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Others 69 “I’mGoingtoDie,Aren’tI?” Several years after September 11, 2001, some recordings of phone calls made to 911 by people trapped in the towers above the points of impact were made public. A woman told the operator,“I’m going to die, aren’t I?” As I began to ask a friend of mine who was with me in New York that day if he had heard the tapes, he interrupted me with a brisk arm gesture and a mumble that meant yes, he’d heard them too but that he wasn’t going to talk about it. I knew then that he had also been thrown back to that horrible day and to the inarticulable shock of it. These recordings could simply not, in any way, constitute a topic of conversation. I think it was the“aren’t I?” that made this call resonate far beyond the 911 operator who received it. ...

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