I began this piece around September 5th. I got the bulk of it down and then on September 10th I began to feel that same old sensation of: Just go to another room, Moira. I wanted to publish it on September 11th but I don't feel safe until I get to September 12th. Today being September 15th I feel I am in the clear.
I can't stop that feeling. That sensation. The feeling that if I don't just put my head down and steady myself and keep going I will burst into tears. Today I feel like I can write safely; it's all done and dusted -- at least until next year.
Last year was meant to be the first and last time I talked about September 11th, 2001. Two thousand twenty was also the first time I watched any memorial type rehash of that day. I was only able to watch whatever it was with one eye open and I made excuses to leave the room to deal with things in other rooms telling myself I could hear from elsewhere. I have been happiest remembering 9/11 when I am safely in September 12th and historically that has meant I kept it all in an ice chest in the back of my mind.
On the day after September 11th, 2001 my fiancé Carroll came home with every newspaper published, all of which had the previous day plastered on their front. One NYC paper had a picture of what is now known as Falling Man. When I saw it I felt ice crystals form in my bladder; everything vital and internal stopped working for a moment. I told Carroll: I don't want to see that.
We were living in North Adams, Massachusetts at that time. I was sleeping as I worked the night shift at some crappy job and had just gone to bed when the phone began to ring. The first few times it rang I ignored it and simply rolled over but then it rang so many times that I knew something was wrong. When I answered it all Carroll said was: Turn on the television, The World Trade Center is coming down. If you knew Carroll like I knew Carroll you'd have done the same thing I immediately did-- I hung up the phone. Of course he called back. How many times he did before I answered again I don't remember now, but I do know that I finally turned on the television not because I believed anything he said but rather to get him to stop calling me and preventing me from sleep. I didn't even have to find a channel as this news was on every channel. I stood in front of our television gobsmacked. Jaw dropped and ice crystals forming.
Carroll had been at work at his job at the foundry in Pittsfield which was about a 45 minute drive from our home. I have no sense of time from that day but I remember in what seemed like minutes he was at my side and we fluctuated between hugging, holding hands, and gasping with us both weeping when the towers came down in an apocalyptic violent menacing atomic plume of smoke. I am writing that we weeped but I have no recollection of crying that day. I only remember feeling frozen.
Somewhere in this time I began to place calls into the city. I have friends who lived only blocks from the towers but high on my list was my brother David who for decades had sent me postcards with nothing but the sentence: Hi from David from the World Trade Center. I was praying that whatever attraction he had with those two buildings did not cause him to be there on that day. My ex lover's daughter, if I remember correctly was attending PS 150 which sat maybe two or three blocks west of the towers. She was a kid at that time maybe 12 or 11. I later learned that she had to walk back to her home in Brooklyn across the Brooklyn Bridge by herself that morning, but she made is safely. Can you imagine teachers evacuating children that morning? Children from all over the boroughs telling them to make it on their own? How many returned home as orphans?
When one calls into a city such as New York City and hears the recording: All circuits are busy; please try your call again later, and that message is heard endlessly it begins phase two of your innards seizing up and threatening you with some internal 'cease and desist' notification. All your brain tells you is: This can't be happening. So you try again and it is only when the television tells you to stop placing calls into the city because the circuits are overloaded and more important people than you need to get through, that you stop. You stop and just have to have faith. Quite quickly a dedicated number was transmitted for those of us that couldn't reach loved ones. That number was manned by a brigade of volunteers that at the same moment that their own fears set in, these individuals took calls from the desperate and terrified and answered my call with calm, love and resolve. Everyone on TV seemed to be holding a picture of a loved one that they begged the listening audience through tears and anguish to search for and find. Everyone was dazed. I was dazed.
That evening of September 11th the fallout ash reached Massachusetts. The sky turned grey and dark. I'd lived through the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helen and ash coming down was something I had seen before but this ash contained incinerated bodies and nothing about this ash derived from Mother Nature. It made me instantly think about the ash that fell from the crematoriums in Europe during the war. One watches this ash come down with silent prayers spoken.
After giving the brigade of volunteers information regarding my brother I was able to get through to everyone I knew at Ground Zero. All I asked for was: Are you safe and OK? Once I learned they were OK I immediately hung up the phone with an: I love you so as not to keep the line engaged and leaving space for the next desperate person to place a call to a loved one. If nothing New Yorkers are organized and get with the program quickly in times of emergency. You see it during black outs, floods, bomb threats, or the derailing of trains. We instantly fall into place and become part of the chain of command helping and ordering others to help. We may seem like an unfriendly lot to the outsider, appearing disinterested but that is what I am most proud of about being a New Yorker: In a crunch no-one does it better.
I can't remember how much time elapsed from when I placed my call to the brigade of volunteers but they called me back to see if I had heard from my brother. I had. He hadn't answered the phone as he later said: Because he enjoyed hearing all of the calls asking about his welfare. He had wanted us to worry a bit longer so he might prolong his sense of reality within the confines of the mental illness that plagues him. He was instantly forgiven as he was safe. Not only safe but he wouldn't be able to get within ten yards, so to say, of the towers until the area could be made safe again, which seemed decades away.
