through gales of decibels when I lived in the dorms at school, so I’ll get used to it again. I just haven’t gotten used to it yet. Right now, Unit 403 is educating me in the art of the muffled break-beat. And it’s only muffled because the toilet is running. Again. But I’ll live; eventually, I won’t even hear these things anymore. That’s probably going to happen about two nights before I have to go back to New York, but whatever.

I’ll miss things about this apartment, though, I can tell. It’s a lot more space than I have in New York, so I’ll miss that. I’ll miss getting to walk out my front door and hop into the car. Okay, so it’s more like “step over several used condoms, stare in dismay at the obvious butt-print on my hood, and then hop into the car,” but that’s a small price to pay. But the best thing about the place? Wood flooring. Yeah, it’s creaky. Yeah, it’s noisy. Yeah, it gets kind of cold. But when I roll a cat toy across the loft and the cats take off after it at a dead run, it’s nothing but good times ahead, because one of the cats is going to lose his footing, and he’s going to flail around and skid into the other cat, and the other cat is going to lose his footing and yaw off to the left while the first cat gets completely tangled up in his own legs and rolls under the bed like a big humiliated dust bunny, and it’s just as funny every time. “Look! Look look! Go get the mousie, GO GET IT!” Whoooossh. Wrrrt wrrrt wrrrt fffffffffffwump. “Pfffft!” Shhhhhhhhhhbonk. “Pfffft!” “Hee hee hee! Oh, don’t look at me like that. You’ll laugh about it later.” You just don’t see that kind of thing with wall-to-wall carpeting. Of course, with wall-to-wall carpeting, when you step on an errant bit of Cat Chow, your foot doesn’t shoot out from under you, and you don’t wind up doing a split with your head jammed under the couch somehow while the cats step over you and pointedly continue eating, but you can’t have everything.

Well, I have to drive to Manitoba to find a goddamn bag of goddamn clay cat litter, so I’ll wrap it up for the week. But first, let me say that it’s a difficult, sad, uncertain time for the US and for the world, and I feel sort of guilty complaining about The Clump That Ate Pittsburgh — but, in a weird way, it’s nice to know that the same old things still get on my nerves. It’s almost a relief. My apartment here is half again the size of my apartment in New York, and the desk is twice the size, but Little Joe still chooses to sleep in the printer tray. That annoyed me a year ago. That annoyed me on the 10th. That’s annoying me right now. Not everything has to change, and that’s a comfort.

September 24, 2001

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