September 11

Today’s topic is September 11.

Not “nine-eleven” as it’s commonly referred to, September 11. September for the month, 11 for the day. Let’s give the date the respect it deserves by at least calling it what it is, not some ill-conceived abbreviation designed for easy media packaging.

For those who don’t know the story, the Indignant Citizen and his wife were living in Brooklyn Heights and getting ready for work and school the morning of Sept. 11 when word came over WNYC that there had been an explosion at the World Trade Center. There wasn’t any particular note of alarm in the announcer’s voice, and we hadn’t heard anything in our apartment, which was about a mile from the Trade Center site as the seagull flies. We continued getting ready, tying ties, making breakfast, looking for shoes. At about 10 to 9, the announcer came back on after a break to plug upcoming programming and said reports were now coming in that a plane had hit the north tower of the Trade Center. This was interesting enough that the Indignant Citizen flicked on the TV and turned to NY1, the local all-news station, to see if there was any footage of what he assumed would be the tail of a small plane sticking out of the building.

The image on TV was from the north, and it showed a gaping, flaming, smoking hole near the top of the tower. That was no Cessna, the Indignant Citizen remembers thinking, and perhaps saying out loud. At about that time, the Indignant Citizen’s wife came into the room and saw what was on TV. Expletives were exchanged. One of us suggested we should grab our cameras and walk three blocks out of our way to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade to snap some pictures before we went into the subway and to work. Each of us took our 35 millimeter cameras and started walking toward the river.

We were not alone. By this time word of the crash had spread, and others in the neighborhood were making their way to the promenade, among them our upstairs neighbor, an off-duty New York cop. It was about a block from the ramp leading from Columbia Terrace to the promenade when the Indignant Citizen first glimpsed the gray smoke, and then millions of sheets of paper fluttering in the blue sky across the river, kind of toward us but just to the south. The sound of helicopters and of emergency vehicles’ sirens filled the air, mixing with road noise from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway underneath us and the hum of boats on the East River. Both of us broke out our cameras and began taking pictures. The Indignant Citizen quickly shot up the 10 or so frames left on the roll of film in his camera, which he had started four days earlier on Saturday, when we spent the day around the World Trade and World Financial centers, shooting the buildings from different angles.

As the Indignant Citizen dropped back, away from the railing and under the canopy of sycamore trees, he noticed for the first time people on cellular phones with worried looks on their faces, staring achingly at the smoking tower and pleading with whomever was on the other end for information, or to get out. One woman close by was asking if whomever she was talking to had seen her husband that morning.

Just then the Indignant Citizen noticed another plane moving across the harbor. His first thought was that it was a flight on approach to LaGuardia. It was not uncommon to see planes fly up the Hudson or over Brooklyn. Still, something seemed odd about it. It was too low, or it was on a strange trajectory. Something prompted the Indignant Citizen to say, out loud, “I’m surprised they haven’t closed the flight pattern.” Then time seemed to speed up, the plane appeared to go into a kind of fast forward for a moment, quickly closing the gap between it and the Lower Manhattan skyline. It banked, and the morning sun clearly revealed that it was a United Airlines jet. We could hear the whine of the engines, a sound that continues to haunt both the Indignant Citizen and his wife to this day.

Then the plane disappeared behind some of the taller buildings along the East River. Although it should have emerged and continued up the island, instead we saw a fireball, followed almost instantly by two distinct concussions—boom ... BOOM! As the black smoke mushroomed up upward, the Indignant Citizen’s wife turned into his shoulder and sobbed, but only for a moment. People gasped. A woman screamed. Next to us, a New York cop who had been on a bike talking on a pay phone yelled, “The plane hit the building. It flew into the fuckin’ building!” Then he slammed the phone down and rode away, presumably toward downtown. With his arm around his wife, the Indignant Citizen turned and looked for his neighbor, who had been standing just over his left shoulder seconds ago. He was gone.

“Where did the plane go?” the Indignant Citizen's wife asked. In hindsight, the question seems surprising, given her initial sobs. But the brain is a funny instrument. Sometimes, when you see something like a plane fly into a building and explode, you instantly recognize it for a tragic event, but only moments later you have reduced it mentally to a best-case scenario. We didn’t just see that. The plane must’ve been empty. It wasn’t as large a plane was we thought. Nobody was in the buildings.

