I try to progress through the airport in the optimal way, with a minimum of graceless, superfluous motions. Boarding passes in respective passports, bookmarking the photo page, all three together in the leather document pouch in my messenger bag. Are they there? Yes they are. One two three. Close the flap with the weakly magnetic snaps. Are they there? Open the flap. Yes they are. One two three. Security is problematic. Will they be checking passports on the way in? I think they do at JFK. But what about Heathrow? If they don’t I’m holding mine like an asshole, nakedly American. Does it go in the gray tray alongside my bag, electronic devices, belt and loose change? Or do I carry it through the detection portal, holding it out as I stand in the full-body scanner and make myself into the shape of a stick figure man? Sometimes they say take off your shoes. Sometimes they don’t. Maybe we’re now past the ritual as a civilization, the shoe bomber’s name having finally been eclipsed from the last of our brains. Richard something. I had only just learned to properly navigate this step, slipping on my sneakers quickly after retrieving them and then, so as not to hold up the line, gathering everything and walking to the nearest row of chairs to put it all back down, step on the seat to tie my laces, then put my jacket back on, then my bag, then my hat, are the passports there? Open the flap. Yes they are. One two three.

I peered up at the sky from the sidewalk table on Fifth. The white expanse was screened by leafless branches, budding in the early spring. I remembered lying on the couch with an ear infection circa 1975. The pain shot through my skull. I tried to kill time by tracing sinuous lines around the bare branches in the picture window; they were a maze, a problem to be solved. I saw a Facebook post of a newspaper photo from 1976 of seven or eight kids from my high school, musicians. Due to the composition those in the front row had to kneel, hands behind their backs. Their posture was deeply familiar to me, triggering a peculiar emotion. It occurred to me this is how terrorists present their captives to video cameras before beheading them.

Sitting at work, I watched them take down the Stars and Bars in South Carolina today. Who were they, National Guard I guess. The fussy ritual—the elaborate rolling and folding, one soldier stepping stiffly closer to the other—was incongruous. Really, a mob shoulda just clambered up the pole and tore it down. Just the other day they shot at it, anyway. “USA, USA!” the crowd chanted, just like they did when we killed Bin Laden. One more symbol of terror vanquished.

We live in the Age of Horror. Beheadings, school shootings, the slaughter of cartoonists. And now an apparently normal young man who turned to the earth to plunge himself, men, women and children to their deaths.

It got warm quick today, from about noon till about mid-afternoon, around the time a gas explosion shook 2nd Avenue at around 7th Street, not far from the old Fillmore East, where other kinds of bombs went off so many years ago.

The Enterprise - 43 - The B-Thing

I arrived at Melissa’s to find my sister, red-eyed, sitting on the crimson Persian rug, gazing at the TV. A vodka martini sat before her in its iconic glass.

“What’s yer poison?” asked Melissa.

These were her first words to me after I crossed the threshold. There were funny things about that question. Among them was this: there was only one poison on offer.

“I’ll have a martini,” I replied. She popped the cork of her beloved Belvedere to pour me the first of many.

With each iteration the narrative onscreen further coalesced around a set of themes: Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden. The planes, one, two, three, four; the Pentagon, the Pennsylvania field. If the whole story could be told at the top of the hour, just once, perfectly—with all the names right, and the times—maybe everything would be OK.

I remembered a night I’d been here, two weeks before, maybe three, and spotted a story in the Times on the kitchen counter. It was about four members of a Viennese art collective who had stayed up all night in their studio on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center. At dawn, they put on climbers’ harnesses, affixed suction cups to the inside of a window, unscrewed it from its mounting, and pulled it into the room. They installed a cantilevered balcony and each, in turn, stepped outside. Accomplices circled in a helicopter taking pictures; a grainy enlargement appeared in the paper. It depicted a human form, sheathed from the waist down by the makeshift structure and framed by one of the tower’s unmistakable columnar striations.

One of the artists was quoted as follows: The amazing thing that happens when you take out a window is that the whole city comes into the building.

No one could confirm that it had happened. No verifiable evidence was found. The Austrians turned mum and the event quickly lapsed into myth. Only its name remained: The B-Thing.

