Waiting in her car in front of my building was Maggie, 40ish with a bowl cut and oversized glasses. She and I were friends from our jobs at the New York City Public Advocate’s office, where she was Liaison to the Asian Community.

I slipped into the passenger seat.

“What’s a fancy white boy like you living in a dump like this for?” She smiled.

“It’s not that bad.” That was a lie. It was bad. Upstairs was 350-square-feet of misery I called home along with four of my bros from California. Though I shared a mattress with a raging alcoholic, I still had it better than Ben who slept on the padded bench and Chris who paid $75 a month to sleep on a yoga mat on the linoleum floor.

“It’s pretty bad,” Maggie said. “I grew up in Chinatown, and I wouldn’t live here.”

We drove to our first stop, a public elementary school near the Manhattan Bridge that was functioning as a polling place that day. Maggie stayed in the car while I got out, carrying a stack of posters, tape and a stapler. Apparently, we were the last campaign to arrive. Every post on the sidewalk was covered top to bottom with posters from various campaigns. Candidates for city council, judgeships and mayor were all represented on these political totem poles.

For the past year and a half I’d been working for Mark Green’s campaign for mayor. I’d started out as an intern in his government office while still in college and worked my way up to press secretary. That morning Green was the undisputed front runner, due in large part to his adversarial relationship with Rudy Giuliani, whose approval ratings had plummeted in his second term. The winner of that day’s primary was expected to be the next mayor after going through the motions of beating the unknown and un-feared Republican candidate, Michael Bloomberg.

I tacked a Mark Green poster to the one sliver of empty space right above a Fernando Ferrer poster. I took a step back to admire my handiwork in all its glory: forest green and white; bold, persuasive lettering. Nothing but a few inches of blue remained visible from Ferrer’s sign.
I continued on like this for three hours, covering every bare surface we came across, with no help from Maggie.

“I have to watch the car,” she explained. “These Giuliani cops would love to ticket me while I’m hanging Mark Green posters.”

With ten posters left and less than an hour before I was supposed to be at campaign headquarters, I found a telephone pole set back in an alley that I designated the Mark Green post. I taped six vertically and the remaining four flapping off horizontally, like a scarecrow.

At 8:45 my 6 train screeched to a stop at Grand Central and I hustled through the train station to the Graybar Building where I rode the elevator to campaign headquarters. As I approached the door, I braced myself for the election-morning mayhem of staffers and volunteers rushing about with campaign paraphernalia. I yanked the door open a crack and jumped out of the way. Nothing. I opened the door farther and looked in. Nobody. I stepped inside. Everyone was around the corner, back toward the press department. They were just standing there, quiet, huddled around one of the TVs.

I approached to see what they were watching. Smoke billowed out from a top floor of one of the World Trade Center buildings. A small fire that looked containable.

“What’s going on?” I asked the man next to me, a volunteer I’d never seen before.

“A plane crashed into the Trade Center.”

I’d seen this happen before. Two days before Christmas one year when I was a kid, a twin-engine plane crashed into the Macy’s near my home. The plane burst through the wall and sprayed burning fuel on a hundred holiday shoppers.

I poked my head into our opposition research office to say hello to my two friends who spent their days looking through the other candidates’ garbage.

“How’s it looking?”

“Not so good,” Stu said. “It’s gonna be tight.”

“He’s just being pessimistic,” Justin said. “It’ll be tight for sure, but we’ll pull it out.”

A chorus of screams rang out from the group watching TV. I turned around and saw the second tower now on fire. People were shouting.

“Another plane hit!”

“This is terrorism!”

We stared at the screen in silence. Then someone yelled, “Everyone, we need you to come up front to get your assignments. The election is still on as far as we know and we need to act like it.”

I peeled off, but the others who saw the crash stayed behind.

My job that morning was to hustle for votes at the 77th and Lexington subway station and then knock on doors in Lower East Side housing projects in the afternoon. Heading back down to the subway, I realized I’d left my government-issued pager at home, and since I didn’t own a cell phone I was going to need it. I decided to jam downtown, grab it, then rush back to the Upper East Side.

Back at my apartment building, I bounded up the stairs, eager to tell my roommates about the Trade Center. The apartment door was cracked open but no one was home. I climbed the flight of stairs to the roof and pushed the door open, stepping into the sun’s glare. Chris was there with his back to me. There were other people I’d never seen before. Then I noticed there were people on all the surrounding roofs, everyone facing south, staring at an immense cloud of smoke.

“What’s up?” I said.

Chris turned. His face looked blank, as if he were scared to move. “The building just collapsed.”

“What do you mean?” I looked at the buildings again. I could see only one and figured the other was shrouded in the smoke.

“It collapsed,” Chris said again, his voice cold and monotone.

His words hit my forehead and crumbled to the ground. What Chris was saying was impossible. Those buildings were permanent. He may as well have told me the sun burned out.

Chris had quit his job in the collapsed building three days earlier. He was supposed to travel to Italy later that day with his sister Hannah, who I then realized was standing next to him.

“Bombs went off at the bottom and brought the whole thing down” he said.

Bombs. For some reason that made his story believable. I’d seen bombs take down buildings before – on TV at least. My body went cold with fear. Adrenaline took hold. My skin felt electric. I got a rush of energy, but couldn’t move.

“I’m going to turn on the news,” I said. Chris and Hannah followed me downstairs. The image on the TV was a ball of smoke and dust covering everything. The announcer’s voice was frantic.

“The north tower has just collapsed!” she cried. “Both towers have now collapsed!”

Hannah sobbed. She was seated on the padded bench, hugging her knees against her chest. It was her first trip to New York, her first time outside of California.

The phone rang. It was Dave, a friend who had recently moved out of our apartment to live in a residential hotel. “How is everything over there?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“How’s the building. Is it okay? Does it feel safe there?”

“Yeah, the building’s fine. We’re safe.”

“Okay, I think I’m gonna come over. I need to leave midtown. I don’t feel safe here.” He hung up.

It was true that our building was still standing, but for how long I didn’t know. They, whoever they were, had placed bombs in the Trade Center. It was possible there were bombs elsewhere in the city. The TV cut to shots of people streaming out of downtown, out of all of Manhattan. They were heading for the bridges – the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg.

