BOUNDARY

(excerpt)

Listen, I don’t want to start this on September 11, 2001, but it’s happening. I know, it’s a little overdone and dramatic. But that day, and the days that followed, mark a before/after line in the lives of many people; I am one of them. I have come to think of this line as a naturally occurring record, like a tree ring, or geologically like a sedimentary layer. The smudged evidence of what happened.

There is a line that appears in some cross-sections of the Earth’s crust. Those samples possess a dark gray line of ash. The line appears in slices of soil and stone of a certain age, all over the world. Called the K-T Boundary (for German and epoch reasons), this is the line below which you might find the bones of dinosaurs. Above it; no dinosaurs. I was taught in school that there was an asteroid, about half the size of Manhattan, that slammed into the Earth and the resulting ash cloud blotted out the sun and the plants died and then the small animals starved and the medium animals that eat the small animals starved and then the big animals starved and 75% of species became extinct over a period of dark sad time. An incremental trudge into nothingness, a meaningless and futile attempt to survive. BUT THAT IS NOT HOW IT HAPPENED. I have since learned that this famous mass extinction took place on a spring afternoon. Boom, tsunamis, superheated atmosphere, shockwave shatter - a wipeout in all conceptions of that word. The wipeout was complete in a few hours. The geologic line mentioned above is the autograph of this destruction. An indicator that something truly, inconceivably massive happened in a surprisingly short amount of time. Very few creatures and plants can reach back into their DNA memories to describe it. Millions of years had to happen before any one creature could describe what happened that day. That ash layer is the most dramatic and surprising line I have ever heard of. 

OK, back to the terrorism. That day (never forget) I was one of 8 million people in New York I was in the borough of Brooklyn, the neighborhood of Park Slope, on 19th Street. Nearly one month before, I had moved into a 3rd floor walk up with my first serious girlfriend who would soon break up with me without telling me. I was 23 and 2 days old. It was shortly before 9am. I can’t remember if it was a phone call or the television that told me to go up to the roof. But I did. We did. Both planes had hit both buildings by the time we were on the roof. I took pictures with a film camera. My first serious girlfriend was wearing tights with the feet cut off under a black skirt and a tshirt with the neck and sleeves cut off at the seams. I don’t remember what I was wearing. Then the cellphones stopped working. Everyone knows what happened after that. The horrors. You know. 

Then there was a big cloud of smoke and ash stretching south and east across Long Island. So we went back downstairs to the apartment. I know now that on that day (never forget) there was an astronaut on the International Space Station that saw the smoke from 250 miles above and kept falling in orbit around the Earth because that is all you can do from that height. You keep falling and in 90 minutes you’re back where you started but it is not a new day yet. You have to unflinchingly wait.

Somehow, I found a job at an insurance company out of Stamford, Connecticut. Stamford, Connecticut is a city to which I have never been, even to this day. My job was to climb into a Tyvek jumpsuit and wander through a building that did not fall down that still stands next to the ones that did. On some of the higher floors there were no windows and it was windy. I was there to count computers and art and whatever else was left in a building beside the smoldering pit that was two towers full of people and things. It had been a few weeks since that day (never forget). Every day I walked from the train to the building that did not fall down and I experienced the sting of burning and the artificial rain from the constant washing of the outside of buildings in Lower Manhattan to keep the ash and dust off. From a high floor (80-something?) I watched tiny firefighters in fluorescent, reflective jackets move sheet draped stretchers and hang flags off of everything.

By November, I was on a plane to Atlanta, Georgia for a few days to see my dad who I hadn’t spoken to for 10 years. I was invited to see my grandpa marry a woman whose husband had died. My grandma had died too, by that time. My grandma’s name was Dorothy, but everyone called her Dot. In my mind she is forever wearing a polka-dot swimsuit near a kidney-shaped pool.