Xan got up from the booth first. "That’s it!" he barked. "I’m done. Are you fucking crazy?"

            "She’s willing to pay us ten million in advance," Appleby said, putting extra emphasis on the dollar amount.

            "I don’t care if we’re getting offered a hundred million," Xan shouted back. "I’m not going to relive the most fucked up day of my life for some rich bitch who feels guilty that her husband is in the oil business. Tell her to get a ‘Never Forget’ bumper sticker for her SUV like the other soccer moms. I’m going back to D.C."

            The bell above the door to the fake Howard Johnson’s jingled, and that was the last I ever saw of Xan.

            "I think I might be out too," I said, getting up to follow him out the door.

            "You can’t quit," Appleby said. "This one’s going to be our greatest job ever."

            "I’m sorry, Mr. Appleby."

            Bobby followed me outside. Xan was already a ghost. "Man, you have to stay," Bobby pleaded. "This is the big one."

            "No way," I said. "You know I haven’t been into this thing for a while now, and this shit just feels wrong."

            His mind was working in that crazy way that got us here to begin with. "You don’t get it," he said. "You arrived late to the show. You didn’t move here until after the shit went down. Being here on that day . . . I can’t even describe it. It was like, before 9/11 I was just some kid from the suburbs who was playing in the big city. But going through that shit, after it was over . . . all I know is, after that I felt like I was really a part of this city. We can cry in our beer over not seeing the Ramones play CBGBs, but those towers falling was the day that really made this town. This is your chance to know what it was like. Man, this is your chance to stop being the small town boy and start being a real New Yorker."

Bobby’s speech wasn’t enough. If I was going to do this, I had to meet the person I was doing this for. A week later, she came into the Old New York offices. The client was a transplant from Colorado who moved to New York a couple years back, well after the events of 9/11. She told us how she didn’t even know about the planes and the Towers as it was happening, that she was in a therapy session the whole time and only found out after she reached the exit room. Since moving to New York, she’d felt like an outsider, like the whole city had been part of some shared experience that she missed out on. No matter what she tried, she couldn’t help but feel like a tourist.

Did I feel sorry for her, or did I identify with her? I had to find out which it was. I decided to ride with Appleby one last time.

I always knew the man had connections, and I thought he had limits. But this woman—she must have a seriously connected husband, because she got us clearance to do shit I never would have thought possible. We got to use authentic NYPD and FDNY uniforms, vehicles, and equipment. We got to study special footage and reports so our reenactment would be as accurate as possible. But most amazingly, we got to stage the whole thing near Ground Zero.

            Next to the hole where the towers used to be, we built a scaled-down façade replica with a limited interior that was designed to mimic one floor of the north tower and an emergency stairwell for our client to escape through. The windows on the floor were actually giant flatscreen televisions that would show computer-generated footage of the view of the south tower being hit and then collapsing. The whole structure was rigged with effects to simulate what it was like inside the tower that day. By the time the client made it outside, our north tower would be collapsing behind her, and off to the side she would see a smoldering ruin representing south tower.

Like with the Times Square job, most of the local merchants fell in line. Some of them were still recovering from the financial hit from 9/11 and welcomed the business the spectacle would attract. One man, a Korean deli owner, told a New York 1 reporter that we were "monsters" and "grave robbers" for what we were doing. Appleby loved the controversy.

The morning of the reenactment, our client was sitting at a desk, pretending to be working for the financial firm her husband owned. As it turned out, our client wasn’t just feeling like an outsider, but she was also feeling guilty because her husband’s firm lost most of their New York staff due to poor training on evacuation procedures. The desk the client was sitting at was a customer service rep she’d talked to once when she dialed the wrong extension. It was the only company drone she’d ever talked to. She couldn’t remember her name.

The clock ticked 8:46, one of our technicians threw a switch, and the client felt the building shudder from the simulated impact. Alarms went off, emergency lighting kicked in, some extras "panicked," others began to "improvise" an evacuation. The client had been assigned to a specific actor, one who had also trained as a real-life EMT. She stuck close to him as she watched the TV screens showing the second plane hit the other tower. She saw tiny CGI people jump out the windows and plunged to their replicated deaths.

We witnessed the whole thing on monitors in the control booth at ground level. Our client handler guided the woman toward the stairs. We switched to another camera and watched them begin their intricately choreographed descent.

Something exploded inside the building.

            The monitor went dark.

            "What happened?" Appleby asked, whacking the screen.

            "It’s not the TV," a technician said. "It’s got to be the internal cameras."

            "Check it out," Appleby ordered. "I want to know what’s going on in there."

            Minutes passed with no word. We sent two men into the building to investigate. More time. And then, over the radio: "—dead!" the voice crackled. "Handler dead! . . Stairs collapsed . . . Neck snapped."

            I looked at Appleby, but he didn’t turn away from the tower. Grabbing the walkie-talkie, he asked, "Is the client okay? Repeat. Is the client okay?"

            Five long seconds.

"Client okay…"

"…bringing out now."

A few minutes later, the client emerged from the tower, streaks of char streaming down her face from the tears. Once outside, she collapsed to the ground as our site medic ran to treat her.

            "I’m sorry!" she cried.  "I’m sorry! I just wanted to know. I didn’t mean to— I just wanted to know!"

            I turned to Bobby. "Fuck! What are we going to do?"

            "We’re going to get sued!" Bobby said.

            "Fuck sued," I said. "We’re all going to jail." I turned to Appleby. "What are we going to do?"

            But he didn’t look at me. "Do you see that?" he said, watching the client’s emotional breakdown. "That woman is a wreck. A real wreck. Those aren’t fake tears she’s crying. That’s real anguish she’s going through." And then he turned to me with that famous smile on his face. "Make sure we charge her extra for that."

In the seven years Kevin MacDonald has lived in New York, he's worked in varying capacities at several major publishing houses and is completing his masters in creative writing at City College. He lives in Astoria, Queens because Manhattan is like an amusement park and, while it's fun to ride the rides, at some point you need to get away from the people in the funny animal costumes.

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