It was ten pm in Japan. I was in a small bar near my apartment, drinking with two Anglo-Indian guys from my building, English teachers at one of the larger chains. They were complaining about their working conditions and how their students always seemed disappointed to see them, and would ask if they were really English despite their thick London accents.
The bartender was squat and sharp headed, a muscular pyramid of a man unusually massive for the country, and I liked to imagine that perhaps he had been a sumo wrestler, though I never saw any evidence of this. He spoke almost no English, but seemed to like watching sports with us. I suspect he enjoyed company but not conversation because he would look irritable after a while when Japanese customers spoke to him.
First one of the teachers got a text from his girlfriend in Kuala Lumpur: she said there was something strange on the BBC about an accident in New York, an accident with a plane and a building. Then the rugby game we'd been watching on the bar's small television changed to a view of the New York skyline.
At this point both towers are already burning. They were of course large structures but on the little television screen they appeared very small. The announcers were talking in Japanese and the bartender shook his head.
After that they start playing the footage of the second plane crashing into the building over and over and one genius among us, perhaps me, said that's no accident.
The bartender solemnly poured us each a new drink. Shook his head again. No good.
The guy without a girlfriend in Kuala Lampur—Raj, I think his name was, or maybe not—picked up his glass and drained it in a long swallow, coughing slightly. He was short, with an older man's belly and a face that was too bony and hard for his soft body.
There's going to be a war. He said this with what sounded like great certainty, then he stood, wobbling slightly, and without saying goodbye or anything at all stepped out of the bar and into the alley, where after a moment we heard him retching violently.
None of us went outside. The bartender polished glasses without looking down.
Instead for what seemed like an interminable time our heads tracked the second plane across the screen like a ball at a slow tennis match. Watching, as by the miracle of rewinding tape, the plane's destruction was undone and it was flung backwards from a fireball which closed like an inhaled breath, until at a certain distance the gravitational force of the building asserted itself, or fate insisted it would not be cheated, or the producer pressed play, and the arrow accelerated across the screen again.
