Never Ever by Evergreen Ippolito

The crying man, seated on the curb, let out a long, keening moan about a hundred feet from them. Iris pretended not to hear. “That’s not what I said though,” Gertrude told Nicki, slowly so the girl would better understand.

“No yeah, like, I know that’s not what you said. I said it’s like what you said.”

“No but like, that’s not what I said at all.”

“I was just saying that it almost sounded like you were, like, making light of it?”

Trudy was still a little drunk. She waited a beat to let the up-tilt of the girl’s question hang in the air, unresolved. Then she shook her head at Nicki, mouth slightly open. “... No.”

“Okay but—”

Uma butted in. “I get what Nicki’s saying. It’s that when you see a huge plume of smoke over Manhattan, and everyone around you is acting really concerned, and your reaction is to laugh and say, ‘Here we go again,’ it does, like, at least kind of sound like you’re talking about Nine Eleven.”

Nicki was nodding vigorously with an apologetic expression. “It evokes it,” she added.

Iris wondered when the crying man would lose his voice. She’d been vaguely keeping track of him without trying to and thought he was starting to sound quieter, more hoarse.

“Okay. But I did not bring up Nine Eleven. That wasn’t what I was saying.”

The big black cloud on the far side of Midtown was starting to attract flying things, like an inverse moth lantern on the vibrating pink horizon. Little helicopter dragonflies with bulbous thoraxes all leaning forward in motion. From the parking lot at Riis Beach they were barely visible, flying in from Brooklyn and Queens, congregating around the leaking dark of the skyline where they buzzed, curious and frenetic, miniscule hummingbirds choosing blossoms in the spreading ash.

Nicki clearly did not have the will to continue contradicting Gertrude, and Uma’s tone was sounding less committal already. “Girl I know. It’s just that probably a lot of people are dead. It’s New York. It’s gonna feel like the last time this happened here.”

“Especially how you said, like, ‘Here we go again,’ like, referring back to something. Historically.”

Iris had been standing for approximately three-quarters of an hour with the three women, facing east across a certain bay she didn’t know the name of yet, waiting for a bus that wasn’t coming to take them to the A train. Her shoulders were burnt. Her face was burnt. The bikini bottom Trudy had given her after they fucked — had insisted she wear to the beach tomorrow despite Iris’s protests — was failing to do its job of tucking her dick into her ass and taint. Far as Iris could tell, the garment’s compacting, tensile design had succeeded only in making the whole situation a lot more sweaty and sore. It’s like it disappears, I promise, Gertrude had told her. But Gertrude was way skinnier than her, and her cock was only like three inches, and she had a fucking orchi already, so obviously. Though Iris eventually felt comfortable enough at the gay beach to remove her top like the rest of the girls on the trip, she had left her jean shorts on since they arrived around three PM.

Uma shook her head. “I feel like it’s a transplant thing. I feel like we don’t have the collective memory of it. Like, I mean we all have a memory of it. But I don’t know if we have the collective, cultural memory of it. Like what New Yorkers have.”

Standing shoulder to shoulder, Iris squeezed the girl’s arm once and nodded towards the skyline in agreement. She had moved to New York less than three months ago. (She planned the move for mid-spring so that she’d have enough time to make friends before Pride.) Now, she felt somehow embarrassed to be here. Like she was a houseguest watching something fucking crazy go down in a neighbor’s backyard. The city’s novelty had just about worn away, but it had not yet been replaced by a feeling of identification — that mirror state where New York equals me— much less a feeling of home. Iris had to keep reminding herself that she actually lived in this city.

“I mean… I kinda grew up here,” Nicki said, voice still devoid of conviction. She phrased it like an offer.

“I thought you grew up in Westchester,” said Trudy.

“Yeah but I was born in Park Slope. We moved out to New Rochelle when I was nine, my bubby still lived with my aunts in Brooklyn though so we came to visit a lot.”

“You remember it?” Uma asked.

