SEPTEMBER 10TH - synopsis & excerpts
Brian Cohen, a sustainable architect, disappears after 9/11. Middle age burnout and the cataclysmic events of the World Trade Center attacks precipitate his escape from career and family to live on the streets of New York in pursuit of anonymity.
“That toxic dump of humanity mangled among the remains of the supreme excesses of architecture, the World Trade Center is an altar of human sacrifice. Man created it. Man takes it away. There is no God to blame here. Not that he ever thought there was one but now he’s sure and strangely takes comfort in the fact.”
Brian’s journey back is an hallucinatory experience where he imagines people he knows on every street corner of New York. Marginalized like the homeless he encounters, from a drug addict who “dulls the emotions so expertly” waiting for handouts in Times Square and a Fire Chief surviving on oxygen by an abandoned warehouse in Brooklyn to a prostitute who calls Bush a primate greasier than an oil slick, there is no escape from the life he once led, a life to which he no longer belongs.
"He can’t think, feels dizzy from the prospect, intensely nauseated and weeps, this time for the world that will not be rid of him, a world undeserving of this failure in humanity, this disturbance of gravity, this shell without a soul or trace of consciousness associated with even the most inanimate of creatures, hardly mortal, barely living, a mere organism as microcosmic, numerous and indistinguishable as space dust. As far as he is concerned, he has vaporized and only the luminous shadow of his cometic existence is still visible."
After nine months confronting the demons he buried so long ago, he runs into his sister Gracie and she convinces him to return home. From the alienation of homelessness after the traumatic events of 9/11, the novel moves into the private lives of a family unexpectedly reunited.
“Knowing and believing are two different things. People know but belief is inherent. Belief is the soul impervious to influence. To let go, that’s the best he can hope for.
"He stares at the bowl of whipped cream cheese in the display case. So dense, so opaque, so white, even whiter than white, the blinding whiteout of a heavy snowstorm like that blizzard one snowy Sunday before Gracie was born, when he was standing by the window watching the fat flakes blow sideways. In the overheated dining room, the table is set with an elaborate spread and he grows impatient waiting for his parents to join him, waiting for what seems an eternity. He scoops up a finger of cream cheese and relishes it with delight. Famished beyond belief he slips out of his chair and creeps like a spider on all fours down the hallway where he sees his father pressing his mother’s hands against the wall. ‘Til the end of time,’ he hears him whisper, their bodies so close the friction could ignite them. He always thought of time as perennial, dormant in winter then blooming in spring, of time as a continuum that never ends. Now it brings with it the longing, that same longing he harbored in the days following the twin tower collapse, a longing so powerful and enduring he can’t ignore it…the longing to be alone when he already was, as if his own person were shadowing him everywhere. His family, the one he’d been born into and the one he had chosen never failed him, not in any identifiable way. The force of his longing had a mind of its own, a force indistinguishable from the drop off the steep cliff of consciousness just before sleep, still aware of sound, a sound so distinct, the vibration building in intensity before the free fall, broken only by a shudder like death’s grip then followed by a stillness, that soft down of tranquility that shelters the subconscious in the parallel universe of dreams.”
“That toxic dump of humanity mangled among the remains of the supreme excesses of architecture, the World Trade Center is an altar of human sacrifice. Man created it. Man takes it away. There is no God to blame here. Not that he ever thought there was one but now he’s sure and strangely takes comfort in the fact.”
Brian’s journey back is an hallucinatory experience where he imagines people he knows on every street corner of New York. Marginalized like the homeless he encounters, from a drug addict who “dulls the emotions so expertly” waiting for handouts in Times Square and a Fire Chief surviving on oxygen by an abandoned warehouse in Brooklyn to a prostitute who calls Bush a primate greasier than an oil slick, there is no escape from the life he once led, a life to which he no longer belongs.
"He can’t think, feels dizzy from the prospect, intensely nauseated and weeps, this time for the world that will not be rid of him, a world undeserving of this failure in humanity, this disturbance of gravity, this shell without a soul or trace of consciousness associated with even the most inanimate of creatures, hardly mortal, barely living, a mere organism as microcosmic, numerous and indistinguishable as space dust. As far as he is concerned, he has vaporized and only the luminous shadow of his cometic existence is still visible."
After nine months confronting the demons he buried so long ago, he runs into his sister Gracie and she convinces him to return home. From the alienation of homelessness after the traumatic events of 9/11, the novel moves into the private lives of a family unexpectedly reunited.
“Knowing and believing are two different things. People know but belief is inherent. Belief is the soul impervious to influence. To let go, that’s the best he can hope for.
"He stares at the bowl of whipped cream cheese in the display case. So dense, so opaque, so white, even whiter than white, the blinding whiteout of a heavy snowstorm like that blizzard one snowy Sunday before Gracie was born, when he was standing by the window watching the fat flakes blow sideways. In the overheated dining room, the table is set with an elaborate spread and he grows impatient waiting for his parents to join him, waiting for what seems an eternity. He scoops up a finger of cream cheese and relishes it with delight. Famished beyond belief he slips out of his chair and creeps like a spider on all fours down the hallway where he sees his father pressing his mother’s hands against the wall. ‘Til the end of time,’ he hears him whisper, their bodies so close the friction could ignite them. He always thought of time as perennial, dormant in winter then blooming in spring, of time as a continuum that never ends. Now it brings with it the longing, that same longing he harbored in the days following the twin tower collapse, a longing so powerful and enduring he can’t ignore it…the longing to be alone when he already was, as if his own person were shadowing him everywhere. His family, the one he’d been born into and the one he had chosen never failed him, not in any identifiable way. The force of his longing had a mind of its own, a force indistinguishable from the drop off the steep cliff of consciousness just before sleep, still aware of sound, a sound so distinct, the vibration building in intensity before the free fall, broken only by a shudder like death’s grip then followed by a stillness, that soft down of tranquility that shelters the subconscious in the parallel universe of dreams.”