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forgave myself.
    Apparently I’d forgotten that in fact the trophy WAS a goose—alive and big as me but a loud purple. Later that night after the applause and congratulations, after the victory celebration, we wandered down a hotel corridor. The goose wanted to go back to the bar, got a bit nasty about this. All I wondered was how I was going to get it through airport security and onto the plane.

    It was, of course, a dream, possibly brought on by this being the night before the Failbeck Memorial Service. I awoke with a strong sense of disappointment. It was as if the dream was a vision of an alternate life as opposed to the gooseless existence in which I found myself.
    There’s prophecy and warning in dreams. Often, though, one is reluctant to examine them too closely.
    Demeanor is important when you’re moving to succeed the old monarch. No one wants to be like Ozzie Nesbitt at the funeral of his legendary rival Norwood Fletcher. Some said Ozzie was drunk. They were being kind.
    When Ozzie sprang up, pushed Fletcher’s wife (once long ago Ozzie’s fiancée) out of the way and kicked the casket repeatedly, he was sober. He kept shouting, “Not much to say now you stupid bastard. Where are all your Hugo Awards now?”
    Obviously it was something he needed to express but it did Nesbitt’s career no good. All this was in the legendary past. These days, things are handled in a more seemly fashion.
    I headed for the little shop on Bleecker. When one is anxious, aware of how important an event could be, there’s the temptation to overdo things.
    Yes, I’ve heard those audios of the service in which my sobs compete with the speakers and the music. So demonstrative was my mourning that several people separately asked me when I was planning to rend my garments. And someone I’d thought of as a friend remarked aloud, “What, doesn’t TOLTOG have a sackcloth and ashes sachet, dear?”
    But I ask myself what Livonia herself would have done. And I don’t feel I was that far off her beat. Besides, she’s dead and someone will have to win those awards. I take my vision of the Goose to be a portent.

“
There’s A Hole in the City ” got written in the spring of 2005, three and a half years after 9/11. I’d watched the towers fall from a street corner a couple of blocks from my house. The story is as much memoir as fiction. It wasn’t just me who needed time to get a bit of distance before writing about that day and what came after. 2005/6 saw the appearance of all manner of stories, novels, films and music influenced by the destruction of the World Trade Center.
    I wrote “There’s a Hole in the City” for Ellen Datlow’s wonderful online Sci-Fiction . It received immediate attention, won the International Horror Guild and Million Writers awards and made the Nebula and Gaylactic Spectrum short lists. It’s been reprinted seven times so far and translated into German and Japanese.

THERE’S A HOLE IN THE CITY

    Wednesday 9/12
    O n the evening of the day after the towers fell, I was waiting by the barricades on Houston Street and LaGuardia Place for my friend Mags to come up from Soho and have dinner with me. On the skyline, not two miles to the south, the pillars of smoke wavered slightly. But the creepily beautiful weather of September 11 still held and the wind blew in from the northeast. In Greenwich Village the air was crisp and clean with just a touch of fall about it.
    I’d spent the last day and a half looking at pictures of burning towers. One of the frustrations of that time was that there was so little most of us could do about anything or for anyone.
    Downtown streets were empty of all traffic except emergency vehicles. The West and East Villages from Fourteenth Street to Houston were their own separate zone. Pedestrians needed identification proving they lived or worked there in order to enter.
    The barricades consisted of blue wooden police horses and a couple of unmarked vans thrown across LaGuardia