AUGUST 24, 2011
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Sometimes, awaiting sleep, or on walks along the river to the Battery, pieces of the day come back. They are never in any order, since memory is a highlight film. But there again are the people, tiny in the high distance, leaping into the empty air beside the smoking North Tower. There on Vesey Street, on the corner of Church, is an immense tire from one of the planes that smashed into the North Tower, and, beside the curb in front of a luncheonette, a pair of women’s shoes and a spilled container of coffee. I can hear the screaming sounds of emergency: sirens, bells, blurry bullhorns. I hear the young policeman telling me: “They just hit the fucking Pentagon!” I see the burning South Tower begin to lean to the east, as if trying to cross Church Street, then right itself, to come straight down in a blinding, thumping eruption of smoke and dust, accompanied by a high-pitched eerie choral sound that must have come from humans falling to their deaths. And in the opaque whiteness, I’m trying to find my wife, Fukiko. Right behind me. Except she isn’t. And I’m shoved into a building, and Fukiko is not there, and I can’t push back through the crowding mass, and the glass doors lock behind us. I’m trapped, with two dozen others. And where is my wife? Fukikooooo.
After 20 trapped minutes, I hear a glass door smashed by a fireman. I step into the whiteness of the changed world. The white tombstones behind St. Paul’s Chapel. The whiteness of Broadway and City Hall Park. White trees. White sidewalks. I am again entering the doorways of stores. Calling my wife’s name. I enter a whitened bus where some of the injured have been taken. She’s not there. Then I am walking north on Broadway, and reach our block below Canal Street. I unlock the front door. Across the vestibule the elevator stops, the doors slide open. There she is. Alive. She had come home, trying to find me. We weep and hold each other tight.
That first night, and in the days that followed, we experienced something sensually new to all New Yorkers: the stench of death. The fires were still burning at Ground Zero, as they would for weeks, and the air was stained with the odor of melting steel, burning wood, burning plaster, burning paper, and the burning fragments of smashed human bodies. If you lived in Westchester or Wasilla, September 11 was a very different experience than it was if you lived in downtown Manhattan or parts of Brooklyn across the harbor. The prevailing winds in those first days carried dust and stench to the east. The stench would be there when you passed into sleep. It was there when you awoke.
And yet, on September 12, New Yorkers began finding their way to work. I know one short-order cook who came all the way from Sunset Park by bicycle—and kept doing so for weeks. Others car-pooled and walked. Work, after all, has always been the most important four letter word in New York. On the days after the mass homicides, there was a kind of heroic fatalism in many people, allied with defiance.
There was also an eruption of public patriotism, which was unusual for New York. The city’s inhabitants don’t often wear their flags on their sleeves. Suddenly there were flags in many places, painted on walls, attached to cars and trucks and flagpoles, emblazoned on jackets and sweatshirts, many accompanied by the letters fdny or nypd. Within hours, a new set of proper nouns had entered our vocabularies: Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, Taliban. And the abrupt language of retribution: “It’s time to kick some ass,” one ironworker said to me.
The local, national, and international media did extraordinary work in those weeks when we did not even know the number of the dead. They told many stories of spectacular human courage and decency. Along with the role of chance and luck. Thousands of people in the towers survived, and thousands died. We still marvel at those firemen and rescue workers who ran into the buildings while others were running out. At the same time, volunteers came from all over the country to help feed the workers, to let them know that other Americans were grateful for what they were still doing (often without masks, because they had been told that the air was safe). For the first time in years, New York felt deeply connected to the rest of the country.
And the city was soon covered with a new kind of wallpaper. The details were always different, but those sheets delivered a common message: Have you seen this person? Most were computer printouts, but some were photocopies of hand-lettered pleas for information about those who were still missing. Most of the subjects were young. Almost always smiling. They appeared on walls and billboards, in streets and subway stations, or tacked on trees in Union Square. All exuded a collective sense of forlorn hope.
