Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air

The other Philip was 17. Down in Austin less than a month. Freshman year at UT. Electrical Engineering, with dreams of computers that could out trade any human on earth. He had found a corner store that sold him cigarettes, a reliable method to download every thrash metal album ever uploaded, a part time job that required little more than a heartbeat, a girl who said he looked like a Greek mobster (whatever the fuck that meant) and reacted with ego vibrating shock and awe to everything he tried in bed, and had secured, with Alex’s help, a PC that could run Unreal Tournament, which they joked was the official game of the school and unspoken double major of anybody worth a fuck. "Hey honey, how’s it going?" Alex would say in his fake student-mom voice. Oh it’s rough Mom. Getting my ass kicked at UT!

Life was good. The car crash style realization that the work was just purely beyond him, which he had been expecting since he signed the fucking papers, never came, and he had started to get the idea that the main difficulty was just keeping your eyes on your feet and not thinking about the hike ahead of you, as Alex put it.

Alex Casebolt was his best friend in the world. He had saved Philip’s life without much fanfare about the second week after Philip moved to Arlington, middle of eighth grade, when Philip was watching the “quiet new kid who no one knew” thing morph from temporary state to permanent ailment, like a plane that just followed the runway straight into the fence. Alex had simply walked up and said something about the weird band on Philip’s t shirt and got him talking about everything from the Pokemon on his Gameboy to his dad’s boxing lessons (the story of his dad knocking him out on accident when Philip let his hand down to go in for a hook and making him promise not to tell his mom in exchange for like five CDs got a cackle from Alex) to what bands he had seen live and, most importantly it turned out, what websites he had found and the state of the schools site blocker.

“Nah dude that things weak,” Alex said, smiling. The bright Texas sun glaring off the gravel track and his sweat shined forehead. “I’ll show you.”

And though for a while, no one could figure out why a guy like Alex was even acquaintances let alone best friends with a kid like Philip, eventually it became just one of those things everyone knew and accepted even if they didn’t get it. Like gravity or strange dreams.

It was thanks to Alex that Philip learned to lean into the metal head thing with confidence rather than bitterness (though he kept his distance from the main metal kid group by shit talking death and black metal whenever he could) and became known as a quick handed wild card who could drink, fight, game, and roast with the best of them, and somehow went varsity in wrestling. And as most things Alex did for Philip, he did it simply, with a few words and a shrug.

“Cliques aren’t real man. That shits only in movies.” One day, when Philip, in what would become one of his most cringe inducing memories for the rest of his life, had asked something like ‘is that kid a jock or what?’ and Alex had looked at him like he had asked what all that green shit on the ground was.

Alex was always like that. Barriers and rules that Philip knew as iron and immutable, Alex would walk right through like he couldn’t even see them. The things he did, skills he picked up, friends he made and girls he talked to. It was like the world was completely open for him in a way Philip couldn’t even imagine.

Not that he was Mr. All Star all the time. He gave up football freshmen year. Sold the Honda he had spent a year customizing without so much as a groan. Gave up girls around the same time. He had found something, finally, that could absorb every bit of his focus, expand around the explosive outward force of his curiosity.

With the money from his Honda, he bought a Corolla with about 5k miles on it, sitting in some old guy’s carport, cleaned it up and put the rest of the money into his computer and home network. At least triple that amount vanished into software and textbooks. He stopped going to parties. He stopped skating around the mall and talking his way out of tickets. He stopped selling weed.

So that day in 2001, while Philip was wobbling through the first stages of an EE degree, Alex was barreling into a full ride comp sci scholarship and was sitting (if you could call it that, more like floating with one leg up the way he always did unless he was playing UT, then it was all forward lean and laser eyes) at his L shaped desk in his dorm, which was really one desk, a filing cabinet, and a long table all mashed together under a plastic top, with a Linux box and two darkened CRT monitors on one side (next to a printer, server, miscellaneous network gear, and a desk phone and answering machine) and on the other side, a larger monitor displaying Baldur’s Gate II: Throne of Bhaal, in which he was fucking around with spell selection while taking input from Philip and Chris.

“Is she a mage?” Philip said, considering something now lost.

“Who?” Alex zoomed out on the party.

A chime went off.

“Is that AIM?” Chris asked.

“No,” said Alex. It's IRC.”

He generally only used AIM for messaging girls, trading warez, and fucking with people. Something about the insecurity of the program that Philip couldn’t recall.

They had tried to move on.

