new novel — prologue — feedback?
Posted: January 28th, 2010, 4:39 pm
i'm shopping a just-finished novel to agents. this is the prologue. wanna read?
the pitch is this:
There has only been a handful of novels to make 9/11 a primary plot focus, and none of them were written by someone who ran from the collapsing towers, had to evacuate lower Manhattan, and went back to work six days later.
“The Light That We Can See” is the only firsthand account by a trained and published author who was present that Tuesday when the sky turned from a perfect blue full of promise to the ashen gray that seemed to linger for so long. In the tradition of “The Naked and The Dead,” by WWII veteran Norman Mailer, and Tim O’Brien’s groundbreaking work on Vietnam, this book will be a milestone in American literature — a debut novel by a promising, original writer who was there to witness a defining moment of our time.
i know i'm close, and i know i can write that amazing novel i just described, but i'm not sure exactly what it looks like to other readers (who arent related to me), so i'd love to get yr impressions in regards to whether or not you think it "reads" like the book i just described.
so without further ado, you've just opened "the light that we can see":
It started with a bunch of what looked like falling matchsticks and within seconds a great noise and violent flood of ash covered everything forever. I ran like hell back to my office building. I didn’t know what I would find there — what would happen next. It was the start of all that. I wasn’t running there to be safe, or to hide, or with any intention of doing anything once I got there. I had gone into the building so many thousands of times over the past few years that it was just the first thing that came to mind — to run upstairs.
Like being a child — after being bullied or coming in from the rain — running inside is an instinct. That’s what I did that day. Seven-hundred-thousand tons of dust and steel rushing down Broadway, and I ran inside. Funny how instincts can handle the most impossible and irrational situations. There’s an obvious advantage to not getting wrapped up and bogged down by any unnecessary thinking. But despite some of what turned out to be my best instincts, I had gotten myself into a pretty horrible mess.
Before you know it, you just fall into your life. It’s impossible to tell exactly when you fell into it, or when it fell into you, or when this part of your life even started. It’s only something you can look back on. Lots of people try to say — this is where it all started, or — the cause of all that is this here, this one thing. But that’s not reality, that’s just an opinion piece. People who focus on things starting and ending, clean causes and effects — those are people who never want to take responsibility for anything. So I say that it started here or there just to get things going. I’m aware that it’s a figment of my imagination.
Lots of things brought me onto the street that day. For a while, I remembered it as if my whole life had been lining up for just that moment. Sometimes I pretend that nothing ever happened to me before that day. That’s the way it always feels, and pretending it’s true makes it easier to believe that I am where I am now, that things turned out this way.
That late summer day we were waiting for autumn but not really wanting it to come. You may often hear the sunlight that day described as brilliant. That’s true. But on that day, it wasn’t just the sky. It never was. I loved New York City in those days and everything about it was brilliant to me. The streets, the sky, the people. And that started when I got a job in Manhattan. Brand new job, brand new life. I was 25 years old and finally getting on with things. I moved down there from Buffalo on Labor Day weekend, unpacked myself into my little Hoboken apartment and got started. It was a lonely weekend, that first one. After having nothing to do but sit around and watch coverage of Princess Diana’s awkward funeral, I couldn’t wait to get to my first day on the job.
Art’s Cards made baseball cards and it was a New York City institution. It meant the Bronx and the Yankees and ticker-tape parades and bubble gum and double-headers and the sounds and thrills of the scraped-kneed American childhood. I was going to be their proofreader. It was a minor job, but I put a lot of stock in it. My career itself was going backwards. I had worked as a proofreader and then an editor at a little newspaper in Buffalo for three years before finally getting up the guts to move to New York and stop fucking around with my life. Even though it was a backwards move, my income doubled. Most of it went to rent, but the raw real number of it bolstered my confidence.
The Tuesday after Labor Day, nineteen-ninety-something — years didn’t matter then. Just another thing to think about or to disregard. Numbers adding up and sometimes after drinking my worries would add up too, but back then, those worries caused grand moves, like finally getting on with my life. They don’t add up quite the same anymore, but there they go — they’re still piling up. Thank goodness for basic physics to keep things moving along. The idea of mind over matter is a good one if you’re trying to fuck with someone’s head, but it doesn’t really mean anything.
