After 9/11

by Helaina Hovitz

  She got to Police Plaza, showed her ID, and was told she couldn’t go through.

  She tried to push through them and they started shouting at her.

  “No! No! Get her out of here!” they said as they pushed her away.

  She sat on the steps and began to cry again.

  Eventually, she looked up at the line of people and followed it until she saw where they were coming from, the Smith Projects, and walked down Pearl Street, the same way we had.

  * * *

  I kissed Grandma goodbye and told her we’d be back soon as Mom and I walked down to our apartment.

  “Don’t touch anything,” she said when we got there, noticing where I had already ran a finger through the ashes on the table.

  We still had electricity within the apartment, so I put in a video tape, Shelley Duvall’s “Fairy Tale Theatre.” It was Little Red Riding Hood. I had this faint hope that a distraction would take my mind off things, but deep down, it seemed absolutely absurd, like trying to mail a package in a burning box.

  Five minutes into watching the video, the power went out. It was 4:00 p.m.

  We decided to see if, by some small miracle, the payphone across the street still worked so we could speak to Daddy, who was still in Staten Island. We grabbed our pink bath towels and wrapped them around our faces and our heads, so that only our eyes were peaking out. When we emerged from the lobby, the streets were empty. The front desk people had gone. Security was gone. We stood in the tornado of ash that still blew down Fulton Street toward the East River, the only two people on the entire block. What was left of the Towers was still on fire.

  Why isn’t anyone around? Where are the police? The firemen? The medical workers?

  It may as well have been 3:00 a.m. There was nothing but white and darkness at once, the sky black, the air white. We stood in this blizzard, holding kerchiefs over our faces, but it didn’t do any good; the wind whipped the dirt around our faces, into our nostrils, mouths, ears. The smell was similar to cooking meat, sweet and acrid, musty and suffocating. The payphone, miraculously, worked long enough for us to call my father, who told us that the Verrazano Bridge was closed, and he wouldn’t be able to get home.

  “The police keep insisting that you’ve all been evacuated and brought to holding shelters,” he said.

  How could the police have told everyone we had all been evacuated when we hadn’t been?

  That’s why nobody’s here.

  Next, we called Aunt Fran to let her know we were okay.

  “I love you, Aunt Frannie!” I said.

  Less than a minute into the call, the payphone powered off for good, ceasing to work as inexplicably as it had worked in the first place.

  I looked through partially shielded eyes at the silhouettes of steel that still resembled buildings. The skeleton of the World Trade Center was still partially intact, but caving in and crumbling by the minute. They were still on fire, floors upon floors all ablaze.

  A good deal of Manhattan had left the city, including half of our apartment complex, but hundreds of us could not. We were alone, in the way that hundreds of people in individual apartments can be alone, scattered behind close doors. Senior citizens, asthmatics, handicapped people, children, infants, can be alone and yet together, as the fires continued to burn.

  Journal Entry, 9/11/01

  The poor pigeons were probably dying.

  I’ve been really nauseous and dizzy, shaking, and terrified of more bombs. We don’t know who did it.

  The people in wheelchairs can’t get out because there are no elevators.

  It was like gold dust outside.

  The beige sand whirled over everything.

  Poor Shane, it was his birthday.

  We don’t know where to go next.

  What about people with asthma? Why is my temperature 100?

  Daddy can’t get home. The Palestinians were celebrating, we heard on the radio. There was a daycare center in the WTC.

  The Internet isn’t working.

  The phones aren’t working.

  They’re not letting people into the city, just out. That means lockdown: nobody gets in or out, uptown or downtown.

  We just bought $100 worth of meat that will go bad in the freezer, its 5:30 and the power is out.

  I had a silly candle fetish when I was ten that has now saved us.

  The smoke is really bad. We have no AC, we filled pots with water just in time.

  Me and Mom are pioneers. We have each other and our own flashlights.

  Grandma and Grandpa aren’t alone; we are here.

  We went back outside to see if the payphone worked.

  It didn’t.

  There wasn’t a soul around, not even security. There are so many helicopters flying around.

  It was around 1:00 a.m. that my mother and I decided to try to sleep—I saw it on her wristwatch, which she left on my father’s nightstand.

  I took his side of the bed and lay down next to her. We were very warm, but couldn’t open the windows because of the debris. My gaze fell to the windowsill where some ash was still visible. I looked outside at the grounds where I had wheeled my baby doll’s stroller years earlier, my grandpa following closely behind with my real stroller, the happiest child in a happy little neighborhood.

  “I’m scared,” I said. “I miss Daddy. What’s going to happen to us? Are we going to die?”

  “No,” my mom said.

  Not sure whether I was more afraid to stay awake or go to sleep, I waited, and I waited, and I listened to the dead silence outside, and at some point, I fell asleep, accepting the risk that I might not wake up.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Post-traumatic stress disorder was first introduced to the DSM diagnostic system in 1980 to describe a syndrome found in Vietnam veterans who, upon returning from their tours of duty, often experienced anxiety, sleep problems, and intrusive and disturbing “flashback” memories of events that took place during the war.

