story6621.xml
Title
story6621.xml
Source
born-digital
Media Type
story
Date Entered
2002-09-12
911DA Story: Story
That it happened on such a luminous morning will always seem an extra measure of cruelty. After the previous day?s thunderstorms, the sky was a sparkling Easter-egg blue, the air warm and clean and full of promise. What pilots call ?severe clear.? Watching the staggering horror unfold against such astonishing clarity would make everything that was about to happen seem even more surreal.
At 5:30 a.m. on September 11th, in a fluky change in my routine, I happened to be waiting for a cab in front of the Marriott, next to the Twin Towers. The morning sun had just illuminated our magnificent skyline and the towers shone proudly, glittering and winking in the sunrise, as they had for the past thirty years.
And like anything that?s right in front of you your whole life, I took them for granted at that moment. I didn?t take special notice of the clean, strong lines on the outside of those two monoliths, didn?t appreciate the dedication and brainpower and good humor among the people who spent so much of their lives inside of them.
The Twin Towers and I grew up together, in a way?both conceived in the mid 60?s and getting taller year by year. In 1973 the World Trade Center was complete and suddenly, the world my brothers and I inhabited was measured on a whole new scale. The dinosaurs we spent so much time thinking about were no longer ?taller than the Empire State Building!? according to our hyperbolic claims, but were now simply ?as tall as the Twin Towers!?
It was like that with those skyscrapers. The Twin Towers were IT. The pinnacle. The zenith. Nothing need surpass them. They seemed to just appear in the New York skyline one day, the tallest buildings in the world to us, dominating the view as if they?d always belonged there. Aesthetes may have scoffed at their unimaginative design, but they were like the ungainly new kid in Junior High who figures out how to be popular anyway.
Until some bitter and demented class cipher can?t take it anymore.
The year 2001 is behind us now. For many, healing has finally begun. Yet I still can?t figure out how to convince my heart and my mind that what happened in September was not just some heinous dream. I can?t accept the idea that we can never go back to the way it was before, that we have in fact been robbed of a fundamental American notion (whether or not such a belief was fair and appropriate compared to the rest of the world): the idea that this beautiful country is a haven from the often misfortunate world beyond our shores.
Scores of emails have circulated the globe about how lucky Americans are to have been spared for this long, about how we have been oppressors elsewhere, suggesting that it is somehow our Karmic due to accept terrorism onto our turf, too.
This explanation doesn?t work for me. I will never understand why anyone would want to inflict such a pointless and destructive wound on humanity.
But I wasn?t thinking about any of that at sunrise as my cab sped away from the spot that hours later would be dubbed Ground Zero, where a piece of the heart of the American Dream would shatter. I simply lay back in the cab and mindlessly watched the towers recede from view as I had a million times before.
I had been up all night playing alcohol-fueled board games with friends?all of us freelancers who keep quirky hours--in an apartment directly across from the World Trade Center. It was impossible not to raise our glasses to our privileged view. We even briefly discussed the intent behind the 1993 bombing and, like everyone has since then, immediately dismissed the idea that such malicious audacity would ever succeed.
How could we know that the often imagined ?unthinkable? would come true within hours.
Uptown, I took a sleeping pill and hit the sack, expecting to sleep at least till noon. But, strangely, I awoke at exactly 8:45 a.m., just as the first plane (which I later learned contained my cousin?s wife and her mother) dive-bombed into tower two. An hour later, unable to sleep and still unaware of the chaos downtown, I turned on the TV.
Ten minutes later I am half-running down Lexington Avenue as most of southern Manhattan is trudging up it, toward the Queensboro Bridge. People are six-deep in line at every payphone. Men in power suits are crying and holding each other. The only store still open is a Foot Locker, which is offering sneakers to the mass exodus like manna to the Israelites. In front of Bloomingdales, I see a man covered in blood and soot. He is carrying his attach? case, dazed, walking like he can?t remember his own name. It starts to sink in. This is not just some tasteless TV movie of the week.