“Not exactly, but kinda. I was born in 2000, so like—”

“That’s crazy,” Trudy, who was born in 1996, cut in.

“My dad’s best friend was a firefighter though,” Nicki continued. “He got cancer a few years ago. I used to like, call him ‘uncle’ even though he wasn’t my uncle. It was one of those kinds of things.”

Their group was one of several remaining at the beach, standing on the concrete, stunned with their backs facing the bathhouse. Forty or so feet away, between their group and the crying man, a Black girl, maybe ten, was tugging at the hand of an older woman. “I wanna go hooooome,” she said, over and over and in different ways, increasingly desperate variations on the same theme. The woman with the graying locs finally said something to her in a low voice and put a hand on her head. Then, she went back to what looked like a very serious conversation with the woman next to her.

“I hope to fucking God we don’t go to war this time,” Uma said. “That part I definitely remember.”

Iris recalled Uma had said something earlier about her mom being brown. She wondered where that part of her family was from. Uma didn’t look mixed race, Iris thought. Maybe a Sephardic grandparent on one side? Then she chastised herself internally for what she figured must be a very suburban white girl way to react to a mundane statement. She wanted to agree with what Uma said, but she sensed a possible implied weight to the statement that she didn’t think she could take on gracefully. She said nothing.

“I mean, do you think it’s even a state actor?” Trudy said. “My money’s on a non-state actor.”

“Al-Qaeda was a non-state actor,” Iris responded. “We still went to war about it.”

“Really?” she said, her tone skeptical if not challenging. “I thought Osama had been like, working on behalf of Iraq. Or something.”

“Nah. The Iraq War was for oil.”

“I know it was for oil,” she said. “I was just pretty sure there had been like, a state connection somewhere. Not exactly how Bush made it out to be, obviously, but like, I thought one came out eventually. Like, in retrospect.” Eyebrows knitted together, she walked in front of the three of them, lit another cigarette, and began pacing again.

“Can I bum one,” Iris asked her.

“Duh,” Trudy said and held out the pack to her. Iris pulled one out and the shorter girl lit it for her, then went on her tiptoes to plant a kiss on Iris’s cheek. “Anything for you, beautiful.” Iris smiled even though she really, really didn’t like PDA.

In the handful of weeks that she’d known her, Iris got the impression that Gertrude was pretty enough (and popular enough with other trannies) that people didn’t call her on her shit too often. At least not face-to-face. Gem had cornered her outside a Williamsburg gay bar the night she and Trudy met to give her a warning. “That bitch is like, crazy-crazy,” Gem had said, and Iris had said something stupid back. Like, she twirled one of her fair curls in a schoolgirl fashion and asked, “Promise?” but Gem wasn’t laughing.

“Bitch no, she’s like, fucking problematic. She assaulted that girl from Headrotting after their show at Opal Bar. They banned her. She can’t go back there.”

“Sexually assaulted?” Iris had asked.

“No, like, hit her in the face.”

Iris assumed that there was more to the story than that. In fact, she kind of resented the other girl’s use of the legalistic term, assault. What were they, cops? She wasn’t yet aware of what she would later recognize in herself as a dramatic, almost reckless permissiveness towards the bad behavior of fellow trans women. They were all so deeply hurt, after all, as was Iris herself. Her boundless grace in this respect would pendulum-swing into an almost phobic cynicism towards her own kind around six months later, following her first major breakup.

“So should we walk to the A?” Nicki asked.

“Darling, I don’t think the subway’s running right now,” Gertrude said.

“I don’t know if I wanna get any closer to it,” Uma said. “Lowkey I’m kind of thinking about staying here until service comes back.”

“... Do we think service is going to come back any time soon?” Nicki asked.

The girls thought. “It’s logistically really hard to fully shut down the internet,” Trudy said.

“True,” Nicki told her. “But nobody I asked here said they had bars, five-G, nothing.” After thirty minutes or so of the bus not coming, Nicki had gone group to group, switching as needed between English and broken Spanish, asking if anybody’s teléfonos were trabajando. It was weird that everyone’s service just dropped like that.