That’s the terrorists’ plan, I thought. They were flushing people out of downtown, out of Manhattan, and then, when the bridges were filled, they’d detonate the bombs, bring down the bridges, killing thousands more. They were going to blow up every place that people were likely to be. Hospitals. That’s where my girlfriend was. She had an appointment at a hospital on First Avenue, near the U.N. building. The U.N. Another target. I called her cell phone. Her voice mail picked up immediately.

“I gotta go get Catherine,” I said to Chris. “She’s at the hospital.”

“Dude, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go anywhere right now,” Chris said. Hannah was in a fetal position on the bench, crying through a phone call to her mom back home.

“I gotta go.” I was in a trance as I bounded down the stairs against my better judgment. Outside, people shoved past my building, shoulder to shoulder, in a lava flow of fear and anxiety stretching all the way from my sidewalk, across two traffic lanes, the wide median, two more traffic lanes, to the sidewalk opposite.

I trudged the half-block north to Delancey Street. It was the same; people covered every inch. I looked east and saw that everyone was headed to the Williamsburg Bridge.

The crush of bodies overwhelmed me. It felt like there was just a matter of time before a fight broke out, then a stampede. Hundreds would be trampled to death. Right then laughter erupted from a group of teenage boys, which sent me over the edge.

I forced my way back to my building and tried to unlock the door. My shaky hands fumbled with the keys. I got the door open, dashed inside, slammed it behind me.

“Dude, I told you,” Chris said as I entered the apartment.

I slumped back into the chair in front of the TV.

Dave walked in a little while later, his face ashen, expressionless. “Hey,” he said, dropping his bag and sitting down next to Hannah on the bench.

“Hey,” we responded then turned back to the news.

A reporter from a local station interviewed a man near City Hall about the extent of the deaths and injuries. “Right now we don’t know,” the man said. “It’s possible that the planes were filled with deadly chemical or biological weapons. If that’s the case, the death total could exceed 100,000.”

“Shut up!” Dave shouted at the TV. “Who the hell is this guy? Why are they letting him talk? He doesn’t know anything. He’s just gonna scare the hell out of everyone.”

He slumped back against the wall, and we continued watching, our hearts beating a little harder.
Hannah finally hung up the phone, and it rang. I grabbed it. “Hello!”

“Sam?”

“Catherine!”

“Why haven’t you called me?” she yelled. “I can’t believe you’re at home. I’ve been calling you over and over! Why didn’t you call me? I thought you might be campaigning near the Trade Center when it fell. Why didn’t you call me?”

She never made it to her doctor’s appointment. Running late, she was still showering when the first plane hit. The brownstone shook. She rushed over to the Brooklyn Heights promenade for its view of downtown Manhattan across the river. As she watched the buildings burn, she noticed the row of women with their kids watching the horror unfold. Catherine walked back to her apartment and spent the next three hours calling me.

We decided on the phone that I would go to her place where it was safer. I waited another couple of hours until the mob had thinned and the police finished their search for bombs on the bridges. There were still no cars on the streets, just a few stragglers in the middle of the road like last-place finishers in a marathon.

The subway car was crowded but no one spoke or made a sound. When the train pulled up to its first stop in Brooklyn, I dashed out of the station and exhaled.

Catherine waited for me on her stoop behind a line of 10 people, some covered in white dust, waiting to use the pay phone outside of her garden apartment.

Not knowing what to do we went for a walk. We passed brownstone after brownstone shaded by elms until we reached Montague Street, the main drag in Brooklyn Heights. It was late afternoon and neither of us had eaten since breakfast. We stepped into an Indian restaurant and took a table next to the front window. The place was empty. We watched paper after paper from the Trade Center float down onto the street outside. It reminded me of jogging through the neighborhood in late October as leaves rained down.

Afterward, we walked a couple of blocks to the video-rental store. It was the most crowded I’d ever seen it and most of the new releases were picked over. We agreed we needed comedy, so I stopped searching when I came to “The Jerk.”

At the checkout counter, I watched the TV that hung from the ceiling just inside the entrance. It usually showed movies chosen by the kids who manned the store, but now it was showing the news. I wondered why the camera was trained on some innocuous office building but then noticed the building swaying back and forth. And then it crumbled. Catherine and I watched as this 47-floor mass of concrete, steel, and glass was reduced to dust in a manner of seconds.

“Is this live or did that happen earlier?” I asked the cashier.

“It’s live. That was World Trade Center 7. That’ll be $3.75.”

Twenty-four hours earlier, the collapse of a major office building in downtown Manhattan would have dominated the news. As it happened, it was the least interesting thing to occur that day. It was hard to believe that the lead story in all the newspapers that morning was the city’s primary election. The event that consumed most of my life for over a year was something I hadn’t thought about since I was on the roof of my apartment building earlier that morning.

Catherine and I never watched “The Jerk” that night. Instead, we flipped back and forth between CNN and Comedy Central, alternating the news with comic relief.

As we headed to bed, my pager vibrated on the kitchen table. I dialed the number. It was my boss. He told me to show up at headquarters in the morning for a staff meeting. The campaign continued.

I contemplated this as the plane bisected the isle of Manhattan. For the first and only time in my life, the airplane went on a daring and gorgeous deviation from her normal path to LaGuardia, flying so close to the Twin Towers I felt I could reach out and answer a buzzing phone in one of the offices.

To be honest, I felt uneasy about being so close to the buildings. I felt like we were tempting fate. I felt like we could crash.

This was one week before 9/11. In the movie of my life, this was foreshadowing.

In my unemployed haze, I’d fallen into the bad habit of sleeping late. This was true that fateful morning when I, once again, smacked my alarm clock into submission over and over: September 11th, 2001. I was supposed to walk the ¾ mile down to the base of the Twin Towers where one of the city’s unemployment offices was located. I had a 9:00 a.m. appointment to scour their databases for a job that might work for a French/Drama double major who’d been laid off from a cushy internet job, and blew all her money doing theater. That morning, though, bed was calling, and I figured I’d move back to Kentucky within a couple of weeks anyway. Who needed this crazy, expensive city? Who needed a job? Not when I could stay under my comforter, the first rays of sunlight raining down on me.

I heard a huge bang, and found myself annoyed at the delivery trucks. How could they constantly forget where the potholes were, day after day?

I heard a barrage of sirens screaming down the street. New York City living up to its noisy, dangerous stereotype.

I heard my cell phone ring and ring. Probably someone from the unemployment office, wondering where I was, dying to give me grief for my lack of motivation.

But then I heard my landline AND my cell phone ring – simultaneously. Something was wrong.