I can't tell you how many people, knowing I was from the city, had asked me to take them down to Ground Zero. I don't take people down to Ground Zero in the same way I don't visit graveyards to gawk at the dead. I was driving around Frisco a few years ago with my dear friend Sue. I had just come from a museum exhibition at the SF Museum of Modern art. There was some film being shown that was a tour of Auschwitz. I felt incensed. I was furious that Auschwitz was open for tourism. Why in the world would anyone want to go to such a terrible horrible place? Her reply was that it was the last place some people knew their family members to have been. It would be like visiting a graveyard. Well I fully agree with this sentiment but I have never visited the graves of people I don't know. No one who has ever asked me to take them to Ground Zero asked me to do so to pay their respects. They wanted to rubberneck. They want to gawk and they can do that on their own time.
My best friend had a connecting layover in Newark Airport which was something ridiculous like 15 hours. I agreed to drive down from Vermont where I was now living and go pick her up and hang out until she went on back to Prince Edward Island. She was with another friend of ours, Gerarda. I can remember only two things from that night. One was being at Gray's Papaya at 72nd Street and B'way at like 11pm and Gerarda wondering out loud: Where in the world are all these people going this late at night?! This caused me to laugh hysterically because Rustico, where they were from, closed up shop after dinnertime practically and there were more people wandering around at 11Pm on the corner of 72nd and B'way than lived in all of Rustico. The second thing I remember about that night was Freda had asked me to go to Ground Zero. I said: There will be no way we can get to Ground Zero as the entire area was closed off from the Staten Island Ferry, west to east side, and all the way north to like 42nd street. We got as close as we could and all I remember, looking down the avenue was the light. It was daylight down there. They had brought in lights that that were so tall and so bright that it was daylight 24 hours a day down there so they could keep working around the clock. The light was so ominous that once again my innards went cold. It was like that glow you see emanating from the laboratory of the mad scientist in old films. It was a light that suggested someone was up to no good. That light lit up possibly 4-12 square blocks (most likely more) and everything around it was pitch black. It was like those lights had been brought in because they had finally found the hole to China and it was now bright enough to see some Chinese people waving back. It was an ungodly incandescence. It was a once in a lifetime glow. It was how one lights up a graveyard still looking for survivors.
People naturally tell you what day it is in passing conversation without meaning a thing. Just the other day Facebook reminded me that two friends had September birthdays that I should remember. Another friend told me of a medical procedure that took place in September. All of these mentions do not slip over or blend with September 11th in my mind. Unconsciously I keep this things firmly compartmentalized in my head and emotional world. How does one get to September 12th without experiencing September 11th?
Years ago I went for a job interview at one of the towers. I had specifically looked for a job at the towers because I had seen the film Working Girl and it seemed at the time like a hip place to work chock a block with dating opportunities. I couldn't have been older than twenty two. I was hired, and on my first day I quit the job because when I had been taken to the 'office' where I was to work I discovered there were no windows. The windows were reserved for big wigs. Windows on the World, of course had windows galore but I could not for the life of me imagine working nine hours a day without a window to look out of even if just passing by. The last time I was in the Towers was with my dear friend David. He had come to NYC from Portland, Oregon for his first visit and he wanted to see all of those touristy things. We took the Staten Island Ferry together and I have a picture of us embracing and it was only after he died that I noticed that the Twin Towers loom behind us in the photo. That same day we went inside the South tower to the observation deck which was on the 107th floor. As we ascended up in the elevator and the whomp, whomp, whomp sound engulfed and shook the elevator I remember thinking what a nightmare it would be getting out of that building should the elevators go out. I remember ConEd black outs and what it was like living on the 12th floor when power went out. Floor 107 wasn't even the top floor in the south Tower.
At the observation deck they had staggered tiered seating like an ampitheater about four rows deep so anyone sitting near the windows would have a view of the Tri-state area. On that day it seemed as though David and I were the only people up there and I took a first row seat right in front of one of those floor to ceiling narrow windows and pressed my nose against the glass to look out and down. I remember immediately pulling back to take a second look at just how thick and secure those windows really were. at that height the windows narrowed from the offices below and were only 28" wide. It seemed implausible that I could be that close to the edge and still be safe. What really surprised me about those windows was that you couldn't hear one bit of sound from the street below. I remember also being amused at how many yellow taxi's there really were in the streets as they dominated the traffic below. I can't remember if the windows were one enormously thick pane of glass or double paned but I am quite sure they were thick enough that it wouldn't be easy to break, that a body accidentally falling against a pane wouldn't be at risk of breaking through or even someone, if high enough, wouldn't be able to throw a rock and break the glass from the outside. Only a bullet, I thought, fired from a gun, could break this glass.
