Here it is. The account. What posessed me to post it now? a year and
a half later? I don't know. Perhaps the realization that I'm never
going to get around to refining it and turning it into an actual piece
of writing. Perhaps the fact that I told someone it was available, but
realized it wasn't. Perhaps boredom.
The bold, italic blocks are
editorial comments to myself and reminders of things to add. I figured
I should leave them in. It really is an "0.1" document, so take that
into account.
This is the unedited version of this. But "release early,
release often." Otherwise it'll never get out there. Please please
please feel invited to send me some constructive writing tips. I know
how bad some of this is, but I'm having a tough time remaining objective
enough to do some real editing.The account...
It's almost
impossible to describe that sound. When you think of a crash, you think
of a cacophony of shattering and twisting noises. A noise that hearts
your ears with it's pitch. But when you're in side one of the objects
in the crash, the experience is much different, almost inverted in a
way. There was a resounding crunch almost too deep to be heard. It
reminded me very much of the sound of a car crash from within one of the
cars. A much more rounded sound.
It was a deep feeling as
well. Most of that was likely due to the fact that I was on the 51st
floor of the building.
At the time I thought it was a strangely
strong lightning strike. As such I was completely calm and settled abut
the whole affair. Indeed I was excited, having a great fondness for a
good electrical storm.
It was a few seconds before the "oh my
god's" started coming from all over the office. I looked up from my
desk in time to see what appeared to be debris of some sort falling past
the window. It was a sunny morning and the debris sparkled as it
fell.
My next thought was that a helicopter must have hit the
building a few floors up. That would at least account for the shake and
the debris.
It was about then that a few people started
running. Shouts of "everybody out" accompanied the stampede of
employees. I noted in passing that Dean, our fire marshal, was among
the first out the door. Well, so much for making sure everybody's out.
I could smell the energy level rise, until the whole office
seemed to buzz around me.
In retrospect,
this is the sound of one person going into deep
shock.
I stood up and looked
around. I had started to walk out, but hadn't gotten all the way out of
my "cube" before I thought to pack my backpack. it seemed unlikely that
we were really going to evacuate, and if we did, we'd get about halfway
down before they told us everything was secure, and to return to
work.
But in the event that we didn't get back in the building
that day, I wanted my bag with me. So for about 2 or 3 minutes I packed
my notebook, the "peerless" cartridge and a couple books. After a
moment's hesitation I decided to pack the whole peerless drive as
well.
Slowly I started walking out the door. I ran into Henry
Bonet on the way out, confirming that everybody else had already gotten
out safely (he also mentioned that the computer room was
smoking.)
- People coming over
to look at the debris.
- Debris on all sides of the
building.
- Watching Dana's hair fly by.
- Acrid smell
coming from the computer
room.
So I had my bag
and my jacket on, and I made my way to the stairs. I don't remember
much about the journey to the stairwell other than the act of walking
out the door to the hallway and seeing it fairly busy with people
standing around trying to figure out quite what to do. I seem to
remember Dan having been there, but other than that the only face I
remember is that of Henry, with whom I walked out.
I paused for a
moment realizing I had to go to the bathroom, but for some reason
thought better of it. In retrospect, a notion that evokes no small
amount of laughter.
The stairwell was pleasant insofar as such
things can be. People were pretty shaken. Clearly everyone's neurons
had all fired at the same moment and there was a bit of edginess about
the whole affair in the beginning. But there was a greater amount of
nervous laughter than much else.
what a
shit sentence
One of the
reasons I live in New York City is for the people. This is a statement
that evokes all manner of oxymoron jokes from the ministries of puns
throughout the world. But that's only because they don't know any
better. I don't mean that New Yorkers are such warm, welcoming,
hospitable people in a day to day sense. But New Yorkers are all about
no bullshit. And when there's a panic situation, the amount of panic is
pretty much limited to the bridge and tunnel people. No offense, but
when there's an emergency in New York, stay the hell in Bayonne or
Scarsdale.
We were descending at a decent pace, when a man lost
his footing to the left of me and up a couple steps. One of a pair of
early 40s round latin women screamed at the top of her lungs. An
offense I found it hard to forgive at the moment. Aside from that
things were pretty quiet. The gentleman, who was clearly caught in an
emotional state with which I am not particularly familiar by the look on
his face and the strange paralysis that seemed to overtaken him, was
caught before he hit the deck by several people, strangely unable to
move his own legs enough to stand up again. Such was the spirit of the
descent.
