After 9/11

by Helaina Hovitz

  Occasionally, someone who was homeless came by, and I gave them the same choice, “Turkey, ham, peanut butter and jelly,” but let them have three or four sandwiches, even though I wasn’t supposed to.

  “We may not have enough,” my dad said gently, when he saw me.

  I slipped extra baby milk cartons into their hands before they left.

  Journal Entry, 9/12:

  4:40 p.m.: The TV went out again.

  5:20 p.m.: The TV came on again, blurry. Remains are collapsing. Everything is normal everywhere else and we’re forgotten. Everyone is hanging their American flag.

  6:07 p.m.: I am scared again, they are saying that 5 World Trade Center may collapse.

  6:25 p.m.: 5 World Trade Center Collapsed. 1 Liberty is collapsing.

  6:45 p.m.: 1 Liberty is collapsing, Millennium Hotel may be in danger.

  7:05 p.m.: The Millennium Hotel lost seventy-five windows.

  7:20 p.m.: The FBI identified most of the hijackers, they think the mastermind is bin Laden.

  7:25 p.m.: I am trying to watch The Mask to calm down. It’s not working.

  8:00 p.m.: The TV went out again.

  Shortly after 8:00 p.m., word started spreading that we were all supposed to pack an “emergency” bag, because “they” were afraid that the Millennium Hotel, which was actually a block closer to us than the Trade Center, was going to collapse, and we had to be ready to go if that happened.

  Go where?

  I retreated to my room to hurriedly pack my bag, trying to figure out what I would need and for how long. I thought of a sleepover at Gina’s house back in fifth grade.

  We had been eating Chinese food around their glass table, Gina, her parents, and her baby sister in a high chair, when the fire alarm in the building went off.

  An automated message came over the buildings’ speakers.

  We all stayed calm and ignored it, but Gina freaked out, leaving the table to grab her things.

  “Mom, what if it’s real?”

  “It’s not, Gina, sit down.”

  “Mommy, can you just call the lobby to make sure?”

  The automated message kept sounding, escalating Gina’s panic with every passing second.

  “Mom, call the lobby!” she cried.

  I chuckled, and her mom and I just continued eating our Chinese food. After a few minutes, her paranoia started to annoy me.

  What would you grab if there was a fire and you only had a minute? She’d asked me that night.

  Journal Entry, 9/13:

  2:00 p.m.: Mom is scaring me because she’s saying if the Millennium Hotel collapses, which they think it will, we’re dead. C-TOWN [supermarket] by the Smith Projects is open, so we have to get better facemasks and walk over because we don’t have any food.

  4:00 p.m.: There was nothing left in C-Town, so we tried going to Jubilee on John Street. I had to run for my life again because everyone was running again; they thought 1 Liberty Plaza collapsed. I am going to have a heart attack if this keeps up. The Borough President Virginia Fields was in the community room hugging me and telling me how brave I am. She’s the only one who cares about us. Nadine said the school auditorium collapsed. The lights are still out at St. Margaret’s nursing home down the block. What’s going to happen to them?

  4:50 p.m.: John Street was evacuated. I am throwing my valuables into the middle of the room. I’m scared we’re being evacuated. Now they are saying that the atrium at the World Financial Center is crumbling. The debris is coming back. There’s a rumor that there is a crack in my building. Nobody is even paying any attention to us. There is a line of ambulances on my block and the army is here.

  6:30 p.m.: Oh my God they just caught more people on American Airlines trying to cause more damage, they were using fake IDs and wearing pilot outfits.

  7:00 p.m.: We are no longer allowed in the street and are confined to our building.

  7:25 p.m.: Grandma came down because she is scared about her window breaking. I can’t believe ninety people made bomb threats today. I hope Kyle’s mom isn’t dead. My friend Liana said one of our old counselors sent her an email about how it’s her fault this happened and she’s probably happy. She’s Brazilian.

  9:25 p.m.: There’s no more police outside, does that mean it’s safer? Dad got Grandma her cancer medicine.

  10:25 p.m.: There is more disgusting smoke in my room. How did it even get in here? It smells the worst. …

  It was to the community room and back in those first couple of days, passing only through the courtyard of our complex’s square, to avoid stepping out into the chaos of the caution tape, barricades, and fire engines in the street. The American flag was lowered at something called “half-mast,” which I didn’t understand.

  When we did try to venture out to the corner, I found military posted there, standing still, like those British guards who weren’t allowed to move or make a sound. A street sweeper rolled by, and the dust whirled about and then settled again. It was like trying to vacuum a beach during a sandstorm.

  On Thursday, my dad started trying to figure out what to do about the people who were dependent on medications, either from Downtown Pharmacy or delivered by mail, who were obviously not going to get them either way.

  “Why can’t the pharmacy people get here?” I asked him.

  “Nobody is going to be at the pharmacy for a while. The pharmacists’ IDs show where they lived, not where they work, so they can’t get in.”

  Don’t people make fake IDs all the time?

  What will people trying to get down here try to do?

  How much worse can it get?

