National September 11th Memorial & Museum Archives
A man of our times, recently downsized from a dot-com, I watch the destruction of civilization from my rooftop.
At 9:15 on Tuesday morning, neighbor Sara pounds on my door. "You've got to see what's happening outside my window." I stumble over in my boxers to look south from her bedroom, where the World Trade Center towers spurt like smokestacks less than two miles south of the East Village. This image is mirrored just below the window on her television, which informs me there's been a terrorist attack.
We rush upstairs. On nearby roofs, Manhattan residents gather, hypnotized, horrified, some with cameras, others have binoculars. About a half an hour later, the south tower silently folds in on itself. People cry out in horror, but my rooftop only gasps. There's nothing to say. We've just witnessed thousands of people dying, their screams unheard. It's surreal: our brains tell our eyes this can't happen.
A woman from the second floor arrives on the rooftop, telling us the Pentagon has been hit. Other hijacked planes are still in the air, and we don't know where they are headed.
One tower stands burning where two once did. I am transfixed by the altered landscape. A few neighbors stagger downstairs, but I can’t pull myself away. Later, I wonder if I was waiting for the north tower to fall.
Then it does, crumpling downward, its huge antenna lurching eastward and out of sight. "Oh my God, oh my God." My fourth-floor neighbor is crying. A massive cloud of brown smoke rolls slow-motion through buildings downtown, snaking around them, enveloping them, headed our way but halting before reaching us. Something has happened, something is happening, but we're frozen under a blue sky, our voices replaced with the scream of sirens. Billowing smoke south of us confirms the world has changed.
Shocking us from above with its razor-blade speed and screech, an F-16 whirls south and around Manhattan's tip. I've never seen one before. The military plane doesn't comfort me.
I’ve spent a lot of time on my rooftop. Three weeks ago on a beautiful summer night, I had a birthday party with forty people here, the downtown skyline shimmering to the south. In the days after the planes hit, I get calls from friends around the country. Phone service is sporadic, unreliable, but little by little, friends from Wisconsin, Mississippi, and elsewhere get through. "I'm looking at a photograph of you on your roof with the towers behind you," says Michael, on the phone from L.A. "This picture's outdated now."
Wednesday, the wind shifts, and a rancid burnt rubber smell blows through the Lower East Side. Rumors of asbestos and toxins are in the air; the mayor's assurances to the contrary are less than convincing. I close my windows and turn on the air conditioner.
I get just one television channel since I don't have cable and the antennas for every station but one are atop the towers. Onscreen, it's all disaster all the time. Sometimes the news reporters seem at a loss as to what to talk about, yet there’s obviously much to talk about. One man being interviewed rambles on about how everyone but him is unprepared for the anthrax disseminated in the blast. He seems out of his mind, but today the world's a different place than it was yesterday.
For example, I need an ID with my address on it to get to my apartment, which is in the cordoned off area south of 14th Street. There is no traffic in my neighborhood but for ambulances and garbage trucks. (What more do we really need? I ask, always an advocate for fewer cars.)
Along with many others, my friend Carl and I walk the car-free streets. It's another beautiful late summer day but for what feels like the end of the world. Another F-16 shatters the sky above. "It's all for show," says Carl. "There's nothing else coming." Still, we hear that an aircraft carrier is approaching New York harbor. Carl says, "It's ridiculous. Nothing could make these people happier than seeing this over-reaction."
That night is the quietest I've experienced since moving from Wisconsin fourteen years ago. Again on my roof before I go to bed, a chilly wind refreshes. The season is changing. Smoke blows from the wreckage south. Many buildings have extinguished their lights. The sky is unusually dark. Manhattan's nighttime glow is gone. I see stars. A helicopter moves across the sky, heading south. At three a.m., I’m awakened in bed by another F-16. If the planes were being flown just for show, it was a strange time to do so. Now wide awake, I take in the eerie quiet following the plane's racket. In the distance, an ambulance’s siren calls out, almost comforting.
Thursday, I venture uptown, out of my quarantined neighborhood, to meet my friend Linda and Michelle, a writer from Las Vegas stranded in Manhattan. We have a glass of wine at an outdoor café in Rockefeller Center. Michelle has just been shopping at Saks, which she claims is her patriotic duty. She says nearly everyone in the store stopped her and asked where she bought her fabulous beaded American flag purse. Using apocalyptic sales tactics, a Saks employee had been pressuring her to purchase a dress, saying she might never have another chance to buy it. We spot publishing colleagues walking by and they join us, joking it’s like a café gathering in wartime Paris. It all seems perfectly normal until the wind shifts and there is that burnt rubber smell.
Catching a cab downtown with Linda, the traffic snarls. Fifth Avenue is unexpectedly closed south of 34th Street. Police cars and ambulances rush past, sirens blaring, red lights lighting anxiety-ridden faces. "Something’s happened," says Linda. "Do we live in Tel Aviv now?" she asks. It's agreed we don't want to live in Tel Aviv.
New Yorkers, I boast as a convert, are good at adjusting, given prices, subways, and rents. But now a hole in the skyline is part of our daily lives. And there are thousands fewer of us.
Linda and I have dinner at Pitchoune, a French restaurant on Third Avenue and Nineteenth Street. It opens at its front, with tables outside, but we prefer eating inside rather than watching the traffic clustered around a nearby police station.
A crowd's cheer from down the street rolls towards us in a wave. On the back of a flatbed truck moving up Third Avenue are hard-hatted, dust-covered workers from Ground Zero. As they are slowly carried north, the restaurant patrons stand up and cheer, clapping and yelling with gratitude and love. On the truck bed, looking exhausted, some stare out in space and a few others give a wave. And while I worry what tomorrow may bring, that people elsewhere will die for foul deeds that have nothing to do with their struggles or poverty, of course I cheer these fatigued workers. Digging for civilization, they hope to uncover what’s lost; applauding their efforts, we fear it's gone.
POSTSCRIPT
Decades later, our nephew Chris was in New York from New Mexico, and we went to the World Trade Center site. Standing at the foot of the colossal new skyscraper, Chris said, “People jumped off the building, didn’t they?”
“Yes,” I answer slowly.
I am stunned, suddenly recalling standing on our apartment building roof, watching silvery wisps fall from the buildings like ashes, and with horror, wondering what they were. These may or may not have been people I saw falling from the burning towers—we live more than a mile away. Either way, my brain edited out these thoughts. I hadn’t remembered those falling ashes when I wrote the above essay, nor in subsequent years. My brain had edited out that horror, but now I remembered.