The start of something

In 2007, it was revealed that Tania Head, the president of the World Trade Survivors’ Network, had fabricated her story and had not been in the towers during the 9/11 attacks.  She wasn’t living in the United States in 2001 and her name wasn’t even Tania.

You want to know how it started?

It started so easily and there are so many others to blame.  Not just me.  I blame it on the internet, the fact that my mother is left-handed, and because my star sign is Leo.  I blame it on the first smell of cut-grass, a sea breeze in Andorra and staying up late one night drinking whiskey.  I would also then have to blame it on the whiskey stained wooden table that next morning and Meg.  But most of all I blame it on a phone call from Dave.

Dave was the light in my life.  I had loved him a long time before I spoke to him and would spend hours just delighting in his beauty, intellect and wit.  I was drawn to him from the start and as he was the only other American in the office that spring, we shared an immediate connection.

We spent many happy afternoons together and I felt at home with him.  I even liked myself when I was around him and didn’t worry about my weight or my shyness.  Briefly put, he made me feel beautiful and wanted and as if I were a part of something.

But “I don’t love you” was all Dave said on the phone that night and I felt like I had vanished.  The disorientation lasted a long time and I felt beached and sick and could hardly recognise myself in the bathroom mirror.

“I’ll change” I promised

“No you won’t.  You’re a liar” he said and he hung-up the phone.

I didn’t tell lies I told stories. The stories came so easily to me and I told them casually and without malice.  Sometimes I changed a bit of detail to spice-up the mundane or to offer a little character to an otherwise boring anecdote.  But they weren’t lies, they were stories.

So I couldn’t believe it when he asked me to stop calling him and he returned the watch I had given him for his birthday.  One day we were eating fresh strawberries in the park, laughing at the people walking by and the next day he hated me and thought I was a liar.  He made it impossible for me to see out my contract in Barcelona which is why I had to get a transfer back to the States.

It took me a long time to settle into New York.  My tasks at work were almost the same as in Barcelona but my colleagues did things with so much more confidence and ease.  I organised my new life, rented a cheap apartment in Brooklyn and tried to walk around the city as if I really did live and belong there, but it was futile.  I didn’t understand the new city I lived in, I couldn’t go back to Barcelona and I didn’t want to go home.  I was stuck.

But life improved when my colleague and my only friend at the time, Meg, asked me out for lunch one Friday.  She said she had been meaning to invite me for weeks, but between one deadline and another, time had just slipped by.  I accepted and we headed to her favourite place on 42nd street, which is where she started to asking me about my personal life.

“So tell me all about yourself” she commanded “any lovers, stories, secrets to share?”

“There was a man, yes there was one” I said.  “His name was Dave, but he…he died in the towers”.

Her immediate grief and empathy seduced me and I felt at home, safe and nested and no longer stuck or cemented as I had been.  I looked at her eyes filled with sorrow for me, and when she held my hand I started to cry too.

“Dave died in the towers” I repeated.  “I survived.  Of course, most days I wish I hadn’t”.

“My God, I had no idea” she said “you are so brave, so strong”.  She was overwhelmed with the proximity of the tragedy.

Neither of us went back to work that day.  We called in sick with some excuse about food poisoning and went back to her apartment with whiskey.  We talked and cried until early the next morning and it was wonderful.  But I often think if she had stopped me there in that café that I might not have continued.  If only she had doubted my claim for one second and not comforted me or encouraged me to tell her more gruesome detail, I might not have gone on with my story.  My version.  My history.

So it’s really all Meg’s fault when you think of it.  She’s far more to blame than Dave ever was or could be.  And so I incriminate and charge her.  For the deeds at her feet and those muddy ones at mine that I don’t like looking at.  For all that has passed since and for some future sins that none of us have thought about, developed or are aware of yet.  It’s all her fault and I blame her.