Clete and his brother Cy were out for a Sunday drive in December, and when they came home they found Florence agitated, the baby on her hip.

What in the world is the matter? Clete asked to his wife.

Florence clutched the baby Peggy to her. The Japanese, she said. They just bombed the Panama Canal.

Somebody turned the radio on, and when they heard it was Hawaii in flames they knew that Cy was headed for the Army, and maybe Clete with him. But he had a job with an awning company that turned to churning out parachutes and knapsacks, good enough to keep him in civilian labor status for the next four years. Still it was a splendid war, best soundtrack ever.

My mother was almost a year old at the time of the Panama Canal commotion. She remembers it, she says. Feelings, really nothing concrete, but enough that she can close her eyes and recall the overwhelming sensation of adult upset, of jittery comings and goings and distracted pats on the head. The United States of America enters World War II, and all she knows of it are wisps and shadows.


"We'll need your picture. When can you come in for a head shot?" says the woman from the Enquirer.

"Um..." Here is my schedule: work, thesis, fret about the thesis, fail to go to the gym; work, thesis, more fretting, further failure. Late mornings are good.

"Tuesday?"

"I--"

"Eleven all right?"

"But when will the--"

"I'll tell the photo studio you'll be in at eleven AM on Tuesday."

I rip a corner from the first piece of paper in my printer and scrawl: Tuesday, Sept. 11th, Enquirer. Then I add a smile face, and then a few stars, because my byline is going to be in the big-girl paper, and this is very happy news. "Do you have any idea when this is going to run?"

"I can't say for sure. Soon."

It never ran.


I am looking at the back of my own head, watching me take that phone message, and I need to press pause for a moment.

Here is what was most concerning me at that second:

-Dear God! How am I going to have time to eat lunch between the photo shoot and the start of my work shift?

-I simply have nothing to wear.

-I'm going to get hosed on the parking. You always get hosed, when you park downtown.

-What am I going to do with my hair? The bangs aren't grown out yet! I was still in-betweening! God, my life sucks.

And I would like to smack myself. You stupid self-obsessed little bitch, you have no idea. You have absolutely no idea what is about to happen. Your nation is going to be attacked and one of your best friends from college is going to rush to the Pentagon site and the very same little Natalie who used to throw M&Ms at you in the dorm hallway is going to be pulling body parts out of the smoking hole in the Navy wing. You poor stupid ignorant child.

It's like watching a dollar-theater slasher flick, with the deep bass pulls on the soundtrack and the airhead actress opening the basement door so as to expose herself more readily to the undead person with the chain saw. Don't go in there... the calls are coming from inside the house... you ninny... but she goes ahead anyway... she has to.

It is easy, from the safe distance of December, to marvel at our collective idiocy, to whip ourselves with the stupefying fact that nobody saw it coming. How could we not know it was coming? This is the way history operates, is it not, in tidy parallel thoroughfares, everything falling into place exactly as it should there in the columns of the high school textbook: we should have known, we could have stopped it. What were those Boston ticket agents thinking, selling those one-way tickets for cash to a bunch of people looking like they came out of Terrorist Central Casting? Didn't the FAA know that you can slice a throat open just as easily with a box cutter as with a machete blade?

Hold the shuttle launch, the right booster's O-ring is going to slip... There's a man with a gun there on the sixth floor of that building, send the President's motorcade down the next block... Wake up, there's a whole wave of Japanese fighters coming in... wake up!

It is not fashionable to think about what almost happens. Ask any American teenager: they do not know the metallic autumnal fear of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It is a movie, it is a book assignment, marginally interesting for what it averted, a trimly packaged metaphor of the non-war that never quite got declared. The near-misses, the photo-negative events: these are glossed over, politely nodded at with relief-- Regan was shot but he recovered, the weather on D-Day stood fair enough for the beaches to be stormed, the rocket never blew up under John Glenn the way it did on the testing range. We turn our faces from days like these; they are too close, sliced too thinly for our consumption. It is morbid, it makes us queasy, to think of what very nearly wasn't.

