What was more disgusting still was that people wanted to have this to take home and look at. People were buying them. Who the fuck would want that as a souvenir? Do you understand what that was like?
We could hear people say, when they arrived at the site, “That’s it? There’s just a hole?”
“Like they’re disappointed,” Sarah fumed in the girl’s bathroom one day. “What do they want to be there? What part of ‘gone’ don’t they understand?”
“They’re just taking pictures and carrying on with their day,” I responded back, layering on red lipstick and wetting my hair to keep it from frizzing up. “They’re just spectators. It’s our neighborhood. They have no right to be there.”
I felt angry, and then I felt something new: pure hatred. I hated them.
Since when do I hate anyone? They ruined my entire day just by being there, stomping all over the remains of my old life.
My urge to jab an elbow into anyone with a map in their hand or a camera around their neck grew stronger with time. I wanted to make them feel what they should have felt, being down there: pain. When it got to the point where my mother and I couldn’t even get to where we were going, I became a lit stick of dynamite, angrily pushing myself through them, boiling over with this flood of toxic emotions and feelings I didn’t recognize. The mood would stay with me for hours, making me snippy and nasty.
“What the hell’s the matter with you?” my mother said in a shrill voice that cut through me like a sharp axe made of ice. “You’re like an animal! Knock it off.”
For years, tourists excitedly flocked to the site. They wanted to be a part of something they never could, and we would have given anything not to be.
* * *
Whenever “Breaking News” interrupted a television program, my entire body seized up in terror, ready to bolt.
All kinds of triggers were setting me off before I knew what a trigger even was. Suddenly, I was agitated, restless, scared, cringing, and crying, and wringing my hands. There was a churning in the middle of my body; the feeling like I needed to act, quickly, but that there was nothing I could do. It felt like driving a car and having one foot on the accelerator and another on the brake, holding them both down with all of my might while the tires just sputtered in the mud.
I need to do something but I don’t know what. I’m going to die. You shouldn’t be like this.
The threats, the Orange Alerts, began to pile on. Every single human being in New York City was a potential suicide bomber. They could be standing next to you at the corner, in a store, or a garage. They could follow you into your building. There was no real security on the subway or on a bus. Millions of people were just darting around. Now, the UPS guy was a suspect.
Suspicious Package! Walk the other way!
I began having panic attacks on the subway, shaking whenever the train stopped in the tunnel. My brain was shouting “You have to escape!” but there was no way out.
Then this campaign began:
“If you see something, say something.”
You were supposed to call the police (even though cell phones were only first starting to become popular, and nobody had service underground) if you saw a suspicious, everyday object left unattended, like a briefcase or a backpack. All someone had to do was leave a briefcase on a subway platform to turn the entire world upside down. These became the objects we feared, as children: duffle bags, suitcases, backpacks, briefcases, purses, boxes, were all lethal and fatal. Nothing made sense anymore.
Greg got out of the subway to make those calls, which sometimes made him late to class.
I don’t have a cell phone.
Noises bellowed up from regular city construction projects, from dumpsters, from trucks, from police cars and ambulances. People screamed, and every scream was as startling as having a gun pointed in my face. Wherever I was standing, I was on the lookout, with my hair on end, charged and raring to go. My mind never let me rest. Logic was being redefined, or perhaps it was collapsing into itself as a concept just when I had started to grasp it. I watched as it slipped through my fingers like sand. It was all gone. Our home was quarantined from the rest of society, and a pervasive feeling spread through my body as though it was being injected with a needle: the underlying sense of danger, that everything wasn’t what it seemed.
“What if.”
Some of my fear, the lack of control, started twisting and contorting into something else: anger. Someone has to be blamed. It would’ve been much more politically correct if none of us were terrified when we saw dark skinned, bearded men wearing caps, and women in burkas on the train or in a store.
But that wasn’t the case.
We were being shown these faces, told to look out for these men, who looked a lot like the guys who operated news stands, rode the subway, drove cabs, owned delis, walked around with luggage, just like everyone else.
* * *
After school every day, I went right upstairs to check on Grandma, but the nature of those visits changed. Now, instead of finding comfort, instead of going to be enveloped in the warmth and the joy and the fun, I was going to make sure she was okay, to watch over her.
No matter what my parents tried to do for me, taking me shopping or for ice cream or to the movies, I hated all of it. On top of it, I was upset that I couldn’t feel happy, or anything less than permanently awful. The child-like behavior of other kids, the happiness of people around me, made me even angrier.
In late October, we went to Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut to try to “get away from the smell and have some fun.” As always, there was a ton of bumper-to-bumper traffic before the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. As our car chugged along, stopping and starting, my pulse began to quicken; I craned my neck to see out of the back window, cars in front, cars behind. Car bomb. The droning man delivering the news on 1010 Wins agitated me and I kicked my mom’s seat in front of me.
“Can you turn off the news? I hate it!” I said. It wasn’t the radio host’s fault. It was the sensation of being trapped that made everything else feel too tight on me. It was like someone was yelling in my face and the car doors were closing in, a teakettle was whistling in my ear.
