"Watch it! Watch the video. And. Tell. Me. How?" he punctuated. "Those towers fell faster than the speed of gravity itself! How is that possible? It's time to wake up people!"
The conspiracy theorists always forget the human element, don't they?
If a Navy Seal who shot Osama bin Laden won't keep his mouth shut and his book unwritten, it seems unlikely to me a government could successfully cover up a much larger inside job.
"9/11 Inside Job," read the ominous black leaflet that theorists had stuck on a phone box.
A man in a brown suit with a sharp leather briefcase snatched it off and scrunched it up as he charged by.
He didn't litter, though I'm sure he briefly considered it. He wanted to be certain it ended in a bin.
On the ground nearby was a simple chalk sketch. Few noticed it, few stopped.
"Always on our Minds, Forever in our Hearts" it read, with an image of the two towers that used to stand before it.
I focused on it for a bit, counting every big footstep that stamped down from above.
At 10.28am people whispered for a few seconds and the footsteps all stopped.
A couple of tourists crept out of the nearby subway entrance. A church nearby sounded its bell.
People turned towards the chicken wire fences and the construction zone beyond it. A child whispered to his mother, confused.
After a while we heard a microphone beyond the fences murmur back into sound, and the footpaths murmured back into movement.
It was the final moment of silence, for the moment the second tower collapsed.
Beyond the fences, family members of those nearly 3000 killed continued reading out the victims' names.
They surrounded massive memorial waterfalls, each a gaping black abyss. It's as though a city block had simply inverted and turned itself inside out. As though the twin towers stretch down into the ground as deep as they once were tall.
A stiletto punctured the chalk sketch. The woman had a big Starbucks coffee and a copy of the New York Times. She was hustling to an appointment.
Her newspaper's front page carried no reference to the anniversary, no photos, nothing.
On the 11th anniversary in a city that burned, it was a remarkably unremarkable day.
Everything continued in New York. Life continued.
It paused briefly and appropriately, families reflected and grieved, but from monumental destruction 11 years ago, it was a little reminder of just how quickly things change.
I looked at the magnificent gleaming tower rising where two others had fallen.
I thought of my home. I thought of my city. I thought of Christchurch, and I felt optimistic indeed.