- Cell phone
discussions
- "Nah, it's such a strong building
though"
- 1993 Veterans
- Women's shoes all the way
down
It was a good 10
or 15 floors before we started hearing "Get to the right!" from several
floors above or below us. In the beginning this evoked a modest effort
to scrunch along the walls as extremely distressed people came down with
a clear-headed escort, or firemen went up, overloaded with gear
(including 1 or 2 compressed air tanks, 6' polearms, a vast length of
hose and sometimes drinking water, to say nothing of their suits) would
come up, sweat poured off them like a bad special effect.
People
were quiet, just watching the express lane when it was called for. The
only thing we knew was that we were part of "the masses" and that
perhaps this wasn't a particularly ordinary
circumstance.
34th
floor?
My bladder was beginning
to govern my mind (having descended from 51 in an amount of time I have
no ability to calculate or rederive) I needed a solution. So I opened
the door and walked out into the hall. The smoke was fairly thick,
which I didn't understand. I thought I had seen forms moving behind one
of the glass doors, so I went inside the office and talked to a couple
people.
There were a bunch who were just standing around waiting
for the staircase to clear before beginning their descent (a phenomenon
I noticed at many more 'poke my head in' moments on the way down.)
Among them were a couple veterans of the '93 bombing who "weren't going
to die by being trampled to death."
A kid (about 25) dressed
in 1985 conservative garb was on the phone trying to figure out and
report (in a rather coldly financial way) what had happened. A request
for directions to the bathroom resulted in my worst fears realized.
They were locked on all floors, and nobody around had the key (these
were apparently all squatters from higher up.) So I went back to the
stairs.
Strangely, when I got there, nobody had moved. Henry said
"Yo, you missed it. Some wounded came down." This didn't have the air
of rubbernecking excitement that putting it on paper might imply. It
was a simple fact. Someone standing next to me leaned in and
near-whispered "yeah, it was pretty bad, a bunch of people had to turn
away." I could only imagine what that meant. It occurred to me then
that those could only have been the wounded that were able to walk down
the stairs.
From then on, when someone shouted "Get to the right"
people hustled.
It was about the early 30s where the smell of
smoke began to get dense. People were looking down the middle of the
stairs trying to figure out how bad it was going to get, and would we
have to get off and wait in one of the offices until things had cleared.
My spider sense went nuts at the idea. No, it was better to just go
down through it. After all, the firemen were coming up. Eventually
that was what reassured us. They told us to keep going. It would get
worse for a couple more floors, but then the air cleaned up, which it
did.
It was about then that I first had the thought. "What if the
fire is in the stairwell 20 floors down and there's no way out?" It was
a kind of understanding that caused me to become more calm. No, calm
isn't the right work. Calculating is better. I was anything but calm.
It just wasn't being expressed by sweating and having that strange
"I'm about to burst into panicked tears" facial expression that seemed
to rule the day. I wasn't spending alot of energy trying to reassure
people so as to reassure myself. I was just being an observer, more and
more detached form the reality of what was taking place as I descended
each step. I could feel myself getting farther away with each new
detail. It was as though the heat of my own fear drove me out of my
body.
We caught some word from people going up that a plane
had hit the building. I could imagine that being an accident, but it
didn't seem too likely. It wasn't long after we started getting news
that we got the telling piece of information. It wasn't one plane, it
was two. One hitting each tower. For some reason I don't quite
understand, most people didn't seem to do the math. People repeatedly
declared how strange that was.
I have to imagine that I felt and
heard it, but I just don't remember, or can't place the time closely
enough to explore my surrounding memories for some telltale sign. Maybe
the buildings were just that well insulated. yeah, it seems pretty thin
to me too.
Perhaps it's the cynic's lot to accept such truths more
readily than normal people. The The couple people who seemed on the
ball enough to handle the news (and close enough to me that I wouldn't
have to shout it) and I spoke a bit about how it could only have been a
terrorist attack. They would shake off my hypothesis (or rather, the
effect of hearing it) with a resigned "yeah, you're
right."
But still, through all of this weirdness, no
panicking. Only the rivers of sweating faces of the overloaded firemen
and people in other more official uniforms I didn't quite recognize
coming up. The civil, if terrified, people going down.
