[Excerpt from City of Pillars: Voices from Manhattan. Collected and Edited by Solana Mitchell and the Manhattan Memorial Project. Published by Random House, 2003.]

Cressida Hovanic, 29, now living in Kansas City, KA, is a marketing coordinator for an online computer software retailer. In early 2001, fresh out of college with a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from CalTech, Cressida took a traveling representative job with the computer security firm InSoc Digital Defenders in San Francisco because she wanted to travel around the country. She’d grown up in southwestern Pennsylvania, always dreaming of a job that would let her experience “all the places I saw on TV as a kid and fell in love with.” Her first assignment for InSoc was the inaugural Waters Financial Technology Congress being held on September 11, 2001, at the renowned Windows on the World Restaurant, on the 107 Floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower.

On December 14, 2002, we meet at the Starbucks next door to her new business’s office. When she comes in out of the light snow, I notice that she walks with a faint limp, but it’s otherwise impossible to tell that she has an artificial leg to replace the one she’d lost on September 11. She is a bubbly, vivacious young woman who says she has told this story “about a thousand damn times already to family, friends, reporters, whatever,” but as she begins to tell it to me, I notice that her eyes get moist and dart around frequently, and she nervously bounces her leg—her real one—underneath the table, sometimes shaking the table so badly that she apologizes when our coffees overflow.

I woke before dawn that morning despite the jet-lag because I was so excited. The night before, when our plane landed, it had been storming something awful, but you could already tell that today was going to be clear and sunny and warm and…just perfect. The sky was clear as far as you could see. I could almost see the Statue of Liberty from my hotel window, and I kept thinking about how I’d promised my mom I’d email her some pictures of Ellis Island. “This is a business trip,” I kept telling her, “not a sightseeing tour: I’m only going to be there one day”—but she just said, “That’s where your Grandfather Hovanic first set foot in America, Cressy. You know I’ll never get out of this house to see it for myself and blah, blah, blah.” So I figured I’d make time that evening for a quick jaunt out to the Bay if the conference didn’t run too late—that is, if I even made it through the conference. I was as nervous as I was excited—this was my first official gig out of InSoc boot camp. As I was getting ready for the day, I started feeling a bit queasy and lightheaded and I kept thinking, Oh, God, what if I pee myself? What if I have a friggin’ stroke on the convention floor? I got myself so worked up thinking about the thousand and one ways I could possibly screw up in front of some billionaire potential investor that I wasn’t sure if I’d even make it to the convention.

We—that is, me and Raj [Pavinder] and Ray [Lenck]: I was there with two of InSoc’s more experienced technology reps—we had to be at the convention center at WTC 1, the North Tower, by 7:30 to set up our display and catch breakfast before the thing got under away at 9. I was bathed, brushed, perfumed, wearing my best grey dress-suit, and ready to puke my guts out by the time Raj came by to make sure I was even awake. When he saw me already dressed, twitching and twittering about my hotel room like a chicken, he laughed and laughed, then he sat me down for a bit on the bed and said, “The first thing you need to do is just chill out, girl. Ray and I will be doing all the heavy talking; you just need to answer basic questions, ask people to sign up for the newsletter and hand out the demo CDs. Your mission is to look pretty for the very, very rich old men and the very, very rich bull dykes and you’ll do fine. Maybe you’ll even find a sugar daddy…or, uh, mama. Make sure you tell ‘em to show you the money first, though; you don’t wanna come across as cheap.” I slapped his shoulder—hard—but he just laughed it off and hugged me until I didn’t feel like puking anymore. Then he left to get Ray.

Raj had that kind of sense of humor that a girl could easily mistake for sexual harassment if it weren’t for the fact that he was very openly gay and always tried to be everyone in tech sales’ Big Brother. He’d taken on and supervised so many new reps on their first live gigs in the five or six years that he’d been with the company that they’d actually written it into his contract. He was our department’s official Big Brother. An like any Big Brother, just before we’d left California, he’d taken me out to dinner—at a Hooters, of all places—and got me riotously smashed on margaritas and tried to sell me to some big, hairy commodities broker from London, but that’s a whole different story….

I’ll never forget what he said that night, though, when he dropped me off back at my apartment. “The world’s a scary place, Cressida”—he never called me “Cressy” like most people do—“and the more you see of it, the scarier it becomes. I’m not even gonna try to protect you from it, because no one can do that, but I’ll always do my best to make sure you know how to handle it.” Raj knew I hadn’t gotten around that much before I joined InSoc, and he wanted to be certain that I learned how to live on the go—to live out of a suitcase, he called it—because this job was eventually going to take me from coast to coast and all up and down the entire country, maybe even overseas. I had always wanted a job that would take me all over the world, but the one thing they couldn’t teach you in tech-rep training was how to survive the world. When he was only eleven years old , Raj had travelled alone from India to Dallas, Texas, by way of China and two or three other countries so he could live with some relatives. Never said why he left India, and he would never talk about that trip, but it had taught him a lot, “and a lot can hurt you if you’re not prepared,” was all he would say about it. He promised to teach me everything he knew.

Anyway, our hotel was only a couple of blocks away from the World Trade Center, on Christopher Street, but Raj and Ray were your typical alpha tech-geeks: why walk or do anything physical when you can spend a few bucks to have someone else do it for you? We could’ve walked to the North Tower in ten, fifteen minutes, tops, but instead we caught a cab that took nearly a half-hour to get us there through the morning rush-hour. Those two bastards spent most of the ride making fun of my wide-eyed gawking, but everything we passed was just so fascinating to me: I’d never seen anything like downtown Manhattan before in my life. I had to take a picture of everything I saw—even the diamond fire hydrants! The city glittered like it was jeweled. All those windows and structural diamond. I kept looking around in the air and on the streets, too, hoping to see a real live alien, like a Yuggothian or even a Mounder, but everywhere there were just people, you know, Humans, but from every corner of the planet, dressed in all the colours of the rainbow. Some of the streetcorners were so packed, you could’ve hidden a whole flock of aliens in the crowd and no one would’ve spotted them. So much life, so much activity—and it was just after seven in the morning! “Manhattan is the world’s crossroads,” Ray said, and it was true. Why bother to travel around the whole world when you could just spend a few days in Manhattan? You’d meet people from every corner of the globe. I even saw a guy who must’ve been from one of the Moon bases: he was really tall and pale and had a sort of framework—an exoskeleton, right—on over his suit.

So we finally got to the Center and the cab let us out at the plaza on Vesey Street. I just stood there in all that bright white reflected sunlight staring up at the towers, thinking, I have never seen a building so high. And we’re going to the very top of it. I was staring straight up and it was like the Tower was actually infinitely tall, like the sky was just a blue-painted ceiling and the rest of the building kept going up on the other side of it, all the way to the Moon, for all I knew. That thought made me so dizzy my knees actually gave way; luckily Ray was there to catch me or I would’ve fallen right into one of the flower beds! The Towers were just amazing to look at. Honestly. Especially with that new diamond lattice exoskeleton the fungs had donated when they opened their embassy in the South Tower. The towers looked like they were covered in glass lace. It was so beautiful.

“Look, Ray!” I suddenly shouted, pointing. “Look, it’s one of them!” And there it was: a real, honest-to-god Yuggothian flapping in the air near the middle of the South Tower. When I first saw it, I thought it was just another seagull or pigeon or even a peregrine falcon—I’d read somewhere that there were hundreds of them living in Manhattan—but then I recognized the clumsy, moth-like way it flapped its wings and caught a glimpse of its red shell. I grabbed for my camera but by the time I got the damn lens cap off the Yugg had disappeared behind the building.

Ray grabbed my shoulders from behind and squealed, “Oh my god, watch out, they’re gonna cut your head off and take you to Pluto!” He startled me so goddamned bad I almost dropped my camera and pissed myself. I wasn’t even in the Trade Center yet and I’d already nearly fallen on my ass in the flower bed and pissed my pants. What a rube, huh? I smacked him good for that, but it only made him laugh harder.

Honestly, I could’ve just stood there in the plaza outside the North Tower all day long just watching people come and go and keeping a look out for Yuggs or Mounders but we had to be up on the 106th floor in just a few minutes, so the guys dragged me into the building and bustled me into the first elevator that opened for us. I wanted some pictures of the mezzanine but we had to get booking: tourist-time would come later; we had actual work to do now.

It seemed like it took forever to reach our floor. I swear we must’ve stopped at every single floor between 10 and 96 to let people on, let people off. We even changed elevators twice. Eventually the only folks left on the elevator with us were other conference attendees wearing laminates around their neck. Raj had run into a “con buddy” in the elevator—a guy from some other firm whom he knew from various past conferences like this—and they were just yapping away about encryption codecs and fleecing the gullible old millionaires. Ray was chatting up some young lady writer from Forbes Magazine. And me? I was squeezed into a corner, feeling queasy every time the elevator lurched up and stopped, all the way up to 106.

Luckily, all of our booth materials had been delivered yesterday to our spot in the Horizon Suite, which was the be the con’s showroom. All we had to do was set up the display and the laptops in our booth and take a few minutes to go over our presentation notes one last time before we headed across the hall to the Windows on the World ballroom, where a huge continental breakfast had been laid out. Once again, as soon as we entered that ballroom, I was glad the guys were there to prop me up. The Horizon Suite was mucho impressive itself, but with all the cubicle walls set up and the presenters’ tables laid out it pretty much looked like any typical IT convention showroom—but the ballroom was like….

It was like the ballroom of the Titanic—in the movie, that is. Everything was golden and gleaming in the sunshine pouring in through the windows. There were waiters and waitresses in black-and-white uniforms laying out donuts and jellies and these huge tubs of scrambled eggs and hash browns. There were giant pots of gourmet coffee and hot water for tea. The room was so nice and warm and smelled of smoked salmon and eggs, coffee and a thousand different aftershaves and colognes and perfumes. It was really quite overwhelming, but even in a golden ballroom like that the smell of breakfast will keep your centered, keep your head level. I started calming down a little. The last thing I’d eaten had been a bag of peanuts on the flight. I was starving.

But then “Look around you,” Raj just had to whisper in my ear. “These lucky bastards could buy and sell you.” My stomach immediately knotted up again. He was right, though: the amount of money in human form in that room was just incredible. Seriously. Raj pointed out some bigwig from Schwab, the CIO of Federated Investors New York, the National President of the Sytrex Interspecies Technology Exchange, and a hundred other celebrities of the Information Technology and Finance worlds—people that most folks would never recognize even if one of them came up to you and said, “Hello, I’m Irving Wechsler from United Defense.” I mean, who is Irving Wechsler, right? He was just a little old fellow in a grey suit about a size too big for him. He looked like an old retired dentist. But, see, that oversized suit was worth at least eight thousand dollars—it was an Italian original—and that little old retired dentist was Chief Financial Officer of the number one defense contractor in America. Ray said the guy was worth at least three billion dollars. Billion. When a waitress came by to freshen up his coffee cup for him he tipped her a hundred-dollar bill—I was right there, I saw him do it. I mean, a hundred bucks for a guy like him was just…that wasn’t even pocket-change to him.

When I was in college in California, I’d met a couple of celebrities, here and there—there’s no way you can avoid them, really. They’re everywhere. I’d seen Bill Gates give a talk on commercial software security and met him afterwards, and I’d gotten to hang out with Chelsea Clinton, the ex-President’s daughter, for a weekend—she was lifelong friends with my sophomore-year roommate. I’d even won a ticket to a special luncheon with Madonna and Guy Richie and a number of other big names in the music and movie industries for the dedication of the new Arts Academy at CalTech. But none of those people, not even Madonna, had the same air of…massiveness that the men and women in that ballroom had. Madonna might sell a million records, but that lady over there who looked like my old Aunt Sheila was Investment Manager for Yuggothian Prime Technologies Brokerage. She was the one who actually brokered the deal for their structural diamond manufacturing process. All that diamond you saw in New York and everywhere these days? She was the one who got the fungs to teach us how to do it. And then that guy over there? President of some investment group that bankrolled New York City’s entire arts budget. There’s a CIO, there’s a CIO—everywhere you looked, there was a Chief Info Officer. I later learned that a number of top New York City officials—the guys who ran the City—had been there as well, having a breakfast meeting on the floor above us. Some of them kept coming down to hobnob with the other power brokers. Hell, there was even a Kennedy mingling with the bigwigs. I swear whenever one of their shadows fell across me it felt like I’d had a blanket thrown over me. When they walked the floors shook. These were the titans of industry who literally made America run. Several of them were well over a hundred years old but didn’t look a day over forty thanks to K’n-yan rejuvenations…which weren’t strictly legal, of course, but do you think everyday laws apply to people like that?

But you should’ve seen Raj and Ray moving among them as though they were merely statues, tugging me along behind them like a frightened pet. They were totally used to dealing with people like this. They’d worked these kind of conferences a hundred times. As Ray said, “These people talk and act like they’re Great Old Ones or the Other Gods themselves, but after you’ve seen them nod off during a boring presentation or come across one of them suffering from explosive diarrhea in the men’s room…well, you realize that they’re just people. People with a fuckload of money and power, but no more nor less Human than me or you.” Raj added, “Even though some of them ain’t all Human. No, really. There’s a lot of K’n-yan blood, here. Look for the really big fiveheads, that’s a dead giveaway. Plus, most of these old fucks have Yugg-made replacement organs keeping their decrepit asses vertical. But like Ray said, they still eat and sleep and shit like regular people, so you can’t let them intimidate you. Most of them have never even been off the planet, even though they act like they own it.”

Regardless of the guys’ “kind” words, I still felt like a mortal wandering around on Mount Olympus, afraid of being accidentally stepped on by Zeus’ ten-thousand-dollar Italian wingtips. I watched the guys load up plates with gourmet breakfast foods—one of the first lessons Raj ever taught me was never turn down free food—but all I had was a cup of some fancy coffee. I was still so nervous I couldn’t even drink it.

We ended up over by the windows with their panoramic view of the city, away from most of the big name players, and finally I felt like I had the room breathe again. The fake smile I’d clamped onto my face was making my cheeks hurt but I couldn’t let it go for fear someone would see. So I looked out the window at the sunlit city skyline and forced myself to forget my jitters and just act like a tourist again. Luckily, a number of other “booth monkeys” from the showroom had found us and were checking out the view as well. Many of them had been to New York City numerous times, they said, but this was almost everyone’s first time at the very top of the World Trade Center, in one of the swankiest locations in the entire city. People were pointing out landmarks and again, I saw the Statue of Liberty. It looked so little from way up there: like a little plastic action figure out there in the river, with miles and miles and miles of City stretching behind it all the way to the horizon. City, everywhere you looked.

