Rewind

Jon Stewart was on hiatus this week, so I missed my 11:00 sanity fix. Instead, I entered the surreal world of 9/11 on Thursday night. Do you remember, really remember, that morning seven years ago? I thought I would never forget, that the images and sequence of events were forever imprinted. But I was wrong.

I was flipping channels, looking for light fare, when I stumbled upon MSNBC’s "9/11: As It Happened." It was simply a rebroadcast, with some editing, of NBC’s original coverage from the morning of September 11, 2001, as it unfolded, with Katie Couric and Matt Lauer in New York. At first I tried to resist—no, no, watching the footage and seeing the towers would be too upsetting. I'd seen the tributes earlier in the day. I know what happened. But after two minutes, I was frozen. Just as frozen as I had been when it was live. What’s going on? What will happen next?

As the first tower burned, they speculated about a small errant plane that might have caused the explosion and fire. Remember? They alluded, not casually, but not alarmingly, to the 1993 WTC bombing. It was so strange, the sight of the billowing smoke from that initial blast. Then a reporter on her cell from a nearby neighborhood saw the second plane crash—not a small plane but a jumbo jet, live, as it happened. Could the air traffic control system have failed? Why would a pilot fly into a building? No, this is no accident. Terrorist attack. A declaration of war? The report of a hijacking. Tom Brokaw joined Matt and Katie in the studio, and Jim Miklashevski was on the phone, safely harbored in the Pentagon, until the Pentagon itself shook from another unknown blast. What’s going on? What will happen next?

This compulsion, this exercise of watching the rebroadcast, was almost like rereading a tragic novel, one I’d read repeatedly, knowing the outcome but forgetting the details. Wishing, hoping that if I read it with fresh eyes, it might yet have a happy ending. As the emerging facts were recounted, Katie added, "And, of course, who knows the human toll?" Remember? They guessed 50,000 people could've been inside but hoped most had been evacuated safely. I remember seeing that live, hearing the estimates. It was a third plane that hit the Pentagon, they announced, not a bomb on the heliport.

Some of the story is locked in my memory. Yet now I struggled again to string it all together. Which flight came from where? It was two from Boston, right? Was it the north tower that was struck first but fell second? Or vice versa?

By now, it was long after midnight and I had to sleep. I hit the VCR and watched the rest on Friday. How could the coordination have been so perfect? Were more planes being transformed into missiles? Air traffic across the country had been grounded and transatlantic flights diverted to Canada. I’d forgotten that. The first tower fell. The second tower fell. A fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania: United Flight 93.

While smoky footage rolled from Lower Manhattan where the towers had been vaporized, Tom Brokaw said, in his twangy, comforting way, putting the pieces together, slowly and confidently: "It is hard to overstate the consequence of all this, and this is just the beginning. We’ll be living with this story and dealing with the consequences for some time. It will cost us in loss of life and cost us in terms of the psychological security that we have in this country. America has been changed by all this."

What was it the beginning of? Had we not felt vulnerable before? I don't remember. And who would have imagined Iraq and more needless reckless loss of life and Bush 2004 and the sickening spectre of McCain-Palin? Are we back to sleep? What’s going on? What will happen next?

I hit the button to rewind and the video played backwards, the story reversing. Transfixed, I watched the smoke billowing in, not out. The towers uncollapsing, one by one. The scene of a single fire in a single building. We interrupt this broadcast. And back to the beginning. A sunny September morning when the sky was safe and azure.

I switched off the TV, took a deep breath, and went about my day. Unlike the 9/11 families, I have the luxury of putting the story away, until I need to remember again how it began and ponder how it will end.