This week's New Yorker has a short fiction piece by Don DeLillo, 'Still Life.' It is about someone who returns to his estranged wife on September 11, 2001.
Its opening paragraph reads:
When he appeared at the door, it was not possible, a man come out of an ash storm, all blood and slag, reeking of burned matter, with pinpoint glints of slivered glass in his face. He looked immense, in the doorway, with a gaze that had no distance in it. He carried a briefcase and stood slowly nodding. She thought he might be in shock but didn’t know what this meant in precise terms, medical terms. He walked past her toward the kitchen and she tried calling her doctor, then 911, then the nearest hospital, but all she heard was the drone of overloaded lines. She turned off the TV set, not sure why, protecting him from the news he’d just walked out of, that’s why, and then went into the kitchen. He was sitting at the table, and she poured him a glass of water and told him that Justin was with his grandmother, released early from school and also being protected from the news, at least as it concerned his father.
What is really, really strange is in the advertisement in the sidebar, there is a shot taken from Windows on the World, in an ad that reads, 'Great Restaurants of the World.'
Six years have gone by, the day has been mercilessly exploited by the current president for his war in Iraq, works of fiction started appearing two years ago about the day, I even read one written by a French author, Windows on the World, that is about a father and a son who go to the restaurant and how the last two hours of their lives unfold that day and, ultimately, how they die.
I read this stuff, I read the story, and yet it still seems too recent, too real. Perhaps that is because of the current administration's political exploitation of the day. They have kept it alive but not in healthy or helpful ways.
Ultimately, I myself still am not past that day. So, for me, in some ways, not enough time has passed.
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