We passed
them every morning, my dog and I, as they walked north
on Avenue A. Two Muslim women in robes and veils, I imagined
they were mother and daughter, though we never spoke. In fact,
we rarely acknowledged each other at all, which I attributed
to the fact of my dog, eying them curiously as I made every effort
to keep him from them. He has a reputation for tugging on dresses.
I'm sure we must have passed them again on that
last Tuesday morning; I had a cup of coffee in my hand, the newspaper
under my arm, and after our paths crossed, the dog and I turned
into the park as usual, to spend the morning in the dog run.
The following 
morning,
someone would tell me, "We heard it. Don't you remember?
We were talking and there was the sound of an explosion. You
rolled your eyes and went on." But I don't remember it now.
All I can recall is returning home, where I had left the television
on, and discovering that there was no reception. I turned the
channels and finally found one that was still coming in: the
image of the Towers in flames. I phoned my father in Pennsylvania.
He was first to tell me. "It isn't an accident," he
said.
I ran down the street and was called onto a roof
by neighbors a block away. The first Tower went down as reached
the top of the stairs. I could hear the others on the roof screaming,
and then I knew what had happened before clearing the door to
see for myself. We stood watching, bumming cigarettes, as the
tops of the neighboring buildings filled with people huddled
together, frozen. I watched the fire in the second Tower burn
from a circle to a
perfect square. "Now its coming down," I announced.
And it did.
It was our dogs that kept us going. The neighborhood
was shut down, no traffic, no news, no television, no mail, the
shelves of the grocers were empty. But the dogs still had to
go out, even if they could smell it in the air, even more than
the rest of us.
I took him with me to the firehouse on Great Jones
were my parents had found help earlier in the summer when their
car had broken down. We bought sunflowers on the walk there and
my dog eyed the firm stalks for a moment before instinctively
backing down. When I placed the flowers with the others in front
of the station, he sat suddenly, quietly, in front of the shrine
and wouldn't move. Later that night, he sat again like that,
with his head down, in front of a field of candles that had been
lit in the park near the run. "Click click click."
I heard the shutter of a camera taking our pictures as we sat
there together, a stranger photographing us like a tourist documenting
a place to which they feel no connection.
I didn't know anyone directly involved, meaning
no one I knew were among the casualties. Everyone was just one
or two people removed. Friends of friends, my chiropractor's
brother. But it didn't 
matter.
We had stood together on the rooftops as it happened and then
the city was filled with MISSING flyers, documenting who had
been taken as we watched.
In the park the dogs kept playing. But the two
veiled women, like so many others, are gone.
*Ken Foster is the editor of an anthology, "The
KGB Bar Reader," and the author of a collection of stories,
"The Kind I'm
Likely to Get," which was a New York Times Notable Book.
His non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times Book Review,
The San Francisco Chronicle, The Village Voice and other publications.
The recipient of a grant from the New York Foundation for the
Arts, he recently completed a novel, "Missing," and
is editing an anthology of essays about "Dog Culture."