  My dad had become an unofficial “liaison” to all of the elected officials—Councilmember Catherine Freed, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, and Manhattan Borough President Virginia Fields. Tuesday the eleventh had been Primary Day for elections, so even though they had left, that day, they came back in the following days. While Battery Park City had been evacuated, we hadn’t been, and they, at least, knew that. My dad let them know what we needed, and, at the same time, began negotiating with the police to make sure the pharmacists could get into the area and start getting people their medication again.

  Back in my room, I did mindless things like re-arranging the hundreds of Lisa Frank and Powerpuff Girls stickers on my night table, which was really two clear plastic storage drawers. The movement matched what was going on in between my ears, frenzied thoughts like angry bees swarming a hive, going in a thousand different directions, all of them bad. Somehow, new smells kept entering the apartment, even with the windows closed.

  I looked out the window at the place in the yard where we buried Sally, my first real pet. Sally had been our class hamster, but I had grown attached to her while we took her home to care for her during winter break, so our second grade class voted to let me keep her. As for that “yard,” it was a concrete basketball “court” with two hoops, framed by four tall buildings. Sally was buried there in a large, square planter full of dry dirt and small patches of grass.

  “Ashes, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” my mother had said when I finished my teary speech, pretending she was only sad because I was sad, or maybe she was. I peered out at the planter and thought about how unsettling it was that Sally was now covered in ash.

  The dead were everywhere, I was beginning to learn, whirling around and settling, but they were nowhere to the people looking for them.

  Pictures started to go up around the neighborhood, of people in happier times, getting married, having a picnic, on a cruise. The faces of moms and dads, sisters, brothers, and best friends covered the walls of hospital, the lampposts, and the church by what was now being called “Ground Zero.”

  The people who loved them were torn between grief and hope, unsure of which hurt more and which emotion was more dangerous to give in to.

  We had a lot of food that was defrosting, since the refrigerator didn’t work, but the gas on the oven worked. We were able to eat what we had in the house, but stores re
mained closed because nobody could get in.

  Some people wore proper gas masks, others walked with their shirts over their faces. Some used towels, but most people wore flimsy paper masks that did nothing.

  * * *

  Christine, her mother, and her little brother were confined to their building in the Smith Housing Projects for those first two days. The barricades outside did not make her feel safer, and neither did the police. It made her feel more afraid. Police were not a new sight, after all, Christine lived down the block from Police Plaza. But these police were armed, and there were a lot of them, and they stood in the same spot outside for hours. All the stores had already been looted, so that was done. The rest of the stores were closed.

  On Thursday, she and her family were permitted to walk over to the Pathmark on Cherry Street. When the automatic doors opened, she felt like she was stepping into a post-apocalyptic movie, watching as people scoured the bare shelves for whatever they could find. Random items lay in disarray everywhere, some bread here, a can there.

  On the way back, soldiers asked her and her brother for ID before they would allow them back in the building.

  “We don’t have ID,” her brother said. “We’re twelve.”

  Her mother interjected.

  “When can trucks come in with food so we can feed our kids?”

  Christine watched as annoyed looks flashed over the soldiers’ faces. They ignored the question.

  You’re supposed to be helping us, she thought. You’re supposed to be protecting us.

  Meanwhile, the violence in the projects was escalating. An old Muslim woman who always sat outside her building had been shot. Bodega owners were being beaten up, their stores looted and broken into. Police escorted the rest of them out of the neighborhood, and they had to close down their stores for the week.

  * * *

  On Friday morning, I ventured out to the corner where a few people sat outside in front of Burger King, trying not to actually listen to what they were saying.

  “… Biological war.”

  “They’re telling us that we should clean our terraces with a wet rag.”

  “… Nuclear bombs.”

  “… and Christine Whitman from the EPA is saying that the air is safe to breathe.”

  Actually, Miss Whitman, the administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency under President Bush, was wrong, we’d later learn. The EPA would go on to detect twenty-two metals in the air: antimony, arsenic, beryllium, cadmium, chromium, cobalt, lead, manganese, nickel, selenium, aluminum, barium, calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, potassium, silver, sodium, thallium, vanadium, zinc, asbestos, benzene, tolene, styrene, propylene, and ethylbenzene. And they hung around for a very, very long time.

  The conversation was interrupted by the whirring sound of a plane passing overhead

  Vrrrrrrooooom.

  It was flying low, too low, which caused me to duck.

  “Look at that plane! Did you see how low it was? Right over Lower Manhattan,” said my neighbor loudly.

  The anger and fear in her voice scared me.

  “Daddy …” I said through my teeth, pulling at his shirt, wanting to go back inside. “Daddy!” I hissed again.

  “What sweetheart?” he asked, but continued talking anyway. I watched as the National Guard pulled up and troops filed out onto the street. My adrenaline was pumping, and all sorts of conflicting messages were flashing through my brain like lightning.

  Run.

  You can’t run.

  If you don’t run you’re going to die.

  You can’t leave Grandma upstairs.

  The army is here.

  It’s too late.

  They’re the good guys.

  How are they going to keep us safe?

  Maybe the adults were able to talk themselves into feeling safe, but I couldn’t.

  All around us people started and stopped running at random.

  It’s happening again.

  A truck made a noise.

  What was that?

