On the morning two commercial airliners crash into the Twin Towers of The World Trade Center in New York City, my father wakes up in his bed in Memphis, Tennessee. Unaware of the disaster now in progress, he turns on the shower in the adjoining bathroom to awaken Laurie, his second wife who is still asleep, then shuffles into the kitchen to turn on the coffee machine and feed the cat. In the kitchen alone, my father lights his first cigarette and watches the cat, a skinny stray he found hiding in the barbecue recently, systematically wolf her food. It looks more like backwards vomiting than eating, he thinks, but my father watches the meatballs he has prepared for Littleslip (whom he also calls Lovebird sometimes, or Ki Ki) disappear with rapt appreciation. If he could, my father imagines, he would live with thousands of cats--thousands, if Laurie wasn’t allergic, but it is nice enough of her to even put up with this one, he reminds himself. Laurie (and it almost brings tears to his eyes to think of it) is a very generous young person.

Just after 9:30, Laurie appears in the kitchen in her business suit and the two leave their house at 7095 Ivy Leaf Circle. They step over the newspaper lying on the doormat and get into my father’s 1989 Honda two-door coupe. My father is behind the wheel in Bermuda shorts, T-shirt and Italian dress shoes. Laurie is beside him with her open
briefcase in her lap, paging through computer forms that will become vitally necessary to her life in the hours ahead.

“I love you,” she says to him, her eyes still on the forms as they pull out of the driveway, and my father answers her as he does to anyone who tells him they love him.

“Good to hear you,” or “You’re my Baby,” he says, then reaches for the radio knob. It is a habit of years gone by when he drove expensive sports cars and all of them, the Austin Healy, and the Ferrari, the Alfa, even the rickety vintage corvette, had radios. But now, as his hand moves toward the dusty space above the gear shift, he remembers: This is Memphis. This is his Honda from the divorce settlement. He doesn’t have a radio. It is broken and he hasn’t replaced it.

I like to imagine that when my father reaches for the radio, this is when he remembers us: The underachieving oldest child in Los Angeles with the decent marriage and the temperamental chip on her shoulder. The workaholic youngest with the great job in the Transamerica Building in San Francisco. The video poker-addicted son back in Oregon who doesn’t have a bank account or a phone since his dishonorable discharge from the Navy almost a decade before. “Screw the lost radio,” he might say to himself whenever he reaches for it. “Where the hell are those children?”

At 10:00 sharp, my father pulls the Honda to the outer perimeter of a large multi-national paper conglomerate and drops Laurie at the watchman’s gate. “Don’t worry about it,” she tells my father when he offers to drive her past the security checkpoint. “It’s late. I’ll walk in myself.”

“OK,” my father says, then watches his second wife disappear through a series of chain link fences into the executive compound. My father, now a sculptor in bronze and glass, who left his dental practice ten years ago to become an artist in his mid-fifties and who now takes water color classes at Memphis State under the tutelage of a female professor he calls “inarguably brilliant and with an excellent figure,” then exits the curving hills of the business park and drives back home to retrieve his brushes and paints.

An hour later, he sets up an easel on the lawn of a second business park located near the airport on the opposite side of the city. The assignment the Professor has given his watercolor class is “Half-Urban Reality,” and he has chosen this area because there are two mirrored skyscrapers, one large in the foreground, and one smaller that appears to be reflected inside it, built several miles away. Behind him is the Mississippi River, and extending east and west, rolling hills of tree.

Before he begins, my father puts on his lucky straw hat and runs a comb through his beard. He slips on the old flowered shirt he bought when he lived on Oahu, changes into his Huarachi sandals and adjusts the Bermuda shorts he woke up in. The clothes are old and loose and flow around him. They feel like biblical clothes, caftan-
like, and as my father stands in the sunshine, his feet firmly planted in the present moment, he wonders if anyone sees him here now as he finally sees himself, as he wished to be seen for so many years in his life and wasn’t--as an artist. But the lawns of the industrial park around him are deserted. No one is entering or leaving the area.

After he unwraps his brushes from the tissue paper, my father moves his easel closer to the wall of the building. He decides that, in the painting, he wants all the angles to be very abrupt. He wants the reflected building to look almost like a separate structure cocooned within the first. Watercolors as a genre are prissy and he has to work directly against that, he thinks.

