story1292.xml

story1292.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-08-20

I woke on the morning of September 11 to NPR on the clock radio. It was early here in San Francisco but mid-morning in New York, and the story was still developing. The radio came on in the middle of an interview with a Washington correspondent who, with the rest of the press pool, had been evacuated from the White House with no clear idea why. I thought sleepily, oh, great, some nut job called in a bomb threat. But then they cut back to the studio and announced, probably for the hundredth time, that a jet liner had struck the World Trade Center. I will never forget that moment. For a second or two, still mostly asleep, I played the words back in my head and wondered if I'd really heard what I thought I'd heard, and then I rolled over and stared at the radio in disbelief, as if it could explain the meaning.

For the next forty minutes or so, I was glued to NPR. I was so stunned that it never occurred to me to turn on the television. I can't even remember anything I actually heard during those forty minutes. I know that when I finally did think to turn on the TV and saw the towers fall, I wasn't expecting it. It was probably a replay, at least of the first tower's collapse; I don't remember the anchors seeming surprised. But I was still too much in shock to register everything properly, and I've never been able to work out exactly what I saw when. All I remember clearly is the terrible way in which it kept getting worse: the blow of seeing the first impact, no less staggering for having heard it described again and again on the radio; the kick to the stomach of the second impact, when it became so awfully clear that it was an attack; and then the bone-chilling, unthinkable horror of seeing first one tower and then the other collapse, terribly aware that there were people in there. And I dimly remember thinking: "It's finally happened" -- the kind of horror we've seen a hundred times on movie screens and yet never quite allowed ourselves to really believe could ever be made real.

The rest of the day passed in the peculiar numbness of grief settling in. There were phone calls and tears; a brief, useless attempt to get my mind out of the horror by going to work; an equally useless trip to an overwhelmed Palo Alto blood bank; and finally I sat out the evening with a close friend who had moved here from Manhattan. I was lucky: in the end, somehow, not one person that I knew was killed in the attacks. And yet I felt the attack -- and still feel it -- personally. I think we all did.

One other moment in the late morning still haunts me. I had to keep a doctor's appointment -- it seemed mad to go on with such a routine bit of business, but there I was. As I parked my car, the NPR reporter outside the White House was describing how a young man had bicycled up to the crowd and declared loudly that the U.S. had got what it deserved. I started towards the doctor's office in a helpless rage. Around the corner I passed a stranger who looked like an Arab, and for the briefest instant I hated him, purely and completely. The feeling passed, but it shook me badly, because I hadn't thought I was capable of that kind of blind hatred, even for a second; and because I realized that if my own response could be that savage, then Arabs in the U.S. were in for a very rough ride, and I understood for the first time that there were more tragedies still to come. As it turned out the aftermath was much worse than I'd feared, and I never heard news of violence against Arabs -- or Sikhs, or Indians -- without the uncomfortable memory of that one awful moment of fury.