I was half-listening to the local public radio station as I waited. An announcement came over the air about some kind of incident at the World Trade Center. Then the FM signal went out. My wife eventually found the station on AM. A witness was reporting having seen a plane fly low across the city and into one of the towers. We turned on the TV to find an image of a tower with gray smoke pouring from an enormous gash high up, like a fatal head wound.

Years before, I had worked in the World Trade Center, on the 82nd floor, teaching English to Japanese businessmen. I’d had to change elevators on the way up, like transferring on the subway. I could remember the sunlight coming in through the narrow windows. To see this tower burning was like looking back at the shore on that day of good waves in my youth, when I found civilian life so foreign. Only this time I could see myself there. I was up there in the sheer, pitiless air of the 82nd floor.

The phone rang. It was my friend. He said he had noticed the smoke in the sky after dropping his daughter off at nursery school. When he got back to his house, he went up to the roof and saw a long streak of smoke with bits of white glitter in it — office paper, he realized. It led all the way back to the tower. He was weeping as he told me.

Then the second plane hit.

The college canceled classes. I walked over to my class and told my students in person, as if I had had every intention of teaching. I had little else to say. I was too stunned. They went up to the roofs of the campus buildings; I went home. Later, I heard their shouts as first one then the other tower collapsed.

The next day there were small leftover waves from the hurricane swell. I did what I usually do when I’ve lost my bearings: I headed for the ocean, driving out to Long Beach on my own. I was thinking about stories I had read on the internet about surfers who had called in sick to jobs at places like Cantor Fitzgerald and lived. I took a wrong turn and wound up on one of the ring roads of Kennedy Airport. When I realized my mistake, I tried to make a U-turn. A cluster of plainclothes policemen staking out the intersection angrily waved me down, leaning into the windows of my car to ask why I turned around when I saw them.

“I got lost,” I said. I pointed at my board where it lay in the back. “I’m just trying to go surfing.”