From Slushpile.net - Jay McInerney, literary chronicler of New York City, stood in his large window struggling with a broken shade. He wasn’t actually paying attention to the view–he’d seen it many times before: the wide expanse of water towers and fire escapes, the blossom of Wall Street, and the Twin Towers lurching out of the sea. Focusing on the errant shade, he glimpsed a flash of red-orange on the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

“God,” he thought. “That almost looked like a plane hit there.” He returned to the window shade. And then his phone rang.

“When I turned on the television, I was looking at the same view that I was out my window,” he says. For the next two hours, he watched the catastrophe through his window pane. In the following weeks, McInerney volunteered at a soup kitchen feeding policemen, iron workers, and rescue personnel. But the haunted scene from that window and the sensation of that red-orange flash drove him from the apartment. He moved two months later, unsure if he would ever write fiction again.

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