That first Tuesday too was very warm and sunny, but humid and stifling. If that’s not true, it’s my wobbly memory. I didn’t know then that I should have been writing things down, that these were the moments in the final pile — that it was all meaningful — that it had already started. The subway tunnels may overwhelm my recollection of that day — those first subway tunnels. I took a route downtown from the Port Authority terminal on the red numbers — 1 9 2 3 — after taking a bus through the Lincoln Tunnel. It embarrasses me to remember it now. In a matter of days (though it seems now like weeks), I realized that what I was doing consumed twice the amount of time that the trip needed to, including longer walks down tighter, hotter underground ramps than I’d nearly ever have to walk down again. It was a bad heat — close, intense. And me in my unnecessarily formal shirt and tie and jacket, struggling against crowds, not having learned to make my eyes and body twist to get myself on and through the oncoming bouncing mass of other commuters, sweating, slick, chafing and nervous — conscious of my wristwatch, and re-gripping my briefcase. Anyone could be a thief — that’s how newcomers often feel in this town and I was no different. The sounds were the sounds of thousands of soles of shoes slapping and slipping on the tilted floor, and of the raspy voice of the stooped and ragged bearded man performing Christopher Cross songs hunched over his amped-up keyboard.
I made it to work overdressed and melting, needing a shower, feeling hungry from the effort. I met a few people and they showed me the place. Then they sat me down at a cubicle with a pile of printed proofs about which I knew absolutely nothing. I reflected on its size. I thumbed through it after I had finished with my new-job paperwork, thinking of other things, feeling like my ducks were lining up, feeling very much like an adult, sensing the value of organization and planning and responsibilities fulfilled. I went outside at precisely noon, having started none of my work, understanding nothing.
The thoughts we have are rarely measured. And the things we do, those measured things, are largely common. I don’t remember much of what I was thinking that day. The day was a common day. I had nerves about being in the big city, doubts about the something genius in me I otherwise knew was coming. Mostly it was a day of doing new things and really thinking about them. Sweating in the subway tunnels, vigilant not to miss my stop. Moving carefully through busy hallways in the building, careful not to upset anyone or walk in the wrong direction. Trying not to knock over my enormous stack of papers. Trying to remain under the radar for as long as possible. My day was marked by what I did. Nothing happened. It was just me in a void within a fully operational world that was mostly oblivious to my being there at all.
I don’t remember much about what I was thinking that day until I got out to Battery Park with my lunch in the plain brown bag, and a book to read. The view was spectacular, even in the haze I may falsely remember. The harbor was busy with ferry and tourist speedboat activity. Tourists lining up for tours of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, tourists pointing at tourists from touring speedboats. Ferry captains talking with one another, looking strong and leaning on things like four-inch thick ropes and huge brown fibrous pilings. Bench musicians with open instrument cases drawing crowds of varying and mostly appropriate sizes as the camera-strapped and happily out-of-style out-of-towners walked through the park on the way to here and there, mostly between the Statue ferries and the South Street Seaport, I guessed. Or Wall Street, perhaps, or just inward. Moving here and there, sometimes stopping to hear the music of the sax players, harmonica players, guitarists, drummers, a flutist and a lanky younger man telling jokes to himself as he paced around a maritime memorial monument. I don’t know if he was a licensed performer, but I did see that people were giving him money.
As a kid, I had collected Art’s baseball cards for a minute or two, but the most appealing part of the job was that here I was in New York City. I thought my mistake was that I was overdressed for my office, but sitting in the park among the rest of the lunch crowd, I realized how off-the-mark even my dressiest fashion sense had been. Everything was black and white. This was Wall Street, as far as those of us who were working there were concerned — the financial district. There were old churches down here and revolutionary war-era architecture. People dressed up to work downtown. Art’s Cards was mostly casual, but they still dressed well. At least I had worn black pants. I had recognized black as the only safe color. My tie was blue, I think. It doesn’t matter. My shoes wouldn’t last a month, not with that walking, and their shape was all wrong anyway. My tie was too short, my collar not right, my belt the wrong width.
No one else in my office was wearing a tie — no one on my level, anyway. Of course the bigwigs were dressed real tight, with cufflinks, manicures, expensive haircuts and uncracked belts. But even though I was out of place up there in that building, from a distance, down here, at least to the tourists, I sort of fit in. I was another important business worker sitting on a park bench eating his lunch while they walked by, some taking pictures of us — just part of the scenery. Three years out of college it took me to get my fucking life together, but here I was, part of the Manhattan scenery. Part of the postcard.
