The September 11 attacks enter the novel not as a fully narrated historical episode but as a remembered disaster that shapes how people respond to a new blackout. For Clay, Amanda, Ruth, and G. H., the attacks provide a frame of comparison: they make the possibility of catastrophe immediate, but do not tell anyone what is happening now. The memories are partial and personal, and the effort to draw certainty from them only exposes how much remains unknown.

Recalled Against the Blackout

When the lights go out across the East Coast, Clay and Amanda compare the disruption with earlier blackouts, including the 2003 grid failure. Clay remembers that he crossed the Manhattan Bridge during that earlier outage and could not reach Amanda by phone. His recollection then turns to September 11: people were already remembering the attacks, he says, but the blackout had felt much less terrible than that day. The comparison is intimate as well as civic. Clay places his worry for Amanda inside a shared memory of a city in crisis, while acknowledging that the blackout and the attacks did not carry the same weight.

The conversation takes place amid uncertainty about the current event. Amanda has seen a news alert reporting a major blackout on the East Coast, but the app will not open. Later, the television offers only the Emergency Broadcast System screen, beeps, and static. The contrast is consequential: the characters can invoke September 11, but their present-day communications cannot provide the kind of information that might distinguish an outage from a larger threat. The familiar disaster supplies a vocabulary for fear, not an explanation.

Personal Memories and Limits of Evidence

G. H. recalls being at Balthazar for breakfast on September 11, close to the towers. He remembers the meal and stresses that he heard nothing at first. He says that sirens came later, followed by people in the restaurant beginning to talk. His account resists the assumption that a person near a disaster must immediately understand what is happening. Information reaches him indirectly, through sound and other people’s conversation, rather than as a clear view of the event itself.

That memory unsettles an argument Clay is making during the blackout. Clay reasons that a bomb would have produced a boom, and treats the absence of such a sound as evidence against that possibility. G. H.’s experience complicates the inference: proximity to the towers did not mean he heard the attacks as they happened. The novel does not use his recollection to establish the cause of the current blackout; instead, it shows why confident conclusions drawn from what someone did or did not hear may be unreliable.

Amanda asks the others not to talk about September 11. Her discomfort marks a limit within the discussion: a familiar reference point is not neutral or reassuring for everyone present. G. H. continues by explaining that he heard sirens and then learned from people at the restaurant what had happened. The difference between his recollection and Amanda’s response makes the conversation less like a shared, settled account than an encounter with memories that carry unequal emotional force.

Terror, Speculation, and the Present Crisis

As the blackout continues, the characters speculate about bombs, missiles, and terrorism. One suggestion links the current outage and the earlier mysterious noise, imagining that a bomb might explain both. The thought turns quickly toward the work that precedes an attack: terrorists plan, meet, raise money, and practice. The novel notes that the nineteen attackers had trained in flight simulators, emphasizing the hidden preparation that television images cannot show. This detail makes an attack seem at once organized and difficult to anticipate from the fragments available to people caught in its aftermath.

But the characters have no evidence that the blackout is an attack. G. H. regrets joining the speculation and urges attention to what can actually be seen. Ruth, meanwhile, fears for her daughter and grandsons and imagines threats from different parts of the world. The attacks thus return not as an answer but as a source of possible scenarios, each more frightening than the last. Remembering a previous catastrophe can make danger legible, yet it can also encourage people to fit a new event to an old pattern without knowing whether the pattern applies.

Narrative Significance

The references to September 11 connect private anxiety with collective memory. Clay’s memory of crossing the bridge is bound to his inability to reach Amanda; G. H.’s begins with an ordinary breakfast and the delayed arrival of news. Neither recollection gives the characters a complete account of the past or reliable foresight about the present. Instead, each shows how crisis is encountered through partial signals, relationships, and retrospective interpretation.

That uncertainty echoes Ruth’s understanding that social order depends on a tacit agreement that it will hold. The blackout makes that agreement feel fragile, while the memory of September 11 supplies a precedent for fear without guaranteeing that the current crisis has the same cause or scale. In this way, the attacks function as a measure of remembered danger and a warning against mistaking memory for knowledge: the characters know that catastrophe has happened before, but that knowledge cannot tell them what has happened now.