I keep stumbling downtown, searching my adrenaline-addled brain to remember which of my friends work in the towers. I?m riddled with guilt for abandoning my Scrabble mates downtown earlier that morning. (I eventually learn that they were yanked out of sleep to the precipice of Hell, shattered glass and soot blasting through their apartment. A few days later, while a national guardsman escorts them up to the penthouse and the roof? ?airplane parts? and ?body parts? grafitti?d in spray-painted neon--I wait for them in the middle of ground zero. A layer of thick white ash blankets everything and everyone. My eyes and throat burn. The ground is hot under my feet. Singed and sodden financial documents and streamers of audiotape are wrapped around defoliated trees. I peer inside an abandoned bagel truck. The bagels, covered in a thick layer of soot, look like iced donuts. A knife sticks straight up out of a tub of butter. A soot-filled cup with a teabag waits under a spigot. The owner?s jacket hangs on a hook. It?s impossible not think of Hiroshima.)
As I continue downtown, watching the frightened, lost expressions on people?s faces, my heart begins to swell and tremble with an unfamiliar feeling?a deep sense of protectiveness for my city and its inhabitants.
At 1:00 p.m. I find myself on 12th street on a friend?s roof looking at the radically altered view. I feel like I?ve lost a limb--as though I?ve emerged from anesthesia and discovered that my arm, or a breast, was unexpectedly amputated. Thanks to CNN, the sinister image of those dark planes ramming into the buildings is burned into everyone?s brain. I feel violated, repulsed by so much anger directed at my hometown. It makes me wonder how rape victims all over the city are taking all of this in.
My friends and I go from hospital to hospital to give blood. There is a seven-hour wait everywhere, but we are weeded out of line for health reasons: I?ve been treated for cancer and my friends have been to Africa recently. They don?t want our blood. We go to North Moore and Greenwich streets, where we hear they are looking for volunteers to help the rescue workers. This line, too, is around the block. Still unable to comprehend what has happened, we helplessly watch Seven World Trade burning nearby. Moments later it begins crumbling?the third building to fall that hellish day--and the police scream at hundreds of us to run; apparently it?s falling somewhat unpredictably, toward us. No one is hurt.
I race a few blocks north and am greeted by a group of ironworkers. They offer me some bottled water and a puff of oxygen if I want it. I decline and tell them number Seven is down. They begin assembling the torches they will use to cut the steel in the remains of the building, then start scribbling their phone numbers on little scraps of paper. Would I please call their wives and tell them they?re okay? It seems like peculiar timing to reassure their wives before they venture into the unstable, smoldering remains of what had minutes earlier been a 40-story building, but it?s the least I can do for these brave men. So I spend the next half hour at a payphone telling reassuring white lies to housewives all over Queens.
Around 5:00 p.m. I trek out onto the Manhattan Bridge, where I am dismayed to find myself under a billboard for a cheesy TV movie that states portentously, ?This Fall, Prepare Yourself For One Unforgettable Day.? In the distance, acrid plumes of smoke permeate the canyons of a stunned and heartbroken city.
I?m still so shattered about the buildings themselves, I haven?t yet begun to really think about the husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers and lovers who were trapped inside them.
That soon changed.
I spent the next three weeks at the Family Assistance Center, at the Armory and Pier 94. My fellow volunteers and I greeted the victims? families, many of whom approached bearing Ziplock baggies containing their loved ones? toothbrushes for DNA sampling. The futility of it all was overwhelming. One man had flown in from Argentina to deliver his roommate?s hairbrush. Another woman had tracked down the biological parents of her missing adopted son in order to obtain their cheek swabs.
The space was teeming with bleary-eyed but determined representatives from NYPD, NYFD, FBI, FEMA, the Medical Examiner, the US Attorney?s Office, The Red Cross, social workers, translators, chaplains, priests, rabbis, and imams. There was a toy-strewn child-care area, makeshift prayer space for every religion under the sun (for Muslims, a carpet below a handwritten sign that said simply ?East?), even a masseur (the much appreciated first stop for rescue workers coming back from a shift pulling bodies out of ?the pile?).
