Troubled Sleep

It is 4:00 pm New Year's Eve, 2001. I begin this piece that has been with me for quite some time, and for quite some time I have found it hard to sleep.

Let me explain.

The theater and film section of the Journal appears once every six months. Copy must be delivered about 5 months in advance, and so I first began thinking about this piece last August. I considered writing about the effects of mass media on education. I considered the effects of violence in film. I was considering these, but had not found a satisfactory thread as I was sitting in my office talking to a patient I treat by phone. She had once lived in New York. She lives on the West coast now. I have saved her life more than once. She is attached to me. It was a little after nine in the morning New York time. She said to me, “Do you know what's happened?” “No,” I said. “A plane just slammed into the World Trade Center,” she said. We ended the session. I turned on the radio, and the voice on the radio repeated, “A plane has just slammed into the World Trade Center.” I cleared my schedule, and for 36 hours sat in front of the TV, paralyzed. It has been hard for me to sleep.

I was scheduled to leave New York for Moscow on the night of September 11th to attend the memorial service of a dear Russian friend (I would get to Moscow, but two weeks late), and then for the next two weeks, after coming out of paralysis, I worked at the Armory, at the Javits Center, at Ground Zero helping perhaps four or five people with what seemed like the beginnings of what might have been, might be, PTSD, eating donuts, drinking coffee with firemen and cops—realizing that what I was doing was of some help to those four or five and of great help to me. Had I been younger I might have joined the NYPD. Had I been younger, I might have become a reporter, worked for a newspaper. And then I realized I am a reporter, an editor actually, at something like a newspaper. I am an editor