“I’ve got web on Nalia and—”

Then more chimes. More noise. Nokia tones. Email.

“What the fuck. Hold on.”

He slapped the button on one monitor. IRC was blowing up.

A silence, then.

“Two planes just crashed into the fucking twin towers.”

Another pause, then Chris made a relieved groan.

“Oh, no dude that’s that fucking X-files thing.”

“No dude,” Alex said. “This is real.”

He found the remote and flicked on the TV, till then sitting calmly on its wooden drawers, as friendly as could be.

A jump from Tech TV to CNN. And there it was.

They watched the world from that room for twelve hours. Made calls. Cleaned out the mini fridge and cabinets. Said Jesus and Fuck and every other swear a million times. Felt an absolute shock at the collapse, one after the other. But for 12 hours, he realized later, too late, Alex hadn’t said a single word. Just sat there, shaking almost, throbbing, like a human engine idling, waiting.

Those first days, they had thought there would be tens of thousands dead. It was chaos. The talk of everyone. The center of everything. Like someone had punched a hole in the world and they were all just leaning into it, helpless. Looking back, shamefully, he had been waiting for it to pass. Couldn’t conceptualize the carnage. The pain. The individual human tragedy. And other times, like the OK city bombing, the world had seemed similarly singularly aligned for a while, then settled, eventually, back to normalcy. Why would this be any different? Why should it have anything to do with where his life was heading?

And eventually, most of them did move on, in a way, at least finding a place for this thing that apparently wasn’t going anywhere, a spot in the day and in their conversations to acknowledge it and the most recent ramifications or maybe one or two morbid details, but also became very adept at moving on from it and discussing their immediate concerns, grades, money, girls. Even the main looming attack related concern, the draft, had mostly been put aside.

But not for Alex.

Maybe he too, like Philip, had been unable to take it in, to conceptualize the event in real terms. But unlike Philip, who had accepted his own ignorance and un-understanding, Alex, of course, had thrown himself into a study of the thing.

And typical Alex, it came at the expense of everything else. He spent every waking moment reading, messaging, watching, listening, going to and waiting at the blood bank. At first, Chris and Philip couldn’t figure out how he was able to keep up with his classes and do his “Fox Mulder shit” as Chris called it. It would be a few months before they realized that he wasn’t. For Alex, college ended with a dust cloud.

“They think the guys in the Pittsburgh flight broke into the cockpit. Saved the fucking white house.”

He said, out of nowhere, at lunch.

“Jesus,” Chris said. “I probably would have been pissing myself in the bathroom.”

“Most of them wouldn’t have thought they were going to crash,” Philip said. They basically tell you to comply with hijackers like that, because they generally land the plane, ask for money—”

“They had already heard about the other two planes though,” Alex said. “They knew.”

That pretty much put an end to the discussion. Looking back, that talk should have been clue number one.

Then, his statements, like his research, became more specific. And Graphic.

“The plaza was covered in remains before the collapse. There was a stage—”

“The jet fuel flowed down the elevator shaft and exploded. Killed her waiting in the lobby.”

“A lot of them were waiting in the sky lobby when—”

“He saw a pregnant woman—”

But by then Philp and Chris and everyone else had learned Alex was mostly talking to himself. Maybe they should have said something. Maybe by ignoring it and waiting for it to pass, they guaranteed it wouldn’t. Especially when they started hearing those magic words.

“I enlisted.”

They heard them everywhere. On the day itself, within a few hours, the morning after. And on and on. A steady cadence. It sounded to Philip, given the setting, like people announcing they were about to fall through the earth.

And it didn’t come at all from the guys he would expect. The frat kings and tough guys were mostly silent. So were the political guys, the debaters, most of the sports stars. No. It was the weirdos, the quiet kids, the athletes who only seemed to have two speeds, max and dead still, and a few guys whose persistent enrollment had always been a mystery to Philip and his friends.

As the empty seats became more noticeable, Philip and Chris started looking at each other every time they heard the words. They both knew. Like waiting on a disease to get your friend who keeps licking doorknobs, as Chris put it one day. Their laughs at that had been tempered and quiet.

Then in November, when the skies turned grey and they all started dressing like New Yorkers, news broke of a man killed in Afghanistan.

“He was trying to make peace,” Chris said, staring at his own crossed hands. “They weren’t supposed to have any weapons. One of the Al Qaeda guys was from fucking California.”

The words “first American casualty” rang in Philip’s head in newscaster cadence like a tolling bell, and he knew his friend was gone.

“The special forces came in and saved the journalists.”