“THANK GOD YOU’RE OK! YOU ARE OK, RIGHT? ARE YOU OK? WHERE ARE YOU?” Mom was hysterical.

“Mom, what’s going on?”

“You haven’t been watching the news? A plane flew into the Twin Towers. Turn on the TV.”

I turned on the TV just in time to see the second plane hit. My knees gave out on me. Suddenly, my debate about whether or not to live in New York City was moot. I was going to die here.

I sat down on the dirty, hardwood floor, sandwiched between the tiny, street-found couch and our Ikea kitchen isle. Two planes within moments of each other? My brain couldn’t make sense of it. All the rules of our universe were suspended.

The word “terrorism” floated in the air, spoken from an immaculate newscaster. I definitely wasn’t surprised to hear the word. But it was the final stone in my sinking stomach.

I didn’t know what to do. My mother was saying something in the phone, but I didn’t hear her. Less than a mile from me, people were dying. People were burning. Less than a mile from me the world was ending.

I walked to my roommate’s door, and knocked. When there was no answer, I opened it to a neatly made bed. Not home. I had hated her guts and dreamed up any number of evil plots against her, yet, at the moment, I found myself praying to God she was alive.

The TV screamed at me that more planes were down, the Pentagon, Pennsylvania. This was just the beginning. What was going to explode next?

Mom was still on the phone. “What are you going to do? You can’t stay there. Where are you going to go?”

I didn’t know. I didn’t want to leave my apartment. I figured more planes would fly overhead, bombs obliterating everyone in their path. How could any plan matter now?

I told my mom I had to let her go to check on my friends and figure out what to do. She didn’t want to sever the connection. Now that I’m a mom, I get it. That was, literally, her lifeline. She made me swear to call her as often as possible.

My hands shook so drastically I couldn’t shut off the phone until the third try. I started to pray, but I didn’t know what to say. How could I ask God to spare me when any number of people were already dead? I simply prayed that I make the right decisions.

But that was the problem. I felt underwater, struggling for air. I had no clue what decisions to make.

I called my best friend, Alex. Somehow, she sounded normal.

“Randi, it’s going to be okay. We’re going to get out of the city. I’ll figure something out. I’ll walk to you from work and we’ll go from there. Do you want to buy some food? It’s probably a good idea for us to stock up on canned goods.”

Yes. Go to the store, and buy food. It would mean walking outside, but at least I would be doing something, rather than just sitting here, shaking and barely breathing.

I stepped outside to one of the most truly perfect autumn days I’d ever witnessed. The sky was a bright azure, not a cloud to be found. The temperature was perfect – eighty degrees – the kind of day that used to make me feel optimistic.

I looked up and saw the Towers – high and gray and enflamed. Around me, New Yorkers simply stood and stared. To my right was the local laundromat owner, a notoriously cranky and disgruntled Chinese woman who was the bane of my existence. She sobbed. “This is…this is…I can’t believe it,” she said, as her body shook.

“Yes,” was all I could manage.

I walked two blocks to the local store and traveled the aisles. Other people walked beside me in similarly confused dazes. I picked up a few items and got in line. A woman ran up behind me and asked to go ahead. She had on an FDNY uniform and was purchasing first aid items.

“Of course,” I said. This was the first time since moving to New York that I let someone go ahead of me in line. New Yorkers do not do that sort of thing.

I walked home, my eyes glued to the Towers. I couldn’t shake the feeling of watching a movie. I could not accept this was real life.

At home I pulled out a knapsack and threw in some clothes. When I started to pack the food I realized I’d bought ten cans of chickpeas and little else.

And that’s when the building shook. I flipped on the TV to see one of the Towers collapsing, debris exploding into the air.

Newscasters were screaming, people outside were screaming. I crouched, holding my head, certain my old, decrepit building would also collapse. When it didn’t, I stood up and went to my window. My tiny, expensive West Village apartment literally had a view of a building five feet away, but I figured if I couldn’t see that building, things were bad. I could see the building, so that was something.

I went back downstairs and opened the door to the impossible sight of one Tower, standing alone on the horizon, still burning. A black cloud floated up around it and the air smelled like singed hair.

And that’s when I saw them. Walking slowly, somberly, a brigade of soldiers in three-piece suits, covered head-to-toe in ash. Silence, heavy and sickening, engulfed us all. Looking back at this moment, I feel disgusted at myself. I should have brought down a jug of water and some mugs. I should have offered them a drink or a shower or some food. Instead, I stood and gawked.

Alex arrived, the opposite of me – a woman of action, competent and energetic. “Honey,” she said, looking at me as if she were looking at a child, “you’re still in your pajamas.”

I hadn’t realized it until that moment, but she was right. We hugged – hard – and I changed clothes. Alex guided me to pack my cell phone and even took a few moments to laugh at my purchase of chickpeas.

“I found out there are some ferries running to New Jersey. I’m not sure where they land, but when we get there, we can call Don and he can take us to Hoboken.” Don was her boyfriend. Hoboken was the location of her apartment. Alex was my angel.

As we walked up 6th Avenue, Alex said we should take pictures. I’m not great at remembering to take pictures on a good day, but it certainly never occurs to me when times are bad. “Randi, this is a day we’ll never forget. And who knows how long THAT Tower will stand? We should document this.”

It never occurred to me that the second Tower could fall. New York City with no Twin Towers? It just seemed so disturbing. I snapped a couple of pictures of the single, burning tower, then turned away from it, for the last time.

We passed a church and Alex asked if we should go in. I said yes. We settled into a pew and prayed together, out loud, for the first and only time. We held hands so tightly our knuckles were white.

We walked onto the ferry and I called Mom. She was so relieved that I was getting out of New York that the change in her voice was palpable. I paced up and down the aisles of the ferry, thinking about how expensive a boat ride like this could be under different circumstances.

Don was waiting at the dock, and he and Alex held each other tenderly. I realized then I had a built a nearly solitary life, no person to call home, no foundation. I was always so afraid of rejection. Now that fear seemed so small, so needless.

We went back to Alex’s apartment. Her roommates, people we knew from the theater world, sat chain-smoking. We hugged and repeated endlessly, “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it.”

I assume we ate, I’m sure we did, but I couldn’t tell you what it was. The TV remained on, a constant influx of horrible news. The second Tower fell, and all we could do was cry. I kept praying for survivors, somehow survivors.

