Shadows On the Pavement

The Flare and the Towers

Twenty-three years ago, I was at a stranger’s house in Alameda. I was there to help the household move, because we’d met in line at a movie theater a few days before and we wanted to continue a conversation that had gotten shushed by other theater-goers.

I was looking for people to work on my first feature film, you see. I had no budget, but I had a lot of moxy, and I kept my ears open for interesting talent or mentors I might pick up when out in public—including waiting in line at the cinema.

The night before—twenty-three years ago last night—I’d split my time doing competitive visualFXs tests with an internet buddy, and settling down with my partner-in-crime to watch a movie that I’d missed in the cinema. To be honest, I was watching it for the cinematography education. It was one of those films that, at the time, was on the cutting edge of visualFX work—most of the shots were hidden, and even today you can’t spot them if you don’t know where to look.

To understand what happens next, you need to remember something that’s been lost in the years since:

Not long before—I can’t remember whether it was a couple weeks or a couple months—a small private plane had wandered off the beam and smashed into the Empire State building.

Well, on the morning of September 11, 2001, I was roused by a phone call:

“Someone just crashed a plane into the World Trade Center.”

My response was the half-sleepy retort:

“This is getting to be a habit. Call me when they hit the Chrysler building.”

And then I hung up, unplugged the phone (yeah, it was a corded phone), rolled over, and went back to sleep.

My alarm roused me not long after. I rolled out of bed, pressure-washed my face, scraped off my surplus whiskers, polished my choppers, got a cup of tea, and sat down at my workstation to check my email.

The most recent message was from the buddy with whom I’d been collaborating the previous night. The subject line was:

“You’re not going to believe this one.”

I opened it up. The note said:

“Check it out,” and had a link to a video clip on his home server.

It opened to reveal a fairly low-res animation of a 747 (the first one) smashing into the World Trade Center.

I replied:

“Damn, dude, you nailed that composite! What’s the trick to the light matching between building sprite and the plane sprite?”

I then opened my news feed and found out what the secret was.

I’ve never particularly been a news junkie. Not since the first Gulf War, a decade prior, had I found myself glued to CNN. Hell, I didn’t even have CNN. I didn’t have a television. I was producing independent films. All I needed was a video capture card, a monitor, and a VCR or a DVD player. Who in their right mind would want to pay for cable when you could make things that might someday appear on cable?

Two planes had hit. Two more were still missing.

The radio news played all the way to my appointment in Alameda. When I got there, I found the entire moving crew glued to the television. I took a seat and joined the conversation. One of those in attendance had lived for a time not far from the World Trade Center, and had an uncle who’d worked on its construction. She started explaining about how the ground beneath it was soft fill rather than hard schist, and how it was honeycombed with utility tunnels and subway tunnels and disused construction tunnels.

“Just you wait,” she said, “In another hour or you’re gonna see fires springing up in other buildings.”

So we waited. And watched. And Building 7 caught on fire. And a few other buildings caught on fire.

Humans who couldn’t make it down the stairwell dove out the windows.

And then, about ten minutes after I got there—ten minutes that felt like an hour—the South Tower collapsed, and I just about lost my shit from deja vu.

That movie I’d watched the night before?

It was a little box office bomb called Fight Club, and it ends with this sequence:¹

I said “Damn. The VFX supervisor on Fight Club really knew his shit,” because I didn’t have anything better to say. Neither did anybody else, so we talked about the history of VFX work as we each tried to avoid the thing we were glued to.

As the day went on, the North Tower collapsed, and then WTC 7 collapsed, and the fire crews managed to get the fires under control to save the rest of the buildings. We listened to a live feed from Afghanistan as Kabul was shelled, and for an hour or so we all thought the US had launched a retaliatory strike²—because even at that stage, anyone paying attention knew who had to be behind it: the same group that had tried to take out the World Trade Center in 1993.

Al Queda. The Foundation. The Wahhabist terrorist sect that had been causing trouble for nearly a decade, the rouge child of the Mujahadeen, an army fostered by America’s proxy war against the Soviets in the late 1980s (which was, among other things, the subject of the James Bond film The Living Daylights). The leader of that group was a science fiction nerd and had sent fan letters to some of the people in that room (which was filled with Boomer science fiction authors, among other things), and he’d been known to require Dune as reading material for his generals.

And Dune, as we all knew, begins in the year 10,191—an anagram of 9-11-01.

What none of us knew it at the time, because you can’t know a thing like that, was that we’d all lost friends or acquaintances on those four planes. I knew four of those people—not well, but well enough. Two of the others present had lost former lovers who had become longtime friends.

What we did know, and silently agreed to talk around, even as we actually moved the house and packed the storage unit and kept the news feed going on the radio, was that we hadn’t watched the collapse of the World Trade Center.

We had watched the collapse of the world, full stop.

Tomorrow, civil liberties would be dead. The day after that, somebody somewhere would start a war to capitalize on the rage and give it a safe outlet that would protect the powers-that-be from the public’s outrage. And that’s assuming there wasn’t another attack—something targeting one of the seven major aqueducts, or six major grid junctions, or one of the dams whose destruction could drown a few hundred thousand people and the loss of whose power and water supply could kill a further few million, or any one of the other then-hyper-vulnerable parts of the American infrastructure.

We gamed these scenarios out with the help of the retired mercenary on the moving crew.

Because we knew that the sun would rise tomorrow on a sky without planes. And people we know would march off to fight an unwinnable war in either Afghanistan or Iraq (none of us expected both). And that, whatever that sun shined on, it would no longer be the America we’d all known, all loved, all enjoyed getting pleasantly pissed off at.

And, after all these years, the corpse of that nation still stinks. And the beauty and insanity and glory that died that day still leaves a ghost on my mind, like the shadow of a frozen man burned into the concrete after a nuclear war.

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1. Please ignore the dumb-ass conspiratorial title on the video.

2. Turned out it was actually infighting between Taliban factions.