The Enterprise - 42

I picked up my overnight bag at home and headed out to Melissa’s, jumping on a crowded bus that crept down Fifth. I stood in front, near the driver. Everyone was talking about it. Nervously, I suppose. But their chatter had a tone of eerie glee. They seemed eager to outdo each other in hyperbole, like kids at recess. Was it vanity—unbridled, like our other basest urges, by the trauma? Or was it a tactic? If they made it worse in their heads, and made it worse out loud, mere reality might not be so hard to bear.

“I heard forty thousand people died," a woman said.

"Oh no. Way more than that," said a man. "Two hundred thousand."

Then the driver told his story.

"I was down there," he began. "I looked out the window and I saw what you call it. Graffiti. I saw graffiti comin’ outta the sky." We all knew what he meant. "But then I realized it ain't no graffiti. It's pieces of paper.” He shook his head. “Eight and a half by eleven."

I got off around the Metropolitan Museum and crossed Central Park with the crowd. Everyone’s pace had slowed by half a step, as though in a dream. With nothing left to escape, our bodies moved with processional solemnity. In a way, it was just a beautiful day in the park. There were lots of children—acting like children, skipping, swinging their parents' arms. But they knew. I heard a little boy say:

"Daddy, did the airplane really hit the building?"

"Yes."

"What happened to the people inside?"

A roaring fighter jet pierced the empty sky above us.

The Enterprise - 41

It occurred to me that I ought to do some work. I was at the office, after all. Everything around me—computer, desk, chair—had been set in place to facilitate my productivity. Besides, it might be useful to lose oneself in labor at a time like this. Therapeutic. But after I opened the document of code I’d been working on the day before, I got the eerie feeling the earth was trembling and sliding under me.

There was nothing left to do but go. A few of us set out onto Fifth Avenue, must have been one o’clock or so. Every building downtown—those still standing as well as those that weren’t—had disgorged its contents onto the streets, and now a great tide of corporate humanity, of minions and executives, some blasted with ash, some weeping, many women in their stocking feet, was rising like bile up the gullet of the city.

Julie muttered that she’d heard from her Israeli fiancé’s cousin that Yasser Arafat had taken credit for the attacks.

“The Sears Tower is next,” she said. “Mark my words. Lev told me so. He knows. Arafat won’t stop until he’s made us bleed out every drop of blood.”

After a few tries I managed to reach Mike in Chinatown.

“You heading uptown?” he asked.

“Yeah. What are you doing?”

“I’ve been on my roof. I took some Super 8 of the towers before they fell.”

“Wow.”

“You know what this means, don’t you?” he asked.

“No. What?”

“From now on there’s a before and an after.”

“Yeah.”

“From now on there will always be before. And then there will be after. And there will always be this.”

“This here right now,” I said. Then we got disconnected.

A pickup truck drove slowly up the street, its bed crowded with men. Still one more ran after it and clambered up the bumper, the others grabbing his arms and pulling him aboard as to a life raft.

I contemplated the Empire State Building, radiantly naked in the sun.

I heard something behind me and turned to find that it was a woman, crying inconsolably. I expected her to look up, to offer me the opportunity to express my sympathy. But she did not.

On the Upper East Side I happened to pass a posh restaurant. It was open. I peered through a pane of its French window. Inside, the space seemed cool and dark and quiet. Two couples in late middle age, the men broad-shouldered, wearing jackets, the women delicate and thin, sat knifing and forking as a waiter hovered at the ready. A bottle of wine rested in a dewy bucket in the middle of the table, ringed by four glinting glasses, each a quarter filled.

The Enterprise - 40

We think words mean things. But they really mean ideas. This is by design—this is how we want them to behave. If we don’t like something, we can change its name. Or pretend its name means something else. We’re in control. But the thing is: we don’t live in truth. We inhabit a brokered, dubious realm, situated in the gaps between words and what they represent. We are insulated by language—most of the time. What happens when it fails to protect us?

