September Again

September 11, 2003
R. D. Kushner

The sky was suspended like a giant canopy; a veil held mysteriously aloft from one horizon to the other. It contained all the sounds of the Earth and yet reflected back only a narrow silence. This flat blue surface compressed the cool air into the Earth, creating breezes which whispered secrets through the streets. There was the taste of metal in the air, and each human breath was like the chanting of an ancient rite.

Today we arch our backs and contort our minds as we look up to find what is missing from our memories. Razor sharp details still cut like a knife’s edge and a wounded site still sits open to the air; an exposed concrete liner for an enormous empty grave. This counterfeit necropolis is filled daily with the anxiety of a million starved souls who stare hypnotically into the strata of the earth; their minds should be probed to such depths. Tomorrow, blood will be shed again. It is on our hands. It is on our faces. It stains our clothing and we track it around in large viscous clots on the bottoms of our shoes. It is carried along in putrefied rivers. It bubbles up from sewage grates and oozes from dark corners. The villains continue to change, but the response is always the same.

The machine is running in the background. It fills the air with acrid smoke. The sky is caked with carbon effluent and huge chunks dislodge and splash down into a vast dead sea. We’re listening to an endless loop of elevator music and scrubbing our skin with formaldehyde. We can smell the bodies rotting in the room next door, but we’re too busy re-reading last weeks paper to get up from the anemic furniture which has been grafted onto our bones like a giant rusting scaffold.

All the while, the march continues recklessly up the mountain of fear. Fear of life, fear of death, fear of sharp objects and cold weather; fear of snakes, caterpillars, and prime numbers; fear of loneliness, poverty, canned goods, loud music and foreign names; fear of starting, fear of finishing, fear of red, white, blue, purple, orange, magenta, and green; fear of conservatives, liberals, and of new ideas; fear of the known, the unknown, the past, future, and present; fear of loving and being loved; fear of walking, sitting, standing, falling, eating, drinking, smoking; fear of light and fear of darkness. The litany of fears reads like a masochistic orgy. And the fears never go away; they fester as they are continuously tended to and nurtured.

Life is worn like an antique garment, and it smells of mothballs and old cigars. It is talked about like a precious gem and then abused like a renewable resource. One hundred years from now only a few old wrinkled senile minds will remember how beautiful the sky was that day; they will salute, pledge the allegiance, and squirt shots of oily liquor down their worn out gullets. And when it’s September again, the flags will be unfurled just as the knives are drawn again.