The most immediate glamour of New York City is certainly vertical. That happy and gleaming and aggressive concrete and glass phenomenon. The statue out in the harbor seemed smaller than I had expected — further away — but still stood tall — even her. Lower Manhattan formed a towering semi-circle of glowing glass around and above me. Walking down Broadway, as my route took me to work, even relatively low buildings formed that canyon — a deep gorge taken out from the concrete evidence of this our great capitalism. Trinity Church launched into the sky unafraid, sharp and mean. And beyond the church, beyond the Broadway gorge, stood the stark, bright, directly vertical sprawl of the World Trade Center towers. Each of these buildings filled with legends and haunts and even new energies, and though I knew none of them, I felt them inside — like I knew them. It wasn’t yet a relationship, perhaps, but it was a familiarity, and a comfortable, welcome one. This is what I wanted.
Surrounded by overwhelming heights, and me this barely entry-level hopeful just sitting and watching, I felt attached to my environment. Working in New York, despite the specific shortcomings my career had to suffer, provided an immediate ticket. You’re either in or you’re out. Each cliché you hear is true. And even the rookies are in, because the city is made of rookies. There are old school New Yorkers, but the energy, the passion and the tragedy that make the city what we’ve made it, those things I felt when I was sitting there in the middle of those looming landmarks, are made from rookies — the ones you never hear from again, the ones who weren’t born here and probably won’t die here. Those are the real New Yorkers — the struggle and the stress — not the old timers straddling Central Park in brownstone mansions. And now I was one of those rookies. If no one ever heard from me again, at least I was making a go of it.
And that’s what I was thinking, sitting on that bench, feeling and seeing those visions of strength all around me, these great architectural dreams like elevators to God and money.
I don’t remember when the visions started, when I started imagining them falling, everything falling, but mostly the towers, those two twin towers that everybody thought about for a while in the early nineties when Islamic terrorism first introduced itself to this land — like some fucked up, out of place, scrawny party crasher from that part of town that nobody wants to talk about except to pretend to remember how it used to be. A blind guy trying to blow up the once tallest buildings in America. Nobody ever thought about Chicago anyway. The Sears Tower was a novelty, an amusement, a trivia quiz answer. The World Trade Center, though — now that was a symbol. My memory images of that event consist of weeping female office workers gagging through handkerchiefs and the shady robed ringleader in court, seeing Gotham tabloid headlines on the local television news upstate. It was a laughable attempt on mighty America, but it did thrust my imagination toward very bad things.
Now here, now seeing them, I imagined something deadly and sharp, something hacking at the towers from just above the foundation, and both buildings then toppling like thin, once sturdy trees into the underbrush below. First they came down south. Maybe sitting there that day, eating my lunch, considering my new place in the world, maybe some time vaguely “later,” I saw them possibly reaching the park, spreading a shaking rumble for blocks upon impact, scattering debris like torn leaves and dirt on the faces of stunned onlookers.
If they fell east, it would be onto Wall Street. North into Tribeca, bringing down studios, art lofts, men in black, women in heels and sunglasses and scarves. Sometimes, just for the splash, I’d crash them into the Hudson River, but it seemed like a waste.
Can you imagine those things coming down like that? Barely like trees — more like telephone poles. Perfectly straight and true. People watching as the sky blackened overhead, the shadow quickly widening and lengthening to encompass everything in sight, and then a thunderous stomp.
And then a silence.
What was it that brought my imagination to that horror, benign as it was — lacking in blood and death and stink? How did I get there? First I saw myself as an integral and necessary part of the reality of historic and forever Manhattan and then I was destroying people like ants under the weight of the most recognizable skyscrapers in the world. Was this my humanity? My shared humanity? Or an anomaly in me, a sociopathic flaw, or was it fear? Of course, it was none of that. Was I fucking kidding? Where did that image even get there? It obviously had nothing to do with reality — towers don’t fall like that — towers don’t fall at all — it was just their striking and lopsided height that, to my eye and to my brain, untrained in engineering or physics, made them seem unstable, like objects as benign as a tower of baby blocks wobbling in mid-air or a straw standing upright on a fingertip. They fell because they were supposed to fall, and skyscrapers just don’t fall like that. I was being stupid. And since it was not a real threat, it became a daydream, a fantasy, a musing, a meaningless photograph in the mind repeated so often that its very repetition becomes the stuff of sameness that provides comfort amidst the concrete chaos we can never stick in a frame.
