Remembering 9/11

A response to a reader request America America (Robert Beschloss)

9/11

My alarm went off and I had hit the snooze button delaying inevitable morning rituals and drive to work. My phone rang just as I was prepped for 7 and a half minutes of snooze, it was a newly ex-boyfriend I had seen at a concert Monday night. He asked if I was ok and I sleepily remarked that I was of course ok, a little bit tired but - he interrupted me, which wasn’t like him at all, at least, not at that time of the morning, and he told me to turn on the TV. His voice alarmed me, I asked which channel, he told me it wouldn’t matter, just turn it on. I did. I was trying to make sense of what I was seeing, and before he could explain or anything really processed in my brain - I watched the second plane fly into the South Tower. I think I said, “Oh my God.” There was silence and I told him I needed to go. We hung up.

I frantically began dialing numbers that I had for my mom, who was living in Morristown, NJ at the time and had regular meetings in Manhattan on Tuesdays... she didn’t answer her home phone, and I really hadn’t expected her to do so, but ‘just in case’ was I’m sure my thought process. Then I called her office in Parsipany, NJ, I couldn’t get through. After multiple attempts, I finally got through and her secretary answered. I asked if I could speak to my mother. The phone was very quiet and she started to explain that my mom wasn’t in the office today...I knew this, but again, the mind stubbornly defaults to maybes...my mind raced and all of the options that it wanted to be true were struck down. I could hear her secretary still speaking to me, calmly and quietly about attempting to reach her and some of her colleagues, that they had not received any calls from her yet, but were certain that it was most likely only because they lines were all so busy and that she would get word to them once she was able to get through. I was still watching the television as I listened to her on the other end of the phone. When I realized there was silence, I uttered some sort of acknowledgment and tried to be positive. Her voice finally cracked a little bit as she promised that I was on her list of people to contact the minute she heard word of anybody’s status because as she confirmed, my mother had gone into the city for a meeting relatively close to the towers in the WTC complex.

I finished readying for work. I don’t remember much of it or the drive to work. I was working at the time at Austin Harley-Davidson. I don’t remember much about work that day other than a large TV being brought into the center of the showroom and employees mostly standing around the TV and watching. I thought about my little brother briefly, but checked him off as “ok” in my mental checklist - he lived in Manhattan, but I had mentally placed him to be out of that area for the workday. So, I waited to hear about my mom as I watched the scene unfolding. I began to think about my mother’s neighbors, one worked at the stock exchange, etc., they had kids, young kids. I felt that pain that twists and wrenches one’s soul begin to work its way into mine. I had made myself impervious to that kind of pain- up until my employment with Harley-Davidson, I had been a paramedic with the City of Austin until deciding to work internationally on seismic research vessels as a fitness paramedic and safety officer. I was moving on from emergencies and tragedies and general human suffering. But there it was, on a huge tv display, all the things that I didn’t want to be a part of anymore. Then they cut to wider view and I could see the NYFD Incident Command and I wanted to yell at the TV. It was too close, the towers are going to collapse was all I could think about, the Command is too close to the scene! The smoke was thicker, they were people on top of the Towers and the were talking about helicopter rescues...and I knew that couldn’t happen - but those people!! - and then I saw something that I could not comprehend - objects falling from the building, but it wasn’t an object it was - a person! That person had been standing on a crag of the building and jumped! No!!! The whole thing just became more and more horrific. My phone rang. I answered it - I never answer my personal phone at work - but I actually had it with me instead of in my purse, and I answered it (fire me for breaking the rules, I felt it was justified) it was my mom’s secretary. She had contacted the office to check on she had diverted and was returning to the office, or home. But she was in NJ, not NY, she was fine. She was goi by to go sit with her neighbors and she would call when the phone lines weren’t so jammed. I was relieved. Then I looked at the TV, I felt so guilty for feeling relief.

They day was pretty much a haze of dread, empathetic overload. But dread. I stared at the TV and wanted to scream until NYFD heard me and called a mayday to clear all personnel out of the building, Nobody should be in there anymore. Why would people still he in there? Certainly all of the buildings had set off alarms to evacuate the buildings and complex when the first plane struck the North tower, right?

The first tower fell and people my heart fell with it. Why were so many people still in the area?? I thought about my little brother, I hoped he and his fiancé weren’t planning on returning to their apartment that evening, in my mind it was too close to the WTC, and they should probably just leave Manhattan while the dust settles. He was practical, he would audibly roll his eyes over the phone whenever I mentioned this to him later that day, I’m sure, but he would chuckle and agree with me just shy of saying something like, “duh...”

The TV cut to the Pentagon and the wheels of the landing gear from a plane that struck the building, laying there on the ground looking like a scene from a kids toy soldier battle. My Aunt lived outside of D.C., she was an analyst for the FBI. She didn’t work at the Pentagon...she was ok. I called her anyway. I got her answering machine. I left a message telling her I was checking on her. And that mom, her sister, was ok.

