I, on the other hand, had made my stage debut as Gollum. I still recall how on opening night, while I was pulling on a black rubber wetsuit and being lathered in petroleum jelly backstage by a thirteen-year-old male costume assistant, a number of future life pursuits seemed to shift into focus. I came on right after Ana’s scene, where Bilbo has to outwit the three bumbling trolls. My cue to enter was a blast from the smoke machine that filled the entire gymnatorium with subterranean gloom. To this day, whenever I smell the acridity of theatrical smoke my heart begins to beat a little faster and I’m taken back to that Platonic cave of shadows where I thrashed about yelling “Curses!”

Ana and I were children of the nineties, which meant we came of age in a decade of blockbuster disasters. Volcano, Twister, Deep Impact, Armageddon, Dante’s Peak. I grew up in a world where I watched the earth open up in the middle of Los Angeles and people slip into a fiery chasm, where mile-high waves consumed fleeing crowds and fathers were sucked into the sky out of storm cellars. I watched a man fall screaming from the upturned deck of the Titanic and plummet through the cold night air, down along the ship’s terrifying, exposed underbelly, screaming as he fell, still person, until he ricocheted off an exposed propeller and spun, now body, in silence like a pinwheel into the dark water. Or the grandmother in Dante’s Peak, pushing her family to safety in a corroded motorboat while slowly melting in a lake of acid. As a child I watched death’s horrifying prelude over and over, when person and body began to become unfastened, when I could see a living person as their corpse, as well as the horror of the person seeing their own body as a corpse.

The planes hit the World Trade Center towers just as Ana and I hit puberty in grade eight. A disaster movie writ large. The disaster movie that put an end to disaster movies, at least for a decade. The moment the first plane struck the North Tower I was in the fourth and final stall of the ground-floor boys’ bathroom, bent over, examining the first, tentative hair on my ball-sack. During lunch break that day I passed Ana in the hallway, where she was holding court in a group of girls. I heard her say the words “people jumping.” I hadn’t yet seen the images but my heart began to race — I could already picture what those two words meant.