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.”