And so when we don't squeak it through, when the luck doesn't hold, we pick the day apart, second for second, down to the last molecule; we sift through the rubble and writhe on the graves, for the why of it all must be around here somewhere. It's not fair. It wasn't supposed to go this way. A bad day in these parts is a boring Super Bowl. If we soak ourselves in the blood of the dead with enough anguish, we can atone for not knowing what we couldn't have known and not doing what we couldn't have done. And thus there are commemorative coins and coffee table books and celebrity tribute albums: if we don't let ourselves forget this happened, maybe, the tragi-whammy will never find us again. Lethal lightning never stutters.

All right.

Hit play.


One side of my hair is curled; the other, not yet attended to, is straight yet, and limp. For the past thirty minutes, this has been my life's focus: searing my hair around the heated barrel of the curling iron, then letting it spring free, transformed.

I was stripped from the waist up, as I usually am when attacking my own hair and face; underwear and slippers and not much else. I do not remember what was playing on the stereo.

My mother hollers down the steps: two commuter planes, one in each tower of the World Trade Center. There it is: Faraway smoke and shaky camera angles, and I feel nothing. I feel nothing. It doesn't look so bad, really there can't be many casualties at all. This is a New York thing (poor bastards.) This is none of my concern. This will not affect me. This was not an accident, but the death toll can't rise much above the two idiot pilots who pulled this off. They can't have killed anyone but themselves.

I do not like the morning anchors on this channel; they are annoying, and stupefyingly dumb. But the TV stays on; this will be the news story that never ends, I can see it coming. I spin another curl. Twirl twirl twirl click.


The male anchor's voice cuts over the grating of the curling iron cord. "This is terrible." I peer around the corner of the bathroom, tethered by the electrical outlet. "There are... people are falling from the building."

I stand over my clothes flat on the bed, laid out side by side with the shoes on the pillow. Now there's close-up footage, film of the second plane hitting the second building. That's no tiny-ass drug running propeller plane. That... is that is a passenger jet.

I dial my sister, already sealed into her corporate cube for the day.

"Are you near a television set?"

"No... what... what is-- two planes, someone's saying, in New York?"

"One in each tower of the World Trade Center." Now there's a little trailer, snow-day style, at the bottom of the screen: AWAITING STATEMENT FROM PRESIDENT BUSH.

"It's true, it's real," I hear her say to someone. "The internet is down. Someone heard about it on the radio but CNN.com is absolutely locked up. We cant get anything."

The station runs the crash footage again, the nose of the plane bearing down on the building, then a fire plume ripping it back to front.

"Find a TV, if you can. You have to see this. I can't-- its like a movie. The people on the plane, I don't-- this plane, it..." I fall silent, watching it ram the tower again. "It's just like a movie."

She wants to call her husband; I need to get moving on my hair again. They hit the towers high, at least; it could have been worse... they could have collapsed.

I yell occasional updates to my mother, the silver barrel of the curling iron to the side of my head. She has seen the footage once, on the tiny portable TV beneath the cookbook cupboard, and then she turned it off. Once is all she requires: she shall watch nothing further, there is nothing new in it, and the chatter and conjecturing of the news people makes her nervous.

"George is talking, all channels. CBS has the best picture."

"Manhattan's closed."

"The FAA just grounded everything."

Then the Ken hair nancy-boy anchor again: "We have...we're getting reports, now, and I want to stress that this is just a report... but were being told that another plane is down in Virginia, possibly on a highway near Arlington, possibly the Pentagon itself. You've gotta believe that its happened again." He pauses, chokes. "Please remain calm, we are the United States of America, we are still the strongest nation in the world..."

So... not a New York thing anymore.

I lay the curling iron down, now; there's no use to it anymore, because we are all going to die. Dying was one thing; but my God, man, do it with dignity. Still the stron- of all the dumbass, idiotic things to... I run to the stairwell, but my mother is already halfway downstairs, trying to beat out Mr. Hindenburg there on the TV, intent on telling me the Pentagon news herself before I find out all alone, there in the bathroom without any clothes on.

I'm in a war zone. I am living in a nation that is under attack, really for-real under attack, not by cocaine trafficking or CD pirating software or the gentleman across the aisle representing the great state of Massachusetts, but by very angry people, with big fat planes, who want everybody dead.

My mother steers me back into the bathroom. Finish up. Get ready. You should have left by now.