“It’s in the building,” the Indignant Citizen responded quietly. We stared at the now two buildings on fire. More paper was fluttering through the air around the towers, and the sound of emergency sirens filled the air. Murmurs among the growing crowd now turned into shouts. “That was deliberate. This is an attack!” Sounds of panic began to swell, joining sobbing and unintelligible screaming. All the while more people were arriving at the promenade. The Indignant Citizen asked his wife if she had more pictures left. Yes. You should take some. She did.

Suddenly the Indignant Citizen was overcome with the sense that we—everyone on the promenade—were in danger. We had to leave immediately. It seemed like we were exposed, an easy target for whatever further evil would come hurtling from the sky. Behind us was a wall of oncoming onlookers. We headed north along the promenade. Close to the end, we encountered a crazy person, yelling about the apocalypse and how our sins had wrought this destruction.

There was no thought of going to work now. We had to get inside. As they walked hand in hand through the filling streets, the Indignant Citizen and his wife did not speak. Along the way we heard snippets of conversation, but nothing that stuck with us. We went upstairs and turned on the TV.

Subways and roads into Manhattan: closed. There would be no going to work. The Indignant Citizen called his parents in Oregon. 7:30 a.m. there. His mother answered. Hearing his voice, she asked if he was OK. “Yeah, I’m OK. We saw the second plane from the promenade.” “What are you talking about?” his mother asked. “You haven’t been watching TV?” “We just got up.” “You should turn on the TV. We’re safe. I have to go. I love you.”

Then the Indignant Citizen called a coworker in Midtown. As he was making arrangements to coordinate some kind of coverage for the magazine, he heard a roar like another jet. From the other room, his wife called out, “I think the building just collapsed.” The Indignant Citizen hung up and went to the living room. Indeed, the South Tower had just caved in, reduced to a smoking pile of metal and dust. The North Tower fell a short time later, in the same way. Later, workers clearing the debris described their amazement at clearing rubble from two massive office buildings but not finding a single desk, or even a phone. Everything had been pulverized or smashed beyond recognition. One chunk of debris four feet thick comprised four floors of one of the buildings—more than 40 vertical feet, plus everything in between.

We spent the rest of the day stupefied watching TV. The Indignant Citizen spent a good part of the following night, and many subsequent nights watching TV. Later that afternoon, after the skies above our apartment cleared, we walked down to the promenade again. Just as we arrived, 7 World Trade Center collapsed, the drifting dust and smoke driving us back inside, and we again cranked the windows shut.

As summer faded into fall, and northwest winds brought cooler air, they also brought the stink of ever smoldering Pile into our bedroom. Closing the windows helped, a little, but the stench of burning oil and tires and God knows what else seeped through the cracks. It was stifling and we couldn’t breathe.

Why bring all this up now, four years later? Because we can’t forget. We were lucky. Everyone we knew in the towers got out. Some people we know well knew people who didn’t. The firehouse on Middagh Street, a few blocks from our apartment, Engine 205, Ladder 118, lost eight firefighters. They were guys we’d see around the neighborhood, in the Key Food, hanging out in front of the firehouse. The New York Daily News ran a photo on the front of its Oct. 5 of Ladder 118 racing across the empty Brooklyn Bridge with the two towers burning in the background. Someone in a high rise had taken it by chance. It is a haunting image, like so many from that day.

It is a day that haunts all of us still; and will perhaps forever. The day is gone, but what it wrought has sent us hurtling in a direction perhaps none of us could have imagined. War. More death. Fiscal hardship. Censorship. Government encroachment upon civil rights and personal liberties. Fear.

Ah yes, The Fear. In lighter moments, the Indignant Citizen tells people Sept. 11 is proof that the sun will shine even on a dog’s ass some days. His personal opinion: the terrorists succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, and will never again be able to pull of a similar stunt. The odds are against it. One wind shift here or a solar flare there and Sept. 11 never happens at all. But it doesn’t matter if Al Qaeda or some other group ever attacks the U.S. again. They’ve already sown The Fear, and that Fear is causing us to do strange things.

At this point, the Indignant Citizen fears The Fear more than he does the terrorists.