Surprisingly, the atmosphere was reminiscent of a well-funded political campaign. Except that every so often heartrending sobs punctuated the din.
It soon became apparent that relatives were extremely lucky if they received even a small fragment of a body part to bury. Yet the need to continue believing in the impossible was astounding. One young woman was certain that her missing brother was still alive?after ten days?convinced that he was surviving on dripping rainwater. A man whose boyfriend disappeared after running toward the collapsing towers in order to help was hoping that his partner had just been so caught up in the volunteer effort that he hadn?t had a chance to call?for almost a week. A Westchester housewife faithfully met her missing husband?s commuter train every evening for days afterward, hoping that he?d just become disoriented and would eventually find his way home.
Understanding the grief that awaited these people when they were ready to face it was nearly unbearable.
It?s been several months since a piece of our soul was taken from us. Given how fragile things seemed at first (watching millions of tons of steel and concrete crumble changes one?s perspective about what is solid in this world), it seems amazing that life has gone on. Even those of us who were a little behind the healing curve are now on the mend. I no longer flinch when a jetliner flies over the city or jump out of my skin when dishes invariably crash at the corner diner. I?m thinking about getting on an airplane again. My single girlfriends and I have forayed back into the dating trenches and have resumed our complaints about men. We think about the future, a concept that seemed almost pointless not so long ago.
Life does go on. Soon it will snow and in the spring, crocuses will emerge. Summer will follow and on September 11th and every anniversary to follow, we will relive the sadness and the media will no doubt reanalyze every minute detail of that surreal day all over again. But people will fall in love, some will make babies, some will split up, maybe fall in love again. We?ll continue to be born, eat, sleep, dance, laugh, cry, dream, work and die. Perhaps we?ll come back, in another form, with a new understanding of everything. Perhaps not. Something will be built where the towers briefly stood and someday that building, and all of New York, will disappear and be replaced by something else.
In the meantime, all we can do is love our city, our planet, and each other. That shouldn?t be too tall an order. After all, nothing worth creating is too high to strive for in this town. Just look at our skyline. (It?s still pretty magnificent.)
At 5:30 a.m. on September 11th, in a fluky change in my routine, I happened to be waiting for a cab in front of the Marriott, next to the Twin Towers. The morning sun had just illuminated our magnificent skyline and the towers shone proudly, glittering and winking in the sunrise, as they had for the past thirty years.
And like anything that?s right in front of you your whole life, I took them for granted at that moment. I didn?t take special notice of the clean, strong lines on the outside of those two monoliths, didn?t appreciate the dedication and brainpower and good humor among the people who spent so much of their lives inside of them.
The Twin Towers and I grew up together, in a way?both conceived in the mid 60?s and getting taller year by year. In 1973 the World Trade Center was complete and suddenly, the world my brothers and I inhabited was measured on a whole new scale. The dinosaurs we spent so much time thinking about were no longer ?taller than the Empire State Building!? according to our hyperbolic claims, but were now simply ?as tall as the Twin Towers!?
It was like that with those skyscrapers. The Twin Towers were IT. The pinnacle. The zenith. Nothing need surpass them. They seemed to just appear in the New York skyline one day, the tallest buildings in the world to us, dominating the view as if they?d always belonged there. Aesthetes may have scoffed at their unimaginative design, but they were like the ungainly new kid in Junior High who figures out how to be popular anyway.
Until some bitter and demented class cipher can?t take it anymore.
The year 2001 is behind us now. For many, healing has finally begun. Yet I still can?t figure out how to convince my heart and my mind that what happened in September was not just some heinous dream. I can?t accept the idea that we can never go back to the way it was before, that we have in fact been robbed of a fundamental American notion (whether or not such a belief was fair and appropriate compared to the rest of the world): the idea that this beautiful country is a haven from the often misfortunate world beyond our shores.
Scores of emails have circulated the globe about how lucky Americans are to have been spared for this long, about how we have been oppressors elsewhere, suggesting that it is somehow our Karmic due to accept terrorism onto our turf, too.
