One day that shook New York

In a midtown office, you arrive for work a few minutes before nine and go to the kitchen area to make a cup of coffee. You listen to chatting coworkers – “I thought, that plane sounds way too low” – and you don’t think much of it.

At your desk, you check your e-mail: still no follow-up from that guy who asked you out on a date last week. America Online has a news alert: a plane has hit – yikes – the World Trade Center. That’s all it says. You click and click on the alert, but there’s no link, no more to the story. What a freak accident, you think. You’re picturing a private plane, something so small as to bounce right off.

Still, you call your friend Steve, who produces the World Trade Center summer concert series. No answer. But you’re sure he’s fine. Aren’t you? You try, unsuccessfully, to load CNN.com a few times. You even do a bit of work. Then, because you can’t begin to comprehend what’s going on, because you just don’t know, you go in search of your morning meeting and wonder why no one’s there. Soon, you find other members of your department, pale, shaky – “Do you know anyone who works down there?” Johanna says.

Only now it dawns on you that there will be no meeting, no work today. This is serious. Somehow that hadn’t hit you yet. You try the phone again – still no answer at Steve’s. You go back and huddle around Jim’s computer. You see for the first time the North Tower turned into a smokestack. Someone else, an intern whose name escapes you, says there was a second plane. The other tower is burning, too. You wonder how on earth they’re going to put those fires out.

Next minute – or maybe it’s an hour that’s passed, you’ve lost all track of time – there’s talk of a hit at the Pentagon, possibly the White House, too. And at least one more hijacked plane. Maybe eight all together. What the fuck is going on?

“There’s a TV in Brigitte’s office,” Johanna realizes.

You get there, and Brigitte’s assistant, typing away, says, “You know one of the towers collapsed, right?”

What? It can’t just collapse! But there it is, on the TV. Your hand goes to your mouth, stays there in a cartoonish gesture of shock. Ohmigod. Betsy’s friend Lisa Felcher. Didn’t she just tell you at that her birthday party last week that she worked in the World Trade Center? But there’s no time for that. Get out. Now. But where do you go?

Back to the phone. You can’t help it. Steve, then Betsy, then Steve again. Still nothing. Your brother calls, says to go to his apartment. His wife’s already on her way home. You get through to Steve. He’s home. He’s safe. He tells you about the second tower. Gone? But that’s just not possible. Flee now. Talk later. You respond to a few e-mails, friends from up and down the eastern seaboard, some you haven’t heard from in years, wondering if you’re okay.

You leave work. Just stay the fuck away from the St. Patrick’s, and Time Square, and the UN… and, well, everything. And there it is, straight down Fifth Avenue. A massive cloud. Smoke like you’ve never seen. You’re walking toward it, while hundreds upon hundreds walk the other way. Your brother’s place is fifteen blocks downtown. You still haven’t talked to Betsy. Oh no. Her brother. A trader. Where’s his office? Fucking cellphones. Useless.

And now people are lined up at payphones, cash machines, news tickers; they’re stopped around cars whose radios are turned up loud. Every third person you pass looks like they’re barely holding it together.

No one’s home at your brother’s. You use five of the seven dollars in your wallet to buy a pack of cigarettes. You light one up with a shaky hand and stand there, on the corner of 34th and Park, staring up at the Empire State Building. Maybe you’ve come to the wrong place. Your sister-in-law finally appears out of the crowd. Ohmigod, I’m so glad to see you. Where were you? Did you know anyone? Turn the TV on.

You get home to Brooklyn that evening. By now you’ve established that your close friends and family are okay; this fact will yield a complex stew of guilt and comfort in days to come. There have been heartening stories of near misses, fluke sick days, arbitrary midtown meetings, hangovers that kept people in bed a little longer than usual.

There are even a few reports of bizarre psychic dreams. James dreamt he had drinks with his dead grandmother and his mother, who died two weeks ago, at a rotating bar on top of a downtown hotel; while there, he felt vertigo kick in, thought he might fall out. Then he woke up, heard the news. No, that can’t be. It was a dream.