I pick up an eyebrow pencil, just pick it up, and carry it back in to my mother there front of the TV. "Where's the President? Is Cheney with him? Where is Laura? Did she go to Florida?" My mother is saying something. I look at the thick blackness pouring out over Virginia, now, and turn away. My hair--

"...and now one of the towers is collapsing," she says, and I turn to watch it fold into itself, and that is so fucked up that I sag against her, a grown girl of twenty-four with a job and credit card and a college degree, and say, "Who does this? Jesus Christ. Who does this?" and she says with a tight mouth, totally ignoring that I have said Jesus Christ, but I can't, I never say that... "Bin Ladin. The bombers from the first time they got the towers. Jerk. Bunch of jerks. Hes a jerk."

Fine white powder everywhere, and people running... a journalist shoves a microphone into the face of a black woman doused with ash. He asks questions; she blinks and stares, and finally just keeps walking. Hey, he says to some passerby, pointing at her, hey, this womans in shock, she needs help.

He plucks at an aid worker dumping a bottle of water over his head. Where are you going? Guy looks at the reporter like hes just dropped in from Mars: Going to help people. People trapped. The journalist trots after him.

I hesitate a moment, then pick up the cordless, dig the index card with the fourteen digits from my upper desk drawer. Dial. Dial. Stop shaking. I press line and start over. But it's just as I thought: there is nothing there, nothing at all on the other end, not even static, the brittle phone lines of the South Korean phone system, stung with twine and Doublemint during the Truman administration and left to rot after the cease-fire, are down again. I slam the handset back in the charger, crumple my ex's apartment number back into the dark little drawer. His airbase was most likely on the highest state of alert, wartime-type stuff.

"Well, I'll just let you go then!" the reporter calls after the rescue crew.


I stood; I watched the second tower burn and the smoldering hole where the first had been. It was confirmed now, the Pentagon was in flames. Still fifteen domestic flights unaccounted for. I stood, I saw all this, and I knew that I was naked.



This is the Carew Tower, the beige block of 5th and Walnut. It is Cincinnati's most distinctive highrise, the very uppercut of our skyline. There are offices in there, and a nice big mall.

I was at the top of it once, on a field trip. I had a camcorder with me, and once above the city I could not stand to get a straight-down shot of the street. So I cheated; I held the camera over the edge of the safety railing, lens down, and even when I watched the tape I had to turn my head. Leaning over that far made my innards tighten; it was horrible, that drop, the very idea of plummeting that distance-- all forty-eight stories-- to the plaza below.


In the downtown headquarters of the Cincinnati Enquirer the elevators are impatient ferries; reporters whoosh around the main lobby's revolving door. Some are running.

There is a beige square of paper in my hand. It is an ad. Some guy, some poor starving artist or poor starving artists boyfriend, was standing out on the corner, shoving flyers at pedestrians. There is to be a gallery opening or art show shindig or something going down at the Art Museum, and he wants me to care about it. When he handed me the ad I looked at him slitty-eyed, and twice glanced back over my shoulder after I'd moved on. Riiiiight.


Once in the photo studio I stand alone before a white screen, staring at a poster-sized image of Bengals coach Dick LeBeau spitting away a mouthful of water.

The photographer leans into me with a camera. The second World Trade Center tower had collapsed, he tells me, and another plane just downed itself outside Camp David. "Tilt your chin up. Now smile. Smile!"


As I walk back to my car I glance over my shoulder at the swooping curves of Riverfront Stadium, a chunk of it broken off to make way for the construction of a new baseball field. It is empty; each seat and both dugouts gaping, exposed.

Right over there is Fountain Square, the nucleus of the downtown district. I clack away from it, fast as I can in these heels. Cars. Suits. Cops. Grates. Tangle of narrow streets and crammed-up storefronts: Where can I run, were would I escape to, if a 757 tilts from the sky and slams into the side of the Carew Tower, if the Tyler Davidson Fountain there evaporates in a plume of fire and brown twists of metal? I look, I search all around me; but there is nowhere.

Outside the parking garage, the guy with the gallery opening flyers tries to hand me another one.


There is a handful of people in front of me, draped over pews, balancing their bodies on the softest part of their knees before the main alter of the downtown cathedral. There is a line at the votive candles.

I watch from the back, far from the Blessed Sacrament. The stained glass windows strain to let in light.

I kneel, finally, on the marble floor. It is not enough. I lean forward until my forehead is also resting there, a posture Catholics reserve for-- well, never. Old people, women in blazers and tall shoes, step around me, their footfalls numbed by the thick walls.

