"It's all falling indelibly into the past." - Don DeLillo, UnderworldAfter ten years, timelines run together. What memory edits in to immediacy may have happened hours later, or even the next day. Images and thoughts linger and get spliced together and rearranged in order to better construct a narrative. This occurred and then that came to pass before the situation resolved; in fact things were going on simultaneously and the resolution may yet be ongoing. With that caveat, this is the truth as it appears when I close my eyes and remember what it was to be 19 and heartbroken.
When I woke, a breeze was blowing through my window and the sky was sapphire. There was no heat rising from the pavement and everything seemed fresh. I had just returned to New York for my Sophomore year and the weather had never been so fine. I resolved not to call Kim at all that day and took a shower.
My apartment was in Midwood, Brooklyn and if the Avenue I stop of the F line hadn’t been positioned directly out my bedroom window, I would have had a direct, if remote, view of Lower Manhattan. I never minded because I always got to see the city when I caught the train to go to work or class. Showered, I put on my backpack and grabbed The Brothers Karamazov, my subway reading. I stopped at the deli for a toasted cinnamon raisin bagel with cream cheese and a cup of coffee. Of all the delis I have frequented over the years, this was the only one that had a dining area, two tables with rickety chairs in the windows that fronted Avenue I. I never used them, but on that day, both were occupied by middle aged men, all of them talking to each other about airplanes and the World Trade Center. I thought it an odd hypothetical to pursue, but by that time I was used to overhearing all manner of odd conversation. You interact with so many people every day in the city that strange snippets become normal, even reassuring.
Up on the platform, Lower Manhattan was gone. Thick black smoke mixed with a gray-white cloud that billowed in that gentle breeze that streamed up through the Verrazano Narrows. I asked someone else on the platform what had happened, and he told me that two planes had hit the World Trade Center and one of the towers had collapsed. I laughed hysterically, and realized for the first time what hysteria really felt like.
“Shit,” I said. “I guess we’re going to war.” I figured that my diabetes would keep me from getting drafted and tried to make up my mind if that was a good thing.
When the train came, I got on to the first car. There were maybe half a dozen other people, all of us crowded up by the front door, watching the cloud get larger as the F plodded up McDonald. The conductor had his door open. I had tried to call my mother, but the cellphone wouldn’t connect. I tried to call school to see if classes were in session, but the cellphone wouldn’t connect.
“Are we going to be able to get in the city,” I asked the conductor.
“They haven’t told me to stop yet, but I ain’t going in that mess,” he said.
I got off the train somewhere, maybe Church Avenue, walked to the nearest pay phone and was able to tell my mother I was okay. I don’t remember anything about what was said, but I do remember that the pay phone was near my Laundromat. I considered whether I should do laundry since I couldn’t get to class, hung up and walked home. Sometime around then the North Tower tumbled to the earth.
All of the rest of that day is hazy, dominated by electronics, the television and the telephone. I answered calls. It felt odd having to reassure people. There was no reason that I should have been at or near the World Trade Center. I knew no one who worked or lived near the site. I was miles away. Dan Rather was crying. I wasn’t used to Rather, I had always watched Tom Brokaw on NBC, but NBC’s signal had gone down along with the towers, and I doubted that coverage was varying much network to network. The fire, the second plane, the explosion, the jumpers, the collapses, the cloud roaring through the narrow 18th Century streets accompanied by the bleating of a thousand car alarms. The Pentagon hit, perhaps a dozen planes hijacked and flying at top speed, bearing death to unknown destinations, fighter jets scrambled, the president aloft, en route to somewhere safe even though such a place was difficult to imagine just then.
Emily called sometime in the afternoon. She lived in the dorms on William Street, basically around the corner from Everything. I don’t know if she was drunk when she called, but she was definitely shitfaced when she got to my door.
Emily. She was pale to the point of being translucent on a good day, wore her hair in pigtails and had a neo-hippie style that I never found attractive. She hailed from Vermont and we were friendly. We had taken a couple classes together and had similar politics and reading habits. It’s possible we would have become actual friends, but that wasn’t how things played out.
Her bottle of Absolut was about half empty and the look on her face was… I don’t really know how to express it. I’ll give terrorism this – it’s effective. She woke up when the first plane hit and grabbed her camera. She was taking pictures of Everything and she pointed her lens at the smoke and snapped a picture just as someone stepped from the burning floor out into the fresh air. She stopped taking pictures, feeling implicated, as though the negative in her camera contained something sacred and private that she had stolen with the intent of selling the image. Horrified at everything, and particularly herself, she bought a bottle and turned into that miserable skid.
We ate something. I don’t remember what, probably canned soup or microwaved quesadillas. Rather reported that Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were most likely responsible for the murder and destruction that morning. He cried some more. We cried a lot. She drank a lot. I joined her, but halfheartedly. My brother had died September 12, 1996. Kim had dumped me. I was taking classes I liked in a city I loved, but both of those things seemed tenuous at best and the closest thing to a friend that I had made in the city up to that point was the girl crying on my shoulder. I felt enough self-pity without the booze.
