story5783.xml

story5783.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-12

On the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I felt groggy and badly-dressed. Still nursing a hangover from the previous weekend's revelry down at my favorite (and soon-to-close) haunt, Wetlands Preserve, I made my way wearily to the subway station hear my bachelorette pad in Brooklyn, NYC, scarcely 15 minutes from what would soon become a smoldering wreck in the heart of one of my favorite parts of town.

I am a native New Yorker, and damn proud of it, if not more so since last September. As the air cools here, now, at the end of Summer 2002, my skin registers the horror and misery of last Autumn and Winter, the souls of the dead wafting on every frosty breath of the living. I was born in the Eastchester section of the Bronx, in November 1974, on the heels of war and scandal. I became a Buddhist in June of 2001, finally settling into what I feel has always been a rather peaceful existence (at least regarding myself towards others).

My first visit to the top of the then-World's Tallest Building came just three years following its completion in 1973. As a screeching toddler, I was served both the knowledge of my fear of heights, and my a lifelong fascination with architecture, ice cold. I later spent my growing years on the outskirts of Queens (on the border in Nassau County), and earned writing and art degrees at university in Upstate, NY.

Since graduating in 1996 (after witnessing the first attack on the Twin Towers from my Oswego, NY dorm room in my sophomore year, 1993), I have once again been proud to call NYC my home: for good, for bad, and for worse. I spent my first three years working in the world-renowned Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, of Columbia University. Talk about

Worse awaited us all that bright, beautiful morning, like a curled up panther, dark against concrete jungle soil. Standing on the Manhattan-bound Q train platform, in one of the lushly sunlit, tree-lined outdoor subway gulches of Flatbush, a train approached the station. I checked my watch habitually. Commuter reflex. The time was 8:48AM. A ping rung out from the PA system:

"Due to an incident at Cortlandt Street, there are delays in Manhattan-bound service..."

I, like any true New Yorker, used to be anywhere from moderately to completely numb, to the drone of subway announcements (in whichever various registrations of ear-bleeding volume). Barring occasions involving the instant fear, upon hearing "your train" mentioned in the "lineup of doom," I was not normally one to tune in.

At that moment, however, I tuned in.

Cortlandt Street, I thought. World Trade Center, natch. PATH Stations, shops, Century 21. The nexus, I mused. Still a little sleepy, the amazingly clear blue of the sun and sky stunned me into awareness. The air was amazingly crisp and warm, and yet a little cool; a perfectly cloudless, late-summer morning.

A strange kind of adrenaline surged very slightly behind my eyes. World Trade Center. Something in me sharpened.

"...plane crash," I heard a fellow commuter say, as the endless second rang to a stop, the train doors jumping open to admit morning passengers. I stepped on, not thinking. I'd just heard someone, a pretty, petite woman wearing a denim skirt, and holding a mobile phone, "there's been a plane crash...a plane crashed into the World Trade Center..."

Looking back, I just wasn't thinking. When you have to go to work, you go to work. I suppose. Now, after realizing I was risking my life for my job (in no short order), I have to come to terms with knowing that, under similar circumstances, I just might have done the same. When I say "commuter's reflex," I am really talking reflex. Thinking back to it now, it scares even me. There was a weird synergy to the whole experience that lives in the map of my sensibilities.

My destination that morning (as it had been since 4/18/2002) was just a shade off the corner of Park Avenue, across the street from the world-famous Four Seasons Hotel, in the crisp, beige gallery, run by a pair of world-famous rare book dealers. Their partner sold maps of great antiquity for the business, making it an altogether truly fascinating (and often frustrating) place to be employed. Large, aged maps of the United States, and others even older of the Middle East (plated in gold), and Africa, on huge posts with fringed finials, hung on the walls. Like any other morning, the moldy odor of ossifying Galileos and Keplers would waft in on the scent of gourmet coffee, from the machine I would fill each night, before departing on the downtown train, into Brooklyn.

That night, I wouldn't return to the home I would barely recognize when I did, until 10:45PM. I feel fortunate to have turned up in a friend's car, and relatively unharmed...at least in body.

The train pulled out of the station. I felt a kind of pressure, again, behind my eyes, like something enormous was happening, just inches out of my grasp. The mounting tension behind the statement, "Plane crash," began to slowly dawn on me. The minutes seemed like hours, the train crawling laden with A.M. commuters, directly into the path of events of unknowable immensity. The word leaked over the train like hot red ants, as people's phones received their last signals, before the train moved hapless into the tunnels beneath Brooklyn.

