“It’s so horrible,” she says. “I hope you didn’t see …”
And I think, What didn’t I see?
Later that night, after Sammy is asleep, we piece it together, mapping out our day against the news. We are in an apartment on Eighteenth Street where Mom’s friends Ted and Lia live. I was friends with their daughter, Rana, when I was little, but Rana is away at college now. Mom, Ted, Lia, and I watch CNN at midnight as they give us the chronology of what happened.
While I was holding Sammy’s hand and Lizzie’s hand, while we were following Mrs. Lawson, the second tower fell. We were too far away to hear it or to feel the ground shake. If you weren’t watching—if you hadn’t turned back to look—there was no way to know. You could imagine they were both still there. Just in the same way we imagine our own apartment is there, waiting for us, untouched. We’re not allowed to go home.
“We are not supposed to comprehend something like this,” my mother says to me as we watch the latest update before she heads to bed. It’s a sentence that I keep repeating to myself. I even take solace in it. I cannot comprehend. I don’t want to comprehend. Instead I will try to remember what matters. I will do this as I wonder what happens next.
Even though they tell me to sleep, I watch the news all night.
I don’t want to know anything, and I want to know it all.
WAKE UP, IT’S OVER
Jasper
I missed the whole goddamn thing. Slept late, woke up to the phone ringing, was completely oblivious. In fact, I was pissed that the phone was ringing, because it was before noon, and it was the house line, which meant it probably wasn’t for me. I had two weeks before I had to go back to school, and I’d been planning to spend those two weeks sleeping. And when I wasn’t sleeping, I was planning to nap. So I would’ve had the machine pick it up, only I’d unplugged the machine a couple of nights before when someone was leaving a message that I couldn’t deal with—something about getting out the vote, blah blah blah—and the only way I could think to shut it up was to pull out the plug. I was maybe a little drunk at the time, so it made sense then. But now the phone was ringing for the eleventeenth time and I realized if it was important and I didn’t get it, my parents would find out and I’d be wading knee-deep in the shit. So I stumbled out of bed in my boxers and yelled at the phone to hold on, I was coming.
It was still ringing when I got there, and I was a little surprised when I picked it up and said hello and my mom started saying thank God it was me, thank God I was okay. My first reaction was, what the fuck have the neighbors been telling her, and did they really call Korea to let her know I was drinking so much? And then my father was on the phone, too, and he was saying they were watching CNN and it was just terrible, completely terrible, and it had taken forever for them to get through. I had to say I had no idea what he was talking about, and then, only then, did he say, “Did we wake you?” And I wasn’t going to lie—I said, yeah, they had, so this whole phone call wasn’t making much sense to me, and that’s when he told me the World Trade Center was gone—that’s how he said it, “The World Trade Center is gone,” and I honestly thought, Does he mean Grandma? because that’s why he and Mom were in Korea in the first place, but obviously I was wrong on that count, because Grandma was fine, it was just all these other people who were dead.
As he was telling me this, I walked over to the window, and, Jesus, even from Park Slope you could see that something completely hellish had happened. There was all this smoke billowing up from downtown. And the Twin Towers were nowhere to be found.
“Holy shit,” I said. “I mean, holy shit.”
This was probably the first time I’d ever cursed while talking to my parents, but they didn’t reprimand me. Mom was saying she wished she could be with me, that they would try to get home on the first available plane. I asked them what else was going on in the city, and my dad couldn’t resist it, he said, “For once in your life, turn on the news.” So I took the phone into the other room and turned on the TV, and it was amazing to see what was going on practically next door to me, and it was totally surreal that I’d slept through it all. My parents were telling me to go to the grocery and stock up on water and canned goods, like Brooklyn was going to be under siege at any minute. I said yes to everything they said, and then when my mother started crying, I told her I was going to be fine, that I knew how to take care of myself, which is why they’d left me alone here in the first place. This made her cry even more, the idea of me being left alone, and I assured her I still had a lot of friends who hadn’t headed back to college yet, and if I needed somewhere to go, there were plenty of places I could crash. When that wasn’t enough, I even said I’d take my cell phone with me so she could reach me whenever. This made her quiet down a little, and my father said that it was probably time for them to go, and that I shouldn’t hesitate to call them if anything went wrong. For one stupefying moment he was quiet, and I actually thought he was going to say he loved me or something out of control like that. But as usual, he left that to Mom, who—also as usual—overcompensated, although in a situation like this, when your only son is almost seven thousand miles away from you and his city’s under terrorist attack, I guess there’s no such thing as over doing it.
After I hung up, I sat on the couch in my boxers and watched more of the news, and all I could keep thinking was Holy shit, holy shit.
