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I have never met Jonathan Segal.

But I know that he was present near the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11th, 2001. Unlike 3000 others that day, he went home to his family that night. On September 13th, he wrote an account of the events he had witnessed.

A few months later, he moved his family to Fiji, where I imagine they reside still.

On the morning of September 11th, 2001, I was asleep with my wife Lauren in Berkeley, California. That day was for us, what it must have been for many Americans. A day of disbelief pervaded by the sensation that something inside you was being recalibrated.

I had not been in New York since October, 1999 — prior to the Attack – and did not return to New York until June, 2004.

It was an odd trip.

In February, 2005, an acquaintance of mine (and friend of Jonathan) showed me his account:

THE FIJI FILE

After reading Jonathan’s account, I wrote this letter to Jonathan’s friend, to thank him for sharing it with me:

“Wow, that was amazing. Did you know that I am from New York City? I lived there all my life until ‘98. Better than that, I worked in Tower 2 for 4 years from 93 to 97. And I had not been back until last Summer. I’ve never met or spoken to anyone who was close when it happened. Maybe I should get back there more — only been back once since it happened.

“Anyway, your friend is a great journalist. It saddens me to realize it’s probably the extraordinary mind and spirit trauma he had just suffered that gave his writing that “unaffected” voice. But that’s probably it. Thanks very, very much for sharing this. Ive always felt kinda, I dunno — bad — that I was living in California when it happened. When I found out it was like noon in NY. It made me realize that TV’s are only the tiniest, most useless little windows when it comes to any reality of value. It’s not just the size of the screen that destroys access to the truth of things, it’s also the fact that TV operates in its own “time” — all flickers and edits.

After 911, things were amiss with me. I understand now it had to do with the insufficiency of my Record. I did not appreciate how paltry my collection of recollections was until I went there. And when I did go, in Summer 2004, I felt like a person might feel who walks into a room where a really sad story or a funny joke had just been told — disconnected.

Since long before I made the trip back in ‘04, I always thought in the back of my head that I was going to “measure” myself when I got to NY — measure the present me against the man I remembered having been THERE. This way I might get a better handle on the effects of California on me.

Returning to NY was supposed to put me back in touch with my original origin, that I might better measure the distance traveled. Does that make sense?

But — it was impossible to measure, when I got there. I had lost the thread completely. New York was different. I was different. But the worst part, and it was quite overwhelming to discover it while I was still there — NYC and I had lost all our common history. It did NOT feel like City and man had simply grown apart. It felt like we had never been together in the first place.

After my trip to NYC, I thought a lot about that feeling I had had there. I finally figured out what happened. For not having been there when it happened, 9/11 severred me irrevocably from the city of my birth, my childhood and my early adulthood.

It made me a personal history pauper. When I got there, I was the teenage son who’d been wandering the forest at night, while the family home had burned and some cousins were lost — hence my great guilt, my inadequacy. The city asked me when I got there, “You know what the FUCK happened here?” — oh my dear god — And I realized all I had with me were my memories of having watched TV in Berkeley for 24 hours straight in the strangest kind of pain I’ve ever known. I was dirt Poor.

The visit back to NY afforded me a few “souvenirs”, a few pieces I can use to put back solid some of the Swiss Cheese — I want to build an answer for myself, to the question.

They included (the souvenirs I brought back) the changes to my older brother’s face, and an incredible slice of blue sky visible from a spot on Broadway in Lower Manhattan (across the street from where the Towers still were in my head) — where there had never been a slice of blue sky to see before.

Reading Jonathan’s memoir has given me another piece. I really appreciate it.

Jack

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 4th, 2005 at 2:11 am and is filed under Letters, 2005, Death, Historical, September 11th. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.