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September 12, 2001 - 7:59 am

Stopped Watches

After the U.S. dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima in Japan, rescue workers sifting through the rubble reported finding wristwatch after wristwatch, frozen at the exact moment of the detonation. I think of the piles of watches that stopped the very moment their human owners lost their own lives, the jagged and twisted hour and minute hands forever frozen and outstretched like pointing, accusing ghosts. And I think of the way time stopped for us yesterday, our own ghosts manifesting themselves in cracked voices, ashy faces, and in the imaginations of thousands of people who can now only wonder and will never, ever have answers.

There will never be words to do justice to something like this, no matter what anyone writes, or what imagery they conjure.

I was in the middle of an entry yesterday when I glanced over at the muted TV. I learned about the first plane crash. I lost my mood to write a funny entry, posted what I had written, and turned to watch the news. I assumed the crash was an accident, and the anchors didn't know much more themselves. As I watched, on live television, a second plane emerged from the fog in the background. I saw it coming. I thought it was a routine flight, maybe a surveillance plane. The explosion came, my jaw dropped, and the network anchors were silent, stunned as anyone else.

You know the rest.

I called Sally at work and told her to stay away from the Sears Tower, to come home. She had no idea what was going on at that point. Eventually, her building was evacuated. She and another girl walked from the Chicago Loop to the Fullerton el stop, four and a half miles away. They didn't want to be on a train downtown.

On my walk to work, the world's busiest airport didn't have a plane in the sky. A mute O'Hare. And every time you heard a siren or firetruck, you wondered.

I'm still stunned. I felt sad and sick yesterday. Three o'clock in the afternoon, walking home along a busy Chicago street, traffic was thick, and every car radio was tuned to the news. I'd hear snippets of words, 'American Airlines,' 'terrorism.'

And some of the things I think about seem mundane: What kind of memorial will be erected at WTC plaza? What will be on the cover of the next New Yorker? Will this eventually be a national holiday?

The world is going to change. Everyone I talk to seems to agree that the logical evolution of this is into an ultra secure, locked-down America. Police with automatic weapons. Arriving three hours early for domestic flights. Armed guards once again on airplanes, like it was in the 70's. People evoke Tim Burton's Batman, or Bladerunner. Maybe 1984. Dystopia.

And after work, I walked to Sally's. It was enough just to hold one another. We are lucky that none of our own people are ghosts.

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