This week I've changed the station more than I ever have in the past. The reason for this is the growing din of memorializing 9/11.
I had wondered how the 10th anniversary would unfold for me, at first it was a lazy, kind of minor academic thought that floated through my mind, later it caught my attention more, and now that I know, I've realized I'm completely unprepared for it.
On the radio, it started off with a gradual turning up of the volume and frequency of stories about 9/11, a report here, an individual testimony there; but over the past week it has dominated nearly everything I've heard on all the shows I normally listen to. It has become inescapable.
Today was the worst. While driving Toby and Beruria to school, there was a lengthy segment that detailed the death of the "first" casualty of the attacks that I listened to quietly (so that hopefully the kids didn't hear too much) -- that is to say, the first whose death certificate was formally filed of all the thousands that would follow.
And for the first time in nine years, I broke down and started crying. I had to change the radio station.
I haven't had this feeling for a long time. And it made me realize that I need to somehow try to exorcise these feelings that have laid dormant for quite a while.
There was a time when I cried every morning for a good four or five months after the towers came down. Every morning I would open the New York Times, and after reading through the first pages, inevitably came the pages of pictures and memorials for the victims that had been identified that day. I read them every day, and like a ritual every day I broke down over my coffee. I didn't intend to, I didn't do it because I liked it. I felt like it was an obligation, that I owed it to someone to read those stories.
Kara and I moved to New York City one week before the attacks. Kara was starting her first year of grad school at Rockefeller University on the Upper East Side, and we had just moved across country to our tiny, 175 square foot apartment on West 58th and 9th avenue. I had taken to going to minyan every morning up the street at the Lincoln Square Synagogue, I think services started at about 7 or 7:15 am. I cherished watching the city wake up every morning, the shopkeepers hosing down the crap on the sidewalks, the number of yellow cabs and buses ramping up in the eight blocks between our place and the shul in 66th. A brand new New Yorker, I lived this little fantasy life. Through a twist of fate Kara and I had ended up in the center of the world, the place I'd been reading about and seeing in movies since I was a kid. A few blocks away from where Holden Caufield caught a cab and drunkenly asked the cabbie about where the ducks in the Central Park pond went when the water froze. Eight blocks south of the record shop where Woody Allen met Diane Wiest in Hannah and her Sisters. Every day I walked past the Iridium where Les Paul had a standing gig every week. Living close enough to Julliard to actually be annoyed by the obnoxious hothouse flowers who went to school there...I could go on and on.
Long story short, I liked walking home from shul in the morning.
That morning I walked home, even though I wasn't planning to. Kara and I needed an external disk drive, and I had intended to jump on the #1 subway at 66th Street and take it all the way down to Park Row, to the mecca of all electronic stores, J&R Music World. I had only been there once, and was amazed that when I turned the corner the first time to Park Row, I looked up and saw the Twin Towers for the first (and, it would turn out, the last) time in my life. They were just across the street. Right there, so big, just popping up out of nowhere.
But I didn't think it through, and as I was leaving shul I realized that the last thing I wanted to do was to ride the subway for God-knows-how-long all the way downtown with my tallis and tefillin bag. That seemed like a royal pain, so instead I just walked back to our building, went in the front door, said hello to the security guy, and rode up to our apartment.
If I'd have taken the train, I probably would have gotten downtown at just the wrong time. I would think about that a lot after that day.
Kara was in the shower. I yelled hello to her, went to the cupboard, grabbed the Raisin Bran, poured a bowel, sat down at the tiny table (the apartment was only one room). The futon we slept on was folded up. I don't remember if the tv was on or whether I turned it on, but I started watching Katie Couric and reading the paper. At some point I looked up and saw the North Tower (I think that was the first) burning. I turned up the volume, and heard Couric describing it, saying a plane had flown into the building.
"Kara! Holy shit! A plane just flew into the World Trade Center!" I yelled...Kara was then drying her hair. I remembered immediately a story I'd read about a similar thing happening during World War II, when a B-25 flew in to the Empire State Building. "Oh my God, Kara, it's just like the thing that happened with the Empire State Building!" I remember seeing pictures from that, and thinking about the people who were killed in the accident (it was an accident -- I think low clouds or something), and especially about the secretaries -- for some reason the thought of these people just doing their normal jobs suddenly finding the building in which they were working disappearing around them, finding themselves falling hundreds of feet to earth. That image had always really disturbed me. "I wonder what happened?"