You’re oddly compelled to go see, to walk up to the Brooklyn Heights promenade. You call your friend Peter, tell him you’re going, does he want to come, too? “Are you fucking kidding me?” he says. You’ve obviously lost it; what kind of sicko would go up to look, and take her camera? Then he says, “Of course I’ll go.”

It’s a bizarre, morbid pilgrimage, you know, but you just have to see it, the skyline, with your own eyes, to believe it. So you stop in at the hospital and ask for a face mask, and wonder where the hell all these face masks even came from. The cars are coated in a cement grey dust, the smoke thick. You don’t even want to consider the smell.

And even when you see it you still don’t believe it. You’re quite sure you’ll never believe it. There are hundreds of hundreds of people, gaping out across the East River in silence as the sun sets, so painfully gorgeous. You cry for the tenth time today, but only ever for a few seconds at a time. There’s still too much shock and fear in the way. And then, you take a picture. And you go home and you pull out the other pictures, in dusty photo albums and envelopes stashed here and there around the apartment, and you realize that yes, this seems a trivial way to realize it, but yes, the fabric of your life here, in your hometown, will never be the same again.

I don’t even know how old I am in the first one. Three? Four? My mother even younger than I am now? The Trade Center hadn’t been around much longer than I had. Did I know that then? In my life it’s just always been there, and I imagined that it always would be; rather, I never even considered the possibility that it might not.

I wonder whether my brother remembers that day, what brought us to that particular vista, whether it was the first time we saw the skyline or the twentieth. I know he’ll never forget the last time he saw those towers; like so many others, he watched them collapse from the street in the west village, stood there frozen as the unimaginable became reality.

Next comes one with my mom and two cousins, one of many photos taken during a city cousins/country cousins summer exchange that went on for years. We’re on the Trade Center observation deck, Mom in funky shades; there was a guy up there dressed as King Kong that day and we later posed with him, too. I’m up there again in the next photo (see illustration this page), with my cousin Rachel, in our blue shorts sets. We’re truly on top of the world there – so young, so nonchalant. There’s a swagger to my pose that astounds me. We were mistaken for twins that day, up there on the twin towers. We thought it was just so funny. How many times we went there as kids I don’t know.

Somehow, it just never got old. We’d put quarters in the viewfinders, spot things we recognized in the distance, like the building where Dad worked, and Staten Island, our home. We’d visit the Guinness Book of World Records exhibit and buy postcards and tiny half-spheres with chunky fake snow falling on the skyline.

Next, there are years and years of pictures with high school and college boyfriends. Matt shot a whole roll of me on the Brooklyn promenade the day he got his fancy new camera; it’s hard to take bad pictures up there but he did his best. Those images conjure more memories of trips up to the observation floors with still more friends, visiting from Boston and Dubin and Texas, just last year. We’d marvel at the view, the quiet. We’d lean our heads against the thick glass in Ferris Bueller fashion. We’d talk about how if you dropped a penny off the top, you’d kill someone.

Then there’s a shot taken on Melissa’s Brooklyn rooftop in 1998: old friends getting ready to go to our ten-year high school reunion. We thought of going up to that same rooftop on Tuesday night, but Melissa’s friend Maria still lives in the building. Her brother is among the missing. A one-day conference Maria hadn’t even known about. A troublingly high floor. Not a word.

Two years later – July 2000 – pictures from Melissa’s wedding day. Will she ever look at them the same way again? There were three or four wedding parties under the Brooklyn Bridge that day. Where do you take your photos now?

They’re just a handful of photos, snippets of a lifetime lived in the vicinity of two towers that were a photo opportunity unto themselves. Just by being there. Some of the memories were already bittersweet enough; my mother, for years the leader of our sight-seeing expeditions, has been dead since I was a teenager. My father has long since stopped working downtime, long since stopped buying our Christmas presents in the World Trade Center mall. He swears now, he won’t believe it until he sees it with his own eyes, has to drive in from New Jersey and go down there. “So many memories,” he says. “I can’t believe it’s gone.”

“I’m going to know people,” he says, after he cries for maybe the third time in his life that I’m aware of. “You are, too.”

The skyline will never look right again. Not in this lifetime.

Not in mine.