A few of us were going to the game on Monday night. Kevin, Rob. Maybe Peter, Jimmy. Maybe Steve. It was going to be Yankees-Red Sox, Roger Clemens. But a hard rain started in the afternoon and didn’t let up. After work we went to the dark bar around the corner to wait and see if the game got called. In the cozy barglow we felt a little lazy, like we were playing hooky. But on TV we saw the tarp get rolled out over the infield. A few intrepid souls in garbage-bag ponchos huddled in the stands. We began to drink in earnest then, shooting pool, insouciant. Outside the rain was grim and unforgiving.

The following morning I awoke later than I wanted to. As usual. Coffee, shower. The whole routine. At my bus stop all was quiet and serene, the sky a limpid blue pierced by a column of black smoke from some building on fire downtown. As the bus progressed along Fifth I had that thought that everybody has: I wonder if it’s my building that’s on fire.

It probably wasn’t. Hundreds of buildings down there. Thousands. But still.

“The last stop on this bus will be Fawteenth Street,” the driver suddenly announced. “Fawteenth Street will be the last stop on this bus.”

There was a French couple near me, young, eager to see the sights. Qu'est-ce qui se passe? she asked him. What’s going on? He translated the thing about 14th. That’s all anybody knew.

A fire engine passed us and one of the firemen, in a rear-facing window seat, leaned his head out, looking back. He bore the smile of a man who knows exactly where he’s going and what he has to do.

I got off at 23rd, the smoke still far away. The building super, an older Hispanic man, was sweeping the little foyer by the elevator. He stopped and looked at me, resting his hands atop the broomstick. He seemed a bit alarmed to just be clearing out the dust.

“The towers!” he said. “Plane hit towers!” He made a swooping gesture with his hand by way of illustration. “Twin Towers! Yes? Plane!”

“Really?” I replied. I tried to strike an appropriate posture of concern. “Wow.”

“Two!” he added, eyes wide, holding up his fingers in a V. “Two plane hit!”

“What?”

“Two plane hit towers! Two!” he insisted.

It seemed like he’d doubled the number in dissatisfaction at my response. What on earth could he actually be talking about? I imagined a little prop plane wobbling off course, bonking into the side of a building; another somehow following suit. (Didn’t a bomber do that after the War? Stick into the side of the Empire State? Then a giant ape came along and tore it out?) I tried again to pitch my voice to the urgency of his outlandish assertion.

“Two planes?!” I said. “That’s incredible!”

I got off the elevator to find most of my coworkers on the other side of the sculpture and the plant, staring dumbfoundedly at the television. The same plume of smoke was on the screen, bigger and closer, a little less real. Newscasters were gravely reciting the facts as they were known: airline names, flight numbers, emergency response activities. Origins and destinations. Times to the minute. Speculations as to the dead and injured. Each of the twins bore on its face a crooked maw with a tongue of fire inside, vomiting torrential sheets of slate-gray smoke into the sparkling, baby blue sky. Down below, safe in the valley of shops and streets and sidewalks, many stared up at the conflagration with hands over their mouths. Police waving stand back, stand back. Nothing to see here, folks.

A blizzard of documents—reports, charts, memos, contracts and faxes—animated the air and fell, confetti-like, upon the living. There went our paperwork. There went our records.

The rest of the office looked normal. The same walls and floor, desks, lamps and chairs. Yesterday’s coffee mugs sat upside-down in the rack beside the sink.

Were we now living in a new world, different than the one before? A world of smoke and death, where nothing can be trusted?

Neil paced between his office and the TV, murmuring a word or two of consolation when it appeared to be expected. He suggested we all go home if we like. This is so bad, you don’t even need to do your jobs. Brett embraced Julie in a comforting, older-brotherly fashion, his leather jacket muffling her sobs. It was like we were in high school and a friend committed suicide. It was hard to say what it was like.

I wandered over to my desk and placed a call to Melissa. She was up on the roof with her binoculars. While my voice was worried, tense, aggrieved—all the things it was supposed to be, I thought—hers was weirdly calm, detached. Like it always was, in fact. Why shouldn’t it be?

“I can see it from here,” she said. “I can see it really well.”

“You can see the towers?”

“I can see the smoke.”

“You can see the smoke?”

“I can totally see the smoke.”

