My 9/11 Story
My wife and I sat in the half light of the theater, a rare midweek date night, recounting the un-events of our earlier hours as we waited for the trailers to begin. She was indulging me this evening. Usually our choice would have more likely been a romcom, or at least a period piece with some swaggering young male heartthrob. But she somehow agreed to see Zero Dark Thirty, the dramatization of the American military’s hunt and elimination of Osama Bin Laden.
I had great respect for the director Katherine Bigelow. She had been named Best Director at the Academy Awards a few years prior for The Hurt Locker, her fictional depiction of the Iraq war through the eyes of an explosives expert whose mind and body bore the stress of near daily life and death decisions. This movie would not be as acclaimed, probably at least partially due to Bigalow’s own decisions to intrude on sensitive realities in service to the story, as well as because of the moral greyground of the act of assassination, even of an individual overwhelming viewed, at least by the Western world, as relentlessly evil.
Before long the lights dimmed, the trailers played out, and the theatre went fully dark. Disembodied voices filled the room. Through the blackness we heard the confusion of Cleveland’s air traffic control, in contact with those aboard United flight 1523, segueing to United Flight 93, which ultimately fireballed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. A son calls his mother to speak to her one last time. Ladder 15 is advising firefighters of the developing situation in New York. As the terrors of 9/11 relived themselves in my ears, the hair rose on my arms and neck because in my gut I knew that Melissa was about to come next.
Are they gonna be able to get somebody up here?
[Dispatcher] Of course, ma'am, we're coming up to you.
Well, there's no one here yet and the floor is completely engulfed. We're on the floor and we can't breathe.
[Dispatcher] Hold for one second, please…
I'm gonna die, aren't I?
[Dispatcher] No, no, no, no, no, no.
[Dispatcher] Ma'am, ma'am, now,
I'm gonna die.
[Dispatcher] Look, stay calm, stay calm, stay calm, stay calm.
Please, God...
[Dispatcher] You’re doing a good job, ma'am, you're doing a good job.
No, it’s so hot, I'm burning up.
[Dispatcher] …fine, they're gonna come get you.
[Dispatcher] Can anyone hear me?
[Dispatcher] Oh, my God…
And with that the screen went silent.
I imagine that everyone of adequate age has their own 9/11 story: what you were doing when you first heard that the first plane hit; what you were doing when you first heard that the second plane hit; what you did to handle the shock for the next 24 hours or 24 days. If you happened to be in New York City that day, as I was, we’re talking on an entirely different level. If you happened to be in lower Manhattan that morning, you're possibly still reliving the nightmare. If you were actually within One or Two World Trade Center, survived and walked away covered in the silt of pulverized concrete, computers and corpuscles, as a few of my Wall Street friends were, you're possibly now living in Kansas as Barry and his family do.
It was an amazingly beautiful early fall morning. Technically it was still summer, but everyone in New York knows that summer officially ends with Labor Day. I was on the 7:37 express from Huntington, a great train because it originates in my hometown, so I always had my pick of seats. My fellow commuters and I herded ourselves onto one of its dozen or so cattle cars bound for Penn Station. I always sat on the south side against the window, backward-facing, soaking in the early morning sun and catching up on week-old news with Time Magazine or some saved sections from the most recent Sunday’s New York Times. On the 7:37, Syosset is the third and last stop before Manhattan and only about 10 minutes into the hour-plus ride. But the entire train, though packed to standing room, was already silent, everyone trying to escape within a semi-conscious snooze before facing the looming realities of the workday. You could hear the metaphorical pin drop.
As we rolled towards the City, I leaned back and quickly drifted off into my fantasy of someday not having to spend every morning making this same monotonous trek. Most days my slumber remained uninterrupted until the conductor announced "Penn Station next!" sometime during our submersion under the East River. But that day the calm was interrupted by someone's verboten cell phone call, announcing itself with one of those innocuous and ubiquitous ringtones rendered in annoyingly synthetic notes that causes everyone on board to turn and glare at the offending recipient. Are you kidding me? You're going to take a call? Here? Now? I suspect most of my semi-conscious fellow commuters we're expecting either a blow-by-blow recreation of a bad blind date or another inconsiderate early-morning sales pitch. It was neither.
"What? Are you shitting me? A plane just slammed into The World Trade Center?"
The young woman's surprise registered with everyone instantly, and we wrenched our necks to wheel our heads in unison to witness plumes of smoke billowing from atop one of the Twin Towers a split seconds before the train's sudden plunge into the tunnel served as the off button to the remote. The young woman's contact was curtailed - cell service was suspended beneath the river - so facts were not available. Speculation ran rampant.
