Flagpole Days

A new expatriate class was forming, another diaspora was underway, a quiet but steady migration of people who were fed up with the old country, only this time the old country was the United States. Some were the lucky or fortunate souls who won the state lottery or cashed out the zero coupons and the 401(k) money and made the biggest roll of their lives, pulling up old roots to start new businesses, new lives, somewhere else. But mostly they were people who'd been working in offices and banks and stores watching the U.S. economy go into critical condition; people who hadn't been able to do a damn thing about it except perform their numbing, supplicant tasks and save money, save like crazy despite the mountains of debt they already had and those they would inherit; people who figured that if they had to die they wanted to do it in another, more exotic locale, anywhere but the steelyard of the cities where they'd lived forever. Warren could tell from just looking around. He recognized them right away, despite the undergraduate bravado. It was a tiredness of spirit he could see in their eyes, no matter how drunk they got. They were Americans and they'd seen too much. Too much power, too much green death. They were sick and tired of being citizens of the place everyone was scared of, the nation with the biggest stick on the playground and the biggest dick in the locker room. For now they were weary of being Americans, with all that it lately entailed. For now, they just wanted to be people. Any flag of convenience would do.

***

In the endless replays of the moments before that placid, impossibly beautiful morning in September ended in dust and darkness -- you witnessed it, on videotape or TV monitor, in the long views of the skyline. It was almost ballet, choreography by matador: The first blow, like the glove on the face of a heavyweight champion unaccustomed to such contact; the first lance in the side of the bull, the wounded animal's first reaction one of stupefied surprise, a not quite believing.

No one yelled "Cut" the moment it first happened. There were no retakes. For those first incredulous seconds when the first plane struck the tower, before the new-technology fall morning was barely underway, people could scarcely believe it was, in fact, the realest of real things, and not the latest big-budget greenscreen or CGI special effect. Spielberg wasn't in town, to the best of anyone's knowledge, nor was George Lucas or Michael Bay. The movie-crew trailers that routinely lined the streets of lower Manhattan on any given weekday in the summer months were nowhere in evidence that morning.     

So it took more than a moment to sink in: the dimension of the action, its outright audacity. There was a pause in the disaster, a sense of enormity but an opportunity to put it in an innocent though tragic perspective. This kind of thing had happened before, some said to themselves, almost shrugging it away. It was uptown, at the Empire State Building, back in the forties. These things happen. Accident. Just run like hell, it'll be all right.

And then it happened again.

The second plane, a knife to the heart, the shaft between the shoulder blades, from out of nowhere, carving through a sky agonizingly, breathtakingly clear, to embrace its target. The second jet seemed to disappear inside the building for a moment. For that microsecond before the world exploded in fire and dust, it had affected an almost magical disappearance, the kind of seamless morphing of shapes Hollywood was so good at. And then the knife of flame, spent aviation fuel, shattered windows, fortunes, lives, auguring into the ground one hundred and ten stories below.

The two chimneys of the skyline of the city engulfed, fully involved, then descending fast, pancaking floor by floor like a deliberate implosion, collapsing in a heap that spread a wind of smoke and ash for blocks as fast as a man could run. And a deep and primordial sadness took hold long after they crumbled. The towers had their own purpose for everyone. They were tuning forks of the national economy for some; for others, a way to tell uptown from downtown when they staggered drunk out of a bar in search of a cab. They were an anchor. They looked great in the movies, and they made the City proud, and just that fast they were goddamn gone. The day, that flaming sliver of a day, marked the demarcation between old and new, between one world and another.