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We went to the Newseum last weekend, where I had not expected but was somehow unsurprised to see photos from Sept. 11 blown up to poster size, endless loops of broadcast video from that day, some from newscasts I saw when they were live, many many images I had not seen since the TV networks decided they needed to stop showing them. The fuzzy, shrill voices of telephone calls broadcast to the airwaves. That moment, that moment "---!oh! another one just hit" where bad went to worst, Katie Couric still talking about plane number one as plane number two makes its impact which seems

to happen

with excruciating slowness.

*****

I have for a long time loved apocalypse stories. something about the scale of it, I suppose, the scope a tale like that can take.

I had a moment a while back that felt straight out of The Stand, Steven King's grand-daddy classic of apocalypse stories, early on in which 99% of the human population of Earth is wiped out by a superflu germ accidentally unleashed from a U.S. government lab. My Stand moment was this: on the way to work I cased the headlines on a Washington Post newspaper box, as I do most days, and was surprised and unsettled to see that it was yesterday's headline, yesterday's paper. Something about anthrax, was the lead. And it occurred to me that if, when, the world ends, there will be all these newspaper boxes on the street corners of towns and cities everywhere, turning yellow and brittle inside their glass doors. Like as not, with headlines reporting very bad news, to be read by... whom?

This Is What Happened Here.

most of the rest of this entry I wrote a while longer back still. I don't know how relevant it is now to me or to anything, but I wanted it here. part of the record, before time slips by and memory does its slow fade trick.

The short version is: I hope I never see, on my television or (pleasegodno) in real life, as terrible a thing as what we all saw on Sept. 11. It's over two months past now but it still can twist my stomach, catch my breath. After it was over, or mostly so, I remember agreeing with Don that it seemed like the longest day that had ever been.

*****

I was at his house, just beginning my day, maybe a bit earlier than I usually would, because we were expecting some guys to come by that morning to replace the hot water heater, and it wouldn't do to have not bathed when that happened. It was going to be a long day at the office: September 11 was to be the day the IT team at the news agency I work for deployed its new web-based editorial and distribution system. Any technical or user crisis would belong to me and my boss.

I was in the shower a bit before nine o'clock, when Don came upstairs and called over the noise of the water, "A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center."

He said the t.v. was saying it might have been a twin-engine plane that had flown off-course, but there were rumors that a hijacked commercial jet had been in the air at the same time. That CNN was being very cautious in its reporting, but that some people were putting two and two together and fearing the worst.

My first thought was: Oh my god, those huge buildings, a plane, this is going to be horrible. My second thought was: the office is going to be utter chaos today.

By the time I made it out of the shower and downstairs, it was a few minutes after nine. The TV was showing, over and over again, a gigantic fireball exploding from the side of one of the twin towers. The perspective of the shot didn't make it clear that this was a second hit to the second tower, but Don said that's what it was. I felt confused. "It's not a replay? That has to be a replay." It wasn't a replay. And, it seemed clear, it wasn't an accident. I remembered that as little as days before, I had been quietly amused at the stories of heroic journalism the guys in Editorial would tell about things like the JFK assassination, how they'd have people all over the world contributing bits and pieces to stories, and that our new editorial system needed to be built to allow for such a workflow. I was not amused now.

Until this point I had been thinking only that it would be a busy news day, but not the end of the world, that we'd launch our new system as planned. Which seems ridiculous now, but I guess I had still been trying to grasp what was happening. I didn't realize how big it was. It did not enter my mind that maybe downtown Washington, D.C. was not the place to be on that day. My brain was telling me that I had to get to work as fast as I could.

A plumber's van pulled into the alley behind the house. I gathered my things to go, deciding that I would drive downtown rather than take the time to walk to the Metro station and wait for a train. As the plumbers unloaded tools from their van, Don grabbed me in a great big hug, and I held on tight too. I don't think we said anything, but the urgency of that hug, with the fireball still looping on the big t.v. in the living room behind us, made me feel fear for the first time that day.

He went to the back door to let the plumbers in, and I went to the front door to let myself out. In my car, I scanned the AM band looking for news, but could pick nothing up. I switched to FM and found NPR covering the story. I turned it up and drove as fast as I dared toward downtown. It was 9:30.

My office is a few buildings away from Lafayette Park, across Pennsylvania Avenue on the north side of the White House, where the street has been closed down to traffic for a few years now and only police and government and Secret Service cars ever drive. At quarter til ten, I neared my office, still in my car, and saw crowds of people in suits and heels flooding out of the park, away from the White House. At the same time the radio begin to issue reports of "a fire at the Pentagon," and evacuations there and at the White house. I got to a public parking garage and handed over my keys just before attendants put up orange cones to prevent anyone else from entering. I walked back up the block toward my office and became aware of fire truck and police sirens whooping from the streets in the surrounding blocks.

When I made it into the office, the floor where IT is located was nearly deserted. My boss was in the office we share with two other people, but on the phone. I turned on my computer and fell into my chair to await instruction. There is no t.v. in our office, and the radio was not on, so it wasn't until Eric got off the phone that I found out that the South Tower of the World Trade Center had just collapsed.

Steven, IT's fearless leader, came in then, telling us we should go home. Eric's reaction was to look at Steven blankly. Mine was to say Maybe in a bit. Steven saw that we were entrenched and told us that if we wouldn't go home, we should head upstairs to the newsroom. There are lots of TVs there, and we'd be able to watch what was happening. So that's what we did.

