I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This by Nadja Spiegelman

of red beams. They hung in the air, shimmering. And then they too became powder, became particles, became the air and fell, and everything fell, everything fell.
    My mother screamed the name of her friend who lived beneath the towers. A huge white cloud was moving toward us. I watched as my school disappeared. All around us, people turned and began to run uptown. I had grown up in a city of skyscrapers. They weren’t supposed to fall down.
    â€œ
Run!
” someone shouted at us as he passed. “The smoke will kill you!” And then I was very high up in the air. Somewhere on the walkway below, a girl turned and began walking. From where I floated, I could just make out the words she was saying: “
My friends, my school, my friends, my school!
” Over and over, like an incantation. A stranger offered her water. She didn’t respond.
    She should take that water,
I thought.
She needs to calm down.
    My father took the water and pressed it into my hands. And then I was back in my body. The words were coming out of my own mouth. I forced a sip down my throat.
    We turned away from the river, onto Canal Street, and became just the three of us once more. The street was achingly familiar. We had walked this way many times, my family and I. But it was different now, in a way I could not name.
    Ahead of us, a man had set up an easel on the sidewalk. He was absorbed in his painting.
Look,
I said, tugging on my father’s arm. On the canvas, the towers burned. But past him, in the real skyline above, the towers were gone.
    â€”
    I TOLD THIS STORY so many times over the years that it ceased being a memory. On rare occasions, when speaking to a close friend, I could still feel the aftershocks of emotion. But most times I simply felt myself stepping through a series of empty images that I had stepped through many times before. I could not turn my head left or right. I could not see the details I hadn’t already told. Once, at a party, a girl said with delight, “
Ooh,
you’re giving me shivers!” and I felt the twisted pleasure of doing myself violence.
    For the most part, I stopped talking about it. When I did, I never included the man painting on the street. That’s my father’sstory now, immortalized in the comic he wrote about the day. I wonder, at times, if I can still see that red skeleton of beams hanging in the air or if I only see the drawing he made of them. We’d talked about it, he and I, before he drew the image: how you didn’t see that in the newsreel. So you saw it, too, he said, and I had. I had seen it, too. But my memories were so easily overwritten by his. They squared themselves away into comic book panels that contained pictures of me I had not even posed for.
    They sent us back to school while the ruins were still red embers. We showed our high school ID cards to the federal guard stationed at Canal Street, downtown still off-limits to most. Our return was televised: the brave students of Stuyvesant High School. Journalists found and called our home phone numbers. Our teachers spoke over clanging metal as cranes lifted pieces of the skyscrapers onto the barges outside our windows. A man in a full yellow hazmat suit stepped into our classroom and told us to ignore him. The small device in his hand went
beep beep beep BEEPBEEPBEEP
. He made a few notes and left silently. A social worker handed out a worksheet:
If Lucy feels alienated from the adults around her, if Lucy has trouble sleeping at night, if Lucy becomes anxious when watching the news, then Lucy has post-traumatic stress disorder
.
    My hand shot straight up in the air. “Lucy sounds like a normal teenager,” I said with righteous fury. “Have you
seen
the news these days?”
    The social workers begged us to talk to them. We didn’t even talk to one another. The hallway walls filled with messages sent from schools nationwide. “Our prayers are with you,” surrounded by