9/12
Not the day of, but the day after. Or the days after. Because though it seemed like it would, the world didn’t stop. There was a Wednesday.
So I stand on the edge of the Queens College lot looking west at the black smoke rising into the sky. And then on the streets, the traffic impossibly slow even for New York. Three hours to drive what might otherwise be 30 minutes.
Stopped on the exit ramp of the Southern State, there’s a boom, and I lurch forward. “I’m so sorry,” says the woman in a wrinkled blue shirt. Her face looks pale and tired, as my face probably does. There’s a futility to our cars pulled over on the side of Hempstead Avenue. Even if we were to care, to call the cops, would they respond? Our city is aflame, thousands have died — the idea of an accident report seems laughable. “It’s okay,” I say, “We should just go home.”
The one channel left broadcasting in New York and over and over again, they play that moment. The second plane crashing, the first tower on fire. And then the crumbling of it all into dust. And the people running, the people covered in dust and ash. It makes me ill to watch but I can’t turn it off, can’t do anything else. Just think repeatedly about how real those people were, how terrifying their last moments, how much their families and friends must hurt.
With the days trickle the reports. Janet, whose children I used to babysit — her brother. Billy, who I was friends with in high school — his father. And every day in the New York Times, a column of mini obituaries of the people on the planes, in the buildings. This one on her way to Disneyland, that one in his first day of work. All real. All people. Just like me and everyone I love.
It took a month before I had courage to even step foot back on Manhattan. The island I’d worked on and danced on and played in and loved for so long. But this was a new Manhattan. A sad, empty Manhattan, its streets smelling of burning jet fuel. And the walls of its subway stations turned into cemeteries — the faces of the dead smiling out at me from faded papers, the word “MISSING” in large black letters so contiguous it becomes a design.