My father lights a cigarette and looks at the expansive sky. For a long time in his life, he felt ruinous. He would place his highly trained fingers in patient’s mouths and wish they would bite them off. He remembers lowering the opaque half-mask of the nitrous-oxide over people’s faces and feeling the terrible sense that he was smothering them as he had been smothered, first by his father and his father’s Jewish God, and then by his first family, who wailed for the good life to the point of insanity, and then, when he went bankrupt trying to give it to them, shrugged their shoulders and turned their backs. But now, in Memphis, he feels something. Something much like the vacant, half-urban Tennessee country gaping open around him. He feels free.

As he works, my father loses himself in the colors and shapes of his work. Red and black. An astonishing new green. He isn’t sure how much time has passed, but when he surfaces again, he looks up and notices that the windows of the building he has been painting are filled with people. They are tall and short, men and women, old and young, but they all have one thing in common, their faces are pressed against the glass and they are, each one of them, looking at him. He’s not sure why this is, but the thought occurs that it may make the painting better, scarier, and so he begins to paint the people into the water color, the shapes of their bodies and faces. All staring out of the skyscraper and down at him, the artist, as if they are trapped.

When the out-of-breath security guard arrives, he is nearly finished. She is large and worried, wearing a tight, sheriff’s uniform, carrying a gun. “I’m sorry,” she says to my father in a thick country accent, “but we’ve had terrorist threats. The people here would feel better,” (she gestures to my father’s audience in the windows) “if you would
leave.” The security guard turns toward the expansive parking lot and clasps her hands behind her back. “Right now.”

My father is shocked. He can’t believe it. Is it because of the way he’s dressed? Like some kind of ruffian? Is this what the south is coming to, the whole nation. Is this it?

He sets down the brush and invites the guard to take a look at his rendition of the manicured grass they are both now standing on. “Is there a law against painting a fucking watercolor?” he asks her, pointing at the people in the building who are still, it appears, staring down at them. “Is it because I have a goddamn beard?”

The guard flinches at the word, as if she has just been slapped. “I need you to evacuate the area immediately,” she commands without looking at him. “Evacuate this place of business. Now.”

Utterly incensed, my father slams into the Honda and burns rubber toward downtown Memphis. As he speeds away from the airport, he sees at least a dozen F-16’s cruise over at a low altitude. So close to the ground he can see the markings. Feel the boom in his chest.

My father pulls off at the first freeway exit and idles for awhile, waiting to see if there are more. He puts on his hazards and scans the sky for anything. Clouds. Birds. In Vietnam he always knew. In Vietnam he could always tell if the silence was deadly or if it was safe. This is why he is still able to sit in a Honda two-door today. Breathing.
At 1:00 he re-assembles his easel in an alley which looks out through a tangle of fire escapes and loading docks onto the cool, brown ribbon of the Mississippi. As yet unburdened by east coast headlines, he makes several attempts at the initial sketch, Then, before he realizes it, finds himself drawing his own face when he was younger, standing outside a Quonset hut with his first wife, in Guam. Drawing his first wife’s hair makes him laugh. He piles it higher and higher into a ridiculous pyramid, before adding in the pregnant stomach that holds his son. He places his son inside the stomach of his first wife and curls him like a caterpillar with antennae and then some coconut trees in the background, blowing in opposite directions, as if there is a typhoon. His oldest daughter he draws into one of the trees next, hanging by her legs from swaying branches as if she is a monkey. The youngest goes in the upper left hand corner, looking down at them all through a window in the ceiling, still unborn.

By 2:00 my father is tired. He drives home, steps over the newspaper, eats his lunch, lets Littleslip convince him to take a nap. They curl on the sofa together and he dreams whatever a man dreams who is 60 and lives with his second wife in Memphis and the cat he loves. He is known to very few people, my father, but I’m sure the dreams rub up against him, purring. The bright pop and scream of a newborn in a delivery room. The lips of his humanities professor in college. Helicopter sounds.

At 5:30 he is back at the entry gate of the multinational paper conglomerate, where the kindly woman in her 70’s with the American flag toothpicks in her beehive has been replaced by several national guardsman wearing camouflage.