I slept in the living room, tried to ignore the persistent clouds of smoke and refused to turn off the TV. I drifted off to a newscaster repeating, “It’s just incredulous, totally incredulous,” and cursed her bad English, before realizing how silly I was.

The next day, Alex and I traveled back into the city via the PATH train to give blood. I expected the train to explode at any moment, but I had to do something. I couldn’t just sit in Hoboken while people lay buried under ash.

We went to a few different Red Cross centers, but nobody needed our blood. None of the bodies they rescued were alive.

All available spaces – lampposts, sides of buildings, trees, parked cars – were covered with homemade signs. Pictures of husbands, wives, fiancés, mothers, fathers, adult children accompanied desperate pleas for any information about their whereabouts. I couldn’t shake the thought that had I gone to my meeting, my picture would be up there, too.

I tried to go back to my apartment to pack up more things, but that section of Manhattan was closed, a barricade of silent, frowning cops blocking the way. I had no idea what condition my apartment would be in when I could return.

We returned to Hoboken and I called every person I’d ever cared about who lived in the city – my selfish roommate, the ex-coworker on whom I had an unrequited crush, the boy with whom I’d had one failed date, college friends who lived in the city whom I hadn’t seen in too long. I sighed deeper with each living, breathing voice who answered the phone.

My mother begged me to come home to Kentucky and I relented. Flights were impossible, of course, so I took a Greyhound from Newark. It was an epic, two-day hell-hole of a ride, of which all I can really remember is sleeping on my sweatshirt and buying junk food at rest stops.

My mom looked at me like I was a corpse. She ordered me to strip off my clothes so she could wash them. I hadn’t noticed, but she said they were ashy.

We attended a memorial service in a small, rural town. The people were sweet and sad, but I felt I didn’t belong. They were mourning something they saw on TV. They hadn’t breathed in the ash of burning buildings and bodies. They hadn’t heard the screaming. They didn’t have to live with the fact that it could have been them. I resented them.

My sister and her boyfriend took me to a haunted forest attraction in the woods outside of Louisville to lift my spirits. I’ve always loved horror movies and Halloween-themed events, but this night felt uncomfortable and inappropriate. Looking at actors bathed in corn-syrup blood and being chased by men with chain-less chainsaws felt cartoonish and silly. I’d seen actual death. This could not scare me.

I broke my mother’s heart a few days later when I told her I had to return. Watching the footage of New Yorkers pulling together settled the argument in my heart – I was a part of all that. I belonged there. I had to help rebuild.

I repeated the Greyhound trip in reverse, feeling better this time, less like a run-away. The debate in my head was settled. For the time being, at least, New York was worth the expense and the craziness. New York needed me.

In the year that followed, I found the man that would be my husband and father of our daughter. I became a public school teacher and found the career that would fulfill me and possibly change the world. I learned not to fear life because death could be lurking around the corner. And I learned that we can heal from almost anything.

We received many responses; here are a few.

Phone Numbers of Strangers

by Neesha Navare

She Looked Like She Was Dancing

by C. R. Lofters

Dear NYK People

by Christian Bonnard

Guided Tour

by Susan Volchok

NYC Me

by Adam Baer

Another Visit

by Peter F. Eder

Dear Jon

by erika

My Friend, The Fire Chaplain

by Kathleen Crisci

October 7, 2001

by Patrick J. Sauer

Photographic Memories

by Christie Grotheim

Manhattan Eyeline

by Jackob G. Hofmann

I Have to Be Here

by Kate Walter

“Yeah, I’ll be back,” I said. “Probably the third weekend, definitely not the weekend of September 11. I have to be in the City then.”

“Oh,” she said, surprised. “ I thought you’d want to be out of New York on that date. They’re threatening another attack on the anniversary.”

Actually, I hadn’t heard that but it was hardly news.

“I need to be in the City to attend the services,” I said, referring to upcoming events at my church and my yoga center. I also planned to rejoin my neighbors on the roof that morning. “Even if they did attack again, I’d want to be in the City “ I added defiantly.

I recalled friends who were out of town on that Tuesday ten years ago and they were distraught. They couldn’t wait to come back and offer assistance. I was fielding their emails as I made pit stops to my apartment from my new post on the West Side Highway. I had joined the crowds cheering the rescue workers, a job I ended up doing for month (and writing about for this site) To this day, I think my presence on the highway was one of the most meaningful acts I’ve done in my life.

If New York City got attacked again, I could not imagine being in New Jersey, my home state, watching this on television. I’d go crazy. The events of September 11th deepened my love of this incredible City I’ve called home for most of my adult life. I’ve lived her since 1975 and have never felt prouder to be a New Yorker than in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks.

I know my elderly mother just wants me to be safe, but I will not let a gang of sick fanatics dictate how I run my life and where I live, not even for a weekend. Yes, I will be in Manhattan on September 11, 2011. I’ll pray at my church, chant at the yoga center, and return to Point Thank You on the highway to wave my flag one more time.

The weather is glorious. The air is crisp. The sky, tranquil. I am walking downtown en route to a trendy West Village bistro. As I approach the corner of East 10th Street I come to an abrupt stop ...

“I never realized how clearly you can see the towers from here,” I say to my partner, Hugh, who is standing beside me. “Just look at them, lit up. They’re stunning.”

In the past, I have made conscious efforts to avoid most things iconic in New York City. I’m not sure why. I mean, really, it’s not as though I lack an appreciation for the city’s history or its exceptional architecture. Quite the contrary. But, for some unknown reason, I experience great resistance when confronted by Manhattan’s compelling complex skyline.

Maybe it stems from a fear of reprisal. A certain unease that washes over me whenever I attempt to express genuine gratitude for things like the Chrysler Building, or say the Statue of Liberty. For this New Yorker, an unexpected anxiety always arises every time I try to acknowledge these structures in a meaningful way. As if the mere act of admiration alone could cast me back into that contemptible category of being an out-of-towner. An unsophisticated tourist. A wannabe.

On the eve of September 11th I find myself dining among a diverse group of quintessential Manhattanites: visual artists, photographers, graphic designers ... A few of them sip fancy cocktails. Others don expensive eyewear. All partake in witty conversations about foreign film, current MoMA exhibitions, and the opera. Contrite, I sit at the end of the table waiting for my grand opportunity to chime in about something, anything, that can be considered remotely Manhattan-ish. Alas, I am at a loss for words. The situation is vexing and echoes one of those The New Yorker magazine contests where the reader considers a cartoon and is then challenged to come up with a clever caption for it. Again, I have nothing to contribute.