  They were frequently jumpy and some responded aggressively to even the most minor signals of threat. Many had terrifying nightmares and reacted to loud noises as though they were gunshots, and they were still in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

  During my general psychiatry training, I had worked with vets who suffered from PTSD, and many psychiatrists were, even then, beginning to recognize its prevalence in adults who’d suffered other traumatic experiences like rape and natural disasters.

  What struck me especially was that, although the experiences that had scarred adults with PTSD were often relatively brief (usually lasting for a few hours at most), their impact could still be seen in their behavior years—even decades—later.

  How much more powerful, I thought, must the impact of a genuinely traumatic experience be for a child. The developing brain is most malleable and sensitive to experience—both good and bad—early in life. This is why we so rapidly learn language and motor skills. They are also easily and rapidly transformed in traumas.

  —Dr. Bruce Perry, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog

  For many, it was all over. Time to go about business as usual.

  But the next morning, little pieces of paper were whirling around in the sandstorm, right outside the window, like confetti that announced the end of a parade.

  But neither the Giants nor the Yankees had won a championship. Someone was going to claim a victory, but I wasn’t sure who, or even what they’d been fighting for.

  The rancid fog still lingered heavily in the air, so opening the window was still not an option. The water was off and the phones were down. According to my mother’s silver watch, it was 6:00 a.m.

  I remember pacing the apartment, asking, “Where’s Daddy? Where’s Daddy?” A question I knew she wouldn’t be able to answer. I tried to keep my body in motion, picking up a magazine, putting it down, picking it back up, looking out the window, and helping my mother clean. I speculated about what might be next as I tried to figure out what to do with myself, feeling like a sitting
duck just waiting for a hunter. I contemplated the first thing I would grab if I only had time to grab one thing. Thousands of thoughts jumped from point A to point Z, and nothing made sense, a series of equations that weren’t even written with numbers or letters but in some foreign language. A feeling of doom infiltrated every inch of our apartment, from the magazine rack to my bedroom bookcase to the photos hung up on the wall.

  Now and then, a scream or a sob made its way in from outside.

  For a brief moment, the TV flickered on and revealed Mayor Rudolph Giuliani telling us to “Go about our lives as normal.”

  He was standing at a command post surrounded by other men in suits, Governor George Pataki among them, in front of a silver clock with triangles instead of numbers and a red and white striped collapsible wall that only reached to the governor’s shoulders. The screen was split, with Giuliani in a small screen in the upper left hand corner and various news montages of the attacks and the aftermath in the full screen view.

  “The best way for the people in New York to deal with this right now, not only with their own grief which we all feel and have, is to show that we’re not going to be affected by it,” he said. “We’re not going to be cowered by it, or afraid. We’re going to go about our business and lead normal lives, and not let these cowards affect us in any way, like they’re trying to do, which is to instill fear in us.”

  The sound of the front door swinging open ripped my attention away.

  My father stood in the living room breathing heavily, and I wrapped my arms around his middle. When I pulled away, I was sticky with a film of sweat and dust.

  When I looked up, I saw a combination of terror, exhaustion, and relief on his face, something that’s impossible to imagine unless you’ve actually seen it. Wide-eyed and mouth slightly agape, he looked almost stunned, the hair around his face wet and matted to the sides, his body soaked with sweat and covered in gold dust.

  Covered in dead people.

  When he realized that the police weren’t letting people drive into the city, he had tried to hire a boat, looking up boat companies in the Yellow Pages, but none would go near Lower Manhattan.

  At 7:00 p.m. they opened the Verrazano Bridge, and he was able to drive to downtown Brooklyn to his school principal, Mary’s house, in Carroll Gardens, and found that another of his colleagues, Phil, was already there.

  Dad parked the car and, an hour later, tried to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, but the police held him back, just as they held everyone back.

  He told them, “My family is down there,” but they replied the same.

  “It’s too dangerous. We don’t know what else could be happening. Everybody has been evacuated.”

  He tried to tell them that they were wrong, that he had spoken to me and Mom, that we hadn’t been evacuated, but they didn’t listen. He turned back and drove to Mary’s house and found out that the subways were running, but not all the way downtown—they were stopping at Phil’s house, though, so they traveled together to his apartment in the West Village. Dad began calling all of the emergency numbers that the news stations provided.

  “All downtown residents have been evacuated and are now in holding shelters.”

  But nobody would tell him where these shelters were, or how to call them directly. How would he find us?

  After a sleepless night of crying and watching the attacks replay on the news, he gathered the few things he had with him at daybreak, around 5:30 a.m. He began to walk downtown, staying as close to the East River as possible, hoping he’d find a way in past Canal Street. Police and barricades still blocked off every possible way anyone could enter downtown.

  “They told me everything was still on fire, so nobody was allowed to go past Canal Street.”

  Without ever lowering his ID, which he held up to show he lived in Lower Manhattan, my father kept trying checkpoint after checkpoint, holding up his license like a tour guide with an umbrella, herding an invisible group.