In the weeks ahead, there were too many funerals, too many bagpipes. Slowly, the flags vanished; the improvised murals succumbed to weather and grime. The clerking of the disaster went on, counting the dead, examining DNA from splintered fragments of bone and shreds of flesh. Some demanded compensation for their losses. How much was a husband worth? Or a daughter? Others raised fundamental questions: Why do they hate us? And: What happens now? The answers were always vague. Conspiracy theorists and blame-gamers began raising their voices.
Meanwhile other, more positive men and women began to appear, on the Internet, in small groups, then at larger, more public meetings. They were conceiving visions of the future on those 16 obliterated acres, hoping, through design and art, to create a meaning beyond mass death and fanaticism. Proposals ranged widely: from a simple park, with a tree for each of the nations that lost citizens to the horror, to an exact re-building of the World Trade Center. The process, of course, was often afflicted by the permanent New York habit of contention. Angry, self-righteous, exhausting. Soon, there was an ongoing war in Afghanistan, the goal of which had morphed from finding bin Laden to nation-building. Then a second war, this time in Iraq. Most New Yorkers lost interest in the future of the downtown site or the competing versions of what for a long while was called the Freedom Tower and is now 1 World Trade Center. They got on with their lives. I was one of them.
These days, I often pass the site in my wanderings and have flashes from the highlight reel. I move among tourists, foreign and domestic, as they point gadgets at the rising floors of 1 World Trade Center. Some were ten when the towers came down. On some days, I glance at Vesey Street, see those woman’s shoes again in my mind’s eye, that spilled coffee cup, that immense tire, and hurry home to my wife.
Pete Hamill is a veteran journalist and author of 21 books, including 11 novels. This piece ran in the September 15, 2011, issue of the magazine.
9 comments
We wuz attacked by a crew of Arab Muslims who hijacked civilian airliners and drove them into the WTC and the Pentagon. The plane that crashed in Shanksville, PA was likely headed for the White House or the Capitol. Let's name the enemy, understand their terrorist religion (ever hear of Jihad?), and stop all this empty orchestrated whimpering.
- amidut
September 9, 2011 at 7:47am
A beautiful piece by one of my favorite writers. I love your work Mr. Hamill - New York's own personal poet laureate. Fine amidut - how about if you name the enemy properly, precisely? Unfocused generalizations did done nothing but drive people apart, scatter and waste our resources and slow down the execution of said enemy. As we approach the tenth anniversary, I thank God for many things - but especially for the competence, maturity and clean-minded approach of our current military, intelligence community and President, who have spent he last few years properly identifying (finally)and quite competently executing the right enemy: Al Queda, an organized group of Islamic extremists.
- WandreyCer
September 9, 2011 at 9:49am
All 3 of my children were born after 9/11, I think the date will be as meaningful to them as Dec. 7 1941 was for me. I think this is a good thing, I don't want to burden my children with my fears from those days, especially since the aspirations of the fools who brought it about; a grand Islamic jihad remaking the world, are now as discredited as Nazism or the vision of an Imperial Japan. I like the message of May 1 better than 9/11 as I like VJ day more than 12/7. If we are going to commemorate dates, lets focus more on the victories and the message behind that. Never forget that because of the helicopter being forced to land and the blast explosion breaking into the wall of the compound Osama Bin Laden knew what was coming for him, that fucking coward didn't even go down fighting, instead he stood still paralysed in fear and doubtless shit his pants.
- blackton
September 9, 2011 at 12:26pm
It's those seemingly trivial details that create the image and allow the reader to share the experience of the writer. Do great writers see the details during the experience or do they recreate them only when writing about the experience? An admirer of a good writer we both knew once compared his paragraphs to the frames in an old-fashioned movie reel. I suppose those seemingly trivial details are what make up each of the frames. It's a talent that must be inate and cannot be learned. Hamill was blessed.
- rayward
September 9, 2011 at 3:33pm
Amidut, "There are more things in heaven and earth...Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Your comment is narrow and crimped in rough proprotion to the high quality of Hamill's evocative writing here. Plus you miss the theme of his piece--uneditorialized remembrance. I once read an essay, by whom I can't remember, that rightly I thought marked as near to obscene some writers making lyrical hay out of the September 11 events just after it. I don't see how this piece, only partly because it is a remembering, beautifully done, 10 years after, succumbs to that charge. No wonder Mailer loved Hamill. On your theory Amidut, Lincoln needn't have said "Four score and seven years..." He could have just said "87." Rayward, you say: "An admirer of a good writer we both knew..." Who's the admirer, the good writer, the we? What an odd locution!