But then there it was. And above and beyond all the guilt, fear, sadness and rage about what happened, what lingered was that it was real.
the pitch is this:
There has only been a handful of novels to make 9/11 a primary plot focus, and none of them were written by someone who ran from the collapsing towers, had to evacuate lower Manhattan, and went back to work six days later.
“The Light That We Can See” is the only firsthand account by a trained and published author who was present that Tuesday when the sky turned from a perfect blue full of promise to the ashen gray that seemed to linger for so long. In the tradition of “The Naked and The Dead,” by WWII veteran Norman Mailer, and Tim O’Brien’s groundbreaking work on Vietnam, this book will be a milestone in American literature — a debut novel by a promising, original writer who was there to witness a defining moment of our time.
i know i'm close, and i know i can write that amazing novel i just described, but i'm not sure exactly what it looks like to other readers (who arent related to me), so i'd love to get yr impressions in regards to whether or not you think it "reads" like the book i just described.
so without further ado, you've just opened "the light that we can see":
It started with a bunch of what looked like falling matchsticks and within seconds a great noise and violent flood of ash covered everything forever. I ran like hell back to my office building. I didn’t know what I would find there — what would happen next. It was the start of all that. I wasn’t running there to be safe, or to hide, or with any intention of doing anything once I got there. I had gone into the building so many thousands of times over the past few years that it was just the first thing that came to mind — to run upstairs.
Like being a child — after being bullied or coming in from the rain — running inside is an instinct. That’s what I did that day. Seven-hundred-thousand tons of dust and steel rushing down Broadway, and I ran inside. Funny how instincts can handle the most impossible and irrational situations. There’s an obvious advantage to not getting wrapped up and bogged down by any unnecessary thinking. But despite some of what turned out to be my best instincts, I had gotten myself into a pretty horrible mess.
Before you know it, you just fall into your life. It’s impossible to tell exactly when you fell into it, or when it fell into you, or when this part of your life even started. It’s only something you can look back on. Lots of people try to say — this is where it all started, or — the cause of all that is this here, this one thing. But that’s not reality, that’s just an opinion piece. People who focus on things starting and ending, clean causes and effects — those are people who never want to take responsibility for anything. So I say that it started here or there just to get things going. I’m aware that it’s a figment of my imagination.
Lots of things brought me onto the street that day. For a while, I remembered it as if my whole life had been lining up for just that moment. Sometimes I pretend that nothing ever happened to me before that day. That’s the way it always feels, and pretending it’s true makes it easier to believe that I am where I am now, that things turned out this way.
That late summer day we were waiting for autumn but not really wanting it to come. You may often hear the sunlight that day described as brilliant. That’s true. But on that day, it wasn’t just the sky. It never was. I loved New York City in those days and everything about it was brilliant to me. The streets, the sky, the people. And that started when I got a job in Manhattan. Brand new job, brand new life. I was 25 years old and finally getting on with things. I moved down there from Buffalo on Labor Day weekend, unpacked myself into my little Hoboken apartment and got started. It was a lonely weekend, that first one. After having nothing to do but sit around and watch coverage of Princess Diana’s awkward funeral, I couldn’t wait to get to my first day on the job.
Art’s Cards made baseball cards and it was a New York City institution. It meant the Bronx and the Yankees and ticker-tape parades and bubble gum and double-headers and the sounds and thrills of the scraped-kneed American childhood. I was going to be their proofreader. It was a minor job, but I put a lot of stock in it. My career itself was going backwards. I had worked as a proofreader and then an editor at a little newspaper in Buffalo for three years before finally getting up the guts to move to New York and stop fucking around with my life. Even though it was a backwards move, my income doubled. Most of it went to rent, but the raw real number of it bolstered my confidence.
The Tuesday after Labor Day, nineteen-ninety-something — years didn’t matter then. Just another thing to think about or to disregard. Numbers adding up and sometimes after drinking my worries would add up too, but back then, those worries caused grand moves, like finally getting on with my life. They don’t add up quite the same anymore, but there they go — they’re still piling up. Thank goodness for basic physics to keep things moving along. The idea of mind over matter is a good one if you’re trying to fuck with someone’s head, but it doesn’t really mean anything.
