Five Years Later

On September 11, 2001, the first thing I heard was the discordant sound of my bedroom telephone ringing. Three separate calls, four rings each, twelve in total. I ignored them completely. I was still asleep (or trying to be) and didn't feel like waking up. How prophetic.

The fourth time the phone rang, I finally picked it up with a "What the fuck -- hello?!" It was T., my sister.

"Go put your television on."

"What? Why?"

"Just go put it on. A plane just hit the World Trade Center."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"Just go put your t.v. on!!"

Incredulous and still half asleep, I got out of bed and walked bleary-eyed to the living room of my small, Upper West Side apartment, phone in hand, and snapped on the remote. Sure enough, on Channel 4, they were showing replays of the second plane flying into the South Tower, followed by an enormous explosion.

"Holy. Shit."

"See? I told you. They think it might have been pilot error."

"No fucking way this is pilot error. It's a clear day -- look at it. The sun is shining! This was intentional. This has to be terrorism. Jesus."
Then the reporters said that that this was the SECOND plane that had flown into one of the towers. Another plane had hit the North Tower just a few minutes earlier. I got off the phone with T., and for the next half hour watched news reports of the horror happening downtown, three miles from my apartment. Like millions of other New Yorkers, I could not believe what I was seeing. Again and again, I kept watching the second plane shoot through the air like a poisonous missile and hit the South Tower. From one angle, you could almost feel how fast the plane was going when it hit. Then, an angry, explosive, fire bubble. Over and over. My stomach sank. I wondered with morbid horror at the sad fate of the people who were sitting in their offices when the planes hit. People just like me. Going to work and sitting at their desks to begin their day.

I could not believe that someone could do this intentionally. Then, live shots of the buildings burning like two overwhelmed chimneys. The smoke was pouring out of the two sharp, slashes in each of the towers. People with ghostly faces waved desperately to the circling helicopters from broken, jagged windows, hoping someone would come to rescue them. No help would ever come. I later learned that some people had tried to go up to the roof, rather than down the stairwell. A fatal decision. The emergency doors to the roof were locked. Others could not escape because the floors below them were on fire, burning off the jet fuel from the two planes, which were fully loaded for trips to California. The smoke from the towers began to turn from a smoky gray to a charcoal black, foreshadowing worse events that were yet to come. I tried to imagine what it was like in those buildings. What those poor people were going through. People were jumping out of the windows. How unimaginably bad must it be in there for people to be making that choice? My mind couldn't fathom it.

I thought of the people on the planes. What did they experience before the planes were taken over? What did they feel as they saw New York, not Midwestern fields, below them? What were their final thoughts as their planes did something unthinkable, flew directly into two of the tallest buildings in the world? A member of my college class was on Flight 11 from Boston -- the first plane that hit the North Tower. Attending a college memorial service in New York weeks later, I remembered her pretty face, and the cold, winter morning many years ago -- a lifetime ago -- that she was kind enough to open the door to her locked dormitory floor for me, so that I could complete my newspaper delivery. Given my grungy, unshowered condition and the two-day stubble on my face, this was no small act of courage. That winter day in 1988 was my only direct, fleeting contact with her. Thirteen years later, she was gone, a victim of cruel fate. She left behind a husband and a baby girl. Five years later, he has remarried and her baby is now a little girl, who is growing up.

Suddenly, a picture of the Pentagon appeared on the television screen. It was on fire. That's when your friendly neighborhood blogger got very nervous. You know the shit is truly hitting the fan when the Pentagon -- the fucking Pentagon! -- is on fire. I could not believe that the only building in the entire country that I thought was impregnable was burning as if it were a pile of old tires in a junkyard. There were no anti-aircraft batteries around that thing? Are we this fucking vulnerable? Exactly how bad is this day going to get? How many rogue planes are flying around in the sky right now? What the fuck are they going to hit next? How is this happening? Jesus H.

I didn't feel like sitting around all day watching television. I wanted to be around people, to try and get some semblance of the routine. I decided to go to work (a nonsensical decision in retrospect). I quickly showered, dressed, and made my way outside, to the B train on Central Park West. I looked up and winced at the irony of the sun's optimistic rays shining in the brilliant blue sky. The perfect weather added to the surreality of the day. "How can this be happening on a beautiful day like this?" I wondered to myself. I still remember one of the songs I listened to on my CD player (not iPod -- thanks K.) as I made my way to work: "Die Hard The Hunter" by Def Leppard. It seemed to fit my angry, adrenalized mood.

I don't know why I thought the subways would be running, but they weren't. I walked down Central Park West, to Central Park South, then all the way down Central Park South towards my office on the East Side. New Yorkers were walking even faster than usual (if that is possible). Everyone had a tense, shellshocked look on their face. Some people were sitting in their cars listening to radio reports, and watching television screens in store windows, hoping to get an explanation, some kind of clue as to what exactly was happening and what was going to be done about it. People were desperate for news.

At Sixth Avenue, I stopped. From Sixth Avenue, you could normally see the Twin Towers all the way downtown, sticking into the sky, like two massive, supersized Legos. Except on this day, when I looked downtown, I didn't see them. All I saw were two empty plumes of smoke. "I guess all the smoke from the fire is obscuring them right now," I thought to myself.

I made it across town and to my office in about 35 minutes. "What the heck are you doing here," my secretary J. asked me when I got to my desk. The entire hallway was empty of lawyers except myself and one or two others.

"I came to work -- this is happening downtown, not up here."

