I married in 1999. There were no children yet. Cathmar, in Paarl, was electronics and engineering and the careful work of sound — a shop that believed a picture should be true and a note should be clean. Tuesday, 11 September 2001, began without omen. I remember only that the afternoon was busy.
That morning the owner’s son had been at the hundred-inch rear-projection set, fighting the lens after a bump threw the image out of true. Those machines asked for patience. I stood at the counter. Sun lay in a slab on the floor. I turned to the wall of televisions, a metre from the glass, and the colour had changed. CNN International. Under the picture, a line about attempts to hijack aircraft.
Fourteen forty-nine, our time, Carol Lin cut a commercial and named what she could: a very disturbing live shot. A tower already on fire. The first aircraft had struck the North Tower at fourteen forty-six. Most of the world did not see that blow as it happened. We saw smoke, and men and women in studios reading the same thin sentence we were reading. They knew no more than a shop in the Boland.
I looked at the owner’s son. He looked at me. Perplexity sat on him without a joke to cover it. He took the remote and walked the DStv bouquet. BBC: the same banner. Another channel: the same. I heard my own voice, small in the room. No. No. This cannot be happening. The storeman said he needed to fill his lungs and never reached the door. The owner came down the passage faster than his ordinary walk. They had just said it on the radio.
Clients gathered at the glass. The young repairer from the workshop, the one who knew everything, be just stood and watch, he had nothing. Trade fell away to the odd youngster buying a part for some smaller bench. At fifteen oh-three a second aircraft entered a shot already aimed at that skyline. At fifteen oh-five an aide leaned to President Bush in a Florida classroom. The face did not change. He kept the chair. The children were told later. At fifteen thirty-seven the Pentagon was smoke from a long way off. At fifteen fifty-nine the South Tower fell. At sixteen oh-three an aircraft was gone in a Pennsylvania field and the picture, for a long time, was almost nothing. At sixteen twenty-eight the North Tower followed.Two thousand nine hundred and seventy-seven people died that day in New York, at the Pentagon, and in that field. In the years after, more died from the dust and from the work of lifting it. On the twenty-fifth anniversary the Memorial set a further silence for them. Three thousand was never a round comfort. It was a number that would not stay still.
Five o’clock. Closing. Between the blinds my late wife was already waiting. The street had gone quiet too early. No cars. I did not kill the wall at the mains. I stood in front of each set and turned it off with my hand, afraid of missing a sentence. In 2001 a telephone could not search. The glass was the world, and I was putting the world to sleep one screen at a time.
I greeted her and started the VW. We guessed, and we were horribly wrong. I said Russia had the means and not the will. She was nearer the truth. She said it could be Middle Eastern. 5FM would not give the news back to the songs. The voice that belongs on that drive, if the old roster is kind, is Darren Scott’s. We bought bread and milk. Behind the café counter they were watching a set in the corner. At the house — two weeks new — we sat in the car until seven with the radio only. We warm up the stew in the microwave, wat down in front of the Sony Trinitron. We sat and watched until after three am. At twenty-three twenty a third building, 7 World Trade, came down. At two-thirty in the morning Bush spoke from the Oval Office.
I was at work again, I went in early to see if any thing new was shared. Every set on a different channel. We waited for their sunrise as if light itself might make the sharing the horrible info any easier. It did not. They fed us more, and never enough.
*The glass was not only in Paarl. Twenty-five years on, a reader can open this from the Missouri valley on a morning when Nebraska’s flags sit at half-staff, and the picture is still the same picture. Distance did not hold then. It does not have to hold now.
Then the existing close
*From South Africa the distance was far. It still came through the glass. Twenty-five years on, the names are still read at the water where the towers stood. We add our ordinary afternoon to that reading: sun on a floor, a banner under a picture, and three thousand lives that were not ours to keep, only ours to refuse to forget.
What honours the dead is not our guessing in the car. It is that we stopped. A shop in Paarl ceased to be a shop. A street forgot its traffic. A man turned televisions off one by one because he had no other way to be careful with the truth. From here the distance was an ocean and a continent. It was not far enough. Twenty-five years on, the names are still read at the water where the towers stood. We add our ordinary afternoon to that reading: sun on a floor, a banner under a picture, and three thousand lives that were not ours to keep, only ours to refuse to forget.