That truck is going to explode. You’re going to die. You can’t get out.
Get out! You have to run!
Get out!
Get out!!!!!!
“We need to go,” I said quickly, which was absurd, given the circumstances. “I need to go. I need to go. I need to go. I need to go. Now. Now.”
“What are you, crazy? Stop already, you’re annoying me now,” my mom said.
“Uggggh,” I sighed, clonking my head against the window. I squeezed my eyes closed and shut up.
Journal Entry, 10/20
There was a concert for NYC today. There were six thousand police and firemen there. My mom said, who’s watching the streets? Billy crystal made a joke, “This is the first time I’ve seen rock stars back stage running from white powder.” I think they meant anthrax. My mom thought that was hysterical, but then started crying when a dead firefighters’ family came on, and then everyone was crying. I brought the tape of the concert to Grandma’s so she could watch some of the songs.
“Don’t go out on Halloween, there’s going to be another terrorist attack,” I heard Michael say to Greg back at school.
“How do you know?” I intercepted.
“My friend from Hebrew School said his Middle Eastern babysitter told him to stay away from malls or crowded public places,” he said.
After Michael’s parents picked him up from P.S. 3 on the eleventh, he lay in bed that night thinking two things.
Someone has to pay for what had happened. And I’m the one who needs to make them pay. Then, this is the most important thing that will ever happen to me in my lifetime. Don’t forget what happened today. Try to remember everything. Someday, somebody is going to want to hear my story. There were many thoughts absent from his mind over the next couple of weeks, months, years: fearful
thoughts, flashbacks, nightmares. Until he got to high school, he felt like he was “pretty much okay.”
Charles, who was still adamant about not letting the terrorists win, attended the children’s Halloween party in Southbridge dressed as a rescue worker, wearing his father’s hardhat, neon vest, and gas mask.
When I.S. 89 had our own Halloween dance, I went dressed as Columbia from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, but nobody knew who I was supposed to be.
As we danced wildly, trying to ignore the huddles of parents by the door, Christine told me about her friend who would only wear flats.
“Why?” I asked.
“She said she has to be able to run in her shoes.”
We danced to “Bootylicious” by Destiny’s Child, “Miss Jackson” by Outkast, “Family Affair” by Mary J. Blige, and “I Hope You Dance” by Lee Ann Womack.
The last slow song came on at 9:00 p.m., signaling that the dance was over. It was Enrique Iglesias’ “Hero,” and I danced with Henry while some of the boys, like Devin, made fun of it all. Too soon, the lights abruptly flickered on to reveal all of our parents waiting by the door. Our little cluster of costumes and swinging elbows was broken up by the blast of those sad florescent bulbs. We slowly trudged toward the door, some of us stalling for time, more than just disappointed that the dance was over: we were trying to avoid going back to the nightmare that was our reality.
The next day, President Bush threw the first pitch at the World Series on October 30.
He later said that that was the most nervous he’d ever been in his entire presidency.
Journal Entry, 11/1
Killing for religion seems like an excuse to me. Islamic religion isn’t based on killing, but the terrorists changed it around to fit themselves. How could people who got letters that their homes would be destroyed not warn anyone else? It’s like Kitty Genovese, they knew it was happening but didn’t want to take any action for anyone but themselves. Why haven’t we learned from past history? The civil war should have taught ALL of us to wipe out racism, and should’ve wiped out such uncivilized behavior.
One day, I decided to “like” Henry back.
I thought a boyfriend was exactly what I needed to take my mind off things, and it didn’t seem like there were any other takers.
The only problem was, he was with Becca.
So, during violin class in the storage closet, I passed him a note, and he passed one back, and I made a convincing case. Becca never took it out on me, never got angry. Most likely because they weren’t doing much boyfriend-and-girlfriend-ing anyway.
Henry came from a very strict Filipino family, so we weren’t allowed to hang out after school. We had brief moments of time together, like grabbing a slice of pepperoni pizza and orange soda before we hopped on our separate trains to head home, kissing each other with garlicky, greasy pizza mouths. He got me a rose one day, I called him one night and his mother told me he had to call me back because he was taking a bath. I remember that night specifically because, the next morning, on November 12, American Airlines Flight 587 crashed into a field in Queens. I had just woken from the first nightmare I’d had in two weeks, of a plane crash and fiery remains of buildings blazing, chasing me and Grandma. I woke up and walked in to the living room and saw it on television, and I thought that I was literally losing my mind.
Journal Entry, 11/19
Oh my God we were on the C train, which was delayed for fifteen minutes because there was a fire, and my nerves are shot and I’m sweating and exhausted. I’m going to collapse.
Journal Entry, 11/21
This really nice lady from Colorado came to our school today, and we had a great conversation as we were going from class to class, about everything related to the WTC. It was hard to talk with all the chaos in the hallway. I’m sorry she only came for one day. I thought a lot more people would have opened up to her if they got the chance to talk, and I found it really upsetting that some people made fun of her accent.