The biggest city I’d been to prior to New York was Los Angeles, which is absolutely huge, but I didn’t get to see much of it—some college friends and I had just driven up to see Hollywood one day, and that was it. From the top of the World Trade Center, you could see all of New York City. All of Manhattan. Well, and New Jersey, but it all looked like New York, New York to me. This is really the capitol of America, I kept thinking. This is where all the real economic decisions were made. This is where everything gets started. There was just so much City out there, so many people, so much to do….

And while I was standing there, I spotted a couple more Yuggothians flopping around the South Tower. I knew they had an embassy somewhere in the building, somewhere near the middle—then I spotted one of them jump out of an open window or a door or something in the side of the tower. Then more of them came out, too, and now everyone at the windows had spotted them and were pointing and laughing at the aliens’ funny flight. I couldn’t tell one from another, so it was hard to count how many there were, but there had to be at least twenty or thirty of them, and more were jumping out of those doors or hatches all the time. They looked like bees pouring out of a hive, like something had agitated them. They were circling the building, all of them flying in one direction. “Boy, something’s got them all riled up,” I heard somebody say.

I got out my camera and took some photos of them, but the way they were flying around and around the tower was making me kind of uneasy—kind of dizzy, too, to be honest. A lot of people were standing around now, watching them, talking about how you never saw that many aliens in one place, even in New York. An older man standing next to me was telling some others that there were usually only a handful of Yuggs at the South Tower embassy; most of them never leave that mountain of theirs in Vermont. He said maybe they were performing some kind of “ritual” or something.

[For a detailed account of the Yuggothians’ activity at the South Tower, please see Michael Ondaatje’s account on pages 139-47.]

Anyway, once Raj and Ray had eaten their fill, we all went back to our booth in the Horizon Suite. It was now just after eight in the morning and most of the exhibitors were now open for business. The first panels had just convened around the corner and we were all ready to go. I had even begun to relax a little. I’d gotten some great pics of the Yuggs and the view that I knew mom would love. Some of the big money players were already chatting with people at other booths.

And then—THUD!

The floor jumped up beneath us, knocking a lot of people down, and everything shivered, like we were having a small earthquake. Raj was lying on the floor; he’d knocked down one of the walls of our booth. I was still on my feet, though I’d dropped all the CDs I’d been holding. “What the fuck was that? ” Ray said. All the exhibitors around us looked confused—not scared, just…puzzled. Then someone on the other side of the room shouted, “Oh, shit!” and the lights flickered out and the fire alarms started blaring. There was a huge, deafening explosion in the lobby and suddenly the air was full of thick black smoke. There were voices coming through the PA system but you couldn’t hear them over all the screaming and coughing and this roar—like a train going by beneath us. All of this happened in less than a second, by the way…but thinking about it now, it feels like two or three hours.

The emergency lights came on and immediately everyone started picking themselves up and heading toward the red lights flashing on the opposite side of the showroom. The smoke was horrible—and hot: it was like breathing in fire. People were choking, wheezing. I pulled my blouse up over my nose but that didn’t help at all. The floor felt wobbly, so I kicked off my pumps—I was afraid I’d break an ankle in those heels if I tripped—and the floor tiles under my feet were warm.

And then the shockwave hit us.

[Due to features of the North Tower’s construction, the force of the plane’s impact between Floors 96 and 98 had primarily traveled down the length of building before encountering the foundation and reflecting back up.]

Everyone was thrown to the ground and everything went black. The air was full of smoke and fire; it was shooting up through the emergency stairwell and the air conditioning vents and was just everywhere. There were people trying to scream all around us but no one could get their breath; all you could hear was coughing and the roar of fire—so loud it actually hurt, like someone was jamming fingers in your ears. Somehow Raj got me and Ray back on our feet and said, “Come on, we’ve got to find another emergency exit. There’s one on the other side of the building.” We all linked hands and Raj started pulling us through the crowd.

You couldn’t see a foot in all the smoke, and everyone was milling about, running into one another, knocking each other down…but no one was really panicking just yet. I kept hearing people say it was a bomb—somebody had set off a bomb somewhere below us, maybe in the elevator. That both terrified me but, oddly enough, calmed me down at the same time. I remembered the first World Trade Center bombing, in ’93. I was in grade school when that happened, and I’d done a research paper on it. As a result of that disaster, the Towers both had gotten these brandnew fire alarms and warning systems. The bomb obviously hadn’t gone off on our floor, at least, so as horrifying as the idea of being in a hundred-story building where something had just exploded beneath us was, I knew that if we made it to an unblocked emergency stairwell, we’d get out safely. It didn’t matter if one of the stairwells was blocked—there were supposed to be exits all around the floor. We’d be fine. I was scared to death, but I kept telling myself, “They planned for this. It’ll be okay.”

In the lobby outside, though, the smoke and heat were even worse than in the showroom. It was like an oven; there were even little glowing flakes of ash blowing around, and we had to keep our hands over our eyes so we wouldn’t get ash in them. My eyes were burning so bad, though, I just kept them shut. You couldn’t see anyway. I had my suit’s handkerchief over my mouth but it was just a flimsy little decorative thing; it did nothing to filter out the smoke. My lungs felt like they were full of burning dust. Every time I would cough I tasted blood.

But we made it to a corner where the smoke, for some reason, wasn’t all that bad. We could at least catch our breath. There were some men there, crouching down to get below the smoke. They all had their cellphones out and were trying to call 911 or the police. One of them said, “A plane? A fucking plane hit us?!” and I tugged at Raj’s shoulder, telling him what I’d heard. He had his own cellphone to his ear. I started digging for mine in my jacket, but then the smoke closed in and Raj said, “Come on, we’ve got to get out of here now.”

We linked hands again and Raj led us back into the smoke. We were close to the elevators and that’s where most of the smoke was coming from. The elevator doors were all blown out and there were flames gushing out of them. It was so hot I started to feel faint but I slapped myself across the face to keep awake, keep walking. If I got separated from Raj and Ray I wouldn’t have any idea where to go. We were shoving our way through the crowd when up ahead of us somebody shouted, “The stairs are on fire—shut the door, shut the door!” and the people around us started surging back. Now they were panicking. All the exits were blocked. We were suffocating and we were being baked alive.

Raj got us turned around before we got caught in the stampede and started leading us back toward the conference room but a man with a burnt face and a fire extinguisher—empty—ran into us, screaming, “Don’t go down there, everything’s burning—we got to go up, get higher!”

“Where?” Raj gasped. “Is there a clear stairwell anywhere?” But the man was already gone.

Raj kept pulling us and somehow we ended up in the ballroom again. It was just as smoky and crowded but the room was so much bigger it seemed a little easier to breathe. I saw the guy from Schwab lying in a corner, his head pillowed on his thousand-dollar suit jacket, coughing so hard it sounded like he was strangling. It looked like he’d been by the elevators when they exploded. There were suits and techies and wait-staff banging around and everyone—I mean everyone—had a cellphone clamped to their ear. I finally pulled mine out of my jacket and speed-dialed the first number that came to mind: my mother.

I didn’t think I’d get through, but I did, though the signal was weak. Mom answered immediately: “Cressy, what’s happening in New York?! The TV just said an airplane hit the World Trade Center—where are you?”

“I’m right above it,” I said. “It hit below us, I guess.”

“Oh my god, are you all right?—is everyone all right?” She started babbling and crying and I could barely hear her with all the noise around me.

“I’m all right, mom,” I told her. “I don’t know if we’re trapped up here or what but they’re gonna come get us soon.” I told her, “I love you! Everything’s gonna be okay.”

One of the bigwigs I saw earlier was trying to get everybody quieted down. The man with the burnt face was next to him talking on his cellphone and I remembered then that I’d seen the two together earlier; they were both representatives from the same security firm, I believe. “We need to get up higher,” he yelled just like before. “The plane hit somewhere in the nineties and it looks like all the stairs are blocked below us, so we have to go up, you understand? We have to go up to get away from this smoke—get to the roof. They’re gonna have to land helicopters to get us out of here. Go up, get to the roof.”

There was a stairway somewhere outside the ballroom that went upstairs to 107, the second floor of the restaurant. Ray said he knew where it was; we’d actually passed it, twice, but didn’t see it because so many people were pushing and shoving their way up those stairs like cattle in a chute, climbing over each other. Raj tried to lead us over there but it was a horrible mess. A woman was trying to keep everyone calm and orderly but no one was listening. Everybody was panicking by now and the stairs were completely blocked up. There were people on the floor and the others were stepping on them, kicking them out of the way. It was unbearably hot and the smoke was like acid in my eyes. The elevator doors were just a few yards away and there were bright orange cinders in the air. I felt like I was going to pass out again.

“Here,” Raj said after he tugged us back toward the ballroom. He handed Ray and me wads of paper napkins that he’d soaked in water. We plastered them over our noses and mouths like he had and breathing became a little easier. “Fuck this—we can just go up the emergency stairs,” he said.

“But that’s where the fire is, you idiot!” Ray snarled.

“They’re blocked below us,” Raj explained, “but they’re clear above. We just need to go up one floor—we can hold our breath that long. Or do you want to get trampled into the carpet down there?”

I’ll admit, none of us—nobody there whatsoever—was thinking straight. This was a completely stupid idea. Just…stupid. But I saw the people literally fighting their way up the restaurant stairs, punching and kicking, and I thought, I can do it, I can hold my breath and run up just one flight of stairs. Ray kept saying “This is crazy, you’re fucking crazy, Raj,” but we started pushing against the crowd toward the nearest stairwell.

We weren’t the only people who’d had that idea: there was a knot of others at the stairwell, too—booth monkeys like us. The door was open and smoke and ash were billowing in. It was impossible to see inside. Just smoke and a dull orange glow from below and the grinding sound of metal breaking. A man in a green CISCO jacket was the “leader,” the person getting the crowd ready. “On three!” he shouted. “One, two, three!” and the clump of people, who were all holding hands, too, began to run into the stairwell, vanishing into the smoke. Raj grabbed the hand of the last woman in line and we plunged in as well.

It was like jumping into the stairwell that goes straight down to hell. The heat was murderous and you couldn’t breathe at all because the heat would literally ignite your lungs and you couldn’t open your eyes or they’d bake in your skull. You just had to close your eyes and make sure you kept hold of the hand in front of you and the hand behind you and you kept one shoulder to the wall so you knew when you’d reached the landing and the stairs changed direction. It was so horribly loud: all you could hear was this monstrous roaring below. Oh God, oh God, I prayed, just let me make it to the next floor. Just the next floor.

I made it to the landing and Raj was squeezing my hand so hard it ached and somehow…that’s when Ray’s hand slipped from mine.

We were all drenched in sweat and his hand just slid right out of my grasp. I heard him make a gagging sound behind me and I almost opened my mouth to scream for him, or my eyes to see, but I couldn’t, I knew I couldn’t. If I did…I would die. He was just behind me, though: he just had to keep going up, keep his hand on the guardrail. He would make it if he just kept moving. That’s what I kept telling myself, anyway.

The only way I knew we’d made it out onto the 107th floor was the noise of people suddenly coughing and screaming all around me again, and the heat and smoke were a little less horrible. I opened my eyes, but I couldn’t see anything through the tears and the burning, and Raj was right there, asking me, “Where’s Ray? What happened to Ray?”

“He let go,” I choked. “But he was right behind me!”

There were three men pushing the stairwell door shut but Raj threw himself into the gap shouting, “No, no, not yet—there’s still someone in there!” and the guys started arguing with him, telling him they had to shut the door or they’d all suffocate, and they were pulling him, trying to get pull him back in so they could shut the door but Raj said, “Stop it, goddamnit, I got him! I got him!”

And then Raj just disappeared.

One second he was there, the next…gone.

One of the men at the door went in after him—I guess they thought he’d gone back into the stairwell for Ray. We all heard the man scream, but it was cut off almost instantly. The last two guys on the door were calling him—“Bob! Bob, what happened?!”—and then the…the worms came through the door.

Well, they looked like worms. Like earthworms, but big and purple, big as firehoses. And covered with ash—there was ash all over them, like they’d come out of the fire…and I think I even saw one of them still burning.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Two of them whipped out of the smoke and wrapped around the man closest to the doorway and he didn’t even have time to say anything—he was gone. They’d pulled him into the smoke. “Close the goddamned door! There’s more of them!” somebody shrieked and then I was throwing myself at the door with a bunch of terrified people and the heavy emergency exit door slammed shut. I had my hands on the door and felt something hammering against the other side. Hammering. Hard. The door was jumping beneath our hands and everyone was saying, “Block the door, block the door.”

I was shoved aside and two boys in black-and-white waiters’ uniforms came through the smoke carrying a metal desk. They threw it up against the door but the…the worms—or something—on the other side were still pounding, pounding so hard it sounded like someone was using a jackhammer on the door. People were standing on each side of the desk holding the door shut while the waiters and some others went back and forth dragging dining tables and chairs behind them, heaping them up in front of the door and I just stood there, watching. Numb. “Get out of here if you ain’t helping,” someone said to me, so I just…wandered away into the crowd.

People immediately started asking me, “What was that? What’s going on here?” but I couldn’t tell them anything. What had just happened? Where was Ray? And Raj? I’d know Ray only a few days, but I’d known Raj since the day I interviewed at InSoc. And now they were… gone? What, just like that? I kept seeing the worms in the smoke and how they’d latched on to that man by the door—they must’ve had claws or mouths in their tips, because they just locked onto him. They pulled him away so fast I don’t think he even had an idea what was going on. I was sobbing for breath and every gulp of smoke I swallowed seemed to go straight to my head. I couldn’t think. Everything was just a hot grey blur. I was going to pass out and I didn’t care. The crowd was so thick, if I went out, the pressure of their bodies would keep me upright until I snapped out of it.

“To the windows!” I heard then. “They’re breaking the windows!” And shattering. We were on the restaurant’s main floor: there were windows all around us. Windows on the World, right? People had taken up chairs and tables and were smashing them against the diamond panes but the diamond was too tough to crack. They didn’t even make a scratch. But something was shattering. “Over here!” I heard. One wall, the windows were still glass, and they’d knocked them all out to let in air.

[Almost all of the glass windows in WTC 1 and 2 had been replaced with structural diamond at the same time that the diamond ultrastructure had been added to the Towers in 1987, but New York City municipal safety codes mandated that any building that adopted unbreakable diamond windows after commercial SD production began in 1980 must still have at least 10% of its windows made of breakable glass to allow for escape.]

