Did you watch it on TV, or listen on the radio, or did the whole morning pass under the radar for you? I figure since this is the five year anniversary, and that is not an arbitrary thing what with the mathematical and physical realities of the cyclical nature of the universe, that I should take a moment to reflect upon my own interactions with the event known as September 11th, two thousand and one. This is the internet, where we can laugh at everything, but I remember how it chilled me to the bone.
I was here, in New York City, and that morning my roommate and I were getting dressed and ready for class in our fourteenth floor dorm room on Washington Square when we heard a distinctly loud *clap.* Our bedroom window faced south straight towards the World Trade Center but we didn't even look there - Sasha, a girl who lived next door to us, let out a scream and we ran to see what was going on.
She was pointing out her own window, at what was clearly a large flaming hole in the side of one of the towers. We turned on the TV, and CNN was yammering about exactly what we all assumed was going on - someone flying a small commuter jet had crashed into the WTC. You could see flames jumping out of the hole, I filmed it a little and have since lost that particular tape, regrettably. We watched for a bit, calming down Sasha (a fragile jap of a girl), and then my roommate Dan and I went downstairs for breakfast.
In the time it took us to eat breakfast, the second plane hit - I never found out, not till much later. We left the cafeteria and went our separate ways to class. I walked over to Cooper Square, where I had a 9:30 Italian class. It was around 9:45 or so when a janitor burst into the classroom, exclaiming:
"Terrorists have bombed the Twin Towers and the Pentagon! They're evacuating downtown! Everyone needs to calmly evacuate the building and start walking uptown."
At the time i still had notions of being some great renegade filmmaker so I did what any respectable renegade would do - I whipped out my miniDV camera which I always kept on me, went outside with everyone else, and started walking downtown. Whatever was happening, I wanted to witness it. I filmed people as I went, their faces streaming towards me, a mix of anguish and confusion, and a palpable amount of fear was hanging in the air.
Far down the length of the Bowery you could see smoke rising from the Towers. The entire city was awash with the sounds of emergency; the overhead buzzing of police and news helicopters, the endless moaning and swelling of sirens near and far as they raced downtown towards unforeseeable destruction, the screams and cries of human beings overwhelmed by panic as they sought to escape something they could not comprehend.
I was filming all this, and I walked into the middle of the avenue. Traffic had stalled, the police had seen to that, and I walked freely along the double yellow line, filming the towers as they sent plumes of smoke up into the air. And then the yellow battery icon started blinking on my LCD, and BATT LOW blinked beneath it, and my camera died.
And I looked at it in disbelief, and maybe it happened for a reason, because what I saw next was one of the realest things I've ever witnessed. And rather than witness it through the lens of a camera I saw it with my own eyes and it changed something inside of me forever. I looked up and I saw the first tower drop. I was about 25 or 30 blocks away, and so it was completely silent, and almost graceful. It just looked like legos melting away into dust.
Slowly and silently, and decidedly, the building slipped away and left behind nothing but dust and ash. I stared and stared and stared, and as the smoke cloud grew larger and larger, I realized it was time to walk uptown. I made it to my dorm in time to join my roommates at the television and the southern window where we could still see tower 1, which was still standing. Just as my roommate Doug was telling me he had seen people committing suicide through his binoculars, the tower dropped.
95 percent of my dorm's occupants went home, or home with people who lived nearby on the eastern seaboard. But I stayed that whole week. I couldn't bear to leave. Those who left were visitors to this city, here for education and drinking and experience. To me this was home, and I couldn't comprehend what had happened to my home.
The air was thick with dust, and breathing was difficult, but that night we walked the empty streets of Manhattan for hours. One does not get an opportunity to see an empty, quiet Manhattan very often. Only in scenes like the opening to Vanilla Sky do we ever get to see an silent, barren Times Square. I saw these things.
And I don't care to ever see them again. This city is my pulse. And 9/11 sent a hiccup through the blood of the metropolis. Everything stopped, and stuttered, and stammered, and this city...this city doesn't stutter. It just goes, and it grinds. It walks all over people, too, but you can find ways of keeping pace with it, of finding a way through the maze.
I am trying not to let the simple fact of time detach me from all I witnessed. But I also refuse to give in to grief or worry or panic or nervousness. When a friend got through to my phone that morning, all I could say to him, in my half-delirious state was,
"This is the most awe-some thing I've ever witnessed."
He screamed at me...awesome, he said? Awesome? How can you say that? But I meant the word in its truest meaning. The event inspired awe in me...a desperate cry for attention, maybe it was. But no, we can look at it that way or we can see it as a grand expression of hate. Either way, it is not something easily forgotten.
I have no need for these movies they release now all about 9/11. I don't think it needs a movie. I don't think anything so real has happened in the greater landscape of my life, and maybe I've no interest in these films simply because I saw it all for myself. All you need to see are those two planes hitting those two buildings. And all you need to know is that at two in the morning, this city was close to being pronounced dead. People scattered through the streets like errant weeds, detached dandelions blowing down Broadway, running down the avenues and streets while Hummers patrolled, the entire island of Manhattan turned into a military quarantine. Never again, I hope, never again.
--------------------
Acid doesn't give you truths; it builds machines that push the envelope of perception. Whatever revelations came to me then have dissolved like skywriting. All I really know is that those few years saddled me with a faith in the redemptive potential of the imagination which, however flat, stale and unprofitable the world seems to me now, I cannot for the life of me shake.
-Erik Davis
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