September 11, 2001 — Niko's Account
Context
- Working at Fred's company carbonmedia (later tntmax.com) in LOWER MANHATTAN
- Was supposed to be at work that day
- Stayed home — was sick, or maybe just felt like staying home
- Saw it happen on TV from home
The Rollerblade Rescue
- Grabbed HER rollerblades and his own rollerblades
- Subways had been shut down — no way out of lower Manhattan by train
- Rollerbladed DOWNTOWN — against the flow of evacuation
- Had to fight with police to get through barricades
- People were not allowed to go in that direction (toward Ground Zero)
- Fought past them to bring her rollerblades so they could both skate out
- They rollerbladed out of lower Manhattan together
The Zombie Army
- Saw all the people walking uptown
- They were covered in a layer of white ash
- "Like a zombie army" — thousands of people, silent, ash-coated, walking north
- One of the most surreal and defining images of his life
Framework Connection
- The instinct to go TOWARD the danger, not away — same survival architecture as Chiapas, as the streets
- Fighting past police barricades — same pattern as resisting arrest, as escaping Saint Cabrini's
- The body moves toward the person it's bonded to — Marco Polo architecture in flesh
- Rollerblades as survival technology — improvised solution when the system (subways) failed
- The ash-covered people = a city's graph in visible collapse, every person reduced to the same monochrome, all surface identity stripped away
- Stayed home that day — the Interoceptive dimension said 'don't go' before the conscious mind had a reason