“Hi, yes. There’s a hole in the World Trade Center.” I coughed. “Small plane probably.” I hoped this sounded informed.
“Humm. We’re watching it on Sky. Can you get down there? James Bone’s already on his way.” The voice was impatient, harried. There were probably much bigger stories to be worrying about, I thought. What with the arsenic in the water supply, this would probably make only a few hundred words: a photo story, perhaps. Maybe it would be a lead nib. I was good at those.
“Yes, I’m not far fro—”
“Good, good.” The voice was distracted.
Me: “I’ll call in later.”
I hung up, eager to cause the least possible inconvenience.
In front of me, of course, was the biggest American news story since December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. I was young, ambitious, and—after months of lift and view—desperate for what Linda Christmas called real journalism. So what did I do next? Run toward the flames? Hitch a ride on a passing fire truck? Jump into a cab and order the terrified driver to step on it?
Alas, no. At 8:53 A.M., on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I strolled back inside 666 Greenwich Street and took the elevator up to my apartment, where I collected some pens and hunted for a notebook. I congratulated myself on getting out of a day’s work at the veal-fattening pen on Sixth Avenue. I was ignorant, of course, of one crucial fact: The World Trade Center had been attacked before, in 1993. The alleged bomber, Ramzi Mohammed Yousef, who had entered the U.S. with a fake Iraqi passport, was currently residing in the “supermax” correctional facility in Florence, Colorado. Yousef was a close friend of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who at this moment was watching the burning north tower from a bunker in Afghanistan. No doubt he was whooping, cheering, and doing whatever else terrorist chiefs do when they’ve successfully murdered a few thousand innocent men, women, and children.
At home, I looked in the mirror and took some multivitamin tablets. Unable to find anything to write on—not even a napkin—I snatched the red, leather-bound diary that Alana had bought for me as a gift from Italy, along with my dry cleaning, and headed for the door. As an afterthought, I also grabbed my digital camera, which I jammed into my jeans pocket. It didn’t occur to me that the fire in the World Trade Center would be the most photographed event in history. I thought The Times’s picture desk might appreciate some amateur shots. By the time I staggered back out onto Greenwich Street—coat hangers in my teeth, a bag of laundry over my shoulder, and blankets and sweaters under my arms—it was 9:02 A.M. I checked the World Trade Center again: The burning had intensified. I reassured myself that I had plenty of time to get down there before my deadline. The truth, however, was that I was deliberately stalling: I was apprehensive about the prospect of having to interview real people instead of doing the usual lift and view. Part of me was tempted to go back upstairs and cover the story from CNN. Sweating, I ducked inside the dry cleaner’s, which was next door to 666 Greenwich Street, and dropped everything on the counter. The Asian shop owner, unable to pronounce or spell my second name, was struggling to label my clothes when I heard another distant crash. By the time I made it outside, there was another gash in the World Trade Center, this time in the south tower.
I looked again.
I’m hallucinating, I told myself.
I got Alana on speed-dial. She was having breakfast with her father, who was visiting from Ohio. No, she hadn’t seen the World Trade Center. “Switch on the television,” I told her, adrenaline now starting to feed through my nervous system, dissolving the grogginess. I had already forgotten about gallbladder disease and arsenic poisoning. Alana, who had an irritating but understandable habit of never believing anything I told her until she had independently verified it, sounded uninterested. “I’m heading down there,” I said, trying to sound brave. I wanted her to tell me—or better, beg me—not to go down there. She didn’t. “Give you a call in a bit,” I said. “Enjoy breakfast.” I hung up. I tried to call the foreign news desk, but it wouldn’t connect. Karen’s office number, meanwhile, just rang off the hook.
Now I was worried.
I jogged south, passing tables set up outdoors for voting in the mayoral elections. The winner would replace Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was standing down after two controversial terms. There were people wearing sandwich boards with the names of candidates and campaign slogans daubed onto them. “He has commercials, I have credentials,” read one. Behind the campaigners, plumes of stinking black smoke were rolling out over the Hudson River. The sirens of emergency vehicles wailed hysterically. New York is deafening on a good day. Today it was unbearable. It was as though the city itself was howling.
The campaigners and voting officials didn’t seem to know what to do. They sat on their camping chairs and watched two steel volcanoes erupt less than a mile away. Later, much later, some of these same people would criticize President Bush for continuing to read “My Pet Goat” to the children in Florida, even after he had been told about the south tower. Inaction, however, was an almost animal response: like rabbits caught on a six-lane highway under a Xenon glare.
By this time I was in Tribeca, an empty warehouse district that had been gentrified with “white box” lofts, furniture shops, and Robert De Niro’s Mediterranean restaurant. There were pedestrians everywhere, all of them speed-walking north. It looked like Fifth Avenue at the weekend. Then it hit me: The pedestrians were evacuees from the World Trade Center. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of them—the men dressed in Italian pinstripes and Thomas Pink shirts, the women in smart pantsuits and low heels. They were possibly the world’s best-dressed refugees. I stopped one of them, who told me his name was John Fratton.
“What happened?” I asked. “Was there an accident… with a plane?”
John, a grandfatherly figure with thick gray hair, was agitated. “This wasn’t some two-bit propeller job from Teterboro airport,” he said, waving his arms at the burning towers. “There were two jetliners! Jetliners!” John wasn’t looking at me as he spoke. It was as though he was trying to explain to himself what had just happened. “The cops said the second one came in over the East River—and then, slam!” He shook his head, as if something was trapped inside.
His pupils were pinpricks.
For some reason the word “jetliner” clicked. I thought of the silver tube of a Boeing 767 and the damage it would do to a skyscraper. It didn’t occur to me that a Boeing 767 would also have nearly twenty-four thousand gallons of jet fuel in its wings. I was, however, a little skepticaclass="underline" Did John really know what he was talking about? There were plenty of amateur pilots, after all, who flew small private planes from Teterboro airport in New Jersey. Surely it was possible that they could get their navigation so muddled that one could hit a 110-story building. But two planes, into two buildings, within minutes of each other? On a clear and sunny September morning?
“Thank you, sir,” I said, giving him a quizzical stare.
John Fratton didn’t look like an exaggerator.
At this point, of course, I hadn’t seen what the rest of the world had already watched live on CNN: United Airlines Flight 175, from Boston to Los Angeles, making an unscheduled stop between the seventy-eighth and eighty-fourth floors of the south tower. The aircraft had seemed to twist as it cut into the building.