Five Years in the Shadow

I was watching the French newscast this evening; they marked the eve of the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks with a retrospective of the events of the day--clearly, concisely, almost clinically. Compressed into a couple of minutes were the first plane hitting, the fire and smoke, the second plane, people waving from upper-story windows and finally leaping from one certain death to another, and then, one after the other, the buildings folding into dust.

Five years on, having seen the image of the second plane a thousand times from a dozen angles, I still found it hard to watch. Hours after watching it, I am still shaken. I can't begin to imagine how it must be for those who were there, or whose loved ones were to become part of that cloud of smoke and dust.

There are "where were you when" moments for every generation: Where were you when JFK was assassinated? (I don't remember; I was only four. I knew who he was, though, and I remember the funeral vividly.) When King was shot? (In school. They closed the school and sent us all home.) Bobby Kennedy? (Asleep. My mother shook me awake before the alarm when she heard the news. We had a school field trip that day to Little Red Schoolhouse Nature Center, during which the teacher silenced us periodically for updates from her transistor radio. I remember imagining that he would recover and make a surprise campaign stop at our destination, be waiting there to greet us. On the ride home was the final update that he was dead.) The two shuttle disasters? (Home, both times. Saw them on TV after the fact.)

9/11?

That last one is different. How we experienced those other earth-shaking events has its commonality in the moment, either of the event or of hearing the news: the when. But for 9/11 the impact is different depending where you were relative to the events. The New York Times had an article a few days ago about this.

Newcomers and survivors: those terms ring harsh and blunt only because the line is so often unspoken. It runs soundless and invisible down Broadway from Harlem over the Williamsburg Bridge out to Coney Island and to Fresh Kills, up past the airports across the Grand Concourse into Yankee Stadium, through the bleachers where you can’t drink beer anymore and up out of the park into the nighttime sky.

The line flashes into view on the city streets for moments at a time. When jet fighters buzz the skyscrapers for Fleet Week, some of the people below — the ones who were here on Sept. 11 — flinch. More frequently, though, the line operates beneath the surface of conversations, of interactions, of transactions, of life. The line controls small things, controls the way people react to the phrase “and then Sept. 11 happened,” as though a date on the calendar could “happen.”

Some of the newcomers in the article express dismay at the you-had-to-be-there reactions of those who were in the city when, as the article says, 9/11 happened. But unlike those other historical moments, this one didn't happen just to one or a few people--it happened to the thousands killed, the thousands more who were there and made it out alive, and the millions--like me--who were near enough to see . . . and to wonder whether we were next.

The where makes it vivid, unforgettable, even behind squinched-shut eyelids. Fiction writers are often told to make their work more vivid with imagery of smell and taste. How vivid is 9/11? How much of the rancid, dusty air did you breathe, the air that probably contained the dust of some of the dead?

I was 80 blocks away, in Midtown Manhattan. I read back over what I wrote at the time to friends in other places who were only seeing the flat images on their TVs. I repost those notes here in five parts:

• I: Manhattan Refugees


• II: Living in the Penumbra


• III: Becoming


• IV: Pilgrimage


• V: Coming of Age in an Imperfect World

The key part is not the attacks but rather what "normal" became in the days after, when the Korean ladies at the nail salon greeted returning regular customers with hugs--because who knew which of them had gone forever. When every surface was papered in photos of the missing, first labeled "Have you seen" and later changed to "In memory of" when hope finally gave out. Some of what I wrote then, and remember just as vividly now:

Thursday we went to work. We stopped at the Quik-Stop by the train for a newspaper (we couldn't get a paper Wednesday--they were all gone in minutes). Outside the door, a fireman heaped his gear, hat perched on top, as he and two colleagues went in for coffee. I'm not normally one to offer benediction to strangers--in a normal world, it seems kind of obnoxious; but this isn't a normal world--but I couldn't walk by without speaking. After a nervous "Hi, guys," I offered, "God bless." As we walked a few steps behind them up to the train, the senior of the three was explaining how to protect the eyes from the dust of the pulverized buildings once they arrived.

A couple months ago, three firefighters died here in an explosion at a hardware store in Astoria, Queens. The city slowed down to remember them. When a crowd of firefighters rode the train to their funeral, the conductor made an announcement on behalf of the passengers and crew of condolence, thanks for what they do, and begged them all to be safe. The dead men's pictures are still posted in various places--banks, stores--and there have been any number of charitable funds and events to raise money to support their families. Just to show you how this city feels about its firefighters.

There are maybe a hundred times as many firefighters lost this week as died in the Astoria fire. As a result, firehouses in the city have become places of pilgrimage--mounds of flowers outside, people bringing food inside. At HarperCollins, the company has set up bulletin boards for employees to place their notes, poems, pictures, anything they want to send to the firefighters, cops, and their families, and the company will take them down and deliver them periodically. The library promotions department made lunches for the firefighters at the firehouse on 44th. A colleague said he and his wife went to their Brooklyn firehouse Wednesday just to say thank you. (Brooklyn is, by the way, covered in ash blown from the disaster. Last night the wind changed and you could smell the smoke in Queens.)

Homes of the missing are sites of pilgrimage, too. We're lucky; as far as we know so far, no one on our street was in or near WTC. I keep hearing colleagues talk about candlelight vigils in front of the homes of missing neighbors. Meantime, the city is papered with photos of the lost, adult milk-carton photos: Have you seen my brother, wife, mother, uncle, who was last heard from on whichever floor of one of the towers? You can't help thinking, as we hear how even the steel of the building was reduced to dust by the fire and impact, that there will never be a body for many of these families to bury. To dust you shall return.

And it's not over. Thursday was a day of rolling bomb threats in Midtown. Every few minutes there would be a sudden sea of people outside a building that had been evacuated. Sure, we know that it's mostly fucking idiots with telephones, taking advantage of our anxiety. We also know that all it would take is one real bomb exploding in one of these buildings to shatter our fragile resolve to go on as usual.

When I left the house Thursday morning, I seriously considered leaving a note on the table with instructions for friends and family should we not arrive home. Each good-bye is invested with a lot more awareness of the tenuousness of life, that anything could happen and you might not see this person or place again. When I left Rob at his office to walk the couple blocks farther to mine, he said, "You'll be okay? You want me to walk you there?" On Monday it would have been an unthinkably ridiculous question. On Thursday it seemed utterly normal.

They tested the fire alarms in our office building; when the PA came on to say that, the "May I have your attention please" made most of us jump out of our skins. At lunch in a diner (Time Warner had been evacuated, so why not meet for lunch?), I caught sudden sight of a mural of the twin towers, and it startled me. When I reacted with "Oh my god" and pointing, Rob just about hit the ceiling thinking I had seen something on a TV or through a window, another building turned to dust.

No, just a ghost.

Yeah, it's different here. Even five years on.