The twin towers of the World Trade Center are seen through fog from the observation deck of the Empire State Building in New York in 1996. (Marilynn K. Yee / The New York Times)
And soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.
— Robert Penn Warren, “All the King’s Men”
Every one of us can close our eyes and go back to that day. The images will be there, projected on the backs of our eyelids in vivid color. The uncertainty after the initial explosion, the jarring realization after the second, the paper raining on the city from the gashes in the buildings followed by the bodies raining from the windows when they chose falling over fire. Finally, the collapse, the fury of dust and ash boiling through the city, people painted white with the bonemeal of co-workers and undone concrete as they ran, and ran, and ran.
In the days to follow we were confronted with the faces of those who charged in when everyone else was running out, trying to save as many as they could. In the close-knit firefighter neighborhoods of Rockaway, there was keening from behind closed doors in anticipation of the funeral bell services to come. Blue skies became a menacing thing, airplanes in flight an active threat. Most of us were not in those doomstruck buildings, not on the streets of New York when it happened, not in the Pentagon or in a Pennsylvania field, but in a great many ways we were all running for our lives that day. We are still running all these years later, and the ashes are still in our hair.
We are still running because September 11 never ended. To the contrary, it grew, expanded, metastasized and ultimately subsumed this nation. We are a wildly different place, and a wildly different people than we were fifteen years ago. We are barefoot at the airport talking on tapped phones with the latest war dispatches garbling from the television. Down in the basement, a pile of plastic sheeting…