Survivor

I’m the guy who walked out of the building and the building fell down.

That’s certainly the sort of experience that’s going to stay with you, but I sure as hell never thought it would come to define me to such an extent.

A close call like that is all it takes anymore to make a man a celebrity in America. I guess it bothers me, though, to think that might be it for me, that an accident, an utter fluke, might represent …what? My legacy? My entire life boiled down to one terrible moment?

Because in that instant I became a career survivor, the most hapless sort of success story, a kind of superstar of random fate, almost, you’d think, a hero.

You’ve probably see the video footage, the tape that was replayed thousands of times on the television news, a tape that was itself an accident, shot by a German tourist who was panning the square outside the building. It was purely happenstance. They had to blow the sequence up, of course, but there I unmistakably am, purportedly the last person to make it out of the building alive.

I’ve just exited the revolving door in the west lobby, my briefcase dangling from one hand and the other arm swinging free of the entrance. I take three steps into the square and then duck instinctively, covering the back of my head with my right hand. And then, almost as if fleeing a crime in which I had some complicity or foreknowledge, I run, ambling like a drunk right into the inescapable arms of what now passes for history.