Last-ish Thoughts

I haven’t posted any last thoughts on the 9/11 anniversary, because I’ve had a very hard time settling on some. That’s not to say I don’t have any — I’ve written several drafts, and thought of more. But they seem either too negative or too unfocused. What do I want to say about this? What statement would be useful, for me or anyone else?

The bottom line, very generally, is this: when it comes to our response to 9/11, I don’t think we, overall, have done it very well. From the earliest days, when our national leaders were amazingly absent and only Rudy Giuliani seemed to have any concept of just diving in and doing what was needed, to this past Sunday, when the public was excluded and the organization around the site was simultaneously heavy-handed and utterly chaotic, this event and its ongoing aftermath seem to have become an excuse for emotional porn and jingoism more than anything else.

Betty Bowers, the fabulous satirist who bills herself as “America’s Best Christian,” had it right when she said, “Most of the media commemorations this week have been harrowing tales intended to evoke tears (emotional porn), which flatter the survivors with how much they feel, rather than honor the victims with how much they lost." When a friend shared this quote with me it made me realize how deeply I’d fallen into that trap, myself, and it helped me break free of it, for which I’m grateful.

I’ve always been pretty disgusted with the public discussion about rebuilding the site. By enfranchising so many discordant, uncollaborative, and deeply biased voices, the process has seemed to play on and enflame sentimentality over healing, and to look back at those who died in the Towers rather than allow any look forward to what would really benefit the city and the nation in coming generations.

The fact that the construction process is so hidden from public eye also seems like a huge failure — all people want to do is see into the site, see what’s going on there and try to square the new view with their memories of what it used to look like. But the construction walls shut us out utterly, and in the one public space (a pedestrian bridge over the West Side Highway) that allows a partial view of the Memorial, security guards yell at anyone leaning against the wall to take a photo and chase children away. Out on the all the streets surrounding the site, policemen yell at anyone who pauses to take a picture or try to see in, although there’s very little traffic to block and no obvious security concern. It all seems ridiculously secretive.

But having said that, I now officially lay off. I’m interested to see what the site develops into and how it looks when it’s finished. All those trees and that huge open space in the middle of such a dense urban area is definitively a good thing. And the pools and fountains do look impressive. At some point, the whole place will become normalized, just part of Manhattan’s layout, and the police will relax about it. So let’s wait and see.

Meanwhile, I can’t say the anniversary events gave me anything in particular. But I’m still extremely, unhesitatingly glad I went. I feel a sense of separation, if not exactly closure, and that is a good thing. The site has moved on. And so, much to my own surprise, can I.

Maybe someday I’ll have a better, clearer, wiser perspective about the experience of 9/11 and how it fits into the rest of the world. That hasn’t happened yet. But I’ve decided not to cling to it anymore.

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.

9/11 Tenth Anniversary: Why I'm Going

Shortly before I moved away from NYC, I called a 9/11 help line and described some symptoms I’d been having. I couldn’t sleep without worrying about the five upper floors of my apartment building crashing down and crushing me. I thought about explosions or random violence every time I entered the subway. I’d grown afraid of heights, and I sometimes had anxiety attacks on airplanes.

“I’m not a physician,” she said, kind but careful not to commit herself or her non-profit organization to anything, “but what you’re describing sounds like post-traumatic stress syndrome. Many people who experienced the attacks, especially eye witnesses, have these problems. I have a couple groups I can recommend to you, or, if you’d prefer, a private counselor.”

I took the names of the groups. I didn’t go. For that moment, it was enough to hear that what I was experiencing was reasonable, normal, shared by others. I really couldn’t fall asleep without thinking about buildings falling on me in the dark. Not ever. Not one single time in any of the nights between 9/11 and May 2006, when I left New York City once and for all. In those years, I knew that my life was, if not falling apart, then not progressing. I was hauling around a weight of terror and sadness that was making real happiness or progress impossible. Many days, I dragged myself from home to job to grocery store and back home, and I was always exhausted.

Having a life that had, over nearly a decade in the city, finally come together, didn’t help. I had an amazing apartment, a job I adored, great friends, but those happy things only coexisted with the great darknesss. Even falling in love didn’t overcome it. The fear and anxiety monster always lurked just out of site, and came out with a vengeance every night when I turned the lights off, or in the subway, or at other times without warning, and often swamped me completely.

I knew, in the end, that leaving New York City was the only thing that was going to save me. And it did. I’ve never had one of those visions – airless, terrifying, crushing – of the building falling down on me in another city. I even get through plane flights much more easily now. And in the past few years, when I’ve gone back to visit New York, I’ve barely thought about my old relationship with it – the darkness, the feelings of asphyxiation.

I have to go back for the 10^th anniversary of 9/11. Recording this milestone anywhere else in the world would be completely inadequate. I’m going to retrace my steps from that morning, going with my husband toward the site and, I imagine, telling him stories about what I saw then and how that day went. We’ll walk past my old workplace, where, of course, I stopped on that day, and continue the last five blocks to the site itself, and no doubt join crowds of others who feel called there. I know there are dozens of events and rituals scheduled. I don’t know if I’ll want to have anything to do with any of them. But I want to be there, and I believe – we’ll see if I’m right, but I believe – that this will mark a new era in moving on. Putting the demons down.