Alec Mouhibian

New York, NY—I sneezed in the subway train to Brooklyn on the morning of September 11, and I half-expected someone to say, “Bless you.” The train was packed as ever, but a reverent silence soaked in the air. It would probably have been the same in 2002 (the year after) or 2006 (the fifth anniversary). Except I like to think someone would’ve said, “Bless you.” But it was September 11, 2007. It was not a special day; it was a good day to forget.

“Life has to go on,” said Michael MacIvor, 32, as he walked his dog Rosie through a Brooklyn park. A nose-ring firmly in place, MacIvor swiftly apprehended his insensitivity. “I didn’t lose anybody,” he rationalized. Joseph Ellis, 23, added, “The first three years after, the feeling was different. Now it’s a little bit back to normal.” Amanda Jones, 24, talked about her feelings shyly, perhaps because they’re not so strong anymore. “It’s not really fear,” she said. “Sadness is the predominant emotion.”

But sadness often requires fear or anxiety to survive. In the rectory of Sacred Heart and St. Stephen’s Church in Brooklyn, Reverend Anthony J. Sansone explained, “When the psyche is wounded in some way, it carries the wound. It’s like a red light that tells you it can happen again.” His red light is still working. “Because I was so close, it’s always left me a little frightened,” he said.

Father Sansone watched the collapse of the twin towers from a roof in Brooklyn. “Because there was a wind, all of the refuse came this way. It came in the form of white powder, including the powder of the dead,” he said. “Everything was covered in white powder: the cars, the streets.” Everything including the thousands of people who were running for their lives from Manhattan’s inferno: “They looked like ghosts coming from the Brooklyn Bridge.”

For New Yorkers like Father Sansone, who lost several parishioners on that autumn day, memory is still ablaze in horror and sorrow. “We mark time at the firehouse as before 9/11 and after 9/11,” said Lieutenant Peter Acquafredda of Red Hook’s Fire Station #1, which sacrificed seven men to the flames. “I think it continues to affect all firefighters.

Acquafredda was not happy to report that the defining event of his life is slipping from American consciousness, but he understands the ebb and flow of human memory. “It’s a big country,” he said. “People who weren’t affected are already over it. But we don’t look to get over it. We want to move on.”

The first part of moving on is looking back. That is what Loretta Heaney, proprietor of Ceol Pub and Grill, intends to do. A sign on her bar read: “September 11. Ceol wants to thank all military, NYPD, and FDNY for their service. Please come in and have a drink on us.” Heaney, whose husband is back from two tours of duty in Iraq, said that the mood that night would be different from usual. “Today, it’ll be solemn,” she said, “Everyone will remember September 11 and give their account of September 11. There will always be a dark cloud over this day.”

Of course Heaney did not mean it literally, but when I left the tavern in the early afternoon, the sky over Brooklyn was black and sobbing. As the rain gushed, the heavens blasted and exploded in thunder. I imagined that a similar sound was heard on September 11, 2001.

The chaos above put a sudden end to lunchtime at a school in Carroll Gardens. Just twenty minutes before, the children had been stampeding the playground with ropes and balls, and I had been watching them from the fence. To the children, this day was as good or bad as any other. It would not be spared their shrieks, laughs, and kicks.

As I wondered how September 11 would prove to change their lives, a chubby boy began shouting and running toward the fence. “Oh my God! Oh my God!” he yelled and twisted his face. I thought he’d broken his bones. He could just as well have been running from the towers. But in his next sentence, it became clear that the boy wasn’t in pain, but in euphoria. “Oh my God, I’m stealing home!” he yelled, scoring a run. The boy was stealing home.

Obviously maturity, if not sensitivity, barred MacIvor, Ellis, Jones, and the many others I encountered from being so cheery today. For them the day is still reserved for quietude; they said it would be uncomfortable to attend a party or celebration that night. Heaney talked about a friend with a September 11 birthday. “He doesn’t celebrate it anymore,” she said. And it’s not likely that he will soon.

But this too is changing. “Every time September 11 fell on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday [in the past six years], there would be no marriages at the church,” Father Sansone explained. “Now it’s changing. It’ll inevitably keep changing.”

For the time being the September 11 subway ride has not changed. On the way back from Brooklyn, the trains were still silent. But it was no longer clear whether the travelers were honoring the day or respecting those who were honoring the day. Soon enough, I suppose, it will be clear. Soon enough sneezing citizens will receive dirty looks again. Soon enough September 11, which the New York Times downgraded to a D story, will no longer be news fit to print.

That people will have gotten over it, however, does not mean they will have moved on. The people of New York, those who love and accept this ongoing magic show, will forever remember September 11, for it was always part of them. The essayist and New Yorker E.B. White remembered it half a century before it even happened: “A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now.”