Now, down
below the 30th floor, the firemen were in the individual floors with
their pokes, prying apart vending machines to get at something to drink.
There were also firemen just dropping bottles of water on the way up
the stairs because they were just too damn heavy. Promptly someone
would pick them up and offer drinks to the others until the bottle was
empty or accepted in it's entirety.
My heart began to sink and I
became heavy with guilt as the "rescue workers" (as is now apparently
the polite euphemism) went up the stairs to do whatever they possibly
could. Not knowing what that even might be. A part of me, a big part
of me, wishes I could remember more if not all of those faces. I didn't
know it at the time; that they were climbing to their deaths. It was a
couple days before I had another thought about that... They may have
known full well.
See, I've waited too long to pen this account.
But it is only now I can keep my head clear and eyes dry enough to get a
significant amount of words out on paper.
In the mid-20s, the
flow of firemen became fairly consistent. People stayed to the outside
edge of the stairwell by default now as best they could. Descent was
extremely slow, taking a couple minutes at each floor. It was here I
believe a number of people switched to stairwells. Some advantage
seemed apparent to them. I didn't find the going quite that slow, and
frankly I wasn't that bothered.
On 22 was where they were all
congregating. They were stopping on the way up for a breather, and going
up in shifts of 8 or 10. All of them had radios and they were referring
to each other by what company they came from. It did me some good to
see them resting. They were human after all, and after what I'd seen
already, I was beginning to wonder about that.
Things began to
speed up dramatically down in the low teens. People's spirits were
lifting and the line was getting a bit faster. More frequently though,
the floor in the stairwells would be wet. After all, it was almost
over.
By the time we got down to the 6th floor, the water was
coming off the floors themselves, pouring out from under the doors and
down the steps. This was causing a fair bit of excitement. People began
to try and make time getting down as quick as they could, sacrificing
basic safety rather readily. By the 3rd floor it was difficult to walk.
But you could hear the police at the bottom telling people to move
on.
It wasn't until I got out the door at the bottom of the
stairwell, nearly pushed by the police, while they were looking at
nobody in particular, yelling to keep moving, run, get away from the
building. But the stairwell exits into the bottom of the building which
is at least 2 floors underground.
I walked out the door into the
lobby and saw some destruction for the first time.
The marble
facades on the walls (the 3 or 4 story high walls) had come down in
several places, leaving debris scattered everywhere. The turnstiles
were battered to bits, presumably by the firemen who had larger things
to get upstairs than just themselves. The floor was covered in 3 foot
high piles of marble and plaster. They had dug a trail from the doorway
out through to the mall entrance.
Everything I remember from those
few minutes is white and gray. The color of concrete.
As we
single-filed out of the stairwell, people were bewildered. There was
destruction, the first signs of it with plaster and marble covering the
floor in 3 foot deep piles that had been quickly shuttled around to
clear some relatively safe pathways out to the mall. They stopped,
looking to the police and FBI for some kind of information. But there
was only one thing they would get:
"Keep moving. Do not stop to
talk on your cell phone. Walk this way out to the mall. Move as fast
as you can. Get away from the building."
"But what's
goin'..."
"Keep moving. Less talking more walking. Let's go.
Let's go."
wouldn't make eye
contact
There seemed to be
hundreds of cops and FBI agents around, all saying the same thing;
herding us into the mall, down a specific path. Positively herding
us.
"Run as fast as you can, get away from the building." They
were programmed to not interact with us in any way, not to say anything
that would cause us to stop and try and talk, just to get us out the
door.
The sprinkler systems in the mall were going full blast
and the floor is a glossy tile. The LAST thing a thinking person would
do is run across that floor while it's covered in an inch of water. In
retrospect, yeah, I probably could have trotted a bit.
We were
herded around a couple corners to an escalator exit that came up in
front of Borders. By the time we got there the sprinklers had been shut
off. Not that it mattered much, I was already soaked to the
bone.
We got up the stairs and it was more of the
same...
"Keep moving. Run! Run away from the building as far as
you can get."
"How many blocks?"
"Just keep
going."
"But how far?"
"As far as you can
get."
"Which direction?"
"Any direction, just
go!"
This was representative of the conversations I heard between
people just trying to understand their plight and those who were
expected to know more than us.