The whole crowd surged toward the wall where the windows had been busted out, and it carried me along We could hear wind howling and the smoke thinned a little, but we were still packed in like crackers in a box. Millionaires, billionaires, waiters, waitresses, janitors—you couldn’t tell one from the other in the smoke and the darkness. I watched an older man in a fancy suit struggling to help a pair of girls who I think were trade journalists behind him but they were both burned pretty badly and kept slipping to the ground. I…stopped thinking. I pushed and pushed into the crowd—no clue where I was going, I just wanted away from the stairwells. I kept hearing “Keep the doors shut! They’re coming in!” behind me people were trying to pick up tables and chairs and desks to pile up in front of the doors, and made the rest push even harder toward the windows. There were people screaming and gasping because they were being squashed. I was jammed in so tightly I could hardly breathe. I hadn’t even gotten ten feet from where I’d been.

Suddenly, the crowd sort of broke around me and I saw a woman being carried between two men who were shouting for everyone to get out of their way: her blouse was completely soaked in blood and it looked like one of her breasts had just been…torn off. Torn. Off. I just stared. “Move,” the men said. “One of those things bit her.”

I turned around to try for the windows again but I tripped over a man—a young black Muslim guy in a waiter’s uniform—who had bundled up a tablecloth into a prayer rug and was kneeling next to a giant potted plant, praying and sobbing. People couldn’t see him and they were kicking him, stomping on him, but he kept praying and praying, pressing his head to the floor.

I was pushed into a table near him and I managed to crawl under it. All I could see now were legs kicking and shuffling. The Muslim kid was right there, next to me. I reached out and tried to pull him to me. “Get under here—it’s safer.”

He looked up at me and I reached out and grabbed the edge of his tablecloth prayer rug and tried to pull it toward me. “Get under here,” I said. “You’re gonna get trampled!” He got the idea after another tug and jumped forward under the table. His rug vanished into the forest of legs instantly. As soon as I got him under the table he asked me, “Do you have a cellphone, miss? Please, can I call my family?”

I handed him the phone and then I just lay there, curled up in a ball, with my face on the carpeting, choking for breath. We’re good as dead, I kept thinking. How’re we going to get to the roof if the stairwells are full of fire and…worms? I remembered seeing an old man in a wheelchair downstairs, with a tube under his nose and an oxygen tank strapped to the back of the chair. Was he still down there? Right then, I would’ve ripped the oxygen tube right off of his face just to take one real breath.

I could hear the boy talking to someone on my phone in, I don’t know, Arabic or Swahili or something. He could barely speak; he kept coughing and sobbing for breath. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen years old.

And then the real screaming began.

There was…not exactly an explosion—like a slow-motion explosion. Like the sound of a bulldozer knocking down a shed. There was wood splintering and metal tearing, and then…this shrill howling. Louder than the screaming—louder than anything. It was so loud even under the table, even with people packed in all around me, it hurt my ears and made my teeth hurt and it made my head spin. It was like that weird electric buzz that locusts [cicadas] make, or every cricket on earth chirping at the same time. When he heard the sound, the Muslim boy’s black skin turned grey as ash and he dropped my phone. He hugged his knees to his chest and started repeating something, over and over and over again. It sounded like “Allaseef, allaseef, allaseef.”

[The boy was saying the Arabic word “Al-Azif.” It is doubtful that he was referring to the Al-Azif, the “holy book” of Cthulhu cultists and Azifist terrorists. More likely, he was using it in a colloquial fashion: even today in northern Africa and the Middle East, it is common for Arabic-speaking peoples to use “Al-Azif” to refer to the sound of night insects, which folklore holds to be the shrieking of the djinn, the demons of the deserts.]

The legs by the table started thrashing around; people were fighting just to move—and over it all, that horrible high-pressure squeal that just kept on and on. I couldn’t even hear screaming anymore, just that sound, and the floor shaking like the building was collapsing. The table we were under jumped up from us as somebody grabbed it and next thing you know I was being trampled under all these feet.

Everything next is a blur. I can’t say it has any accuracy at all, because I was lying on the floor most of the time, half-unconscious from being unable to breathe and from being kicked in the head a few times, but….Take it as you will.

I looked up and saw men flying through the air, tumbling, flailing. I saw one of them hit the ceiling, smashing the tiles next to a chandelier and then…just his legs were hanging down. More people flying, like they were being thrown. The Muslim boy was gone. I tried to get up by grabbing someone’s belt and pulling myself up when—WHUMP—a man landed right in front of me. Part of a man. He was still alive, his face nothing but blood, his suit half-torn from his body, but his legs were both gone. He was squirting blood and was crying, trying to say something but I couldn’t hear him. He grabbed my hand and held onto it and closed his eyes—I think he died—but his hand was locked on mine like a handcuff. I had to pry his fingers loose once I got my wits back.

Someone next to me screamed, “I got it! I got it, it’s down!” but then the floor jumped under me and threw me down and people fell on top of me. I heard a roar like a really strong wind blowing through a window and felt the most unbearable heat envelop me—I could feel it blistering my face, and my hands. The people who’d landed on me were thrashing and screaming and I could smell burning meat. I reached up to push them aside and felt slick, burnt flesh slipping off under my hand. It was so awful, I puked all over myself. The people lying on me weren’t moving anymore. I shoved them off of me and somehow made it to my knees, and…I could see them. They were all blackened and burnt, some of them screaming and curled up into little balls. All around me were burnt people. It…looked like they’d been hit by a flamethrower.

And then three men carrying a table in front of them like a shield appeared, backing out of the smoke. I could see flames flashing on the other side of the table. They stopped a few feet from me and put the table down, still holding it up like a shield, and they all crouched behind it.

“What is it?” I cried. “What’s going on?”

“Keep your head down—it spits fire!” one guy yelled back. He was wearing a chef’s jacket that was covered in blood and ash, and he held a huge carving knife in one hand. “Go to the windows—we’re trying to keep it back. Go toward the windows!”

I turned in the direction he was pointing and started crawling away. Crawling over burnt people writhing in agony. They were begging for someone to help them, and I wanted to help them, but….I could see a wall of people emerging from the smoke, people with overturned tables in front of them. A woman in a bright yellow pantsuit was picking the flower pots out of a decorated fountain and hurling them into the smoke. There was a flash of purple and she was pulled over the table onto the floor. The worm was huge, twice the size of the ones I’d seen at the door, and it wrapped itself around her like a python.

Something big moved in the smoky dark behind me. It sounded like a truck being dragged across the floor. I finally got to my feet and ran a few paces and threw myself into a huge potted rubber tree. Behind me, I could hear another whoosh of flame and heat on my back. I glanced over my shoulder and saw the chef ‘s table was on fire but the men were nowhere.

I crawled into the plant and just…sat there, behind the trunk. For a few minutes. Watching. More worms came out of the smoke, biting into the crowd. Tables and chairs were thrown. Something gigantic was in the smoke, where all the worms were coming from: when it moved, the everything shook, and that noise. It was moving toward the crowd of people pressed up against the windows. The smoke suddenly parted and I saw this thing…a huge, deep red thing: it looked like a crane-arm—I mean, a mechanical crane, with all these joints, and there was a gigantic red worm coiled around it, and the end of the arm a big round ball of…it looked like bubblegum. Honestly. A big wad of someone’s chewed-up bubblegum stuck to the end of the arm. As I watched the bubblegum opened up like a flower, petals peeling back, and then whoosh—it blew a gigantic cloud of fire right into the crowd. People fell. Worms came crawling out of the smoke to drag them back toward the thing in the smoke. Then it slid forward again and the shaking was so bad I fell out from behind the tree.

I saw bodies being flung through the air again. Pieces. A hand still wearing a thousand-dollar Rolex landed in the plant next to me. I could smell the foulest, most sickening stench I’ve ever smelled. I gagged but I had nothing left to throw up. I just turned and threw myself into the crowd.

After the thing had sprayed the crowd with flames, a lot of people ran away from the windows toward the other side of the restaurant, I think. Somebody next to me was saying that the kitchen was safe, everybody run for the kitchen, and I was kicked to the floor again as the crowd surged that way. All I could feel were people’s shoes kicking me in the head, the chest, everywhere. This is it, I thought. I’m going to be trampled to death. Better than being burnt alive, I guess—or being hauled off by the worms. But that saved my life. Being on the ground, I mean—because there was this loud boom, like something had exploded above me in the crowd, and suddenly I was sprayed with blood and bodies just fell all around me. I have no idea what happened. My nose was bleeding and my head was ringing and all you could hear that goddamned locust screeching the thing was making, so I lay there. Waiting.

But I did notice it was easier to breathe now. I sat up after a moment and looked around and there—it was just a few feet away from me—was a broken window, with a bunch of people clinging onto the frame, hanging halfway out of the window, holding on for dear life. Smoke was boiling out around them. There were still people crowding by the windows and now I heard a loud, wet slapping sound coming nearer. Screams. The thing was coming closer.

So I picked up a big metal vase that was rolling around on the floor and got up and started beating my way toward the nearest open window.

I just…started hitting people. Knocking them out of my way. They were out of their minds with fear—I was out of my mind. Everyone was. No one knew what to do; they were just surging around left and right. But I had to get them out of the way so I could get to a window. I didn’t look at them, didn’t look at anything around me: I just swung the vase at anyone that came near me and kept pushing toward the window. Every now and then a gust of wind would stir the smoke. It felt like heaven, like a nice cold towel pressed to my blistered face—and I could breathe. I could see flashes of blue sky but all I wanted was to breathe. I smashed in someone’s face with the metal vase and there—I was almost there—

And that’s when the window went dark. I saw something red and spiky, dark red plates, and then this harsh, electronic voice—honest to god, it sounded like one of the robots from that old show my dad used to like, Battlestar Gallactica, I think—saying, “Hold on to me. Do not let go.” And then the window was open again, and one of the women who had been holding onto the window frame was gone.

Oh my God, it’s outside, too, I thought, and that woman had just jumped to get away from it.

Of course, later on, I saw the pictures of people jumping from the North Tower. When the thing came out of the stairwell or wherever it came from, and everyone was pushed up against the windows, a lot of people just…jumped. To get away from the thing. They didn’t want to die like that. Better a long fall and then—poof. It’s over. Anything’s better than being eaten alive. Or torn to shreds. Burnt alive.

If I could get to a window…what was I going to do? I was going to jump, too. I was. I remember thinking that so clearly. I couldn’t face what was in the smoke. I was smashing a metal vase into people’s faces—innocent people’s faces—just so I could get away from that thing.

And I made it. I made it to the window. I don’t know how, though I remember climbing over several unmoving bodies. There were six people crowding the frame, hanging out, screaming, “Come here, get us!” Was there a rescue effort underway? It didn’t matter—I could feel a bit of fresh air blowing in between them, so I threw myself at the window, sucking up the air by the lungful. My God, it was heavenly.

But someone was pushing me away. I swung the vase at him but he blocked it with his elbow and shouted, pointing, “Go to the next window, the one on the left. They’re going from window to window that way.” He was saying this to all of the people who were trying to climb up into the windowframe, trying to keep them back or stop them from mobbing the window—but then he was gone. I think he had been pushed out of the window.

I instantly awoke from whatever daze I was in. There was a rescue attempt happening! Again I heard, over all that noise, a loud, mechanical voice saying, “Hold on. Do not let go of me.” It was somewhere to the left of me. So I kicked some old man in a fancy suit away from me and pushed toward the next window, pushed and pushed, swinging that vase at anybody in my way. Just as I was going to swing at her, the girl in front of me was jerked away into the crowd. I don’t know what happened to her. She was just there, and then she wasn’t.

But she was the last person in my way. I made it to that window. I hurled myself at it.

Everything becomes crystal clear now. This I remember perfectly. When the wind hit my face it blew all the smoke and craziness out of my head. It was so cold but, dear God, I could breathe again. I was looking down the side of the Tower, straight down toward the ground. I was half-hanging out of the window; my legs were caught on something, or else I would’ve just tumbled out. There were flashing lights everywhere on the ground below—fire trucks, police cars, ambulances, you name it—and the sheer height….Everything below was reduced to tiny little specks of light. Directly below, at the bottom of the tower, there were little black shapes moving around, and some that weren’t moving. And there was the flower bed I’d almost tumbled into, the streets, crowds of people beyond the firetrucks and ambulance—firemen, policemen, onlookers, I couldn’t tell: they were just smears and dots of color. None of it looked real, but still, vertigo hit me right between the eyes. I was still holding the vase, but I let go of it. It fell so fast it just…disappeared. And then I let go of whatever I was holding onto, and I started to slip after it.

I closed my eyes and just let my body go limp. It would be quick. It would only take a couple of seconds for me to fall all that way….

But someone grabbed the back of my blouse and pulled me back, hard. My ribs caught on the windowsill and almost broke. I was acting entirely on instinct at this point, so I got a hand on the window frame and pushed myself up. I managed to get one leg out the window so I could just wrap my body around the frame, holding on so tight I thought my knuckles were going to pop through the skin.

But I could breathe! And I could see again. There were people wedged in all the broken windows, shadows flapping past them, and then I saw them: the Yuggothians. They were everywhere, filling the sky above the blaze below. Some of them were diving in and out of the smoke, but most of them were flying up to the windows and grabbing people. As I watched, one of them flapped up to the farthest window with people in it, at the corner of the building. It fell away from the window with a person, an older guy, clutched tight in its legs, flapping its wings hard to get away from the building. As soon as it was clear, another Yugg flew up to the next window down and the same thing happened.

“Here! HERE! Over here!” I was screaming at the aliens—but everyone else was screaming the same thing, even though it was clear the aliens were following a strict plan. Oh, God, please let them get me, I prayed. Behind me, I could hear another roar of flame and felt the heat singe the back of my neck and there was a terrible THUD that made the entire building shake. Below me I heard the most horrendously loud cracking sound and I swear the building tilted. Diamond cracked and fell away in big chunks—one of them almost hit me as it was falling from above. Behind me, the thing’s buzzing suddenly stopped and I thought, Is it gone? Did someone kill it? I looked into the room but I couldn’t see anything for all the smoke and there were people shoving up against me, arms reaching out the windows, desperate….I tried to kick at them with the leg I had inside but they were pressed so tightly against the window I couldn’t move. I could’ve thrown myself from the ledge right then and would’ve just hung there, because my one leg was pinned.

