The Zozobra, or What I Talk About When I Talk About 9/11

The phone rang. “We heard a plane went down,” my father said, calling from his home in Indiana. “Are you okay?” I put down the receiver, turned on the TV and saw Flight 175 slam into the south tower of the World Trade Center only nine miles away from my apartment on Claremont Avenue next to Riverside Church. When I moved to New York, I would use the towers to situate myself when I came out of the subway, the 1/9 being the line I used the most. It was my lifeline to the city, taking me to and from The Village where I was a bartender for a Janis Joplin musical, only blocks away from the Financial District. “I’m fine,” I told my dad, but I wasn’t. The phone kept ringing all day, when the line wasn’t jammed. Calls from Florida, Colorado, Chicago. “I’m fine” I told every one of them.

The night before the attack I was flying home from New Mexico. I was at the Fiestas de Santa Fe to see the Zozobra, or Old Man Gloom, a giant fifty-foot-tall marionette burned in effigy. The people of Santa Fe bring notes, legal documents, divorce papers, even wedding dresses to burn with the puppet and reduce their bitterness and misery to smoke and ash. I was in my last year of graduate school at Columbia University and Zozobra, a story about being haunted by the past, would be the title of my thesis play. When I landed at LaGuardia, I treated myself to a taxi home, learned my appointments in the morning had been canceled, and I waddled to Tommy and Kyle’s apartment on 121st and Broadway. They were classmates of mine in the acting concentration. We ate combination lo mein, or what Kyle called “The Goodness”, drank Budweiser and watched the New York Giants lose to the Denver Broncos on Monday Night Football. Kyle is one of the coolest cats I know. He had a cellphone before anyone else, and we could call from anywhere. I can talk in detail about what happened on 9/10 in his home, but I remember almost nothing from 9/11.

I see 9/11 in bits and fragments, postcards like flickering boxes or flashcards in my mind, still looking for the right answers. Between phone calls I went out to Broadway looking for classmates, looking to see who was alive and who was missing. The air was still as people briskly walked down the street. Everyone had a cosmetic calm on their face with a “hold me closer and never let me go” look in their eyes. I found Kyle at The West End, the infamous bar at Broadway and 114th Street where Allen Ginsberg used to drink, and watch the finest minds of his generation be destroyed with madness. The West End had become a second home for us. Kyle said more planes had been hijacked and there were rumors of car bombs exploding in Washington Square, two blocks away from the Janis Joplin review. I crossed the street and took $200 in cash out of an ATM, leaving me with $18 in my bank account, and bought a jug of water and all the ramen I could carry. By the time I got home my answering machine was full with calls from Albuquerque, Indianapolis, and Seattle, people asking if I was “fine,” people worried as they couldn’t reach me. I had left the TV on and I watched the towers peel apart in flames. In that moment, on that morning, the towers became the Zozobra, burning with pain. There was no goodness, only gloom, and I was numb.

I can’t talk about what happened on 9/12, or 9/13. I don’t remember those days. I know I didn’t turn off my television. The news channels all had the same people saying the same things, “This is war.” MTV played the same videos over and over again, all of them slow, most of them sad. One was U2’s Stuck In A Moment You Can’t Get Out Of, and the entire city was frozen. Then on 9/14, on MSNBC, a question was posed to a retired army general: could he confirm the rumor that America was buying fighter jet fuel from NATO allies. His simple response was “Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics, and the United States military is nothing but professional.” With that, I felt rage. “It’s our turn now” I said to myself, and I was ashamed.

The next day I left the house for the first time. I went to work and took the 1/9 train line to 14th Street because that was as far as it could go. When I emerged from the subway, I looked for the towers to orient myself, but they were gone. All I could see was a cone of lifeless smoke. That day my girlfriend forced me to get a cellphone so she could find me anywhere in the city and talk if we were attacked again, and although I’ve moved away from New York, to this day I still have the same number that was given to me with that phone. Seven months after the attack Tribute in Lights, an art installation conceived by John Englehart premiered at ground zero. Two simple beams of light in remembrance of the towers and the people in them. It has been said that people could see the lights as far away as Fairfield, Connecticut. Isn’t that wonderful? At a silent art auction I won an original photograph of the lights I keep in my office at the Catholic university I teach at now as a way to settle myself, next to pictures and postcards of my father, my teachers, and my former classmates, a compass and a reminder on which direction I’m facing and how to find myself.

Before the pandemic, I would go back to New York for business about three times a year, see friends, and see plays. The West End is now a board game café. The Janice Joplin show is dark, and the 9 train has been discontinued, there is only the 1 train now, but when I exit the train I still look for the towers and the lights in the sky to situate myself, hoping they will appear, even though I know they are gone. This is what I talk about when I talk about 9/11, when I call my old classmates and talk about that Tuesday, that time when I wasn’t fine, and that place where the train used to go.