This explanation doesn?t work for me. I will never understand why anyone would want to inflict such a pointless and destructive wound on humanity.
But I wasn?t thinking about any of that at sunrise as my cab sped away from the spot that hours later would be dubbed Ground Zero, where a piece of the heart of the American Dream would shatter. I simply lay back in the cab and mindlessly watched the towers recede from view as I had a million times before.
I had been up all night playing alcohol-fueled board games with friends?all of us freelancers who keep quirky hours--in an apartment directly across from the World Trade Center. It was impossible not to raise our glasses to our privileged view. We even briefly discussed the intent behind the 1993 bombing and, like everyone has since then, immediately dismissed the idea that such malicious audacity would ever succeed.
How could we know that the often imagined ?unthinkable? would come true within hours.
Uptown, I took a sleeping pill and hit the sack, expecting to sleep at least till noon. But, strangely, I awoke at exactly 8:45 a.m., just as the first plane (which I later learned contained my cousin?s wife and her mother) dive-bombed into tower two. An hour later, unable to sleep and still unaware of the chaos downtown, I turned on the TV.
Ten minutes later I am half-running down Lexington Avenue as most of southern Manhattan is trudging up it, toward the Queensboro Bridge. People are six-deep in line at every payphone. Men in power suits are crying and holding each other. The only store still open is a Foot Locker, which is offering sneakers to the mass exodus like manna to the Israelites. In front of Bloomingdales, I see a man covered in blood and soot. He is carrying his attach? case, dazed, walking like he can?t remember his own name. It starts to sink in. This is not just some tasteless TV movie of the week.
I keep stumbling downtown, searching my adrenaline-addled brain to remember which of my friends work in the towers. I?m riddled with guilt for abandoning my Scrabble mates downtown earlier that morning. (I eventually learn that they were yanked out of sleep to the precipice of Hell, shattered glass and soot blasting through their apartment. A few days later, while a national guardsman escorts them up to the penthouse and the roof? ?airplane parts? and ?body parts? grafitti?d in spray-painted neon--I wait for them in the middle of ground zero. A layer of thick white ash blankets everything and everyone. My eyes and throat burn. The ground is hot under my feet. Singed and sodden financial documents and streamers of audiotape are wrapped around defoliated trees. I peer inside an abandoned bagel truck. The bagels, covered in a thick layer of soot, look like iced donuts. A knife sticks straight up out of a tub of butter. A soot-filled cup with a teabag waits under a spigot. The owner?s jacket hangs on a hook. It?s impossible not think of Hiroshima.)
As I continue downtown, watching the frightened, lost expressions on people?s faces, my heart begins to swell and tremble with an unfamiliar feeling?a deep sense of protectiveness for my city and its inhabitants.
At 1:00 p.m. I find myself on 12th street on a friend?s roof looking at the radically altered view. I feel like I?ve lost a limb--as though I?ve emerged from anesthesia and discovered that my arm, or a breast, was unexpectedly amputated. Thanks to CNN, the sinister image of those dark planes ramming into the buildings is burned into everyone?s brain. I feel violated, repulsed by so much anger directed at my hometown. It makes me wonder how rape victims all over the city are taking all of this in.
My friends and I go from hospital to hospital to give blood. There is a seven-hour wait everywhere, but we are weeded out of line for health reasons: I?ve been treated for cancer and my friends have been to Africa recently. They don?t want our blood. We go to North Moore and Greenwich streets, where we hear they are looking for volunteers to help the rescue workers. This line, too, is around the block. Still unable to comprehend what has happened, we helplessly watch Seven World Trade burning nearby. Moments later it begins crumbling?the third building to fall that hellish day--and the police scream at hundreds of us to run; apparently it?s falling somewhat unpredictably, toward us. No one is hurt.