So we walked. Some trotted, but not
too many. We were out of the building, what could possibly have been
the need? More debris maybe. But they were being a bit melodramatic
about that if that was the reason. It occurred to me finally that I
wasn't even half way up to start with. If they were evacuating the
whole building then just to have the crowd there would be dangerous, so
of course they would want us "as far away as
possible."
Satisfied with my own explanation I walked off in
the direction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Worse comes to worse, I'll just
walk home that way and figure out what's going on later.
I
remember my route fairly precisely. I could rewalk it in a heartbeat if
it were there anymore. Unfortunately I don't think I ever knew the
street names so it would be of no use to anybody.
I walked
diagonally across the street in front of Borders off to the left and
passed in front of Staples, still amazed at the police
presence.
It wasn't until I was in front of J&R Computer World
that I turned around and saw what had become of WTC-2.
I could
see the flames. From what amounted to 6 blocks away from the building
and 60 floors down I could see the flames.
My mind was as empty of
thought as it has ever been. I had absolutely no reaction. For seconds
I watched it burn, thoughts slowly returning to the charred remains of
my mind. "I'm not going to die by getting trampled to death." Was the
most coherent thing I remembered. No sir. I'm deeply sorry to say, you
weren't.
I returned to my exodus with hundreds of people on the
street. Slowly people began to realize what was going on as they turned
around for the first time and looked at what I had just seen, and
screamed. People stopped to take pictures. Occasionally I had the
presence of mind to scream at them "Are you fucking stupid
!?!"
I heard the source of a noise in my stomach and bones.
It was a sound of cosmic import. I turned around a bit quizzical. I
watched as each successive floor blew out with flames, then smoke. The
sound would have been deafening but it was almost too low to even hear.
My feet heard it, my stomach and bones heard it, and my spirit was
fractured by it. In a steady meter, obscuring the floors above them in
smoke that rose to the top of the building (and above) each floor
exploded, pausing only a fragment of a second before the one below
erupted, obscuring the next floor up in it's entirety. I couldn't help
but think of it as the perfect movie effect.
I trotted a bit,
sprinted for a little while, but not very long, then went back to a fast
walk as the screaming people came on. Frankly I was far more afraid of
them than anything else, so my speed was intended to match theirs so I
could 'bodysurf the crowd' rather than getting trampled by a bunch of
panicking morons.
I turned around to see which way I would be most
likely to dodge them when I saw the cloud of smoke and ash beginning to
snake it's way between the buildings. It took a good 10 seconds to
register, then I did some very quick math and started tearing off in
more or less the direction of the bridge, having come to a frightening
conclusion.
You can't outrun the cloud. No, it's not a movie tag
line. You CAN'T outrun the cloud.
I noticed as I ran that it
was getting quiet behind me. There weren't any screams. but it wasn't
a "clear" sensation. It was a great thing, a monster that swallowed
screams and the people who made them, swallow them whole. And it was
going to get me, strangle me, and kill me.
My shoes started
looking a little grey as strange particles of ash blew forward between
my feet. I turned around to look and there was nothing. Just grey. By
the time I turned back around to face forward the rest of the world had
disappeared.
Silence.
Complete and
perfect.
Deadly.
I couldn't hear myself breathe. I
couldn't feel the air entering my lungs. I couldn't see my own feet. I
looked down at my clothes, and could only make out the barest outline of
myself, if that was even him. There was no sound, there were no people.
There was no Brooklyn Bridge to run to. There was no East River to get
to where the cloud would have dispersed. There was no City Hall, no
fountain, no J&R. There were no cop cars. There were no camera
wielding fools. There were no cops or FBI agents, no matter how well
armed. 500 panicking screaming people within 100 yards of me were
gone.
Just like me.
There was no lower Manhattan, no new
York City, no United States, no North America, no earth, Solar system.
No milky way galaxy. No universe. No black, no white. No hope, no
light. No love, no life.
Nothing.
Nothing but
grey.
Nothing but fear.
Nothing but death.
And me.
Alone. Again. Still. After everything in my life. To die,
alone.
Fuck you too.
Huge deep panic breaths. Every breath
I take is killing me. Put your shirt over your mouth. "But I can't
see." Just walk.
I had been untethered from everything. All
I wanted was something to put my feet onto that could move, something to
grab on to that was made of steel.
There was someone else moving
out there, in the infinity of 10 feet away. I got to him and put my
hand on his back. We walked for a while and got separated. It must have
been a hallucination.