The newsroom was chaotic. Those who weren't holding a phone with one hand and jotting furious notes with the other, while calling out leads and rumors to the rest of the group, were standing in front of the bank of televisions on the wall behind the copy desk, transfixed by images of vast white clouds of smoke and debris blotting out the New York City skyline, of billowing black smoke rising from the Pentagon, of stopped cars and suited pedestrians clotting I-395 where it snakes alongside the low building so big that a new visitor to the city might drive past once or twice without realizing what it is.

This is where I was when I heard that all flights across the country had been ordered to land and that United and American were beginning to confirm that they had lost some planes and that another plane had gone down in an empty field in Pennsylvania. This is where I was when I heard that international flights were being routed to Canada. This is where I was when the North Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed; I watched it happen live on CNN. Everyone did. The entire newsroom froze, as we witnessed the deaths of thousands of people. Eric, next to me, made the sign of the cross. I stared mutely, somewhere between crying and not-quite.

The noise level in the newsroom rose again. I headed back down to my own floor, starting to think about leaving. I called Don and said Steven had told us to go home, that I'd be heading back to his place, but that I wasn't going to go quite yet. He said he'd be there; all federal offices had been closed so he couldn't go to work. He'd heard a car bomb had gone off at the State Department. The new hot water heater installation was going fine, and the plumbers were taking turns coming up from the basement to watch t.v. in the living room and to ask him what was happening.

I asked Eric: "If I stay, can I be useful?" He paused, and sort of laughed, and said, "Sure." I wondered if it had been a stupid question. I wasn't sure what I could do, exactly. We surely would not be deploying our new editorial application that day. A lot of people were working from home or staying with their families, just to be careful.

The question of staying or leaving soon became moot. We heard that the streets outside were being locked down, that no one could leave, that if we needed food or anything else, we were opening a tab in the little snack shop in the lobby of our building, that we should make ourselves as comfortable as we could. I headed downstairs past the snack shop and out the front door to see what I could see. What I saw was a dead intersection, no signs of life except for uniformed Secret Service agents walking down the middle of the street with automatic weapons quite openly displayed. One of them called to me from the street to ask what I was doing. I told them I worked there. He told me I had to go in. I did.

Being locked into my building made me feel less safe, not more. I called Don again from my desk and told him that I was stuck, and that I was scared, and that I wanted to come home. He said soothing things to which I paid little attention. I hung up and felt utterly lost.

After a while there was something concrete to do. One of the other properties supported by our web staff is a newspaper whose site carries breaking headlines from a competing agency, which had been a fixture before the merger that had made my agency and the paper corporate siblings. We saw an opportunity to keep the newspaper site updated more frequently by using our own wire stuff, and dispatched our fearless leader to get the okay from the corporate guys. He did so, in record time.

So for the rest of the day we watched the wire, and got the back-end systems on the paper outfitted to take our content, and made sure things were staying updated. I made periodic trips to the newsroom to watch news develop, listen in to televised press conferences. Someone brought in sandwiches from the little snack shop in the building lobby. Once or twice, smokers' expeditions were mounted to the small and grimy delivery area in the back of the building, where Secret Service agents would not be prowling. Fiveish came around and word was that they were letting people out of the area though not in, and I walked through deserted streets to the garage where I was parked, a block or so east at the border of the cordoned area. Small groups of policemen with their motorcycles sitting idle guarded intersections. I retrieved my car, and headed back toward Don's house through sunny streets that seemed oddly unruffled by the long, hard day.

On the way I stopped at a gas station. While inside I saw copies of the paper version of the newspaper whose site I'd spent the day updating. An "Extra" section was folded over the front page that had been printed before the day exploded. The headline on the extra was "TERROR," above a gigantic, awful photo. I bought a copy and took it with me. It's been in a drawer since, untouched.

I arrived at Don's, so glad to be back with someone to feel safe with, and so glad for his comfy couch and the big teevee, with cable even. I think I opened a bottle of hard cider pretty shortly after getting through the door, and finally really did cry, off and on the rest of the night.

And since then, a lot of time has gone by. We got our new system deployed at work, and it's working pretty well, I think, though maybe some of our users would wish to express contrary opinions. Last weekend was the first weekend in two months that I didn't have to spend some time watching the wire to keep things updated, everything's automagical now. I'll be glad to get away from the news for a whole couple of days at a time, sometime soon. As awful as September 11 was, at least I knew how to feel that day. Over the last two months, it's been harder to know how to react to things, the new fears and new ways of life. I'm just so worried about everything. That civil liberties and other rights may be given up in the name of security while people are so scared, that our bombing and killing won't make people with nothing to lose and heaven to gain want to not bomb and kill again, that something's going to happen next, something's got to happen next, and if fear is a strong daily undercurrent in the aftermath of Sept. 11, then what fear will there be if some other catastrophe should occur close on the heels of the last?

No people should have to go through what we have all gone through the last two months. There are people in the world for whom these sorts of atrocities, on smaller but more frequent scales, are daily threats. I've read accounts of life in the pre-Soviet Kabul and it doesn't sound like the same place: universities and miniskirts and how could those people have expected the next thirty years to have happened to their country?

I just don't know how humankind is going to avoid exterminating itself someday, that people should want to do such things to one another. I'm doing okay these days, by any comparison and not just given-the-circumstances. Still happy and healthy, but I worry so much for the future.

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