2 hours ago
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I noticed Justine before she noticed me. We were at a literary award ceremony and she was wearing a dress, upcycled from a black Velvet Elvis painting, talking to a man three times her age.
I asked my friend, Carol, who knew everyone, why I’d never seen her before. Carol explained that she was an Australian academic, researching the history of publishing, and led me across the room.
“Justine,” Carol said. “You’re researching science fiction in New York. This is Scott, he’s a science fiction writer in New York.”
Justine turned from the older man, glanced at me, then shook her head. “Not my period.”
I was too young. She was studying science fiction’s golden age, a time before either of us was born. No one under 80 was relevant, or worth remembering.
A week later, we ran into each other at a reading. This time we talked. We discovered we’re both fans of Samuel R Delany, Octavia Butler, Ursula K Le Guin, eggs with hot sauce, bushwalking, and exploring new cities.
We were seeing other people at the time, but continued to run into each other at science fiction gatherings. Then came Justine’s last week in the city before returning to Australia. At a big farewell dinner, we were sitting directly across from each other, with lively conversations on either side, and we made eye contact, momentarily alone together.
“I just broke up with my girlfriend,” I told her.
“Me too,” she said.
We spent her last weekend in NYC together.
Then Justine was back in Sydney, and we spent months talking on the phone and emailing. This was our romantic jet lag era, 10 time zones apart. She was waking up when I was going to sleep, and vice versa.
In early September 2001, I flew to Sydney to see Justine’s city, her family, her friends. It was spring and everything was in bloom. The harbour was sparkling, and the big local news was a host of flying foxes invading the Royal Botanic Gardens. I was utterly charmed.
Until bigger news happened. Justine and I were at one of Sydney’s finest restaurants, Tetsuya’s, eating an extraordinary degustation, discussing each and every dish and drinking too much. When we left at midnight, (10am in New York), the staff seemed oddly sombre. The taxi driver didn’t speak much English. We didn’t learn what had happened until the next morning when Justine ran into her addled flatmate on her way to the bathroom. “She says the Statute of Liberty exploded?”
We turned the radio on and lay in bed holding hands, listening to what had happened to the city we both loved. We tried to call friends, but reached only overloaded circuits.
We had a flight booked to Melbourne the next day, to meet more of Justine’s friends. We’d heard from our New York people by then. All of them safe, but shaken.
It felt like tempting fate, boarding an aircraft on 13 September 2001. Even the cabin crew wasn’t pretending it was a normal flight. Justine and I huddled in our row of two, staring out the window, holding hands again.
Halfway to Melbourne, we hit a stretch of turbulence. And it struck me: passenger jets were now weapons of war. International travel as we knew it might be over. What if I went back to the US, and couldn’t see Justine again for years?
I opened my mouth to say all this, but instead said: “I love you.”
My voice was calm and level. Here, with her, I felt certain, despite the tumult outside.
“Me too,” she said.
Australia felt very far from Ground Zero. Normal life was still under way, except when people asked where I was from, and I became the focus of a sweet, unnerving kindness, treated gently, given free drinks. Once, an actual fruit basket.
The fruit basket became a running joke, one of many we had that week. Part of navigating a crisis with a partner is knowing how to change emotional gears. Justine and I would talk about the coming war one moment, and about sulphur-crested cockatoos the next. We were skinless, our feelings always close to the surface.
With the world reorganising itself, we had to let each other feel the weight of history, but also remind each other to taste the wine in front of us.
There was a deeper question, one that many New Yorkers asked themselves in the days after 9/11: Who do you want to spend the apocalypse with? Who can you trust to make the right silly joke when the world is demanding to be taken so seriously?
Turned out, I’d found that person just in time.
Jets kept crossing the oceans, of course, and Justine returned to New York much sooner than expected: in November, to meet my parents. We were already married by then, eloped upstate without telling our friends, and have been together ever since.
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The Mortons by Justine Larbalestier and Scott Westerfeld is available now through Penguin ($AU34.99).
English (US) ·