story9928.xml

story9928.xml

born-digital

story

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2003-09-11

It was a beautiful day. No matter how many times you visited the World Trade Center or how long you worked there, you never got over the beauty of the place. The towers were bold strokes against the sky, signifying to the world that we were the biggest and the best. The view from inside was even grander. In 1997 I began working for the Port Authority Law Department. My office faced the East River from the 62nd Floor of tower one. I will always remember the view I had each morning when I looked out the three eighteen inch windows I was allowed. On a sunny morning I could see the East River bridges reaching across to pull the boroughs closer to Manhattan - pulling their inhabitants, their money, their dreams into the bosom of the city. All of them crossing a river of gold. On days when the storms would roll across the Hudson I would be lost in the clouds where, as anyone could tell you, it snows up instead of down.
It was a beautiful day.
I was newly married and that morning I kissed my wife goodbye and told her that I loved her. She said, "be careful.", but I was already down the stairs and gone. At 8:46 a.m. I was standing in my cubicle and contemplating whether I should go for a cigarette when the floor started to sway beneath me. I heard no sound - no crash, no explosion, no screams, but I felt that fortress of steel and glass wobble back and forth like it was a cheap card table, nearly knocking me off my feet. It felt for a moment as if the entire building would go toppling over onto Church Street. I turned to see black chunks falling outside my window and a cacade of papers floating in the air. What a surreal sight, I thought. My friend yelled, "Lets get the fuck out of here!", and I wasn't about to argue. There were eight of us in the office that morning and we filed out into the hallway where someone was screaming "Hit the deck!" I got down on my knees for a second and then I realized the absurdity of that position - being several hundered feet in the air and without much cover. One of our secretaries, a survivor of the 1993 bombing said, "I'm not going down 62 flights in my heels again." My boss and I went back into the office with her to get her sneakers while the rest of our colleagues began the long descent down the stairwell.
My boss made one last check of the office while we were there and found his secretary under her desk. We pulled her out and left our office for the last time.
As we entered the stairwell we were greeted by a throng of people from the upper floors who were calmly making their way out. We slipped into the line and heard almost immediately that a plane had hit the building. It was generally agreed that it must be a small Cessna that got lost or lost control and struck one of the upper floors. I don't know if this was a logical conclusion or a reassuring one, but I know it calmed me down. I thought, "This will be a nice extended vacation while they repair the building." I didn't think twice about the people who might have died in the crash and I certainly didn't think about what those black chunks outside my window might have been. Once I was in the stairwell I smelled that awful smell - burning jet fuel and God knows what else. It was that same horrible smell that lingered over Manhattan in the weeks and months to come.
We progressed slowly down the stairwells, stopping every couple of minutes or so and then on again. Gradually we lost sight of the other people from our office. My boss said, "stick close to me, I may need your help." "I live to serve", was my standard reply. I thought I was going to get home early, but c'est la vie. About 9:15 a.m. or so, we started to get updates on our pagers that confirmed that we had been struck by an airplane and that tower two had been struck as well. I didn't process what this meant until much later. I figured maybe some debris from tower one had struck tower two - that was all. Shortly after that we stopped altogether to let some firemen up. They were packed with what seemed like an obscene amount of equipment - their faces grimy and uncertain. They kept looking up inbetween the railings, I guess to see when the line of people would end, but the lines didn't end. Those guys were so tired, but they wouldn't stop until they found somebody who needed their help. I don't know what end they came to, but I will never forget those grimy New York faces passing me on the way up as I was going down.
Now the hard part. We had to stop more often. My wife kept paging me, but there was no way I could call her back to tell her I was OK and that's all I wanted to do at that moment. Of course, I had no idea what she was seeing on TV - what the world was seeing on TV. At this point people were jumping out of the buildings in groups and crushing themselves on the ground they so desperately wanted to reach. I had no idea. We were blocked off from the world.