Then a man in the window one down from me—one of those billionaires I’d seen below not even half an hour ago—screamed and pushed himself off the window frame. He fell, screaming all the way. I watched him plunge right through the cloud of aliens circling below. A few of them folded their wings and dived after him, but I don’t think they were agile enough to catch him. In a second he was just a dark speck among all the specks below.

“Oh, dear God, no,” the man clutching the other side of my window frame said. “No! No. NO!” And then he was gone. He had thrown himself out the window, too. And there were screaming people battering each other to follow him. A terribly burned girl vaulted through the window as if she’s been thrown, and behind her came others, drenched in sweat and blood, all fighting to get through.

“What are you doing?!” I was screaming at the top of my lungs. “The aliens are helping us!” But people were leaping out of the windows on both side of me. The Yuggs flapping up toward them grabbed for them—I saw them actually catch one guy—but I saw a woman hit one of the aliens as she fell. I don’t know if she killed it or broke its wings or what, but they just folded up together and tumbled away. I got my right leg free and began kicking at the people near me—

And I felt something hot and…pulpy, like a rotten banana—soft and mushy—curl around my ankle then there was a blinding pain behind my knee. I screamed and lurched back, away from the pain, and I slipped out of the window.

For an eternity—but probably no more than half a second—I saw nothing but sky. Sky and the hard white edge of the Tower above me. I felt cold, clean air all around me. I didn’t feel like I was falling—I felt like I was flying, like I was falling up into the sky….And then—BAM!—everything turned upside-down as I smacked into the side of the Tower. Hard. Hard enough to break bones. My back had hit a knuckle in the diamond ultrastructure and I cracked all the ribs on my right side. I was lucky I didn’t break my back. But there I was, hanging upside down against the side of the North Tower, almost blind with pain, seeing only flickering shapes and colors above…below me. I saw one of my shoes tumble past my face—everything was happening in slow-motion—and I looked up.

One of the worms had my right leg. It was coiled around my ankle and had bitten into my calf just behind the knee: there was a mouth, or maybe a ring of sharp hooks, at the end of it. I could see blood on my skin and felt flesh ripping. I don’t know how I stayed awake with all that pain, but….I could see it tugging me back up toward the window. A man was in the windowframe stabbing at it with a chunk of broken glass in his hand, slicing it open—orange blood was spurting from it—and I just watched him do it with the most complete…detachment I’ve ever felt in my life. He raised the chunk of glass to take another stab and there was a purple blur and he was gone. A young African-American girl in a waitress’s uniform immediately took his place and threw herself out of the window.

She’s going to hit me! I thought as I saw her arcing down toward me, and….I will never forget her face. I’d never see such a look of utter horror in my life. Her eyes were blank, mindless. She had her hair done up in thick black dreadlocks, but they weren’t dreadlocks—her hair was just matted like that with blood. She had her arms stretched out in front of her and they were all bloody or black with ash.

And then she stopped. In mid-air, she stopped. And just like that—so fast I didn’t even see the worm that grabbed her—she jerked back up through the window and all I could see in the window then was worms and red, boiled-looking flesh and it was all spilling out towards me.

But then a shadow fell on me and I heard the leathery whop, whop, whop of a Yuggothian’s wings and then I felt all these bony legs fold around me, claws clamping down painfully on my arms and legs, and the Yugg’s voicebox saying, “Hold on. Do not let go.” I instinctively wrapped my fingers around one of the legs and held on for dear life.

The Yugg tried to fall away from the building, maybe thinking the worm would pull loose—but it didn’t. It still had an iron grip on my leg. My hip dislocated and it felt like my knee exploded. I could literally see the bones popping and splitting beneath the skin. Then there was a bright flash of light and the pain shot straight up into my head and burst like fireworks and then everything went black.

Everything I know about what happened next came from the Yugg who saved me. He told me what happened once we were safely away from the building and I’d woken up.

The worm hadn’t only bitten my leg, but had started sending some kind of…roots up into my leg as well, digging into the bones and the muscle. The Yugg saw this, somehow, and used a “cutting tool” of some kind—something from its toolbelt—and sawed my right leg off at mid-thigh, above the “contaminated region.” After my leg was separated, the Yugg simply fell away from the building, opened its wings, and glided away.

I came to about halfway there, awakened by the pain as it was tying an improvised tourniquet around my thigh. My face was crunched up against the alien’s carapace, and I didn’t want to open my eyes. The pain in my body was incredible. Sickening. I could actually feel the blood spurting from where the alien had sawed off my leg. The Yugg’s shell felt like rough plastic beneath my cheek and I remember feeling something pulsing, really fast, beneath it—one of its hearts, I guess—and it smelled like burnt cotton candy and smoke. I don’t know how it realized I was awake, but as soon as I was the Yugg told me about my leg and then said it was taking me to Liberty State Park over on the New Jersey side of the river, where there were ambulances and EMTs waiting.

[When the Yuggothians had volunteered to rescue Humans trapped above the impact zones in both towers, they had demanded that a triage center for rescued persons be set up across the Bay in Jersey City. The Office of Emergency Management (OEM) and the Port Authorities of New York and New Jersey quickly designated Liberty State Park as the location and EMT services were dispatched. For a more comprehensive account of the OEM and Port Authorities’ actions, please see pages 158-175 and 210-240.]

The alien landed in the park and immediately I was surrounded by EMTs. They put me on a gurney and started an IV, then hauled me off toward the nearest ambulance. I could just see the Yugg leap back up into the air as another one was landing with a person clutched in its limbs.

As they were loading me into the ambulance, the South Tower collapsed. The back of the ambulance was pointed toward Manhattan and I saw it all. I hadn’t even know a plane had hit the South Tower too until then. For a second I could see both Towers still standing in the distance, great black plumes of smoke trailing from them, the little black dots of Yuggothians swarming around them, and then there was a soft, far-off rumble like heat thunder. “Oh my fucking God!” the one EMT said, and everybody just…stopped what they were doing, and stood there. The sides of the tower above the long gash where the plane hit blew out and in the smoke and flame and dust you could see—at least, I thought I saw—a huge purple mass, writhing and churning. The Tower fell straight down into a gigantic cloud of grey dust.

Everyone was immobile for a moment, frozen. Just…staring at that grey cloud billowing up across the river. No one made a sound. Then they all sprang back to life as one. The EMTs slammed the doors of the ambulance and we started toward the hospital. One of the guys in the ambulance with me was asking me my name and address and what day it was, but the other one was crying and swearing viciously in Spanish as he worked on my leg. The pain was so intense it was making my vision go dark and I knew I was going to pass out again. But right before I did, I heard the ambulance driver shout, “Jesus Christ, they say that thing in the South Tower is still alive.”

“So. What’s it like?” I mumbled as I leaned against the kitchen sink in Greg’s hot, narrow house, staring out the flyspecked window over it, staring at the filthy grey sky above. Dawn was soaking into the concrete sky above the Bronx, a flat plane of cloud like wet tarmac sweating a greasy rain onto the city. The grass in the postage-stamp of backyard hadn’t been mowed in years; a rusted grill and several other unrecognizable lumps of corroding metal were swallowed up by the weeds and the greenblack ivy that hung loose on the fence. The alley beyond was full of garbage. Nothing moved. Not a bird or even a rat in sight, and the air was still and grey and heavy, pressing down the lackluster grass. It already looked hot and sloppy outside: the perfect kind of day for tramping around the ruins of a murdered city.

I’d forgotten how goddamned ugly East Coast weather could be. Ugly as the weather inside my hungover head.

“What’s what like?” Greg asked over his mug of bourbon-spiked coffee. He tilted back in his chair at the table, the legs whining beneath his weight. He was wearing an expensive suit of some shimmery lightbrown material that had clearly been tailored for him when he was much thinner, and with his hair slicked back across his balding pate he looked more like a Fish Market goomba than ever. In front of him sat a steaming coffeepot, a bottle of Jim Beam, and a newly-opened pack of Marlboros. Breakfast of champions.

“Here. Living here, still,” I finally managed.

He was silent for a bit, then shrugged. “Different, man. Way different.”

He slurped his coffee and lit up a cigarette. I watched him, expecting more to follow, but Greg only sat there watching the smoke curl up toward the cracked ceiling, looking uncomfortable. I’d hoped for a more substantial answer, especially considering Greg’s proximity to the very heart of that difference itself.

Manhattan was just a mile or two away from Greg’s house, “down the street and around the corner” as we used to say. For some insane reason, Greg lived close enough to the Line of Demarcation and No Man’s Land that we could’ve walked to Manhattan that morning if we really wanted to…though the Military Police guarding the Line would probably have something to say about that. When he’d told me how close to the ruins he lived, I’d almost asked him to take me to a hotel—in Queens, in Jersey, in Long Fucking Island…anywhere as long as it was as far away from that blank black spot in the City as possible. But, ultimately, I hadn’t bothered. I could feel the Pull in every cell of my brain and body: what would a mile or ten miles matter now that I was back in New York City, on the rim of the abyss? All night long—well, throughout the three-and-a-half hours of night left between the time we got home from the bar and when we had to be up for the day’s “festivities”—I’d lain weary and drunk but unsleeping on Greg’s sofa, listening to his old house’s painful creaking (all buildings this close to Manhattan had suffered some damage from the earthquaking blasts of the final bombing), feeling the terrible presence of the ruins just a short walk away and struggling, fighting, to keep myself awake. A few times I’d drifted and I’d heard words whispered from the sky, the whirlpool in the earth. We were so close I could feel it grinding in my half-dreams, but rationalized the sensation away as the distant rumble of the subway after I surfaced again.

We were close enough, too, that you could always smell the everpresent cloying stink of compacted ash and suppurating poisons saturating the air. It was a thousand times worse than the stench of putrefying garbage that had befouled the City for several weeks when the sanitation workers had gone on strike during my junior year of college. This was a horrible, strange odor—a thoroughly unnatural stench that stung the sinuses and clotted like blood. During the summer after 9/11, I remembered, a high-pressure front had stalled over the City for two weeks and nearly closed down Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx because the stewing reek had been enough to make a maggot vomit. The Great Sickness, they’d called it, earning the City another new negative nickname: “The Rotten Apple.” It hadn’t been noticeable in Queens, but as we’d driven home last night, the smell had grown from a faint sourness on the back of the tongue to an overwhelming opprobrium that literally made me dizzy.

“How in the hell can you stand this?” I’d asked. Greg had smirked and pulled out his pack of Marlboros. So that’s why he’d learned to smoke like a crematorium: the smell of cigarette smoke was infinitely preferable to—and did a great job of masking—the noisome funk of the dead zone. According to Greg, the number of smokers in the City had tripled since 9/11 simply because cigarette smoke killed your taste buds and deadened your sense of smell. “Anytime you want one, help yourself,” he’d said. Now, just catching the faintest whiff of it seeping through the loose windowframe, I was close to reaching for his Marlboros, starting a habit of my own…something new and deleterious to distract me from the churning in my gut, the febrile sensation of absolute dread that suffused me.

I sat down at the table, but reached only for the coffeepot and poured a mug. It was some savage Starbucks espresso roast that tasted like burnt bile. When Greg saw me wince he pushed the bottle of Jim Beam toward me. “Here, add a little hair of the dog,” he suggested. “Takes away some of the nastiness and gives you a little extra motivation, too.” I poured in a finger of bourbon and took another sip. Huh. The liquor actually made the coffee more palatable.

Silence stretched until it grew uncomfortable. To say something, I asked: “So. What’re the chances of me finally getting to kick Solana Mitchell’s teeth down her throat today? ”

“Slim to fucking none. Chances are we won’t even see the bitch if she’s gonna be riding with her little boyfriend General Wiesy and the VIPs—but that’s who you need to be watching for, y’know? Who she’s skeezing on, whose asscrack she’s got her nose wedged in now. You wanna get something on her, you don’t waste your time looking at her, you look at everyone around her. Especially with that entourage she’s got these days. Christ. Like fucking Madonna. Keep your eyes and ears on them people and—trust me here—I guarantee one of them’s gonna shit out something you can throw back in her face.”

Well, that’s why I’m here, I thought. Isn’t it? Maybe. Sixthirty in the morning, September 11, 2009, and I was still asking myself every five minutes what I was doing here on the wrong side of America. And every time the answer was something different. The patent ridiculousness of my situation was more bitter than the acrid coffee. I felt alternately petty and hormonal as some teenage idiot nursing schemes of righteous retribution, then as confused as an old man who’s just run off from the rest home and doesn’t know where he is or why he’s there. Then terrified. Then angry. Lather, rinse, repeat—over and over again. I was pretty certain now that Greg only wanted me here to help with his eternal crusade against the US military. Maybe he intended to use my presence as a tool to get a rise out of Mitchell and her camp. After all, she was the only common element we shared.

Last night, Greg had taken me to some faux-Irish pub in Queens after we’d left the airport and we’d closed the place down, slumped over pints of Guinness and shots of Jameson’s at the bar, awkwardly trying to reconnect. Reminiscing about The Times, our college years at NYU…carefully steering clear of any mention of the today until we literally had nothing more to talk about, and then saying only what we absolutely had to say: what time do we have to be there, what are we allowed to bring, etcetera. Even after the booze began to work on both of us the conversation never became less than awkward. Greg was more stranger than friend now. Had I really expected anything else? The last eight years had changed him—and me—to the point that we were now like two vague acquaintances that had inherited some other guys’ memories of their idealized past. I was suspicious of his motives and a little uneasy at the constant anger in him; he didn’t know how to take my reticence when I dodged around questions about life Out West. I couldn’t tell if I was trying to protect the sanctity of my California cocoon or just ashamed to admit how shallow my life had become. The only thing we really shared anymore were our various scars from September 11. I wanted nothing more than to ignore mine. Greg wore his like badges of authority: they were the mandates that validated his rage at “the fucking wound-licking bastards who live off the blood of this City.” It just so happened that Solana Mitchell was one of them—one of the worst, in fact—so we’d ended up talking about her more than anything else. At least our mutual hatred for that bitch gave us some kind of common ground.

Still, I was desperately uneasy talking about her. Until the furor over the press junket began in July, I hadn’t heard Solana Mitchell’s name mentioned since late 2004, when she had been one of the last witnesses to testify in President Bush’s trial. Her statement had only been a minor tack in that bastard’s coffin—one of several thousand that the Weismann-Paul Committee had collected—but once her name came up in relation to the trial, her Manhattan Memorial Project, which had been largely underwritten by the Bush administration, had briefly drawn some media scrutiny. Fortunately, I had been too “busy” collecting stories about Lindsay Lohan’s latest drug-trafficking charge to seethe at how expertly she’d sweet-talked everyone into believing her to be just another poor, gullible victim of the Cabal. I’ll admit, regardless of everything I thought of her, I had to admire her spin skills. She was a magical liar. Half the asshole PR agents in Hollywood would give their firstborn sons to have her ability to lie down with the devil on the steps of the Capitol Building and, years later, convince the rest of the world that she was still as pure as a goddamned bonafide angel. She was tricky, allright. I had firsthand knowledge of it.