Truth be told, I feel like a fraud. Even though I have been a New York City resident for nearly thirteen years, it has literally been months since I have actually “lived” in the borough of Manhattan (at this time, my Union Square Park apartment is rented out and there are still four months remaining on the lease).

At the end of the meal, I leave the bistro and drive back with Hugh to Connecticut. Though I feel blessed for having a lovely home to go to, I can’t help but feel lonesome for my beloved 650 square foot walk-up apartment on East 16th Street. I miss it terribly.

September 11th, 2001. 9:15 AM.
New Milford, Connecticut.

The weather is glorious. The air is crisp. The sky, tranquil. I am outside and the telephone rings. Hugh answers. The world stops. From this point on nothing will ever be the same again. (I will not repeat the things overheard on the phone. Revealing these details would seem superfluous, perhaps even insensitive.) From this remote distance, my 9/11 experience as a New Yorker oddly becomes an intangible one. Out of reach. I do not see the first plane hit 1WTC in real time, nor do I come out of a subway station to discover total pandemonium accompanied by foreboding plumes of black smoke. I am not among the massive herds of terrified citizens running frantically uptown as the North Tower implodes and collapses to the ground. Rather I am safe, out of harm’s way, in Litchfield County Connecticut no less, watching all the horror unfold on TV.

I become increasingly removed during the ensuing weeks. While thousands of New Yorkers deal with real tragedy, loss, and the unthinkable, my conflict centers on being absent from my city--being away from my home. I feel like someone who has just jumped ship. A shameful deserter.

A Judas.

September 1st, 2011. 8:46 AM.
The corner of 16th Street and Fifth Avenue.

The weather is glorious. The air is crisp. The sky, tranquil. I look down Fifth Avenue and take in the new construction of One World Trade Center. At the moment steel has risen to the 78th floor. Installation of a glass curtain wall has reached the 49th floor. An elephantine crane looms ominously in the background. To gain a better vantage point, I step into a bike lane ...

“I didn’t realize that the new tower was so far along” I say to myself as I am clipped by clusters of frenetic text-messaging pedestrians. “It took so long to break ground and now it feels like it’s all going up overnight.”

Again, there is a disconnect.

No matter how hard I try, I cannot seem to wrap my arms around this new almighty tower. While I do admire its preeminence, and its structural engineering, I question its significance. What exactly will this new high-rise mean to New York City?

What will it mean to me?

I do my best to drum up some enthusiasm for One World Trade Center but I find it difficult to embrace this New York icon in the making. At the risk of sounding ungrateful, it seems to pale by comparison. Perhaps, with time, I’ll begin to feel differently about it ...

E.B. White once wrote: “No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.” Looking down Fifth Avenue on this beautiful September day, I consider these words and then contemplate the upcoming anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. I reflect upon the 2,753 victims who pointlessly died that day. I think about their loving families and how they are coping, ten years later, and it is in this New York minute that I am humbled and realize just how lucky I really am.

Dear Jon,

They want to build a mosque where you were murdered. I want to do the right thing. So I’m having a debate in my head taking on the two sides. What would you want I wonder.

See, that’s the hard thing. I’d think after knowing you for such a long time, it would be easy to know your mind. I conjure your shit-eating grin, those blond tendrils of hair, I can picture the debate as it takes place. The problem is, I don’t know what you would say.

Remember that time in D.C. when we were talking to the Jehovah’s Witness’? They said they would see you in heaven because you frustrated them so. You could debate to the death. I always said we argued, but you insisted it was debating. I’m wondering now what you would think of the situation we are in. They want to build a mosque where you were murdered.

One day, after having summoned all my courage, I walked into the church office.

“I need to talk to your nicest priest,” I said to the receptionist. I spoke in a low voice, feeling embarrassed and foolish. Why would any priest be willing to perform a wedding on my terms? The woman looked at me with a blank expression for a moment; then smiled brightly and told me to have a seat as she picked up the phone. Minutes later, a tall and handsome white-haired man wearing a brown friar’s robe and sandals stepped into the room. As he shook my hand my discomfort vanished.

I was instantly at ease with Father Mychal. He took me into a conference room, beckoned me to have a seat on the sofa, and looked at me intently while I tried to articulate why I was there. He seemed to understand what I wanted far better than I did myself. By the end of our meeting he had agreed to marry us, and wanted to meet Javier and our 18-month old daughter, Desiree.

I couldn’t believe my good fortune at having found Father Mychal. I was living a life of confusion and chaos, which was why I was reluctant to seek out a priest in the first place. Father Mychal was unlike other priests I had known: some apoplectic and unapproachable, others warm and caring—all ineffective in helping me understand the incomprehensible elements of my religion. Catholic-school educated as a young girl, I was continually warned of the dire consequences of straying from the faith. Yet so much of what I’d learned made no sense to me as a child, and much less as an adult. Father Mychal seemed to understand. “Sometimes I feel that way, too,” he said, laughing, when I disclosed my feelings of ambivalence. Despite his laughter I believed him. “You have to do what feels right to you,” he continued, “and listen only to yourself.” After spending an hour in his presence I felt I had embarked upon a profound spiritual journey replacing the road to hell I thought I was traveling on before our meeting.

When Javier met Father Mychal, he experienced a similar apotheosis. Javier, who is Bolivian and went to a very strict Catholic elementary school in La Paz, thought he had had it with priests and religion when he came to New York. But, as we discussed the details of our wedding, I could tell Javier liked Father Mychal and that the feeling was mutual. As we said goodbye they were patting each other on the back, like best buds. As for Desiree—for days she went about our apartment repeating “Far Mychal.” As in far out.

Father Mychal told us that the church schedule on the Saturday Javier and I had planned to get married was crammed with activities and appointments.

“So…” he admonished Javier. “That means 10 o’clock North—not South—American time. Don’t get me in trouble with the pastor.”

I nudged Javier, who—it’s true—was rarely on time; yet, I was the one who was late for our wedding. As soon as I woke up that morning I had a panic attack. I had meant to—but could not—prepare for the sacrament of matrimony by confessing my sins. How could I do that when I didn’t agree with the Church on what constituted a sin? I hadn’t murdered or robbed anybody. At the same time I didn’t want to be disrespectful, and now it was too late. Fortunately, I had a friend helping me get ready who pretty much pushed me out the door.

