Brightness falls
There was a hole in the skyline, the morning after. I pulled the chain on the shade of my bedroom window with a certain mournful sense of ceremony. A plume of pearl-grey smoke rose into the sky, marking the spot where the twin towers used to stand - my view, and everything else, forever altered. It's just steel and concrete, of course - but the dead and the injured were still largely invisible and uncounted. And the ruined towers were also a symbol, to those who targeted them as well as to those of us who lived, often unconsciously, beneath them.
Now I am angry. I'm depressed. I'm weepy. I can't control my emotions at all. I want to hug strangers. I want to hurt other strangers, anyone who had anything to do with this, those fucking people in the Middle East who have been dancing in the street. With maximum prejudice. It's not just me. Everyone I have spoken to is feeling indiscriminately compassionate. And furiously vengeful.
It's always dangerous to generalise about this heterogenous and contentious mass of humanity, but I think it's safe to say that New Yorkers have finally come up against a phenomenon larger than their collective capacity for jaded equanimity. We are famous for not looking up at our signature skyscrapers. We took them for granted, just as we took our own pre-eminence, our own importance, for granted. Public displays of surprise and wonder are banned by city ordinance. But we are visibly stunned by the disappearance of one of those monuments to our own magnificence. We will probably feel the absence of those towers far more acutely than we did their presence at the apex of our skyline.
We will never forget where we were on Tuesday when we first heard the news, when we first saw two 100-storey buildings collapse. Me, I woke at 8.15, and lay in bed till 8.40, at which point I got up and struggled with my bedroom shade, the chain of which had somehow become jammed. As I tinkered with the chain, trying to get it back on its track, I briefly noted the fact that, after four or five months in this apartment, I was already starting to take the view for granted. It had been days, maybe weeks, since I'd really looked out at the vista of the river to the right and the World Trade Centre rising above the apartment buildings of the West Village. I went out to the kitchen to turn on the coffee maker.
When I returned to the bedroom a few minutes later I noticed smoke coming out of the north tower of the Trade Centre. It was hard to tell but there seemed to be a jagged hole up around the 80th floor. I looked at the clock; it was 8.50. The phone rang - my girlfriend Jeanine, sounding breathless, told me to turn on the TV. (Actually my ex-girlfriend, but in light of the events of the day the distinction seemed to blur.) CNN was showing a similar, slightly better view of the World Trade Centre, the north tower smoking away, although no one was sure what had happened. I kept turning between the window and the television, a 90-degree angle, verifying what I was seeing on television. Just before nine, CNN got an eyewitness on the phone who said he had seen a plane crash into the tower. I realised I had missed seeing this incredible event by a matter of seconds - like the lumpish ploughman who fails to witness the fall of Icarus in Auden's Musee des Beaux Arts. It didn't seem to occur to me or the commentators on CNN that this extraordinary event could be anything but an accident.
I went out to get the papers, although never had they seemed less relevant. The towers weren't visible from the street. In the deli two scruffy old codgers were arguing about the merits of John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock. I asked them if they'd heard about the plane that had crashed into the World Trade Centre. They looked at me, the way one looks at fellow New Yorkers who are ranting incoherently, before turning away. "You can't compare Rear Window to Stagecoach," said the skinny one, resuming the argument.
Out on the street, a young woman walking her pug stopped me to ask me if I had heard about the crash, restoring my confidence in my own sanity. Incredibly, the New York Post had a picture of Paul McCartney playing piano for a smiling Hillary Clinton. I'm not quite sure whether I was looking at the TV screen or at the window when the second plane hit a few minutes after I'd returned to my bedroom.
I've seen the replay so many times now. The plane approached from the south so that I couldn't see it from my south-facing window. And over the course of the next 40 minutes I kept turning between the TV and the window. I remember that I was looking out of the window when I first noticed that the south tower seemed to be tilting; a minute later it collapsed. From the window I just saw it disappear into the smoke, sinking beneath the rooflines of the West Village. About 10 minutes later, the north tower did the same. Jeanine called again; she'd been out on Sixth Avenue and watched the tower go down. She told me that people were crying after the collapse of the second tower. A policeman with tears in his eyes had suggested that she stock up on food. It seemed like a good idea - like the kind of thing that people in this kind of situation should do. By this time we realised that we were an island in the strictest sense - all bridges and tunnels were closed. Anyway it was a response - a course of action in the face of a sense of paralysis.
I walked one floor down to check on Lora, my downstairs neighbour, and suggested a grocery run. "Can you believe this?" she asked repeatedly. We discovered that we weren't the only ones who'd decided to stock up - the aisles were jammed with shopping carts. Lora got into line behind 20 people while I went around stocking up - eggs, milk, pasta... I couldn't really focus. Everyone grim but strangely polite. A strange silence prevailed. Curiously, no one was really talking now, two hours into the crisis.