There was more talk on the TV regarding planes being grounded. Confusion. Lots of confusion. Then another plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. There was speculation that it was also a hijacker’s plane. Really?? We’re speculating? The country seemed to hold its breath. Until the last plane in the air landed without incident, we all held out breath. More chaos and horror unraveled on TV. The other tower collapsed. I didn’t cry. I didn’t want to shout. I was numb. I was back to being the person I was before making a career change. The person with a wall surrounding her heart and her mind that was so tall and so think, it was impervious to attack. Nothing got through that wall, externally or internally. And I watched as everything around me unraveled. There was talk of a possibility of war - oh, no, buddy, I can tell with certainty, we are going to war. Bags are being packed, gears are already in motion, it may not be stated officially, but it’s happening. And with the unraveling, the new state was setting up shop. Welcome to the State of Fear. The President is on Air Force One - is this good or bad? Who knows. Cheney is taking control. Is this good or bad, he seems a little to prepped for this moment. This is the guy who shot a guy in the face on a bird hunt. This is scary.

Rudy Giuliani speaks to the country. The mayor of New York brings people together, bolsters the country, and has what we will later realize is the climax of his career. Turns out to be the penultimate, but in retrospect, should have been the moment that ended and defined his career and his character. But I digress.

I speak to my mom. She is staying with neighbors and being supportive as they wait to hear from or greet loved one returning from the city. Our conversation is brief and she tells me to call her when I leave work.

The work day ends. I clock out. I don’t want to go anywhere with my coworkers. I don’t feel sociable.I call my mom during the drive home for a quick update. I ask her about my little brother’s fiancé, she’s ok and with Danny, right? I can’t hear my mom on the other end of the phone. I can hear her again. She asks me where I am. I tell her I am driving. She pauses. She tells me I should pull over. I begin to protest - and I suddenly can’t see the road in front of me. It’s like the cars and the building - everything - has disappeared. I feel something similar to a sucker punch in my solar plexus and I can breathe. The wind has been knocked out of me. I pull over into the parking lot if a little fast food burger shack directly behind my apartments because I can’t make it 50 feet to the intersection to take a right and turn into my apartment complex. I can’t hear my mom. My fingers are bone white I am grilling the steering wheel so hard, I may actually crush the material it is made of...mom’s trying to talk. She’s searching. She’s confused but doesn’t want me to know...I finally can get words out, and it is just one word and I scream it, “NO!”

I won’t listen to her as she speaks. I refuse to listen to her. I’m going to hang up on her. She is talking fast. She’s asking me something - can I call my boyfriend - he isn’t my boyfriend anymore - we broke up, or quit seeing each other, whatever it is that 30 somethings do. We still speak, but he knocked up some chick, so, yeah, we’re not anything but friends anymore. She tells me I don’t need to be alone right now. I tell her I’m fine!! Like dominoes in a formation, or floors collapsing in The Towers as they each fell???, pictures and facts start coming to view in my mind and they keep slamming together one by one and I realize what I had done from the moment I got out of bed and turned on the television only to see a plane slam into the tower best to the one with smoke and paper billowing out of it - I had immediately locked down certain areas of my brain that held information that needed to be kept out of my thoughts, out of my sphere of knowledge...possibly forever, but someone just blew the air locks on it and dammit! Dammit! That was closed off for a reason! You see, what I didn’t want to know, or admit to knowing, what I didn’t want to consider was the hard truths of reality. My little brother lived in midtown, he worked not only close to the WTC, he worked in the North Tower. He worked for Marsh McClennan. He had been a contracted employee for the past year doing computer stuff for them and that was his first week as an actual employee for Marsh McClennan. He was self taught on computers because of his curiosity of how things worked , so he had disassembled a computer one day and from there ignited a passion, or a gift that he turned into his profession. The first plane hit his offices directly. And deep down, I think I knew this from the moment I got the phone call telling me to turn on the tv - it was the reason for calling me, because Danny worked there. I suddenly realized why I hung up on Noah, the boyfriend (ex) that called, I cut him off before he couldn’t say my greatest fear. I wouldn’t say that I wasn’t concerned about my mom and her being scheduled to be there, it’s just that the quick calculations in my head produced results that her chances of being ok were in the high 90s percentile, the calculations regarding Danny weren’t being discussed by my inner voice and I because I wasn’t allowing it. I wanted desperately to be in denial. I was angry. So angry! And then I was just numb again. I don’t think I have ever really recovered from 9/11. So many people were robbed of lives and futures. The country was robbed of Imani of its best qualities. Kindness felt like it died that day. The better part of me died that day.

Danny’s body was never recovered. No DNA was recovered...I take solace in knowing that that Tuesday morning was one of the most beautiful mornings ever, with a sky so blue that it was a standout kind of morning, that’s the kind of person Danny was. That’s the kind of light that he carried within him. That sky was one of the last things he knew of this world and then his death was by all calculations, instant. Losing him has been indescribable. Losing him with the possibility of thinking his last moments on earth were a horror of deciding whether to jump to his death, be burnt and crushed in the collapse, or trampled to death in one of the stairwells as people stampeded to escape, those are all thoughts that I can not allow to play out in my head. From all technical views, it is most likely that he and his coworkers were vaporized before they ever really knew what hit them. That is the most humane of possibilities in a a group of shit choices.

Danny was 25 years old. The world is a much lesser place without him and the hardest part for me to grasp is that his departure from this world didn’t even cause the earth to pause in its rotation - it stopped my world from turning and I don’t think it has ever truly recovered.

This is the first time I have written about that day. More may follow since the story obviously does not end there. It took this long to put it into words that weren’t crumpled up and thrown away or summarily deleted.