The Zozobra, or What I Talk About When I Talk About 9/11
The phone rang. “We heard a plane went down,” my father said, calling from his home in Indiana. “Are you okay?” I put down the receiver, turned on the TV and saw Flight 175 slam into the south tower of the World Trade Center only nine miles away from my apartment on Claremont Avenue next to Riverside Church. When I moved to New York, I would use the towers to situate myself when I came out of the subway, the 1/9 being the line I used the most. It was my lifeline to the city, taking me to and from The Village where I was a bartender for a Janis Joplin musical, only blocks away from the Financial District. “I’m fine,” I told my dad, but I wasn’t. The phone kept ringing all day, when the line wasn’t jammed. Calls from Florida, Colorado, Chicago. “I’m fine” I told every one of them.
The night before the attack I was flying home from New Mexico. I was at the Fiestas de Santa Fe to see the Zozobra, or Old Man Gloom, a giant fifty-foot-tall marionette burned in effigy. The people of Santa Fe bring notes, legal documents, divorce papers, even wedding dresses to burn with the puppet and reduce their bitterness and misery to smoke and ash. I was in my last year of graduate school at Columbia University and Zozobra, a story about being haunted by the past, would be the title of my thesis play. When I landed at LaGuardia, I treated myself to a taxi home…