Once I’d gotten a grasp on what was going on and I was reassured that terrorists wouldn’t be storming over the Brooklyn Bridge anytime soon (or ramming a plane into it, for that matter), I decided to check my email. Lo and behold, it seemed that every single person I’d met in college, as well as a few I’d met before college, had emailed to see if I was okay. I guess they didn’t know anyone else in New York City, or they didn’t know that I lived in Brooklyn, or they were worried that I had gotten up early to check out the Observation Deck. (Thinking about the Observation Deck suddenly made me really sad. We always had relatives visiting from Korea, so we’d go and do the touristy things that most Brooklynites never do. I loved being up that high—in the clouds, sometimes—and I would always run to the east side of the building, even when I was older, to try to look out the window and see our house. I never saw it, but I swore I’d come close a couple of times.)
Some of the people who emailed me said I was in their prayers, and while that was a nice thing for them to say, I wanted to tell them their prayers could probably be redirected to more deserving people. But then I realized they had no idea whether I was dead or alive, so I basically responded to each and every one of them, saying I was fine, and that the city would be fine, and that I appreciated their concern. I didn’t mention that I’d slept through the whole thing, and I definitely didn’t mention that I was alone, because from the sound of some of the messages, I would’ve had a prayer circle on my doorstep in ten seconds flat, just to take care of me.
Even some of my high school friends, who were already back at college, emailed me to say how weird it was to be away, hoping things weren’t too crazy back home. I sent them back the same email saying I was okay, but I couldn’t give them any real details, since all I knew was from TV, and it was probably the same thing they were watching in Chicago or Colorado or California.
There was one email from a guy named Peter, subject: RE: TONIGHT, and I blanked at first until I realized it was the guy I’d met at Mitchell’s party Saturday night, who I was supposed to meet to go see Hedwig and the Angry Inch later in the day. He was a high school senior, which at first I wasn’t sure about. But hell, I was only two years older and he was cute, so I’d said a date would be cool. Now he was saying:
jasper—
this is peter. from the party. with everything that’s happening, i hope you’re alright. i just got home from school—it was crazy. since it’s looking like all the subways are out, i’m guessing our movie plans are off. i guess we can see how the week goes. i was really excited to see you (i know i’m not supposed to say that), but i promise i
’ll still be excited whenever we reschedule. if i have to walk across the bridge to get to your borough, so be it.
again, i hope you and your family are okay.
talk soon,
peter
It was a little bit much for before a first date, but I emailed back to say, yeah, we’d reschedule. Normally I would have taken a day or two to respond, just so he wouldn’t think I was eager or needy. But the whole notion that he might think I was dead or something made me figure it was better to write sooner rather than later.
Even though the news was saying phone service was spotty, my phone was working fine. I called Amanda, this girl who went to my school who also lived in Park Slope, and I asked her what was up, and she said she was going down to the hospital to give blood. I said, yeah, that was the right thing to do, and if she could wait a few minutes for me to put on some clothes, I’d go with her. She said sure, and I told her I’d pick her up.
In the shower, all my mind could do was wander back to Holy shit. I was afraid to check the news again, because what if this was just the beginning? What if there were more planes coming down, or bombs about to go off? I had to imagine Brooklyn was pretty safe. Except for the bridge, we were pretty much devoid of symbolic targets. It was hard to imagine terrorists getting excited about the Wonder Wheel on Coney Island. Still, even though I lived in Brooklyn, Manhattan was the reason I loved being from the city, and the idea of it disappearing was pretty dire. I knew there was no way to get there right now except by foot, and there was no reason to go, but part of me wanted to trek there anyway, just to help it out.
By the time I was fully awake and fully dressed, I had already seen the news loop around at least three times. I had seen the replays—so many replays, from so many angles—of the second plane hitting, of the towers falling, of the Pentagon burning. And I kept looking out the window. I kept seeing the smoke.
But nothing—I mean nothing—compared to stepping outside.
It was one of the things the news hadn’t mentioned: the way the wind was blowing. East. So we were downwind from everything that had happened. The smoke was moving in our direction.
It wasn’t like it blocked out the sun or anything. But it was there in the air, and the smell wasn’t like any smoke I’d ever inhaled. This wasn’t campfire smoke or even the smoke of a house that had burned down. No, this was much, much worse. It was like someone had strapped a tire under your nose and it was burning there. It came in waves—sometimes unbearably strong, other times thinned out. I honestly wondered whether I should’ve been wearing a breathing mask.
And then came the next thing, which is still the thing I remember the most, more than my parents’ phone call, more than the images on TV. They were sitting in our front yard—the four-by-three-foot patch we call our front yard. Two sheets of paper. I only picked them up because I thought I might have dropped them; they didn’t look like trash or flyers for the local Chinese restaurant (which seemed to be addicted to giving out flyers). At first I didn’t get it—one sheet of paper was a printout from one of those old printers, the kind where the paper had holes on the edges so you could feed it through. It was a report from 1993 about a stock. Someone had initialed it on the bottom. The other piece of paper was a memorandum announcing someone’s promotion. It was dated November 8, 1999. I recognized the name of the company immediately, since I’d just heard it mentioned so often on the news. Its headquarters was in the World Trade Center.
