9/11

Late summer, 2008. Posing as a secret agent against a white wall, somewhere in Sicily.

Graffitti, in Italian and English, handwritten on the wall by an unknown author.

In Ranzanno, the old people walked alone through the streets until their shadows caught on fire. Dressed in black, they looked like they were out to watch each other die. Americans had bombed the town in the final stages of World War II. Perhaps some of them remembered.

Palermo, a world city, where the world could change wildly one street to the next, from rich to poor to squalid in an instant. Mothers suckled babes in open windows, a rich matron argued with the gelato maker, claiming she'd ordered chocolate and been given raspberry. The gelato melted as she scolded the poor man, the gooey gelato running down her right hand as she held the cone in the hot September afternoon, and onto her wrist over her sparkling gold bands. The city seemed proud not to have re-built any of the buildings Allied Forces trashed, arc-lights showcasing the boulevard where bombing had occured as if it had happened just yesterday.

Seven years earlier, he'd been in Dublin, Ireland, September 10, 2001, his last night in Europe before returning to America. John Hurt was starring in "Krapp's Last Tape" at The Gate. There was one--one--ticket remaining and he watched Krapp from the front row peel the banana and make comic record of his misery. Returning to his hotel, he had one last Guinness and slept like the dead.

The next morning he boarded a flight from Dublin to Heathrow, from Heathrow to Los Angeles. Somewhere over the east coast of the continent, the captain's voice came over the loudspeaker saying they were to make a landing in Montreal, that there were some complications with radar equipment in the US, that there was nothing to worry about. Two minutes later, he indicated the plane would land instead in Toronto.

September 11, 2001. He was taken off the plane at gunpoint by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and spent five days and four nights in Toronto as a guest of the Canadian branchof the free world. Finally able to reach his family in LA by phone to tell them where he was, he walked the corridors of the hotel, unable to sleep, hearing screams and sobbing from behind the closed doors of some of the rooms, issuing from those who feared they'd lost family members, lovers, close friends in the conflagration.