Now that another 9-11 is past... it's funny, when I look back there's a gap in my diary, from September 10th to the 27th.  It was rare for me to miss more than a day or two in those days, but for that two-and-a-half weeks, as packed with imagery and emotion as they were and remain in my very vivid memories, words utterly escaped me. 

At first, like so many others, I could not believe my eyes.

I remember thinking, so this is what it's like when the world stops turning.  That predictable arc from now to the future, that link from one moment to the next, had suddenly snapped.  That's why 9-11 is frozen in time — it's a day when the future disappeared.  Maybe it was hubris to think we had some idea what the future would bring in the first place.  Suddenly it was anyone's guess. But then I guess it always was.

One reason I stopped writing was because all those things that vexed or delighted me had, until 8:46 a.m. on September 11th, 2001, at least, naively depended on things going on much as they seemed to me more or less always to have done. There was nothing in my experience, that had prepared me for playing an extra in a real-life Hollywood disaster film. 

9-11 was the stuff of summer blockbusters where Superman swoops down at the last minute to thwart the evil plot and save the day.  And now here it was on live TV.  But if I had to choose a movie to live in it'd be, I dunno, Annie Hall.  Or Saturday Night Fever.  Or Tootsie.  Not Dark Knight, Die Hard, or The Towering Inferno.

An element of unreality had intruded into ordinary life — or was it the other way around?  At any rate a kind of evil no ordinary person could affect had entered my world, a world I thought I knew the rough contours and perimeters of.  Now I suddenly felt like we'd all stumbled into some terrible made-for-TV parallel universe.  I wanted out, back. I didn't know what to do, how to be in this new reality. 

Nothing in my arsenal of tools — not irony, not a wry sense of life's absurdity, or a casual fixation on the morbid and grotesque — none of it was appropriate or adequate in the face of this atrocity unfolding in real time in front of the eyes of the world.  What could you possibly say?  What could anyone say? 

The events of the day — the images of the day — ran so counter to human intuition.  The nihilism of the Jihadists, who had chosen death, was horrifying enough, without the murder of thousands on top of it.  But my mind still reels at the forced suicides — those ordinary people — you can see them clearly in photographs — diving from the top floors of the towers to certain death.  Live, on television.  We all saw them die.  We all witnessed their world ending in the most horrific way imaginable.  What could you possibly say?  What could anyone say?

We all have a little toolkit equipped with various instruments experience has taught us come in handy when confronting the challenges of an ordinary life. There was nothing ordinary about that day, and nothing in my toolkit for it. 

It's not as if I had never experienced a death, but, like most people, my first experience of death was of a natural death.  It was when my grandfather, with whom I'd spent the previous summer in Mesquite, Texas, died of a brain aneurysm.  I was ten.  He was 83 and frankly about due.  It was a very easy out for a very difficult man. 

At the funeral there was a whole slew of Texas in-laws from my granddad's second marriage I'd never met before and would never meet again.  The most memorable of them was — true story — my Uncle "Boob" (it's a Texas thing).

Two scenes from that occasion stick with me.  They not only provided me with some of the tools I carry to this day, you could say my whole worldview is built on them. 

One was seeing my granddad, who was already pretty much mummified at the time of his death, in his open casket in a small, stuffy chapel in the Texas heat, with flies on his face.  I remember them preening on the end of his nose and fighting in his eyelashes.  And it would have been indecorous to shoo them away.  So there they were.

The other indelible scene is my trip to the Texas State Fair with Uncle Boob.  Boob was a big slab of Texas beef, the likes of which I had never seen, striding through the Midway, picking fights with "faggot urban cowboys" (it was the year Urban Cowboy, with a still very young and very pretty John Travolta, came out).  At one point he proclaimed: "when I die, don't bother with the funeral — just come on back to the Texas State Fair, boys!"

And I had to give it to him: it was a pretty grand idea. 

As soon as we cleared the ticket booth he asked us both where we wanted to go.  True to form, my brother, who was an ordinary boy, was drawn to the bright flashing lights, the bells and whistles of the Midway.  He wanted to throw things and hit things and shoot things and win things, as boys do.  I, on the other hand was drawn inexorably to the solemn, strange, almost mystical darkness of the Freak Show.  Uncle Boob, bless him, was game.

Even in my memory, it was a sad little affair.  A few forlorn marginally freaky folk making a little extra dough after their shift at the factory, sitting alone, looking waxy and bored, maybe even a little contemptuous, on makeshift thrones on elevated platforms behind a ratty velvet rope in suffocating darkness.  Even at that age, I knew they were just people.  Still, I felt a strange thrill looking at them looking back at me, watching me watching them.  Who was the freak here?

For me the highlight of the show was the sarcastic dwarf at the very end who was hawking tiny Bibles, some with white and some with black vinyl covers. They fit right in the palm of his little hand. The print was so tiny you'd need a magnifying glass to read it.  He went on cynically about "these poor unfortunates" and "the mercy of God". 

His pitch appealed to an inborn sense of pity that was above and beyond the call in this instance.  We had not, after all, been treated to Lionel, the Lion-Faced Man, Eng and Chang, or Krao, The Missing Link.  In fact, we had breezed through the whole show in under five minutes, and it was nothing you couldn't see any night of the week in the local biker bar, which my Uncle Boob surely knew.

I bought it hook, line and sinker, of course.  It was a marvelous empowering feeling — this pity for people purportedly less fortunate.  I had never felt it so intensely.  I wanted a fetish to remember it by.

It was too much for Uncle Boob.

"Come on, kid," he nudged me along.  "Let's go."

But I wasn't going anywhere without my souvenir!  I flailed and floundered at his feet, foaming at the mouth.  I would have my fetish! 

My Uncle was unmoved.  He was certainly not about to shell out five bucks for something he knew I could get for free and about three times the size back in our hotel room, courtesy of the Gideons.  And anyway, none of it was real!  The joke was on us!

But I wanted my Freak Bible!  A white one! 

Uncle Boob gave me another look, and burst out laughing.  It was a big, booming, Texas-size laugh the likes of which you never hear out East. He was laughing at me, it's true, but his laughter was so bewilderingly generous, it shamed me into full retreat.  I probably owe my consciousness of my inclination toward sentimentality, and my enduring skepticism in the face of an expected emotion to dear Uncle Boob. 

He gave me the blunt tools to resist the dwarf's pitch, which had appealed to my sentimental training. And thus to embark on my education in real emotion. 

Seeing those fliers appear overnight all over Lower Manhattan — the reality of love — the way it grew spontaneously — and nearly instantaneously — from that scorched earth — and the nobility of the grief of those who had suffered the greatest loss — the nakedness, the realness of it — was a revelation that awed me after the shock of the evil the world had just witnessed.

It's true, 9-11 was quickly appropriated by evil ideologues — just as the evil ideologues who had perpetrated it had planned — who could see its uses — the dwarfs hawking their tiny Bibles, if you will — but what really happened on that day and the days that followed was a glimpse of the inner workings of Evil and Good. 

Evil, which plots and plans in secret and seeks revenge on Nature and Life. Good, which grows wild, through cracks in the concrete, after death, disease and conflagrations.  Despite Evil.  You could almost say oblivious to it.  Evil is not absolute — it needs Good, it needs Life, it needs Love — it needs something to destroy.  Love grows on its own, and endures.  It's stronger then death. 

I was dumbfounded, myself.  I would never have believed if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.