I was sleeping recovering from something or other, probably self-induced, when the phone rang and my wife informed me a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. Knowing her propensity to hyperbolize, I dismissed it as at best a random small aircraft incident, but turned on the TV nonetheless. First one, then two planes were depicted crashing into the buildings, the smoldering towers became a shocking, gaping hole in our collective consciousness (literally and figuratively). I stood on the corner of my West Village residence a mile away from the wreckage and watched in disbelief. At the expensive of being horribly desensitized, I was sorry I walked back in when the actual buildings went down. I admit to the morbid human frailty of the impulse to rubberneck. Yes, the deaths must have been agonizing beyond imagination; the suicidal jumpers went missing from the local media. The devastation will never be lost on us. I wouldn’t dream of belittling the events of the day, but there was something, somehow unthinkable and grandiose at the same time when two of the world’s tallest towers were nearly simultaneously razed flat. Terrorism as spectacle. How can you read fiction when no imagination can conjure such a massacre? The immediate fear of gas mains bursting resulted in our being evacuated – the smells alone that ensued for months were a putrid reminder of all that was incinerated human, manmade and other. I visited the devastation and the area was white-dusted with an eerie dry snow, piled high. There was a single, smallish, lattice-like skeletal presence of structural remains. It was otherworldly. Nowadays, 9/11 colors all we see and think and the towers remains in their absence, like missing teeth from the NY skyline. 10 years on we can only stoically await what will come next whether a dirty bomb, or small scale nuclear or chemical conflagration.
Kenny Schachter