Dan Fishback: To this opportunity...

I sit on the right whenever I take New Jersey Transit to New York City. The approaching skyline makes for sweeter eye-candy than the surrounding marshland. Last Thursday, I spent my train ride anticipating a changed New York.

I imagined that everyone would crowd around the right-hand windows, staring at the new shape of the skyline. Riding through Pennsylvania and New Jersey, I could feel the anxiety around me. People started eyeing the window well before we reached Princeton Junction. Many were visibly frightened.

New York is still handling regular bomb threats. You need an ID to move around south of Canal Street. You can still smell the soot in the air. I could see the death-fantasies on the faces of my neighbors. I was scared too. The city still seemed fictional to me. The chaos still sounded like a movie. I thought the sight of the missing towers would diffuse my nervousness, but the rain gathered strength, the clouds descended and the fog was so thick that, before we could make out any buildings, we had arrived at Penn Station.

Katherine was supposed to meet me under the arrivals and departures board. But, standing under the sign, I felt vulnerable somehow, as though an explosion would send the entire train schedule crashing down on my head. So I stood slightly to the left of the board. Katherine was late, which was fine -- whatever, people are late.

But now, she had surely blown up in some subway bombing. Or maybe a building fell on her. Or maybe a frantic ambulance ran her down. Or maybe that's her coming down the stairs now. Yes.

We hugged and Katherine started leading me to the subway. I stopped her -- I had cab money. The day before, my mom pleaded with me not to take this trip. She said it was dangerous. She said a concert wasn't worth the risk. I told her I'd avoid landmarks and subways, and she seemed a little less nervous.

So Katherine and I walked out to the dark, rainy street. It was miserable outside. Cold, windy, gray. Tense. Getting a cab was an ordeal, which upset me, because I wanted very much to get away from Penn Station and find a secluded restaurant in an unimportant area of Manhattan. We tucked ourselves away in a cozy booth and marinated in our rainy clothes for a few hours.

We couldn't go back to Katherine's NYU dorm because she couldn't sign in a guest. So we sat in the empty cafe and talked, braiding a few different conversations in and out of each other: school, love, politics, war. At times, the braid grew fuzzy, and I couldn't see where one strand of thought ended and the next began. Because the attacks on Sept. 11 really were, in a sense, attacks on our lives. Because I am a gay male living without secrets. Because Katherine is a woman getting an education.

So if these killings really were the work of misguided Islamic extremists, then our lives really are a threat to their worldview. Then we really are targets not because we are abstractly "American," but because we are concretely, threateningly free. So to sit there, in a city just now being washed of the smell of death, and speak freely about love to a fiercely intelligent, liberated woman -- to be honest to my own humanity -- was the most violent protest I could muster. My freedom at that moment was louder than any bombs our government chooses to unleash.

And yet, stepping onto the street again, my violent protest seemed pretty wimpy. I was still scared. Most of the time, when I equate my very existence to an act of violence, I'm thinking of Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson. But even they are mildly concerned with respectability, and probably wouldn't die for their cause. It's different now. It's more dangerous now.

"As if someone's going to blow up Christopher Street," I thought. "As if someone's going to fly a plane into the World Trade Center," I retorted. That seemed like an awfully convenient excuse to stay in bed all day and never do anything, never activate the very freedom which, come to think of it, I would die for. If our way of life is literally under fire, then to hide at home would be literal surrender, which would be literally stupid. So we hailed a cab and went to the concert.

The lights went down, the music started, Laurie Anderson walked to her keyboard and spoke:

"We'd like to dedicate our music tonight..." and we all said to ourselves, "to the memories of..." But she paused:

"...to this opportunity."

Dan Fishback is a junior English major from Olney, Md.

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