September 11, 2001

In New York City

When I crossed Madison Avenue on the way to work, I looked south and I saw one of the World Trade Towers bellowing smoke.  The other Tower hadn’t been hit yet.  I could time my position in time by that moment, like the frozen clock at Hiroshima.  Smoke was gushing out of the east side of the building.  The building was hemorrhaging smoke in a fat black plume.  It was as if an aorta running through it had been severed.  The smoke was pouring from at least four or five flours.  The air was so pure and crystalline that morning, I could see that even from four or five miles away.  Anyone who saw it knew that this was no ordinary fire.  The building had plainly been grievously wounded, and it was terrifying to see it bleeding so profusely.  Even so, no one could in his or her wildest dreams would have thought the wound was mortal.

What was this?  People on the street were saying that a plane had crashed into the Tower.  What kind of plane?  How?  No one knew the full truth yet. 

I went to my job, and that’s when I discovered what had happened.  Everyone had seen the news on the Internet.  Women were walking up and down the halls crying, just like the day Kennedy was assassinated.  I tried to call my former wife, Brenda, where she worked, which was not far from my office.  I couldn’t get through.  I sent her an e-mail, but had no idea if that made it through.  I tried to call our daughter’s school, which was, I thanked God, far to the north, at 114th Street, on the West Side of Manhattan.  I couldn’t get through. 

I left.

I crossed Madison again, looked south, and saw the building was still burning, but in my hurry to find my ex-wife and my daughter, I don’t remember seeing both of the towers burning, or if one of them had fallen.  Everyone was walking—the whole city, it seemed.  The streets were full of people walking. They were walking quickly, with an urgency.  Everyone was trying to get home, wherever that was.  They flowed off the sidewalks and into the streets.  No one could get a cab, the busses were full, and it seemed insane to go into the subway.  The only option was to walk.  It was a sunny, a brilliant day—I will never forget how beautiful and lucid the day was—an easy day to walk great distances.  I asked to borrow a cell phone from someone, but most cell phones weren’t working, and this one didn’t either.  The lines at the public phones were six or seven deep.  I wanted to find Brenda, and to see if she was all right, and to make sure our daughter was ok.  No one knew anything then, you have to remember.

The guard at Brenda’s office building told me she had left already.  I began my walk to the Upper West Side, to home.  (I lived two blocks from Brenda.)  I finally found a phone that worked and got through at least to Brenda’s answering machine.  I told her I was ok, said I hoped she was, and that I was going to the school to find out about our daughter.  Leave a message, I said, if you get this, let me know if you’re all right.  God bless our daughter, I said.  This was a day that unsettled our very cores, that uprooted us from all our connections.

It was strangely peaceful as I made my way up Riverside Drive that morning.  There were a few people walking along with me.  Everyone’s pace was fast.  I finally reached my ex-wife on the telephone.  She said she was ok and that she had been to the school already and that our daughter was all right.  The Head of the school had told the parents they could take their child home, but she recommended they leave them in school for a sense of normalcy. 

I went to the school myself, saw the Head of School, and heard it from her lips, and felt she was right.  I went back to Brenda’s apartment.  We looked at one another as so many others that day in New York did, with a deep sense of fearful disbelief.  What had they done to our city?  What had happened to us?  We knew so little.  It wasn’t even noon yet.