On the eleventh of September the second of May.
I remember the day Osama bin Laden was killed because I heard explosions on my street like many cars backfiring at once. I left the television playing the news and peeked through the window at the commotion. People were flooding the streets like rainwater, heavy and spilling into flowerbeds, alleys. Some held sparklers. Those less prepared for death carried on with only pots and pans. Many simply held their hands in the air and whooped like a Southern Baptist congregation imagining the second coming. The backfiring noise came from the fireworks, illegal throughout the city and neighboring Maryland and Virginia, but apparently well stocked in the personal armories of the quiet neighbors who shared gardening tools and hellos with me.
It did not immediately occur to me that they were celebrating his death. I called a friend to ask if there was an event in the city that I was not aware of, some International Coffee Day or Talk Like a Pirate Day about which folks were unusually excited. It was only when he, a soft spoken Seventh Day Adventist, said no, those in the streets “must be feeling relief or something like that” that it dawned on me that the revelers were celebrating the Seal Team Six victory over bin Laden. For thousands of citizens of the worlds largest self-proclaimed democratic superpower to take to the streets in jubilation of the extra-judicial military execution of a man in a foreign country was my first real heartbreak. The artifice of American moral superiority crumbled for me then, though I was old enough that I should have already known all republics fail. I lit a candle for that old Saudi and set it on my stoop, a stupid bit of defiance birthed from the arrogance that no one else might mourn the divine light in him, see him as a disillusioned man who got God wrong, and as a result died unceremoniously in the dirt of a filthy concrete compound.
The Washington Post would report a few days later on the chant of some. “We are not celebrating death, we are celebrating justice. This is a vindication!” which sounded strange to me then and does now, as vindication is a proof, a equation of equity with the soothing of a soul as its sum. Death is not a vindication. Death holds no tribunal, never shouts “order!,” never deems it necessary. Death is not jury and executioner, death is the absence of courtroom, of witness, of crime. If there is anything worse than one man orchestrating an attack on thousands of innocents it is a country of three hundred and twenty million gleefully celebrating the death of one man, for the former is the work of a madman and the latter the pastime of an entire culture.
When I think of the eleventh of September I do not think of my uncles, two brothers who worked in Tower One and decided to go into work late that morning, stopping for a rare breakfast together. I do not think of their estranged older brother, a Manhattan police officer I have never known, who was unaware his brothers headed to work late, and ran into Tower One after them, that decade of silence between them forgotten in the smoke. All New Yorkers, all survivors of anything, have these stories, their beauty lying in their commonness. Instead that gleaming blue New York afternoon comes to me on long runs when I smell the rotting flesh of a dead animal in the brush and my mind says “no that is not quite the smell” and thinks more rubber tire, more chalk, more ash of ash. When a plane flies too low overhead and the scream of it fills my mouth with black and with white, or when I am buckled in for takeoff and the engines start, the scent of fuel takes over the cabin, and I remark to myself how no one else seems the slightest bit sweaty. No. On the eleventh of September I think of the second of May.
After we hung up my friend came over and we sat on the front stone stoop holding hands and watching red white and blue run whooping into the crosswalks. The scent of firecracker smoke settled like a blanket on our shoulders and we stayed this way for what felt like quite a long while but was only how long it took for the sun to fall beneath the land, about seventeen minutes.