Taller Than Giants

The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were so tall that it was hard to see them. I mean it was hard to conceive of how big they really were, even as you stood staring at them. Your eye tended to reduce them, to perceive them as more or less ordinary skyscrapers. I always had to make a deliberate effort, to go back and make my eye travel up all those rows of windows, to force myself to see how immensely out of scale they were. The Towers were never beautiful. But they were always awe-inspiring.

There was a moment, as I was running toward them on that morning, when that visual trickiness came into play. Staring at the gashes ripped through them by the planes, at the smoke and flames, I struggled to understand the scale of what I was seeing. How big were those tears? How expansive were those clouds of smoke and fire? I couldn’t figure it out.

Around the tops of the Towers there were fluttering clouds of debris. They looked like papers caught in a windstorm. But I had my usual moment of, “no, they’re much bigger than that — look closer,” and I saw that the debris was whole pieces of furniture, sections of wallboard with torn edges, things the size of my mattress at home, and bigger. All getting chucked and sucked out through the air hundreds of feet above the rest of Lower Manhattan.

I heard someone I was passing on the sidewalk say, “There goes another one,” and I squinted up, scanned the debris cloud, to see what he meant. I focused on a tiny figure with windmilling limbs arcing down through the air. A person.

Fallen? Or jumped? Sucked out as the air evacuated a burning room through a shattered window? Panicked? Deliberate? No way to know. Falling now, certainly. Arms and legs going in fast motion. Struggling, even as there was no longer anything to struggle against.

I looked down and didn’t look up again. How can you watch that? The person I saw flying out of the Twin Towers may have chosen their own end. They may have chosen the clear air, rather than continue choking on the smoke and waiting to be burned or crushed. It doesn’t seem like an unreasonable decision. Regardless — windmilling arms and legs, silhouetted against the blue sky, falling alongside all that fluttering debris.

It’s one of the moments that defines the day, in my mind. No matter what the story was behind that person’s fall/jump/fate, they are the tragedy of 9/11. The planes were an attack, the fall was a disaster, the plan was a crime against humanity, God, and the world. But that person falling was a tragedy. Even now, it makes me nauseous.