I told her I’d probably head up to her place in a little while. I called my sister and my brother. Then I wandered to the TV just in time to see. It came as a surprise, at least to me. How does a burning building crumble to the ground?

I returned to my desk and watched the calamity as it was haltingly presented online. I expected some reassurance from the words arrayed in different sizes on the screen. Not from the words themselves—the words were UNDER ATTACK, TERROR, STUNNED—but from the fact that they were words. Our words. We had typed them into a machine. The machine displayed them back to us. This was still the world as it should be. Was it not?

Instead I felt a greater unease, almost nausea. The words, the phrases, they only pointed feebly—cravenly—toward the meanings that they would contain. I perceived the awful intrusion of something raw and powerful—something unnameable—into our insular domain.

“Oh my God,” I heard Lucy wail across the divide. “Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.”

“What?”

“The second tower just collapsed.”

I dutifully read the Hertzberg in the New Yorker, as though I were submitting to a Revival litany: The invasion and occupation of Iraq have diverted essential resources from the fight against Al Qaeda, amen; allowed the Taliban to regroup in Afghanistan, that's right; fostered neglect of the Iran nuclear threat. Help me somebody. The editorial voice of the Left now, it is like a jackhammer: stubborn and tedious, but true.

I arrived at the Coffee Shop on Union Square West 15 minutes late to find my cousin Eleanor a.k.a. Winston or Winnie at the bar in rather close conversation with a corpulent Chilean named Patrizio. It occurred to me this is a big part of how she survives. She gets rich, fat, horny guys to buy her drinks.

50% Free Alberto VO5 Normal Shampoo Gentle, Balanced Cleansing for Every Day.

Another morning under the invented menace of Level Orange Alert.

Or is it Alert: Level Orange?

Orange Level Alert.

Level level alert level orange alert level level orange alert orange level orange level alert alert level orange orange orange alert level orange alert orange level level alert level alert alert orange level.

Played chess again with George in the heavy sidewalk air. He beat me but good in one game and I came back and won the second, my pawns marching inexorably, two abreast, toward the scared-out king.

There's a picture of B's cunt on my computer and I see the tiny thumbnail for it when I start up or shut down. It's there in a folder of other miscellanea: my password for eBay, frequent-flier codes, an address for a long-lost friend. I took it on her digital camera one night. The following day she titled it "Close Up" and e-mailed it to me. Though it's tiny the image is incongruous, conveying rosy voluptuousness in the dreary list of icons for plain text files.

She was raised in Christian Science.

I lay recumbent in the faux Eames with a plate of cheese and crackers balanced on my belly and I was watching Nightline with that fucking inordinately cheerful guy Chris Bury and they showed the video of the Islamists with the Korean captive right before they cut his head off and there he was on his knees, the three ski-masked men behind him, and he was moaning and wailing for his life, I don't wanna die! I don't wanna die!

I don't wanna die.

Outside some alarm has gone off; at first I'd imagined a car alarm but it did not ring insistently. It bleated out a few loud tones in a babbling, singsong melody and stopped. Perhaps a police alarm gone haywire. It rang in oddly organic fits and starts – at one point I wondered whether it was the whooping of a lunatic, wandering off the avenue and into the darkened street to rattle the dozy citizenry.

It has stopped now.

The soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison, it is said, filmed themselves, in the words of military officials, "acting inappropriately with a dead body."

Who knows what the fuck that means but it's worth noting in connection with our revulsion at how Iraqis in Fallujah tore apart the burned bodies of the ambushed Americans a few weeks ago. Even those among us who are critical of the U.S. surely felt a pang of racist, all-American disgust: Look at these animals. We're not like them.

Oh, but we are quite like them. And this leads me to a strangely, under the circumstances, reassuring realization: We are them and they are us.

Went to the Yankees-Red Sox playoff game, the stadium packed and a lone helmeted sniper visible above the lip of the roof, perched in some forbidding place beside a row of lights.

Foul balls arced swiftly into the soft fleshy surface of the crowd, to be absorbed like grains of salt on a thirsty tongue.

