Skip to primary content

Distortion | Sep 23 2001

Several nights back, Rachel woke me in the middle of the night to say that her throat hurt. We talked it over (I have the strange ability to engage in seemingly intelligent conversation at the moment of waking) and decided that she should go to kitchen to see if there were any cough drops in her utility drawer.

When Rachel returned, she said that the cough drops were stale but that a stale cough drop was better than no cough drop. I asked her, not being a regular cough drop user, what a stale cough drop tasted like. “It’s soft and chewy,” she said, “which is weird for a cough drop, because it makes it difficult to suck on.” Then she mentioned all the dead people, saying how sad she felt about them.

We spent the next hour imagining the last moments of the people who died in the stairwells. How long, we wondered, did it take for the buildings to collapse once they began collapsing? Ten seconds? This means that if you were in a stairwell near the bottom of the building, say the fifth floor, you had perhaps ten seconds, probably less, to contemplate your fate – assuming you knew what your fate was.

What exactly did you know? What exactly was happening around you?

I said that there must have been a great rumble, and screaming, and that the walls and floor must have buckled. Actually the rumble and screaming probably came first, joined by the buckling.

About the screaming, we realized something important. The screams didn’t intensify over time but diminished, as less and less people were alive to scream. But the rumble, we agreed, grew louder. How loud exactly? What does a 110-story building sound like, from the inside, as it collapses on top of you? We didn’t ask ourselves this question and I’ve no guess now as I write this.

Fucking loud. So loud you couldn’t hear any screams.

Last month Rachel and I visited Rye Playland, an old-fashioned, wind-worn amusement park about an hour north of the city by train. We purchased a limited number of tickets (they were surprisingly expensive) and negotiated which rides to use them on. Rachel wanted to go on the Ferris Wheel twice, but I insisted on using one set for the House of Mirrors.

I’m a bit of a House of a Mirrors aficionado, so I feel qualified to say that this particular House of Mirrors sucked: you always knew which way to go by looking at the floor. But the experience was redeemed halfway through by a room filled with what I think of as “circus” mirrors, the kind of mirrors that distort your body – your reflected body – in various bizarre ways: first inhumanly skinny, then impossibly squat.

I reminded Rachel of those mirrors as we discussed the people in the stairwells, saying that the walls and floors must have distorted like this. However it occurs to me now that no one actually saw this happen since the lights probably went out the instant the rumbling started. Or did the rumbling start first, followed by the lights going out? To answer this question, one would need to be an electrician and also know how those towers were wired – and even then, I’m not so sure one would know the answer.

And anyway, what different does it make? Either the lights went out immediately or they didn’t. Either the walls and floors distorted or they didn’t. Either you could hear the screams or you couldn’t. Whatever way it happened, people were killed in a few short, unimaginably horrific seconds, crushed to death in a collapsing mass of concrete and steel and other people.

There was more that Rachel and I discussed that night; this is merely what I remember. But then finally, after at least an hour of this, it seemed that we had covered everything, had talked it all through, all the possibilities and impossibilities, and could give it a rest.

We spoke for a moment then of returning to sleep, only we both recognized that this was ridiculous. How can you return to sleep? You can’t, you can’t and you won’t, so there’s no use even trying.

Instead we started in on the people on the planes.