President George W. Bush, at this freeze-framed moment, is 1,217 miles southwest of New York, in Sarasota, Florida. He’s in a motorcade on his way to a photo opportunity with a group of local schoolchildren. He intends to read them a story entitled “My Pet Goat.” He has not yet been told by the Federal Aviation Administration, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the National Military Command Center, the Pentagon, the White House, the Secret Service, or Canada’s Strategic Command that at least one commercial aircraft has been hijacked. He is, in fact, remarkably ill informed for the leader of the free world.
In my apartment, I am also ill informed. I return to bed, yawn, scratch, and then stare at the ceiling. As I lie there, another Boeing 767, this one operated by United Airlines, is diverted from Los Angeles to New York. The pilot doesn’t know about the diversion because he is currently being murdered by one of Atta’s fellow members of al-Qaeda, an Afghanistan-based terror group.
I list the arguments against going to the office. Number one: Joanna Coles no longer works for The Times —she left yesterday, after being offered a job at New York magazine. That means a solitary lunch at 1211 Avenue of the Americas. Number two: Joanna’s replacement, Nicholas Wapshott, is currently on the deck of the QE2, probably a thousand miles off the Eastern Seaboard, having decided to use a one-hundred-year-old mode of transport to get to his new posting. That means no one will know I’m working from home.
As I talk myself out of leaving the apartment, The Times’s only other correspondent in New York, James Bone, is a mile southeast, finishing a cup of coffee at an Egyptian newsstand on lower Broadway. He’s late for work, but about to get the biggest front page of his career.
The seconds and nanoseconds tick toward 8:46 A.M. Another aircraft, a Boeing 757 operated by United Airlines, idles its engines on the runway of New Jersey’s Newark Airport, 16.5 miles southeast. The pilot, who has just received clearance for takeoff, is unaware that he has only forty-one minutes left to live. He has never heard of al-Qaeda, or of Saudi billionaire Osama bin Laden. A passenger on the plane, Todd Beamer, has no idea that he is about to inspire a Neil Young song entitled “Let’s Roll,” or that his family will publish a book in his honor.
I jump out of bed: I will go to the office. As I make this decision, another Boeing 757, operated by American Airlines, nears cruising altitude. It is twenty minutes into its journey from Washington Dulles to Los Angeles. The pilot of the plane has nine minutes to live. The passengers have fifty-two minutes.
The plane will not reach Los Angeles.
It is now 8:46 A.M. Outside, I hear a distant crashing noise. The world changes. In an instant my generation loses its war virginity—and I become a war correspondent. But I don’t know any of this yet. I’m still worried about my gallbladder. I assume that the noise outside is the opening of the metal shutter of the kebab shop opposite my apartment. The shop is owned by an Iranian family. I can hear sirens now; the city whines into an echo chamber. Nothing unusual in that. There’s a strange, acrid smell. I curse New York. I can see clear blue sky outside. It’s hot for September.
I put on my clothes—dark blue denim, light blue work shirt, aviator sunglasses. I open the front door to my apartment and pick up the New York Times. The lead story is this: “Arsenic Standard for Water Is Too Lax, Study Says.” I wonder if my gallbladder problem is, in fact, arsenic poisoning.
In a few minutes I won’t care.
I stepped into the elevator at precisely 8:50 A.M.
“Down?” I asked.
“Did you hear anything about the trade center?” came the unexpected reply from a middle-aged woman dressed head-to-heel in Prada. Her jaw was locked with worry as she gripped her Motorola phone.
Me: “No?”
“I heard it on the radio,” she said. “An explosion; or something. My husband’s there. He’s not… he’s not picking up.”
She stabbed at the Motorola.
At first the words “trade center” didn’t mean anything to me. It was early, after all, and I hadn’t had my morning espresso.
“Yeah, I heard that too,” said the gay investment banker next to me. By the end of the sentence his voice had risen an octave. “I think there’s been an accident with an airplane,” he speculated. “Ohmigod.”
I wondered if this was a news story. If so, I was in no position to cover it: I kept all my pens and spiral-bound notebooks at work. The “trade center” still didn’t mean anything to me, even though I had recently taken my parents to the observation deck on top of the south tower. In fact, I had been invited to a party at the Windows of the World Restaurant in the north tower, for Thursday. The invite was currently sitting on my kitchen table. “Cocktails at 1,350 feet,” it said.
I needed coffee. My stomach ached.
The elevator jerked to a halt. I strode past Walter and Carlos, the building’s doormen, and out into the sunshine. I cursed as I realized I’d forgotten my dry cleaning. Then I searched for a cab, catching a glimpse of something unusual as I turned. I looked right, toward the familiar view of downtown Manhattan, dominated by two gigantic silver towers: an inverted Bugs Bunny smile poking out of the gum of the skyline. “That’s the trade center,” I scolded myself. “The World Trade Center.” But something was wrong. There was a black gash about three-quarters of the way up the north tower and a trail of smoke coming from it. I could see an orange glow from deep within the hole. An accident, I thought: Probably an amateur pilot in a small plane. I remembered reading about the Army Air Corps B-25 bomber that had somehow managed to hit the side of the Empire State Building in 1945.
A yellow cab pulled up beside me.
“Man, that pilot must have been on fuckin’ crack to crash into somethin’ that big, on a day like this,” said the driver. “Holy crap.”
I waved him away and called my friend Karen, who worked for Deutsche Bank somewhere within the trade center complex. Perhaps she would have the real story. No answer—she was probably late for work, as usual. It didn’t occur to me to be worried. I knew she was on a low floor: She complained about not having a view. Wearily, I called the business desk in London. “Something’s hit the World Trade Center,” I said. “There’s a bloody great hole in it.” I felt myself wanting to exaggerate—to sell the story. This could be a way of avoiding the office after all.
But as I looked at the flames, I suspected I didn’t need to embellish.
“Yeah, we’ve heard something about that,” came the distant, vague reply. Barrow was clearly knee-deep in mucky copy.
“Shall I take a look?” I asked.
Barrow: “I’ll put you over to foreign.”
I immediately tensed. The foreign news desk represented the exotic, dangerous world outside of financial journalism.
I heard eight bars of Vivaldi, then another voice. It was posh, and clipped.
“Chri-is?” My name had a dip in it, signaling the need for information.