As I continued jogging south, the refugees began to look more ragged. Some of them had specks of white dust on their business suits. The election officials, meanwhile, were starting to hurriedly pack up their tables. The was an overwhelming stench of what I assumed to be jet fuel… and something else. I stopped one of the evacuees. She seemed calm and together. She said her name was Diane Rieck and that she worked for American Express in the World Financial Center, one block north of the twin towers. “I heard a big bang and then saw a… a huge red fireball,” she told me, her hand over her face to shield it from the sun. Diane continued: “But the worst was seeing the people jump: three or four from this side, two or three from the other.” She pointed matter-of-factly to the inferno of the north tower. I finished my jerky writing—in longhand—then began to process what Diane had just told me.
“What? There are people jumping?”
Diane didn’t answer; her face was suddenly awash with tears and mascara. A colleague held tightly on to her arm.
“Interview over,” he said.
It’s now 9:45 A.M. This is what I don’t know: The fire caused by the twenty-four thousand gallons of jet fuel in the plane that hit the south tower is weakening the steel core of the building. It will collapse in twenty minutes, nearly killing me. A total of 642 others will not survive: 18 of them on the ground, 618 above the impact zone between the seventy-eighth and eighty-fourth floors, and six on the floors below. The north tower, even though it was hit earlier than the south tower, will take another forty-three minutes to fall. A total of 1,466 will be killed: 1,356 of them at or above the impact zone between the ninety-fourth and ninety-eighth floors, and 100 below. This is what else I don’t know: at 9:30 A.M., President Bush described the events in New York as “an apparent terrorist attack”; at 9:40 A.M., the Federal Aviation Administration grounded all flights in the U.S.; and at 9:43 A.M., 213 miles southwest of Manhattan, in Washington, D.C., an American Airlines Boeing 757 nose-dived into the west side of the Pentagon. I also don’t know, of course, that at this very moment, 2.6 miles northeast of the burning Pentagon, the White House is being evacuated.
I have jogged from Tribeca to Murray Street, three blocks north of the World Trade Center. I’m facing sideways with the sun searing into my forehead. Beside me there’s a man sitting on the curb, his back to the inferno and his son on his lap. The boy, barely more than a toddler, is being shielded by his father’s body from the unbearable horror behind him. The man is holding a book of nursery rhymes and reading into his son’s ear, not once giving in to the temptation to glance over his shoulder. I wonder where the mother is. Then I look up at the flames.
There’s a police blockade in front of me. NYPD officers and FBI agents have gathered around their cars, watching helplessly. Four burly and uniformed men are around one vehicle, thumping their fists on its roof and stifling sobs. They’re listening to something on the police radio. “People don’t see shit like this in wars,” says one. A yellow school bus grunts eastward. Some of the cars on Murray Street have shunted into each other, a disaster movie visual cliché, as their drivers stare at the spectacle above. Already the crowd on Murray Street has witnessed scores of people suffer one of the most wretched deaths imaginable. Here they come: black shapes, writhing, turning, and grasping as they make the quarter-of-a-mile journey from the top floors of the World Trade Center to the concrete plaza below. They fall silently: The sirens scream for them. I tell myself they have passed out with shock; but why are they moving? Why do they seem to be clawing at the acres of glass?
I remind myself that I have been to the observation deck of the south tower three times. Each time I felt a chill of fear as the elevator doors revealed Manhattan and New York Harbor as if viewed from space. I remember the sickly sensation of the building swaying in the wind; I also remember reading that the 1,350-foot towers swing a few feet every ten seconds, their giddy movements counterbalanced by gigantic steel pendulums in the center of each structure. The last time I was up there I wanted to be back on the ground immediately. The elevator operator cracked stupid jokes all the way down. I wonder if he is one of the terrible black shapes.
Now they’re falling in clusters; two of them appear to be holding hands before gravity takes over. I glimpse a flapping necktie. The cloudless blue sky makes for perfect viewing conditions. Someone in the crowd says he has just escaped from the building. He says he saw bodies in the treetops.
The clutter of the skyline makes it impossible to see where, or how, the black shapes land. Then a terrible thought strikes me: The human shrapnel must be deadly for those trying to evacuate the building. Again I think of Karen. The plaza itself must be a vision of hell—God, I hope she was late for work. The crowd gasps, weeps, and whoops as the human confetti continues. Every so often a bystander falls to the ground, shaking and praying, unable to watch anymore. This happens to me after perhaps the sixth faller. I’m a godless soul, but praying seems appropriate. I’m willing to try anything to help the poor bastards falling from the building.
At first it seems inexplicable why they would choose to jump. Then comes the slow realization—the furnace of burning jet fuel, the charred skin, the toxic fumes. And then the conclusion that there is no choice at all. There’s a helicopter hovering close to the mast on the south tower. I wait for it to land on the roof, but it backs away and circles. Some trapped office workers are waving brightly colored rags out of the shattered windows. “What the fuck are they doin’, man?” someone next to me shouts at the retreating helicopter. “Why don’t they land on the roof and save them?” No one is able to supply an answer. And then it starts to happen.
There’s a crunch, a boom, and the sound of several thousand windows exploding. A section of the north tower comes loose, like a melted ice shelf falling into the ocean. The impact creates a wave of debris that crashes through the streets, channeling itself between buildings and sweeping pedestrians off their feet. Then comes a terrible realization: It’s heading for Murray Street. For the first time in my life I experience mass hysteria: Everyone starts to run. Head down, my notebook in one hand, camera in the other, I sprint northwest, toward an apartment complex near Chambers Street. I stop noticing other people. I find an enclosed square and a doorway facing north, away from the collapsing building. There are perhaps ten of us in the doorway—we look at each other but say nothing. The smoke clears; we’re okay. I jog east to where Chambers Street meets the West Side Highway. I walk slowly backward up the highway, staring at the disintegrating skyscraper ahead of me. Then a police officer shouts something. There’s a loud pop: Did someone fire a gun?
Then another crunch, another boom. This time much, much louder.
I think of the man sitting on the curb with his son.
I’m running again.
I didn’t stop running until I was about halfway up the West Side Highway: Only then did I dare turn around to confirm what had caused the seismic boom behind me.
The south tower of the World Trade Center had disappeared. In its place was an acrid mushroom cloud, slowly billowing northward and upward: black ink spilled on a blue canvas. I wondered what had happened to the police officer who screamed at the crowd to move. I could have sworn I heard him fire his pistol into the air. I concluded that the people only a few yards behind me as I ran north must have been killed: At one point when I looked over my shoulder, I saw them being sucked into the wall of smoke. There were, however, some survivors, their suits ripped and matted with dust. They ran, walked, and stumbled north, occasionally pausing to throw up in the gutter or spit out gobs of filth. None of us had even thought about what would happen if one of those 110-story towers collapsed. After all, the Empire State Building hadn’t keeled over after the B-25 hit it back in 1945. “You bloody idiot,” I thought to myself. “What were you thinking?” But I wasn’t thinking. I was watching.