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ch’io non avrei mai creduto
che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta
— Inferno, Canto III, 56-57

The first time I was at the World Trade Center was in grade school, on a class trip in the 1970s. I don’t remember exactly when. I do remember going up to one of those tall, narrow windows on the observation deck to look down at the city below, and being badly startled when a loose floor tile gave a quarter of an inch underneath my feet. I thought I was going to plunge through the window.

The first memory I have of the WTC that wasn’t lost in my childhood haze was going to the Concourse level, probably sometime late in high school, perhaps senior year. We were geeky teens who had just discovered a mall to meet at, lame though it might have been as a mall. I remember being surprised that this underground mall even existed in Manhattan.

The time I worked there was in 1994, a year after the bombing. This was for one of my SIPA internships, and it was at some small Port Authority group that did trade promotion for New York City. That group was re-orged away sometime in 1995, being vaguely silly in its scope. Locally made beauty products being shipped to Asia? I’d be surprised if they ever shipped more than a pallet-ful of that. This was only for a semester, and we were in the north tower (WTC1), I think on the 30-something floor, and the reasonable PA cafeteria I got lunch in was at least one Sky Lobby above us. I’ll always remember the thrill of walking out of the Concourse and into the huge, magnificent lobby of the tower. Compared to the florescent-lit Concourse, it was filled with light.

Over the years, like a lot of New Yorkers, I was in, out and around the WTC. It’s where the Broadway IRT stopped downtown, where there was a nice Border’s bookstore, the first in Manhattan I think. In 1993, I worked at the city’s Campaign Finance Board, down at Rector Street and under the shadow of the Towers. Over the past couple of years, I returned a number of times to Windows on the World to set up trade show laptops and LCT displays for Random Walk; these were probably the first times I’d been above the 100th floor since elementary school — New Yorkers don’t often go to tourist attractions, and I’d forgotten what the view was like from up there.

I heard about the first plane when I was getting ready to go to work, listening to radio. NPR flickered with static for a moment, and shortly after that the radio announcer said that a plane had struck the Twin Towers. I turned the TV on — it was CBS, and was just as good as any other channel — and made some phone calls. I thought it was a Cessna, but the hole in WTC1 was too big. Someone on NPR said it was big, like a 757. Shit, a lot of people must have died, probably a couple hundred. I turned away for a bit, and there was an explosion on the second tower, and the TV announcers started gibbering in shock. They rewound the live feed a few seconds, and there was another plane. The camera angle they had was bad, and it look like a small, slow moving plane. I realize now that the 767 had approached from behind the Tower, and the small line I saw was the wing peeking out from around the side of the bulding. But at the time, I thought it was, I don’t know, a police aircraft that was doing a survey of the damage on the first tower that had somehow lost control and slammed into the second tower, one awful accident after another. I didn’t realize that the explosion I saw was the jet blasting through from one side to the other.

I got through on the phone to work. I was going to come in after the first plane struck, thinking there’d be some disruption downtown, but that’d be it. I was told not to come in, and that a bunch of people from the office were supposed to be at Windows on the World. I went back to watching TV, something I’d do for the rest of the day, sort of for the rest of the week.

When WTC2 collapsed, I just stared. I though the newscaster was making a mistake, that the Tower was just behind that cloud of dust, that the cloud of dust was kicked up by some secondary explosion from jet fuel, something. The dust cloud began to clear, and I still thought I could see the Tower, a shadow in the cloud. But that’s all it was, a shadow in the cloud. I just sat and stared for minutes.

Grace came back early: she’d been in the Kings County ER, volunteering to help with the flood of wounded. People were sent away after 3PM, because there just weren’t any. That night, I didn’t feel like cooking, so we went out to dinner in a Park Slope sushi place. Walking down Seventh Avenue, we could see a clear sky, except for cloud-like plume of smoke from Manhattan. There was a smell of burning in the air. That evening, the wind was blowing south.

We came into Manhattan for the first time on Wednesday afternoon. We took the Q train in — the trains that go through the Financial District weren’t running. When the train crossed the Manhattan bridge, what little conversation in the subway car stopped, and everyone quietly moved to the south side of the train and stared out the windows. Through the smoke, we could see the towers of the World Financial Center, towers that we could never see from the bridge before.

I had a bunch of newspapers from the previous week in my apartment that I hadn’t gotten around to reading yet. I tried to read them, but wound up throwing them out. These were news stories about another world, now gone.

I remember some statistic that was thrown around in the old world about how it’s more likely for an American to be struck by lightning than to be victim of international terrorism. In this new world, every New Yorker knows someone who knows someone who’s been struck by lightning. Every American knows someone who knows someone who did some sightseeing at where the lightning struck. I found out later that not everyone scheduled to be at Windows on the World got there on time. We haven’t heard from the two who were there.

I heard a funny comment yesterday: if there ever was a time to have a gun-slinging Texan in the White House, this is it. I don’t believe we can negotiate with people who have not reconciled themselves with the end of the Caliphate and the arrival of Crusaders in the Holy Land, and believe that mass murder will recall a golden age that passed before the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts. This is a cancer that must be cut out. The conditions that allow this mentality have to be addressed, but those possessed of this hatred of us for simply being are probably beyond hope. The cutting out has to be careful, so as not to spread this cancer, but cut it out we must. Hopefully, our policy makers are up to that task.

I saw more American flags hanging from buildings in New York, hanging from backpacks, purses and hats, than I’ve ever seen before. Bin Laden has called America a paper tiger that will crumple after a few blows, and one of the Taliban recently proclaimed that these attacks have turned the United States from a “superpower to a zero power”. This is like what the fascists said in the 1930s. I don’t believe he and others like him quite comprehend what they’ve set in motion, quite understand the whirlwind they’re about to reap.

Tomorrow, I’m going to make blueberry pancakes, and hopefully I’ll remember to spray the claims-to-be-nonstick griddle with Pam.

Posted on Saturday, September 15th, 2001 at 9:31 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.