“Can we not do a Mass?” I said to Father Mychal, who had been frantically pacing the vestibule, according to what Javier later reported. “Can we just keep it simple?”

“We’ve got all these people in there waiting for a Mass. Of course we’re doing a Mass.”
As he laid his hands upon my head, I felt that any adversity lurking inside me had just packed up and left. Banished. Just like that.

After the ceremony Father Mychal remained to take photos with us, in spite of the fact that I’d made him late for his next commitment. In one of the shots, I stand between him and Javier, leaning closer to him than to my husband. I remember inhaling the scent of his freshly-laundered robe and the feeling of peace and security I had standing next to him.

“I’ve always been afraid of priests.” I whispered to him while my friends were snapping our pictures.

“Me too,” he whispered back.

After the wedding Javier and I made a point of showing up at St. Francis more frequently. Desiree loved the beautiful old church. “Far Mychal?” she would ask as soon as we pushed her stroller around the corner from Seventh Avenue onto Thirty-first Street. While I liked all the friars I considered Father Mychal to be my special friend. He never failed to approach us and hug us after Mass; sometimes he invited us in to chat, particularly if we hadn’t seen him for a stretch of time.

Besides regarding Father Mychal as a priest, I realized from the start that I also saw him as a man, a man to whom I was deeply attracted. I knew this from the way my heart raced whenever I spotted him. He was so readily accessible, he always said the right thing, he was funny—what more could a woman want in a man? When I mentioned this to Javier, who had many of the same qualities himself, he said that he felt the same way. You just wanted to be near the man.

At some point in the mid-eighties Father Mychal left the country to go for an extended visit to England. What will I do if I need him while he’s away? I wondered. When he returned I felt relief. He was my emergency back-up plan in the event of a crisis in my life. I thought of him as my own personal 9-1-1 and kept that feeling alive by greeting him and filling him in on the details of my life whenever I had the chance. When Javier and I had our second daughter, Valerie, Father Mychal christened her.

“Would you like me to come and bless your house?” Father Mychal asked one Sunday, as we had coffee together in the friary.

“Would that be the Catholic equivalent of a mezuzah,” I joked, and he laughed.

“Call me, or stop by, and we’ll set a date.”

I wanted to invite him to dinner; my biggest regret is that I didn’t. We had recently moved to Washington Heights and I told Javier it might be too much to expect a busy man like Father Mychal to travel that far. The real reason for my reluctance, though, was that while our new apartment was bigger than our studio in Chelsea, it was also quaint—meaning cockroaches and a bathroom door that had been painted over so many times it didn’t quite close. At the time I still didn’t fully comprehend the unimportance of such matters to Mychal Judge.

And then I didn’t see him for a very long time. Three months? Six months? More? I went into the church office to inquire.

“Oh, he’s now the chaplain for the fire department,” the woman said. “He’s very busy…not here all that much.”

I gaped at the woman, not knowing what to say.

“But he might be upstairs now,” she said, offering me the phone. “Why don’t you call him and see.”

I declined. Was it that I didn’t want to bother him? By then, my marriage was in trouble and I felt reluctant to tell him. Would he be disappointed in me?

One Sunday, when there was a call for Eucharistic ministers, I signed up. I wanted to know what it would feel like to take a more active role in church affairs. As a child I was envious of altar boys and badgered one particular nun in grade school over the question of why there were no altar girls. And, on a more adult level, I viewed it as an opportunity to continue to grow spiritually.

They needed me for Saturday Mass. Week after week I’d go to church, sit inside the altar, and distribute Communion at the appropriate time. I did this for over a year. I didn’t then, and I don’t now, consider myself to be religious. But it was important to have that time to be more in touch with my spiritual self, an aspect of my being that sometimes got lost in the complexity of trying to balance the demands of work, the educational and emotional needs of my two daughters—teenagers, by then—and the frustrations of a marriage that wasn’t working so well anymore.

On the evening of September 11, 2001, while Javier, Valerie, and I—Desiree had just departed a few weeks earlier to start her freshman year at Williams College—sat silently in front of the TV, trying to make sense out of all the senseless details of the day, it was I who noticed the news crawl.

“Oh, look,” I said. “Father Mychal’s down there.”

Of course he would be down there.

And then the words registered: the fire chaplain was dead. We sat silently for a long time staring at the TV. I kept waiting for the news to crawl around again with a different message. We made a mistake. Sorry. He’s actually alive. As reality took over, a cloak of profound sadness enveloped me as the horrors of the day suddenly became personalized for me. And the fear. What would I do now if a crisis arose in my life? Like this one.

One thing I knew for sure was that I wanted to administer Communion at his funeral.

I’m sure they didn’t ask me—I’m sure I had to beg to be allowed to be a Eucharistic minister at the funeral mass. The details are vague in my mind; what is clear is the memory of being there and the incredibly great honor it was. I learned that Father Mychal had thousands of friends with whom he’d had special relationships, just like me. The Clintons, Rudy Giuliani, Steven O’Connor, thousands of fire fighters and the widows of fallen fire-fighters. I distributed wine to scores of people who considered themselves his friends, and I was grateful and humbled for the privilege of being there.

Although I still occasionally go to Mass at St. Francis of Assisi, I never sat inside the altar as a Eucharistic minister again.

My kids are now grown, and my husband and I are no longer together. Often, while going through the rough transitional stages of Javier leaving and the girls going out into the world , I thought of Father Mychal. So many times I wished I could sit down and talk to him about my sadness and anxiety. Although I had never called upon him before for a personal crisis, I was finally in the exact situation I knew he could help me with. He was the one person who could help me find the answers I needed.

I have since discovered that, if I sit very still and listen, he is there helping me with the answers. With empathy, without judgment. Whenever I am at my most despondent or irrational, all I have to do is conjure up the image of my friend on the steps of the church on my wedding day, or his hands touching my head, and I can find my way back to sanity.

I only seriously contemplated writing anything for two reasons:

1.) The weeks following the attack ultimately morphed into never-ending wars, and as someone who didn’t lose anyone close, 9/11 became shorthand for something much uglier. Right, “Mayor of 9/11?”

2.) I didn’t want to fake it by coming up with some tangential tie to the attacks just because I could. Anyone who was here, or countless other places, has a claim on 9/11, but not like those who lost loved ones or like the kids who got sent to far off shitholes in the name of freedom. I am neither of those people. I’m simply a guy who lived, and lives, in the place where the terrible dudes nailed the bulls-eye. Ultimately, it’s a colossal coincidence. To pretend otherwise is narcissism at its best, unchecked hubris at its worst.

