The ritual of a new day at work in New Jersey is over. My husband John calls from New York to tell me that a plane has hit The World Trade Center. A short call. My colleagues hunch over their computers. I call John back. Is this a hoax? Orson Welles, I'm thinking. No, it's not. Alexis and Charles are ok. Don't come home. My colleagues scan for news. One turns around: The second tower has been hit.
I can't breathe. I have to get home. NJ Transit isn't running. My colleagues rise as one and offer me their homes for the night. They touch me. The last thing I tell John before the phones are out is that I have a place to stay. I can't reach my daughter Alexis. Talking will make her safe. Not reasonable. But my gut knows this to be true. I am bereft.
The escape into the ordinary begins. In this capsule, hurtling through time, small tasks matter. People leave the building. Not us. We hold our department meeting aggressively and at length. We dicker and consider and abandon ourselves in it.
A refugee now, I travel South with my boss, my host now. The highway unspools unobstructed, black with thick tree walls on both sides, and a vast light blue void above. No planes. Just a long, slate blue cloud crawling forever over the tree tops. My host and I chat. He asks me about being a child in Germany during the war. I tell him I no longer have nightmares. I explain that talking about it makes tears come, even when I'm not crying. I'm not crying, and tears come.
I speak of Osama bin Laden. My host has not heard of him. He's very interested, and I try to dredge up everything I have about Afghanistan, the Taliban, and the US role during the cold war and after. He tells me he has a soldier's heart.
We turn off the highway into a seaside town of Victorian houses, carefully restored. Gingerbread in candy colors.
In my host's living room his family and his wife's Amish relatives watch a video about Alaska. There are my host and his wife, two honey-tanned young daughters; a bearded Amish patriarch, who has just sold his farm; his wife, who gave birth recently, and their new baby girl; the Amish couple's young daughter; their four boys, two small and two adolescent; and the wife of the eldest boy. The Amish relatives wear the somber dress of their community, the children miniatures of their elders. My host tells me I remind him of the Amish patriarch's mother, and I realize that I must be older than the Amish man, although the opposite appears true.
My host's wife is glad that George W is Commander-in-Chief, not Bill Clinton, because Bush respects human life. How do you come to that, I ask. Because Bush protects the life of the unborn. My skin crawls.
We do not watch the news, we do not listen to the radio, we mention the attacks, we do not talk about them. Everyone is extraordinarily kind to me.
We go to the beach. My host does not succeed in persuading the older boys to get into swimsuits to surf with him. His daughters go for a walk on the beach with me. We poke hemispherical jelly creatures, wonder if gulls have webbed feet based on their tracks. I look back to see silhouettes from another time against that translucent, empty sky.
We eat dinner on the porch: chicken, salad, scalloped potatoes, home-made eclairs. Delicious!
The boys and I get a tour of the area in a sports van. A little lesson in sociology, my host says. Picture perfect towns, estates - Billy Joel lives there in a house shaped like a piano. And then Asbury Park, same real estate but like Beirut after the first clean-up. We return to the house in the dark, and the Amish return to Lancaster.
We head for the huge TV in the brand new, nearly empty home of my host's mother. The rug is thick, the color of Astroturf. The ceiling higher than the room is wide, like a chute. On the floor the girls sleep under a blanket. The beer is cold and good. Over and over again I watch the plane hitting the tower, a multi-color bulbous fungus growing as in time-lapse photography, spores of dust and death, the towers imploding. I am a guest watching a TV program about what has happened to my city, the people I live with. I've lost my place.
We return to the house, and I sleep like a stone.
I lose the following day working. I am on automatic pilot. I can go home now, and I wonder about the view on the train. The one with the church on the ridge and the Twin Towers behind it. The church is so much closer to me than the Towers are, and yet the Towers are still so huge, I always marvel. Will I weep when I get to that place? I don't. Instead I see another church with the Empire State Building behind it, just as remarkable for the relationships of size and distance. The Towers have never been. I made them up. It has always been the Empire State Building on my commutes.
The train plunges noisily into the tunnel under the river, and finally I emerge into the filth and noise of the bowels of Penn Station. Up, up, up into the main waiting room. I rush to the escalator. I shall see my city now.
And then I smell it. Acrid and inert.