The last few floors were flooded form a sprinkler system that had gone off so I pulled my pant legs up and trudged down the last few stairs. I remeber people were laughing they were so happy to be out and breathe fresh air again. I finally reahced the bottom about 9:30 a.m. Unexpectedly for me, we came out on the mezzanine of the lobby facing West Street and not the ground floor. We made our way around to the east side facing the plaza. There my boss saw one of the executive officers of the Port Authority who was directing people out of the building and asked where the rest of the PA leadership was meeting. He didn't know. As he spoke to him my eyes wandered out onto the plaza that had been transformed into some place I did not recognize. We have all heard a thousand times that people who jumped form the towers were pulverized when they hit the ground. They were not. They were broken. They were burned. They were twisted into unnatural and horrible poses. I felt my jaw loosen in its sockets and begin to drop and my stomach begin to churn. I have since learned that this is a normal reaction to such a scene.
My boss grabbed me and we descended the escalators to the ground floor and passed through the revolving doors to the shopping mall under the plaza. The mall was flooded from the sprinklers and some of the marble was coming off the walls. I recognized a Port Authority police sergeant that I knew and asked him if he knew where the PA leadership was meeting. He said we could try the police desk in WTC 5. My boss and I headed east through the mall and then up the stairs to the police desk. We introduced ourselves and made our way to the back of the command center. There was a TV there, but it was only getting sound and very fuzzy pictures. It was there I first learned that the Pentagon had been attacked as well and that there were reports of multiple planes that had been hijacked and were unaccounted for. The information slowly sunk in. This was not random, not an accident, not a solitary madman in search of glory. This was war and whether I ever saw my wife and family again was completely up in the air. Just then my pager went off again for the umpteenth time. It was my wife. I asked one of the officers if I could use a phone he said there was one I could use in the offices around the corner. I sat down at a desk and began to dial my number, but a thousand feet above me tower two had begun to come apart and the line went dead, the lights went out and the building began to rumble like it was sitting inside a thunder cloud. I tried to make my way back to the room where my boss was, but kept losing my footing as tower two came down on top of us. I found him and we started running through the dark to the front of the command center. There we were greeted by a phalanx of firefighters, police and FBI who were running towards us. We turned aorund and began to follow them out a door that led to the concouse, but all we found was fire and debris. We shut the door and started to run back towards the entrance, but the building was shaking so violently now that we braced ourselves in doorways for what was surely the end. What a strange way to die, I thought. And at that moment the most beautiful calm came over me and I knew that I was ready for death. But it never came. The rumbling stopped and we carefully stood up and surveyed our surroundings. The emergency ligths were on, but it was difficult to see through all the dust. We gathered around a water cooler and put water on our handkerchefs or ties to cover our mouths with and decided to try and go out the front.
When we opened the door we found pitch blackness and dust. The cops turned on their flashlights and then we saw the ghosts. People covered in dust - dazed, bleeding, crying. We grabbed as many as we could and stepped over the ones who were beyoned help. I looked at my boss and without a word we clasped hands and followed the police and fire personnel, not knowing where we were going. They found the door to Border's bookstore and smashed it open. We walked through the store and out into the open. We were free, but not home. There were horrors still to be seen and realities to be faced, but none very different than the expereince of many New Yorkers that day. I walked more than a hundred blocks to come home to my wife that night and I wept uncontrollably when I got home and finally relaized what had happened that day and how many we had lost.
I will never be whole again. That day has stripped me of so much. There is a sadness that intrudes even the happiest moments of my life now. A silent persistent presence in every moment that may be pushed to the background, but can never be pushed out of the room. For a long time, I did not know why I lived and why so many valiant others perished. I'm not sure I even know now. Why? Why? Why?
I have decided that I will make my own reason and that the reason I survived is to meet my daughter. She is that much more beautiful to me for all the terrible things I saw that day. She is the reason I survived. She is the reason I can endure this day every year.
I am so grateful. So sad. So very sad.
But I am alive.