Now, I don’t want to make light of this. I want to say that up front, because people get the wrong idea. They think because I have a little smile, or because I pause, that I’m about to do a bit. I’m not about to do a bit. I’m going to say something true, and I would like you to sit with it the way you sit with a hymn.
9/11 was a national tragedy.
I say it whenever it comes up, and also when it doesn’t. A man will be talking about his dog, or a sandwich, or a movie that didn’t test well in Baltimore, and I will wait until there is a little hole in the talk, and I will put it in the hole. 9/11 was a national tragedy. Then I watch his face. The face is the whole show. You can see the priests arrive behind the eyes. The back straightens. The mouth has to pick a job, and it does not like either of the jobs. If he laughs, I ask him what is funny about a national tragedy. If he does not laugh, I wait, because that is worse. Silence is a kind of laugh you haven’t admitted to yet.
People say I am being cruel. I don’t see it. I am agreeing with them. That is the most polite thing a man can do. They have spent twenty-five years teaching me the sentence. I learned it. I say it. They get angry that I learned it too well. That, to me, is interesting.
They used to say comedy is tragedy plus time. I liked that. It sounded like a recipe, and I am a simple man, and recipes I understand. You take the bad thing. You wait. You add time the way you add salt. Then you may speak. Only nobody wrote down how much time. A week was too soon. A year was too soon. Ten years, you could do it if you had a relative in the building, and grief, they decided, is a credential, like a liquor license. You have to show it at the door. I never had a relative in the building. I had a television. So I am not licensed. I am just a fellow who remembers that it was a national tragedy, which it was, and who cannot understand why the licensed people are allowed to make a joke and I am only allowed to make a face.
Too soon, they said. They are still saying it. The children who were not born that morning can drink now. They can vote. They can be humorless in their own right. Two wars started and then, in the way of wars, they became something you could not find the end of, and then they ended anyway, the way a man leaves a party. Still too soon. So I think the phrase was never about a clock. I think too soon means I would prefer you felt what I am feeling, and I would prefer you felt it now, and I would prefer you did not notice that I am also checking my phone. That is a lot to put in two words. English is a marvel.
Never forget. That one they put on hats. They put it on a 5K. They put it on a moment of silence that lasts exactly as long as a television commercial, which I thought was efficient. You stand there and you remember, or you stand there and you remember that you are supposed to remember, which is close enough for government work. Then somebody sells you a cinnamon bun. I have no quarrel with the bun. The bun is honest. The bun does not claim to have been in the stairwell.
Everybody wants a stairwell. That is the part I cannot get over. You will be at a dinner and a man will say, where were you. And then they go around the table like it is a game. I was in a classroom. I was in an airport. I knew a guy who knew a guy whose cousin was a firefighter. I walked through blood and bones looking for my brother. Now, if you walked through blood and bones looking for your brother, that is a terrible thing and I am sorry. I am not making light. 9/11 was a national tragedy. I am only noticing that the conversation is a contest, and the prize is that people have to look at you for the rest of the soup. Proximity became a kind of money. The people in the stairwells cannot spend it. The people at the table can.
Like many others, I watched it on television like it was a weather event that had gotten ambitious. We all said the right things because we are polite. Then America built a religion in a week. That is fast work. Most religions take centuries and a desert. This one took a Tuesday and a chyron. There were heroes, and there were villains, and there was a sacrilege if you asked about the plot, and there was a different sacrilege if you did not ask about the plot, and either way you had to take your shoes off at the airport, which is the one commandment that stuck. I don’t mind taking my shoes off. I have feet. I mind that we called it security and then we called the cinnamon bun remembrance, and nobody was willing to admit that both of them were just things we did with our hands so our hands would not have to be still.
I will say the true thing until the true thing sounds like a gag, and then I will look surprised that you laughed, because I did not tell a gag. I told you what the news told you, what the president told you, what the hat told you, what your uncle told you at the 5K. If that has become funny, I did not do that. You did that. You did it by repeating it until it was a product. You did it by making the date a test. You did it by turning a morning into a manners lesson. I am only the man who keeps handing you your own hymn and asking you to sing it like you mean it.
They put up a new tower. It is very tall. It has a name with Freedom in it, which is a lot of pressure for glass. Down below there is a pool where the old building used to be, and names, and people who are actually remembering, and I have nothing for those people except to get out of their way. 9/11 was a national tragedy. The trouble starts when the rest of us show up with a script. We know our mark. Head down. Voice low. Never forget. Then we forget, because we are people, and people forget, and the forgetting is the most human thing we have done about it, and so of course we are not allowed to admit that either.
I am interested in the room. The room is still doing the bit. The room puts on a face. The room says the sentence. The room gets angry if you say the sentence without the face. So I say the sentence without the face, and I wait, and I ask why you are smiling, and I am not smiling, and 9/11 was a national tragedy, and if you laugh now I will have to ask you, again, what is funny, and if you do not laugh I will have to sit here until one of us tells the truth, and I have time.
I have nothing else. That is the whole essay. The country already wrote the punchline, and then they asked me not to read it aloud. I am a reader. I read. 9/11 was a national tragedy. Say it with me. Slower. Again. Again. Do not smile.
Why are you smiling?