I found a wall and followed it with one
hand. but I didn't know where it led so I moved away from it and walked
out into the street. But I don't know which one.
This shirt (over
my face) is doing me no good.
I couldn't see anything. I felt my lungs filling up with this crap. How
much would it take to kill me? Before my lung capacity was reduced to
the point of suffocation?
I saw the lights of a cop car and
approached it. I looked at the driver's side window, but couldn't see
in. Cops were doing important things. I wasn't important enough to
bother them. Besides, all that ash would just get in their car.
A fence... I didn't know any fences around there. I must not've
been there. Which way then?
Another form, moving quickly.
A cop hat.
He sees me.
"Give me your hand. We're
going to run."
I may have said something about not wanting to
die.
He didn't wear a mask. But I think he had glasses. Shorter
than me by about 5 inches, with a grip I was thankful for.
We
ran.
"You're going to see a triangle of light in the upper
left side of your vision. When you do, keep running to that." What the
hell did that mean?
It wasn't long. I could see it. We were
running under something. The Bridge! It was the overpass to the
bridge.
"I see it."
He ran with me for another
second.
"It's clear there."
"I'm not going to die. I'm
good. I'm ok." I was reassuring him (or was it me) and letting him know
that he could let go and get back to whatever important stuff he had
been doing before getting sidetracked by running into me.
He was
gone. But I was here, and there was color and people and New York City.
Damn I love New York.
I came out on the "wrong" side of the
street. Out from under an overpass I didn't recognize (until going back
to retrace my steps.) There was an FBI agent armed with a combat
shotgun and a vest. "You're on the wrong side of the street. You need
to be over there."
"Dude after what I just came out of, I'll
go wherever the hell you tell me as long as it's not back that way.
Damn, he couldn't even smile.
My thought seems to be tightly tied
to my ability to see, because as the detail of the world emerged from
the cloud, my brain popped the clutch and lit up the tires of my
mind.
I vaulted over the guardrail to get on to the right side of
the street and started walking. I am I and I had deep purpose. There
were things that needed to be done now. Between steps I could summon up
as much spit as I could to get the grit, gravel, dust, and ash out of my
mouth and throat.
My teeth crunched and I spit continuously for
the next 10 minutes.
I walked north. Everybody walked north. It
was only a block or two before there weren't very many people covered in
ash the way I was. As I approached Canal street, people started looking
at me funny. (Well, truth be told people started looking at me funny 30
years ago, but that hardly helps the point.) I stood for a moment on
some island near the Manhattan Bridge, I think. It might not have been
that far up.
The moment I stood still people started feeling
guilty about being overcome by their urge to crowd. there were a couple
guys begin worn by "nice" suits (read: expensive as they were boring.) I
think one had a yellow tie and a beeper. he started talking about
having been down on wall street when they evacuated. He looked like he
had just stepped out of the shower, talking to me about a harrowing
experience. What a little bitch-ass.
"Where were you when the
building came down?"
"What?"
"You know, when it
fell."
"WHAT!?! It didn't occur to me that I hadn't turned
around. I did. There was only one tower. "IT'S FUCKING
GONE?"
"Yeah man."
It took me a minute to rejoin the
conversation. There were only the two of us talking before. He didn't
seem to need my attention. But I snapped back, having replayed from the
beginning.
"Look at me, where the hell do you think I was? Just
below city hall, in front of J&R. I'd just gotten out of the
building."
"THAT ONE?"
"No, the one that's still there."
Because at the moment, it was.
A couple oriental people asked
what questions they could with the English they knew. Frankly I don't
remember them. I was happy to stand there and answer people for a while
though. Something in me understands the need of people to have a first
hand account. After all, you're reading this, aren't you.
In my
left periphery I saw a short hispanic man kneeling with a disposable
camera tilted on it's end trying to get a discrete picture, as if
somehow I was too big to get into frame otherwise. He saw me notice him
and ws overwhelmed with shame. As he started to turn around, his head
slung between his shoulders, I smiled and waved him forward.
Giddy
at the opportunity he took the picture, paused a second, then handed his
camera to a friend, came over and put his arm around me. We smiled as
he took the shot. Then they switched places. I just laughed, really
hard. Dust billowing from my lungs. "Come to New York, see a real-live
terrorist attack! Get your very own picture taken with a real-live
victim." What I wouldn't give for a copy of those
pictures.
