INTRODUCTION
This
is a collection of memories that popped into my mind over
a period of seven years at work, as a copy editor at The
Wall Street Journal, across the street from the World
Trade Center. As far as I can tell, the memories came from
nowhere, with no relation to the mostly political articles
I was editing about the Republican takeover of Congress,
the government shutdown, Monica Lewinsky, the Starr Report,
the downfall of Newt Gingrich, impeachment, Florida or Bush
v. Gore. Many of the memories are glimpses of places,
a street corner and nothing more, as if a major function
of the mind were this continuous global positioning, this
continuous murmuring, ''Right now, I'm at the
corner of 10th Ave. and 64th St.'' The places are
distributed fairly evenly over the course of my life, with
a somewhat disturbing precedence given to the streets around
my childhood home at 251 Montrose Ave. in South Orange, N.J.
I first became
aware of these memories in my twenties, but it wasn't until
my mid-thirties that I really paid attention to them. A cascade
began when I learned that my wife, Louisa, was pregnant with
our first child, Charlotte, in 1993. A few years later, when
I was taking care of identical-twin babies, Natalie and Emily,
as many as three memories would pop into my mind while I was
changing a single diaper. I tended to view them as memories
being killed off by the brain. This was the last time they
would enter my consciousness, at least until I short-circuited
the dynamic. Maybe so many memories popped up because a powerful
new experience was killing out an old experience, taking over
its cell, or whatever. I didn't have a chance to write
down many memories, which are truly fleeting, during child
care. Almost all the memories in this book were written in
the right-hand margin of a sheet I filled out every day at
work with the names and hedline sizes of the stories I handled.
Usually, a memory or two a day would float up, sometimes more,
sometimes none. The most that ever floated up was nine, I think.
At the end of my shift, I would copy them into a little notebook,
often to some raillery from Josh Rosenbaum, Peter Saenger or
Tom Walker. I, of course, was happy to accomplish some psychic
research at work. In later years, I would make a photocopy
of the story sheet and add it to the pile in my desk drawer,
turning in the original to the copy chief with the memories
in the margin erased.
This steady
drip of memories through the years, this slow accretion, began
to dry up in the beginning of 2000. In the third week of the
new millennium, I was loaned for a few months from the national
news department to the foreign department, where they didn't
fill out story sheets. When I returned to national news, we
had finally shifted from our antiquated CSI computer system
to a new one, Hermes, that enveloped much more of my mental
space. I started recording memories again, but at a diminished
rate. Instead of a couple a day, there was only one a week.
That's where things stood on September 11th. Our building,
the so-called World Financial Center 1, was severely damaged
by the collapse of the south tower of the World Trade Center.
The newspaper was dislocated to South Brunswick, N.J. I knew
that years worth of memories, hundreds of copies of story sheets,
were entombed in my desk. From the fragmentary reports available
to us about the state of our offices, it sounded like my memories
would be fine, a bit dusty at worst. I didn't care about
them inordinately anyway, because my impulse had waned. During
that October, a few people were allowed to retrieve computer
hard drives and the like from the WFC, but it was discouraged,
and I figured I could wait until the dust settled. Then, we
learned the copy desk was being permanently transferred to
South Brunswick. Workmen were going to gather our belongings
on the 9th floor of the WFC, take them to another floor, vacuum
off any toxic dust, then box and ship them to South Brunswick.
People who didn't know me would be handling my things—a
recipe for disaster. The story sheets looked so unprepossessing
someone could easily throw them out. Special dispensations
were possible, but again discouraged. It took me about one
second to decide to seek one. I walked over to the ''wartime
cubicle'' of Cathy Panagoulias, my former boss, who
was in charge of the move. ''Cathy, you've got
to save me. I've got the last part of a book manuscript
in my middle desk drawer at 200 Liberty.'' ''What
is it?'' ''I know this might sound flaky, but
you know the story sheets we fill out? Every day I wrote a
couple memories in the margins.'' Cathy rolled her
eyes, but said OK. A few days later, I was notified that a
special delivery of my things could be retrieved in the basement
of Building 5 in the South Brunswick complex. The vast space
was mostly empty, with a few small islands of boxes on the
concrete floor, but I learned that in a month 15,000 boxes
would be there. My unconscious out-of-order autobiography was
safe, along with everything else, including the much-maligned
pile of newspapers I always had on top of my desk. I was pleased
in a way to find that my last memory was from September 10th,
and that it was portentous. If our building had been destroyed
by the attack, as one might have reasonably expected, all the
memories after number 1035 would have been lost.
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