I remember that day, because it was the day Thomas told he returned to his Gateway Plaza home in Battery Park City for the first time in November, and waited outside with his aunt by the entrance to World Financial Center while his parents entered, then passed, the checkpoint. He told me there were giant mounds of rubble everywhere. When the first plane hit, it blew out windows and tore at his building.
“The side of it was clean wiped away,” he told me at lunch.
The guts of the building were exposed, as if torn open for an architectural autopsy.
“I could count the floors and see into peoples’ apartments. Pieces of metal were stuck into the sides of the building.”
He was not allowed into the apartment with his mother, who found a leg inside, underneath six inches of dust. In fact, she later told him, there were so many random body parts you couldn’t even tell what they were. The dust settled high above the floor, the bed, and the couch. The furniture was burnt and singed. His prized Beanie Baby collection had been destroyed, even the special Princess Diana Bear. His collection of McDonalds toys and little cars were all gone. Nothing in the apartment was salvageable.
He waited, watching people roaming around in gas masks, looking at the skeletal outline of the outline of the World Trade Center yards away and thinking, like he did every day, about what he had seen there two months earlier.
I didn’t find out the magnitude of what Thomas had been through until nearly a decade later.
* * *
Jorge the Spanish teacher had circulated through first period Spanish class with a microphone around his neck, winding in and out of desks, teaching the kids a song that they never finished.
Vroooooooom.
Jorge didn’t stop the kids from rushing to the window, but soon Debra, the eighth grade literacy teacher, came in and whispered in his ear.
“We’re going to evacuate,” Jorge announced.
The kids lined up and mocked fainting, laughing, saying “We’re all going to die!”
Thomas laughed nervously and fell in line with the others. His father had just finished parking their car in front of the World Financial Center and appeared in the hallway before the class went down to the cafeteria. Thomas caught Ellen’s eye, and the look in it caused his stomach to turn. Her eyes were wide open and searching for something that her frozen stance signified she could not find. She has no idea what to do.
As Thomas and his father left the school building, a strange woman ran up to them, took in a sharp breath in, swallowed quickly, and warned them, “Don’t go that way! People are falling!” His father ignored her, and they kept walking toward the Towers, toward home.
As they approached the Winter Garden of the World Financial Center, Thomas saw an old lady kneeling on the floor, covered in blood. It was at that moment that the two of them broke into a sprint, surfacing on the other side by the boat basin and watching as one person after the other jumped and fell from the building like dominoes.
Thomas turned around to see a woman melted by jet fuel lying in a pool of blood on the sidewalk.
As they hurried into 600 Gateway Plaza to grab their one-year-old miniature poodle, Eddie, Thomas glanced sideways out of the window facing the Tower, feeling as though he was just inches away.
That would be the last time he saw his apartment for six months.
They were riding in the elevator when the lights began to flicker and the elevator floor began to shake. Eddie whimpered in his carrying case. The power was beginning to cut out.
The elevator eventually reached the lobby, and the doors opened to reveal police with gas masks on barking at them all to get out of the building and over to “the tip of the island.”
“Manhattan is going to explode. The jet fuel and gas lines are going to destroy everything!”
Thomas clutched Eddie’s carrying case as he and his father were stopped by police putting up barricades and positioning their cars to keep everyone contained in one area.
For twenty minutes, they were corralle
d in front of Gateway Plaza, watching people jump and land on the pavement in front of them.
A woman in a blue dress.
A man in a white shirt.
A woman with blond hair.
Scream.
Splat.
Crunch.
Scream.
Splat.
Crunch.
Eventually, the cops allowed them to take the back entrance out of Gateway Plaza, so they hurried South toward the water, further downtown, to the edge of Battery Park. Nearing Bowling Green park, Thomas’s heart nearly stopped as he heard another vrooming noise, like a motorcycle speeding up. It sounded exactly the same as the first noise. Before he could register the next thought, he heard screams everywhere and they ran toward the park, behind the Museum of Jewish Heritage. He suddenly felt dizzy; he was having visions of the woman splattering on the pavement in front of him, limbs flying everywhere.
“This wouldn’t happen in Florida. I want to move to Florida,” he kept repeating.
“That’s not going to help us now, stop saying that,” his father barked through a coughing fit.
They sat on a park bench behind the museum to catch their breath, his father silent and stone faced, Thomas with Eddie’s cage in his lap.
The woman sitting on the bench next to them suddenly screamed, clutching her poodles to her chest. “Oh my God! Oh my God!” she shouted, over and over. Thomas did not immediately register what he saw as he turned around, nor did he think the cloud of smoke was so close that it could come toward them. But in a millisecond, the cloud wrapped around Liberty Court, pushing the fastest moving crowd he had ever seen further toward the water, closer to the boats.
They didn’t have time to reach them before the cloud gained on them.
Thomas and his father hit the floor and rolled underneath more nearby park benches as it passed over them. The last thing Thomas saw was a woman jumping over the railing into the river.
After 9/11 Page 12