I moved to New York City in March 2001, with no job and no particular plan in mind. A friend had offered me a windowless room in Brooklyn for less than three hundred dollars a month. About six months later, at the time of the terrorist attacks of September 11, I was sharing a studio apartment in Queens with my girlfriend, Emily, who had just been laid off from her dot.com job. We were both unemployed and both becoming serious about writing; she worked on a laptop in our loft bed while I typed away below her at a desk fashioned from a spare door. We found out about the attacks over the phone from my mother, who called us from Wisconsin to break the news. Up on our roof, from across the East River, we watched the blitzed city burn. The towers were gone. Neighbours spread rumours that hospitals were overwhelmed with casualties and that the New York University medical centre had been bombed. Military jets streaked back and forth over our heads. Four days earlier, Emily had been at the ‘Top of the World Trade Centre Observatories’ with a friend from London, and had seen Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo perform Act II of Swan Lake in the WTC Plaza. My copy of the New York Post of 13 September led with ‘10,000 feared dead’. In the following days we spent a lot of time in Manhattan, visiting the barricades at 14th Street, the massive ad hoc memorial at Union Square, and, when it was reopened, Lower Manhattan, where night crews dismantled the looming wreckage with welding tools, an unforgettable smell filled the air and National Guardsmen handed out tissues to passers-by. 

I believe that the September 11 attacks were designed to be witnessed worldwide on live television. But we didn’t have a television, and we hadn’t seen the towers fall; we had gathered instead around the radio like a Depression-era family awaiting guidance in dark times from a fireside chat. I first saw the images a few days later in an electronics store near Union Square, an entire window full of screens all silently broadcasting the same footage.