I was jammed into an elevator in Minneapolis this summer, heading for the fiftieth floor, up like a shot, when someone tapped my shoulder. I wiggled in place, craned my neck around. “Hey, I know you,” a woman behind me said, smiling. “I took a class with you. I was in your lecture when the planes hit the towers.” We stepped off together—floor fifty turned out to be a wall of windows—and looked out at the city spread vertiginously below us, remembering that moment, twenty-five years ago, in a Boston University lecture hall. The class, The Emerging United States, started at 8 A.M., so early that the student athletes brought breakfast and the room smelled like Egg McMuffins. That morning, we’d been in the eighteen-twenties, and I’d been blathering about Andrew Jackson and the penny press when cellphones across the hall started bleating like lost lambs.
Goddammit, I’d thought. No phones in class. Then someone gasped, and someone shrieked, and someone called out that he’d received a text from his sister in New York, and the towers, oh my God, oh my God, the towers, thousands of people, Jesus no, oh my God. That couldn’t be true. Could it? Plenty of students didn’t have phones then (I didn’t), and texting was spotty. The phones kept ringing, baa baa. The Pentagon? The students were polite, hesitant. “Please, please answer your phones,” I said. “Pick up, call back, call.” The rest of us waited. A student talking to her father said that the planes had come from Logan and he wanted to know, Was she O.K., was Boston under attack? We knew nothing. What was safest: stay or go? Go, I decided. I ended class. Go straight to your dorms, and be safe, be safe. Then I got on my bicycle, turned on a radio bolted to the handlebars, listened to the unfathomable news, looked up at the clearest, bluest sky—no planes, no planes, no planes—and pedalled across the river to a day-care center to pick up my very little boys because mammals gather their young.
Every September 11th, people assemble near Ground Zero for the tolling of a bell, the whispering of prayers, the offering of flowers, the waving of flags. For twenty-four years, the bell has tolled six times: at 8:46 A.M., when a plane crashed into the north tower; 9:03 A.M., when a plane hit the south tower; 9:37 A.M., when a plane hit the Pentagon; 9:59 A.M., when the south tower fell; 10:03 A.M., when Flight 93 crashed into a field in western Pennsylvania; and 10:28 A.M., when the north tower fell. Between bells, mourners read aloud the names of the nearly three thousand people who died that day. There will be a seventh bell-tolling this year, for the thousands who have since died by suicide, or from cancer and other illnesses caused by the ravages of terrorism.
