Where I was

Nebraska. No, really. My pre-tenure sabbatical had just started, and I was visiting some collaborators for a week. We went to a cafe for breakfast and the barista told us he'd heard something about a plane hitting the World Trade Center. I pulled out my laptop. The cafe had free wireless—it was the first time I'd used my new computer someplace other than home. The CNN site somehow wasn't down.

I called Beaker. He was in the hospital (same one as he checked into today, and this is the first time he's been back since) and glued to CNN. I tried to call my foster father, but couldn't reach him.

Eventually my colleagues and I found our way to a campus lounge where TVs had been set up. I think I saw the second tower collapse live, crouched on the floor and surrounded by blond corn-fed kids for whom Manhattan had been merely a glamourous alien landscape.

All the academics I was working with were foreign. They were lightly repulsed by the sudden ubiquitous displays of patriotism, and they were disappointed that I couldn't rise above the tawdriness. But-but-but-if I'm from anywhere, originally, it is New York. Lower Manhattan. Not that far down, more Greenwich Village up to 42nd street or so. And back when Union Square was dangerous to walk through. But still. It hurt. I spent the rest of the week in a daze.

Ray was fine. Talking to him, it sounded like he was most upset that his apartment was on the wrong side of 14th street; for a little while he had to go north to buy groceries, instead of south, and that, yes, that was hard for him.

Soldiers with bomb dogs in Grand Central. The posters, oh the posters, and the vigils in Union Square. The continual shots of the skyline with its gap. Look, if you lived in Manhattan, if you walked the streets, those towers were more reliable for navigation than the sun. I first moved there in 1975. They'd always been there. One of my first dates consisted of simply walking to the site: how far could it be? and how could one possibly get lost?

The next few mornings, the cafe was full of stranded travellers. I worried whether I'd be able to fly home. Neither Amtrak nor Greyhound ever picked up the phone, and the airports I needed were open on Friday. I flew home via St. Louis, quietly shocked at how little security had changed. I read Time's photo-heavy new issue on the plane.

Later that September, I saw Philippe Petit speak. His faith in art and in human aspiration hammered my soul. (Yes, last week's New Yorker cover means more to me than it does to you.)

That October was the first time I went back to New York. For the wedding of the guy I'd walked to the towers with, in fact. It was an Upper East Side crowd, and an NYU science crowd, and a little of a Queens crowd, and we all marvelled about how none of us knew anyone who'd been in the towers. But everyone who'd been in the city had seen it, of course, seen the smoke and felt the cries.

Ground Zero was still cut off and still smoking—we'd smelled it from midtown. Beaker and I circumnavigated the perimeter at night. We stood for quite a while at the edge of a tunnel, into which drove truck after truck after truck full of debris.

Somehow over the next few months I ended up seeing the wreck of the Pentagon far more often—well, it's so visible from the highway, and I was in that part of Virginia. Driving past now the miracle, of course, is the invisibility of the repair.

Comments

[Nors]

Hope Beaker is doing better.