According to Greg, she’d spent the last four years flitting back and forth between New York and the Capitol, kissing asses in City Hall and the Beltway to ensure her foundation’s future under Kennedy’s pro-tem Presidency and now the Obama administration. She’d shucked-n‘-jived her way through the chaos by always remaining in the shadows of the Big Time Players, the ones whose back pockets contained the healthiest donations to her little foundation for “preserving the memories of all those whom 9/11 had touched.” She’d even cozied up to the Pentagon, as well, joining in with the chorus of former Bush lackeys who’d managed to save face by denouncing their former sugardaddy once the War on Terror had turned into the Unending Occupation. The Manhattan Memorial Project now had a list of Big Name Donors a mile long, collected over eleven million dollars a year tax free, and their book, City of Pillars, was coming up on its fifth, newly-expanded, reprint. Solana Mitchell had weathered the political Katrina that was the Interim Administration and come out even better than she’d been before the Cabal had imploded…all because she had found a way to make the loathsome horror of 9/11 pay by marketing the slogan “Never Forget” and using it as an unassailable bargaining chip when dealing with politicos.

Oh, how she’d grown from being the scared, horse-faced freshman journalism major who’d begged Greg and I to help her survive Montague Summers’ Intro to Media Ethics class….From crying to me that she’d never had a boyfriend to “being seen” all over the Capitol with General Anthony Wiesenthaller.

Who was I kidding? What could I possibly do to sully the reputation of someone who’d clearly proved herself a thousand times more fit to the Fame Game than I could ever be? I wasn’t even fit to drop her name in a mudslinging gossip column.

Well, then, why was Greg encouraging me—much like he used to encourage me all those years ago—to go after her? He was the professional, the notorious “Big Dog Barking,” the people’s champion or what-the-fuck-ever. The thought made me feel even more like I was just his pawn. Sullen anger cramped my guts and I swallowed hard to force the taste of espresso and whiskey back into my stomach, where they were sizzling painfully.

Greg looked up at the clock on the stove. “Well, c’mon, shithead,” he said. “Gotta get moving. We’re due at LaGuardia at 8 sharp and one thing hasn’t changed about this fucking place: rush hour still sucks the big bone.”

Allright. I could feel a little of the tension leave me as my body clicked into autopilot again. I grabbed my camera and my handheld digital recorder and followed Greg out the door to the streetcorner where he’d parked his rusty little Dodge Neon. The muggy air, slimy with the stink of the ruins, gagged me. It pressed against my face like a fever. I was dizzy and sick by the time I reached the car. Greg held the door for me and I collapsed into the shotgun seat. My stomach felt like I’d swallowed a freshly-fired brick and to keep it from revolting I fixed my eye on a picture taped to the dash in front of me that I hadn’t even noticed the night before: an old Hello From The Big Apple! postcard depicting of one of the lions outside the New York Public Library, pigeons dancing on its insensate stone head. Greg had a thing for old postcards depicting Manhattan landmarks, I noticed: there were at least ten of them stuck to his fridge with magnets. He had never been much of a memorabilia collector before (except for his Steelers jacket, which had been a gift from his mom who’d moved to Pittsburgh after she’d left his father), but so much of Greg’s life—like everything in this goddamned City—had come to revolve around the void at its heart. He probably collected the postcards as reminders of a happier world that, in retrospect, was just as flimsy and throw-away as those cards.

Greg sat down with a grunt and started the engine. He stared at me for a moments. “Last chance to bail,” he said, then shrugged when my thousand-yard stare never changed and I never said anything. I kept my eye on that stalwart stone lion and Greg pulled out onto the buckled street.

Greg was right: life in the City was totally different. Even the morning Rush Hour traffic had changed—for the worse, which I could hardly believe was even possible. But with the absence of Manhattan and the re-establishment of many businesses in the remaining Four Boroughs, traffic patterns had suffered severe upheavals that the Metropolitan Transit Authority and the City Planners were still struggling to deal with. Luckily, Greg told me, last year the city had finally reopened all the streets in the Bronx that had been blocked by collapsed buildings or sinkholes. “Otherwise,” he said, “we’d have to leave at five in the fucking morning just to get to Queens.”

As we inched our way Queensward through the Bronx morning traffic, Greg got me to chat aimlessly about random crap we’d heard about in the news, but neither of us were really paying attention to one another. Oddly, my stomach had calmed down once we were moving, and I let my attention wonder from the faded postcard to the streets creeping by a car-length at a time outside the rainflecked windows.

People were milling about as always, hugging wives/children/parents goodbye as they went to work or school, standing at bus-stops talking to each other or their cellphones, crowding benches, reading newspapers or paperbacks or magazines until the buses came, descending into subway entrances. There were faces everywhere, laughing, babbling, wearing monolithic grimaces of tedium or annoyance, blank, blind, or animated. Undoubtably alive. An old man at his newsstand was tossing free bags of freshly-roasted peanuts to passersby. A group of young black girls on their way to school sang a Beyonce tune as they danced together down the sidewalk. Three times loopy streetwalkers with grimy rags offered to wipe down Greg’s windshield. There were a lot of African-Americans and Hispanic and even Asian folk in the crowds—more than I’d ever seen in the Bronx. Evacuees from Harlem, which had been bulldozed to make the Line of Demarcation. You couldn’t easily tell that these people had been only a handful of minutes away from being devoured by monsters from a thoroughly-insane otherworld. They were going about their lower-income lives like always. The famed resilience of New Yorkers was never more visible. At least that hadn’t changed.

But I could tell that beneath the veneer of everyday living lay a taut unease. You could see it occasionally in the tight grimace of an old man passing by a crowd of black teenagers lounging on a streetcorner, the glare of a young Asian woman who stood at a busstop with a bunch of loudmouthed factory workers. I had always steered clear of the Bronx when I’d lived in Manhattan: it was one of those neighborhoods most people tried to avoid. Even Greg hadn’t liked going back, though I’d gone with him once or twice to visit his dad and stepmother (who were still living in the broken-down brownstone his old man had owned since the early ‘70s). A lot of refugees from Manhattan and Harlem had been Resettled in the Bronx, and after six years there was still considerable tension between them and Bronx natives. The Bronx was even rougher, more dangerous today thanks to the magnified poverty and overpopulation brought on by packing a hundred thousand exiled people into an already-overcrowded dump. The crime rate had soared, outstripping the capacity of the NYPD even as they hired more and more officers every year. At his father’s suggestion, Greg had gotten a concealed-carry permit and usually had a snubnosed .357 under his jacket (though he’d left it at home today) and his house was outfitted with a state-of-the-art security system—even though he didn’t own anything worth stealing.

But I could almost see why he chose to live here, nonetheless. For all its stink and squalor and anger, it was clear that life had gone on here as it always had despite the horrors that had happened only a few miles away. The buildings were all lopsided, darker, dirtier, permanently smokestained. Many showed signs of having been hurriedly expanded. Many roofs had wooden shacks built upon them and even abandoned, condemned buildings were clearly still inhabited by squatters. There were a lot of abandoned storefronts, many of them with broken windows and jimmied doors.

Despite all that, nothing appeared that much different than I’d remembered. The Borough may be dirtier and more crowded than ever, but it didn’t look wounded. People still lived. They worked, they scavenged, they survived. The streets were alive just like they’d always been.

Of course, I couldn’t see the cancers growing in these people’s lungs, planted there by the toxic smoke they’d breathed day in and day out while Manhattan was burning. The frequency of mesothelioma and related lung cancers had quadrupled in the Bronx and Queens thanks to all the carcinogenic shit that had been in that smoke. The death rate was supposedly just a few percentage points higher, but the hospitals were overflowing just the same. A year or two ago, Greg said, he’d done an exposé on the real mortality figures that the City and the US Government didn’t want to be public knowledge. Not pretty. And he hadn’t even mentioned Manhattan Syndrome.

No one talked about Manhattan Syndrome.

In fact, hadn’t I just seen a man curled up in a plastic-tarped refrigerator box in the mouth of an alley, his belly bulging out from beneath a grimy New York Mets t-shirt, a long grey limb looped ‘round his waist like a swollen belt? People would sooner walk in the street that get close to the man. For all I could tell, he might be dead. Above him, spraypainted in neon green on one side of the alley, a diagonal stick with three branches on one side and two on the other.

Now I noticed the graffiti. Graffiti everywhere—more than I’d ever seen. Almost every building had something spraypainted on it: tags, gang signs, strangely beautiful cartoons and murals…and weird sketches that made me feel antsy. My stomach knotted when I spied the stick-like device again. “Greg?” I asked, pointing. “What is that?”

“What—the graffiti? Idaknow. I think it’s somekinda new gang sign. You see it in Queens, too, and Staten Island, for that matter. Ever since half of Harlem got dumped into the Bronx we’ve had gang trouble like you wouldn’t believe. We even got some genuine homegrown Cthulhu cultists, can you believe that?”

Of course I could: they were everywhere these days. Even San Diego. Every year in early March the lunatics gathered at beaches up and down the West Coast to wade into the chilly waters and sing praises to their comatose god beyond the horizon. Since 9/11 their gathering had drawn mockers and increasing violence, to the point that police had to be called in to guard their ridiculous ceremonies. I could only imagine them doing the same here, gathering on shores facing the ruins of Manhattan….“How many?” I wondered.

Greg shrugged. “A few, here and there. Not as many as you’d think. Right after 9/11 they were fucking everyplace, but the police ran most of them out of town. The Church of the Great Old Ones had a little storefront on Whateley Street for a little while but the neighborhood, they didn’t take too kindly to them, for obvious reasons. Someone torched the place. I’ve got it on good authority that it was the FDNY themselves did it. The fire only destroyed the cultists building; didn’t damage anything else.”

“That symbol has something to do with them,” I muttered under my breath.

Greg still heard me. “Probably. Who knows. All kinds of whackjobs in this City these days.”

As we passed a building standing all alone between two vacant lots, I saw that the entire base of the building had been spraypainted with weird, jagged designs that almost looked like Egyptian hieroglyphs and, on one side there was a tall white blot where something had been sprayed over in white paint. You could still recognize the outline, though: the huge, cephalopod head, the wings, the bulbous body. One each side of the blob, an eight-pointed star had been painted. In the center of each star, an eyes with a tripartite pupil.

Feeling sick again, I turned away and looked straight ahead at the line of traffic creeping toward the onramp and said nothing. Greg fiddled with the radio until he settled on a classical station playing an odd, frantic violin piece. I closed my eyes, pretending that I hadn’t seen the coils of light writhing sickly in the weeds and brickpiles beneath that malevolent white stain.

Once we got onto 678, the Hutchison River Parkway, we actually began to move. Greg and I rolled down our windows to get some “fresh air”—the stink of Manhattan was barely noticeable, overwhelmed by the cold, wet odor of the East River as we crossed the Bronx Whitestone Bridge. As Greg weaved through traffic on the Bridge, I finally looked west toward Manhattan. I couldn’t help it. After the claustrophobic confines of the Bronx, it felt liberating to be free of beetling buildings and honking congestion. There was no skyline anymore in the distance: just mist and sweaty grey clouds. Nothing to see…only a flat emptiness beyond Rikers Island and the spiky wreckage of the TriBorough Bridge. A charcoal smear along the shore of the Hudson River, and beyond that, above it, the shimmering—

I felt a surge of acid in my chest.

“Pull over,” I told Greg.

“Huh? What, we’re on the bridge—”

“Pull the fuck over unless you want your car to smell like puke.”

“Aw, for fuck’s sake,” he grumbled, but he did put on his flashers and maneuvered over onto the thin verge so I could roll down the window, lean out, and finally vomit up all the coffee I’d drunk. I didn’t heave, I didn’t even feel nauseous: the brick in my belly had just dissolved into a nasty sludge that my body wanted rid of, so I hung my head out the window and the coffee just spilled out of me. When I was done, I leaned my face on the door and spat the taste of bourbon and scorched beans out of my mouth, breathing heavily, still staring at that strip of emptiness beyond Brooklyn….

The clouds were dimpled above the Island, scraped and swirled. Everything, whirling down the toilet.

“You didn’t get anything on the car, did you?” Greg griped. Traffic roared past, honking, missing Greg’s car by inches.

I hawked the last of the espresso taste out of my throat and dug in my jacket pocket for some Rolaids or breath mints, found a stiff old stick of Wrigleys gum to chew. “No. Go on, drive. I’m done.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. Let’s go. Get this over with.”

Greg stomped the gas pedal and screeched back out into traffic. The disaster certainly hadn’t changed New Yorkers’ driving habits. I was slammed back into the seat and my heart sputtered. Christ, I’d forgotten just how bad New York driving was. No wonder I’d never gotten a driver’s license.

Since the TriBorough Bridge was gone, to get to LaGuardia we took the Whitestone Expressway past College Point and Flushing and again, I was amazed again to see that the City around us was cruddier than ever, yes, but just as active as it had ever been. The highways were choked with the usual traffic as millions of commuters entered the City for work or drove from one Borough to another. Queens and Staten Island were booming since many of the businesses whose main offices or headquarters had been destroyed in Manhattan had resurrected themselves in the surviving Boroughs. The new Times office was in Staten Island, for instance, almost all high financing had moved to Queens, and Brooklyn was experiencing an honest-to-god economic Renaissance thanks to all the shipping coming in through its expanded docks. I saw license plates from every state in the Union, hundreds of old MTA buses farting clouds of diesel fumes, and a few brandnew electric models that were supposed to replace all MTA buses by 2010. The City might have been cored, but it was clear that however much it had suffered, it had survived. It was still the economic capitol of the East, regardless of the miseries, hatreds, and fears that writhed in its myriad slums.

When we exited onto the Grand Central Parkway toward North Queens, for the first time I saw military vehicles mixed in with the everyday commuters: greenpainted trailers hauling construction equipment, green and tan Hummers ducking in and out of traffic. Going the other way, flatbeds and dumptrucks piled high with wreckage tied down beneath tightly-drawn tarps, tails of ash and dust puffing from beneath the billowing shrouds. The clean-up effort was kicking back into high gear, but I still wondered: each of those trucks can only be carting away…what? A couple tons of wreckage, smashed cars, shattered stone and asphalt, dirt baked into a blackish glass? And the ruins of Manhattan covered how many square miles?

