This is what was left behind when the clouds of debris finally settled: a child's soft toy — a lamb — sitting atop the rubble and looking heavenward as if with bewilderment and disbelief; a menu from the Windows on the World restaurant, whose staff was a rich, ethnic mishmash, lying discarded on the street; a business card that wafted over the Hudson River from the crumbling towers and was picked up in Brooklyn; a set of miraculously-preserved dictionaries, their languages — German, French, Russian, Spanish, Dutch, Italian — a symbol of unity against the malevolent events of that day.
There were also things you couldn't see: the gaping hole in New York's skyline; the acute loss of those twin towers — the biggest building project since the pyramids at the time that construction on them began in the 1960s; an agony so great it broke through family and borough and city containment lines and rushed outwards until it had swamped an entire world.
A decade later, that sweet lamb looks up at me from within its protective glass case inside a building on Liberty Street in New York. It reminds me of lost innocence, and of my six-year-old son who had stayed home from school sick on that day and had continued watching TV as the events in New York replaced his afternoon cartoons.
He was transfixed by these movie-like stunts that beamed into our living room in South Africa even as they were happening half a world away; his big eyes grew ever larger as a plane arced towards the second tower and disappeared inside it, releasing a violent outburst of tremor and explosion. He was witnessing the very first imprint of history.
Nearly ten years later he stands silently beside me in the Tribute WTC Visitor Centre, across the way from Ground Zero. The centre has catalogued September 11 through the minutiae of everyday life, displaying relics that have been carefully collected and preserved, as though in lieu of the incinerated bones of those who died. There are twisted forks and spoons, computer fragments, a sprinkler valve sign, elevator floor plaques and two 357 magnum revolvers encrusted in molten concrete.
My son is processing the event through the lens of