I wish I could talk about my years at the Bystander, my last in journalism, with such pride and self-importance, like some grand old dame of media. But I can only think of all the people I failed, all the dead.

The girl opens The Complete Bystander and begins asking about my pieces—profiles of John Malkovich and Madonna, reviews of Eyes Wide Shut and All About My Mother, a two-part essay on Napster.

“The Bystander seems like a golden age,” she says.

“It didn’t feel that way at the time.”

“Then take me back.”

I look at her phone. There would be room in there for everything, for the story I never wrote, the one I can never tell.

If I were being real with her, I’d begin with the bandage on my wrist. How on a night when I seemed nothing more than hair and fingernails and one cold skull, I’d sprawled on the couch with glass after glass, the untold dead pushing out. The glass dropped from my hand, it broke on the floor. I saw the shards on hardwood and chose one.

Then came the blood, and with it, a thought. It couldn’t happen like this. Slathering red over the screen, I managed to call 911.

And I would tell her about surfacing in the ambulance as they began the transfusion, how when I grasped what was happening, I yanked the IV from my arm. The medic lunged for the drip as it swung, dribbling blood.

They had to hold me down, there wasn’t much time. But by then I’d seen the color of the blood. It was red, it was fine.

2.

“The attacks were, for me, a personal catastrophe,” said Daniel Eastham. “Rogue Winter hit shelves that same morning. Do you think anyone bought novels on September 11?”

I glanced out the window at the snow falling over Brooklyn. You wouldn’t normally have been able to see the Towers from Eastham’s brownstone, but now there always seemed to be an absence in the sky. I’d arranged this interview months ago, but given the attacks, it had been put off to December. My first assignment back on the Bystander’s culture file, it was supposed to have been a coup. At thirty-seven, Eastham was the youngest, most adroitly aloof member of an exciting generation of New York novelists, and Rogue Winter, a 900-page postmodern comedy set several years in the future, was positioned to be his grand affirmation. But then, in just a single morning, it became clear that 2003 wouldn’t be like his version at all, the America he’d purported to capture had changed, and none of the jokes were funny anymore.

Eastham reached for his glass of red wine and said, “No one’s reading fiction right now, let alone author profiles.”