The Memory of Things

“Two planes have hit, one building is down, and my dad is in there somewhere.”

The novel’s action begins in media res: Kyle moves in a vast, surging crowd across the Brooklyn Bridge just after the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapses as a result of a terrorist attack. Here he recounts the conflict on the novel’s first page, updating the reader in real-time. The conflict is bold and sweeping, affecting thousands near the attack; it is also deeply personal, as the general whereabouts of Kyle’s father is known but his precise location and condition a mystery. This line sets the stage for the duality of the novel’s conflict; it will exist on two levels (communal and personal) throughout.

“He waits, so I try, / nod and breathe past the / scraping pieces in my chest: / (brick, / stone / metal, / glass). / Try to ignore how it aches.”

This early passage from the first-person perspective of the nameless girl establishes her character voice and represents her confusion and pain with its free-verse style, word choice, and connotation. The parentheses indicate images and memories from the scene of the attack; later, Kyle indicates that the girl’s covering of ash and dust is so thick that she must have been very near the South Tower when it was hit or when it collapsed.

“You…dah…?”

Uncle Matt cannot elucidate messages very easily after his injuries sustained in an accident, but he is quick to ask about Kyle’s father (his brother), indirectly demonstrating Matt’s priorities and love of family. The novel offers slow-building clues about the family dynamics between Kyle’s uncles Matt and Paul and his father; Kyle states he is not much like his own father, but he demonstrates respect and pathos for Uncle Matt’s intelligence and struggle.

“I don’t think she knows who she is.”

Kyle reveals to Uncle Matt that he led the nameless girl home and that her condition is worse than he originally assessed. This simple statement is more significant than it might appear. It is Kyle’s first admission that while he wants to help the girl and assuage his own loneliness with her presence, he cannot easily help someone who does not recall their own identity. The line encapsulates the more profound complexity of his internal, personal conflict within the bigger communal conflict of the terrorist attack.

“The boy has been nice, / trying, / but I can’t— / Everything feels too precarious. One wrong move, / and the eye floaters will rush in like a deluge.”

These lines of verse from the girl serve as a mini-cliffhanger at the end of Part 1. She indicates indirectly that she is ready to give up hope, and rather than fight the shakiness of her mental and emotional state, she would prefer to maintain a modicum of command over it by taking the stolen Valium. There is a notable parallel here between her need to exact some control over her out-of-control world and Kyle’s need to do the same, but whereas the girl wants to resort to unconsciousness, Kyle attempts to take charge of mundane tasks in an effort to push normalcy.

“Uncle Matt is a genius and a memory expert. He has an IQ of 152. Only eight points lower than Einstein’s. I never got why he wasted it being a cop.”

Readers glean just as much about Kyle as they do Uncle Matt in these lines, if not more. It is indicated subtly that, while the men in Kyle’s family join the police force, Kyle already suspects he will disappoint his father in that regard. Here, he reveals that he does not associate serving as a police officer with the kind of intelligence Uncle Matt possesses in abundance. While Kyle never comments on how intelligent he believes himself to be, readers know that he attends a math and science magnet school (Stuyvesant) and has an affinity for performing some type of music.

“How can a person get up and go to school on a Tuesday morning, their life all normal and fine and, then, boom, gone? Life should be more permanent than that.”

Kyle finds out from his friend Marcus on the phone that classmates’ close relatives almost certainly died in the Towers—a father, an uncle. His thoughts here connect directly to Uncle Matt’s accident, in that just months before, Matt was a strong, capable, and energetic man with goals and plans; now, he cannot get to the bathroom without help. Both examples are hard for Kyle to comprehend, and he finds their unfairness overwhelming. The lines support the theme of “The Ephemerality of Life.”

“I stare at her knee, filled with an overwhelming desire to kiss her, which I know is totally inappropriate. I don’t even know her name. She doesn’t even know her name.”

A little levity eases the tragedy’s tension as Kyle feels nervy and awkward near the girl. His crush on her is apparent; she’s physically attractive to him, but moreover, she is filled with a mysterious allure he finds irresistible. Like the soldier and Esme he reads about in Salinger’s story, he cannot stop thinking about her.

