Disintegration
Twenty years later. Am I traumatized? It was a century ago; it was yesterday; it’s still unfolding this morning, right now. We addressed one another gently, appraised ourselves and our spirit, for a few weeks, a month or two of somber, sober autumn. We pulled together before we flew apart. We voted for the war before we voted against it. We voted against the war and we went to war anyway. Did the terrorists win? Worse than that: they turned us against each other. These days, we don’t worry too much about them. We mostly terrorize ourselves. So: mission accomplished.
Am I traumatized? I didn’t lose anyone but strangers I grieved; maybe you lost people much closer to you. I didn’t lose anything but a busload of faith; maybe you lost something even bigger. The closest I got that day was my subway car from Brooklyn, inching its way across the Manhattan Bridge, stunned into silence, surrounded by passengers screaming at the view of the towers as we approached them. Orange flames, black smoke billowing out of the fissures and streaking into black cirrus against the blinding blue sky, important financial documents glittering in the air like dust motes. (I didn’t see people. Thank God: I didn’t see people.) Terrorists never shut down the subway that day; these days, climate change stops it with a laugh.
Am I traumatized? At my desk, a phone full of voicemail that got through before the lines went down, telling me the Capitol and the Sears Tower had been hit, too. Emails: no email. That was stacking up at home. Cell phones? I didn’t have one yet; it wouldn’t have worked anyway. Others crowded at the window to watch the towers collapsing. Like the smoke I’d seen in the sky before I’d left home, I refused to let myself believe it. Someone I didn’t work with and whose name I didn’t know, but who I knew I hated for smoking selfishly every day behind a closed door, paused at my desk to wave me to the window: “You can see it!” I was missing the action! The tone was close to glee: psychotic. I bared my teeth and growled: “I don’t want to see it.” Then I left the office and started walking, uptown, away.
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Am I traumatized? The closest I got two days later was a block or two away from the pyre, walking home to Brooklyn after Jason Adams and I talked our way past a checkpoint — a privilege, I know, of looking harmless and being powerless — through a silent district choking on acrid air and coated in gray dust, with everything around us crushed, including things that seemed too big to be crushed: cars, fire engines. Not props. Real things with license plates and shopping bags on the seats. I saw one person that Thursday afternoon: a rare African-American firefighter, walking toward us across the Brooklyn Bridge, heading back to the ruins, who smiled as he declined the warm bottle of water that was all I could offer him.
Am I traumatized? I watched it happen live from a mile away. I walked through the remains. No Instagram. It happened. Social media might have cleared the air with irrefutable crowdsourced evidence; it might have polluted the air worse than it has, insulting the victims and the survivors, poisoning gullible minds in real time so that by that afternoon, it all would have been in bloom already: the fantasy that it was all a mirage, a conspiracy somehow perpetrated by millions of us extras who for whatever reason had an interest in supporting this fake news.
I thought about it every day for, probably, a decade — or at least, I said I thought about it every day whenever the subject came up — until one day a therapist asked me why I still thought about it every day, and I realized I no longer did. Am I traumatized? Sure. But who cares. Everyone you meet today is traumatized, because we survived it, plus 20 years of everything else there’s been to survive, plus lifetimes and histories before that.
“9/11”: I could never and still can’t bring myself to use the neat shorthand. I won’t say it; to me, it’s a profanity. A day like that doesn’t deserve such a dismissive nickname, condensed into an abstraction packed densely with “freedom” and eagles and rallies and justifications and collective madness. I respect it. I call it by its name.
I didn’t hear William Basinski’s “Disintegration Loops” until just a couple of years ago. If you can bear it, it’s worth your time. On the morning of September 11, 2001, Basinski finished the recording: a tape of four mournful brass notes, run through a tape head for more than an hour until the sounds were entirely obliterated with hiss, like a rescue party drifting into the smoky distance. And then Basinski went upstairs to his building’s rooftop and saw it all for himself. Many numb hours later, as evening fell, he set up his camera, so the world could see the smoke and the night converge.
