The following article appeared in the Oct. 25, 2001, issue of Rolling Stone.
I guess I loved my little downtown neighborhood more than I ever realized. The outdoor cafes along West Broadway. The grassy promenade along the Hudson River. The cobblestone
side streets, the all-night Korean delis, the big Borders bookstore just a five-minute walk down Church Street, where I’d spent so many mornings poring over the shelves. And, of course, the apartment where I’ve lived for the past ten years, only three blocks from the cloud-piercing towers of the World Trade Center.
Some of this is gone forever now. The rest will never again be the same.
Like many another local, I suppose, I was rocketed out of bed shortly before 9 a.m. on September 11th by a bang that was shuddery even by New York’s clamorous standards. Making our way down to the street, my girlfriend and I saw smoke filling the sky to the south, very nearby, and knots of puzzled people beginning to form on the corners below. Was it just a fire? A blown-out gas main? What? Then another explosion shook the scene, and suddenly an inconceivable word was in the air: terrorists.
Having raced back to the apartment to gather up our two dogs, I could hear the sounds of chaos and catastrophe mounting outside — sirens and screams and the horrendous, rumbling crunch of something unimaginably huge collapsing. Back down in the street, police and firefighters were everywhere. People were fleeing up Greenwich Street in unbridled panic. I braced myself against the wall of a building and stared up toward the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the neighborhood’s most familiar and dominant sight. One of them was — astonishingly, impossibly — gone. The other was hideously split and flaming. From its uppermost floors, people were leaping out to their deaths, windmilling in terror toward the concrete below. (My son, who was standing outside his school directly east of the WTC, later told me he saw a man and a woman, holding hands, launch themselves backward into the air high above, and, after a long, fluttering fall, hit the ground before his eyes.)
Then the remaining tower imploded. Fifty years of Hollywood disaster movies couldn’t prepare anyone for the reality of this terrifying sight — so close and so enormous that it seemed like hell’s own tsunami come to wash us all away. Everybody still left on the street was running now. I turned to my girlfriend, on a nearby corner, and we ran, too.
The rest of the day was a daze. We made our way to a friend’s place in Greenwich Village, past clumps of people lined up at pay phones and others gathered around blaring car radios, trying to take in the nightmare that had suddenly become the news.
Even this short distance uptown, ordinary life went on — in a bizarre way. Although the only traffic in the streets seemed to consist of emergency vehicles screaming their way downtown, and the only things to be seen in the sky were fighter jets and military helicopters, some restaurants were still open around Bleecker and MacDougal, and people were calmly — eerily, I thought — sipping coffee in the brilliant sunlight. Washington Square Park was lightly populated with the usual chess players and itinerant stoners. But the stores we passed that weren’t already closed were getting ready to once the sun began to set. It was at this point that I received a heaven-sent cell-phone call from a friend offering the temporary use of an empty studio apartment on the Upper East Side belonging to his family. Clearly, of all the thousands of people directly affected by the World Trade Center attack, we were among the most extraordinarily fortunate.
On Friday morning, flourishing an old utility bill that attested to our address, we managed to make it through various police barricades as far south as Chambers Street. There we joined a half-block-long line of people waiting for their street name to be called, and we were finally led through debris-blasted streets to our building, where a National Guard sergeant guided us with his flashlight up a dark back staircase for a fifteen-minute visit. Inside our apartment, everything, near-miraculously, was exactly as we had left it, apart from a weird Pompeian mutation: Because we’d left our windows open, everything was covered with a uniform, half-inch-thick silt of whitish-gray dust that had drifted in from the demolition outside. Dazed and disoriented, we gathered up some clothes and quickly departed.
I returned to Chambers Street on Friday night with a friend and her twelve-year-old son; she wanted him to actually witness the horrible reality of what had happened and not just take it in through the bland filter of the TV screen. We couldn’t get past the barriers this time, so we scuttled across Greenwich Street to a big news pen, where the camera crews confined within had set up their by-now-familiar shots. Down at the end of the street, just a few blocks away, framed between the southernmost buildings still left standing, rose a monstrous, seething pile of twisted metal and stone and God alone knew what else, smoking and steaming and hissing and spitting in the dreadful, pitch-black night.
On our way back to my friend’s car, we stopped by a bar, the Reade Street Pub, where a group of tired and grimy emergency-rescue workers, just going off shift, were having a few well-deserved pops. For days, the news channels had been holding out hope that there might be pockets of survivors buried within the acres of burning rubble at the World Trade Center; they’d been dutifully airing pictures of some of the nearly 5,000 people still officially listed as “missing.” This improvisation of last-minute hope was truly heartbreaking. Anyone actually on the scene, I thought despairingly, would have to conclude that such possibilities were grotesquely remote.
At the bar, I encountered one of the many dog handlers working the site; he was holding his trained Rottweiler, equipped with emergency-supply saddlebags, on a thick, black leash. A number of rescue dogs had already been lost in the treacherously shifting debris, he said. As for human beings, he’d managed to unearth thirty-three body parts, including two torsos and one arm, amputated from the forearm down. (This reminded me of a story I’d heard earlier in the day, about an ironworker at the WTC site who’d been assigned to shear off the top of a very large elevator car that had turned up in the wreckage; inside he found … well, a sight he’ll never forget as long as he lives.)
Standing next to the dog handler, his stethoscope curled on the bar, was an EMS worker from New Jersey who’d driven in to volunteer his services as soon as he heard the news of Tuesday’s attack. This man felt certain there were still living victims trapped within the rubble.
“I know there’s a miracle out there,” he said, wearily knocking back the last of a glass of Scotch. “Have you found one yet?” I asked. “No,” he said.
IT IS MONDAY AFTERNOON as I write this, nearly a week after the catastrophe that so literally rocked our complacent world. I am now sitting at a computer overlooking a garden in upstate New York, imposing on yet another generous friend, far from my rubble-strewn street in downtown Manhattan, which is still blocked and inaccessible and may remain that way for some time to come. Like every other American, I’ve been trying to make sense of what’s happened to us so suddenly and brutally and … inexplicably.
Are we at war with radical Islam? If so, is it an enemy along the lines of the Nazis and the imperial Japanese of the last century — a psychopathic social malignancy that needs to be erased utterly, and at any cost, from the earth?
Or have we been belatedly sucked into the complex river of contemporary history, a coursing torrent in which the rest of Western civilization already has been flailing for decades, and from which we’ve managed to isolate ourselves, in our shore-bound ignorance, at very great peril?
These are big questions, and I’m not up to contemplating them. Surely the horror of what happened in New York on September 11th will remain etched upon the soul of everyone who passed through it. Right now, though, I’m tired, and weary of thought, and of fear. I just want to go home.
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