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229 On the morning of September 11, 2001, the phone awakened me at seven in the morning. It was my sister on Vashon Island. Her first sentences garbled flat against my drowsy ear. She began to cry and blurted out unintelligible sentences. I was now fully awake. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?” “No, not me,” she said. “It just—everything’s falling apart.” “Is your husband hurt?” “No, no, you don’t understand, it’s, oh my God. What are we going to do?” “But you’re not hurt? You’re OK? Everyone else is OK?” “Yes, yes, but no, none of us is.” My mind raced to the most horrific unimaginable scenarios I could conceive. “Did Mount Rainier blow up? Has someone dropped a nuclear bomb?” No, I thought, such explosions would have awakened me. “No, no, they just crashed right into them…” “Are you personally in danger, right now?” “No, no…” I felt the fear slide out of my body, replaced by an open awareness, cold, sharp, alert. It was the same balance I knew from skirting gun battles and knife fights on the streets of Salvador, from times spent in Papua New Guinea waiting for local marauders to attack, of odd experiences with crazed men in the South Pacific when I was young, of being in the Underground in London when a bomb scare was announced; all circumstances when I knew my survival hung on a single move, mistake, or on sheer chance. “It’s OK,” I said to my sister. “Breathe. Focus on the plant beside you.” Gradually, she calmed down and told me of the New York and Washington, D.C., plane attacks. After we had talked for some time, she hung up and went, I knew, to visit her best friend down the road, to walk and think. Later, I saw the television footage of the attacks. I permitted myself twenty-four love 230 dance lest we all fall down to view it once.Then, I turned off the television and turned on the radio. Beginning about ten in the morning, U.S. Pacific Standard Time, the phone began to ring. Rita was the first to call. “Are you all right?” she asked. “New York is on the opposite side of the country.” “I know, but…I don’t know, you could have been visiting. And your brother’s a fire fighter, isn’t he?” “Yes. But we were all here.” “It’s strange, Margaret, but I feel more empathy for the people of the United States than I ever thought possible. They now must understand—what we went through with the dictatorship, what went on in Chile, Argentina. How it feels to know fear with no escape, to have something fundamental shattered, to realize how fragile we are, every one of us.” “Yeah.” I gave a rueful laugh. “Americans, particularly white nativeborn Americans, have never experienced and probably never understood, that our borders are permeable, that even the United States is only a piece in a larger whole.” “And now they do,” she said. “They’re the same as us. In a sense, I can feel empathy because you are now equal to us. Americans, like most of the rest of the world, now know in their gut the absolute insecurity of real disaster. You know I love you.” We sat quiet. As I hung up the phone, I was crying. Soon friends from Europe began to ring and, as the time zone caught up to her, a friend from Australia. A garbled message from Jorge’s family, clearly trying to put through their first international call. From everyone and everywhere, the message was the same. It was love. I felt enveloped in a warmth I had done nothing to deserve, brought by the catastrophic deaths of people I never knew. My overseas friends had always tended to separate me from my nationality when they wished to reinforce our rapport. “You’re not really like an American,” they’d say. Or, “You’re the first American I’ve liked; you’re different.” “You’re almost like a European.” “You’re almost like a Brazilian.” “You’re almost like an Australian.” Eventually I concluded that I must either be an impressive chameleon , or that their image of an American and my persona—perhaps 231 margaret willson the first American these people had ever really known—were different. These friends—who almost universally disliked the United States, its foreign polices, its international business practices...

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