We have set the world stage and dim the lights for the 18th annual 9/11 Re-enactment Ice Show Spectacular, brought to you by Burger King. America is no longer the Home of the Brave, it is officially, legally the Home of the Whopper®. Freedom and liberty abound in this gymnasium, we are rippling like cold skin. This year’s reenactment will be a star-studded ice skating spectacle, live-streamed to your computer (with a cable provider subscription) and television sets.
The high school gym is packed with hunched, darkened faces, sounds of coughing, soda slurping, a mass odor of slow death. They do not have a proper rink for the ice show, so they just froze over their pool. It goes down forever.
We are the audience and the players both. We are all on our couches watching, all in the Twin Towers burning, all in the 9/11 Memorial Gift Shop, deciding which doggy bandanna to buy, FDNY or NYPD. We wait with anticipation to see the explosion replayed in slow motion, from new angles, to see bodies falling on fire. Jet fuel can and can’t melt steel beams. Everything is true this morning. We exclaim in exasperated, desperate barks that the entire thing is staged, it’s an inside job, and we also agree, yes it is staged. It’s a performance, we tell ourselves. We bought tickets.
We are waiting for the show to begin, the 9/11 reenactment, this year on ice. It’s magical. Popcorn falls onto the floor like bodies. Someone vapes a 9/11 Juul juice called “Holly Burton”. We are gathered here for this mass ritual of public mourning. See how sad we are, but how grateful for the chance to feel something. The colorful costumes, the drama, the jokes. We are so happy to be alive and to be here.
The actors who play the hijackers are genuine Saudis, United Arab Emirates, a Lebonesian and an Egyptian. We are very careful to cast genuine ethnicity in those roles. This year, the organizers have finally done away with all the Mohammed Atta cosplayers, stating the costumes were offensive and inappropriate. George W. Bush plays himself, so eager to relive his finest moments, the greatest hits. Shouting pleasantries into a bullhorn atop a foam pile of bricks and ashes, plotting unwinnable wars, playing dress-up as a pilot, torture, blood.
The show begins precisely at 8:46 AM.
It is a musical romance between two planes and two towers, with the side story being a plane and a pentagon. The two stories intertwine into a single musical crescendo. There is a lovely solo by a plane in a field with 44 backup singers. The High Jackers, the antagonists of the show, snarl with delightful villainy, snapping their fingers as they rattle off the clever rap lyrics we all know and love. Songs like “The Great Satan”, “Osama Bin Boppin'” and a new hilarious rendition of “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane”.
At the same time, there is another performance, the one of the shadowy plans to destroy the Twin Towers to usher in the surveillance state and New World Order. We upload our defiant “WE WANT TRUTH” selfies to Facebook. They happen simultaneously, in the same space, in the same mind, clear and perfect and unblemished by time. We see in pixelated YouTube video, drawing red circles and arrows in the air, asking the tough questions, exposing the truth. We are heroes.
The explosions come like orgasms. We, as a nation, cum. That’s what we’re here to see: the fire, scorched flesh stinking like burnt brisket, the towers ablaze with fun and joy, the dancers dressed like flames in red streaming leotards, diving out of the windows onto safety nets. The smell of jet fuel, that kerosene stench, makes us lightheaded and giddy as we watch us plummet.
Our performance is flawless, perfect, one for the record books. “Just like the Twin Towers, we bring down the house,” the critics will say in a 3 and a half starred review.
We laugh and learn something about ourselves. We honored the dead by buying a t-shirt before the show. A sharp, metallic snap and we pop open beers with our 9/11 bottle openers. We cut open bags of Skittles with genuine replica box cutters. During the Moment of Silence, we resist the urge to check Twitter (out of respect).
The demolition charges under the stands go off. We hear the ice cracking under our feet. The bleachers all collapse inwards like a black hole. The sudden pull of gravity downwards into the deep, dark water. Air bubbles upwards with our cheers.
We die. We are still applauding. We are still Americans.
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.