That first Tuesday too was very warm and sunny, but humid and stifling. If that’s not true, it’s my wobbly memory. I didn’t know then that I should have been writing things down, that these were the moments in the final pile — that it was all meaningful — that it had already started. The subway tunnels may overwhelm my recollection of that day — those first subway tunnels. I took a route downtown from the Port Authority terminal on the red numbers — 1 9 2 3 — after taking a bus through the Lincoln Tunnel. It embarrasses me to remember it now. In a matter of days (though it seems now like weeks), I realized that what I was doing consumed twice the amount of time that the trip needed to, including longer walks down tighter, hotter underground ramps than I’d nearly ever have to walk down again. It was a bad heat — close, intense. And me in my unnecessarily formal shirt and tie and jacket, struggling against crowds, not having learned to make my eyes and body twist to get myself on and through the oncoming bouncing mass of other commuters, sweating, slick, chafing and nervous — conscious of my wristwatch, and re-gripping my briefcase. Anyone could be a thief — that’s how newcomers often feel in this town and I was no different. The sounds were the sounds of thousands of soles of shoes slapping and slipping on the tilted floor, and of the raspy voice of the stooped and ragged bearded man performing Christopher Cross songs hunched over his amped-up keyboard.
I made it to work overdressed and melting, needing a shower, feeling hungry from the effort. I met a few people and they showed me the place. Then they sat me down at a cubicle with a pile of printed proofs about which I knew absolutely nothing. I reflected on its size. I thumbed through it after I had finished with my new-job paperwork, thinking of other things, feeling like my ducks were lining up, feeling very much like an adult, sensing the value of organization and planning and responsibilities fulfilled. I went outside at precisely noon, having started none of my work, understanding nothing.
The thoughts we have are rarely measured. And the things we do, those measured things, are largely common. I don’t remember much of what I was thinking that day. The day was a common day. I had nerves about being in the big city, doubts about the something genius in me I otherwise knew was coming. Mostly it was a day of doing new things and really thinking about them. Sweating in the subway tunnels, vigilant not to miss my stop. Moving carefully through busy hallways in the building, careful not to upset anyone or walk in the wrong direction. Trying not to knock over my enormous stack of papers. Trying to remain under the radar for as long as possible. My day was marked by what I did. Nothing happened. It was just me in a void within a fully operational world that was mostly oblivious to my being there at all.
I don’t remember much about what I was thinking that day until I got out to Battery Park with my lunch in the plain brown bag, and a book to read. The view was spectacular, even in the haze I may falsely remember. The harbor was busy with ferry and tourist speedboat activity. Tourists lining up for tours of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, tourists pointing at tourists from touring speedboats. Ferry captains talking with one another, looking strong and leaning on things like four-inch thick ropes and huge brown fibrous pilings. Bench musicians with open instrument cases drawing crowds of varying and mostly appropriate sizes as the camera-strapped and happily out-of-style out-of-towners walked through the park on the way to here and there, mostly between the Statue ferries and the South Street Seaport, I guessed. Or Wall Street, perhaps, or just inward. Moving here and there, sometimes stopping to hear the music of the sax players, harmonica players, guitarists, drummers, a flutist and a lanky younger man telling jokes to himself as he paced around a maritime memorial monument. I don’t know if he was a licensed performer, but I did see that people were giving him money.
As a kid, I had collected Art’s baseball cards for a minute or two, but the most appealing part of the job was that here I was in New York City. I thought my mistake was that I was overdressed for my office, but sitting in the park among the rest of the lunch crowd, I realized how off-the-mark even my dressiest fashion sense had been. Everything was black and white. This was Wall Street, as far as those of us who were working there were concerned — the financial district. There were old churches down here and revolutionary war-era architecture. People dressed up to work downtown. Art’s Cards was mostly casual, but they still dressed well. At least I had worn black pants. I had recognized black as the only safe color. My tie was blue, I think. It doesn’t matter. My shoes wouldn’t last a month, not with that walking, and their shape was all wrong anyway. My tie was too short, my collar not right, my belt the wrong width.
No one else in my office was wearing a tie — no one on my level, anyway. Of course the bigwigs were dressed real tight, with cufflinks, manicures, expensive haircuts and uncracked belts. But even though I was out of place up there in that building, from a distance, down here, at least to the tourists, I sort of fit in. I was another important business worker sitting on a park bench eating his lunch while they walked by, some taking pictures of us — just part of the scenery. Three years out of college it took me to get my fucking life together, but here I was, part of the Manhattan scenery. Part of the postcard.