"You're crazy, no one is coming in today. Did you hear that the towers came down?"

"You mean they were hit by planes -- yeah, I know."

"No, they collapsed. They fell down. They're gone."

"What???!! Those motherfuckers! I hope we kill every one of the assholes that did this."

On the night of September 11th, an acrid, smoky, bitter mixture of burned steel, benzene, dust, and who-knows-what-else drifted uptown from Ground Zero. It soon enveloped the entire city. No matter where you were, you could smell it. You could almost taste it. For everyone in New York, this was a little taste of hell, and it served to remind us all that thousands of people had just died a horrific death only a stone's throw away.

Five years later, it's hard to describe what it was like to be in New York on that day and in the days that followed. To define the shock, sadness, and disbelief that I felt for weeks afterwards. On the subway, the fear and paranoia were palpable. You just didn't know if something else was going to happen. If there was going to be a second wave of attacks. If you were going to make it to work. Every single passenger looked deflated, tired, exhausted, and emotionally wasted. "Is that box a bomb? Is that a suicide bomber in that heavy coat? He's smiling funny. I don't like it."

Over time, my paranoia got so irrational that it bordered on the absurd. Is that Pakistani cabbie a member of Al Qaeda? Why doesn't he have an American flag sticker on his cab -- is that a subtle protest? Did Al Qaeda plant suicide bombers in New York to use later? Is something else planned? Are they just waiting to attack? At my lowest point, I am embarrassed to admit that I even wondered if an Arab-looking waiter at my favorite diner was going to poison my food. When that happened, I thought I was going crazy. It was utterly ridiculous, but I did feel these things at the time. I had terrible dreams. In one of the recurring ones, I kept dreaming about a single propeller plane flying over New York City and unloading a nuclear bomb. It was very vivid. I would see it sillouetted against the blue sky, seemingly innocent, like a seaplane. Then its bay doors would open, and out would come a silvery, glittering bomb, like in one of those old World War II movies. Slowly I would watch it fall, fall, fall down, a shiny silver dart, until just before it hit the ground. That's when I would wake up.

These are memories that I am more than happy to put on the shelf. I don't enjoy revisiting that day very much, and I think that is how most people who live in New York feel. I didn't see "United 93." I didn't see "World Trade Center." I have zero interest. I even avoid the retrospective documentaries -- I watched them when they first came out. Wallowed in them. No need to see them again.

In addition to the grief I felt for the loss of life and destruction on 9/11, I was greatly saddened by what the attacks did to New York City itself. For a long time, there was very little happiness here. People didn't go out as much. It seemed disrespectful. How do you enjoy a nice dinner or drinks when you know that a few miles away, they are searching for people's remains? The driver safety cones -- I mean tourists -- stayed away too. For once, I wanted them here. We were beat up and felt victimized, and that is just not a normal position for a New Yorker to be in. The unbridled, carefree joy that I once felt riding the subway and just walking around the City disappeared. After 9/11, it felt to me as if a huge dark cloud had floated over New York and the sun would never shine again. Even when the sun WAS shining, it didn't truly feel sunny. It was very sad, and I wondered if the City would ever be the same again.

As terrible as 9/11 was, five years later, I am happy to report that New York has bounced back and is as vibrant and strong as it ever was. Slowly, we began to focus on the stories of heroism that took place on 9/11 instead of the attacks themselves. The firefighters and police who died trying to save people. The survivors who miraculously escaped certain death in unconventional, serendipitous ways. The restaurants and stores who gave away food, water, and other necessities to people who needed it. The help and good wishes that came from outside the city, both in the U.S. and around the world. New Yorkers who lined up to give blood that sadly, was never needed. And others who volunteered in myriad ways around the city. The good souls who sifted meticulously through the enormous field of debris at Ground Zero for weeks and months in an effort to find remains and artifacts for the families of the deceased. Spontaneously-organized memorial services at Strawberry Fields in Central Park and Union Square, where people expressed their grief openly and honestly. The way strangers randomly connected and bonded. New York took pride in surviving, in rebounding, and in giving an upturned middle finger salute to Osama and his 19 dead accomplices.

Through the passage of time, New York has rebounded from the grief-stricken depths of that day. While the possibility of more terrorism is ever-present (and simply an unfortunate matter of time, in my view), there is a sense of normalcy here again. In fact, you will be happy to know that people are back to swearing at each other in public and cutting each other off in traffic, both pedestrian and vehicular. Now, that's more like it!

There will be other opportunities to discuss the costly, domino-like mistakes that our government has made since 9/11. How we squandered the world's good will from that day on an expensive misadventure in Iraq. Indeed, the fact that Osama "Been Forgotten" is blowing out five candles today to celebrate the anniversary of an event that he and his colleagues consider to be a great "victory," says it all. The Bush Administration's masturbatory backslapping about the fact that we haven't been attacked on U.S. soil since 9/11 is completely illusory and should not make anyone feel very safe. (Factoid: there was a gap of almost 9 years between the two attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and 2001. History suggests that terrorists work very slowly and on their own timetable).

But that's for later. Today, the focus should be on remembering those who died, celebrating their lives, and honoring their memory by holding our leaders accountable for their decisions -- past, present, and future. And by making a personal promise to ourselves to learn as much as possible about Islam, Al Qaeda, and American foreign policy in the Middle East, so that we can defeat this enemy, develop a more sensible interaction with the Arab world, and try to prevent this from happening again. Those who died on September 11th deserve no less.