Eventually I said my polite good days and started
walking North. On a lark I dug out my cell phone. It was working but
all the lines were busy. Liz was clearly the person to call. This
classified as "emergency" status. They'd all wonder where I was, if I
was alive, and where I'd go. If they'd bothered to trust their
instincts they'd know the answers to all those questions, but I'm not
here to bore you with my own metaphysical cosmology. Failing that
though, I'd call Liz and she'd get the word out. Of course i could have
called Laura just as readily had I known where she was.
In those
first 20 minutes, when people were still finishing up their first couple
breaths, you could see the fraternity of New York City already in full
tilt. Like I said, New Yorkers are all about no bullshit. And there
was no bullshit in the way here. Something larger than us had happened,
and it had given us purpose. It's a sense of purpose whose flare will
die down, but will be integrated forever into The City, forging us all a
bit closer together. You could smell the difference.
People
had woken up.
Someone once posed the question "How do you wake a
person who's dreaming they're awake?" I know the answer now. You crack
the walls of their dream reality with something they have no choice but
to handle, and no basis or tools for handling it.
So many
conversations erupted spontaneously in those next few blocks. Busses
filled to capacity and beyond were picking up whoever they could, then
just heading North to whatever destination they could reach. People in
cars were picking up anybody who caught their attention.
I've met
people I would like to have kept in touch with. Other alumni of the
event. I wish I remembered them. But I don't.
A very well
dressed oriental gentleman approached me and my fly-by-night coterie (my
clothes, hair, skin, and backpack white with ash after having been
through the sprinklers, then the cloud, gave me away.) He was wearing a
bow tie. Who wears a bow tie? He held out his business card towards me
with a shaking hand. "I...I...Iwwwas llllate." He stuttered. "I worked
on the 82nd floor of building 2. Are any of the people I worked with
alive?" Somewhere in there he said that he wasn't sure he was making
himself clear, so that's why he was holding out his card.
"Well,
they started evacuating tower 2 as soon as the plane hit tower 1, which
was a 20 minute time difference. It's just chaotic down here. I
wouldn't worry too much." In the immortal words of Edward Norton "I'd
like to thank the academy." There was no way I was going to tell this
poor guy that no, I think everybody he worked with was just blasted off
the face of the Earth.
People were crowded around parked cars
with their doors open and radios on, listening to the breaking
news.
I had given up on putting my cell phone back in my bag after
every attempt, and just kept hitting redial hoping that at some point
I'd get in a window and get through to Liz's work number. She'd deal
with the rest of the calls. It occurred to me that I was walking there
as well. She works on 44th street, around the corner from Grand Central
Station. It was an easy 3-4 miles away. It was just the easiest place
to know to get to. My father works in the Empire State building, but
you couldn't get me near there with a cattle prod and duct
tape.
After some length, but still south enough that the streets
had names, not numbers, there was someone standing on the sidewalk
nearly shouting "Does anyone need anything?" It was a fairly peculiar
site. He was standing underneath some scaffolding in front of a large
pair of open doors in a stone building, scanning the crowd for
something. Then he caught sight of me. "Excuse me... do you need
something? Men's room? Some water?"
"No, I'm good man, thanks.
Wait, you know, I've had to go to the bathroom since I was on the 51st
floor of that building." I knew something mundane was bothering me but
I just couldn't put my finger on it. I probably would have gotten all
the way uptown before realizing it.
"Right through here
sir."
There was a woman in the men's room since the ladies room
was out of order, so a couple of us waited outside. As I did so I took
a bit of a better look around where I was. The people were
predominately black, with a couple exceptions. Several of them were
missing teeth. They weren't dressed very well and they all had the same
look in their eyes as they watched the exodus from lower Manhattan. It
was pure sorrow and compassion. They looked to me and nodded, asked how
I was. Better off than most I think. Better off than
most.
Unfortunately there was no mirror in the bathroom, but
the relief was an ecstasy without words. I stepped outside and started
talking to a couple guys standing there watching all this goin on
shaking their heads. One white guy, a big "biker stereotype" looking
fellow and an older less-descript black guy. they were standing there
smoking some thin chestnut colored cigarettes I see now and again. I
talked with them for a good 15 minutes about who knows
what.
Finally I started North again, but paused.
"Hey,
where am I anyway?"
"You're on Bowery." There's one in every
bunch, usually it's me.
"No no, this place. What is
it?"
