16 years later
real wreckage real carnage still all too real …
Editor’s note: Portions of this column were originally published on Sept. 11, 2014.
Sixteen years ago I walked into hell, felt the ashes of the dead shift under my feet, tilted my head to a sky of soot and cursed God.
As time pushes me farther away from Sept. 11, 2001, it seems I remember events at Ground Zero with more clarity each year.
Maybe because I have more to lose now with a family, three children. Maybe because I better understand the random, savage nature of violence. Maybe because I no longer believe in the promise of afterlife.
I ran toward the World Trade Center because I wanted to bear witness. The burning towers became falling towers. Survivors, some bloody and broken, all changed, emerged from the wreckage with stories of panic, bravery, self-sacrifice, horror and pain.
A police officer was screaming in shock and grief on a street corner; another officer slumped in the basement of 100 Center Street describing how pieces of airplanes fell onto her partners. Two maintenance workers in the basement of Tower One were talking about elevators, cables severed, dropping from upper floors and spilling out burning bodies. One of the men reached for a victim and the skin of his arms sloughed off.
Each person became a piece in a giant jigsaw puzzle without any reference picture and with edges that still defy definition (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria).
On the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, my kids (triplets, then 7 years old) constructed a block tower and were launching paper airplanes at it from behind the couch. “Look,
Daddy. The World Trade Center.”
I can find humor in the bleakest moments. I tried to laugh; something else lodged in my throat. Then, I nearly lashed out and knocked down the tower. The idea of those bricks scattered on the floor instantly sent me back to Ground Zero. The image of real wreckage, real carnage was momentarily superimposed on the family room.
I saw once again the bodies tumbling through the sky; heard the concussive thumps that I told myself were gas explosions. I remembered the face of a firefighter emerging from the debris with a decapitated head, hysterical about not being able to find the rest of the body; cadaver dogs exhausted on the smell of death; severed limbs sticking out of the ground like obscene shrubbery. I recalled the fires and the taste of tannic-laced air through the paper mask.
On Sept. 11, 2001, rubble shifted under my feet. I was tramping through the cremated remains of thousands of people vaporized when the Twin Towers fell, and I desperately wanted out of my shoes.
I never think about how close I came to being numbered among the dead. I was on vacation, my first time in New York City. When the first plane hit, I went to work as a reporter. I made it to SoHo before the first tower fell. I was only blocks away when the second tower fell. Ducked into a store when the vertical mushroom cloud chewed up streets.
I spent a week writing firsthand accounts. I listened to people, their bloody, terrible stories of survival. I turned off my feelings, let their emotions pass through me onto the notebook. Thought how lucky I was to be here, doing my job, while the rest of America huddled impotently around television screens.
But there is a price for this kind of intimacy, one I pay every Sept. 11. Guilt. Revulsion. Hatred — at the moral degenerates who embraced insanity; at God for letting it happen. Memories are penance and punishment.
I think about the FedEx worker who stopped me on the street and begged me to help him find his wife. She worked on the 100th Floor of Building One. I took his name and assured him she made it out. I remember how desperately he clung to my words, my lie. She didn’t survive.
But I did. And every year, I tell the story. Not for prurient purposes, not as a brag. I wish I could sum up my feelings with insight about the fragility of life or collective catharsis. I can’t. I’m compelled to share it because I can’t let it go.
One of my daughters told her class a couple of years ago: “My daddy was in the World Trade Center, but he got to come home.”