So why write anything, smart guy?

Well, there’s one day that I have never been able to shake and if you’ll indulge me, I think it’s story worth telling. I make no claims on what it means, but I will say, and say what you will, it haunts me.

October 7, 2001. I was meeting up with my younger brother Daniel to watch out beloved Philadelphia Eagles at Reservoir, a fine Union Square sports bar with a lot of TVs and an excellent chili dog special.

It was early in the game and Dan hadn’t showed up yet. I called him and said something like, “Hurry up, it’s on.”

“What’s the score? “

"No, I mean it’s on. Afghanistan. We just started bombing.”

Dan showed up soon after and we watched the Eagles on a split-screen that showed the Birds lose to the Arizona Cardinals on one side and Operation Enduring Freedom on the other. I’d be lying if I said the barflies, us included, were more interested in rooting for their respective NFL squads than our tax dollars kicking off the military-industrial-complex payback on Al-Qaeda.

Everyone in the bar was locked in. And the beer was flowing. USA! USA!

At some point, Kim--my then girlfriend, now wife--showed up and grabbed a glass. Dan left and we stayed for the late game.

We staggered out in the early evening and a massive cold front had set in. I’m sure if I did enough web research, I could give you an exact temperature, but I’m lazy, so trust me. I’m confident enough to say it was motherhumping cold.

Kim had already started a crockpot of chili in our 25th St apartment, so we were set. But as we walked up University, she noticed a couple huddled together in a doorway, barely keeping an eye on the pathetic change cup they’d set out.

It was a young couple, neither wearing clothes for the elements. He had a thin jean jacket; She wore an even thinner sweater. Unlike the typical pierced-tattooed-me-and-my-dog-want-your-spare-change-and-are-in-desperate-need-of-a-bath corner beggars, this couple was shivering together and didn’t seem to have an agenda outside of keeping one another warm.

Kim stopped.

“I think those two need help. They look like they need a place to stay. I think they’re in real trouble.”

I asked if she was serious. Thanks to the mix of liquid courage and the collective pall that hung over the city, she said yes.

We went over to see what they needed. Not being flush with cash, we offered what we had- a hot bowl of chili and a warm place to sleep.

They accepted.

I don’t remember their names. There’s a good chance I never learned them that night. What I do remember is that they were young. And very much in love.

He worked off-the-books at the Fulton Fish Market, but it was still shut down, so they had to give up the room at the pay-by-the-week hotel. Her folks lived on Staten Island. She’d called and told them she was alive, but they hated him, so she stayed with the freelance fishmonger. Love won out over shelter. The only thing he was carrying was the Kurt Cobain Journals.

I engaged him a bit on Nirvana, but he was a man of few words. She told us everything. We set them up with a bowl of chili--Kim’s award-winning recipe with all the fixins’ I should add --and they ate a ton. We tried to make them feel comfortable, but all we could offer in that apartment was a two-person loveseat, one so close to the fridge that it provided the benefit of being able to grab a beer without even getting up.

After a couple of beers, he opened up about how Cobain’s music affected him. If memory serves, he’d been on his own for years. Shitty family, little education, crappy job, the whole nine, but his best girl had given him hope for the first time since a skinny junkie from the Seattle area laid down tracks. He showed me his copy of Cobain’s diary with notes in the margin, but he didn’t really want to share his inner-thoughts. And to be honest, I had nothing to offer anyway. Collectively, we’d lived through 9/11, but he’d lost everything, and I was a simply a guy with a story. The only thing we had in common was the love of a good woman, and terrorist attacks or not, my situation never involved a family’s wholesale rejection.

Kim talked to his girlfriend for a bit. She was incredibly sweet, and overly effusive, but severely worn out in the way that sleeping on the streets taxes the human body. After a couple of hours, the beer ran its course and we called it a night. Not to be insensitive, but we had to get up for work.

We laid out a sleeping bag, but they said they were fine with blankets on the loveseat. This “couch,” a street grab Dan and I carried home from 21st St. the first night I slept in our apartment, was enough for them. They wrapped themselves in each other’s arms and passed out before Kim and I finished brushing our teeth.

Early the next morning, logic kicked the booze out of Kim’s brain, and she asked me to make sure that opening a hotel to urchins hadn’t been a horrible idea. I reassured her, saying we had little worth looting to begin with, but I would offer them coffee and politely ask them to get the on their way so we could meet the day.

They were gone. They left a simple note of thanks.

We never heard another thing from them.

I hadn’t thought about the couple for a long time, but it all came flooding back the night Obama announced we took out Bin Laden.

Why? I have no idea. That night hit me in ways I never could have anticipated. I guess it’s because, in some facile way, it felt like we’d finally had catharsis. Ten long years of fear, anger, paranoia, bloodshed and sadness had come full circle. But not really . Afghanistan rages on, an arbitrary anniversary is reached, and we continue to go on living.

Like I said, I have nothing of value to say about 9/11. But the night Bin Laden went into the big drink, I got a warm feeling, imagining that somewhere in this city, or in parts unknown, a loving couple sat down on a big-ass couch and played the now twenty-year-old classic Nevermind. Maybe Dad even hugged his kids and told about how one time, on the day America went to war, two friendly half-drunk fellow-citizens gave them a hot bowl of chili and an uncomfortable loveseat.

Cobain may have been right that all alone is all we are….but not being alone sure helped in those few months afterward.

Peace.

Patrick J. Sauer is a freelance writer for Fast Company, ESPN, Popular Science, Smith, AOL and Huffington Post Humor. He is the author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to the American Presidents and is featured in Mr. Beller's anthology Lost and Found. Originally from Billings, Montana, he now lives in Brooklyn where he spends his days following his baby daughter's orders. For more, check out patrickjsauer.com or follow him on Twitter @pjsauer. 

My roommate wrote down phone numbers of strangers' spouses, families, friends. They wanted to get through to them, but cellular networks were quickly shutting down in NY. They were walking dusty through the streets, searching for a way home while we called their loved ones to tell them: "You don't know me, but your wife is OK. She can't get word to you, but asked me to let you know." We would never meet those people and, perhaps, they always wonder about the anonymous voices on the phone that day.