I race a few blocks north and am greeted by a group of ironworkers. They offer me some bottled water and a puff of oxygen if I want it. I decline and tell them number Seven is down. They begin assembling the torches they will use to cut the steel in the remains of the building, then start scribbling their phone numbers on little scraps of paper. Would I please call their wives and tell them they?re okay? It seems like peculiar timing to reassure their wives before they venture into the unstable, smoldering remains of what had minutes earlier been a 40-story building, but it?s the least I can do for these brave men. So I spend the next half hour at a payphone telling reassuring white lies to housewives all over Queens.
Around 5:00 p.m. I trek out onto the Manhattan Bridge, where I am dismayed to find myself under a billboard for a cheesy TV movie that states portentously, ?This Fall, Prepare Yourself For One Unforgettable Day.? In the distance, acrid plumes of smoke permeate the canyons of a stunned and heartbroken city.
I?m still so shattered about the buildings themselves, I haven?t yet begun to really think about the husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers and lovers who were trapped inside them.
That soon changed.
I spent the next three weeks at the Family Assistance Center, at the Armory and Pier 94. My fellow volunteers and I greeted the victims? families, many of whom approached bearing Ziplock baggies containing their loved ones? toothbrushes for DNA sampling. The futility of it all was overwhelming. One man had flown in from Argentina to deliver his roommate?s hairbrush. Another woman had tracked down the biological parents of her missing adopted son in order to obtain their cheek swabs.
The space was teeming with bleary-eyed but determined representatives from NYPD, NYFD, FBI, FEMA, the Medical Examiner, the US Attorney?s Office, The Red Cross, social workers, translators, chaplains, priests, rabbis, and imams. There was a toy-strewn child-care area, makeshift prayer space for every religion under the sun (for Muslims, a carpet below a handwritten sign that said simply ?East?), even a masseur (the much appreciated first stop for rescue workers coming back from a shift pulling bodies out of ?the pile?).
Surprisingly, the atmosphere was reminiscent of a well-funded political campaign. Except that every so often heartrending sobs punctuated the din.
It soon became apparent that relatives were extremely lucky if they received even a small fragment of a body part to bury. Yet the need to continue believing in the impossible was astounding. One young woman was certain that her missing brother was still alive?after ten days?convinced that he was surviving on dripping rainwater. A man whose boyfriend disappeared after running toward the collapsing towers in order to help was hoping that his partner had just been so caught up in the volunteer effort that he hadn?t had a chance to call?for almost a week. A Westchester housewife faithfully met her missing husband?s commuter train every evening for days afterward, hoping that he?d just become disoriented and would eventually find his way home.
Understanding the grief that awaited these people when they were ready to face it was nearly unbearable.
It?s been several months since a piece of our soul was taken from us. Given how fragile things seemed at first (watching millions of tons of steel and concrete crumble changes one?s perspective about what is solid in this world), it seems amazing that life has gone on. Even those of us who were a little behind the healing curve are now on the mend. I no longer flinch when a jetliner flies over the city or jump out of my skin when dishes invariably crash at the corner diner. I?m thinking about getting on an airplane again. My single girlfriends and I have forayed back into the dating trenches and have resumed our complaints about men. We think about the future, a concept that seemed almost pointless not so long ago.
Life does go on. Soon it will snow and in the spring, crocuses will emerge. Summer will follow and on September 11th and every anniversary to follow, we will relive the sadness and the media will no doubt reanalyze every minute detail of that surreal day all over again. But people will fall in love, some will make babies, some will split up, maybe fall in love again. We?ll continue to be born, eat, sleep, dance, laugh, cry, dream, work and die. Perhaps we?ll come back, in another form, with a new understanding of everything. Perhaps not. Something will be built where the towers briefly stood and someday that building, and all of New York, will disappear and be replaced by something else.
In the meantime, all we can do is love our city, our planet, and each other. That shouldn?t be too tall an order. After all, nothing worth creating is too high to strive for in this town. Just look at our skyline. (It?s still pretty magnificent.)
Collection
Citation
“story6621.xml,” September 11 Digital Archive, accessed January 10, 2025, https://911digitalarchive.org/items/show/17519.