From an email from Jamy, New York City:

Yesterday, Carol walked to work, wondering about the menacing smoke visible at the south of the island. She saw both towers in place, as always. My friend Kramer phoned shortly after her departure and woke me, telling me to turn on the television. Both planes had already hit. Carol and I spoke, and shortly afterward she came home. In the course of her 20-minute walk, the first tower went down. I watched both towers go down live on camera ... at first it was impossible to understand what had happened when the first one vanished. It must be obscured by smoke, right? It must be there, right? It can't be gone ... can it? This is not merely an international symbol to the world ... this is the view in my home town.

We went out to donate blood but they were turning people away. We walked to Central Park to be out amid our city and among other NYers. As we walked west, crossing each avenue we could look south and see the smoke and ash, until we reached views where the towers had always existed and now were clearly missing.

Sitting in the park for a while, there was no air traffic except for the distant roar of military fighter jets circulating the island at high altitude.

We returned home, past long lines at a blood bank, to discover Carol's sister, Chris, and shortly afterwards her boyfriend, Mike. We came upstairs, and I prepared a dinner for us all, while we spent the evening talking, watching, thinking. I was raised to believe that when the world is coming to an end, you eat as well as you can, so we did.

They left to make their way home, and hours later, past midnight, our friend, Tim, came by on rollerblades ... he needed to get out of the house. Early in the morning, as soon as he heard some news, he went out and brought a video camera ... he reached the west side highway down around the Village level, and stopped. He took video of both towers going down. The worst of it was seeing the people jumping out of the building, clearly different from the falling debris ... and it made him wish he hadn't seen it. He posted the video on his web site and sent a mass email to friends and colleagues, and as the day wore on and word spread, the web host phoned and explained apologetically that his traffic was consuming their servers, and that they would have to take it off line soon.

Phone service, both land and cell, was intermittent ... some incoming, less outgoing, but with exceptions to both. We couldn't get on line all day because all the local att dialups are dead. Today I got online by connecting through out-of-town dialups. What phone calls did get through were from all over the country, and indeed the world. Magicians calling from all over, magicians trying to make inventory of magicians in New York, then emailing (this morning) a list of those accounted for. I got calls from Japan, Morocco ... emails from all over the world today, checking, asking, wondering ... People's concerns and generosity becomes the most desperately needed and effective antidote against the evidence of our capacity for hatred and violence. A close friend from Boston reached on the cell, but six hours later his first voicemail suddenly paged through to me ..."I'm hoping you're alive."

Although the city is mostly closed for business today, Carol is in the office with a slender staff, doing the work of journalism, telling the stories we need to make sense of the senseless.

Second Avenue, in front of our apartment, was closed off early in the morning and used as a southbound route for emergency vehicles and the like all day. The first four hours were non-stop sirens ... we saw fire trucks from well out on Long Island ... to the point that by the time the end of the night came around, Carol and I were both imagining that we heard sirens where none existed, an eerie sensation. All day the avenue was filled with streams of people, wandering, trying to figure out what to do and where to go and how to get out of the city. In the early evening the traffic changed to earth movers and the like on flat beds. Then later we saw flat beds hauling racks of huge lighting arrays, lots of generators, and emergency equipment from Con Ed, phone, etc. Carol's brother, Michael, is a fireman who works in Queens, and in the early evening his unit was moved by bus into the zone to work on the rescue; he called his wife at 8:00 pm to say he'd be there all night, and for all I know he may still be there now.

And as I finally lay in bed in the dark, I tried to determine if the sirens in my head were real, or imagined.