Filed from the flat middle

Bloomington, Illinois, September 11 to 13, 2001. Wallace puts the warning at the top: this was typed fast by someone who was not thinking straight yet.

“Written very fast and in what probably qualifies as shock”

Reserve breaks in the checkout line

Strangers here smile but never chat. Now a cashier and a man in a cutoff denim vest are talking at the gas station like they all just saw the same wreck.

“til then after a while they started to notice it was the same movie on all the channels”

Flags sprout overnight

By Wednesday morning they are on every house, mailbox, grille and antenna. Little parade flags all over lawns. Even a half-collapsed empty house has one planted by the driveway.

“You never see anybody putting out a flag, but by Wednesday morning there they all are.”

The neighbor on his stepladder

Mr. N is out polishing his anodized flagpole with ointment and a chamois. He explains the etiquette: you run the flag to the top first, then bring it halfway down, or it's an insult.

“it's true that his metal pole does shine like God's own wrath”

Ask what the flags mean

Support and empathy, as Americans. For pride. To show we won't bow down. That they messed with the wrong people. One grad student had a different answer entirely.

“The flag is a pseudo-archetype, a reflexive semion designed to pre-empt and negate the critical function”

The empty yard starts talking

Nobody stops their car to say your house has no flag. But it gets easier and easier to imagine them thinking it, and the pressure builds all day.

“it seems like at a certain point of density of flags you're making more of a statement if you don't have one out”

Every store is sold out

The groceries have none. The novelty shop has only Halloween. The Yellow Pages list nothing under Flag. The last plastic ones out by the interstate were already gone.

“The reality is that there is not a flag to be had in this town.”

Undone by a plastic flag

He ends up standing in a convenience store afraid to go home. When people ask if he's all right he lies and blames a Benadryl reaction.

“All those people dead, and I'm sent to the edge by a plastic flag.”

Tea in the stock room

The store's owner, a Pakistani man, sits him down in back with milky tea until he can compose himself, then gently suggests construction paper and markers. That is where the homemade flag comes from.

The town insurance built

Bloomington is 65,000 people and recession-proof, run in practice by State Farm, split between SUV and pickup, with four phone-book pages of churches and not much other public life.

“the ocean here is corn, which grows steroidically and stretches to the earth's curve in all directions”

Reality arrives by screen

Any felt sense of a larger world here comes through television. The New York skyline is as familiar as anywhere, and what it's familiar from is TV.

“what you do in Bloomington is all get together at somebody's house and watch something”

No TV means come over

Having no set makes you a permanent guest in other people's homes. In a crisis you call someone, say you have no TV, and that settles it.

“Well shoot, boy, get over here.”

He doesn't ring the bell

One of ten gorgeous days a year, the county half stoned on hay fever pills. He arrives at Mrs. Thompson's with dried shampoo in his hair and walks straight in, which here you never do.

“In retrospect, the first sign of shock was the fact that I didn't ring the bell”

The clip they never reran

A wide shot of the North Tower, dots detaching and falling, tightening until they resolve into people in coats and skirts with their shoes coming off. The room looked at each other, childlike and horribly old.

“It seems grotesque to talk about being traumatized by a video when the people in the video were dying.”

Like a liftoff run backward

Wallace thought the South Tower went down the way an elegant lady faints. It was Duane, the irritating kid who kept his hat on indoors, who nailed it: NASA footage in reverse.

Everybody calls everybody

One wallmount phone in the kitchen, in constant use. The 212 area code yields only a whooping sound. Somewhere outside, a man is mowing his lawn.

“One side effect of the Horror seems to be an overwhelming desire to call everybody you love.”

Nobody knows where midtown is

Mrs. R is coming apart over a grandniece interning in some tall New York building. Explaining Manhattan's layout is the one useful thing he does all day.

Not one cynical remark

No one notes the anchors in shirtsleeves, or Rather's conveniently mussed hair, or how much of this mirrors Die Hard. They sit together, feel awful, and pray.

“Nobody's edgy or sophisticated enough to lodge the sick and obvious po-mo complaint: We've Seen This Before.”

Praying you're wrong about Bush

Their company makes him do what he wouldn't alone: pray silently that his read on the president is distorted, that the man is more than a suit full of interests. He says it's good to pray that way.

“It's just a little lonely to have to.”

Their America, and his

Part of the horror was realizing the country those men on the planes hated so much was much closer to his own than to the innocent women around him.

“Innocent people can be hard to be around.”