It Is September 12th, Again

The lights are on again. A friend and I had our own tribute tonight: We called it the "Tribute in Chinese" (i.e. our best attempt at a terrible Onion headline)—we ate Chinese food and drank Brooklyn Lager on my roof, stared at the lights, commented on the way they hit the clouds, shared stories of reporting at ground zero, remembered the heat that built that day (it's cooler this year, with a few more clouds in the sky, although not many more), wondered if we saw souls rising, as so many people say they do in those lights. Text messages flying to and from my phone about the shafts: "Can you see them?" "I can." "I see people trapped in them."

We sat on my bedroom floor and sorted through a sooty pile I haven't touched in years—newspapers and magazines from that black time: "War" read the full-page hed in the Post. New York Times: "Stunned Rescuers Comb Attacks Sites, But Thousands Are Presumed Dead; F.B.I. Tracking Hijackers' Movements" (banner hed, Sept. 13). New York Times: "Bush Tells the Military to 'Get Ready'; Broader Spy Powers Gaining Support" (banner hed, Sept. 16). New York Times: "Agonized, New York Bends, But It Doesn't Break" (inside Week in Review, Sept. 16).

Clyde Haberman's lead in that last story, second graf:

"'New York is peculiarly constructed to absorb almost anything that comes along,' E.B. White wrote, and it does so 'without inflicting the event on its inhabitants.'
"'So that every event is, in a sense, optional,' he said, 'and the inhabitant is in the happy position of being able to choose his spectacle and so conserve his soul.'
"Not this time."

There was no one crying on the subway tonight that I saw but me. It was, though, a quiet crying, a quiet cry of remembrance. I remembered my college friend and my fireman friend, how young they were, how young we were, remembered all the people I never met but have come to know through their friends and relatives over the years. I try not to remember their terrible deaths, but after you spend years working on projects that reconstruct exactly how certain people died, you have to will it out of your head. I do that neatly. Sometimes. Finally.

A friend who knows from these things as well or better than anyone wrote this to me tonight:

"I spent time thinking about the last five years too. Exhausting, unbelievable by pre-9/11 standards, and still happening."

And now it is September 12th again.