In 2002, I remembered, General Albert Cunningham, the poor shit the US Army Corps of Engineers had put in charge of the original clean-up effort, announced it would take more than twelve years to scrape the Island clean, and who knew how many more before anyone could safely begin rebuilding there. By ’03 there was even a lot of talk about abandoning the Island entirely and designating it a national monument, but the New York City Council fought vehemently against that option—and rightly so—citing that nobody in the surrounding Burroughs wanted to have a mouldering toxic junkyard lying there in the heart of the City, a constant reminder of the unimaginable loss of life and destruction of one single day. Luckily, now that Obama was in office and the sheer chaos of the Interim Administration was finally contained, a new wind of hope was supposedly blowing through the City and, along with the restructuring of the military clean-up effort, there were supposedly investors by the thousand jostling to be the first to lay the cornerstone of New Manhattan. So Greg had told me last night, anyway. What the New Manhattan would be—a whole new cityscape, a giant memorial park, miles upon miles of low-rent housing, manufacturing space, and warehouses, or all of the above—was a hot topic to bet on. Nothing was certain. There was a war of words and dollars going on between City Council, the Army Corps of Engineers, and damn near every real-estate developer on the East Coast concerning how the land was going to be parceled out once it was cleared.

“And if you can believe this shit,” Greg had said, “there’re motherfuckers already selling property on the Island based on survey records from the 1870s—and people are honest-to-goddamn-god giving them money. Plus, half the businesses who actually owned property in Manhattan are claiming that their holdings still belong to them. Council’s got their heads so far up their asses they can’t tell what’s legal or not. Gerv’s gonna be batshit crazy by the time he’s done being Mayor just from dealing with all the goddamn real estate disputes. And dear god, don’t even ask about the insurance battles. I tried to write an article on that once but gave up. That shit’s enough to make Nyarlathotep himself dizzy.”

Greg kept ranting on about the financial chaos and I tuned him out—he’d forgotten that money-talk made my brain shut off. So much of it was already dimmed or dampened, just by defense mechanisms I hadn’t needed since those horrible, horrible days immediately after 9/11, days spent…somewhere my mind could no longer go. Days of blood and fire.

I cocked and arm out the window and lay my head on it, face catching the buffeting wind, and I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see the structures in the clouds over Manhattan, or in my mind, the scaffolding of shadows that only I could see once more….

[Excerpts from The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. Authorized First Edition. Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.]

The Hijacking of American 11

United Airlines Flight 11 provided nonstop service from Boston to Los Angeles. On September 11, Captain Michael Loesky and First Officer Reginald Hong were piloting the Boeing 767. It carried its full capacity of nine flight attendants and eighty-one passengers (including the five Azifist cultists).

The plane took off at 7:59. Just before 8:14, it had climbed to 26,000 feet, not quite its usual assigned cruising altitude of 29,000, because of the aerospace alert announced three days prior for the states of Massachussetts and Vermont. An empty ATK transorbital ore hauler (USSTC Des. AT933) was being maneuvered down from LEO (Low Earth Orbit) to the Yuggothian mining facilities at Bald Mountain, Vermont, and had been given priority clearance. All communications and flight profile data for Flight 11 were normal. About this time the “Fasten Seatbelt” sign would normally have been switched off and flight attendants would have begun preparing for cabin service.

At the same time, American 11 had its last routine communications with the ground when it acknowledged navigational instructions from the FAA’s air traffic control (ATC) center in Boston. The ore hauler had begun its descent and would be entering the atmosphere in several minutes. Sixteen seconds after that transmission, ATC updated the flight’s pilots with the ore hauler’s descent path and instructed them to maintain altitude at 26,000 feet. That message and all but one subsequent attempts to contact the flight were unacknowledged. From this an other evidence, we believe the hijacking began at apprixmately 8:14.

Reports from two flight attendants in the coach cabin, Christina Bi and Clark Duranty, give us most of the information we have concerning how the hijacking of American Airlines Flight 11 took place. Because of its detailed nature, this information would later prove vital to the military response during the subsequent Manhattan crisis.

The hijacking began when three of the cultists—Satam al Suqami, Wail al Shehri and Waleed al Shehri, all of whom were seated in the second row of the first class section—leaped up and stabbed two unarmed flight attendants preparing for in-flight service. Christina Bi, who was preparing flight service at the attendants’ station in coach, from which she had a clear view of the first class section, witnessed the attack. According to her description, she initially thought the men were attacking with disposable plastic cutlery, but when she got a better look at the men she saw that the blades “were either strapped to their wrists or were coming out of their wrists or the palms of their hands.”

It is uncertain how the hijackers then got access to the cockpit. FAA rules require that cockpit doors remain closed and locked during a flight. Bi said that they “broke down the door,” but it’s also possible that the terrorists had gotten a cockpit key from one of the attendants they’d stabbed, or had persuaded the pilots to open the door with threats of further violence. As soon as the cockpit door was opened, Muhammud al Quthuli—the only Azifist on board who was trained to fly a jet—and Abdulhazred al Omari entered the cockpit to take control of the plane. The three remaining hijackers released Mace, pepper spray, or some other form of aerosol irritant in the first class cabin to force the flight attendants and passengers toward the rear of the section. Though Bi did not witness this event, she later reported what a first class passenger had told her. One of the terrorists had appeared to vomit at the front of the plane, and the fumes from the vomit had been extremely noxious to everyone but, apparently, the terrorists themselves. All the while they taunted the frightened passengers, claiming they had a bomb or weapon they were going to use that would “break a hole in the sky” which would swallow them all.

Many passengers from first class fled into the coach section, but the majority of them took cover behind the seats in the rear of first class since the terrorists did not seem intent on leaving the very front of the plane. There has been some popular speculation that the passengers who remained in the first class cabin were following the orders of fellow passenger Michael Guilder, a former career officer in the Israeli military, who is believed to have been attempting to organize resistance against the hijackers. However, there is no evidence to support this. Though Guilder was listed as a first class passenger on the plane, neither Bi nor Duranty ever mentioned him or a “counterattack” in any context.

Of those passengers that did enter coach, several immediately commandeered drink and food carts to blockade the door between coach and first class. Flight attendant Clark Duranty was among them, and remained at the blockade, watching through the window in the door as events further unfolded in first class.

Shortly after she’d witnessed the attendants’ stabbing, Christina Bi ran to the back of coach and contacted the American Airlines Southeastern Reservations Office in Cary, North Carolina, via the AT&T airphone at the rearmost attendant’s station to report an emergency aboard the flight. This emergency call lasted 30 minutes, as first Bi and then Duranty frantically relayed information about the events taking place aboard the airplane to authorities on the ground. Bi’s first words were, “We’re being hijacked—some people were just killed in first class—I don’t know what’s going on but I don’t think they’re Human.”

Christina Bi’s statements were proven true at 8:20, when al Omari emerged from the cockpit with the two pilots in tow. Duranty was watching, and described everything taking place in first class to a fellow flight attendant, who shouted the details back to Bi; Bi, in turn, repeated the information as calmly as she could to authorities on the ground.

Al Omari was naked, and according to Duranty, his skin looked bruised, as if he’d been severely beaten, and “he had weird symbols all over him.” Duranty could not describe the symbols, but did say that they looked like they’d been cut or burnt into his flesh. Duranty also said that the cultist had looped belts or possibly “some kind of ropes” around the pilots’ necks, but when al-Omari forced them to their knees, Duranty corrected his description: the restraints were “growing from his belly…big thick purple tentacles…that he was choking them [the pilots] with.”

As soon as al Omari left the cockpit, the Azifists in the first class cabin began chanting loudly in a language that Duranty (incorrectly) identified as Arabic. As soon as the pilots were kneeling, two of the armed men came up and slit the pilots’ throats. Al Omari immediately threw himself down on top of their bodies and began to smear their blood all over himself.

The passengers remaining in first class immediately began to panic and many tried to force the door to the coach section. Duranty wanted to let them in, but the terrified passengers who had blocked the door in the first place refused to remove the carts. An altercation broke out among them and the carts were eventually moved out of the way by other passengers, but only a handful from first class made it through into coach before the armed terrorists began assaulting the knot of people that had formed on the first class side of the door. A foul gas was used again to subdue the passengers, many of whom were immobilized by its nauseating effects. Though sickened by the fumes, too, Duranty and the passengers he’d been struggling with managed to pull a few more first class passengers into coach before shoving the carts back into place to keep the Azifists from entering.

Duranty was experiencing severe respiratory and gastric distress from the hijackers’ chemical agent, but he remained at the door to observe the horrors being enacted in first class because “someone on the ground has to be told what was happening up here.” An unidentified passenger now ran between him and Christina Bi.

At 8:21, one of the employees monitoring the call from Flight 11 alerted the American Airlines operations center in Fort Worth, Texas. Manager on duty Cyril Kilborn quickly realized this was an emergency completely unlike anything in his or his company’s experience. He instructed the airline’s dispatcher responsible for the flight to contact the cockpit immediately. At 8:23 the dispatcher received this brief statement from al Quthuli: “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh fhtagn a’tquan.” (“In his city at R’Lyeh dead Cthulhu waits no longer.”) There would be no further communication with the cockpit of Flight 11. Moments later, an air traffic control specialist at the operations center contacted the FAA’s Boston Air Traffic Control Center about the flight. The center was already aware of the problem.

At 8:25, Duranty replaced Bi on the airphone and related the following details for the remainder of the call. He was almost incoherent with terror, and it wasn’t until several hours later, after the recording of the call had been analyzed thoroughly, that a reasonably clear transcript of his portion of the call was released to civil and military authorities.

Duranty had watched the wholesale slaughter of the passengers remaining in first class. The sickening fumes had overcome many of the passengers, who were blinded and vomiting. The three armed Azifists had dragged them one by one toward the front of the plane, where they were routinely dismembered. By now, all of the terrorists had begun to exhibit very noticeable signs of physical alteration. The torsos of the armed men were twisted and deformed, and their arms now ended in long, serrated blades which they were using like cleavers to literally butcher the passengers. Al Omari’s body had almost completely dissolved into a shapeless mass of “purple worms or tentacles” that were devouring the pieces of the passengers’ bodies that the other cultists fed to it. The “thing” was swelling in size much faster than could be accounted for by consumption of the bodies, and had begun making a loud, distinctive “cricket” sound clearly audible on portions of the recorded call.

When the last passenger remaining in first class was murdered and given to the entity, the other three Azifists tried to wrench open the door to coach. Despite the blockade of carts and the efforts of the passengers holding the door shut, the terrorists still managed to pry open a corner of the door and spray another cloud of disabling gas into the attendants station. The passengers collapsed, but the cultists’ attempt to open the door ceased. According to a voice later isolated from the cacophony, one of the entity’s tentacles or pseudopods had snatched the terrorists from the doors. The growing entity consumed the other hijackers just as it had consumed the passengers.

At 8:41, the entity breached the blockade. A tremendous explosion can be heard on the airphone recording as the entity threw aside the carts and came pouring into the coach cabin. Duranty’s last words were: “Somebody shoot us down—please—kill this thing!” The remainder of the recording is nothing but screaming, sounds of intense violence, and the continuous warbling of the entity itself. The call ended at 8:44.

At 8:46:40, American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. It is generally accepted that, by the time of impact, all passengers and crew (possibly even pilot al Quthuli) had been consumed by the First-Stage (Gateway) Entity evolving aboard the plane.

Distance is often the only thing that saves us from the cancerous growth of our lives’ darkest moments. The greater the distance in time, in space, in understanding-or, even better, willful ignorance-we put between ourselves and those events, the safer we are. To do otherwise is to risk a terminal glioma of Utter Despair, which will grow and grow and grow in the pith of your mind like the grandaddy of all tumors, the Cthulhu of all tumors…blooming and ballooning until one day or another, one way or another, you burst. And then some poor fucker from a crime scene clean-up crew will have the dubious honor of scrubbing your dessicated brains off your bedroom wall. There’s no shame in running from something you just can’t overcome.

After the monstrous chaos of 9/11, too sickened by everything I’d already endured to face the malignant aftermath, I’d fled to the other side of America, putting three thousand miles and, eventually, eight years between myself and the horrors (and betrayals) of Manhattan. A few dizzy months seeking refuge up and down the West Coast-and a couple pleading calls to the few People in High Places who would still vouch for me, or, for that matter, speak to me-had led at last to a position as an “arts-and-leisure writer” for the San Diego Sensation. I quickly cocooned myself in a safe, if not particularly sane, new life of Hollywood gossip and glamourspotting and did my best to forget about the World At Large as America went to war, the Middle East seethed and bled through the darkness of Oil Night, and the President of the United States himself was exposed-then promptly deposed-by the Cabal of K’n-yanese and Human right-wing oligarchs that had snuck him into office in the first place. While monsters walked the radioactive wastelands of the Rub al-Khali, I learned to spend my days immersed in the sunlit minutiae of my new hometown. The US government imploded, but I refused to think about anything more than this week’s premiers, openings, club nights, and the famous faces that frequented them. In the chaotic years after September 11, I learned all the tricks of tabloid journalism and mastered the art of cranking out at least two hundred words for every rumour, no matter how ridiculously exaggerated.   My motto, taken from a postcard I bought the day I landed at LAX: There are no shadows in sunny California. Surrounded by so many people who literally glowed with health and money and fame and power, there wasn’t a dark spot I couldn’t find some way to illuminate.

Of course, I was never completely unaware of the Major Events happening around the world….I still worked for a newspaper, after all, however superficial its content. You can’t just clap your hands over your ears and chant “La la la, I can’t hear you!” when the U.S. President is on every single television channel and front page facing execution for Highest of All High Treason. But after a while I did develop a real talent for keeping reality at a distance, busy as I was buying paparazzi photos and filling columns with star-studded stuff and nonsense. Oh, I knew I was “wasting my life and talent,” as so many people (even my own damn editor) told me, but all that mattered to me was that I had something, however meaningless, to distract me from the constant threat of my own memories. I’d tried to develop a serious drinking habit to drown them out, but that lasted less than a year; booze did nothing but give me acid reflux and eat up all my spending money. Besides, there were better methods than the bottle out here in the Kingdom of Zoloft and Alternative Healing. A fortune in pills and therapy, yoga, tai-chi, a vegan diet (that did nothing but make me shit five times a day), and lessons in feng shui and Yithian “transtemporal meditation” eventually made it possible for me to sleep through the night again, despite the everpresent dreams and all I endured in them.