Right after I said that, watching the unchanging image of the burning tower on the tv, and then there was a shadow, and then the tv picture went out.
We didn't have cable in that apartment, just an antenna, and just got the local stations. The shadow, I realized only after I turned to the only station we still got -- it was Channel 2 (I think that's ABC) -- was a plane hitting the second tower. The tv went out because all the stations except for ABC transmitted from atop the Towers. Only ABC had theirs on top of the Empire State Building.
It was at that second that I knew this was intentional, that someone had meant to fly two planes into the World Trade Center.
I remember the fear. I remember hearing that another plane crashed into the Pentagon. I remember not know what was next, whether planes would start careening out of the sky everywhere, the terror that something could happen to us.
In the meantime, Kara and I didn't know what to do. Kara was supposed to start classes that morning. She wasn't sure whether they were cancelled. I'm sure we argued about it -- I'm sure I said that there was no way they were having classes; I know that Kara was worried, because she decided to go across town to the campus. I know I didn't want her to go; I was actually scared and didn't know what was happening. Kara, always the more level and grounded of the two of us, wasn't worried; but she was worried about missing her first class. She went. I stayed in the apartment, staring at Channel 2.
In those days, we didn't both have cell phones. We had one, and I can't remember if I had it or if Kara took it with her. I don't even know how she got across town; I think she maybe tried to take a bus but ended up walking.
I was supposed to be reading books, prepping for my oral exam next Spring. I didn't do that.
After sitting for a while staring at the tv, I had to get out of the apartment.
I decided to take a walk. The security guard was listening to the radio. I remember exchanging a look with him like "what the hell?"
I walked out on to 58th street, and started walking east, towards Columbus Circle. The whole block was dead. No one was out on what was usually an extremely busy street, 9th Avenue. On the side streets as I walked, delivery trucks had just stopped, parked on the curb, and had their doors open and the radio on loudly, so that the people who were gathered around could hear. I remember a number of trucks parked like that, around each one a little community of listeners silent, standing in half-circles around the open doors. Sometimes the drivers were sitting there in the cab, sometimes they were part of the circles. Nobody talked.
I kept walking. I got to 8th Avenue, and I looked downtown.
I saw the smoke. Huge plume of smoke, one giant plume.
I walked to Columbus Circle, and in to a bodega, I think one next to the Starbucks there on 59th. I bought a pack of cigarettes, even though I'd quit smoking a while ago. I walked to the USS Maine memorial on the corner of Central Park, the one facing Columbus Circle, and sat down, opened the cigarettes, took one out, lit it, started smoking.
A guy came up to me. Little overweight, about my age, long hair. He looked at me like he wanted to ask me something.
I remember it was the first time I ever made eye contact in a public place in New York City with a stranger walking up to me...it was something I never did, because I never knew what I'd be getting myself in to. I was a nervous new New Yorker.
But it was just that kind of day -- you made eye contact with strangers on Columbus Circle.
He asked me if I could spare a cigarette. Not like a homeless guy, but like a guy like me -- someone who didn't smoke anymore, but did today. Of course I gave him one.
He lit up, and at that moment a pair of F-16s -- probably New York National Guard -- flew very low above us. I'd see those planes many times that day (or their twins), circling the island over and over again, circling us all with their loud engines -- they were almost the only loud sound you heard where I was sitting.
The guy sat down next to me, and we smoked. I think at one point we started up a very brief conversation, something along the lines of "what the fuck?" followed by shrugging shoulders and shaking heads. "What the fuck is going on here?"
I walked back after the smoke to my apartment. I noticed the people around the trucks getting a little more agitated. I think crying more. I think exclaiming a little more than they had been...and I didn't know why at that moment, but it was because the towers had begun to fall.
I walked into the lobby of our building. The security guy was there, leaning over the counter, listening to the radio. It was a weird kind of lobby, very large and new (it was part of housing that Bard University opened for its New York arts campus, and was quite new and polished). To get to the security desk, you had to go in the door, walk down a few steps, then up again to the elevator. You passed the security guy. He was usually not so loquacious, usually just nodded if you said hello. Not unfriendly, just not so talkative.
Now we talked. "The tower just fell down," he said to me.
I think I said "Jesus Christ" or something. I don't remember, but it was some exclamation.
We just stood there for a minute. I couldn't think of anything to say, he probably couldn't either.