Atlantic Avenue, three stops later, people scurry nervously (yet resolute) through the open doors of the trains. I stand in mute shock, not wanting to actually *go* anywhere, realizing for the first time in months that I could probably take the Q train to Union Square, and transfer there. Beyond commuter automation, there is a certain survival instinct that surges, in such totally blank and fearful moments. Under the tip of Manhattan is where I did not want to be, especially when rumors of some kind of wacky plane crash at WTC were involved. I stayed on the Q train, finally, more than anything, to get a glimpse of what was going on. I couldn't stand knowing that if something WAS going on, I would be trapped underground.

The train lumbered on to DeKalb Avenue. Trying to think, to feel back to that moment, I remember a kind of white panic washing over me. Like a blanket of winter snow, perhaps a premonition of the kind of scene that unfolded in the hours ensuing my trip over the Manhattan Bridge, the last time I saw the Twin Towers standing. That morning will live and die with me. I will live on bearing its remembrance, in my body and soul, for the protest of oppression, and the future of peace on this planet.

The blanket of snow thickened. My watch read 8:55AM. I was experiencing a new morning route, by necessity, along with the increasing feeling that something was going horribly wrong. The train crept at a snail's pace, relatively empty (presumably due to fearful detours, made by those horrified by the thought of going over the Bridge, when some kind of aircraft had crashed into Lower Manhattan). The thought never occurred to me. Like a lioness to her dying cubs, I chose to look on rather than avert my gaze, hawks descending to snatch the youth from the ground. My native home is New York City. There is indeed plenty of world to explore, but I've had to reckon with my love of my hometown, when things were at their ultimate worst last Fall. It puts a shine to things, mere survival. Galvanizing, it is.

The train pulled onto the span of the Manhattan Bridge. I immediately moved to a window facing south, and literally pressed my forehead into the glass, as the lofts of DUMBO and the Jehovah's Witness Watchtower drifted past, as though in a dream, the copper-tinged clocktower of one of the rather more upscale loft buildings a crisp pistachio-green in the cloudless morning bright. My stomach churned violently, anticipating what could only be the worst, considering the funereal pace of the train. As the Financial District came into view, the train's windows passing the Bridge's first main anchor cable, I saw that a black stripe of smoke bisected the sapphire sky at a near-perpendicular angle, with its locus at the southeastern corner of the North Tower of WTC (WTC 1).

The building was being eaten away by sheets of orange fire; it had been run through by what was obviously a large, gaping, airplane-sized hole near the corner at about the 80th floor. I immediately began chanting the mantra of Avalokiteshvara (Tib. Chenrezig). OM MANI PADME HUNG fell from my lips in a low, solemn dirgelike melody I'd learned at the previous year's "Change Your Mind" Day in Central Park (a yearly celebration of Buddhism and meditation). People were very likely dying, suffering, burning, or dead very suddenly...this seemed horrifically clear. It was the last time that day I would feel the pangs of such innocence. I thought, still, beyond a doubt, that some accident, some freak wind, had waylaid a plane into the elaborately adorned Tower 1, it's smooth, grey facade belching black smoke into the clear blue sky.

The train proceeded into the tunnel. A woman who caught the last cellular signal on her phone said, stunned, that a second plane had crashed into the second tower, the one which had, seconds ago, remained unharmed.

A man's voice somewhere on the train said, "Terrorists." There was a dead calm. The train moved silently, slowly forward, and did not stop at Canal Street, mere blocks from where Hell had taken up temporary residence.

By the time the train got to Union Square, hundreds of ashen, stricken commuters still rushed through the tunnels to their usual transfers. I was one of them. I had no clue what was happening above, only that I had somewhere to go, to be, a responsibility to my employers. I don't remember the short ride to 59th Street. But when I emerged from the Midtown Station, crossing Lexington Avenue near Bloomingdale's, I glanced downtown to see the signature of a nightmare bisecting the late summer sky. Bewildered onlookers lined the sidewalk where an otherwise normal Manhattan Tuesday had ground to an astonishing halt.
There were few cars, little activity, and much confusion.

When I entered my office, near the corner of Park and 57th Street, across the street from the opulent Four Seasons Hotel, all was chaos. Half the staff attempted to ignore what was happening, demanding the usual things from me such as office supplies and postage. I couldn't concentrate. I scoured my computer's web browser for proof of what was underway a few miles south. Freshly uploaded photos of bodies hurtling to their demise were already on a few news sites. Even more crushing news came down the pike...the Pentagon, the United States center of defense, had also been hit. A fourth hijacked plane (presumably en route to an unspecified landmark) crashed in a field outside Pittsburgh, PA. Rumors abound...more planes, more destruction, all surely afoot.

