The Bones of It

Here’s what happened: on the evening of Sept 10, it poured with rain. I got to my stop on the A train (the end of the line) and found a knot of people huddled just inside the exit peering out at the bright, cheery skies, hoping they might promise a let-up. They didn’t, and after a few minutes I pushed through and strode home, getting completely soaked in half a block and reaching my apartment wetter than if I’d ridden a water slide home.

The next morning was gorgeous, warm and sunny and bright as hell. It was an election day, I knew Donna would have opened the studio, and I have some memory of trying to call her as I hurried to the subway.

The planes both hit while I was underground. The first one must have been just after I got on my train, the second when I was much farther downtown. We stopped at the West 4^th Street station, where other trains were also stopped and the platforms were full of milling people. It took me a few minutes to look up from my book and realize that something weird was going on and that it didn’t look like we were going anywhere. The conductor was leaning out of her window talking to people on the platform. I stepped out to hear her say something like, “I don’t know. They say a plane hit the World Trade Center!” with a laugh, as if she were almost embarrassed to be spreading such a silly story.

I headed upstairs, thinking that maybe the 1 train would be running still, even though I realized that, as it went directly under the Twin Towers, which the A didn’t, that wasn’t very likely.

I charged up the stairs next to the Waverly Theater on 6^th Avenue in Greenwich Village. I had my head down, like a good New Yorker, and I spun around instantly when I got up to the sidewalk, aiming for West 4^th so I could go a block west and get the 1. I looked up enough to see that there was no traffic in the street. There was no movement. There were people, standing frozen on the pavement and all over the sidewalk, staring with their mouths hanging open at something behind me.

You’ve seen this picture. It was in Time or Newsweek. It was one of the iconic ones of the horror and shock we all experienced. I don’t remember if the actual picture was taken on 6^th Avenue or somewhere else in Manhattan, but it might as well have been exactly the scene I saw.

I turned to look over my shoulder at what they were all staring at. The Twin Towers lay directly in line with 6^th Avenue in those days. Looking down the street was like looking into a frame with the top two thirds of the World Trade Center hanging inside.

The black gashes in the buildings. The smoke. The flames licking out. Everybody shocked, staring.

My first thought, as every single New Yorker’s I’ve ever spoken to who saw this scene live, was, “that looks so fake.” I heard about a friend of a friend who was jogging along the waterfront in Battery Park when the first plane hit. He saw it coming in low over the river, looked up and watched it hit the tower and explode, and his first thought, even though he knew while he was thinking it that it was ridiculous, was, “I didn’t know they were filming down here today.” The scene was unreal. It looked cheesy, like a bad, cheap special effect. Silly. In a movie, you would laugh at it.

In real life, no one could imagine how to conceive of it. All those still bodies, staring. Traffic stopped. New Yorkers, stymied.

I turned around and tore down 4^th Street. I knew there was no chance of the 1 train running but headed that way, anyway. That was what I’d planned, and I couldn’t think straight enough to come up with another idea. I pulled out my phone and started dialing — the studio, my roommate back in Washington Heights, any friend I could think of. I hit 7^th Avenue, saw people pouring out of the subway station there, turned south, with the Towers belching smoke and flames and debris in front of me. I ran toward them.