In my first days as a San Diegan, I made the expected half-assed, obligatory attempt to stay in contact with the handful of friends Back East who hadn’t ostracized me. But 9/11 had utterly saturated their lives, even those who didn’t live anywhere near New York City. Every phonecall, every email had something to do with That Day. The Bronx and Queens were choking on the smoke from Manhattan, there were riots in the streets and the refugee camps, martial law had been declared, the mayor was literally on the run and my gods, the price of gas…! I couldn’t bare to hear or read their litanies of misery-or to be told, for the thousandth time, how “lucky” I was to have escaped. Most of all, though, I couldn’t bare to hear them mention again and again that one fucking name, now synonymous with September 11, that made my mouth flood with bile. Solana Mitchell. Every time someone asked me “how I felt” about her soaring career, I wanted to put my fist through a wall. So I changed my phone number, and conveniently “lost” theirs. I set up a filter that sent their emails straight to the trash. To hell with them. I didn’t need the distraction. The reminders. I had a life to rebuild.

No matter what was going on beyond the ocean or over the Rockies, in San Diego I was safe, bunkered in the West Coast’s relentless banality. Even with R’lyeh itself lurking somewhere below the western horizon, rising more and more every year, Mission Beaches was always packed and no one was afraid to go into the water.

I made money. I bought new friends, a Segway to ride to work, and a condo in Oak Park. I even adopted a cat. I was here to stay.

After eight years, Manhattan’s shadow had all but faded from my mind.

So why, in all the Other Gods’ names, did I go back?

The invitation came from my old friend and fellow journalist Greg Lillard-the one soul from the City with whom I’d never lost touch. Meaning: I didn’t completely cut him out of my life, though our “contact” was limited to him emailing me every couple of weeks.

Greg was now an infamous muckraker at the Bronx Post-”The Voice of the City’s People”-who occasionally graced my inbox with news of his latest stories and investigations, but never expected me to read them or write back. He understood my need for escape: writing to me was just his method of beta-testing ideas and sketching out articles before he committed them to print, a vestigial reminder of the close friendship we’d once shared. I did read some of the emails he sent me, and a few-a very few-I even replied to… just to let Greg know I was still alive and doing okay. Despite the carefully-planned and -executed implosion of my life, I had to acknowledge that he and I shared a bond that not even my own desperate need for self-isolation could unravel.

In New York, we’d been inseparable. We’d gone to school at NYU together, roomed together, and, after we’d both graduated, even worked together: first at The Village Voice, and then the New York Times itself. Our editor at the Voice used to call us Goose and Maverick. We’d always assumed he was making a snide reference to the guys in Top Gun, but no: it turned out that crass old queen had never even seen the movie. He loathed Tom Cruise long before loathing Tom Cruise became fashionable enough for me to write about in the Sensation. Waldrick just called me Goose because of my gawky, awkward frame; Greg was Maverick because he was always standing up to Waldie’s tinpot tyranny of the stringers’ pool. But we were still each other’s wingmen, regardless. We rarely wrote articles without one another’s assistance or support-hence the reason he still sent me draft after draft of his stories, even though I rarely read them anymore. I vetted his dates; he vetted mine. Friends used to joke that we should just give in and become butt-buddies; we would joke back that doing so would be tantamount to incest. We had both come from only-child households, and had found something like siblings in each other. Greg liked to say he was my “brother from another mother.”

After I’d come out, my family-with whom I’d never had a particularly good relationship-prettymuch disowned me. Strangely enough, even some of my “friends” in the City pulled away from me. Greg and I, though, became closer. “It’s ‘cause I don’t have to worry about you sniping my women now,” Greg liked to say, but I think he felt some kind of fraternal, big-brother need to look out for me. Yes, we lived in Manhattan and, yes, it was the mid-‘90s…but Greg came from the shittiest backstreets of the Bronx, and had seen more than one faggot beaten down in the street simply for having the gall to glance at a “real” man. Like me, Greg, too, had fled to Manhattan to free himself from his natal surroundings. Plus, I was rather frail from too much time spent playing Doom on my computer and loathed real-world conflict of any kind, whereas Greg was built like a damn brownstone and never stepped down from any confrontation, whether or not he had anything to do with it. Greg was belligerent and quarrelsome even as a student: a hard guy to like, honestly. But once you earned his trust (and I don’t remember how I managed to do so), he would automatically place himself between you and any threat. He may not have gotten along with his equally-hot-tempered dad very well, but growing up the son of a twenty-five year veteran of the New York City Police Department had most certainly molded his character.

God, how I missed him sometimes.

But as much as I missed him, he was still part of the events I wanted to-had to-put behind me. He’d made an entire career out of riding That Day’s everlasting ripples, and all I wanted was smooth, still waters. Pseudo-brother or not, I had to keep even him well at arm’s length in order to keep myself safe. And he respected that.

When I received an email from him on July 1st, 2009-at my work address oddly enough-I hadn’t heard from him in months…not since he’d wrote me a note in March describing his latest offensive against the U.S. Army, National Guard, NYPD, and even the Marines for “human rights violations” regarding the policing of the Harlem No Man’s Land. The subject line read: STRIKE, THIS IS GHOSTRIDER: WE’LL TAKE MANHATTAN. What the hell? With a subject like that-mentioning our old Top Gun “call signs”-I simply had to give it a glance…even though I figured it would just be a ten-thousand-word summary of the progress he’d made on his new crusade. Worth a glance, but destined for the trash.

Instead, I read that the Army Corps of Engineers had just finished a complete top-to-bottom reorganization of their restoration activities on the Island of Manhattan,  and now the military was going to conduct, this coming September 11-the eighth anniversary of the catastrophe-an exclusive press junket to the Island to publicize the new administration’s “renewed commitment to restoring the heart of New York City.” After more than half a decade of mismanagement, overextended budgets, missing millions, lawsuits, and, finally, a Congressional investigation into the ubiquitous fraud among the independent contractors hired to do the actual work, the new-and-improved Revised Manhattan Rebirth Initiative had just been launched. President Obama had toured the Island himself and had given the renewed effort an enthusiastic thumbs-up-and his administration wanted the whole world to know. This junket would mark the first time any media representatives had been allowed to enter Manhattan since the military locked down the entire Island in the turbulent wake of September 11.

“And you better believe this is going to be a Big Deal,” Greg wrote. “People all over the Eastern Seaboard, not just the Four Burroughs, are already talking about the restoration for the first time in years and the uniforms just released the info this morning. Obama’s visit and this press exclusive have gotten everyone hyped up. It’s on every TV station and website I click on. Every media outlet from CNN to the Post are going to be lining up for the invites-they’re calling them the Golden Tickets-but check this out: your boy has already managed to get two invites to the show (never mind how), and here’s the kicker: one of them’s for you if you want it. And I’d better hear you say you want it. Seriously, I know this won’t be easy for you, Dave, but you need to be here for this. Time to pull your head out of the sand. It’ll be a real positive step for you, and the old town. Lot of ”

I was immediately suspicious, of course. Something underhanded had to be going on for Greg to get two of the highly-coveted invitations, let alone one, apparently before the Pentagon even began handing them out. After all he’d said about the military, the City government, and the Federal government over the past years, I would’ve thought he’d be blacklisted from any government-sponsored function. Greg had made quite a name for himself at the Bronx Post, after the Times booted him for being “too confrontational,” by writing about the lingering subterfuge, disinformation, judicial manhandling, and the endless trauma that had haunted his benighted City since 9/11. Greg Lillard never wrote positively about anything. Hell, I couldn’t recall him ever using the word “positive” before now. No one could count the number of run-ins with the City Council, the Mayor’s Office, the NYPD, the FDNY, the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, National Guard, Army Corps of Engineers, and the New York state government that Greg bragged about….He loved to make enemies in high places and did not care who he pissed off. He was the “Big Dog Barking”-that was the name he’d given his weekly fingerpointing column in the Bronx Post. For years now, I’d been waiting for the day that his body would be fished out of the Harlem River. But as good as he was at making enemies, Greg was just as good at making friends, too. The New York City Council hated him, yet he was close friends with the new Mayor, Gervais Thompson, whom Greg had met when Thompson was just another exiled Manhattanite living in a Roosevelt Island tent city. He even had the backing of the former state governor, John Riddick, who had been a vehement opponent of the Bush and Interim Administrations and was now Director of Interspecies Affairs under Obama thanks to his close ties with the Yuggothians. Greg must have pulled some major strings to get those invitations, and that meant that either he, or the people at the other ends of those strings, had to have some kind of agenda involving getting him into Manhattan.

But why the hell did he want me to come along? I had barely spoken to him in eight years, and I was little more than a glorified gossip columnist these days. Why did he even think to ask when I’d once told him I’d sooner die than to ever cross the Rockies again?

Strange, but…it didn’t matter. Agendas always meant trouble, and I wanted none of that in my life. So I ignored him.

But you can’t ignore Greg. I don’t know why I even tried.

I should have just sent him a simple reply: “No.” That might have shut him down. But…as soon as the news that the government was opening up Manhattan to the media really broke and the feeding frenzy began, I discovered that I simply could not give him a flat, unequivocal denial. I mean, I would have to be crazy to turn down flat an invitation to the media event of 2009, wouldn’t I? Every TV anchor, every newspaper columnist, every bigtime blogger and every Tom, Dick, and Harry with media credentials in the United States was fighting for one of the six-hundred-some Golden Tickets. Anyone who landed a Ticket more or less had his or her career instantly validated: “One of the first media reps to set foot in Manhattan” would glow like a neon banner on anyone’s resumé. Was I so perfectly content writing about who was screwing whom in Hollywood for a piss-ant local weekender that I could refuse such an opportunity, regardless of the motives behind it? I was and I wasn’t surprised that there was a long-buried, long-starved chunk of my mind that still lusted after real recognition-fame or infamy, as long as it outshined the hateful cunt who’d squelched my ambition in the first place, but….

This was a decision I could not make. So I refused to decide. I refused to reply.

He began emailing every day. Over the next few weeks I received nothing less than fifty emails from him. I didn’t reply to any of them. I set up filters on my work and personal accounts to immediately trash anything from any of his hundredsome address. After a week or two, he started calling me: at home, at work, on my cellphone. My work phone number was easy enough to get-but my home and cellphone were both unlisted, restricted numbers. He still got them. Any time an unfamiliar number showed on my CallerID, I wouldn’t answer. Anytime he left a voicemail (which was every time), I erased the message. I didn’t reply. Even when Benny Benco, the City Paper’s Editor in Chief, discovered that I, of all people, had an honest-to-god Golden Ticket waiting for me, and threatened to skin me alive if I didn’t go to Manhattan and bring him back a goddamn glorious cover story, I still didn’t reply. I told myself again and again that I wanted no part of Greg’s anti-everything schemes. Ignore him and he will, eventually, get the message.

He didn’t. But, subconsciously, I did. It only sank into me, where it curdled in my mind like black milk.

Dreams began to poison my sleep again. Klonopin, Xanax, Valium, Guiness, Cuervo, Jim Bean, a pound of my neighbor lady’s fantastically-potent weed-taken separately or all together-did nothing to keep me from waking up screaming, standing on my bed, in my kitchen, or on my back porch, soaked in the predawn damp or an awful gummy sweat that stank like gasoline…always facing east. I didn’t bother with yoga or any of the other pathetic placebos I’d used to trick myself into calm all those years ago: I knew they wouldn’t work now, or ever again. I took up doing club reviews just so I had an excuse to be out drinking all night, hoping to pass out in a dreamless, drunken stupor when I got home-only to wake up an hour or two after I laid down with the taste of blood and vomit in my mouth and the vile constriction of soft, syrupy flesh fading from my skin. I dreamt there were lines in the sky, hot white wires arching from one horizon to the other, scintillant worms of force spiraling along them, west to east…always west to east. And the sparks that the worms scraped from the wires were words, symbols, a diagonal stick with three branches on one side and two on the other, a sevensided shape with a threequartered eye inside.

I let a friend take me away on a weekend vacation to Tijuana, thinking a break from the office and Benco’s nonstop bitching would help. By Saturday morning he was so freaked out by something I’d sobbed in my sleep that he bought me a bus ticket home. Never saw him again….

I bought enough ephedrine diet pills to keep me awake for a year, but the longest I managed was fiftysome hours-after which I fell into a stupor so profound that, no matter how hard I fought to wake myself from the dreams as they were literally drilling deeper into my brain, I could not escape. When I finally did wake, after seventeen hours of tortured “sleep,” I was so wasted I couldn’t leave my house for three days. I nearly drowned taking an ice-cold bath to cool the fever that was boiling under my skin. I just…spaced out. I came to my senses when the frigid water closed over my face and surged up my nose, dispelling febrile visions of treeferns bleeding sap in the post-monsoon dusk.

Greg kept emailing, kept calling. I kept avoiding him, though I knew how this was going to end. Either the dreams or the nagging had filled me with a sickening sense of predestination. I spent many a free evening sitting in my darkening livingroom, hugging Stubbs, my cat, to my chest and waiting for something inevitable to finally happen.

And that’s how July and August passed.

By the time September began, the national media was frothing with excitement over the Big Day coming. Benco called me into his office and said, in no uncertain terms, that he would fire me and tell the editors of every publishing concern from San Diego to Seattle about my “problems” Back East if I didn’t get my ass to New York City and bring him home a three-page cover story-with pictures. “Then fire me, motherfucker,” I told him coldly. He just sat there staring at me until I got up and left. I had a big-time surfing competition down at Mission Beach to cover.

“How the fuck can you stand to write about surf Nazis when you could be going to Manhattan?” one of my coworkers asked as I gathered up my gear from my desk.

I shouted, loud enough for everyone in the Sensation’s cubicle farm to hear: “All of you: shut up and let me do my goddamned job, okay?” I left the office to its chilly silence and stepped out into the blinding, carefree sunshine to do my goddamned job.

But “doing my job” was no longer possible. When I sat down at a Boardwalk bistro to “interview” two of the biggest names in pro surfing, all I did was set my little digital recorder in front of them and let them talk until they shut up. I could not possibly have cared less what they said. One guy stopped halfway through telling a story about being spiked in the ass by a manta ray to ask me, “Dude, are you okay? Were you, like, in a bar fight or something last night? You look like you took beating…like, with the black eyes and everything?”

