I get confused, now, when I see skylines on television, when script writers use a shot of the skyline, to get me in the mood, thinking I’ll automatically know to which city they are referring.  But I don’t know now.  I used to know, when the Twin Towers still stood, and I could automatically rule out New York, and then could guess pretty well whether it was Chicago or Boston or somewhere else. But now, I just don’t know. Without the Twin Towers as an unmistakable anchor, the Manhattan Skyline is unfamiliar to me. It’s all so unclear now, and I’m never sure, when shown a skyline, where I’m supposed to be.

 My dad and I once stood on the Observation Deck of the South Tower, and played a game of “let’s freak ourselves out.”  We’d lean over the guard rail, towards the window as far as we could, and with our foreheads resting on the glass, we’d look down, miles down, into the streets below, and pretend we were about to jump. It was an impossible, frightening distance, and it was easy to scare yourself, and it was fun, like how it was fun to scare yourself by watching a scary movie.  What if we fell?  What if we had to jump?  But we didn’t have to jump; it was unthinkable, it was out of the question. No one would ever, in a thousand years, have to jump from the top of this building like that. It just couldn’t happen. It was impossible.

——

Tuesday September 11, 2001

I woke up feverish that morning, possibly from eating – the night before – three mussels that hadn’t cracked themselves open during the boiling process, but which I forced open anyway.  I considered calling in sick, something I never did, but today was not just a normal day at the corporate offices in Milford; today was the once-monthly forecast meeting in the City, an important meeting that promised to be difficult.  I couldn’t afford to miss it.

As sick as I was, I still noticed the unusual brilliance of the morning (and I’m not just throwing that in for dramatic effect, after the fact).  It was an unnaturally stunning morning, as if someone had turned both the intensity and the contrast buttons to high.  The sky was computer-screen blue, and the colors of the leaves, only just beginning to speak of fall, were lemon, lime, and loden, with a hint of russet and wine, shining with reflected sunlight.

Stopping first for coffee, which I thought would help my sickness but didn’t, I barely made the 7:44 southbound train, which would put me into Grand Central at 9:06, just in time for the 9:30 meeting.  As usual, I picked the wrong car, the car with the large, annoying Monica Lewinsky-type girl, who proceeded to call every single person in her extended network, talking loudly and at length about every single thing that had ever happened to her in her life since the beginning of time.  She finally shut up long enough for me to fall into a feverish doze, only to be awakened a few minutes later by the jangling ring of her phone.

“Hello?” she screamed, and then went silent for a few seconds, a notable event in itself. “What?” she shouted. “The World Trade Center was attacked by terrorists?”

I rolled my eyes. What an attention-whore.

(Fact: 8:45AM: a  hijacked passenger jet, American Airlines Flight 11 out of Boston, Massachusetts, crashes into the north tower of the World Trade Center, tearing a gaping hole in the building and setting it afire.)

The girl next to me, who liked Loud Annoying Girl about as much as I did, said, “Did she just say the WTC was attacked by terrorists?”

“I think so,” I said, and rolled my eyes again. None of us believed her, and that was all we heard from Loud Girl.  Her phone lost reception almost immediately, and no one had any luck dialing out either.

When the train stopped at one of the stations just outside the city a few minutes later, however, something did seem to be a little off.  Maybe Loud Girl was right, or at least halfway right.  Maybe something small had happened, maybe a bomb scare at the WTC, something not too bad, but at least big enough to give me a believable excuse for being late to the meeting.

Fifteen minutes later, the train started up again, heading south.  They were taking us into the city; how bad could it be?  If there was any real danger, they’d have turned us around and gone the other way.

(Fact: 9:03 a.m.: A second hijacked airliner, United Airlines Flight 175 from Boston, crashes into the south tower of the World Trade Center and explodes. Both buildings are burning.)

If Grand Central felt strange to me – a large hollowing echo – it was only because I had a fever of about 102. Otherwise, walking south on Park Avenue, except for a thick gray plume of smoke off in the distant sky in front of me, it was business as usual.  There was no panic, no sense that anything terribly bad was going on. This was midtown, far from the action.  No one really knew anything; it was too soon.

When I got to the office a few minutes later, Jeff, my boss, was hard at work, more concerned about how to remove the gridlines from his Excel spreadsheet than the fact that something might have just crashed into the World Trade Center.  There was something about Jeff that had recently made me want to disagree with everything he said.  I didn’t think anything work-stopping was happening either, but if he said black, I felt compelled to say white.