Back at the apartment, I tried once again to reach my ex-wife in Tennessee. I wanted to let her know that I was alive and check on my kids. I felt aggrieved that once again there was no answer. I wanted to share the news of my survival, to let the mother of my children know that they still had a father. I wanted to report from the front. After hanging up I called Jeanine, who was 12 blocks closer to the front, but her line rang busy.
I decided to venture out. Walking down Eighth Avenue toward the West Village I was going against the flow. A long column of pedestrians was marching uptown, away from the smoke. The procession was grim but orderly. Refugees from Wall Street - women in high heels, men with suit jackets slung over their shoulders. A low-grade state of shock seemed to prevail. The sense of order started to fracture as I approached St Vincent's hospital on 11th Street, next door to Jeanine's apartment. Dozens of cops were directing traffic away from the hospital as ambulances screamed in from all directions. Hundreds of people were lined up on the street to give blood, hundreds more were standing around watching the ambulances come in. Dozens of orderlies and nurses stood at the door, waiting. The strangest sight of all was of a fleet of wheeled office chairs draped with sheets, awaiting the wounded.
Jeanine was frantic. She was producing a commercial, which was supposed to shoot out on Long Island, a half-million-dollar shoot. Half the crew was out in Montauk waiting, half trapped in New York. The director refused to work until his kids were evacuated from the city. And the phones were barely working. The word came through that a van was leaving from Great Jones street, some 10 blocks from her apartment. Apparently cars could leave Manhattan via certain routes. Maybe. Nobody really knew but Jeanine's company, she had just discovered, had no insurance for terrorist acts and if they didn't get out there to shoot the ad they would be liable for the entire amount. We ran half a mile with her bags.
Sixth Avenue also had its parade of refugees, some of them covered head to foot with white dust, strange walking ghosts among the living. We arrived at the rendezvous breathless, my back thrown out. Her cellphone rang: the van had gone to pick up the director's kids. There was no way to get 30 blocks to the rendezvous. Jeanine started cursing. Then she started crying.
We walked across the street to Time Café, a once fashionable dining spot. It seemed incredible that they were open for business as usual and that they could seat us for lunch. The TV over the bar was tuned to CNN, replaying the collapse of one of the towers. The actress Jennifer Beals walked in behind us, a camera around her neck, looking slightly dazed. We sat down next to a couple covered in white dust. They met an hour before; they had both been caught in the collapse of the second tower when they evacuated their building on lower Broadway and had both found refuge inside a store.
The man's name was Jeffrey Grimm. He was a liability analyst. It sounded like a useful thing to be at this particular moment in history. His eyes were red and watering; tears streaked the mask of white dust on his face; the waiter brought him a little bottle of eye drops. He told us his office was three blocks from the WTC. After the second plane crashed they were ordered to evacuate. He was on the street when the tower collapsed. "There was a rumble, a kind of thunderous sound, and then we were engulfed in a cloud of dust and debris. I couldn't see a thing. People were grabbing at me, screaming. People were saying they didn't want to die. It was pitch black. I was blind. I heard a voice shouting, 'Over here.' Somebody pulled me inside the door of an office building. He probably saved my life."
Jeffrey lived in Jersey, and had no way to get home; he was going to look for a hotel room since all transit, all bridges and tunnels were closed. I told him to call me if he couldn't find shelter, and Jeanine gave him my name and number. He looked at my name and asked me if I was the author of Bright Lights, Big City.
"I just realised something," he said. "Wasn't the World Trade Centre on the cover of your book?" "My God," I said, "I hadn't thought of that." The cover of the US edition of the book shows a figure standing in the street, looking downtown, the twin towers looming beyond. It had become something of an iconic image. Now it would have a grim new significance.
We managed to get our friend Bret Ellis on the phone; he lived nearby and had sounded, Jeanine said after she called him earlier, as if he was having a serious breakdown. Now we were in his neighbourhood. Jeanine told him we would bring him a burger. We walked up to Bret's building in the East Village. By this time another phase had set in among the pedestrians, who seemed to be realising that they had survived a catastrophe. People were smiling again, although the smiles and gestures were somewhat exaggerated in the manner of restaurant patrons who are in the presence of a celebrity and are eager to mask their interest and assert their own vivacity.
At Bret's apartment we watched CNN for half an hour. We kept telling each other we couldn't believe this. I noticed an invitation to a book party on Bret's kitchen counter. "I'm glad I don't have a book coming out this month," I said - a selfish and trivial response to the disaster, but one I thought he would understand. Nobody was going to be talking about fiction this week. "I was just thinking that same thing," he said, with obvious relief.
"I don't know how I'm going to be able to go back to this novel I'm writing," I said. The novel is set in New York, of course. The very New York which has just been altered for ever. "I know exactly what you mean," he said. After half an hour he walked out with us to see what was happening on the street. When we said goodbye he lost his composure. He turned away when he started to cry.
