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I used to be an inveterate movie-goer. There were times I went to up to three movies a week. But I hadn’t gone for a while, and when the movie “Flight 93” came out, I went to see it with a few people.

The theater was about 70-80% full.

The movie was so powerful that when it ended, and the lights came on, you could hear a pin drop.

Nobody moved.

I believe at that point, there were maybe a hundred people in there (I could be off) but I know for a fact that there were not just a hundred people in stunned silence. It wasn’t stunned silence.

I realized that every single person in that room was reliving, in an extremely private and invisible way, a time in their lives that was so significant to them, and that absolute river of thought was completely different for each of those people.

Outwardly, if I had looked back at the people behind me in that movie theater to see the looks on their faces, I expected to see something obvious like grief or anger on their faces. I didn’t look back. But I feel certain that if I had, the the look frozen on their faces would have probably been the last one they had as the movie ended, stuck there like a kabuki mask, fixed in place.

But underneath whatever mask they wore, there was a river of remembered events rushing under the skin of each of those people.

I think that, because that was exactly how I perceived myself in that moment, and there seemed something universal about it, I just felt that everyone was responding the same as I did.

When the movie ended, and the lights came up, not being still “inside” the movie, I remembered that day.

I remembered that I just could not watch the television as other people were doing. I work in a hospital, and patients, doctors, nurses, technologists, and custodial personnel were all clustered around televisions in the waiting rooms. Everyone was uniformly staring fixedly up at those CRT televisions. There were two, or maybe three of those bulky televisions on a large supporting structure in the middle of our waiting room, mounted near the overhead and facing outwards in a small circle so no matter where you were seated in the waiting room, you could see a screen.

When I walked in, there was a crowd of people gathered in a circle around this bank of televisions, all looking upwards at them. In my mind, it is much the opposite of what we have now. Back then, we all look up at a screen of images. Now, we look down at an object flashing images in our hands. I find that contrast interesting.

Anyway, it broke my heart. I couldn’t watch it. I went immediately back to my office in a permanent trailer, and got back to work. I was emailing people, and I did a group email expressing how I felt in my heart that this was a turning point in all of our lives. I am someone who keeps everything including emails, so I had all of those communications from that day. And then, around 2014, we went from using Outlook to using Gmail and they deleted my whole archive.

I was communicating with people via email when that happened alone in my office with only the light from the window. I didn’t even want the overhead lights on, even though it was a workday.

Then I heard the unmistakeable sound of military jet engines, and a lot of them. I ran outside, and saw a flight of maybe seven to twelve F-15’s going over at perhaps 500 feet. Very low, and very slow.

They were in single file, a long string of them, going in to land. As they flew directly over our heads, they rolled slightly from side to side, their landing gear looking awkward in an odd way. As if they shouldn’t have been maneuvering normally like that at speeds and altitudes that low.

Personally, I have spent a good amount of time around military aircraft, and it was very odd to me. I wondered why they were doing that as they lined up to land, I had never seen anything quite like that in four years on a carrier.

As I was taking this all in, a woman nearby blurted out “Look what Bush has done!”

I knew and generally liked this older woman, but that made me boil and I said hotly to her “Why don’t you keep that shit to yourself?”

When I went back into the trailer, my phone rang, and it was the Chair of my department who asked me politely if I could come over to her office. It is not something one takes as anything less than an order. That physician was an ex-Army Colonel who had made a career in the Medical Corps involved near the top in the digitiazation of medical images, she was an Indian-American, and was a woman. She was extremely aggressive, very demanding, and I thought she was often rude and occasionally abusive to people.

I once heard her profanely threaten, as she opened the door to our small meeting room and threatened to shoot a someone in the knees with a shotgun because she thought he had gone back on his word. My boss, who well knew how to handle her, said with a completely calm and straight face “Doctor, you can’t go around threatening to shoot people in the knees.”

When he said this, her face brightened in an odd way and she said “Oh. I can’t?”

I heard, sometime after she left us (via an anonymously mailed newspaper clipping to me) that she had been sued by another doctor who said she threatened his life. In court, the article said that the guy suing her maintained that my former boss said: “I have access to a flamethrower, have had training in the Army, and I know how to use it.”

She was not a person to be trifled with. When she called, she expected action. But it was a little unusual, and it was a long walk to her office, all the way at the other side of our facility. I wondered what it could be about.

When I walked in, she had an awful look on her face, and I could tell she was extremely upset, but not in the manner of being upset that I was well used to see. Her eyes were a bit red and puffy, and I had never seen her like that. She asked me some perfunctory question, then asked me to sit down.

She said she had been trying to call the Pentagon all day to check on someone she was close to who worked there, but nothing was getting through. She reached into her desk drawer and said “I want you to have these” as she pulled out a small silver object. She handed it to me, and I saw it was the insignia of a Bird Colonel. I think she liked me because I had served in the military and I think she felt comfortable around me. They will talk about her at my hospital as long as any institutional memory of her remains. When I go, a large piece of that will go with me.

Then, we began to hear rumors. We heard the husband of another of my former bosses had been on one of the planes, American Airlines Flight 11. That hit close to home. I had gone out to dinners with him and my boss, socialized, went to Christmas Parties and such, and the last time I had seen him was years before 9/11, when I had stayed at my boss’s place near a lake. He and I had stayed up late on the deck near the water, drinking beers and shooting the breeze.

I relate all this for a reason.

Everything I wrote above was a stream of thought that began hitting me as soon as the screen went black on that movie, “Flight 93”. I have zero doubt that every patron in that theater had a rush of thoughts just like mine, and that video reel of thoughts began in everyone’s minds right then. I think people in that crowd were completely immersed inside their own minds.

My story began with I saw an email, and walked into the patient waiting room...”

Everyone has theirs. For example, this was how someone else’s story began: “I was at Jury Duty in a large metropolitan area and after it happened we all got sent home...” and so on.

In that now briliantly lighted theater as soon as the “Flight 93” movie had ended, I heard a lone low voice say “F**k Them.” We knew exactly how he felt.