The essay begins with his awareness of the attacks — watching television, feeling the pull toward the site, making the decision to go. It moves through his arrival and his hours of walking the site before finding Engine 55. It describes the bucket brigade, the body bags, the dust. It records the coworker’s remark about twenty years. It ends with the emotional aftermath: the depression, the anxiety, the therapy, the statement that the experience is still with him twenty years later.
What the essay does not contain is also significant. It does not contain dramatic rescues. It does not contain specific conversations with survivors. It does not contain the kind of cinematic detail — the precisely remembered word, the specific face, the decisive moment — that memoir writing often deploys to give narrative shape to experience. Buscemi’s account is consistently approximate where it is not specific, and consistently honest about the approximations: he was there “for about five days,” working “shifts” that were long. He “walked around for hours” before finding his company. These are the honest qualifications of a person reporting memory rather than manufacturing narrative.
The emotional content of the essay is similarly careful. He describes depression and anxiety as things that happened — attributed, dated, presented as past rather than ongoing states — and he describes the PTSD in the same terms: “definitely” has it, “it’s still with me,” but framed as his 2021 account of his experience rather than as a current clinical statement. He distinguishes the experience at the time (“It actually felt good to be there”) from the experience afterward (“It wasn’t until I stopped that I really felt the full impact of what had happened”). This is a phenomenologically accurate account of how people often experience acute stress and its aftermath, and it is presented as his experience rather than as a generalization.