“Nah, I’m fine. Just didn’t get a lot of sleep last night. Sorry. So anyway, the stinger went through your gluteus maximus, and then-”

Suddenly-it was the second week of September. September 10, to be exact. The world snapped back into hard, sharpedged detail. Tomorrow was Friday, September 11. All those “lucky” bitches and bastards who’d received Golden Tickets would be loaded onto helicopters at LaGuardia Airport and shuttled over to the ruins of Manhattan to witness the new effort to resurrect “the Core of the Big Apple” from twenty square miles of toxic ash and ruins. I worked all day on my feature story for the Surf’s Up! special edition. Benny cursed me for a coward but I just sat there at my desk, doing my goddamned pathetic-ass job…and praying that the next day would just be over already. Somehow during this I covered an entire page of my notebook with doodles: sticks with five branches, three to one side, two to the other.

Tonight it would happen.

That afternoon, just as I got home from work, Greg called my cell again. As I’d know he would. I stood there in my living room, staring at the little vibrating chunk of plastic. With a sigh of utter exhaustion, I flipped it open.

I didn’t even get to say “I’ll be there.” The second the phone reached my ear, Greg’s old familiar voice said, “Solana’s here, Dave. Well, yeah, obviously, you probably already knew that-but listen: She’s supposed to be here on the Foundation’s ticket, right? You’d think. But-get this-she’s now officially listed on the roster as ’special guest’ of General Anthony Baden Wiesenthaller himself.”

I said nothing, but I’m sure he could hear me grinding my teeth. Of course I’d known all along that she would be there. That was no surprise. The co-founder of the Manhattan Memorial Project? The Darling of City Council? Miss 9/11 Herself? She’d probably gotten the very first Golden Ticket. But now she was a “special guest” of the new director of the Rebirth Initiative? That could only mean-

Greg said, “Uh-huh, exactly. Okay. So. It’s, uhh, fivethirty p.m., your time, right? I got Orbitz on my laptop here, and it says if you catch Southwestern Flight 6201 to JFK that leaves San Diego International at seven this evening you’ll be here by eleven or twelve o’clock Eastern. How ‘bout I meet you at the airport and you can crash at my place?”

I stood there in the airconditioned dark, little grey Stubbs curling around my ankles and yowling. I sat down on the couch and he leapt up into my lap, purring viciously.

Finally, I stammered, “Wait-okay, but-shit, man, I never even RSVPed-my ticket-”

“Is confirmed, dude. All taken care of. I took the, uhh, liberty to register you last week, actually. I knew I’d get you out here one fucking way or another and, yeah, I’m sorry I had to play the Solana card, but something had to get through your thick fucking gay-wad head.” When he would get wound up about something, the Bronx boyhood really came out in Greg’s voice: he turned into Joe Pesci in Goodfellas.

“Okay,” I growled. “The flight number-what was it again?”

I had an hour to kill. I spent the most of it fidgeting around the house, unable to sit still, unable to think in straight lines, fuming but…resigned. Goddamn Greg. Goddamn Solana Mitchell. I found a half-bottle of Cuervo somebody had brought over in the remote past and paced from my kitchen to my living room with it clutched in my hand like a weapon, sucking down searing gulps. Stubbs just sat on the sofa with a confused glare in his golden eyes, watching me wander back and forth. I sat on my front porch for a while, debating aloud with the Cuervo bottle on the step next to me whether I should get that flight or not.

The Cuervo won, as it always did.

Feeling just tipsy enough, I sat down at my computer and purchased a ticket for Southwestern Airlines Flight 6201 to New York City. Then I called Benco and told him I was going. “Oh my god Dave I knew you’d come through for me I knew it because you are my number one Dave you hear me?” he squeaked and squealed like an overexcited piglet until I hung up on him. Then I hurriedly arranged for my neighbor to look after Stubbs for a few days.

“Where you going so sudden?” the old Mexican lady asked me, sucking on a joint of her own hydroponically-grown product as fat as her finger.

“Uhhh. Home,” I said. “For a little while.” She passed the spliff; I took a long, scorching hit and coughed and coughed until my eyes watered. The smoke had tasted like burning rubber and metal and flesh both human and not-hot as the smoke from a burning city.

“Death in the family?”

“There may be,” I croaked.

I stuffed some changes of clothes into a suitcase and called a cab to take me to the airport. While I waiting for the cab to show up, I sat hugging Stubbs and whispering to him as if he were a child, telling him that dad was just going to be gone a few days because he just had to do something out of town and would be back on Saturday or Sunday. Stubbs stopped purring and stared at me with sad, slitted eyes, until the cab honked for me outside.

He knew. I’d read once about a study done by Miskatonic University that proved cats to be mildly precognitive. My little grey boy knew I wouldn’t be back. I carried him over to Rosa’s and placed him in her ample, caring arms. He meowed so painfully I almost started crying.

On the way to the airport I kept thinking about that damn emptied Cuervo bottle. I’d left it sitting on the front porch steps where it caught the weakening sunlight like a cenotaph.

At the airport I checked my luggage and passed through the interminable queues at the security checkpoints without my usual impatience with the tedious insanity of post-9/11 airport security. I was like a plane on autopilot, course set, flying along without will or concern-emptying my pockets at the checkpoints, passing through the new Yuggothian bioscanners that frisked me down to the molecular level for weapons or teratogens, handing over my boarding pass to the guy at the terminal…all in a mechanistic state of Zen-like mindlessness.

It wasn’t until the jet was in the air, with the setting sun and the ocean and my new life at my back, that the reality of what I was doing crashed into me.

As soon as the pilot switched off the seatbelt sign I ran for the nearest restroom and spent the next fifteen minutes heaving up my guts. The tequila stung even worse coming up. After I was empty, I slouched back to my seat, pale and sweaty. A concerned flight attendant brought me some Dramamine, which I washed down with a glass of watered-down airplane bourbon. Dramamine always made me sleepy, and I couldn’t imagine being awake for the entire four-hour flight through the darkness just below the starsick void, trapped in a pressurized can with only a hundred strangers and my panic and that fucking movie Titanic-oh, wow, how apropos-to occupy my attention.

But even with the Dramamine and the booze making me drowsy, my seething mind would not let me drift off until I finally overpowered it with two Benadryl capsules. Then I gratefully slumped into unconsciousness…but not deep enough to bypass the dreams that were, as always, waiting for me as

I am standing again on the street outside the 24-hour Kinko’s, crowd of gawkers all around, a random sampling of people frozen in that where-were-you-when-it-happened moment, all gazing up into the bright morning sunlight with their hands shading their brows as if they’re saluting the sky-men and women in hundred-thousand-dollar business suits, cellphones glued to their faces, each one repeating that morning’s mantra: “I’m okay, no, I’m fine but jesus god do you see this?” Next to me there is a scrawny bike messenger in bright orange Spandex and an Indian woman in a dirty blue sari wearing a bulky set of AM/FM headphones that make her look just like a B-movie Martian and a young Asian girl holding her shivering chihuahua tight to her chest like it’s a baby and one of the boys from the Kinkos is standing in the door wiping inkstained fingers on his apron, chanting his own mantra, over and over and over again: “Oh my fucking god, look at that. Look at that, look at

the Twin Towers rising over the rooftops across the street. Just a few blocks away. Turn right at the next intersection, walk straight to Vesey and the World Trade Center Plaza would be on your left, packed with police cars, fire trucks, people running or standing still, frozen, looking up at the great black plumes of smoke boiling from the gashes in the Towers’ peaks. Black filth smeared across the flawless morning sky and tiny batlike shapes swarm around the towers: Yuggs, fungs, braving the savage thermals above the blazing floors to snatch Humans trapped above the impact sites and fly them to safety. Tiny black specks fall through the milling fungi. Somebody says people are jumping from the North Tower to escape the flames or something(-hold on, what did he say?-) in the flames but there are hundreds of people up there, trapped, and only fungi on the wing, helicopters pinned to the sky in the distance, doing nothing because the upwelling thermals are so severe they can’t even approach the roofs and

fire engines roar down the streets, sirens screaming.

Policeman on the opposite corner, pointing, shouting, “Just keep moving, you’re okay now but you gotta keep moving” as

across the street, a man stumbles out of an alleyway, bleeding (Go go GO! Watch out, don’t) and coughing, “It’s coming down you gotta run! move! don’t just fucking stand there, it’s-oh my god it’s coming after us!”

Misser. Misser? What he say?

A rumble, like constipated thunder

followed by a grinding screech

and a collective gasp rises from the crowd. Fingers point (”ohmygodlook“) at the flank of the South Tower, where I look and see

below the fuming wound where the airplane struck, the side of the tower is bulging: diamond panes explodes into clouds of scintillant razors, concrete buckling, cracking, falling, the structure visibly swelling with a long shattering crackle and sprays of glass and diamond, office furniture, cubicle walls, splints of metal, concrete, clouds of pulverized drywall falling, billowing, the flapping swirling Yuggothians diving away in fear or death-

and in the heart of that blossom of blackened debris and white dust and grey smoke and bilious flame something writhes, something churns (what is that oh my god do you see that), limbs unfolding in an origami of flesh, limbs with a million joints or none at all, flailing, whipping back to flog(ood god, what is tha)the crumbling sides of the Tower as the vast bulk at the center coruscates in( )directions, no, dimensions, that make anyone staring straight into it like I am feel sick and my knees wobble with vertigo as

a writhing, churning throat o(h god!)f impossible shapes flowers open and it says only one immense bass howl of words that I can feel humming like a curse or a command in my bones

as the South Tower, g(iving birth)utted, shudders and sags and beg(iven birth)ins to collapse with a rolling rumble into streamers and scads of dust, the upper floors unfurling into falling spears of white dust as the shape is slammed shut and disappears into the roaring tumbling

and the businessmen and women in their hundred-thousand-dollar suits are screaming like children and they’re turning to run and the Indian woman in the sari elbows me aside as she ducks into the Kinkos and the ground beneath my shiny black just-for-interviews dress shoes just polished last night so I can see “my” gawking face which is not my face at all

up and

beneath my feet and everyone in the street is in motion, stampedinget awayou gotta move now go run stop stop some body hel

as down the street a stony grey cloud of ash and dust and vaporized concrete billows around and over and through the office buildings and we running scream(fall)in(bleedin)g people are all swallowed by the clouds that-

When the flight landed at John F. Kennedy Airport, I staggered off the plane and into the terminal on legs cramped with the futile urge to run, turn around and get back on the plane and go home to my cat and my surfer boys article and everything spangled and stupid and simple.

Thankfully, the over-the-counter drugs and the alcohol had sedated me enough that I’d woken up to the sound of the pilot announcing our landing instead of my own bloody-tongued screaming.

I’d awakened as the plane was descending. I made myself look out the window next to me. There, below, I saw New York City and nearby Jersey City, for the first time in eight years, still stretching from horizon to horizon, as far as I could see: a sea of lights and lines-the “constellations of civilization” as I’d written once, so many years before, in an article about an artist friend’s aerial photography exhibition. There was Queens and Brooklyn, that complicated spill of lights with John F. Kennedy Airport at its base and its lips lined with the bright sparkle of the newly-expanded docks. That sprawl of sodium-vapor-orange was the Bronx, where Greg still lived and worked even though he could afford much better. Long Island and the long slice of New Jersey, curving north, blurring away to the west.

Almost exactly as I remembered it…but for the black, unlit emptiness at its center. The blank spot on the map. Here and there along the fringes of that blackness were flares of intense, bright white lights: the spotlights of recovery operations or military outposts, I guessed. But otherwise, the space once occupied by the most-brilliant-of-all lightstorm of Manhattan was blacker than the spaces between the stars.

Some of the other passengers were looking too, whispering amongst themselves. “Shit. You can’t see nothing,” someone sneered. But that’s all there was to see: Nothing. And I couldn’t pull my eyes away from it. As the plane circled into the landing pattern for JFK Airport, it began to look like the bloodshot insomniac lights of the remaining City below were all suds swirling down that vast black drain of Nothing….

Greg was waiting in the terminal when I disembarked. It took me a moment to find him among the departing passengers and the people who’d come to meet them. When I finally spotted him leaning against a trash can my heart hiccupped. After eight years, he looked so much smaller than I remembered…short and fat and balding-Joe Pesci in appearance now as well as sound. All that beef he used to carry had slumped into a rotung gut and jowls sagging like a sad bulldog’s. He was only my age-almost a year younger than me, in fact-but he looked at least ten years older than he should, worn down to a nub by the brutal pace he’d been keeping for so long. He’d confessed once in an email that his life was burning him out, and he literally looked burnt: dry and grey and dessicated. Unlike many New Yorkers who’d lived in the City through the smoky months after September 11, Greg did not have a lung problem-but he sure was trying to develop one. When we were in college, he’d been completely indifferent cigarettes, but by the time I left town he’d taken quite a liking to them. In the years since last I’d seen him, he’d taken on that dull, ashen, perpetually grimy look that anyone who smokes three packs of cigarettes a day inevitably develops. He was twirling an unopened pack of Marlboros between two fingers even now. He still wore the old Steelers windbreaker he’d had since college, though now it wrapped rather tightly around his expanded paunch, and the embroidered logo had lost almost all of its color.

That was my onetime best friend?

I shuffled slowly behind the others, trying to hide from his searching eyes, delaying-but he spotted me in the sparse crowd, and waved me over with a big, slanted smile.

“Hooooooooly shit. Look at this punk,” he laughed uneasily when I approached. “How many years in California and you’re still pale as a sheet?”

I punched him in the stomach as hard as I could.

“Urhh!-shit-fucker,” Greg choked, doubling over. I stood aghast. If I’d done something like that back in the day, I would’ve broken my knuckles on Greg’s abs-but now…it was like slugging a couch pillow.

A passing security guard stumbled comically in his tracks and came toward us with a scowl, but Greg stood up, face tight and red, sucking in a hoarse, phlegmy breath, waving the guard away. “It’s alright, man-I deserved that. It’s all good. No, really. It’s okay.”

“Yeah, it’s fine,” I added. “He did deserve that.” The guard stared at us for a moment then walked away. He’d never said a word.

“Jesus fuck, Striker,” Greg wheezed, “you punch hard for a Left Coast fruit. God, you look like shit, though.”

“Yeah, I know. So do you. Come on-let’s get my bag.”

When we’d collected my single suitcase from the rotisserie in the corner of the lonely, almost-empty terminal, Greg asked, “So. Alright. Home, then? You probably wanna catch a little sleep for tomorrow.”

I shook my head. “No. I slept on the plane. Take me to the nearest bar.”