There wasn’t anything left to say or do. I knew what her experience of the day had been; she knew mine. The vodka was gone, we’d killed some beer and Rather was still crying. Or maybe by then it was local newscasters crying. Sleep was an abstraction, a thing that people did before there were fully conscious men and women plummeting to the street to escape the flames. Fucking was the thing we could do other than not talk. So we did. I didn’t feel much better afterwards, but she was able to either fall asleep or pass out. In any case, she was unconscious, and I felt envious. I don’t remember how I passed the night. She woke up and we fucked some more, maybe I read some pages about that good Christian Alyosha. At some point I thought it was getting close enough to morning that the papers might have been delivered, so I walked over to the supermarket that sat caddy-corner across the street and asked if The New York Times had come in. The clerk told me to come back in an hour or so. I went back to my apartment, fell asleep next to Emily and never read the Times’ coverage, though I’m sure it was comprehensive.
On the 12th we went to Prospect Park. I probably would have stayed glued to the television and the telephone, my electronic reminders of all the reasons to stay bunkered in my apartment forever, but Emily needed to get out. We caught the F and got off at PPW and 15th and found that everyone in Brooklyn had done the same thing. There were softball teams playing pepper on the diamonds, Lycraed yuppies on bikes, mothers with strollers, kids throwing the football around. There was also no sound. The lawns were full and you could hear every ping off an aluminum bat, every whirring flywheel on a bicycle, every slap of football on palm. Out at the end of the Long Meadow the still-billowing cloud loomed, silencing any conversation before it began. We walked, sometimes holding hands but mostly not. A tow-headed toddler stood at a chain-link fence, trying to get the attention of a family of ducks among the reeds on the other side. His somewhat older brother stood to the side with the parents, all of them entranced by the cloud, trying to read omens in its shifting shape. The younger brother obviously would have no recollection of that day in the park later on, while the elder was of an age that it seemed likely he would carry it with him, would be able to tell the story of where he was during those momentous times in the history of his city, his country. I thought of my brother, five years dead on that Wednesday, and the gulf between what he could tell about the world had he been able to speak and what I could express. I knelt beside the little boy. He looked at me, pointed at the ducks, and bellowed ‘ducks!’ It flashed in my mind that while the world in which he would be raised had been irrevocably altered, he would not have the sense memory of the terror and confusion, that whatever shape the city and country reformed into would be normal to him, and for a moment I felt better.
More drinking and eating and fucking that night, but by morning on the 13th, Emily had to go back to the dorms and change clothes and we had given each other all the comfort we could. Sometime around then I confronted the sink full of dirty quesadilla plates with their film of congealed cheese, called Kim and said some unwise, youthful things about how between my brother and the towers it had been driven into my head pretty thoroughly that death worked on its own schedule and when my time came I would rather be face to face with her anywhere than a sink full of cheap plates soiled by sad microwave food in New York. I left out the feelingless fucking, though we were broken up and there was little I could do to help or hinder my cause in any case. She gently reminded me that trauma could change a lot, but that we were both in the places we had chosen, and that we had made those choices in response to the best parts of ourselves and we shouldn't let the worst of the world intrude there.
I left the dishes where they lay, got on the train and went to the restaurant where I’d coat-checked the previous winter. The GM told me I was welcome back, and I clarified that I was interested in volunteering for any efforts that the company was organizing. That evening she and I walked over to the West Side and caught a commandeered Circle Line tourist boat down to the marina off the World Financial Center. The GM was a military brat and shared with me her desire to see some fucking bombs start dropping soon. I felt the same, and for the first time one of the real dilemmas of terrorism sunk in. Since the perpetrators had been incinerated along with the planes, whom should we bomb? The power of terror lies in its disregard of the social contract. There is no separation between civilian and military in the targeting of attacks, no coherent ideology or government to blame for the violence. It is an individual exerting his will against the most basic precepts of civilization. But because it is individuals who carry out the attacks, against what does the civilization arm itself?
These abstract concepts vanished from my mind once the boat moored in the marina. One of the towers of the World Financial Center had been punctured by a steel girder at about the twentieth floor. The beam pierced out of the structure at an angle similar to a flagpole for about fifty feet. Smoke wafted from the pile of rubble. Our job was to feed and provide beds for the emergency workers sifting through the wreckage. For ten hours I ran trays of lasagna and garlic bread and vegetables back and forth from the kitchen to the serving stations. Dead-eyed firefighters streamed on board, chewed blankly, passed out. Some skipped the blank chewing part and just passed out. I bused tables, kept water pitchers full, retrieved pounds of frozen lasagna from the ship’s walk-in refrigerators and thought of nothing save the next task I could accomplish that might help these guys get through the night. To this day, that blank ‘what’s next?’ mentality remains my favorite aspect of service.
Back at school, everything was abstract. The whole student body could debate politics and rhetoric and civics, but no one could talk about the personal. What was there to say? If you invoked your own feelings, you risked minimizing the greater hurt all around you. And it was all around, papered to every fence and construction barrier, every monument in every public square, the pain of the survivors and the faces of the dead. Moreover, if you talked about your opinion, you immediately ran into a simple question – what are you going to do about it? The answer, for most of us, was not much. We were going to do our reading, turn in our homework, attend our classes and later, when we graduated, do something about how he felt and what we thought about the world.
A couple people drew lines in the sand, though. They could deal with most of the political theory and the rampant liberal self-flagellating, but were very clear that anyone who went along with that motherfucker in Colorado’s assertion that the victims were little Eichmanns was an asshole. I saw Emily around campus a couple of times, but we didn’t have any classes together and I had made friends with Kel and Tara and other sandline drawers. I finished The Brothers Karamazov and I don’t know where the fuck she went.
Memory is a funny thing. I remember calling you first thing that a.m. While I was still ironing.
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