Ms. Picky’s regular language blog will resume next week.
Sept. 11, 2001, was a Tuesday. On the 41st floor of the downtown office building where I worked, Tuesdays were the mornings we had conference calls with London. That morning’s call ended at 8:45, and we broke up into smaller groups and headed down the hall, notebooks in hand. My friend Jake was standing at the window.
“Accident,” he said, tapping on the glass where the World Trade Center towers were framed by the window. “Plane just crashed into one of the towers.”
I joined him at the window, and, as we watched the smoke from the tower, we saw another plane approaching. It looked as if it were going in slow motion. We waited for it to pass, but—unbelievably—it did not. It crashed into the other tower. We looked at each other for a moment, puzzled, not knowing what to make of a second “accident.” It wasn’t until we listened to the television in the office pantry that we were certain it had been an attack.
The next half-hour was strangely directionless, in terms of any building-wide emergency response. I went back to look out the window again. There was some smoke from the northeast, but the sun was shining. Against a bright blue sky, bits of white paper were swirling around just outside, like autumn leaves in a gentle breeze, spiraling lower and lower, until they fell into the tide below. I thought of the scene from the Brazilian film Black Orpheus, in which swirling bits of white paper represented lost souls, as Orpheus crossed the River Styx.
Slowly, we were beginning to think again. Some people wanted to leave, but were waiting for an official announcement. It didn’t come.
Others, wary of using the elevator, decided to take the stairs. (One, I heard later, a new analyst from Poland who was eight months pregnant, had walked down the forty-one flights of stairs. Her baby was born, prematurely, the next day.)
Most people sorted themselves into couples or groups according to where they lived. I set out with Mara, a woman from the Ivory Coast, who was supposed to be spending her last day in New York before taking another job in Brussels. We were both going to the Upper West Side.
Our cell phones were useless. We spotted a bus going uptown. We managed to get on it, but, after a block, we realized we’d make better time walking, and got off again.
We stopped into several drugstores along the way, to look for slippers—Mara’s high heels were not made for walking—but the stores were sold out; other women had been there before us. We continued walking, intermittently looking over our shoulders, like characters from an old Godzilla movie, watching the plumes of smoke, high in the sky, that mostly obscured the tops of the Towers.
One time when we looked around, we saw strange-shaped bundles tumbling down, as if they had been thrown from the windows on the high floors of the Towers. We stopped and watched, trying to figure out what they were.
Then, suddenly, we recognized that they were people, that they must have decided that jumping to their deaths was preferable to remaining in the inferno. We turned silently and continued walking.
In a shop on Canal St., we finally managed to buy some slippers for Mara. Just as we emerged from the doorway of the shop, there was a sudden change in air pressure, like a sonic boom. We looked up at the sky. There was only one plume of smoke there now. The other was coming from the ground. The first tower had collapsed.
We continued up the East Side. We needed to cross to the west, but we had been herded east earlier, and now we were just south of Grand Central Station. Police were rerouting everyone around the station, in case it too might be a target. We walked west, then north, then parted ways at 74th St., where I lived. I rushed into my apartment to my landline. Within half an hour, I had managed to track down all but one of my family. My son was still missing, but an hour later, the phone rang, and I heard his voice.
He had been in the subway when the conductor had made the announcement about the attack. His train had been rerouted to Canal St., and everyone told to exit. As he climbed the subway stairs, he was still intending to go to work. He was making his way down West Broadway, when he had experienced the same “sonic boom” I had felt, but, for him, it was followed by a rush of grit like a powerful sandstorm. Then came a strong scent he recognized from his days on a carrier: jet fuel. That was how he had experienced the collapse of the first tower.
The next day, with a friend, I went down to Union Square, the farthest-south point where civilians were still allowed to go, and we looked at the hundreds of photographs posted on the fences: graduation photos, wedding photos, bar mitzvah pictures, communion pictures, portraits, snapshots.
Under a photo of a smiling bride was written:
Have you seen this woman? Worked in Tower 1.
Under a photo of a Mexican boy of about 18 was written just one word:
Missing.
They were, all of them, missing. And they were all, already, being missed. . . .
~ Epilogue ~
Two weeks later, the Wall St. area was reopened, and we were eager to go back to work, to see the friends and colleagues we had shared that day with. As my train approached Wall St. that first morning, I looked around me in the subway car. So many of the stockbrokers and construction workers seemed to have the same Irish faces. How many of them that I had shared the train with for so long would I see again? How many would forever be missing?
I climbed the stairs and took the familiar route, walking down William St., turning in at Hanover Square. I was grateful to see all the reassuringly familiar landmarks. There was Harry’s, where so much of the Wall Street crowd had lunch or drinks after work. There was an oversized American flag draped on it this morning. And there was the brownstone entrance to India House, that ancient club that had all the beautiful old model ships in glass cases.
I looked for the Iraqi coffee man I used to talk with while he made my coffee on cold winter mornings, but he was gone. Gone too was the familiar early-morning scent of salt air from the seaport, and, in its place, the acrid, burning smell that would linger for years afterward, whenever the wind came from the northwest.
Bomb-sniffing dogs greeted me when I entered my the building. I rode the elevator up to 41, sat down at my desk, and booted up my computer. The very first email, dated two weeks earlier, Sept. 11, was from my son:
Mom, I’m ok.
Some weeks later, as I was working on a report, I heard a great clang and went to the window to investigate. On the street below, a crane had dropped a load of metal wreckage onto a waiting river barge. Recognizing the distinctive metal arches, now twisted, atop the rubble on the barge, was like seeing the lifeless body of someone you had once loved.
On Sept. 11, 2002, I had a call from a friend of mine. He had worked in the building across from the Trade Center, above the Brooks Brothers store that had become an impromptu morgue. There was something he wanted to do, and he asked if I would join him. He had bought some white flowers, and, so, together, we walked over and laid them on the rubble.
I never deleted the email from my son.
—Ms. Picky, Sept. 11, 2011
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