“But, look,” I said. “You can see it from the window.   The sky is filled with smoke! There’s something going on down at the World Trade Center.  Check it out.”

“Hunh.  Cool,” he said, coming over to the window, but not very impressed.  “Well, Gwen should be here in a few minutes.  We’ll start the meeting then.”

“Oh … Stacey, you’re here,” said the receptionist.  “Your mother just called, please call her back.” 

My mother just called?  Why?  How did she find me in New York?  She doesn’t have the number in New York.  Why is she calling me in New York?  I call her back, hoping no one had died at home.

“Oh Stacey, where are you?  Are you ok?”  my mother sounded so concerned it was almost funny.  She’d been watching the news, and knowing that I sometimes worked in the city, she’d feared the worst (that I’d been the direct object of the terrorist attack).   She’d called the Milford offices, and had tracked me down in New York.  The whole country was abuzz with the news, every TV in the nation was turned to CNN, yet here, in Midtown Manhattan, without a television, no one had any idea what was going on just a couple of miles south. 

“Yes, I’m fine.” I said.  “I’m far away from that, miles away.  It’s not as bad as the news is making it sound. We’re fine.”

I hang up and call Mark, at the offices in Milford, to get a non-mother-panicked perspective.  He tried to explain, but I still didn’t get it. “The plane is inside the building,” he said.  I picture an airplane sitting calmly inside the floor of a building, all of its passengers intact, still wearing their seatbelts, chatting casually to the people on whose floor they’d just landed, people enroute, perhaps, to the copier machine.  “Here, you guys want some coffee while you wait?”  “Sure, thanks!”

(Fact: 10:05 a.m.: The south tower of the World Trade Center collapses, plummeting into the streets below. A massive cloud of dust and debris forms and slowly drifts away from the building.)

Still not knowing how bad it was, the meeting was cancelled anyway, much to Jeff’s dismay, and we were all free to go home.  Jeff and I decide to walk as far south as we could, to get as close to ”the show” as possible, where, unbeknownst to us,  people were dying, getting smashed between floors, being burned to death, jumping to their deaths.

(Fact: 10:28 a.m.: The World Trade Center’s north tower collapses from the top down as if it were being peeled apart, releasing a tremendous cloud of debris and smoke.)

Every so often a police car would come screaming up through the streets, covered in debris, but that was it, except for the smokestacky greyness that billowed in the sky.  In midtown, people were just starting to realize that something was happening; there seemed to be a bit of a “snow-day vacation-from-school” sort of recklessness  A few blocks into the walk, however, I decided I was too sick to keep walking.  All I wanted was to be sitting on a train, headed back to Milford, where I could get into bed and sleep this thing off. 

I was on the first train out of the city, one of the first people to make it on the car.  I had my own seat, a window seat.  They didn’t charge that day, or check tickets.  We all just piled in, the cars packed with as many people as possible, people standing in the aisles, swaying back and forth, and not even caring, like a train bound for, or away from, Auschwitz.  I was unaware of how long we sat there, because I kept sliding in and out of a fevered sleep, but apparently, we sat there and waited for hours and hours of sweaty hours. Finally, the train pulled out of the station.

(Fact: 2:49 p.m.: At a news conference, Giuliani says that subway and bus service are partially restored in New York City. Asked about the number of people killed, Giuliani says, “I don’t think we want to speculate about that — more than any of us can bear.”)

I finally get home at around 6PM.  Mark is standing out in the yard, waiting for me.  He opens his arms, and he holds me, and I cry a little, not quite sure why, except I’m tired, and it feels like I’ve been gone for a long time, and I’m just very, very glad to be home.  We go inside, and I see the news for the first time.

I cannot believe it.   I am shocked.

———

It’s strange to think that I once sat above the NYC skyline, on the floor of a building that is no longer there. When I remember that day, and picture myself back there with my dad, leaning over the glass trying to scare myself, the floor feels ghostly, and I feel suspended above the city, breathless and exposed, held up by nothing.

And when I think of the people who played the same game that we did, only for real that day … the people who leaned over windows that were no longer there – their foreheads unchecked by glass – and fell from such heartbreaking height, I can’t begin to imagine the horror of what was happening around them, behind them, over them, under them, to make jumping from such a scary, impossible, unreal height seem like, this time, the better alternative.