A Regional Disaster

As you would expect of any semi-responsible editor of a pseudo-legitimate arts & culture site dubiously specializing in human trauma, I didn’t want to allow our 9/11 submission theme to pass without providing some form of contribution of my own. However, I’m in the midst of moving and my life is too full of things to do and things-to-do-adjacent anxieties to write, so hopefully you’ll enjoy this lightly edited excerpt from a scrapped NaNoWriMo novel from three years ago.

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But speaking of 9/11, the Big Bang to which countless soft scientists attribute the birth of our shared post-traumatic universe, I do know where I was and what I did on that lazy Tuesday. (Just think: if the universal emergency response number had been 9-1-0, we could have all enjoyed a three day weekend!) I was just shy of a month into my second year as an MFA student at one of those ubiquitous, interchangeable liberal arts colleges in that part of upstate New York where every small town is named after a Greek city state and harbors a comparable number of pederasts. I won’t bother to name the college because it lost its accreditation seventeen months after I graduated and was shuttered ten months after that.

(Say what you will about these fly-by-night educational institutions, but they have been nothing but good to me. When I was growing up, my mother taught me that the simplest prayers were often the best—and let’s face it: God isn’t much of a listener. Concision pays when you’re dealing with an attention deficit case. She gave me a basic template: thank God for your loved ones and ask that he keep them safe. Anything else, she said, was asking too much from Him and expecting too little of yourself. So, with that in mind, I say, “Thank you Lord for diploma mills. May they never come to harm.”)

I am nocturnal by disposition and I had no early class that morning, so by the time I woke up the initial shock (a small private plane, an accident), the manufactured twist (a second plane!), and the moment of Michael Baysian dramatic excess (a third plane EXPLODES AT THE PENTAGON) had passed. I had planned to have a casual breakfast (Captain Crunch directly from the box and a cup of tea) and write a poem for a 4:30 seminar. (I don’t remember what it would have been about. It was either a reflection on a torrid romance from a perspective of a syphilis spirochete or a retelling of Donne’s “The Flea” wherein the titular flea was a carrier of the black death.) 

Rather than start writing immediately (because, come on) I turned on the television. Oops. I didn’t write a word that day.

After three or four hours of pedestrians caked with carcinogenic dust, prerecorded screams, falling men, et al., I felt I had earned a break, so I decided to take a walk. It was a beautiful late summer day; so beautiful, in fact, that my mind initially refused to digest it. I looked at the blueness of the cloudless sky and I think I choked, or gagged. There was some gross incongruity between my sunny upstate afternoon and the cloud of ash oppressing a city that was only a 4 hour drive away (take I-81 South, get on 380 after Scranton, traffic delays in and around the flaming crater in Shanksville, PA). I couldn’t make it all square. And then it occurred to me: whatever was happening south of me on that day—whatever architectural wonders were being maimed or demolished, whoever was falling or burning to death—had nothing to do with me. Nothing!

It simply wasn’t my tragedy. It was a regional disaster, a bad traffic day in the metropolitan area; not all that different from the day Chris Christie shut down the toll plaza on the George Washington Bridge. (Hell, come to think of it, that was another day in the second week of September. Only it was a Monday. Christie, unlike Mohammed Atta, obviously knew the value of a long weekend.)

So I did the thing one naturally does when it’s a holiday and you’re the only one not at home in the reverent company of your loved ones, but you still want to make the most of your day off: I got Chinese takeout and ate it in front of the television.