"Must have been some small private plane."
"I'm surprised it hasn't happened sooner."
"Hope no one got hurt.”
"Hope it doesn't screw up the subways.”
We arrived at Penn Station not having forgotten the incident, but most had already downgraded its significance and placed it somewhere below our more mundane priorities. Until we hit the street.
The normal rush hour crush of soldiers suited for their Tuesday skirmishes surged into the funnel of the West 34th Street escalators which dumped us into the blinding sun and bright blue skies. But as we rounded the corner we realized that this would be no ordinary day. All attention was turned south, down Seventh Avenue, to see smoke now pouring from both towers. Curiosity was replaced by alarm, and alarm was soon to be replaced by horror. I headed off to my office at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, pausing before entering the building to peer downtown for what turned out to be my last live view of the The World Trade Center.
With construction completed thirty years earlier, the Twin Towers were always a sore spot with architecturally aware New Yorkers, suffering derision for being no more interesting than a pair of file cabinets, albeit each stretching almost a quarter of a mile high. Their significance, as was pointed out to me by a more astute aesthete after my own disparaging discourse on their blandness, was simply that there were two of them, and that they were identical. I got it, and from then on regarded their dominance of the urban landscape with a new found appreciation.
About a year before the catastrophe I visited The WTC for the first time as a tourist. I had at one time had a meeting fairly high up in one of the towers. An uncommonly windy day, I swear I could feel the sway. On another occasion I took my wife for dinner at Cellar in the Sky, an intimate restaurant with infinite views, next door to the more well-known Windows on the World. But one day we spontaneously embarked on a family outing, mother-in-law Mary in tow, that placed us at the observation deck on the top floor of the South Tower. A windless, late October afternoon with just a hint of haze on the horizon, the setting offered 360-degrees of distant horizons and nothing to impede our intrusion into the heavens. Seemingly only inches away - though in fact a good 200 feet - loomed the rooftop of the North Tower, and there the second corner that provided anchor for Philippe Petit's insane stunt of traversing the gap on a three-quarter inch steel cable. The enormity of the buildings was simply unimaginable.
When I arrived at my 12th floor office only about half of the staff had arrived, and information was just beginning to trickle in. One of my associates was growing annoyed that so many of the staff were late and that no one present was getting on with work, until we informed him of what the rest of the world already knew. "Both towers have been hit, and hit on purpose by passenger jets. We're in deep shit."
We had no working television or stereo system in the office, embarrassing to say the least, media being the source of our advertising agency’s bread and butter. Our sole outlet for information about the unfolding events was a small white clock radio commandeered from someone's cubicle, now precariously placed for optimal reception, the volume cranked to the level of distortion. Huddled around that ancient artifact we followed every word of the reports as being released by our local AM news station.
By now Evelyn, our acknowledged office Mom, began working herself into hysteria. Her daughter, Melissa, she tearily told us, was employed for IQ Financial Systems, housed in the upper reaches of the South Tower. Melissa had gone to the office early that day for a meeting at the request of her boss.
I had met Evelyn's daughter just a few weeks earlier. She had come to visit her mom at the office, to talk about their plans for an upcoming trip together to Italy, and Evelyn proudly introduced me to a very pretty, professional young woman. Melissa had just turned thirty or so; I believe it may actually have been her birthday that day of her visit. Mother and daughter were scheduled to leave for Europe on the fourteenth, just three days away.
Frantic phone calls to Melissa went unanswered, as cell phone service in the City during the crisis was erratic at first, eventually ceasing completely due to the sheer overload on the system that widespread panic had brought with it. Our small group remained glued as the unfolding events were being delivered over our pathetic equipment until a collective gasp escaped when the newscaster incredulously reported the collapsing of the North Tower. Hearing how floor was falling upon floor like a vertical stack of dominoes, clouds of dust billowing into an urban mushroom cloud, our disbelief was only eclipsed by our fear of what could possibly happen next.
Evelyn's fears quickly became all too real. She clung desperately to the possibility that the South Tower would retain its stability. It had been struck first, and much closer to its top. Surely it would hold up, at least long enough for those inside to get out. It did not. The South, too, soon fell in its own cloud of grey cement and groaning steel, along with Evelyn's last ray of hope.
