World Trade Center

The World Trade Center becomes a focal point for two sharply opposed responses to September 11: ordinary people confronting catastrophe as incomprehensible loss, and the True Knot treating the disaster as a source of nourishment. The attacks’ force extends beyond the towers themselves, reaching a hospital room where Abra Stone suddenly falls quiet and a crowd at Sinatra Park where Rose the Hat’s followers watch, wait, and breathe deeply. In this contrast, the site is not only the setting of a national tragedy but the center of a struggle over how suffering is witnessed and used.

The Attacks and Their Immediate Reach

On the morning of September 11, a passenger jet struck the World Trade Center. At the hospital, John Dalton arrives after receiving a message and asks David Stone whether he has heard what happened. David, distracted until then, becomes aware of the commotion outside: people speaking loudly, some crying, and a nurse passing with a blotchy, tear-streaked face. Dalton tells him that a plane has hit the Trade Center and that no one thinks it was an accident. The news enters a setting where an infant’s distress had seemed to be the immediate concern; suddenly, that small crisis is surrounded by a much larger one.

The sequence gives the attacks an exact, unsettling rhythm. American Airlines Flight 11 strikes first; United Airlines Flight 175 hits the South Tower seventeen minutes later, at 9:03 a.m. At that same minute, Abra abruptly stops crying. By 9:04, she is asleep. The narration places her change beside the second impact without explaining it away: her sudden stillness is a concrete event, while its coincidence with the news leaves the connection charged with the book’s supernatural uncertainty. The catastrophe is registered both as public fact and as something that seems to touch Abra beyond ordinary awareness.

On the drive back to Anniston, David and Lucy Stone listen to the radio while Abra sleeps peacefully in her car seat. The reports accumulate into a wider picture: two aircraft in New York, one near Washington, and another down in rural Pennsylvania. David listens until the newscaster gives the airlines and flight numbers, then reaches over and turns off the radio. His movement does not undo what he has heard; it marks the point at which continued exposure becomes unbearable. When he begins to tell Lucy that he dreamed something, she says she knows and that she dreamed too. Their exchange leaves the precise content unspoken, framing the event through shock and shared foreboding rather than explanation.

The True Knot as Spectators

The True Knot watches the attacks from a parking lot, passing around four pairs of binoculars. Sinatra Park would offer a better view, but Rose understands that arriving there too early might attract suspicion. Her caution sets the group’s conduct against the day’s unfolding public emergency: even in the presence of an event drawing crowds, the True Knot’s first concern is how to remain inconspicuous. The group waits until around ten, when crowds have gathered along the riverbank, before moving to the park.

The crowd at Sinatra Park is packed and mostly silent; some people weep. Apron Annie and Black-Eyed Sue can cry on demand, while the others adopt expressions of sorrow, solemnity, and amazement. The True Knot fits among the spectators by performing the visible signs of grief, making concealment a form of imitation. Their presence turns the park into a place of double witnessing: people have come to look toward catastrophe, while the True Knot watches with a purpose no ordinary spectator shares.

They remain for most of the day, standing at the iron rail without talking among themselves. The day is cloudless and beautiful apart from the thick billows rising in Lower Manhattan. The narration stresses their long, slow, deep breaths, comparing them to tourists drawing in sea air at Pemaquid Point or Quoddy Head. Rose removes her top hat and holds it at her side as a sign of respect. The gesture resembles mourning, but the group’s breath-taking and its later sense of invigoration complicate that performance: reverence and predation occupy the same scene.

Return, Nourishment, and Narrative Contrast

At four o’clock the True Knot returns to its encampment in the parking lot, invigorated. The group plans to come back the next day, and the day after that, continuing until the good steam is exhausted; then it will move on. The repeated visits make the World Trade Center’s devastation more than a single spectacle for the group. The place becomes a temporary source within its itinerant pattern of feeding, and the crowd’s prolonged attention provides cover for that exploitation.

The contrast with David and Lucy is decisive. For them, the news overwhelms ordinary conversation and leaves an ominous dream only partly voiced. For the True Knot, the same catastrophe is something to observe, breathe in, and revisit. The park’s rail separates the watchers from the disaster while allowing the group to treat distance as opportunity. The group’s apparent respect, especially Rose’s lowered hat, cannot erase the practical purpose of its return.

The World Trade Center’s narrative significance therefore lies in the divergent meanings attached to one event. Its destruction interrupts the Stones’ immediate world, coincides with Abra’s unexplained stillness, and draws the True Knot into a sustained act of watching and feeding. The site links public disaster to private foreboding and supernatural danger; the same clouds rising over Lower Manhattan are, for the True Knot, both a scene of mourning and a resource to be consumed.