TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2:36 P.M. — I live five minutes from downtown Los Angeles. The streets, at 9 a.m. California time, were already boneyard-quiet. No hum of traffic down Sunset Boulevard, no noise from the distant flow off the 101 or 110 Freeways into the city. Eerie stillness. The only sound is the news — the way it is everywhere, I imagine. Occasionally a siren or two, but even that is maybe a fifth of the usual clatter. And the omnipresent helicopters that circle above us on any given night, chasing perps — they aren’t in the air. It’s as if the planet’s stopped, at least outside my window.

The studios, the gyms, the schools, the buses — stopped. Even after the Northridge quake, with the major arteries in and out of the city knocked down, that didn’t happen.

Everything is shut down. Locals remind us that the Latin Grammys, themselves a point of controversy (over possible Cuban terrorism, which is why the event moved here from Miami), will be postponed or canceled. Downtown itself, from the 70-story Wells Fargo building on down — empty. After all, the flights that hit the World Trade Center were supposed to land here. The word on my street, which has more than its fair share of Latino evangelicals (this is still the barrio for the most part; gentrification hasn’t completely set in) is that Armageddon is upon us, that the prophecies are coming true. For once in my life, I am the voice of reason, but it’s a shaky one, trying to calm my neighbors down.

I shudder, thinking about New York. The chaos in the streets brings back the days of the 1992 riots here in LA, the mayhem, the disbelief. Police Chief Bernard Parks and Mayor James Hahn are on the tube now, reassuring Angelenos that all is well, but underneath it all is the feeling that the other shoe has to drop and that something here is going to be targeted. How can it be any other way? I mean, we were rocked by an earthquake the other day, and that little 4.2 temblor completely unhinged everyone who lost a dish or two. This is beyond our comprehension.

LAX is closed down, as is the Burbank airport, so the air above is completely empty. No sounds from the east, where Edwards Air Force Base is, either — which is reassuring in its way. (That route was an ear-splitting corridor during the Gulf War, with fighters headed to Saudi Arabia every half-hour or so.) I don’t think they know what they’re going to do. Our blood is running cold here, because we just don’t know what’s in store for us. Could be anything or nothing, but the waiting is making an already jittery population (contrary to myth, folks, we aren’t laid-back at all) near-hysterical. And the silence is deafening.

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Issue Date: September 11, 2001