I went and took the elevator back up to my apartment.
A short time later the second tower came down, and I remember just yelling. Just screaming. I was angry. So angry. I screamed and I cried, really cried, just wept.
I don't really remember how the rest of the day went. It was a lot of the same. I think at some point Kara called or I called her (the phones weren't working most of the morning). She told me she was coming home. At some point during the day, I got through to my parents. My dad didn't say hello when I got through, he just said "Come home now. Just come home."
I remember the hospital. We lived directly across the street from Roosevelt Hospital. On one of my trips outside I decided to go to the Red Cross which was on 10th about a block north of us. I was going to give blood, and there was a long line outside the door. I got on the line, and after a while a person came out and said that they couldn't take any more blood, that they had too much now, that it wasn't getting used yet, and that they couldn't safely store any more.
When I walked home again, I passed the entry to the ER at Roosevelt. There were a lot of people standing around in scrubs, waiting. They were just waiting, serious-looking, waiting for the flood.
I think the saddest thought that hit me -- or rather, the thought that made me the saddest -- was when I realized that the flood never did come. There weren't enough people who lived to flood the ERs as far uptown as 59th and 10th. They just waited there, the people at the hospital, all day in their scrubs, probably bone tired, and the ambulances never came.
They said they didn't know how many people were killed, but the whole thing was unfolding. The rest of the day it was the same, the smoke you heard about, the people flooding over the Brooklyn bridge. The next day we saw the pictures, the people carrying others out, the finance guys in their suits covered, just covered with dust. The firemen. So many dead firemen, policemen.
I remember thinking, "They planned the timing so that the second tower would get hit when the firemen were there trying to help people in the first." I don't know if it is true, but that's what happened.
I watched the smoke every day. A few days later the winds shifted to the north, and I smelled it for the first time. The smell was entirely new to me, but there was no mistaking what it was.
A few weeks later, I had to go back to Palo Alto. I still had to complete my teaching and courses, and Kara had started at Rockefeller, and we had to do a bi-coastal marriage for about four months or so until I finished at Stanford. I didn't want to leave, I didn't want to leave her there or leave myself, because I had found very quickly that New York was, after those towers came down, a very long way away from everywhere else. I followed the emails that went out on different grad student list serves at Stanford that I subscribed to, and I found it astounding that there was a total disconnect in what they saw from what I saw. They saw it from a long way away; that is the only way I can account for the way they wrote on these lists. It made me angry, and I didn't want to go to Palo Alto and talk to these people I went to school with.
But I went, and I spent a lot of time ignoring them all. I spent a lot of time alone. I'm only realizing this now, but I spent almost all of the time I wasn't teaching or meeting with professors sitting alone in my room in Escondido Village. I smoked a lot. I drank a lot, I'm not proud to say. It is just occurring to me now that I wasn't really behaving in a healthy way. I thought it was just because I missed Kara (which was true), but now I wonder whether it was something more than that.
I got up in the morning every day, and I rode my bike or walked to the center of campus. I bought a coffee at the cafe next to the library, and sat and read my paper. Every day I lit a cigarette, probably more than one, drank my coffee and read and cried. Day after day. Then got on with my day.
I am not proud of my behavior. Today I did the math, and I realized that even if I was in New York City when the towers went down, I was one of 8,000,000 other people who were in New York City that day. Even if I was in Manhattan, I was one of, I don't know, at least 1,000,000 other people there. Even if I was south of Central Park, I was one of hundreds of thousands of others there. I am not special in any way. I was on 58th street.
Hell, I have friends who were there -- literally there. My friend Ari was there; a young guy, starting out in finance, he had to run away from the dust and walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to get out.
Ari is the happiest person I've ever met. I ask him every week in shul how it's going, and he answers, invariably, "It's going great. Fantastic. Just a great week." And he means it. I don't know if it has anything to do with that day, but I think maybe it does.
I'm not special in any way. I feel bad that I spend all this time writing about this, that I've thought about it so much, when it didn't happen to me. But I guess it still just hurts a lot.
So, I haven't listened to too much NPR this week. I don't know what I'm going to do on Sunday, we don't know what we're going to do. I do know that it is still raw, that it still is just this pain that hasn't ever really gone away, all the things that have happened over the last ten years. I don't know if it's wrong -- it seems like everyone wants to remember, talk about it, think about it, but I just find it really hard.
