It was the end of October 2001. We’re deep into fall in New York – more cold days than warm. The drastic weather changes still fascinated me even though 2001 was my third autumn as a New Yorker transplanted from season-steady California. Fall had been my favorite in San Francisco because of the Indian summer, the warm weather that the shivering, tee-shirt clad tourists at Fisherman’s Wharf wished for in foggy June. In New York, I loved fall because of the leaves changing in the park and crisp air providing the chance to wear thick wool sweaters that were always a little too heavy for California.
It was the end of October 2001. Deep into recovery for New York – more good days than scared. The shock isn’t as visceral as it was the first weeks after the attack. After the Towers fell, I had a hollow feeling inside my chest that didn’t leave me for days. Even after I physically felt calmer, mentally I would worry. There was nothing I could do to feel safe because the next attack could be anything.
I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area on a fault line. The threat of the “Big One” was just part of a Californian’s psyche. Tremors came and we were safe under our desks. Big quakes hit and we scurried under doorjambs. We were always okay.
My friend, also an ex-Californian, worked on the 61st floor at 2 World Trade. After the first plane hit, she and her co-workers were evacuated down the stairs. When they got to the 40th floor, they were told everything was okay and they should go back to their offices. As they were climbing up, the second plane hit their Tower, shaking them violently. My friend told me she stopped moving and waited for everything to collapse. She said all she could do was stare at her legs; these appendages that could carry her from danger were now frozen. A man pulled at her arm “Here, stand here.” He pointed at a doorjamb. The doorjamb. Strong and safe in an earthquake, she remembered from school drills. My friend shook her head. What would help her in a more familiar earthquake couldn’t save her from an airplane-sized bomb. She started walking down. When she got to the 20th floor she said she just knew she would be okay. She got on one of the last subways out of Manhattan to her apartment in Brooklyn. She didn’t cry until three days later when it was safe to breathe.
I arrived at work early on September 11. Someone told me to go upstairs to the 47th floor conference room of the midtown office building where I worked. Two planes had hit, I was told. From the conference room there was a clear view of the towers; black smoke like sinister flotation devices enveloped the south tower. The top of the north tower dangled.
“All the people,” someone next to me whispered.
“It’s going to fall,” someone else said. I went back to my desk, stomach hurting from witnessing the death of thousands from the windowed safety of a distant conference room.
After the second tower crumbled I walked through Central Park with a coworker. We held hands and joined an exodus of hundreds going uptown, backs to the south and the pillars of smoke that would later descend upon us as it blew uptown. Hundreds of New Yorkers together and it was horribly quiet. A group of us went to my friend’s apartment to sit by the barely-working phone to hear from loved ones still in lower Manhattan. We hoped that they would be the survivors. We watched the news and the footage of the planes hitting again and again. I waited for the repetition to numb me like news images usually to do. I wanted to feel movie violence that dissipated when you left the theatre. Instead I felt a sharp-spiked hollowness that didn’t go away for the next ten days.
I didn’t sleep the night of the attacks. I didn’t have images swarming in my head. My heart didn’t race. I just didn’t sleep. I was the lucky one. My friends who worked down there were fine. I was fine. I just didn’t sleep.
I went to work on the Thursday after. I looked south as I walked from the subway to my building. I felt the Towers’ absence, like missing my shadow. At lunch a friend asked if I wanted to go out and get a sandwich. I said no, I had already eaten. Ten minutes after she had gone, I gasped. What if something happened? Would I be the one that got stuck in a bombed building? My friend would be sobbing telling the story, “I just left to get a sandwich and then the building was hit…” Every small choice was ominous that day. I went home at 2:30 and slept.
A week after the attack, I went to lower Manhattan with another friend who worked a few blocks west of the Towers. On that horrible morning, she exited her subway stop to see people running frantically and buildings on fire. She rushed into her office and found her boss. “You mean you don’t know what happened?” he said. At that point, was when the Tower crumbled. People around her started running, panicking to get out. My friend still had no idea what was going on. Her boss looked at her and in sheer fear, turned and ran, leaving her standing and alone. She was able to get out and got home safely but was profoundly traumatized.
Now, seven days later, she wanted to see her building. At the subway stop where we got out, the smell was hot, metallic and overwhelming. People walking around us were wearing normal Wall Street business attire. Many were wearing a gas mask while clutching their paper and coffee, walking as if normal. My friend teared as we walked toward her building. “It’s the smell,” she said. The smell made the horror real and my eyes welled too. “There’s my building,” she pointed out. It looked fine. She didn’t go in. We just stood in front.
“Where would they be from here?” I asked, needing to know.
She pointed to a blank sheet of sky highlighted with curling smoke. “There. They would be there.” We left quickly from the absent shadow of the Towers and went to a diner in Chelsea. We ordered fluffy mashed potatoes and meatloaf and creamy pie for dessert. Anything to fill space.
When the U.S. started to bomb Afghanistan, New Yorkers, like the rest of America were hyper aware of it. Everyone on the subway holding the same papers with pictures of terrorists or Bush or bin Laden on the covers. We all said we didn’t want to talk about it anymore but it was all we talked about. I read three papers a day and listened to the news in the morning before work.
Two weeks after I was talking with my friend at lunch. “I’m sick of hearing about all of it. We can’t escape it here,” we complained to each other and then spent the rest of lunch talking about the war and the World Trade Center. I mentioned the weirdness of the U.S. planes in Afghanistan dropping food and bombs at the same time. “I understand it though,” my friend said. I nodded. We were in a non-sensical spiral. We were all in it together.
On a crisp fall night in October 2001, I was at the subway station at 23rd Street. I was thinking about the cute flowerpot I bought for my apartment. I was not thinking about September 11. I look up and on the wall are a few remaining posters of the missing from the Towers. The fliers were mostly taken down two weeks after the attack. Seeing those that remained stung like poking at a bruise. My eyes hurt seeing the collage: wedding photos, a man with a boy on his knee. The captions: “Please call if you have information about my wife…” “Have you seen my dad?” And above it a hand-written sign that read: “HEAL.”
When I first moved to New York from the Bay Area, a New Yorker friend handed me a map and said, “Manhattan’s a grid, easy to navigate. If you’re heading toward the Empire State Building, you’re going north. If you’re facing the Twin Towers, south.” Since my sense of direction had always been bad, if I was walking south and wanted to go west, I’d have to turn my back on the imposing Towers to face north and figure out that I had to turn left. I couldn’t navigate until I faced north. In the days after September 11, all I could to is face south and the gaping wound and know that whichever direction I chose to turn in New York it is a different world than when I first arrived. But then I faced New Yorkers and their kindness that shown in the aftermath of the terror and I knew that it was a different world and it will be better. The beauty of humans, the miracle, is not that we are willing to give blood or cry or rebuild but simply that we are able to heal.