“I can’t begin to wrap my head around that number, so how does Marcus survive knowing his country lost more than a hundred times that number?”

Kyle hears on the news that over 3,000 people may have died in the attacks. After realizing his adopted friend might be reminded of his youth in genocidal Uganda, Kyle tries to research the conditions Marcus survived. For the first time, he sees the statistics from 1983-85’s “population removal” (99). All the numbers are too big for Kyle to comprehend on a realistic level. His interest in and obligatory need to learn something about his friend’s background demonstrate responsibility and maturity on Kyle’s part, but his comments about the number of people killed also reveal his inexperience and lack of worldliness.

“I leave the snow globe on the ground, / a farewell, / and start up the stairs / to the bridge.”

The girl takes one of Kerri’s snow globes with her when she flees Kyle’s apartment for the Brooklyn Bridge; it has apples in it, but all she can think of when she shakes it is drops of blood falling. The girl’s intentions are not revealed directly, but she beats Kyle to the bridge and is certainly thinking of flying, with a specific Swan Lake pose in her mind. Her need to fly toward water like a swan represents her desperation to be rid of the awful memories of blood, ash, bone, metal, and destruction, to be clean of the debris from the collapse, and to be free of the vague memories haunting her.

“He’s the only thing that feels remotely like home.”

A statement like this might typically be hyperbolic in YA literature, but in this case, the girl is speaking the truth; she has no memories yet of her actual home. Even considering a more metaphorical interpretation of “home,” most of her memories are or take a turn toward dark and unpleasant, if not traumatic, events, even the ones in which she can almost see people from her past.

“I forget that this day isn’t normal, that yesterday wasn’t normal, that the entire world as we know it has stopped; […]. And I forget that, at least here in New York, we don’t know when—or if—it will ever be normal again.”

Kyle is thrilled to forget his given circumstances briefly when he teaches the girl how to easily recall a list of ten random items; it is good to let go of the horrific images and painful reality of the last 48 hours for just a few minutes. Situational irony exists in his assessment of the value in forgetting, as part of the reason he enjoys forgetting reality briefly is the girl’s amnesia, which causes him uncertainty and doubt about his actions.

“Whatever happened Tuesday, we’re all New Yorkers here.”

Kyle sees a defiant message—“We are FIRST Americans” (176)—in black Sharpie on cardboard signs in the closed windows of Arabic food stands at Coney Island. He feels nauseous regarding the need for such a message. Despite the mayor’s plea to open businesses as usual, the triple-locked gates and doors give him pause. He has not yet thought about the repercussions to Middle Eastern Americans and Americans of Middle Eastern descent, but the sight foretells conflict in the days ahead.

“I catch my breath, swim out farther, / past where they break, / and the water is calm. / Here, I float / let the silence of the water down out / the sounds / (the tears, / the explosions and / shattering glass, / that still ring / in my ears).”

Seeking respite from her painful, threatening memories, the girl gives in to the pull of the water when she dives into the ocean off Coney Island. Here, her memories of learning to swim at someone’s encouragement combine with the awful images of the terrorist attacks. These lines juxtapose figurative language and sensory imagery in “calm,” “float,” and “silence” with “tears,” “explosions,” and “shattering glass.”

“Like I’m adrift, in soaking wet clothes that are too heavy with the weight of things I don’t even know.”

The girl tries to explain how she feels as a captive to her memory with this simile. She describes a feeling of oppression and heaviness as if the collection of things she will soon remember threatens to suffocate her. Kyle listens and empathizes but mostly feels relief at this moment, happy to get the girl back safely.

“It shows me you haven’t quite found your own love yet. […] For yourself, child. Self love, not outward, is what I need you to understand. […] The line is strong. You have good instincts but you need to learn to trust in yourself. Not worry about others. Follow your heart.”

Madame Yvette, the fortune teller from whom Kyle and the girl seek palm readings, explains a side of Kyle’s personality to him. The lines succinctly summarize Kyle’s character arc; he displays anxiety and doubt, for example, about his father’s opinion of him throughout the early part of the book. Later, once he gains a footing in his own self-worth due to helping responsibly with his home and his uncle, he worries less about others’ opinions, knowing that he is doing the right thing. Appropriately, he notices more pride in his father regarding his actions.

