9/11 Was the 9/11 of Stories About 9/11 but This Story Is the 9/11 of Them Being Terrible

Where everything began and is always beginning

There are a hundred towers all around me and their windows glitter when the sun peeks through the clouds that blanket the world, the black smoke billowing from the thousand gashes, plane after plane cresting the horizon in search of a beautiful death. I am on a street corner directly in the center of a grid that has no beginning or end, whose architect hoped to find god on the map. Empty order. A shelf full of alphabetized titles and blank pages. He died on a toilet of his own creation and never got to see his vision through to this moment.

Everyone stares up at the sky even though this has been happening all day and the constant crunch and tinkle of glass hitting the pavement below kind of sounds like electronic music, which I like. I dance to it all the time and now this is happening. Two and two make four and two towers and two planes and a hundred thousand repetitions make me nauseous. I ask my friends why the planes are doing this, and they say it’s because the tickets are too cheap. You can get a plane to anywhere now. 

Falling debris has crushed all the buildings around the towers. You can get close, but there’s no reason to because there’s nowhere to go, so no one wants to hang out there. Wings and girders and flesh pummeled every roof down to its foundation, every stone into gravel and then into dust, but the towers never fall because if they did, where would the planes go?

They say we’ve lost immeasurable treasures to the carnage. When I try to remember what was in those neighborhoods, I can’t think over the people who tell me about the marble and gold resplendent in the shadow of the towers. When I close my eyes I can see it, I can feel the stone cool to the touch in those buildings that were never raised and yet still demolished. 

No one stops the planes, no one stops more and more people from walking into the towers to go to work. I can’t stand it anymore and I grab a guy by his tie, take his briefcase, scream at him not to go– doesn’t he see the planes?– but he shrugs his shoulders and asks me where exactly he’s supposed to go, if not to work. I panic and say he should get a job at the bank. As soon as it comes out of my mouth I know it’s stupid, and the guy tells me it’s stupid because he knows it’s stupid too.

But even so, I’m not going to let him leave. I drag him to where he could see the most sets of towers, and I ask him if he wants to be a part of it, to mix his blood with oil and smoke. He says no, but that he would get fired if he doesn’t show up. I tell him they’d fire him if he died, too, and for once he doesn’t have a clever response. As the hours go by, he struggles less and less and he says he doesn’t want to take off his tie to escape because if he shows up without it, they’ll fire him for that. I nod off around midnight, and when I wake up the next morning, the tie in my hand is gnawed off at the edges and the man is gone and another collision booms and that’s that. I tried my best.

Eventually I get so inured to the planes in the sky that it takes me a while to realize they changed directions. I don’t think anyone else noticed either; my friends keep talking about how horrible it is that planes were hitting the towers, but when I look up– actually look– that’s not happening anymore. The planes emerge whole from the wounded towers, spots of white, stolen sunlight raining down not just when they burst forth through the windows, but all along their flight paths. There are whole sections of the city where you have to wear thick boots or else a shard will embed in your foot, where you have to carry a thick umbrella to protect you if a plane passes overhead, but my friends are pretty sure it’s always been like that.

I don’t know where the planes go, but they fly off in all directions after their violent births from the towers. I guess they’re going everywhere, everywhere that ever sent them, everywhere that didn’t want to see them again, everywhere that thought it could be them next, and everywhere that thought it couldn’t. They will never stop, and the smoke will never clear.