9/11 Has Lost His Soul:
It was worse than most mornings today. 9/11 awoke with diarrhea, cold sweat, head that felt like he was beaten with a sledgehammer, and the DTs. Shaking, shitting, and shoveling painkillers in his mouth like a spastic child with an extra large bag of M&Ms, 9/11 blamed the smack from last night. Goddamn, he thought, he had to give up the smack, even if he told himself it was only a taste every now and then. Usually when it got close to his date on the calendar. Then, well, who wouldn't need that pinch and warmth, that glow searing through the veins?

9/11 looked around his trashed studio in Queens, having been priced out of lower Manhattan a couple of years ago. He needed to clean up - toss out the pizza boxes, the liquor bottles, the cum-stained tissues, the homemade collage porn where he had pasted various faces on the bodies of naked dudes and chicks - Giuliani on a Russian coke whore with her legs over her head, McCain on a twink spreading his ass cheeks, Bush bent over a rock with Bill Clinton fucking her ass with a strap-on, Bin Laden blowing himself. Each one at different times inspiring 9/11 to jack it, usually with CNN on the TV, god, CNN is a porn flick soundtrack from hell.

He knows he'll head down to the hole today. He'll cackle at the Sisyphean uselessness of the efforts going on down there, the way the Towers are inverted now, a void, an abyss, how they keep building and building with nothing appearing. So much corruption and waste, so much worthless praise, a rank absurdity that'd make Camus hang up his pen and do nothing but publish pictures of the site of the Freedom Tower and say, "This." The human condition, the American condition, embodied in the fact that nothing can be accomplished as long as that hole is treated as anything more than what it is: a hole.

Like that emptiness, constantly, people wanted to ascribe to 9/11 something more than what he was, a marker and nothing else. But, no, he listened at first to those who invested in him aspects miraculous or mystical. He thought he had superpowers, a notion that dissipated quickly when he broke his arm after leaping from the top of a brownstone and after he got his ass kicked attempting to break up a bar fight. After that, it was just despair watching so many posers and losers claim that their deeds and battles were his. Christ, how easy it was to hit the bottle, how simple to score the crack and heroin, how just a name drop got him scrips to whatever pills he needed. At his lowest point, snorting ground up Adderall off a Condi-lookalike tranny hooker's pre-op dick, he wished he could just go into some kind of coma and awaken thirty, fifty, a hundred years in the future.

But 9/11 knows, better than most, that nothing will have changed generations from now. From his toilet, he watches the White House's moment of silence, all four of them, Bushes and Cheneys, in black, awkwardly standing in a row on the lawn, Laura looking like she's wearing ninja pajamas. The seventh anniversary "fact sheet" from the Oval Office had made everything after the date about the date, transforming years of war and destruction into planets orbiting George W. Bush as the sun, listing all the "accomplishments" this president had committed in his name, as if Bush owns it. "Fuck it," 9/11 half-moans, "He can have it." He wipes and flushes, wonders if he should order some pizza.

In the end, he knows, he knows, he knows he'll just end up where he always does, face down in a pool of his own vomit, the needle hopefully out of his arm. 9/11 doesn't know how to cope anymore. He doesn't know who he is. He's too weak, too exhausted to figure it out. Ultimately, someone's gonna have to tell him before he just disappears, too, into that sinkhole of history.