Over

NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK
September 11, 2001

It is over. We sit, stunned in our chairs in the conference room, where an hour and a half earlier we’d been gathering for our meeting. Two towers before. Four planes before. The Pentagon before. We try to see the pattern in the laminate of the tables. We try to comprehend the purpose of breathing. We try to remember how our throats hum with voice and how our mouths carve words, and can’t.

There used to be a building here. Where the thin strip of sky now shows, between the large tower on the left and the smaller square one in the distance, there used to be a skyscraper. The sky is still the same cloudless blue but the building is gone. We looked, it was there; we blinked, it was gone. The whole building, a skyscraper. There used to be a building here.

There used to be.

A building.

Here.

In the hour after the towers collapse, a stream of people look out at this view over and over again as if the building will reappear as suddenly as it vanished. In a daze, they dial their cell phones, realize they can't get through because the transmitter at the top of the north tower is gone, stare at the land line phones, dial the cell phone again and look to see if the tower has reappeared.

Silently.

Over and over again.