I was in suspended animation having my teeth cleaned. Pricked and scrubbed with the forceful persistence of sterile steel tools and empathy from an hygenist who understood how miserable the whole experience could be.
The Pentagon already compromised.
The suction tool in my mouth. Vacuuming out the refuse of my teeth. The report came over the radio in these exact words:
"The second tower has come down. (2 long seconds) It's gone." After about 10 seconds of silence on the morning radio in New York, which is about 10 minutes in NYC time… "I don't know what to say. Could cry."
Fire, smoke, dust. Papers of careers hat no longer matter.
I went home and watched the news. I did not call in to work that day. I assumed the world was halted. All machineries of progress were stopped. The sound of F16 jets overhead.
Silence.
What just happened.
Is this reality or some bad Tom Clancy novel?
Surreal.
A plane down near Pittsburgh.
Why are they attacking every place I have ever called home? Can't they leave my home alone?
Don DeLillo captures the surreal strangeness of 9/11 in Falling Man. I am about 70 pages into it and I can take only about 5 to 10 pages in each sitting. He nailed it. As a New Yorker he knows what we were thinking at the time in such an intimate manner that it is continually mind numbing all over again.
No-one but those in NYC and those in the NYC metro area have the same sense of what occurred that day. We still are numb by it. We try to cover it with consumerism. But the memory is haunting and jarring. The city became a chapel. It was a sanctuary of mourning. It became holy in that moment. Candles burning for the memories of the lost and missing we knew were no longer going to add to our consciousness in the same way.
I have problems reading this book because no other format has revealed what that day means and what we experienced. I still see the smoke over my home. Trailing southward. Looking for a home that it will not find.
As painful as this novel is to read, I want to thank Don DeLillo. He has given us both the gift of death, and the gift of hope. I could cry with each page. Visceral memories trapped in nothingness. A hurt we need to remember each day of our God gifted lives. I don't want to finish it, but I feel like I have to. Like a faithful Catholic holding the blessed host of Christ in his hands.
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