Skip to primary content

[Piece written by Jeff Dorchen for an aborted site I made called 911. My idea, admittedly a stupid one, was for folks to post accounts of what happened to them on September 11, sans politics. The sans politics was the stupid part, if that isn’t obvious. Jeff speaks the truth, weekly.]

I was driving from Texas to LA the day before it happened. And while I was driving I suddenly became certain that I was going to get into a fatal accident. Do you ever, once in a while, stop and realize, “Hey, one day I’m gonna be in the dentist’s chair feeling nervous and in pain and unhappy"? And you remember what that was like, and you know it’s inevitable that, yes, it will happen again. You will again sit in that horrible chair. Or you think, gee, I haven’t lost anything important, like my wallet, in a long time; I bet I’m due. And then you do. Or you don’t. Or you pause on a nice day, even a nice day at work, if you have one, and think, some day soon another person I know is going to die. And you get sad, because you know it’s true.

So this was like that. Except there was this feeling of certainty, like, I could feel it. I could feel in my skull the impact of whatever was gonna hit me, it was gonna come from behind, over my left shoulder, and I could hear its impact in my left ear, which would be the last of my body parts to sense anything, and I could feel my brains fly out of my head and my mind snuff out. It was incredibly real and I had to figure out how to react to it. It scared me because it was such a fleshy premonition. But in the end I just surrendered to it. I resigned myself to the certainty that I was gonna die in an accident on the highway on the way to LA.

But instead I got to LA. I entered the house. This felt odd because I hadn’t expected to do so.

When I was a little kid, my dad told me he was gonna take me to a Red Wings hockey game. I had only seen Red Wings games on TV. So now I was going to a place that I’d seen on TV? It seemed impossible. But we actually did get there.
Another time, I knew I was gonna get a tape recorder for my birthday. I think I was turning nine. And I couldn’t sleep, because I didn’t really believe I myself could actually have a tape recorder. How could it be? I was sure I would die before I woke up, because a tape recorder and my immediate experience could never exist in the same room. Tape recorders were impossible! They could only belong to other people, who were also impossible.

So I walked into the LA house, having not expected to see it again, having believed it on the opposite side of a line it was impossible to cross, beyond a wall made of the limits of what could be real. So there I was, a ghost. And I went to bed in that house.

The next morning I woke up and saw a plane smash into a famous American building and explode, and I watched those skyscrapers collapse and all the rest of it. Just like you would dream it in a nightmare. In your nightmare the sky would be perfectly blue and the plane would come just like it did and the explosion would come. That’s what I saw. And I think I was still a ghost then. And I think I stayed a ghost until I read Michael Moore’s article, Death Downtown, which you can read at his website. And then I realized that I wasn’t a ghost, that someone was telling me he lived in the same world as I did and that he was alive. Moore was telling me things I already knew, of course, but up till then how did I know anyone else knew them? I was afraid to ask if anyone knew them. I was a ghost and couldn’t ask. All these people had died and I had feelings about it and I knew they were valid, they were mine and nothing to be ashamed of. But what right does a ghost have to pipe up amid the misery of living people?

Anyway, I’m just about completely alive now, and I feel bad. I’m mad about what happened because it didn’t come out of nowhere for me, I’ve been talking about it and writing about it and worrying about it all along, like for years. And I don’t like why it happened, and I don’t like what anyone in charge of anything thinks is necessary to do about it. Colin Powell and Osama bin Laden want a world war. That’s what they said. That’s what’s gonna happen, because the disgusting people have gotten so good at fulfilling each other’s worst prophecies that it’s just the ultimate. It’s just got so far out of hand that no one with a mind and a heart can go near the controls, everything’s being run by the self-appointed bringers of the end of days.