The last day at Les Frauds is when Mom and I got to talking about September 11th and it was curiously contentious; she found the picture book moving yet maudlin too, and she was right, and it was exactly what I feared she might think, and what I feared about everyone's reaction to the whole thing too in a way, but I found myself growing defensive anyway. The elevation of the towers themselves as iconic vehicles for the projection of grief and rage, which was fascinating to me (those smooth facades, those beautifully square corners, so abstract, could bear anything in their unreality – after having collapsed in reality under the burden of the attack itself), seemed alarming to her. Those were our worse tendencies, she thought. The vigils reminded her of Lady Di's death, and the exploitation of a moment of genuine national tragedy for such self-indulgent melodrama was sick. Yeah, yeah. I knew she had a point. But I wished I'd articulated something else, a different view, but instead we moved on and talked about Israel and Arab anti-Semitism. I ranted about the eventual decline and disintegration of all major world religions, starting perhaps with Islam. I was inspired toward exaggeration and extreme rhetoric. We talked about the Arabs who would deny that September 11th was the work of Islamic terrorists, what a terrible portent that was. I drew comparisons between the hatred of the Arabs for the Jews with all the other great racial hatreds of modern civilization. And she said it goes the other way too, and remember, the Israelis have so much and the Palestinians have so little. Religion is racist, I said.

A man was wandering crosscurrent to the crowd, shouting into his phone: "I want everyone in the E.R. now!" At that moment what was so disturbing was the idea of a parade of the wounded, the burned, filling overwhelmed triage centers; of course what ended up being more disturbing was the idleness of hundreds of doctors waiting for nothing. 

We walked up Fifth Avenue with everyone. The Empire State Building looked vulnerable and naked in the sun. There was a fierce charge in the air, like anything might happen. You couldn't get a phone signal. We dropped off Daniela with her boyfriend Guy, who was waiting across from Grand Central. Guy held Daniela in one arm and told us they hit the Sears Tower in Chicago. I parted company with Brian and walked up Madison. 

People were generally calm. Some seemed strangely cheerful, like the guys hitching rides on flatbeds and in the backs of pickup trucks. I walked alongside a middle-aged woman with glasses and curly hair who was weeping so uncontrollably she was choking on her tears. I passed a posh Upper East Side restaurant and noticed people inside eating and drinking, seemingly oblivious. They had to know. It seemed outrageous that anyone could be doing anything so indulgent at such a time but then again, maybe no one could take the measure of this event and respond accordingly yet. Still, it was jarring to see their faces dimly through the glass, the glint of silverware before them and glasses on their lips.

The first call I was able to make on my phone was to John. We talked about how it would always be before and after from now on. He said he saw the towers burning from the roof of his apartment in Chinatown and ran down to get a camera, and when he came back upstairs one of the towers was gone. He took some film of a police officer who had helped people escape. While the camera was rolling the cop realized that other guys in his squad had been crushed in the collapse and he broke down. John wondered what he could do with this footage but confessed to feeling guilty for his "mercenary" inclinations. He never did say anything about it again.

Back home, Jill called. She said Lis was over at her place and did I want to come over. I said I did. I got on the downtown bus at Fifth Avenue. It was crowded and I stood near the front. People were talking animatedly about the disaster. There was an eerie glee about the talk. People seemed to want to outdo each other with stories of horror, to be the bearers of worse and worse news just for the vain thrill it gave them. Or maybe if they made it worse in their heads, and asserted it, the reality would not be quite so hard.

"I heard 40,000 people died," a woman said.

"Oh no. Way more than that," said a man. "200,000."

The bus driver told his story.

"I was down there," he began. "I looked out the window and I saw what do you call it, graffiti coming out of the sky." We knew what he meant. "But then I realized it ain't no graffiti. It's pieces of paper. Eight and a half by eleven."

I got off around the Metropolitan Museum and walked across the park with a crowd. Everyone's pace seemed slow by half a step – with nothing left to escape, our bodies had been suffused with a processional solemnity. In a way, though, it was just like a beautiful afternoon of families in Central Park. There were lots of children, acting like children, skipping and swinging their parents' arms by the hand, but it was clear that they knew. One inquired naively about the thing: 

"Daddy, did the airplane really hit the building?"

"Yes."

"What happened to the people inside?"

A roaring fighter jet pierced the empty sky above us.