I replied e res°lve had suddenly formed in me and I needed to be out in th streets that I was going for a walk by the Brooklyn waterfront, to se what I could. "Why don't you stop by the school afterward and look in on us?" she suggested. I said I doubted that I would, not adding that suddenly I felt a sharp urge to be alone. The tragedy had registered on me exactly the same way as after my mother had died: a pain in the gut, the urge to walk and walk through the city, and a don'ttouchme reflex. I made my way down to Columbia Street, which feeds into the Brooklyn Promenade: the closer I got to the waterfront, the harder it was to breathe. The smoke was blowing directly across the East River into Brooklyn. There were not many people on Columbia Street, but most of those I passed had on surgical masks. I started choking without a mask. Cinders and poisonoussmelling smoke thickened the air, and ash fell like snowflakes on the parked cars and on one's clothing, constantly. It was what I had imagined war to be like. This was two hours after the attack, and you could no longer make out the Manhattan skyline; all you could see was a billowing black cloud. Later my wife told me she had actually glimpsed the top of one of the Twin Towers in flames, and I envied her. I found myself envying everyone who had actually witnessed the buildings on fire or collapsing. Of course I had no one to blame but myself, having secreted myself indoors for the first few hours. I still can't imagine running into Manhattan to get a closer look, but I could have gone up to my roof. In the fury of the moment it hadn't occurred to me; probably because I was terrified, the spectating impulse had shut down. Now I saw thousands of people on foot crossing over the bridges into downtown Brooklyn. When I reached Atlantic Avenue I turned east, away from the water, and began to encounter hordes of office workers, released early from their jobs. Not all of them seemed upset; there was a sort of holiday mood, in patches, brought on by unexpected free time. Two young men and a woman their age were even laughing as they recounted to each other the morning's events, how they had been stopped on their way out of the subway. The middleaged and elderly, on the other hand, seemed profoundly disturbed, as if they had not expected anything so terrible as an attack on America to happen in the last quarter of their lives. Just as there is something unseemly when a young person dies, so the natural order of things seems wronged when the elderly, braced for their own diminishment, illness, and death, must absorb the bitter shock of how vulnerable and per h ble their world is-the world they had counted on to outlast them. I elf felt at fiftyseven, that the attack was a personal affront to the autobiographical arc, as though a melodramatic and unnecessarily triplicated subplot had been introduced too late in the narrative. All at once, I wanted to be with my family.