The planes hit the towers. When they did, thousands—maybe millions—of pieces of paper were knocked into the air. Others might have lifted when the towers fell. They were torn from their folders, their offices, their buildings, and they got caught in the wind and were carried. Some traveled only a block or two. Others fell into the East River. And some were scattered throughout Brooklyn.
A stock report and a human resources memorandum. Picking them up and reading them, I felt a sadness so deep that it will never really be gone. It was a sobering moment—sobering not because I was drunk, but because it felt like I was shifting into this new state of naked clarity. It was a higher state of sobriety, a painful state of sobriety, because the truth was suddenly unvarnished, making me feel unvarnished. Something as mundane as two sheets of paper from an office file could provide the final evidence of how vulnerable we are, how we live our lives not knowing how or when they will end. I had a sense then of how if we truly understood how many of the unimportant things we do will end up outliving us, we’d never be able to go on.
I wanted to go into our neighbor’s yard, and the yard after that, all the way down the block, down the street, to gather every piece of paper. As if they were all here to be found. As if a tower could be so easily reassembled.
Amanda called and asked where I was. I told her to hang on and went back inside to put the two pieces of paper in a safe place before I headed out again.
When I got to Amanda’s, I told her about the papers, and she said lots of people were finding them. After the towers fell, Amanda went to Prospect Park, just to be near other people. Her mom was home and distraught, and her dad was stranded on the Upper West Side. She told me now how incredible it was—people just talking to each other, feeling this commonality that you want all human beings to have, but which never seems to happen in real life. I mean, even on a slow day, Prospect Park is a pretty friendly place; when I pointed this out to Amanda, she said it went beyond friendliness.
“It was kinship,” she said.
“So suddenly you had all these new brothers and sisters?” I asked, maybe a little too sarcastic. In response, she hit my shoulder and told me it wasn’t kinship like a family reunion, but something more intense than that.
Unsurprisingly, the line to give blood was around the block. It was, the newscasters kept saying, the one thing that the rest of us could do to help. So it looked like someone was giving out free tickets to a Rolling Stones/Tori Amos/Sonic Youth/Run DMC/Ani DiFranco/Backstreet Boys/Beastie Boys/Lou Reed/Tony Bennett concert. Every possible Park Slope demographic was represented. But everyone’s attitude was dialed down a notch—the hipsters didn’t give a shit what they were wearing, the ghetto boys didn’t strike any poses, and the carriage moms had left the carriages at home and weren’t talking about their kids for once. People were talking about what had happened and where they’d been and who they knew who was there or might have been there. One guy was saying he’d had a meeting on the eightieth floor two days before. He said he wished he was a paramedic, so he could do something other than stand in line to give blood.
“Isn’t it weird that we can, like, create phones that work anywhere, but we still can’t make blood?” I asked Amanda, just as a way of making conversation. She just looked at me blankly. “Amanda?”
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m not really here.”
If Amanda and I weren’t from the same area and going to the same college, I doubt we’d ever have been friends. It’s not that we didn’t like each other, it’s just that the things we had in common were more geographical than attitudinal.
“Do you miss your parents?” she asked me now.
“Why—are you going to hire me a babysitter? If so, he better be hot.”
I was just joking, but she got all snappish.
“I was only asking a question,” she said.
“I was only asking a question back.”
I couldn’t believe that this, of all things, was going to upset her. But she was looking like I’d just put gum in her hair.
“Sorry,” I backpedaled. “I mean, I don’t really miss them. It wouldn’t make it any different if they were here, right? They wouldn’t have been able to, like, body block the Trade Center.”
“That wasn’t my point, and you know it.”
So we stood there in silence for the next few minutes—or at least we were silent with each other. The woman in front of us started to talk to Amanda like they were old war buddies, and I kept looking back to see the line getting longer and longer. Finally we got within
range of the Red Cross volunteer, who handed us a questionnaire.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but we’re out of pencils. Maybe you can share?”
Amanda took a pen out of her bag and gave it to the woman in front of us. I started reading over the questionnaire. At first I thought, I’m totally going to fail this, because I had no idea what my blood type was. I didn’t even know what the options were, except for type O negative, because that was the name of a band.
“Does blood type correspond to personality?” I asked Amanda. “Like, if I’m a type A personality …”
“Or type A asshole?”
“Point taken.” Type B bitch.
I was starting to imagine this dying firefighter getting a pint of my blood and then, whammo, sitting upright in his hospital bed and crying, “I’m alive!” He and I would be in People magazine together, and maybe on the Today show, and he’d be really young and really cute, and maybe one night he’d say he had feelings for me, and I’d have to figure out if it was, like, narcissism or something if you slept with someone who had your blood inside of him, and then I’d decide it wasn’t, and we’d be all happy together, and when people asked how we met, we’d say, “It’s the craziest story …”