That Morning

We were lying in bed, taking our lazy time before getting up. The telephone rang; Deb went to answer it.

It was Guy Thomas our downstairs neighbor Fred Teti, calling, telling us that the World Trade Center in New York had been attacked. Deb relayed the information to me.

"Oh, fuck!" I said. "Osama bin Laden." (The flash of insight was motivated strictly by my understanding that bin Laden's organization had been behind the 1993 truck bombing of the WTC.)

"Palestine is going to be glass," Debbie said.

"We're at war," I said, getting out of bed. "On the wrong bloody side."

I turned on the radio to listen to events as they unfolded. The Pentagon had been hit too, and there were also reports of a carbomb in front of the State Department. Eyewitnesses in New York were saying they couldn't see one of the two towers of the WTC.

After a few minutes, I turned the radio off again. We would find out more soon enough, but in the meanwhile, I knew just how crazymaking it would be to try to follow the media coverage.

Lying unfinished at my bedside was a book: Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia, by Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac. As the nation prepared for a war of revenge on Afghanistan, I couldn't bring myself to finish a book that began with Dr. William Brydon's sole survival of the retreat from Kabul.

We didn't bomb the West Bank into trinitite, at least. What actually happened was bad enough.