I’m in the living room of my old house on Red Hill Road, sitting on the grass-green carpet of the living room floor. On our small TV the towers are falling. When they sink into the ground, I hear a deep, groaning rumble outside, shuddering our house and our street.

This is a fabricated memory. That last detail is the tell — as residents of Middletown, New Jersey, my family is close but not close enough to hear or see 9/11 with our own senses. Am I even watching a live feed, or one of the infinite replays? I don’t know. I know only that my memory of 9/11, one of my first and most formative, isn’t mine.

My parents cushion my sisters and I against the day’s debris with childhood. I zip about the living room with a plastic model of a double-deck commercial airliner, Saudi Arabian Airlines running down its side. I simulate breakneck turns around towering walls and over carpeted valleys, dancing around disaster like Shinichi Kudo’s girlfriend Ran Mouri (not fiancé, contrary to the chaste pretensions of the Arabic dub) in the eighth Detective Conan movie. Even as I delightedly voice the desperate maydays of the pilots, I empathize with the flight crew — I never let them crash.

The muffled clamor of destruction outside grows louder, and occasionally I catch a waft of ash or glimpse a shaft of steel. I understand that everyone in Minnesota is voting John Kerry for president because he doesn’t kill Muslims; I don’t quite understand why everyone is laughing at the comedian begging his son Osama to not shout his name in the supermarket. I notice that I can’t see my mom’s face outside the house, and that my dad looks like the bearded guys on TV, and everyone tells me I look like my dad. My younger sister Asmaa is born on Dec. 7, the retired day of infamy. Thankfully, my youngest sister Sumaiya is born on Sept. 12, 2011. I cough amidst the dust.

The debris strikes at random. On my favorite Detective Conan fan forum, Cider laments terror. “It’s in their holy book,” Cider explains to our fellow users, who to my shock are actually Muslim. They dutifully recite the groveling pieties: Islam means peace (it doesn’t), these terrorists aren’t Muslim (they are), Jihad means internal struggle (it does, but also holy war). I recoil from their meek submission. Immediately I see that the apolitical, anonymous world of virtuality is just reality by another name, the one where 9/11 is happening.

I watch things. I watch 9/11 films, and 9/11 films that I do not know are 9/11 films —The Dark Knight, 2012, The Avengers. In theaters, I watch Chris Kyle mourn in high definition as he snipes brown boys and their covered mothers. In my bedroom, Samuel L. Jackson threatens the hijab-wearing wife of an Arab refusing to reveal an incoming terrorist attack. She reminds me of my older sister. Samuel L. Jackson slits her throat. I gag.

I fall down 9/11 Truth. I replay Loose Change. Jet fuel can’t melt steel, Building 7 is a controlled demolition. The psychologizing debunkers say this is how I retaliate against the its-not-fair-ness of it all, and they’re probably right. Why blame Osama when you can fold the 20-dollar bill to show the twin towers burning?

The catharsis is fun but false. I fall away from 9/11 Truth. 

I arrive at Yale three years after the NYPD admits spying on its Muslim students for terrorist activities, and one after Ayaan Hirsi Ali comes to campus to discuss the intractable “clash of civilizations” between the West and Islam. As with 9/11, I remember these events only in mediation, except now by my own hand. Finally, a Muslim reporter at the Yale Daily News, mutter the weary upperclassman. Finally, a representative.

So surmises the professor of my Iraq War seminar, where I work as a consultant on women’s rights and sharia law. I ask him why the American public immediately links Saddam Hussein, a completely unrelated actor, to 9/11. He has no answer, so in the 6,500 words of my final paper I show how the American media’s weakness for groupthink, official sourcing, and false equivalence legitimizes government propaganda and facilitates wars.

I stare at my professor’s comments for a long while: “You write with a controlled anger that does you credit because you do not pull your political punches, but you remain firmly within the accepted register of academia.”

I do not know why I harbor this anger. I am not my father, assaulted by FBI agents at 4:36 a.m. while leaving for the mosque; I am not the Iraqi prisoners of Abu Ghraib, stripped and raped and stacked in pyramids for photo shoots; I am not my mother, spat on along the Staten Island boardwalk; I am not the boys of Afghanistan’s Maywand district, murdered and mutilated by U.S. soldiers for their trophy photo shoots; I am not my sisters, throats slit by Samuel L. Jackson.

I do not feel worthy of this anger. I play with airplanes.

Every workday I walk past a picture frame of The Blade’s front-page story on the happening. “DAY OF HELL” reads the headline. In the newspaper library, I turn yellowing pages recounting the days after. The mention of television is ubiquitous, the comparison to film instinctive. “It’s like a movie,” is the refrain, and it is — between the opening act of American Airlines 11 crashing into the North Tower at 8:46 a.m. and its climactic collapse at 10:28 a.m., exactly one hour and 42 minutes elapses. 102 minutes, just a minute more than the most common length of a Hollywood film.

For most of humanity, 9/11 is an extraordinarily expensive movie. This is not to say that it isn’t real — it is to say that what is now real is what is mediated. This is the great coup of our age, and as a reporter I am one of its willing soldiers. Perhaps I simply love my mission and believe in its greater possibilities; perhaps I’m trying to negotiate a ceasefire with the part of me that still resents the media class to which I now pledge myself. 

When does a movie happen, and where? Always and everywhere. We never stop watching 9/11. Never forget. But watching doesn’t save our memory; it changes it. It creates it, and us. If our memory is mediated, we are too. 

But mediated memory can be truer than truth. It simply speaks in metaphor rather than history. My house did shudder when those towers fell, and it’s never stopped.

First Published September 12, 2021, 12:30 p.m.