"Oh, this is the Bowery Street Mission."
"Ok, thanks
a bunch."
Of course it was. What the hell else could it have been.
A place where people come to blame their impulse to do good on God.
Hey, whatever works. It's the doing that matters, and these people were
doing it. I wasn't.
I couldn't help but think, as I looked around
at the people there and thought about them later, that these are people
who have had struggle in their life. I understand that everybody's pain
is based on their own experience and position in life and that it's not
possible to compare. But these people were working on the border of
living and surviving. I'm not. I know where my next meal is coming
from. If I was particularly worried about it I could probably buy all
my meals for the next year tomorrow just to be safe.
Here were
people who dedicated some significant portion of themselves to helping
others keep their heads above water (or on the wagon as the case may
be.) I was diddling with computers at a bond market company. You can
argue that my job helps the economy and therefore benefits everybody.
But it would be pretty damn thin and I wouldn't take you very
seriously.
I have some idea of my potential as a human. It's one
of those very very few things I believe that sets me apart from most
other people. Not that I'm capable of anything more than anyone else,
but that I have some visceral idea of the limitlessness of that
potential. And there are people in the world that need help. And yes,
it IS my responsibility to help them.
Enough of that for
now.
I wasn't half a block away from the mission before I heard
it. My body recognized the sound, but my brain didn't. I looked
forward to see people shouting and pointing in a fairly predictable
direction. I turned around but couldn't see anything so I ran up the
block to where everybody was standing and turned around again. I still
couldn't see anything. It didn't occur to me why.
"What
happened?"
"The second tower just came down."
Oh. Again my
mind was wiped completely clean. The destruction was complete. People
talked and guessed about how many floors were still standing but that
didn't seem to make much sense.
I understand something now, about
my reaction to those events. I wasn't emotionless. I was experience a
level of emotion that could not even be fractionally expressed. The
reason to express emotion is to manifest it. To make it real in the
world. Sometimes that includes removing yourself from it. There was
simply not enough tears, or enough wind for screaming that could
possibly express the weight of those buildings coming down on my heart.
The attempt would be nearly insulting.
With new resolve I walked
North.
People kept what they thought was a "safe" distance
from me. I must've been quite a sight.
The rest of the trip to
44th street is a bit of a blur. Probably because it was largely
uneventful. I walked with a strangely refreshing singularity of
purpose; something that, with a massive case of ADD, I don't get the
chance to enjoy very often.
By the time I arrived, more or less, I
had been able to leave a message that I truly enjoyed: "Reports of my
death have been greatly exaggerated." Yes I really said that. In fact,
I left that message on 4 answering machines that day. Life is not worth
living if not for the sake of humor. And nothing is quite as funny as
humor borne of hardship.
I saw Grand Central approaching a
block or so away, and all of a sudden I was stopped. Wait, where
exactly DID Liz work? I knew it was around there somewhere. So I
started weaving between blocks in the low 40s slightly east of Grand
Central, to no avail.
For the first time. I decided to sit my ass
down. So I chose a nice marble building and backed myself up against it
and plopped down on the sidewalk. It occurred to me that I must have
looked like a really nasty homeless person with an attitude. That was
followed almost immediately with the strange thought that it might not
have been a terribly inaccurate comparison.
Sitting down wasn't
going to get me anywhere, and I had a funny feeling that I was the punch
line in one of the universe's simple little amusements. Besides, I was
far too high strung to stay in one place for too long. I stood up and
turned around to look at the building I was sitting against.
Yep,
this was it. Again I reinforced my image as a crazy person, laughing in
this state. While people were on 'smoke break' out front of the
building.
I walked in the building, quite purposefully, and
walked right past the guard.
"Uhm... Excuse me."
I hit the
elevator call button and one opened almost immediately as the guard
rounded the corner.
"Excuse me! Sir?"
I walked in and hit
#4. The doors closed.
Yeah, you're
excused.
Ding.
I left the elevator and knocked on the
door to my sister's place of employment, making great ash smudges in the
glass that pigpen would have envied.
Poor Ruth, the receptionist.
I knew her from nights out with Liz and her posse from work. She looked
like I was a ghost coming to kill her. It took a couple seconds to
realize she need to buzz me in.
"Uhhh... Uhmm."
"Hi I'm
here to see Liz Wilson?" An attempt at disaster humor that was
completely lost on poor Ruth.