Philip didn’t say anything. He just waited. And then,

“I’m going down there to enlist.”

That did it.

“Fucking why! Alex, what do you think you’re going to—”

“I’m going to kill the mother fuckers who did all this. What do you think?”

“Alex, you are not a killer. They have guys with decades—”

“I have to try. I can’t sit here and watch.”

“Then stop watching! You spend all day—”

“I’m not just gonna put my head in the sand!”

A long pause, filled in with low-volume commercials, but Alex still didn’t look away from the screen, as if even the ads had something to do with it all, some kind of naivete he now needed to protect.

“Alex, the guys that did this are fucked. They’re gonna send like Delta Force after them. It’ll be like the guys who did Munich or the Nazis in South America. In a few months none of these mother fuckers—”

“No. Look at this—” He had pointed at the TV, now back to the desert haze. “There’s going to be a war.”

“You can’t have a war against terrorists! It’ll all be surgical strikes and shit!”

“These cells are everywhere.”

“So were the Palestinians!”

“They’ve been talking about this for months. It’s going to take years to get them all. To really wipe them out.”

“They’re just saying that shit to drum up enlistment! It’s gonna be over before you even get in!”

Philip was never sure if he had actually believed it, or just hoped. It had really seemed that way at the time. Guys in caves versus a billionaire military with supersonic bombers. How long could that last?

Alex always said Philip was smart, but sometimes it sounded more like an affliction than a compliment. Philip knew things. Had read a lot of books. Added fact one to fact two and got the result. But Alex just knew. He had known exactly how that shit would play out from the first moment of panic. And maybe, Philip thought now, looking back, he had known everything that would happen for the rest of his life, sitting right there, looking at the ground between them, never meeting Philip’s stare.

Maybe that’s why he never asked Philip to enlist with him. Maybe he hadn’t wanted him to share his fate. Or maybe he had known that Philip would have said no. That the kind of courage and sacrifice and drive to do something that would ultimately tear Alex apart was just a faint voice in Philip.

So instead, he just got quiet. No one could go hours without saying a word and make it seem natural like Alex. When Chris came over, he went to work on Alex, but Philip already knew it was useless, had already been given a blinding glimpse of Alex’s pure sight.

“Dude, go join the ROTC nerds and go in as an officer!” Chris tried. “You’re gonna be wasted on—”

“You know as well as I do that I’m not good at telling people what to do.”

“Bullshit dude! I would jump of a bridge if you told me!”

“I couldn’t make decisions like that. I just go.”

“Then become a computer specialist and fight that way. You’d be doing way more than one soldier could. Most of the war is on a fucking wire now anyway!”

“I’m not as smart as you think I am Chris.”

“What? Are you serious?”

And the conversation fizzled, died, strangled. No big blow up. No final words about one friend going off to die. Just a slow suffocation, smothered by Alex’s brutal, unrelenting silence.

And that was it. The future that Philip had seen since high school, that corny childish vision of Alex and him taking on the world, the Hacker and the finance minded engineer, died, or finished dying, its mortal wound struck months before.

They threw a party. It was a blur. Philip saw and heard the faces and forms through tears, still, twenty years later. All he could think to say, as Alex stood next to a car, was good luck and be safe, and some other platitudes. They’re in fucking trouble now, ha ha. Then, after boot camp, a more subdued get together, in Irving with his family, Alex looking like a prisoner, Philip thought, his hair gone, the wavy bleached thickness that had constantly draped over his eyes, just a sheet on his head. His face drawn in. His body cut in a way far different from his lean track days. Coiled, ready to strike. He had brought a friend from boot camp, a guy without family of his own, and while the guy and Chris hit it off, Philip found himself becoming again the shy kid from middle school, and Alex to occupied to help him.

He promised to write. He did. For years. He called. For years. But Philip never told him, man, I’m fucking terrified for you, every day they read the dead, every day they show the explosions. And with that omission their relationship became hollowed out. A hole in it that Philip could never quite bridge.

Philip, despite himself, made other friends. Changed majors. Fell in love. Got hurt. Picked up habits and skills and figured things out about himself, some of which Alex had tried to point out for years, and eventually, Alex was just a guy out there somewhere, and he knew it was done when one day he stopped himself from saying he had a buddy in the army, and instead said “a guy I went to school with”. He accepted then and there that the friendship had left him, somehow, and imagined that if he ever saw Alex again, Alex would look at him awkwardly like a stranger.

But by the inhuman grace of God, he was wrong.