Rachel Cohn - Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

"Really?"

"Can we change the subject?"

And I find myself saying, "It wasn't really about her." And finding it's true.

"What do you mean?" Norah asks.

"It was about the feeling, you know? She caused it in me, but it wasn't about her. It was about my reaction, what I wanted to feel and then convinced myself that I felt, because I wanted it that bad. That illusion. It was love because I created it as love."

Norah nods. "With Tal, it was the way he always said goodnight. Isn't that stupid? At first on the phone, and then when he'd drop me off, and even later when we were together and drifting off to sleep. He always wished me a goodnight and made it sound like it really was a wish. It's probably just something his mother always did when he was a kid. A habit. But I thought, This is caring. This is real. It could erase so many other things. That simple goodnight."

"I don't think Tris ever wished me a goodnight."

"Well, Tal sure as hell didn't inspire me to write songs."

"That's too bad," I say. "Tal rhymes with fucking everything. "

Norah thinks for a second. "You never put her name in any of the songs, did you?"

I go through the entire playlist, then shake my head.

"Why not?"

"I guess it didn't occur to me."

Norah's phone rings and she pulls it out of her pocket. She looks at the screen and mumbles, "Caroline." I see she's about to answer it, and find myself saying, "Don't."

"Don't?"

"Yeah."

Another ring.

"What if it's an emergency?"

"She'll call back. Look, I want us to take a walk."

"A walk?"

Ring number three.

"Yeah. You, me, and the city. I want to talk to you."

"Are you serious?"

"Not as a rule, but in this case yes."

Ring.

"Where will we go?"

"Wherever. It's only"-I look at my watch-"four in the morning."

Pause.

Silence.

Voice mail.

Norah bites her bottom lip.

"Thinking about it?" I ask uneasily.

"No. Just thinking about where to go. Somewhere nobody will find us."

"Like Park Avenue?"

And Norah tilts her head, looks at me a little askew, and says, "Yes, like Park Avenue."

And then she utters a word I never in a zillion years thought I'd ever hear her utter:

"Midtown."

It's ridiculous, but we take the subway. Even more ridiculous, it's the 6 train that we take, the most notoriously slow local in all of Manhattan. At four in the morning, we're on the platform for a good twenty minutes-the time it would've taken us to walk-but I don't mind the delay because we're talking all over the place, hitting Heathers and peanut butter preferences and favorite pairs of underwear and Tris's occasional body odor and Tal's body hair fetish and the fate of the Olsen twins and the number of times we've seen rats in the subway and our favorite graffiti ever-all in what seems like a single sentence that lasts the whole twenty minutes. Then we're in the weird fluorescence of the subway car, sliding into each other when the train stops and starts, making comments with our eyes about the misbegotten drunkards, business-suit stockbroker frat boys, and weary night travelers that share our space. I am having a fucking great time, and the amazing thing is that I realize it even as it's happening. I think Norah's getting into it, too. Sometimes when we slide together, we take a few seconds to separate ourselves. We're not to the point of deliberately touching again, but we're not about to turn down a good accident.

We get out of the subway at Grand Central and walk north on Park. It's completely empty, the skyscrapers standing guard up and down the avenue, sleeping sentries of the important world.

"It feels like we're in a canyon," Norah says.

"What freaks me out is how many of the buildings still have lights on. I mean, there have to be thousands of lights in each building that are left on for the night. That can't be very efficient."

"There are probably still people working. Checking their e-mail. Making another million. Screwing someone over while they sleep."

"Or maybe," I say, "they just think it's pretty."

Norah snorts. "You're right. That must be it."

"Does your dad work around here?"

"No. He's all about downtown. Yours?"

Now it's my turn to snort. "Not employed at the present," I say. "Definitely for lack of trying."

"I'm sorry."

"No worries."

"Are your parents still together?"

"In the sense that they live in the same house, yeah. Yours?"

"They were high school sweethearts. Married twenty-five years now. Still happy and still doing it. Complete freaks of nature."

We sit down on the edge of one of the corporate fountains, watching the headlight show of passing traffic.

"So, do you come here often?" I joke.

"Yeah. I know, I'm so bridge-and-tunnel-for as long as I've been able to catch the train, I've been sneaking into the city to go to Midtown. Hang out with the bankers, merge some mergers and acquire some acquisitions. The whole thing just reeked of sex and rock 'n' roll to me. Can't you feel it in the air? Close your eyes. Feel it?"

I do close my eyes. I hear the cars passing, not just in front of us, but on streets throughout the grid. I hear the buildings yawning into space. I hear my heartbeat. I have this momentary fantasy that she's going to lean over and kiss me again. But enough time goes by for me to know this isn't going to happen. When I open them, I find her looking at me.

"You're cute. You know that?" she says.

I have no idea what to say to that. So it just hangs in the air, until I finally say, "You're just saying that to get me to take off my clothes and frolic in the fountain."

"Am I really that transparent? Fuck!" Her look is quizzical, but I don't feel like this is a quiz.

"We could go break into St. Patrick's instead," I suggest.

"With our clothes off?"

"I'd have to keep on my socks. Do you know what kind of people touch the ground there?"

"I'll have to say ix-nay on the athedral-cay. I can see the headlines now: 'RECORD EXEC DAUGHTER FOUND PLAYING PORNISH PRANKS IN PATRICK'S. "We thought she was such a nice Jewish girl," neighbors say. '"

"You're Jewish?" I ask.

Norah looks at me like I just asked if she was really a girl.

"Of courseI'm Jewish."

"So what's that like?" I ask.

"Are you kidding me?"

Do I look like I'm kidding her?

"No," I say. "Really. What's that like?"

"I don't know. It's just something that is. It's not something that's like. "

"Well, what are your favorite things about it?"

"Like the fact that there are eight days of Hanukkah?"

"Sure, if that means something to you."

"All it really means to me is that I was slightly less bitter about not having a tree when I was a kid."

"So what about the real things?" I ask. I want to know more.

"The real things?"

"Yeah. Try."

She thinks for a second. "Okay. There's one part of Judaism I really like. Conceptually, I mean. It's called tikkun olam. "

"Tikkun olam,"I repeat.

"Exactly. Basically, it says that the world has been broken into pieces. All this chaos, all this discord. And our job-everyone's job-is to try to put the pieces back together. To make things whole again."

"And you believe that?" I ask. Not as a challenge. As a genuine question.

She shrugs, then negates the shrug with the thought in her eyes. "I guess I do. I mean, I don't know how the world broke. And I don't know if there's a God who can help us fix it. But the fact that the world is broken-I absolutely believe that. Just look around us. Every minute-every single second-there are a million things you could be thinking about. A million things you could be worrying about. Our world-don't you just feel we're becoming more and more fragmented? I used to think that when I got older, the world would make so much more sense. But you know what? The older I get, the more confusing it is to me. The more complicated it is. Harder. You'd think we'd be getting better at it. But there's just more and more chaos. The pieces-they're everywhere. And nobody knows what to do about it. I find myself grasping, Nick. You know that feeling? That feeling when you just want the right thing to fall into the right place, not only because it's right, but because it will mean that such a thing is still possible? I want to believe in that."