I got there a week later, Sept. 18. I had decided that if anyone asked me, I would offer my services as a psychologist, to work with people who were terrified and grieving. When Crisis Management International (a consulting firm that specializes in helping companies and their employees cope with traumatic events) called, I left the next day. The concrete dust was still in the air the night I got there. It gave the street lights an orange haze.

The trip had been strange. On the way to the airport, I wondered what some fanatic might do to my flight. At the ticket counter of USAir, the busiest carrier in the Tampa airport, there were only six people at 5:30 p.m. Security took 30 seconds because there were so few passengers flying. This trip did not seem like a good idea.

Then I sat down in a waiting area beside gates for 10 planes. It looked like it could hold a thousand people. There were 40 of us scattered in a sea of empty chairs. Nobody looked happy to be there. Someone announced a flight to Pittsburgh that I sometimes took. Usually, the plane was full. This time, when they called it, two guys got up and walked to the gate. Finally, the bizarre quality of it allbecame reassuring. I decided that they had already won this round, that they didn't need to hijack any more planes, that next time they would do something else. I relaxed and read the newspaper.

My flight arrived at LaGuardia with 30 passengers on an aircraft that held 120. We walked down an empty concourse half an hour ahead of schedule. I picked up the luggage already waiting for me, signaled to one of the porters who stood there hoping someone would come, and took a waiting cab into the city. I could smell, and see, the concrete dust as we came off the bridge into Manhattan.

The next day, I started going out to meet with people who had asked for someone to do that. I loved walking into a different office every day, telling people I'd come from Florida to talk to them. I loved going in by myself and sitting down with them, finding out what they needed, and figuring out how to do it that day before I left. What I heard made me realize that people who were there that day had been through a war. I heard what it was like to see the air outside become totally dark at 10 a.m., to be afraid of the fumes that could come in, to walk through streets filled with rubble and smashed cars.

Saturday morning, the stories of what it was like the day the planes came were driven home by the smell of thousands of dead people. The smell was there as soon as the subway doors opened at the City Hall stop. I came up the stairs looking around for a cigar store. I wanted to do what homicide detectives sometimes do, smoke a cigar to cover the smell of death. I hadn't had one in about 20 years, but that day I needed one. In that part of lower Manhattan, a yellow fog hung in the air. When I saw a soldier sitting at his post without his gas mask, I wondered how he could stand it.

All this made it seem like common sense to find everyone involved, and kill them. The idea still appeals to me. Other ideas about Sept. 11, what it means or what to do, have filled the air since. My liberal friends talked of theories of how our sins, such as globalization, made the tragedy happen. But the idea I like best is one that a construction worker demonstrated somewhere just south of Central Park, while I was still in New York.

That morning, I was learning firsthand that disaster work means being involved in small disasters of your own. The place where I thought I was supposed to be turned out to be a construction site. The employees I was supposed to see were simply not there. When I tried to call the people who assigned me, my cell phone couldn't get through. Finding a public telephone on the street, I tried to manage getting out change and dialing while holding open a loose-leaf notebook that had the phone number for the office and the sheet describing my assignment. When I started to get out a pen to write down where I needed to go, the notebook fell in mud left by the previous day's rain. I then tried to manage writing in the notebook without getting mud on my work clothes, the jacket and tie I was wearing to look professional.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder. When I looked up, he handed me a huge fistful of paper towels. One of the construction workers had seen my problem, gone inside, pulled the towels off the roll, and come back outside to give them to me. When I took them, open-mouthed, he turned around without a word and walked back toward the building they were reconstructing. As I yelled, "Thank you!" he kept on walking, waving his hand as he went in the door.

– Charles Wheaton is a freelance writer who lives in Clearwater.