When we couldn't stand any more and cell phone service ceased, we sat outside in the impossible sunlight and mourned for those we knew who died, the calls of reassurance their families wouldn't receive, the faces we would never find.

After September 11, I never wrote about that last approach toward an intact Lower Manhattan; in fact, I never wrote about the terrifying events of that day itself, or about the infinitely wretched aftermath, except in random journal jottings and desk calendar entries. There was, of course, no shortage of writerly response: first hand testimony, political editorializing, expressions of grief and rage and all of it, all of it. I found myself unwilling, unable, to join the chorus, or the cacophony. I felt stunned, silenced, stopped, and rather than struggle against that, I accepted it as my most authentic response to the devastation around me.

It was more than a month before I dared venture downtown to survey the ghastly, gaping pit I never called Ground Zero: one morning, I got on my bicycle and rode south along the West Side Highway as far as I could until disaster teams detoured me east, where I dismounted, walked as much of the pit’s perimeter as I was permitted, then slowly rode the bike back up to West 66th Street again. I didn’t write, or even speak much, about that little trip at the time. And I didn’t return, not for quite awhile.

Over the past several years, though, my working life has come to include leading city tours for groups as a licensed New York guide. Uptown/Westside woman that I am, I like nothing better than introducing newcomers to the neighborhoods above 59th Street they usually bypass. But I have spent a great deal more time way downtown, serving as a guide to the one site no tourist in this city can miss, the one site that is like no other—not least in terms of the sense of connection nearly every visitor feels with it, which informs my own sense that you can’t show and tell its history in the same way you highlight landmarks like City Hall or the Woolworth Building or Trinity Church. A canned WTC “presentation,” with September 11 as the centerpiece, has always seemed out of the question.

My style, such as it is, was certainly influenced by my tagging along, early on, with a tour group led by an experienced, if lugubrious, guide who insisted on narrating the entire timeline of the attacks, the building collapses, the early optimism, the crushing of hope, the mounting body count, as if willing each of us to relive the trauma moment by melodramatic moment. And indeed, the small crowd, speechless, seemed properly, painfully overwhelmed. He lectured, they listened; the few factual questions raised were promptly dispatched by this “expert,” no time or room for real interaction. But I resisted the idea of using my “expertise” regarding the past and future of the WTC as a defense against its deeply individual meaning, its emotional associations, for me, for others. Nor was I interested in denying my own longtime diffidence about dealing with September 11 in so many words.

I don’t think my tour of the WTC site has ever been the same twice. I’m perpetually reworking it, while learning to be prepared for reactions ranging from awkward comments to streaming tears. It’s not my job to overawe, or to merely inform. Returning again and again, accompanying people who have most likely never stood in the shadow of this lack of towers before, I’ve wanted to acknowledge what was originally experienced as a collective loss; I’ve tried for more give and take, more conversation than scripted monologue. It has seemed important for me to discover—especially with students—something of what these visitors do remember, what they’ve kept in their heads and hearts, what they’re thinking, feeling, right now, years later. And I am nearly always asked, in turn, Where were you? As a guide, you personalize sparingly, if at all. But I’m their representative real New Yorker, as well as their trusty New York escort; I was there (or somewhere here in town) when the towers fell. What was it like for you? they want to know. So I share the small, unremarkable story of my September 11.

I overslept, only hearing about the first plane when I turned on the radio to get a 1010 WINS weather report. (Blue skies, yes; bluer than blue, we would all later recall.) I tell them that I ran into the living room, turning on the TV just in time to witness the second plane hit, then sat there, disbelieving, watching countless replays along with continuing coverage of the burning towers, the entire area, being evacuated. I tell them that I phoned a girlfriend in the other wing of my building, that we hurried to meet on the roof, where from more than five miles upriver, we could see dense, dark smoke filling the downtown sky. And that we went back to her apartment, where she anxiously awaited word from two daughters who lived and worked in the immediate vicinity of the WTC. (My own young daughter was safe at school just a few blocks uptown from home.) Both her girls escaped to safer ground, one turning up at Mom’s door a few hours later, clothes and skin completely powdered in ash. If there’s time, I tell them that when we greeted her with hugs in the front hall, it was more matter of factly than I can entirely fathom, in retrospect: what’s clear is that we ourselves didn’t yet fully comprehend the horror she had outrun. I’m not sure, I sometimes say, that what was happening seemed less surreal to us in New York City than to everyone else watching it on television around the nation and the world.

And at this point, I usually take out a tiny, treasured September 11 artifact, a panoramic photograph that, rolled up, fits into the palm of my hand. Shot from the 70th Street Hudson River pier (by a friend who, fortuitously, began working digitally just that morning), it captures, in the distance, the ominously mushrooming cloud of smoke we’d watched from our rooftop.

The image perfectly represents how near, and how far, I was from the inferno itself: Near enough that the fire station on my UWS corner lost twelve of thirteen men all those miles down island. Far enough that I still can’t quite explain why I suddenly began locking my enclosed terrace’s steel door (five miles and eleven floors up) every night, against I don’t know what terror. Though it’s true, there were armed men on the roof of the unmarked power facility across the street. I don’t tell my people any of these things, though. I don’t have to say that I was much luckier than many. The photo is more eloquent than I. I love it because it speaks somberly without shrieking, because it is concretely sharable—connecting my inconsequential story to the larger cataclysm—and because it was a gift from the photographer, Ben Stern, himself gone too soon, just a few years later.

What I’ve never shared, until today, in this, my first writing about September 11, 2001—what I hold dearer still, is my own final image of the towers as seen from the Staten Island ferry that long-ago July night. I only wish I could do it justice, give you this glorious yet all too often taken-for-granted view of skyscrapers- so much a part of the urban landscape, you could never imagine them being—gone. I wonder if I would’ve even bothered getting it on film if I’d had a camera with me, which I didn’t. I can only be grateful that I looked and looked and looked some more; I may never be able to completely convey it to anyone else, in mere words, but I’ve got it, it’s mine, here, glowing inside me, forever.

SUSAN VOLCHOK is a New York writer (mainly of fiction) who has published widely in journals and anthologies ranging from Kenyon, Confrontation and VQR to Best American Erotica, as well as in mainstream magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, and online, most recently @ n+1, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, and The Other Room. This essay was written for a public reading on September 11, 2011 at The National Lighthouse Museum, Staten Island, as part of Beacon: Artists Respond to September 11, a week-long 10th anniversary commemoration bringing together both visual and literary artists.