I remember not wanting to be alone in my apartment in Washington Heights. I remember how quiet it was as we joined the slow moving crowd and walked all the way down the island, across the bridge, to a friend’s house in Park Slope. I remember connecting with a friend a few blocks away who seemed far less shaken by it all, which lodged in my brain as something to pay attention to, as another option that I couldn’t quite imagine with my father missing and the world falling down. I remember talking to a friend in South Africa at the World Conference on Racism, who reached me by phone when almost no calls were connecting, who asked me if people were going wild in the streets. I remember my baby radical brain thinking our empire was falling, and perhaps everything I called my life was over, and that made sense to me, felt expected in a way. I began writing this today in that window between first impact and collapse, though perhaps like the event itself, it will take longer than that for the dust to settle. I’ve never stopped thinking about this.Īnd then the towers fell. I can’t remember how I saw this, but I remember it, people having to make impossible decisions, alone and together. On the floors that were on fire, and above the fire, people were gathering on ledges, jumping, falling.
I still wonder about the man with the harried voice – who was he? Did he make it?Īt the towers, people were running down stairwells, stuck in elevators, though I didn’t hear all of that until later. I remembered this flood often over the next few years, which would test our relationship. Before I slept I heard his voice with a flood of gratitude. He was not in his office, which was destroyed. In the end, we were one of the lucky families. I spent the rest of the day praying, trying not to even consider that my dad was dead. A few minutes later the news came over the radio that the Pentagon had been hit. I couldn’t reach him, though someone did pick up the phone and say in a harried voice that they didn’t know where he was. I ran into my office building and tried to call my father, who worked at the Pentagon. All around me on the avenue people were standing and staring, slack jawed or screaming, running, trying to call people. I knew in a way I had never known before that I was in the presence of mass death in that fire were people who had gone to work and were now dead and dying. There were flames pouring out the side of one of the skyscrapers.
Not just any building, but a tower of the World Trade Center, where my crew went often because our friend sneaked us free sushi at her waitress job in the basement mall. I still question myself, did I hear this? How do I remember this sound so clearly?Ĭoming around the corner and looking down the island of Manhattan from 23rd street I saw something I couldn’t comprehend, which is now one of the most familiar images in U.S. It’s been twenty years since I stepped out of the subway on 6th Avenue and heard an unusually close groaning in the sky and then a boom of glass thunder.