“Hey, you guys,” my father jokes as he rolls down the window. “Tell me something. Do I look like a terrorist?”

Unsmiling, the men snap to attention and approach my father’s vehicle. “Pardon me, Sir,” one of them says, leaning in toward the window. “You want to come again?”

My father gives the men an acidic look. He has just about had it with the Regional South in the last 24 hours. The accent. The sweet tea. The naiveté.

Is there a reason he wonders aloud why representatives of the US Military such as themselves have been called in to protect a company whose net worth is about 600 million rolls of toilet paper?

“Seriously, now,” my father says to them. What gives?

Shocked, the men turn to look at each other. They whistle for reinforcements, and within seconds, a group of them have flanked the Honda. Activity comes to a standstill as my father is asked to please exit the automobile.

Once they have him out and his legs spread, the guardsmen frisk his person, in front of a half dozen other exiting employees. My father is speechless and humiliated as the young men pat him down. He watches these uniformed children half his age open the glove compartment of the two-door, then riffle through the rest of the car and find his paints. He has left the first watercolor in the hatchback to dry and they pull it out. The picture of the building, with all the concerned faces, pressed against the glass.

My father watches the group of guardsmen examine the painting (his first audience so far) and he wonders if they like it. They seem a bit in awe of the work, even slightly upset.

“It’s just people in a skyscraper,” my father says. “What’s the big deal?”

The one who appears to be the ringleader looks up from the picture and gazes into my father’s eyes. “Jesus Christ,” he says with a kind of disbelieving wonder. “Don’t you know?”

The boy takes my father by the arm and escorts him to the security booth where a portable television shows a picture of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, one smoking, the other standing. The boy gestures at the black and white screen.

“There,” he says and my father watches a large jet approach the clean, upright tower and be swallowed by it in a froth of fire and glass. Abruptly the picture changes and he watches both buildings peel open before his eyes, blooming out and down like terrible gray flowers.

My father’s hands shake as he removes his straw hat. He turns away from the screen. “What the fuck is this?” he says to the young guardsmen watching him. “What’s going on?”

Several days later, I will talk to my father. He will telephone me and explain he hasn’t been able to return my repeated calls from Los Angeles because his answering machine is broken. He paid seventy dollars for it, he tells me, and he wants the money back.

“They keep asking me for the sales slip,” he says. “I keep telling these assholes... why do I need that? Obviously if I have the machine, I’m the owner. I shouldn’t have to prove anything.”

It was a national emergency, I want to tell him, there are payphones. But I keep my mouth shut.

We exchange stories of where we were when it happened. I tell him how his first wife, my mother, called from Oregon at 7:30 in the morning screaming into the answering
machine. “There are bombs.”

He talks about the US Carriers that made nuisances of themselves off the coast of Yemen, and then the plots of his favorite films. Zabriskie Point. The Passenger starring Jack Nicholson. “That city is hell on people,” he says about New York. “So dangerous.”

“It was my home, remember?” I tell my father. “I lived in New York for eleven years. In 1993, when the first bombs went off under the Trade Center, I was on a train that stalled under Chambers street. By the force of the rumbling and smoke back at Cortlandt, we all knew it was something bad.”

My father pauses at this and his voice fades. When I lived in New York we weren’t talking and we both know it. These were the Manhattan years, when an impenetrable, spiraling silence rose up between us. A vast concrete island of resentment. Stories high. Blocks long.

“Nicholson’s a brilliant actor,” my father says, quietly. “Just so good.”

We are silent now and I look out the window at the curtains of light coming down on Los Angeles. It is garbage day tomorrow and the cans are lined up evenly along the street.

“Should go, Dad,” I say, imagining his cat in his lap, his living room in Memphis I have not ever seen, “Talk to you later.” But my father doesn’thang up. He begins to speak, then stops mid-sentence. I wonder for a minute if he hasn’t dropped the phone. When his voice comes on the line again, it is delicate, too fragile almost, to recognize.

“I was so worried about you when you were little,” he says. “I couldn’t even stand it when you had to go out and sell Campfire Candy. I couldn’t stand to let you even walk out the door.”