The most immediate glamour of New York City is certainly vertical. That happy and gleaming and aggressive concrete and glass phenomenon. The statue out in the harbor seemed smaller than I had expected — further away — but still stood tall — even her. Lower Manhattan formed a towering semi-circle of glowing glass around and above me. Walking down Broadway, as my route took me to work, even relatively low buildings formed that canyon — a deep gorge taken out from the concrete evidence of this our great capitalism. Trinity Church launched into the sky unafraid, sharp and mean. And beyond the church, beyond the Broadway gorge, stood the stark, bright, directly vertical sprawl of the World Trade Center towers. Each of these buildings filled with legends and haunts and even new energies, and though I knew none of them, I felt them inside — like I knew them. It wasn’t yet a relationship, perhaps, but it was a familiarity, and a comfortable, welcome one. This is what I wanted.
Surrounded by overwhelming heights, and me this barely entry-level hopeful just sitting and watching, I felt attached to my environment. Working in New York, despite the specific shortcomings my career had to suffer, provided an immediate ticket. You’re either in or you’re out. Each cliché you hear is true. And even the rookies are in, because the city is made of rookies. There are old school New Yorkers, but the energy, the passion and the tragedy that make the city what we’ve made it, those things I felt when I was sitting there in the middle of those looming landmarks, are made from rookies — the ones you never hear from again, the ones who weren’t born here and probably won’t die here. Those are the real New Yorkers — the struggle and the stress — not the old timers straddling Central Park in brownstone mansions. And now I was one of those rookies. If no one ever heard from me again, at least I was making a go of it.
And that’s what I was thinking, sitting on that bench, feeling and seeing those visions of strength all around me, these great architectural dreams like elevators to God and money.
I don’t remember when the visions started, when I started imagining them falling, everything falling, but mostly the towers, those two twin towers that everybody thought about for a while in the early nineties when Islamic terrorism first introduced itself to this land — like some fucked up, out of place, scrawny party crasher from that part of town that nobody wants to talk about except to pretend to remember how it used to be. A blind guy trying to blow up the once tallest buildings in America. Nobody ever thought about Chicago anyway. The Sears Tower was a novelty, an amusement, a trivia quiz answer. The World Trade Center, though — now that was a symbol. My memory images of that event consist of weeping female office workers gagging through handkerchiefs and the shady robed ringleader in court, seeing Gotham tabloid headlines on the local television news upstate. It was a laughable attempt on mighty America, but it did thrust my imagination toward very bad things.
Now here, now seeing them, I imagined something deadly and sharp, something hacking at the towers from just above the foundation, and both buildings then toppling like thin, once sturdy trees into the underbrush below. First they came down south. Maybe sitting there that day, eating my lunch, considering my new place in the world, maybe some time vaguely “later,” I saw them possibly reaching the park, spreading a shaking rumble for blocks upon impact, scattering debris like torn leaves and dirt on the faces of stunned onlookers.
If they fell east, it would be onto Wall Street. North into Tribeca, bringing down studios, art lofts, men in black, women in heels and sunglasses and scarves. Sometimes, just for the splash, I’d crash them into the Hudson River, but it seemed like a waste.
Can you imagine those things coming down like that? Barely like trees — more like telephone poles. Perfectly straight and true. People watching as the sky blackened overhead, the shadow quickly widening and lengthening to encompass everything in sight, and then a thunderous stomp.
And then a silence.
What was it that brought my imagination to that horror, benign as it was — lacking in blood and death and stink? How did I get there? First I saw myself as an integral and necessary part of the reality of historic and forever Manhattan and then I was destroying people like ants under the weight of the most recognizable skyscrapers in the world. Was this my humanity? My shared humanity? Or an anomaly in me, a sociopathic flaw, or was it fear? Of course, it was none of that. Was I fucking kidding? Where did that image even get there? It obviously had nothing to do with reality — towers don’t fall like that — towers don’t fall at all — it was just their striking and lopsided height that, to my eye and to my brain, untrained in engineering or physics, made them seem unstable, like objects as benign as a tower of baby blocks wobbling in mid-air or a straw standing upright on a fingertip. They fell because they were supposed to fall, and skyscrapers just don’t fall like that. I was being stupid. And since it was not a real threat, it became a daydream, a fantasy, a musing, a meaningless photograph in the mind repeated so often that its very repetition becomes the stuff of sameness that provides comfort amidst the concrete chaos we can never stick in a frame.
But then there it was. And above and beyond all the guilt, fear, sadness and rage about what happened, what lingered was that it was real.