Jeanine and I walked back to my apartment, with her luggage, my back almost ruined after lugging the shit for five miles. When we finally put her bags down in my living room she started to cry. I held out for another three hours before I fell apart. When I checked my email I found a couple of dozen messages from people who had been trying to reach me, including Helen, my ex-wife. Apparently the phones were barely working. I finally raised her on the phone. She seemed genuinely relieved to find that she still had an ex-husband.
The kids had been told. They seemed to be relatively cool about the whole thing, although later my son called me back. He had a question. "Dad, why don't you just leave New York?" It was, under most circumstances, a difficult question. He'd asked it many times before. For once I had an easy answer. "I can't," I said. Before she said goodbye, Helen reported that she had it on good authority - a friend in the military - that the plane that went down near Pittsburgh had been shot down.
A friend in Brooklyn said it was raining paper in her neighbourhood - shreds of résumés, files, letters, tax returns, sales receipts, invoices and possibly even billets doux were falling from the sky. Jeanine got a call from a friend who had managed to escape from the north tower and had run 30 blocks before she realised her leg was broken.
Lora, my downstairs neighbour, invited us down. She'd cooked a leg of lamb. I brought down a bottle of 85 Lynch Bages, the first of several bottles. For 20 minutes I found myself unable to speak without crying. In the middle of the meal Lora got a call telling her a friend had died in the plane that went down near Pittsburgh.
After dinner we ventured out to visit a friend, an investment banker who had escaped from the north tower. He was shaken up; and besides, we weren't remotely sleepy. At 14th Street a policeman from Camden, New Jersey demanded proof that we lived below 14th. I was reminded of a joke in my first book about a character from the upper East Side who felt he needed a visa to travel south of 14th street. Today he would. 14th street has always been a kind of unofficial border. Today it's official. Policemen are posted along the street, blocking access to anyone without proper identification. Jeanine didn't know how to prove that she lived in the area. We all have driver's licences from other states - in Jeanine's case, from South Africa. We want to live here, but we don't want to deal with the city bureaucracy.
I was indignant. What a concept. Prove our residence? Jeanine finally came up with a prescription bottle for sedatives that had her address. "We have our orders," said the cop. "They just shot a guy with a bomb a few blocks down." In the absence of any hard facts, this kind of thing sounded plausible to us.
We finally reached Hayden's apartment. He had a gash on his face. "We heard the first crash," he said. "The building shook. But nobody said anything. There was no announcement, nothing. Finally, when the second plane hit, I just decided to leave. When I got out on the plaza a body hit the pavement 20 yards away from me. I looked up and saw two people jumping, falling 90 floors through the air. I saw 10, 12 people hit the ground." He sounded tentative, as if he were trying to convince himself of the reality of what he'd seen, or just trying to think of a way to tell it. He has the rest of his life. Even those of us who didn't see the bodies falling are dazed, repeating our own war stories, trying to connect ourselves to a catastrophe larger than any we have ever experienced.
On Wednesday morning, we seemed to have regained much of our composure. Here in West Chelsea there was an almost festive atmosphere - an impression that was only reinforced by the lack of traffic and the presence of police officers at major intersections. At lunchtime, those restaurants that were open were jammed with patrons who seemed almost giddy with relief.
At that point, so far as I could tell, after 24 hours of speaking about nothing but the disaster, people here, a mile and a half from the epicentre, were speaking of anything but. The sense of survivor's relief was compounded with a certain pride. We, the unsurprisable, were surprised at how well we were handling ourselves. Even our notoriously cantankerous mayor was showing himself to be more human and inclusive and wounded than we ever imagined he could be. Beyond the immediate scene of the disaster, there seemed to be order and calm. London during the blitz came to mind.
By Wednesday night, the mood seemed to have changed yet again. Two more huge buildings collapsed. The Empire State Building and Penn Station were evacuated because of bomb threats. The wind shifted uptown and we were overwhelmed with an acrid burning smell which seemed to be affecting people's moods. Or maybe it was exhaustion; I saw couples fighting on the street, people bursting into tirades. Another eerie development was the proliferation of homemade posters with pictures of the missing and pleas for help. Suddenly these appeared everywhere, taped to lampposts and fences and the sides of buildings. Missing... last seen... beloved son... please call...
By Thursday, nobody knew what to do with themselves. I told Lora I was heading to the gym at Chelsea Piers. "Don't do that," she said. "They set up the morgue over there."
There are, I suspect, many more mood swings in store. I have a feeling that everything will be "before" and "after" now. As I walked through the streets at midnight, I thought of Frank O'Connor's line at the end of Guests Of The Nation: "And anything that ever happened me after I never felt the same about again."
© Jay McInerney 2001.
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