  “Nobody gets in, nobody gets out,” they kept telling him as he tried different routes.

  He was finally allowed past Pearl Street, and he started to run, tears streaming down his face, afraid of what he would find when he got there. But he found his way home the same way Ann, Charles, and I had the day before, and the same way my mother had, and he found us, alive.

  Journal Entry, 9/12

  9:30 a.m.: Daddy’s home!

  He found out that a man jumping out of the World Trade Center killed a fireman. Couples jumped out holding hands.

  The World Financial Center is on fire.

  People with asthma should stay inside because of the asbestos. I’m going to help Dad help people.

  People who knew they would die called to say I love you.

  My dad hadn’t been home long before he headed right back out again.

  There may have been cops outside, but none of them were checking on the people living in Southbridge—they were busy trying to keep order in the streets. People were still, essentially, trapped, my dad said, without any phones or water or lights, including the old ladies that had trouble walking, that sometimes forgot my name even if they saw me every day.

  They can’t even call their families.

  They’re probably so confused.

  They’re alone and they’re afraid.

  To forget an entire population of people, and to not know they were there, didn’t make sense.

  How much chaos is there? How could we not be prepared for all of this?

  My father left to join the other men from the Southbridge board of directors and maintenance staff who had stuck around, or somehow also made it back in, in the community room. They compiled a list of everyone they could think of to check on, asthmatic neighbors, neighbors who needed important medication, people with dementia who likely had no idea what was happening. They only had a partial list to work from, and from there it was based on word of mouth, neighbors telling other neighbors, running around in a desperate frenzy to try and help each other. My dad, Joe, John, all the guys I usually said hello to, were running back and forth to the community room to pick up water and bring it to people.

  All of the stores and the restaurants were closed.

  I mentally filled in the gaps, speculating about the people who might have been forgotten, the people who weren’t on that list.

  What if all of their neighbors left?

  The sadness that was starting to overcome me felt familiar. It was what I felt whenever I tried to watch movies like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Oliver Twist, a feeling that held on strong and refused to let me move past it to see what happened next in the story, prompting me to leave the room, and staying with me long after the movie was over. I looked over at my Baby Minnie Mouse, the stuffed animal my mother said I would just toss to the side like all the other toys. I had slept with Minnie every night, even when her large plastic eyes began to get scratched up. Now, she was in a garbage bag by the door, along with other dolls coated in the same poisonous dust that spread in sheets across the rooftops and sidewalks.

  * * *

  After making sure that Grandma and Grandpa were still okay, my mom and I went to join my dad in the community room. Stepping outside was like being swallowed in a physical fog, a smell of burnt metal and rust lingering heavily in the air. The smell, the smog, would rotate in its smell, its color, its density, over the next six months, but it would never go away. The air would turn gray and dull, a feeling of doom lurking everywhere.

  I overheard John telling my dad about one elderly woman he checked on.

  “She had a blank look on her face, and was just staring out of her apartment window at the burning buildings,” he said. “Her hands were shaking. She was cold, for some reason, and just looked out of the window. It was like she didn’t realize I was trying to talk to her.”

  He left after that, bringing an arm full of water bottles back out with him.

  I wandered over to a folding table where someone had left a single cop
y of the New York Daily News.

  It’s War.

  That’s all the cover said, along with a caption that described the accompanying image, in case somehow someone had missed it: the second plane heading to the second Tower, the first already on fire.

  How did they write this?

  How is a newspaper out?

  How did they actually produce a newspaper yesterday?

  Suddenly, I remembered that Grandma had said the same thing the day before.

  “This means war,” not as if she were declaring it, but as though she knew what would happen next. Those words triggered something in me, waking up another monster that realized it was all planned. Carefully planned. The new monster would go on to fill so many instances of “not knowing” things with a singular message: Something bad is happening.

  I flipped the cover open to find out that “they” believed that “they” had caught forty of the fifty men who were part of the “diabolical plan.”

  I closed the paper, unwilling to find out more.

  The “what” of what happened is something that would start to make sense in the weeks that followed, fragmented, scattered pieces of facts and speculation forming a collage held together by a very thin and brittle glue. The “why” would never be as clear.

  “Helaina, talk to Aunt Fran,” my mom said. Someone had brought a working cell phone to the community room, and it was our turn to use it. “She said it’s like nothing is happening uptown. People are just eating in restaurants and walking around like normal.”

  That explained my question about the newspaper.

  People in white coats from the hospital began to bring in cardboard boxes full of small milk cartons like you’d get with school lunch and cellophane-wrapped sandwiches.

  “How can I help?” I asked my dad.

  “Come on back here, honey,” my dad said. “Stand next to me, and you can help give out the food.”

  Standing behind the table lined with cardboard boxes, I explained to the old ladies and the children, “These are peanut butter, these are turkey, these are ham.” I wanted to stay there doing that all day, because it made me happy. When I did it, I wasn’t thinking about all of the questions swimming around in my head.