Love Is the Higher Law Read online

  LIMBO

  Jasper

  I felt there was a piece of me missing, a piece that had become so unnerved that it fell away without me feeling it. I didn’t even know what piece it was—I just felt the gap, and knew that whatever it was, it must have been important.

  I didn’t really leave the house. This wasn’t all that different from my original plan for when Mom and Dad were gone, only now there were people calling all the time, checking to see how I was, asking me if I wanted to meet up. It was like some mass email had gone out, and everybody was going out of their way to prove to me that we still lived in a caring universe. But I didn’t want any of it. The good thing about everyone’s post-disaster catatonia was that nobody wanted to be intrusive—they’d express concern or issue an invitation, but they were more than understanding if you said, “I just want to be alone right now.” So that’s what I did. I didn’t rant like a crazy person. I didn’t tell them to fuck off. I didn’t ask them what the point was. I just said I wanted to be alone. And then when I was alone, I ranted like a crazy person, told the world to fuck off, and wondered what the point was.

  The only exception I made was this boy Peter, because he was so persistent it was almost surreal. He made it seem like us getting together was a belief he had. So finally I told myself what the hell. I made him come out to Brooklyn, because there was no way I was going into Manhattan until it had straightened itself out. My initial impulse to go save it was gone. The more footage they showed on the news, the more horror stories we heard, the less I wanted to be there. I would just stay in Brooklyn and listen to my Moulin Rouge soundtrack on repeat until the happy times were here again. Or until I had to go to school—whichever came first.

  Mom was calling two or three times a day—it was probably costing them more than their plane tickets to keep in touch. She wanted to come home as soon as possible, but I kept telling her I was fine, that she and my father should stick to the original plan and take care of my grandmother and let all the other people who were stranded in Korea get home first.