I intentionally was forgetting the date. I knew it is somewhere around the 11th. I don't even like writing that number. I know it's this week, on a Wednesday, because last year it was on a Tuesday, but while I know those things I still cannot naturally remember what day it is. I have to think long and hard, look at a calendar: 9, 10, __.

There was smoke around Manhattan, across the water, like a gray cloud, as though the city had turned into a gray cloud, and I kept thinking of a description I read in some history book, that the columns of smoke rising from the crematoriums in Nazi concentration camps were brownish green, and the smoke around Manhattan was brownish green, and I kept thinking of that description, like it was printed on my brain and there was nothing else inside of my brain to think.

I remember this incredibly nasty cop, laughing at me near the ferry, because I didn't turn my car around fast enough. My stomach still flip flops when I think about that cop. He looked like a kid, a big fat kid in a uniform, laughing at me. Laughing, when across the water was that smoke!

The Prophet of Doom stumbled in the door two hours after he'd left. There were phone calls from his coworkers, but the phones weren't working well. But every hour someone would call, and our TV reception was gone, but on one station we could still receive audio, so we watched a screen of fuzz with newscasters talking, talking, talking.

There were funerals everywhere for the next two months. Bagpipes in the air, from a distance, sound like whale songs. I kept thinking that too: "It sounds like whale songs." I'd be cleaning the house to whale songs.

There are filthy flags all over the island, still hanging from about that time, filthy wreaths of plastic flowers outside the firehouses.

Now there are "memorial services." There are zillions of them. Every church seems to be having them, at least around here. But it's cleaned up, calm. Last years funerals were like... some desperate, chaotic, mess. But memorial services are less chaotic, I guess. There's lots of time to plan. There's no surprise.

People die all the time, right,? In terrible ways. People have always died in terrible ways. But there is something about this that haunts me and eats at me in a way I cannot adequately describe.