Maaaaan.... I hope You know what Youre doing.


There is an email waiting for me when I get to the office.
"I don't know what will happen," it begins.
"These attacks on US soil will most likely change my immediate future. I just wanted to let you know that I'm safe and that I'll try to remain so. Don't worry about me. I'm sure I'll be fine. I just want you and your family to know that I'm safe for know and that I'll be thinking of you. I don't know where I'm going or when, but it'll happen soon if it does.
Love, Joey"

There is no way keep count of which email burns the most Kleenex: this, or the one above it, the one from the flower delivery service in Manhattan confirming that a congratulatory bouquet I'd ordered had been signed for at a building three miles from the World Trade Center at 9:59 AM.

The tenth number on the list, and again, the frantic wrennt! wrennt! of overloaded phone lines. I try the next entry, a bloodbank way the hell over in Mason. They told me in college that I had too many meds in my system to make an acceptable donor. I figure anyone needing blood today will welcome the shot of antidepressants.

I get through to this one; an actual ring.

There is a scene, right after the big attack sequence in the intellectually insulting "Pearl Harbor," in which Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett run to the hospital where Kate Beckinsale is nursing. How can we help? they say, and Kate pulls some Coke bottles off a shelf and goes, We need blood.

"Hoxworth Center."

"Do you--"

"Please hold."

After ten minutes of Celine Dion I get the sentence out. "Do you need all blood types?"

The woman answering the phone has to yell over a pulsing wash of voices in the background. "Yes, all... but call back, please, make an appointment... it's crazy here..."

I guess a lot of people saw that movie.


Someone from Marketing wants a clients parking validated. I compose an interoffice memo, swiftly and mentally, informing them where and at which angle they may stick their validation request, because the Dallas office is on Line 1 asking for the VP of Operations to tell her that their building is being evacuated, and the focus group from Montreal is on Line 4 wanting to know if they can have their deposits for next months convention returned. These calls rolled in just before the comptroller came to me in tears telling me to let her know instantly if I heard from her son, a Red Cross worker in New Jersey. He is not answering his cell.


About an hour before close, the CEO stalks past the reception desk, announcing that he is going for a walk. He returns twenty minutes later with a long cardboard box.

"Call Kim," he says.

I send for his very pregnant secretary.

Together they unfurl a heavily tasseled American flag. "The last one they had. Top of the line," he tells me. I drag the heavy ugly floor vase across the room to make way for the flagpole.

My supervisor appears behind me and surveys the addition to the lobby. That needs to be steamed, she says.

The Vice President of Finance digs a Milky Way out of the candy dish on my desk. "Well, I'm not doing it." She surveys the flag. "Good. Put a flag up. That'll keep us safe."

I type very loudly.


Four-thirty in the afternoon, and CNN has officially run out of guests. Alexander Haig (who knew he was still alive?) is on the air, solemnly answering question after question about terrorism, about the Middle East, about national security. The United States is closed. The day has been cancelled. Domestic flights, we are assured, will resume tomorrow, although not before Boston's airport has ordered each restaurant, food court, and plane to remove anything even resembling a knife from public reach.

Who's in charge here?


Kim waddles past the front desk.

I'm leaving early, she says, hand over her swollen abdomen.
"Do you feel all right?" I ask.

She shakes her head. The baby, it wont stay still. It's playing kickball with my bladder in there. I'm exhausted."

I lean forward to address her womb. You stay in there where its safe.


Dinner, technically. I am not eating; no one is. I push a dissected slice of meat loaf around my plate as the television takes over the room behind us.

Show something else, the viewers have demanded of Fox News. Please stop running those horrid closeup pictures of the plane ramming into the second tower. We are tired of it, it is imprinted now, we know how the story is going to end. Run some video of the aftermath, of the rescue efforts, anything. "It's not that we don't have the footage," the anchor finally says. "We do. What we have is too graphic for air."

I haven't done a great deal of walking or moving once out of the Enquirer building; staring at a television monitor does not demand much of ones hair spray. Still, the hair is utterly destroyed. The mornings curls were holding up well on the left, a cloud of blonde; on the other side of my head, however, where the hair been tended by a different person, they were sporadic, tattered. A shame, really.... that picture today, that was a huge thing.