The Second Plane
NOTES · SEPTEMBER 12, 2026
On the morning of 11 September 2001 I was in California, asleep, and somebody woke me up. It was somewhere around seven, our time, and the first thing I saw with my eyes open was the second plane going into the South Tower. Whether I saw it live or in the first replay I honestly can't tell you; by then the networks were showing it every couple of minutes, and the distinction didn't exist yet. I was thirty. Roosevelt's phrase for the last morning like it was "a date which will live in infamy," and that's true of this one too. But the way I'd put it about myself is that it's a day that lives in me. It is the one morning of my adult life where I can tell you exactly where I was standing and which way I was facing.
Twenty-five years is a long time. It's long enough that a child born that morning turned twenty-five on Friday. It's long enough that I don't, most years, do anything on the day beyond notice it. This year I watched something on a screen, which is also how I watched the original, and it went through me in a way I didn't expect and have spent two days trying to explain to myself. This is the attempt.
Two Thousand Nine Hundred and Seventy-Seven Lights
On Wednesday night, 9 September, 2,977 drones rose over New York Harbor — one for each person killed that day, in New York, at the Pentagon, and in a field in Pennsylvania. The piece is called 2,977 Lights Over New York Harbor. The lights came up off the water in a helix, a spiral turning upward, and then resolved into the outline of the two towers at full architectural scale — the actual height, the actual footprint, standing where you would have seen them from the harbor — beside the two blue beams of the Tribute in Light that have marked the spot every September since 2002. It was made with members of the 9/11 community: Terry Strada, whose husband Tom died in the North Tower; Jim Smith, whose wife Moira was an NYPD officer killed evacuating people from the South Tower; Tim Brown, a firefighter who was there in 1993 and again in 2001; Genevieve Siller, whose father Stephen ran through the Battery Tunnel in his gear; Brenda Berkman, a firefighter and an artist.
I've thought about why that particular thing, of all the things made in twenty-five years to mark this, is the one that got me, and I think it's three things.
The number became visible. "Two thousand nine hundred and seventy-seven" is a figure I've known for a quarter century and never once seen. The names take four hours to read; that's the closest anyone has come. On Wednesday night you could look at the harbor and see all of them at once, each one a point of light, and they were the right number — not a representation, not a symbol, a count. A drone for a person.
The towers were made of the people. That's the part I keep coming back to. The two shapes in the sky weren't a picture of the buildings. They were the people who were inside the buildings, arranged into the buildings. The thing that fell was rebuilt for a few minutes out of exactly who was lost when it fell. I don't know if the people who designed it would say it that way, but that's what it was.
It was the same size. Memorials shrink things. That's their job; they make a loss small enough to stand next to. The reflecting pools at the site are the footprints, but they go down. Wednesday night was the first time since the morning I was woken up that anything stood on that skyline at the height those buildings stood, and then it was gone again, which is the other half of the point.
The Week It Landed In
I can't separate the memorial from the week around it, and I don't think I'm supposed to.
On the same Wednesday that drones built the towers over New York, I was writing an entry about drones of a different kind — the ones that, on Thursday morning, flew from Iraq into the pumping stations of Saudi Arabia's East–West pipeline and lit a fire you could see from orbit. I don't want to make too much of that. A drone is a motor and a radio; it does what it's told. But I noticed it, and I'd be lying if I said it didn't colour how I saw the harbor. The machine that can carry one light for each of the dead is the machine that is, right now, the cheapest way in the world to set something on fire from a distance, and the same week saw both.
And then on Friday, at the ceremony at Ground Zero — which the President skipped for the Pentagon, leaving the Vice President and four of his predecessors to stand there — Terry Strada spoke. The same Terry Strada whose name is on the drone piece. She is the president of 9/11 Families United, and she has spent most of the last twenty-five years in a lawsuit trying to establish what the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia did and didn't do for the nineteen hijackers, fifteen of whom were Saudi citizens. What she said on Friday, with the four presidents in front of her, was that "for 25 years, administration after administration — including leaders in front of us here today — chose to protect the Saudis instead of standing with a 9/11 family."
She said that in the week when the United States' relationship with Saudi Arabia is the hinge of everything I've been writing about — when the Crown Prince was on the phone to the President twice in one day asking for airstrikes on his behalf, and the President's answer was to send targeting help. I'm not going to pretend I know what the Saudi state did or didn't know in 2001; the lawsuit is still in court and the declassified files are ambiguous enough that serious people read them both ways. But I know what it looks like from where I sit, which is a long way from all of it: a widow who helped build a monument to her husband on Wednesday stood in front of the country's leaders on Friday and told them the country had chosen its oil partner over her, in the same week that partner's oil was the reason for everything on the front page. That's not a coincidence anyone arranged. It's just the shape of the last twenty-five years, visible for a moment, like the towers.
What I Actually Felt
Mostly this: that I was woken up once, twenty-five years ago, and I have never in the years since felt that I fully woke up from it. Everything that has happened in the world I follow — the wars, the surveillance, the airports, the way we talk about who is "us" — has a date on it, and the date is that morning. The drones over the harbor didn't say anything about any of that. They just put the people back where they'd been, at the right height, for a few minutes, and then let them go. It was the first memorial I've seen that was about the people rather than the event, and it turns out that was the one I needed. I'd have said before Wednesday that I was done being surprised by this day. I wasn't.
If you were there — in the harbor, or in the city that morning — I'd like to hear what it was like from where you stood. The address is below.
Sources
- ABC7 New York. Drone show recreates Twin Towers, honors 2,977 victims ahead of 25th anniversary of 9/11 attacks. 10 September 2026. https://abc7ny.com/post/drone-show-recreates-twin-towers-honors-2977-victims-ahead-25th-anniversary-911-attacks-new-york/19814308/
- CBS New York. 2,977 drones recreate Twin Towers in NYC skyline as part of 9/11 commemorations. September 2026. https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/twin-towers-drone-show-911-commemorations/
- France 24 / AFP. US marks 25th anniversary of 9/11 attacks. 11 September 2026. https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260911-us-marks-25th-anniversary-of-9-11-attacks
- CBC News. Trump, former U.S. presidents mark 25 years since 9/11 attacks at separate ceremonies. 11 September 2026. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/us-911-25th-tributes-9.7339948
- National September 11 Memorial & Museum. Marking the 25th Anniversary. https://www.911memorial.org/marking-25th-anniversary
- Photographs: Sgt. Randall A. Clinton, USMC, Tribute in Light in 2010, public domain; Andrea Booher, FEMA, photograph 3886, 13 September 2001, public domain — both via Wikimedia Commons.