story1227.xml

story1227.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-08-19

I had spent the night at my then boyfriend's house out in Queens. I, myself, live in Grammercy Park (about 10 blocks north of where they set up the intial perimter to keep people out of downtown and just a couple of blocks from locations that became the intial unused triage center, the morgue and the family center). I had an 8am dentist appointment, but slept through the alarm clock, waking up sometime around 9am.

Normally, he always slept with the television on, but we hadn't had it on that night for some reason, and I went out to get us coffee without knowing what was going on.

When I walked out of his house, it felt like the most beautiful day in the history of the world. I was stunned by the weather, and intended to write about it in my online journal as soon as I got to the office.

Reaching his corner, I looked to my right, where there was a perfect view of lower Manhattan. All I could see was a huge black cloud over the island. It didn't occur to me that anything was wrong, as I've seen storm clouds like that on crystal blue days before, and when I was taking my flying lessons (single engine Cesna, generally a 172) I had a nasty run in with just such a weather system. I remember thinking, "wow, I'm really glad I'm not flying today." I may have even said it out loud.

Halfway up the next block, the pager on my cellphone goes crazy, telling me I have messages, but when I try to check them, I can't get through, and I merely presume Sprint as sent a broadcast message to the system that's tying everything up. I go into a local bakery, get coffees, and wander back out, when the text pager on my cellphone goes off.

Message from mish: turn on your TV RIGHT NOW
Message from tsarina: are you okay?

Those were the first two of about 8, which by the end of the day reached over 30. I still didn't know what was up, but being the age I am, my first thought was "I wonder if we're having a nuclear war."

I walked quickly back to the house. If we were all about to die, I was not going to spend my last four minutes on earth looking like a complete moron. I went into the bedroom, fumble around his room for the remote control and turn on the TV, while repeating over and over "something's wrong" which slowly managed to wake up the boyfriend.

At the point I turn on the TV, one of the towers has already fallen, but whatever news channel I had on, hadn't figured this out yet, and neither had we. They showed the hole in one of the towers, the outline of the jet visible. The boyfriend asks if that's a Cesna, the same question those on TV are asking, but there's no way, no way at all and I suddenly feel frustrated and panicky being able to see this obvious thing, and feeling connected to something I'm not connected to, just because I know a little bit about planes, just because I had worked in those buildings at various points in my career.

I remember then that the night before he and I had been having a "where were you when" conversation, and I told him how during the WTC bombing in 1993 I was in college in Washington DC, online in a chat room, and someone said "the WTC has just been blown up." I had thought they were joking and asked "did it fall over" and when I was told "no" declared I hadn't been interested, until my mother called to say that there really had been a bombing, and I saw the ambulances on TV, in the snow.

The boyfriend said we should go up on to his roof to watch, and we crawl out the kitcen window and start going up the fire escape, but I'm afraid of heights and go back inside, just in time to see the second tower fall. I try to yell for the boyfriend to come see this, but I can't make a sound, like when you can't scream you're so scared, as if in a horror movie.

I remember the newscasters saying, "Oh my god, The World Trade Center is gone" in this incredibly sorrowful solemn voice. After this I sprung into action, using his digital cable modem to email a friend of mine in Boston, who called the boyfriend's family to assure them we were okay, and tried and failed to get through to my own family, also located in NYC.

The rest of the day was spent gathering information and redistributing it to those I could get in touch with, watching the news endlessly, eating terrible Mexican food and just standing on corners in Queens waiting for payphones.

I didn't get home until the next day. My cats were screaming and I suspect it was the smell. It had become unbareably hot, but I went out to try to donate bottled water and volunteer at the rescue center, but I don't have medical skills. There, I met up with my friend Kat and by accident ran into two women we used to work with. It was too bright and hazy and smokey to even turn our heads towards downtown, and Kat and I went to a diner after we couldn't stand to watch people cheer the rescue trucks headed down to the site anymore, where the fact that I had ordered meat seemed tasteless. This was also the first day I checked in on my online journal, where I had messages waiting from virtual strangers wondering if I was alive.

That night, I went below the 14th Street perimeter with a friend who lived there, and wandered around in the middle of Third Avenue, getting ice cream and eating at a vegetarian restaurant and feeling confused. Later, there was a terrible thunderstorm and people in Union Square dropped to the ground and covered their heads at the first sounds of thunder.

During the next week, I sat in my 6th floor apartment and heard people wailing outside my window and they looked for the family center. When I went outside, everywhere I went there were random scenes of domestic violence, people randomly screaming at each other, a couple headbutting each other in front of the Empire State Building. It took days and days for them to change the newspapers in the vending machines, so everywhere we went, were the headlines of the morning of the 11th, before it happened. Women stopped wearing high heels. I visited my parents, who live far enough North that nothing smelled wrong, and I found I couldn't stand the vacation from the new world.

Friends who were EMTs at the site finally checked in, told me stories that were not in the news. I began to receive random emails from people I had known five and ten years ago, especially those, who unlike me, still worked in journalism. And I didn't realize that everything was covered in dust from it, until the trucks came up 23rd street to start hosing the buildings off, and everything was suddenly brighter.