  A piece of metal hit the floor.

  What was that?

  Someone clapped their hands.

  What was that?

  Someone shouted.

  Why?

  Neighbors embraced us quickly as they hurried past—that was what people did now. They hurried, and they cried, and I grew more nervous.

  What were they running from?

  My mind became home to ten different TV screens for which I didn’t own any remotes, producing programming that scared me just for existing, images and scenes that shook me to my core. No matter what the specifics looked like in my mind, one thing was for sure: it was just a matter of time before something catastrophic happened again.

  We had our prayer vigil that evening, which started in the community room, where Joe broke down in tears after someone sang God Bless America. An old lady who liked to knit, Rose, was brought in by the Red Cross. She had been wandering around for days.

  We left, as a group, to walk to the Engine 6 fire station across the street. We held lit candles as we walked.

  “They lost eight men,” my dad said.

  “Lost like they’re missing, or lost as in, dead?”

  “I think they’re becoming the same thing.”

  The faces of the old ladies I knew were twisted in pain.

  I had always run up to them and said something sassy to “Make their day.” That night, I said nothing.

  * * *

  On Saturday, Verizon gave everyone a free cell phone (after a few weeks, they started charging people for the phones, which is when my dad wrote to a reporter named Asa Aarons to help us get those bills voided, which he did). The reason we had no phone lines, I learned, was because all the wires coming from the hub at the World Trade Center were damaged. They started stringing new telephone lines right over the sidewalks, and that caused a whole other issue, especially because they didn’t even work.

  Mom wanted to try to get me away from the smell, to somehow get out of the area, to do something that gave the faintest impression of “normal life.”

  Trying to find some semblance of normal life by walking past Canal Street was like trying to find a pencil mark under a dribbled mess of watercolors bleeding together into a murky brown. What was underneath was now impossible to bring back.

  We had to try three different times, because we couldn’t get past Pearl Street before everyone started running and screaming, not unlike how they had that day.

  “The buildings are falling! Everyone’s evacuating! Go back to your apartments, get your things, we only have a few minutes!”

  As we shuffled along, I asked my mom, “Is City Hall a government building? Is it a target? What about the Municipal Building? The Courthouse? Police Plaza? What about the Brooklyn Bridge? What about the Stock Exchange?”

  At some point, we made it, and found that what my aunt had said was true—aside from a few people wearing facemasks, things were open above Canal Street. But we couldn’t get away from that smell, and I could have been in Hong Kong and not been able to escape the feeling of anxiety vibrating through me with every step. A war was already waging inside of me, where an invisible little girl had taken up a home, acting in constant state of defense and offense, of paranoia, trying to predict where and when the next attack would come from. I didn’t want to go back to school, but I didn’t want to stay in my apartment, either.

  I wanted to be nowhere, because nowhere was safe.

  * * *

  Journal Entry, 9/16:

  I finally took a hot shower today. I’m going down to the community room to help again. We watched the movie ET. I sat in the back with Grandpa. It was a sad movie. Mom and me went to Blockbuster and got six videos.

  FEMA, an organization that provided people with coupons to use for HEPA air purifiers and vacuum cleaners—they had to be HEPA, my mom explained, because those were the ones that filtered out asbestos—initially set their boundaries on Nassau Street, cutting Southbridge out b
y only two blocks. An angry mob went to their office, and the boundary was changed. They also gave us access to a “professional cleaning crew,” one that our neighbor described as “one Mexican guy and a few Puerto Rican teenagers.”

  We had to file with the Red Cross for things that had to be thrown out, curtains, bedspreads, the couch, and the air conditioners, which had been drawing in soot. My dad explained to me later on that some people began to claim they had damage that they didn’t have just so they could get new things, and I couldn’t understand how anyone could be so ugly at a time like this.

  Later that day I ran into my neighbor Franky, who I had rode the bus to kindergarten with years before. Before we could say hello, we heard a boom.

  “Was that sound really loud enough to be a dump truck?” I asked.

  “What the hell else are they going to do next?” he said, trying to make us both feel better. “The damage is done.”

  But his shrug was jumpy, and as he opened the front door, he said, “Phew, it still smells like dead bodies.”

  How many kids can identify the smell of dead bodies?

  With every day that passed, “missing” became closer to meaning “dead.”

  “There’s little hope,” said a news anchor on the TV that kept flickering on and off. “There’s little hope.”

  They also talked about the anthrax scares, about how chemicals were being mailed to news corporations and senators, killing five people and infecting seventeen others. It became known as “Amerithrax,” and the note written to the people who received it looked something like this:

  9-11-01

  THIS IS NEXT

  TAKE PENACILIN NOW

  DEATH TO AMERICA

  DEATH TO ISRAEL

  ALLAH IS GREAT

  Chemical warfare.

  I pondered this as I sat in the slippery orange booth at Burger King, one of the only places to reopen, one table over from a military man with a rifle. My dad found out that my cousin Melanie, who worked at the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, had begun taking Cipro as a precaution. As I picked at my French fries, I thought about having to join a mass exodus of people fleeing the United States. I was certain that it was just a matter of when, and more so than me, I was worried about Grandma.