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‘How is Sonia?’ ‘Still too neat.’ ‘And the nightmares?’ ‘Fewer.’ Inga swallowed. ‘She doesn’t talk much about her father, you know. I worry about 5 it. She writes a lot of poems.’ ‘Does she let you read them?’ ‘Sometimes. They’re good but rather frightening.’ ‘Adolescence is frightening,’ I said. Inga
‘How is Sonia?’ ‘Still too neat.’ ‘And the nightmares?’ ‘Fewer.’ Inga swallowed. ‘She doesn’t talk much about her father, you know. I worry about 5 it. She writes a lot of poems.’ ‘Does she let you read them?’ ‘Sometimes. They’re good but rather frightening.’ ‘Adolescence is frightening,’ I said. Inga smiled. ‘I wonder what she would have been like if there hadn’t been September 10 eleventh." I remembered walking into Emergency that morning. I heard myself explaining that I was a doctor and wanted to volunteer my services. Countless people must be injured, and the numbers would be more than the city hospitals could handle. The memory hurt. ‘Your description of that day is the best thing in the book,’ I said out loud. 15 In American Reality: Examining a Cultural Obsession, Inga devoted one chapter to the media’s version of September eleventh and its almost instantaneous construction of a heroic narrative to gloss the horror. She noted the use of cinematic devices in television reporting, the footage of firemen set to music with American flags waving on a split screen, the spectacular images, the pious announcements that irony had come to an end as the bitter ironies multiplied one on top of 20 another. She wrote about the cheering crowds in other places in the world, who had manufactured their own fiction of heroic martyrdom, one so powerful it snuffed out empathy. And to counter the hackneyed1 pictures and dead words, she told her own story of that day as she remembered it, a fractured account. She heard on the radio that a plane had hit the tower eight blocks south. She decided to get Sonia out of school and began to walk downtown when 25 she saw the second plane ram the other tower. She had started to run then, against the crowd streaming toward her, but she didn’t register what had happened, not really, but raced to Stuyvesant, where she was stopped by a guard. There was another mother, too, whom they wouldn’t let in, a woman whose voice reminded her of a squalling cat at night. Inga remembered the woman’s contorted mouth, her saliva hitting the man’s collar as she wailed, 30 ‘Let me in! I want my son!’ and how the sight of the woman’s face had made her strangely quiet, calm, and distant, and how she had waited for them to find her daughter,