“I don’t know. My folks live out in Long Island —” Uma said, and then paused to wait out a breathy wail from the far end of the curb. She rubbed her eye, smudging mascara. “If I don’t have to go towards that mess, I really don’t want to.”

Nicki nodded. “I personally wanna get to my aunts’ place if I can.”

Gertrude and Iris puffed silently on the cigarettes. Trudy quit her pacing and slipped casually between Iris and Uma, placing her hand into Iris’s back pocket, giving her ass a squeeze. Iris had nowhere to go besides her apartment, or maybe Gertrude’s, if Iris was up for that. Gertrude, she was pretty sure, also had nowhere else to go. She couldn’t imagine that a girl with generous and welcoming parents would have to humiliate finance guys uptown to make rent every month. Blowing smoke to the side, Iris leaned into the shorter girl, who grabbed her tighter by the ass.

A deep, percussive blow hit the parking lot and reverberated off the bathhouse behind them. Nicki shrunk down to the concrete, arms protecting her head. Uma covered her ears with two cupped hands. Iris dropped her cigarette. The crying man went quiet, as did the young girl, and they all scanned the sky.

Trudy had ripped her hand away and was already several steps towards the bushes. She slowed. “Should we uh… get to cover?”

“No, it’s one of us, see?” Nicki pointed at a quintet of impossible machines zipping across the sky. Her voice was hopeful.

Iris had forgotten all about the existence of jet fighters. There were a lot of things from her childhood that she couldn’t quite remember. Not a single moment before 2006, for example. Then, grainy drone footage shot high over a desert landscape, sometime in the Obama years. A picture she had been shown in social studies of a Middle Eastern man in a dank basement with a conical shroud over his head, arms outstretched in crucifixion. In middle school, seated in a grassy field in Pennsylvania, watching the Navy’s acrobatic Blue Angels do a synchronized little flip in the air. All five of them at once, wing to wing. They were sharper than she had expected for airplanes. Little Iris had thought of flying daggers, or axe blades. At one point, she had turned away to get a popsicle and been startled by a booming noise, like the error sound of reality itself. An adult had laughed and told her it was called a “sonic boom.”

“Yeah but are we… under attack?” Trudy said, not calm.

“I mean if we are, it’s not gonna last long I bet. Those things are crazy.”

“I don’t think we are,” Uma said. “I think they’re just waving their dick around. They have to, I guess.”

Nicki picked up her bags. “We gotta go to the subway. Maybe they’ll have a shuttle or something if it’s down.”

“Bitch, it’s Rockaway. The train goes right over the bay to get here. If the A’s down we’re fucked.”

“It’s not an island though. We could just loop around into Queens.”

“Maybe there’ll be information at least. Or we can like, get a cab.”

Uma smiled under pale green curls, washed out with sea salt and fading in the sun. “You can get a cab, babygirl,” she told Nicki.

“Okay fine, I can get a cab. Iris, are you coming?”

Iris didn’t move. A hundred feet from them, the crying man began to scream.

A second black cloud was rising. Something downtown was being reduced to ash. Commentators would later remark on the pacing of the event, how similar it was to the one before, the staggered approach engineered as if to compound initial shock. Iris didn’t remember the seventeen-minute interval between the North and South Towers. In her mind, the towers were struck and fell simultaneously. More accurately, the towers had always been destroyed, and their destruction was an event out of time. A preface to the narrative without argument in the main text. Some German girls, blown to pieces in the Allied counteroffensive, could not have told you much about the Treaty of Versailles or the crushing shame of disarmament twenty years before. Some even had a pretty good idea that the good guys were wrong.

Evergreen is a writer of fiction and nonfiction based in Lenapehoking/Brooklyn. Her first book The Tears of Other People: A History and Memoir of Displacement in Portsmouth, New Hampshire is out summer 2025 through Irrelevant Press. She blogs at EvieIppolito.com.