In all the years since September 11th, 2001 I have never asked anyone where they were, what they were doing, did they know anyone. I never said a word. I've noticed that no-one has ever asked me in return where I was, what I was doing either. It's like one of those things you just don't talk about. That you can only talk about with certain people who you don't have to explain a thing to. I think I don't ask because in my heart of hearts I think my questions will be received with a flood of tears. I don't imagine that anyone can tell me of their experiences without deep pain choking their throats.
I choke up too.
Soon after September 11 2001 Carroll and I separated and I moved to Brattleboro, Vermont to attend graduate school. I moved on. I went on with my life. I frequently drove down to the city to visit a friend over in Sneden's Landing but I never drove into the city. I'd meet people in New Jersey, in The Bronx, in Inwood, but I never went downtown. A few years after 9/11 I was driving on the BQE, (Brooklyn Queens Expressway), with a friend from Vermont and we both began to cough violently, like something was in the air that was not good. I quickly realized that we were on a stretch of the BQE that was right across the East River from where the former World Trade Center stood. We were in a section of the highway in Brooklyn Heights that is enclosed like the letter C, open only on one side with the open side facing the former World Trade Center. I'm sure that little stretch was blanketed with toxic waste. Some time later I moved to Brooklyn and my little studio apartment overlooked the BQE and though I was farther south into Sunset Park and I could now see the Verrazano, I still found myself coughing for awhile until I just got used to it.
In the first year after the planes hit the towers, I went on the internet to try and learn about Islam and to try and figure out why people were angry enough to want to kill themselves, others and what was the statement that was meant for America to hear? I learned nothing but instead made two pen pals whom I still write to to this day. Suicide bombers are lost on me. If you want to blow yourself up to smithereens, do so but I don't think the average American, (myself), perceives that behavior as a lesson to be learned from. I, (and I think I speak for many others), just think you're a nut job with poor communication skills. But if what was meant to be said by downing the towers was: We have suffered under your hand and now we want to make you suffer, then I get that. I don't condone it but I get it. But that also falls under 'revenge' and revenge is what the small minded, clannish type get up to. Also, I would say American is made up of individuals who wander around doing their own thing. Shar'ia means everyone gets on the same page even if they don't want to be. Shar'ia law means individualism becomes an oxymoron of sorts to the Islamic faith. Simply: We are not on the same page and may likely never be.
In the subsequent months there was a flurry of Special Ops which resulted in the death of Osama Bin Landen, and then we opened Guantanamo Bay and an endless barrage of news reports that tried to tells listeners that the world was safe again and we could all go back to sleep, which of course didn't make one whit of sense to me. I mean everyone knows that there is more than one queen bee laying eggs.
I went to Netflix to watch something good and came upon the title Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror. The title, and because there were 5 episodes led me to believe it was going to be historical and perhaps, finally, a straightforward explanation at to why it all happened in the first place. The first episode, presented in real time, beginning with actual people recounting their experiences lulled me into a sitting position in front of the television to listen closely. And then I lost it. I began to cry uncontrollably. I mean uncontrollably. I balled twenty years of tears. I felt broken hearted for the world. Fo all those people who got up that morning just trying to get through another day. Trying to do their job. Rushing off with a quick kiss goodbye, grabbing a coffee on their way to. I don't know why I couldn't talk about September 11th all these years. I don't know why I avoided hearing about it with such determination.
I remember being in high school and we were shown a film about the holocaust complete with footage of bulldozers scooping up the dead for mass burials. I remember hearing some of my classmates titter in the dark as I wept quietly. I don't have a sense that I was weeping because of the horrific nature of what I was watching or because what I was watching reminded me of a time when my mother forced me to watch the same footage when I was much younger and demanded that I keep my eyes open which reduced me to tears. It doesn't matter either way as all of those experiences deserve shed tears.
I suspect that I cry for the loss of lives on September 11th, for the loss of a building I personally have interacted with-- I can't think of those towers without remembering David. I think about my hometown being attacked, that the world has never been the same since. In one of the Netflix episodes a soldier stationed in Afghanistan recounts how he telephoned his loved ones back home. He asked how everyone was and the response was: We're partying, having fun and that no one asked how he was. He said: Here I was fighting a war in Afghanistan to protect Americans from another event like 9/11 and no one back home gave a shit about 9/11, no-one even talks about it anymore. What the fuck was I doing in Afghanistan? His words helped me understand my own silence, but it also made me understand that there isn't one person on this earth that can explain a fucking thing like this. Nothing makes sense anymore and absolutely nothing is 'for sure'.
Perhaps this has been done each year and I just never had the courage to look but this year I found an article, a story about one family, one victim and how everyone changed from that day to this day. The story invited me into their world and it was devoid of screams and panic. It just told me all about their son. I got to know their son and I came to love him as much as they did. And I also got to remember him in the way all of those that died that day should be remembered: For just how truly wonderful they were and how their absence left a hole.
I will end with a link to the life of BOBBY MCILVAINE
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