- basman
September 10, 2011 at 10:28am
Given how much misery and suffering there is in the universe just from natural disasters, ranging from the individual death from disease or accident to the mass disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanoes, and so on. one might think that human beings would do as much as we can to guard, protect, heal, and care for each other. And often we do. However, it is truly appalling to consider how much of our intelligence and emotion we invest in harming each other, as if there were not enough cunning malignity in the natural word to go around many times over. Henry James said, “Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.” His brother, William James, argued for a "Moral Equivalent of War" to inspire human beings, and also said, "A great nation is not saved by wars, it is saved by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans and empty quacks." It is not difficult to be worse than a person who harms you; it is more difficult to be both better and more effective.
- skahn
September 10, 2011 at 2:28pm
Amen.
- Sophia
September 11, 2011 at 12:47am
The needed discussions should focus less on what's become an annual national cryfest and more on what's been happening to our civil liberties since the attacks. And yes, thanks to amidut -- these were murders carried out by a dangerous bunch of fanatics who are still around and will be for a long time. These events have taken on the uncomfortable feeling of almost being celebrations of the attacks. Remember -- the politicians partaking today just wanna get re-elected and the business interests just wanna make money -- the negotiations here in NY surrounding the rebuilding have clearly shown that. Every big shot wanted and got a piece of the action. The whole circus is political correctness out of control. And Mayor Bloomberg, who violated basic democratic process by getting his 3rd term, got to kick off the whole event.
- LISAH
September 11, 2011 at 9:29am
Yesterday I went to Old First Reformed Church in Park Slope, Brooklyn to look at the prayer sheets drawn by residents after the tragedy. The Church had opened up after the plane crashes, giving water and a place to rest to those walking across the bridge, but quickly became the nerve center of the neighborhood, with groups of people gathered on the steps, exchanging information and listening to a radio. That night, unwilling to leave the community with no place to express its fears, my wife and her congregants covered the front doors of the church with sheets of blank butcher paper and taped a box of markers to it, with the heading "Our Prayers". Within an hour both sheets were full and in the ensuing days some 10 or so sheets were covered with prayers. What I found different from these prayers and your description of the mood was a total lack of vengeance. There were expressions of grief, of a lack of understanding, even of anger to God, but also pleas for peace and wishes that no one would attack our Muslim neighbors (in a highly interracial community.) Overwhelmingly the messages prayed for the safety of specific people, the local firemen and prayers for peace and pleas not to generalize anger at the perpetrators to the vastly larger peaceful Muslim population. In fact I think that there was perhaps less vengeance in the reactions of New Yorkers than in people who were elsewhere in America. Maybe we were too busy (together with our Muslim neighbors) digging out and lending a hand to engage in the simplistic jingoism that lead to war. In the ensuing months we did experience INS sweeps where tens of thousands of our immigrant neighbors were swept into detention centers, usually for minor visa infractions or merely for general questioning, held without legal representation or the ability to contact family. Mideastern neighborhoods in Kensington and along Coney Island Avenue had unexpected vacancies after proprietors and workers disappeared. Politicians from outside the area whipped up a frenzy. Care for victims, first responders and their families promised by Congress failed to materialize and the reasonable anger by the forgotten heroes who were demonstrating serious illnesses and an inability to continue working was whipped up by visiting Republican politicians. Those who suffer from cancer caused by breathing in a fog of mercury, asbestos, lead and other toxins shamefully still have not received health coverage. Yes we are back at work and don't spend a lot of energy n the specifics of the memorial. Perhaps it would have been more humane to let the site stand as an intact graveyard than to subject sanitation workers to searching the Fresh Kills Landfill for tiny body parts in toxic construction debris, but the value of real estate in lower Manhattan dictates otherwise.
- LawrenceGulotta
September 12, 2011 at 12:27am