I wish I could say I was a hero for Evelyn, but I wasn't. That would be a young man named Gerard who held her hand through the fruitless search of the City's hospitals and the triage centers that had been set up in a variety of locations below Houston Street in anticipation of the thousands of injured survivors that never materialized. Unfortunately their search would yield no trace of Melissa, and none would be found for several years. Ultimately Evelyn received a call from the 911 operator, a woman who had actually spoken with Melissa while she was trapped in the South Tower. The operator told her that she had a message for Evelyn from her daughter. Like the young man and surely many others that perished that day, Melissa had pleaded with the operator to speak with her Mom one last time. But it was impossible the operator told her, though she promised to deliver Melissa’s message. “Tell my mother that I love her, and that she’s the best mom in the whole world.”
My own priority had been to track down my brother-in-law, John, a corporate lawyer who all in the family believed was scheduled for a meeting in one of the towers that morning. Phones now entirely useless, I headed towards his office several blocks away, arriving to find hundreds of workers pacing the plaza in front, dazed and confused, their faces awash with the same "What-the-fuck-just-happened?" shock and awe that we all felt. I darted throughout the throng, nervously scanning from face to face and to my relief I found John within a few minutes. His meeting, it turns out, was not at The World Trade Center; after all. It had been downtown, but the location was in fact a good distance away from what would soon be referred to as Ground Zero. Ironically, John's conference concerned a suit and countersuit between American Airlines and United, the two carriers whose equipment had just been hijacked for repurposing as weapons of destruction. During John’s meeting, those around the table had actually seen one of the planes fly by as it headed for its target further south. Learning of the attacks and their companies' respective roles, the two sides instantly suspended the discussions, and eventually dropped their suits against each other altogether.
John and I made our way to the apartment of a friend of his and now watched on television for the first time - over and over and over and over - the terrifying events that the rest of the world had seen in real time as they had occurred. Eventually confident that the coast was clear, the skies now under the control of the streaking Air Force F-16's crisscrossing above us, we made our separate ways home, he to Brooklyn, me to Long Island, mixing with the thousands of zombified New Yorkers trudging uptown, still trying to make sense of the last several hours. I boarded the first Queens bound train that came by, packing myself in amongst the other refugees, some bearing signs of the dust that bore witness to their place on the front lines. As I glanced about I caught sight of the sign that told me I was on the E train, heading east to Jamaica from its normal point of origination - The World Trade Center.
Some months later, Evelyn held a memorial service for her daughter - more of a celebration, really. The guest of honor was a 911 operator, apparently the last person Melissa spoke to that fateful day as she was struggling with the scorching heat and stifling smoke on the eighty-third floor. In 2006 the tape of that call would be released and used as evidence in the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the one terrorist that missed the plane. Melissa, in her death, would achieve an unsought fifteen minutes of fame, her face appearing on the front page of local, national and international newspapers and the sound bites of her terror being broadcast on virtually every media outlet. For the longest time, I had personally avoided listening to Melissa's chilling call, initially telling myself that such voyeurism just seemed wrong. But as I began to replay the events of the day now indelibly known as 9/11, it seemed that finally listening to Melissa was an important piece of still trying to understand and contextualize all that happened. Now having finally heard first hand the unfathomable fear that she felt in her last few moments, I'm not sure how I feel, whether I have indeed invaded her privacy or been privileged to have Melissa remind me of just how precious our lives are. Both are true, I think.
As time and the world moved on, Evelyn's resilience was remarkable. At least in public, she was able to adopt an "It is what it is" philosophy, and trusted in God's plan, however mysterious it may have been to her. She returned to work and actually seemed to enjoy open dialogue about her loss. She spoke of Melissa with love and the joy of having known her, never of revenge for the fanatics who had stolen her child's life, never with anger towards the airlines for having such porous security, nor with any resentment towards Melissa's manager, who himself survived solely because of his own tardiness.
Instead, her candor, control and unshakable faith in the triumph of tolerance and compassion over division and hatred put the entire office at ease. She, the one with the incomparable burden to bear, supplied the therapy the rest of us needed.
Almost ten full years later, Navy Seals finally found and killed Osama Bin Laden. The streets of New York and the nation erupted again, though this time with a dark celebration. Young and old, politicians, pundits and recliner-bound patriots were patting themselves on the back for "a job well done" and chanting "USA!" as if we'd just taken Olympic gold in basketball or hockey. But as I watched the sight bites of the crowds I couldn't help but see the parallels to the countless images we've witnessed for decades of similar masses in far off nations chanting "Death to America!" with equal fervor. Did Bin Laden's death put an end to terrorism? Certainly not. And nothing will ever bring back the all the lives that have been lost. And so every every year on the 9/11 anniversary, I wonder just what Evelyn was thinking the day Bin Laden went down. My guess is that instead of rejoicing she was taking the higher road, praying for Osama's soul and hoping that God would forgive him.
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