“For a while we just kiss, and everything else falls away, and it occurs to me that, in the middle of one of the worst things that has ever happened to me, is now also one of the best things.”

Romantic suspense builds up throughout the story as Kyle admits more frequently in his interior first-person monologue that he is attracted to and even in love with the girl. After an emotional day at Coney Island and a cryptic stop at a fortune teller’s, the two finally kiss; the girl reveals she has feelings for Kyle as well. His statement describes the situational irony of the moment: the unexpected dichotomy between tragedy and pure joy.

“We are bound in tragedy, bound by some common enemy together. Even if we don’t know who the enemy is.”

Kyle notes with a metaphor the sense of togetherness and community in the atmosphere on the Promenade three days after September 11th. Missing person flyers, American flags, and makeshift memorials fill the scene. Kyle alludes here to the fact that most Americans have not yet grasped the details of the terrorists’ identities and motivations but felt a spirit of unity that defined the aftermath of the attacks.

“I want to freeze-frame and reverse time, go back before I knew. Before I had any part in making her remember.”

In a low, dispirited moment in the narrative, Hannah shows Kyle on a website the address of her father’s office, where she knew he was at the time of the attacks: the 63rd floor of One World Trade Center. Kyle feels guilt at this moment, thinking the TV show he’d chosen to leave on was the trigger for bringing back all Hannah’s painful memories and realizations. Ironically, after having been her protector for days, he feels he is the one who caused this pain; more ironically, he does not know that she has already regained her memory before hearing and seeing her father’s interview.

“You can’t actually dance in those wings.”

Hannah explains to Kyle with a bittersweet laugh why the photos of her mother’s dance company show Hannah in costume as Odette but without the wings. The line shows the symbolism of the swan wings; they connect Hannah deeply to her mother and represent her grief. She wants to keep the wings near her, evidenced when she brings them or wears them to the café on Tuesday morning, where she feels closest to her mother. As her memories slowly return, she wears the wings in modified dance steps in Kerri’s bedroom the day after the attack; then, her movements are restricted by space and unclear thoughts. To dance without constraint, she must remove the wings; to move forward in her future, she must learn to let go of the grief that holds her back.

“Any minute, he’ll be on his way here to get you.”

Kyle’s father turns Hannah’s world on a dime as he reveals via his police connections that her father, whom she assumed had died when One World Trade Center collapsed, is alive and plans to pick her up within hours. This plot point concludes the brief, intensely emotional relationship that developed in short days between Kyle and Hannah; they make no plans for further get-togethers beyond an exchange of email addresses, wordlessly agreeing that circumstances are too fluid and too uncertain for discussion of continuing to see one another.

“It’s something quiet and possessive, and will fall apart once it’s diluted.”

In his interior monologue, Kyle describes how his overnight attraction and love for Hannah cannot withstand the “real” world once his world and hers regain some semblance of normalcy. He personifies the relationship using human characteristics in the first part of this line, suggesting that their feelings for one another were both emotionally consuming and without explanation. School, family responsibility, and distance will cause their passion to “dilute;” the connotation of this figurative language suggests a fading away instead of a sudden cutting off.

“I’ll take this side. It will be quicker with both of us moving him.”

In a critical moment in which Kyle demonstrates how the events of the last days caused him to mature, he shows his father his willingness to help more with Uncle Matt. Kyle hopes to ease the burden his parents feel from now on while continuing to work with Uncle Matt on his physical and mental recovery. Interestingly, Uncle Matt’s progress so far parallels Kyle’s own coming-of-age experiences in the story. As Uncle Matt improves memory and motor skills, Kyle makes realizations and discoveries about his role in the family and his tendency to protect those he cares about.

“Sometimes never being ready is the best kind of ready to be.”

Hannah hears this line on Kyle’s well-liked show, Cow and Chicken, just before her father arrives to get her on Friday night; she immediately reiterates to Kyle the truthfulness of the statement. Most directly, the line interpretation here indicates that no matter what is said or not said between the two of them this night, they will never be ready to say goodbye after the last days; it is best, then, to not try to plan or explain but simply enjoy and appreciate what they had.