Numb with shock, I wheeled around the office. I didn't feel like a New Yorker, I felt like a raped child, confused and alone. My officemates, staunch in their old-world academic rush to conquer all that man and nature could present, did not look sympathetically on my paralysis.

Then, the unthinkable happened. At about 10:20AM, my colleague, Margaret, told me that the radio had reported one of the towers collapsing. Within a few minutes, the second tower collapsed as well. Just like that, within an hour's time, thousands upon thousands of lives had been lost, but more than that, I had suddenly become a stranger in my own home.

Many hours later, much later after all my colleagues had fled for their respective homes, I was still in the office. Partially scared to leave, and partially spun into a kind of obsessive fog, I finally made my way out into the afternoon, to the deeply disturbing calm of 57th Street. No cars, no noise, few people...many if not all shops shut down completely, and the air smelling of burning metal and ash. I stumbled half-blind to a market and bought myself my first meal of the day, a cheese sandwich. I ate it on a granite ledge encircling a large midtown skyscraper. I didn't taste the food, I didn't feel the sandwich in my hands. I felt nothing.

I made my way downtown by way of the F train, one of the few trains running back to Brooklyn. But I was on my way to the house of some friends, and decided to stop in Greenwich Village, to once again see if my eyes had not deceived me. They had not. At 4PM, stragglers were still making their way, dusty and bloodied, from the scene of a crime against humanity. Filtration masks covered faces, black suits normally natty with early week freshness were sullied by hunks of plaster and the white of an unthinkable mass of ash. Some wore one shoe, or no shoes...some were missing bags or briefcases, naked and vulnerable as they wandered through the street. Looking back, I still don't know what happened, who to blame.

And for weeks, and months thereafter, the smell of human remains, burned steel, and ash became the background aroma for all of our affairs.

Now, a year later, I still don't know what to think. Today was a very windy day in New York City...my friend said it's because the dead are finally ready to come out and make themselves known. Riding my bike down a major street, I was almost pushed into traffic by the strong gusts of wind. I would not blame the dead if they were trying to call attention to themselves.

I watched helplessly as thousands perished. I felt too scared, too helpless, too angry, too confused, to do anything about it. I think about myself, and my life, and the smallness of the trials I endured, in comparison to those who suffered disembowelment, dismemberment, smoke inhalation, plummeting to their deaths, or instant immolation, in the disaster that morning. The media, whom I normally don't trust anyway, I now completely avoid, due to the instinctual feeling that I'm being lied to.

But I've worked hard to stay alive, even against my own depression and malaise. For the first time in a long time, in the months after 9/11, my will to live, to grow, and to improve, became much stronger. Now, I've decided to start my own publicity business out of my home, and try to take my life out of the hands of anyone beside myself. It's a tough call, a risky choice, but at least this way, I can be held accountable for my actions, one hundred percent. It's proof that I am still alive, and I still have hope. Maybe a year from now, it'll all be clearer what has happened, and what I've learned. But for right now, I've learned to take care of myself a little bit better. And that's not such a bad start. One must love themselves truly and completely, before they can love another.

If I am to live with the enemy, I must realize the enemy inside me. I realize with every day that passes that to be at home with oneself, and in accordance with the laws of nature, the truth, honesty and integrity of holy persons will be mine to savor, greater than any paycheck or false credential. And with that, I'll live with honest thoughts and do the best I can, to come closer to my own center, in order to benefit the whole world.

May the wiser of us forgive us for our trespasses, and infuse us with the knowledge of peace.

"I see the states, across this big nation
I see the laws made in Washington, D.C.
I think of the ones I consider my favorites
I think of the people that are working for me

Some civil servants are just like my loved ones
They work so hard and they try to be strong
I'm a lucky guy to live in my building
They own the buildings to help them along

It's over there, it's over there
My building has every convenience
It's gonna make life easy for me
It's gonna be easy to get things done
I will relax along with my loved ones

Loved ones, loved ones visit the building
Take the highway, park and come up and see me
I'll be working, working but if you come visit
I'll put down what I'm doing, my friends are important

I wouldn't worry 'bout
I wouldn't worry about me
Don't you worry 'bout me
Don't you worry 'bout me."

-- Talking Heads, ?Don't Worry About the Government?