"She's not here. Laura came
and got her and they went to her apartment... Uhh... Liz's that is...
thinking that you'd go there."
Great. Liz lived on east 6th
street. Almost all the way back.
"Well, what the hell would she
think that for?" A rhetorical question. I really didn't want to walk
downtown 2 miles, especially not against the tide of crazed desperate
New Yorkers, however tightly bonded they were.
Christie, another
friend of Liz's came in about then and "oh my god"ed up a storm. So I
started with the "yeah, I was in there." and went through the
highlights. Ruth had been on the phone. She started relating what I
was saying, but then resigned herself to just holding the phone out what
I talked. It was a pretty strange scene as people came in and out past
me wondering who I was.
Yep. Back South. It was a much
quicker walk down to East 6th street. I went east a couple blocks to
get away from the madness, but it was still like trying to iceskate
uphill.
There's a little strip-mall looking arrangement in the low
30s down on 2nd avenue or so. They have a bunch of cafe' tables out.
But the whole thing is pretty contrived in a Murray Hill kind of way. I
became quite the attraction as I walked through there.
I don't
remember what got me stopped to talk, but there were a few separate
groups there. One girl asked me about people she knew in the high 90s.
This was beginning to get old and somewhere down in there I
cracked...
"Wanna know what I think?" I was on the 51st floor of
building 1 and I damn near didn't get out." She handled it pretty well.
they must not have been great friends. Besides, what was I going to
say: "I think your friend have been liquified."?
Another girl
approached me in almost the same spot ( probably just waiting until I
was done with the first one) and started talking about how how she's
spent almost 10 years setting up this deal where she'd be working with
some company (I think she mentioned a phone company, but I can't be
sure) and she finally got the deal, started working in WTC the day
before and moved into an apartment 2 blocks from there 3 days earlier.
She wanted to know if she had an apartment.
I felt really bad for
her. She ventured a bunch to come out here from some middle America
suburb state to try and make it happen in the big city. She didn't know
anybody out here. But I was just not clear enough in my head. I didn't
know what to tell her, other than I didn't know what to tell her.
Frankly I should have taken her with me. It was the only right thing to
do. But I didn't. I kept walking.
I was beginning to get a
blister on my thumb from hitting redial. But the phone did something
strange this time, on about 31st street, it rant. I held it up to my
head and Liz answered her apartment phone.
"Reports of my
death have been greatly exaggerated." No WAY I was going to waste an
opportunity like that.
All I really remember was a whole lot of
incoherent excitement and sniffly babbling.
"I'm coming there.
I'm on 31st street. I'll be there when I get there. It won't be real
soon."
"Uhm... Uh... Ok... Uhm."
"Yeah, I'm pretty happy
I'm alive too. I'll see you in a few."
I eventually got there
of course. It was about an hour later, factoring in all the mini
encounters and conversations I had on the way down.
I stopped at
the corner deli and bought a 2 liter bottle of regular coke, a half
pound of salted cashews and some other yummy stuff.
She buzzed me
in and I started climbing the stairs. I really learned to hate stairs
that day. When I got to the 3rd floor I could hear Laura out in the
hall. I started thinking about what they must be doing and had a
uniquely sharp thought.
"The television MUST be off before I get
there." My message was relayed and the telltale sound of "dramatic news
background music" died. I didn't have the intestinal fortitude to deal
with the news yet.
Now this is where I'd put some emotional
scene about the cosmic relief of being together with my sisters. I'm
sure it happened pretty much that way. But frankly, I don't remember
anything like that. My memory skips forward to sitting on my ass on
Liz's floor so I wouldn't shit up her couch and taking off my shirt and
backpack, then plumpfing down in a newly formed cloud that would make
pigpen green with envy.
Liz, Laura, and Dan were sitting around
wondering what the hell to say. they were doing an honorable job at
trying not to stare. But frankly, nothing would have bothered me
less.
Another 50frigginthousand
pages goes here
As a recovering
son of a recovering Catholic, I can speak on the subject of guilt with a
certain first hand authority. Nothing in all time had made me feel as
guilty as surviving that event. No act of distrust, no slight on another
person however damaging, accidental, naive or intentional has made me as
nauseous as being amongst the "rescued" on September 11th.
Stay
tuned for the epilogues, They'll be pretty uplifting. I
promise.
Wednesday, April 2, 2003
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