The building was on fire and there was no way down the stairs. Somehow, he was able to bear hearing it again.We heard her tell him through her sobbing that there was no escape for her. A TV station played it to us, while it showed the husband standing there listening. She left her last message to him on the answering machine. The tower was burning around her, and she was speaking on her mobile phone. A new technology has shown us an ancient, human universal.Ī San Francisco husband slept through his wife's call from the World Trade Centre. Whatever the immediate circumstances, what was striking was what they had in common. All through Thursday we heard from the bereaved how they took those last calls. Now, in catastrophe, if there is time enough, it is there in our dying moments. The mobile phone has inserted itself into every crevice of our daily lives. But Manhattan is one of the most sophisticated cities in the world, and there were some uniquely modern elements to this nightmare that bound us closer to it. It reminded us of other tragedies, of wars and natural disasters around the world. The silent relatives grouped around the entrances to hospitals or wandering the streets with their photographs was a terrible sight.

This was what it was always really about. We were beginning to grasp the human cost. Each individual death is an explosion in itself, wrecking the lives of those nearest. By Thursday I noticed among friends, and in TV and radio commentaries, a new mood of exhaustion and despair. The reckoning, of course, was with the personal. We knew there was a greater reckoning ahead, but we could not quite feel it yet. We babbled, by email, on the phone, around kitchen tables. In our delirium, most of us wanted to talk.

Ian mcewan atonement 2001