Janie and I were laying together in my bed smoking early that morning when the phone rang. A telephone call before seven am meant that either somebody had the wrong number or that something somewhere had gone wrong and a friend or family member, probably my mother, was calling to give us the news. We let it go until the caller hung up and then lay there wondering who it could have been and what news they had to impart. The silence in the room after the phone went quiet seemed spacious and physically empty. I can remember seeing the dust slowly cartwheel across the slice of sunlight cutting through the window and across the foot of our bed. I could hear Janie's lips pull away from the last drag on the cigarette before she leaned over me to stab it into the ashtray on the nightstand beside my bed. There wasn't a sound on the street outside the window, either. I didn't hear any cars or buses, or the snapping shut of newspaper boxes as neighbours got yesterday's news, so I got up out of bed and put on a record. Pre-Millennium Tension by Tricky. It was on heavy rotation in those days. Was that the last day of yesterday's news? Was that the abrupt beginning to a new age when everything happens now, today, immediately, and the past is nothing but decay, and the future only something that we used to long for? My mom called back about fifteen minutes later and by then I was awake and answered the phone. "The terrorists are attacking us with our own airplanes," she said.