This was no accident. We were almost hit by several cars as they tried to back out of their spots. Fenders were bended; information was exchanged; some freshman kid named Dudzinski got his foot run over. Frankie refused to listen to the news once we were safely in his Olds. I don't remember what he put on instead. Getting out of the lot took us about fifteen minutes. During that time, I crushed up my entire bag, and rolled it into one relatively large spliff (the tobacco portion coming from about a third of one of Frankie's cigarettes). Allison and Frankie took this time to argue about the radio. “I need to see this shit for myself, Allie. I don't want some numb-nutted liberal in New York telling me what the fuck's going on, okay.” He looked back to me. “No offense or nothing.” We got stoned as we sat in a Savage Park parking lot. No one was there, not even the typical mother-child pairs or the drifters cutting through on their bikes. We came into Allison's house laughing, saturated with oblivion once again, and then turned on the television. There was just a big cloud of smoke where one of the towers had been only a few minutes previously. We stood staring in disbelief for what seemed like a lifetime. No one said anything. Reporters spoke of the Pentagon over footage of tar-black smoke spewing from the Napoleonic building. Terrorist organizations were being listed indiscriminately, but no serious allegations were being made. The Mall in D.C. was on fire; the tower falling; there was something wrong in L.A.; the tower falling; government buildings were being evacuated in obscure cities; the tower falling; the citizens of Chicago were beginning to compose panegyrics for the Sears Tower; the tower falling; the tower falling (From a new angle that we have just received); the previous vantage. And we just stood there, the buzz of the grass vibrating the world, making our skin feel like the sand beneath a millipede, unable to move the few feet to the couch, unable to take our eyes off the blinking images of carnage revealing an event so utterly shocking and real that we thought of it as surreal, as something that we couldn't handle, that we shouldn't have to handle, as something that stood antipodal to our boring existence, one without the great obstacles and tribulations of generations past. Yes, we had been taught that history ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the IMF-ication of Asia and South America, and, consequently, that generational differences would ultimately rely on little more than consumption preferences. Our mouths hanging open, our shoes probably coated in copious amounts of drool, we could do nothing but watch. Fait accompli. And then—Good Lord; there are no words… — the second tower crumbled before our eyes, the smoke spraying upwards like the sea crashing into a bluff, the debris cascading onto the streets below, the Asbestos-laden cumuli drowning all vantages of lower Manhattan in what appeared to be a gray mudslide. That was not a replay. The second tower has fallen. And then it was just a pile of rubble — a work of art more harrowing and painful than any sculpture devoted to exposing institutionalized resentment and nihilism ever could be (because only a nihilist can be a terrorist: and he may be brave in the sense that he is willing to relinquish his future, but his bravery is disingenuous, as he rejects the future on an ideological level. So his abnegation is one without courage; he surrenders nothing of value (a life without integrity) because he rejects real liberty and, consequently, the future. His future. He may not be a coward, but he is far worse: he martyrs himself in the name of a cause that hemorrhages every semblance of virtue because it puts more sanctity in death than in life.) We watched television for hours. “No Rain” played on MTV at one point. As a nation, we were morbidly chagrined by the lack of a Zapruder in Pennsylvania. Allison cried until well after twelve. Luckily, she did not have to fear for her mother, who had safely landed a few days before, and would not be flying back until the weekend. They talked on the phone for an hour. I had called my mother prior to this. I told her that I had left school. She told me that she'd call in to excuse me later. When I told her that I loved her, the potency of those simple words choked both of us up. Frankie said he was going to enlist in the Marines. I thought it almost maudlin, but, then again, I felt a similar sentiment. I didn't take him seriously, probably because I didn't take myself seriously. But a few years later I found myself back in Allison's house, didn't I? Yes, but now a nation did not mourn. We were a nation who had grown tired of mourning, grown tired of etiologies on the hatred of America, grown tired of thinking, Perhaps we did something to piss off a rather sizable portion of the world. America had once again become the city upon the hill, and anyone who questioned either policy or the inherent virtue of the interests of this peerless nation was nothing more than a kook, a marginal figure with whom good, upstanding and rational people could not reason. The America of December 2004 was no longer searching for its soul or questioning its direction; it was now just a matter of simple syllogism: If it is American, then it is good. It is American. Therefore, it is good. And since the war is American, it is good. So the story on page one was not “Another Soldier Dies in Unjustified and Horribly Mismanaged War”; the story on page one had the word “Hero” in it, and the rest was filler. So the nation did not feel our pain; they valued our loss, but the grief was ours alone. It was just us, back in that old familiar house after strolling around the funeral home eschewing the knowledge that Frankie lay in the coffin nearby both stone-faced and pale. Killed in Fallujah. A death. A statistic about how well the mop-up of the city was going. I was taking my last exam for the semester when it happened.